Hal
Paz

There is a specific kind of credibility that Hal Paz carries into a startup boardroom. When a company pitches a tool that predicts sepsis earlier, he has personally run the clinical trials. When a company promises it can cut unnecessary hospital readmissions, he has had to answer for those readmission numbers in front of payers, trustees, and the media. When a company claims its AI can unlock capacity in an overcrowded emergency department, he has managed those departments - and has watched ten previous "solutions" fail to scale past the pilot.

That filter is rare in venture capital, which is crowded with operators-turned-investors who understand SaaS but struggle to model what happens when a healthcare product meets hospital IT procurement, physician skepticism, and CMS billing rules simultaneously. Paz does not struggle with that model. He has lived it on repeat, across four of the country's largest academic medical centers.

His research career shaped his intellectual instincts in a specific way. Critical care medicine - sepsis, ARDS, mechanical ventilation - is a field that rewards pattern recognition under uncertainty. You cannot wait for perfect data; you have to act. That same posture carries forward. Paz is not a "wait for the randomized controlled trial" investor. He has spent enough time at the frontier of scientific uncertainty to be comfortable betting on well-reasoned hypotheses before the evidence is airtight - which is precisely what early-stage venture requires.

His writing offers a window into his thinking. In a September 2024 op-ed for MedCity News, he took on what he called the "demographic time bomb" - a projected shortfall of 200,000 nurses and 124,000 physicians by 2030. His argument was not that AI would replace clinicians. It was that AI could extend what clinicians can do, allowing a system stretched thin to serve more people without proportionally more headcount. That framing - AI as leverage, not substitution - is consistent with Khosla Ventures' broader thesis about technology building what Vinod Khosla calls "doctor extenders."

The Cleveland Clinic collaboration, announced in late 2025, offers a glimpse of the infrastructure Paz is helping build. Portfolio companies get access to one of the most prestigious clinical environments in the world: real patient populations, credentialed physicians, and the kind of validation data that matters to hospital procurement committees. In exchange, Cleveland Clinic gets early access to emerging technology. It is exactly the kind of structural bridge between innovation and adoption that has historically been missing from healthcare venture - and it bears Paz's fingerprints.

Away from the office, Paz is married to Sharon H. Press, Ph.D., a child and adolescent clinical psychologist, with two adult children. He serves on the board of the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He finished a 60-mile sailing race. His Wordle average is 0.98 - which, if you know how Wordle scoring works, is nearly the theoretical maximum, and deeply consistent with the profile of a man who has spent a lifetime building systems that leave no margin for error.