Mohammad Al-Ubaydli’s unfinished syllabus

When Mohammad Al-Ubaydli could not find a publisher for his book, he bought another book. This one explained how to start a publishing company. He followed the instructions, established Idiopathic Publishing and put his own work into print. Eventually, Wiley bought the rights. The book reached readers in three foreign languages. A rejection letter had acquired rather more consequences than its sender probably intended.

There is a useful introduction to the founder of Patients Know Best in that sequence. Al-Ubaydli reads, tries something, discovers the missing skill and goes looking for instructions. The resulting career has included programming, research, consulting, writing and running a company. A conventional biography can arrange those occupations into a tidy ladder. His own accounts suggest something closer to a workshop, with several projects open and the instruction manuals within reach.

His willingness to change direction began well before the company. So did his interest in how people find work, acquire confidence and persuade other people to take an idea seriously. Read his early writing and you encounter a young programmer inspecting the machinery of adult life, occasionally with a screwdriver, often with an eyebrow raised.

The plan was to study chaos

As a teenager, he read James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science. Here was a subject that connected apparently distant fields: weather, ecosystems, the behaviour of complicated systems. He began imagining a future that would bring different kinds of expertise into the same laboratory. Before Cambridge, he took a gap year to study mathematics and computing at a local polytechnic. Summer programming jobs followed.

He eventually reached the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a place he had wanted to work. The experience helped him decide that a career in chaos research would not suit him. He had achieved an ambition and learned enough to abandon it. That is an awkward outcome for a career plan, but a perfectly respectable outcome for an experiment.

In his 2002 account of choosing a career, he was unusually relaxed about this revision. Experiences could add skills even when they did not produce a permanent job title. The important task was to understand how those experiences fitted together. His early certainty had supplied momentum; changing his mind supplied a direction he could actually enjoy.

A half-hour interview, a longer relationship

Al-Ubaydli’s curiosity extended to the small rituals by which institutions decide who belongs. In an essay from 1999, he wondered how Cambridge could assess a candidate through three brief interviews. He had the grades and a teacher’s recommendation, but so did other applicants. The speed of the decision bothered him. A consequential judgment seemed to rest on remarkably little observation.

He noticed the same pattern at work. His first programming job followed a half-hour interview. Three years later, the boss who had hired him had become his mentor. The initial conversation had been short; the relationship it started was anything but. He was interested in that gap between an encounter and everything that might grow from it.

When applications to investment banking failed, he sought advice about the impression he made. His account does not present a precocious founder gliding effortlessly past every gatekeeper. It presents someone trying to discover why one door opened and another remained shut. The young writer was prepared to examine his own performance along with everyone else’s selection process.

The job search had a human being in it

Another 1999 essay described a year of posting his qualifications on recruitment websites without much success. A friend had found a job online in two weeks. Al-Ubaydli, with a cheerful reluctance to blame his own CV, wanted to understand the difference. A database could contain a million candidates and still leave an employer with the problem of finding the right one.

His experience with the recruitment company DiversityNow was more personal. A recruiter named Claire knew his background well enough to suggest a computing job, although he had been applying for banking roles. She remembered an interest that a narrowly defined search might have missed. In his account, that attention made her something like an agent.

The detail matters in a career so often described through software. Al-Ubaydli was already writing about the person who understood the information well enough to make a useful introduction. More entries in a database would not, on their own, explain Claire’s contribution. Somebody had taken the trouble to read, remember and connect.

“Do something cheap and fast.”

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, on trying entrepreneurship

Before the startup, a business education

He was also suspicious of the familiar story in which a clever young person has an idea and a fortune obligingly appears. In his 1999 essay about entrepreneurship, he argued for the less cinematic ingredient: business training. He paid attention to people who had learned how organisations and finance worked before setting up something of their own.

One influence was Doron Junger, whose route into entrepreneurship included business school. Al-Ubaydli also attended a training day connected with recruiter Peter Harrison. He was interested in the people in the room as much as the advertised career destination. Some wanted an established professional track; others saw the same experience as preparation for a future company.

That distinction helps explain his later consulting work at The Advisory Board Company in the United States. A job could pay a salary and supply an education at the same time. His career did not require every appointment to become a lifelong allegiance. An institution could be somewhere to contribute, learn its workings and leave with better questions.

There is a practical discipline beneath the apparent wandering. Acquiring a new skill takes time, and moving between fields can make a CV harder to explain. He treated the explanation as part of the work. Each experience needed to add something he could use. Variety was valuable when he could say what it had taught him.

The publisher was a problem he could solve

His publishing episode belongs in that business education. An author facing a closed door could keep submitting a manuscript. Al-Ubaydli instead learned the trade on the other side of it. Idiopathic Publishing gave him a way to sell the work himself. Later interest from Wiley made the episode a commercial result as well as a satisfying anecdote.

He had already experimented with distributing writing online, making a handheld-computer book freely available through MedicalApproaches.org. It attracted thousands of downloads. The two approaches sat together in his early career: give something away so people can use it, and learn to sell something when a business needs revenue. He tried both rather than waiting for an established publisher to settle the question.

Books were working tools for him. One could suggest an ambition, another could teach an unfamiliar business, and writing one could force a subject into order. This gives the publishing story its charm. The solution to difficulty publishing a book was, initially, to become a customer for a different book. Authors rarely get such tidy evidence that reading can have practical consequences.

The customer gets a vote

By October 2008, Patients Know Best had its first grant from UnLtd. Al-Ubaydli wrote appreciatively about funding that was small and quick enough to help a prototype happen. He also valued the advice, the network of earlier award recipients and the credibility the grant brought. Money was one part of the assistance; access to people who knew the work was another.

A year later, his writing caught a different part of the founder’s education in progress. Reading Steve Blank on customer validation, he recognised questions he had sometimes asked accidentally. Did a prospective customer recognise a problem? Did they want to change? Would they pay? An interested conversation and a purchasing decision occupied different places in the process.

He also reconsidered his irritation with investors who wanted to speak to early customers. Those conversations could test something useful. He acknowledged that asking better questions sooner would have saved time. It is a modest admission, and an illuminating one: a founder willing to publish what he had misunderstood while the lesson was still fresh.

Patiently impatient, with a book nearby

In 2015, he described the colleagues he wanted to find as “patiently impatient”. The phrase allows room for both dissatisfaction and stamina. A person can want things to change and still accept the lengthy work of changing them. For a manager, he placed the emphasis on finding, training and encouraging people who could carry that work forward.

His reading extended beyond business. He described himself as a history enthusiast and discussed Kepler’s Witch, drawn to the story of the astronomer defending his mother in court. In a 2025 interview, he also mentioned listening to Guy Raz’s founder interviews on NPR. Family time and cycling featured in his account of life outside work.

Today he remains founder and CEO of Patients Know Best and a non-executive director at PHIN. A public appearance in September 2026 found him teaching again, through a UKDHC webinar. The titles have become more settled than the early career essays, but the interest in explaining things has survived.

The publishing anecdote remains a good place to leave him. Someone says the work cannot proceed in its present form. He looks for the part he does not understand, finds something to read and tries again. In Al-Ubaydli’s career, getting an education has repeatedly involved giving himself another job.