Thank you for this, so much needed. I hope that you are going to come to Europe soon. Honest question, how was your experience with getting funding on an open source product within healthcare? My experience so far is that the field is, as you put it, 30 years back, also in terms of business models.
We get asked the fundraising question a lot, especially since we're open source. Once investors understood that we still have a hosted product we charge for, and that we have a large moat since someone could fork our code but it'd be very difficult to run the business (compliance, getting access to the different networks, understanding the niche space, etc) - open source wasn't a hinderance to raising.
One thing we learned though, is that even though every human interacts with the healthcare system in some capacity - very few people know how things actually work. So, we had to tailor our pitches to make investors understand why our product matters, since generally even people that have healthcare experience, have no idea what the hell an HIE is.
That, and our GTM allowed us to sell quickly, without needing to wait for slow moving hospital contracts, as are typical in healthcare - so some decent traction definitely helped.