Physician, founder, and stubborn explainer.

I'm Vishal Punwani — a medical doctor, and the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, which I started at Harvard's Innovation Labs. SoWork builds virtual offices and AI agents for distributed teams, and grew out of a simple conviction: when you remove the corridor, the lunch, and the ten seconds after a meeting ends, you remove most of what a company's culture is made of.

Before that — and alongside it — I taught. I became one of the highest-rated teaching fellows at Khan Academy, making health and medicine material that has been watched more than ten million times, and I worked as an educational consultant at Harvard Medical School and a medical editor at Osmosis. I've consulted for the World Health Organization and the International Telecommunication Union on health and technology.

Three rooms — the clinic, the classroom, the company — each teaching a different kind of rigour.

I'm an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs and a mentor at the Oxford Foundry, and I've been an invited speaker at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, MIT, and Harvard Medical School. My TEDx talk, “Save your culture, save your company,” has been played over a million times.

This site exists because talks disappear and threads rot. If something I think is worth quoting, it should live at a dated address I control.