Founder, CEO, and physician.

Building companies

I'm Vishal Punwani, MD — the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, and a physician. I started SoWork at Harvard's Innovation Labs. It began as a virtual office for distributed teams. We're now building toward a visual operating environment for organizations where humans and AI agents work together: making work visible, communication direct, and coordination easier.

Medicine, teaching, and global health

Before that — and alongside it — I taught. I was a teaching fellow at Khan Academy, making health and medicine material, 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.

Mentoring and speaking

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,” explores how everyday interactions shape an organization.

I write about the questions that connect these experiences: how people learn, how teams coordinate, and how to make good decisions when the consequences matter.