Summary
Insurance paperwork is delaying treatment for patients who don’t have time to wait. One founder built a company to fix it.
In this entrepreneur interview, Dr. Joshua Upshaw — founder and CEO of Hidalgo Tech and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience — shares how a family health crisis pushed him from academic research into healthcare entrepreneurship, why he trusts his gut more than any spreadsheet, and how he built his team around mission alignment instead of resumes.
Whether you’re still validating your first idea or figuring out who belongs on your founding team, this conversation will change how you think about intuition, feedback, and timing.
What you’ll learn:
- How a graduate research background in brain science led to a healthcare startup
- Why Hidalgo Tech is targeting the insurance prior-authorization bottleneck specifically
- How to sift real feedback from noise and when to trust your gut instead
- Why mission alignment matters more than technical skill when building an early team
- How Josh is funding growth through NSF SBIR grants instead of chasing venture capital first
Chapters
0:00 Cold Open: Trust Your Gut
0:22 Welcome to the Startup Junkies Podcast
1:02 What Is Hidalgo Tech? Fixing Insurance Prior Authorization
1:54 From Neuroscience to Health Tech: Josh’s Origin Story
2:59 The Family Story That Sparked Hidalgo Tech
5:35 Why Josh Calls Himself a Problem Solver, Not a Scientist
8:57 Validating the Problem Through Customer Discovery
11:36 Building the Team: Finding the Right Technical Lead
14:55 Why Mission Alignment Matters More Than Skill
16:10 Handling Feedback, Ego, and Doubt as a Founder
19:00 Following Your Gut: Sifting Signal From Noise
21:09 Who Hidalgo Tech’s Ideal Customer Is
21:56 Funding the Company: NSF Grants & Raising Capital
25:32 The Next Five Years for Hidalgo Tech
26:23 Advice to His Younger Self
About Joshua Upshaw: Founder and CEO of Hidalgo Tech, reducing administrative overhead in insurance prior authorization so patients get treatment sooner. PhD in cognitive neuroscience and an alum of the University of Arkansas’s New Venture Development program and Health Tech Arkansas.
Connect with Joshua: LinkedIn
Website
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