Healthtech entrepreneur Parker Hinshaw and his wife Jean Balgrosky said they intended to take a step back when they founded Bootstrap Incubation near San Diego in the fall of 2012.
They wanted to combine Hinshaw’s experience in starting and growing health IT startups with Balgrosky’s expertise in strategic IT planning and overhauling healthcare IT networks—but without getting too deeply involved.
Just a few months earlier, Hinshaw had sold his private healthcare IT consulting company, MaxIT Healthcare, to government contractor SAIC for $473 million. Balgrosky, a health information administrator and former Scripps Health chief information officer, was finishing her doctorate in health policy and management at UCLA.
They came to San Diego in 1996, when Scripps Health hired Balgrosky as CIO and senior vice president. She was previously the CIO for Holy Cross Health System in South Bend, IN, a 13-hospital chain where she was responsible for strategic IT planning from Maryland to California. In 1998, Hinshaw sold another health IT consulting firm, Resources in Health Care Innovations, to Daou Systems, a San Diego-based provider of health IT services. He founded MaxIT Healthcare in 2001.
After selling MaxIT, Hinshaw said he became immersed in the startup world. “We started the incubator with the idea of helping people with ideas, and making some investments,” he said.
They initially raised $5 million for their “Bootstrap Incubation Fund” from a portion of their payout from the sale of MaxIT Healthcare (with the rest coming from friends and family), and settled into an office building they acquired in Solana Beach, CA, about 23 miles north of downtown San Diego.
It didn’t take long, however, until both had joined MD Revolution, a Bootstrap portfolio company providing Web-based services to help people improve their health and fitness. Hinshaw joined the San Diego healthtech startup as senior vice president of business development. Balgrosky is MD Revolution’s chief information officer.
Instead of stepping back, they both leaned in. Starting Bootstrap Incubation “turned out to be a lot of work,” Hinshaw said. Still, they want to help boost the innovation ecosystems in both San Diego and Indiana, where Hinshaw grew up, and are now looking to raise the visibility of Bootstrap Incubation.
“I really want to
