Just back from attending JP Morgan Healthcare week in San Francisco from Sunday night through Thursday night. It’s a force — San Francisco was filled with the healthcare industrial complex, of which I am now a part.

For most of my life, my approach to healthcare has been to 1) Ignore it and 2) Try to not need it.

Now, I have chosen to become a healthcare industry executive in molecular diagnostics. Would you care to hear my broader thoughts on the conference and industry? Ok, I'll drop in thoughts and observations over the long weekend. ...But two that immediately come to mind:

1) JPM Healthcare week in SFO is a force in a way that other industries don't have. I've been to many investor tech conferences in my career -- Morgan Stanley TMT (tech, media and telecom) in SFO, and JPM TMT in Boston -- but they don't command the same "city wide everyone who is anyone must be there" presence that JPM Healthcare does.

The closest industry parallels I can think of are the Paris and Farnborough Air Shows to aerospace, and maybe the Detroit Auto Show, to auto. I wouldn't put CES in that category for tech because many major players in tech don't go to CES. And besides, those shows aren't explicitly investor conferences, they are industry conferences.

The weather was gorgeous, and every restaurant, every outdoor cafe, every hotel, was packed with people from the industry talking about what they do. Got coffee one morning between meetings and overheard, "We just completed our Phase 1A" . . .

So first observation is just that the conference is a big deal and everyone is exhausted by the end, with schedules that start before dawn and end around 10 pm or later.

I’d love to share some knowledge I have about @FDICgov. FDIC is an *independent* government agency — not funded by tax dollars. … I worked in the division of information resources management at FDIC (basically IT) from 2000 to 2003. /1 FDIC was formed in 1933 to prevent a rash of banking failures from ever happening again. FDR’s speech from March 1933 — 90 years ago! — is STILL RELEVANT today: fdic.gov/about/history/…

Quick fun $TSLA story thread, which speaks to @elonmusk’s leadership style. So, I’d been a stock analyst on TSLA since the 2011 IPO, and I knew that it was a get-it-done culture, where “it can’t be done” is a banned phrase. 1/14ish Best story I heard personally was from Peter Rawlinson, former chief engineer of the Model S. He said Elon wanted the cylindrical battery cells in the floor of the car, which presents so many challenges no one else would attempt it. But Elon just said, “do it.” And so, they did.

Anthropologist Edward Hall's 1976 book, Beyond Culture, was probably the single most helpful framework I've ever read in understanding the different ways people communicate. Specifically, his illumination of high context vs low context cultures. 1/13 In high context cultures, context matters more -- body language, what goes unspoken, indirect communication. In low context cultures, words matter more. I believe Hall said, at the time, that Japan was the highest context and Swiss-German the lowest context culture. 2/13

1) People asking me what I think about TSLA going private. Thought I’d share here: 2) Many things to work out and sort. This is unprecedented. The private and public equity arms at giant funds are managed by separate people - unclear how easy it would be to transfer shares among existing institutions, or that’s even desirable.