It was either build a company or keep letting paperwork chip away at our evenings, our weekends, our sense of balance. So, we built the thing.

In June 2023, AJ (who happens to be my husband) and I made a decision that felt equal parts naïve and necessary: we started a tech company.

Not for the glamour. Definitely not for the hype. But to take on something far less sexy—and far more urgent: the quiet, soul-eroding admin burden that was bleeding into every corner of our lives.

At first, it was just part of the job. Then it became the job.

Paperwork wasn’t a nuisance—it was a second shift. It showed up at dinner, during daycare pickups, on vacations, on weekends. It lingered in the background of everything, stealing the moments that actually make life feel like life: bedtime stories, beach days, silence.

Long before we could clearly articulate what the real problem was, we were already trying to solve it—in drywall, floor plans, and the idea that work could feel good.

Back in 2018, we made another slightly unhinged decision. Instead of buying a house like normal adults, we bought a gutted commercial unit and built a medical clinic from scratch. AJ had just finished his family medicine residency. I was deep in my career as an epidemiologist and health data scientist. Together, we designed a space with the kind of obsessive care usually reserved for fancy restaurants or high-concept art galleries. Not because we were trying to be fancy—but because we wanted doctors to want to be there.

I can still remember obsessing over fixtures and millwork. We sketched out clinic workflows with the same energy most people bring to wedding planning (as a matter of fact, we were planning one, ours, at the same time!). AJ was going to practice cradle-to-grave medicine in this space. We wanted it to feel right.

And for a while, it did. The clinic exists as a collage in my mind: dedicated staff, compassionate care, a rotating cast of earnest students, and the many small dramas of everyday medicine. But also: endless clicking. Typing. Clicking. Clicking. Clicking. AJ, hunched at the computer, trying to keep up. The administrative drag only grew heavier.

Eventually, the thing we’d built started to wear us down. I watched AJ come home later and later—7:30, 8 p.m., long after our son was asleep. The clinic that was supposed to support the balance we’d dreamed of was becoming another cog in a broken system.

Then, in June 2023, I dragged AJ and our almost-three-year-old to an academic conference on the East Coast. It was peak academic-nerd-meets-exhausted-parent energy. Before we flew home, we detoured through the Cabot Trail, let the mountains and ocean recalibrate our senses, and in the backseat, our toddler was—mercifully—asleep. AJ and I talked about family medicine. About burnout. About how no one was building the kind of tech we would actually use in our own clinic.

And that’s when it hit us—not in a dramatic startup epiphany way, but in the quiet way that real clarity arrives. We could build something better. We should.

So we did what every career-focused, overstretched, under-slept couple with a toddler and a thesis due should do: we dove in. We wrote a massive product requirements doc (still growing), hired a team, birthed another baby (yes, really), and built Pippen—a tool to help doctors get home on time.

It hasn’t been easy. We chose a complicated problem. Canadian family doctors are buried under legacy software, half-broken integrations, and an ever-expanding public demand for care. The infrastructure is brittle. The stakes are high. But we’re not going anywhere.

Every single feature we design is pressure-tested in our own clinic before it goes out into the world. If it doesn’t make doctors’ lives easier, we don’t ship it. Simple as that.  We build software the same way we built our clinic—with care, intention, and an eye for every detail that makes work feel a little more human. Back then, we wanted the space to feel right. Now, we want the same for every click, every workflow, every line of code, every interaction.

Because family doctors aren’t just providers—they’re the connective tissue of the entire healthcare system. They’re the ones holding it all together. And we owe it to them to do better.

Pippen is our offering to that mission. A small rebellion against burnout. A quiet insistence that joy in family medicine is not only possible—but necessary.

Mary Aglipay, Co-Founder Pippen AI