Having grown up in a family of doctors, Matt Joseph knows what their biggest headache is: paperwork.

MATT JOSEPH, 27

Locent, health care messaging service

Employees: 5

Financials: $750,000 raised in funding. Annual revenue less than $1 million

Locent, his 1-year-old Santa Monica company, could be the solution to stacks of documents that frustrate health care providers as well as patients. The startup converts medical forms and instructions into digital formats, sending out the most useful bits of information in text messages.

“The patient doesn’t actually need the medical jargon,” said Joseph, who was born in Trinidad and grew up in England and Kentucky. “You need to know it’s time to take your medications. It’s time to take your blue pill.”

The idea grew out of Joseph’s hypothesis that businesses would value easy ways to send text messages. Health care companies quickly latched on to the ability to send patients medication reminders, he said.

Joseph honed his strategy at Y Combinator, a prestigious fundraising and mentoring program in Silicon Valley, and is now finishing product updates.

“At that point, I’ll be able to pour some gas on the fire and grow,” said Joseph. The plan is to triple or quadruple his staff size in three to five months.

But Joseph, who has an MBA and JD from UCLA, already knows that uncertainty is part of the game.

“It’s not always clear what the right path is. It’s not like other jobs where you have a preset schedule and focus,” he said.

Finding investors as a black chief executive in the white-dominated tech industry is another uncertainty.

“It’s a feeling of deep frustration,” said Joseph, reflecting on recent investor pitch meetings at Y Combinator where he felt like he was fighting to be taken seriously. “Because I care so much about our business and I want it to succeed, I didn’t want to feel like my race or background or ethnicity had negatively impacted our business.”

Joseph’s tweets about feeling overlooked because he didn’t look like Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg have sparked other conversations about business-world bias.

While he said he’s glad that his tweets got noticed, most of his focus is on Locent – up to 100 hours a week. In his limited off-time, Joseph runs from his Ocean Park home to the beach, or reads books such as physician Robert Wachter’s nonfiction bestseller “The Digital Doctor.”

But he doesn’t mind working morning to night. Those long hours could be key not only to long-lasting success, but also personal growth.

“There’s not an off button,” he said. “The problems are interesting and the hours don’t feel like ordinary work hours.”

— Daina Beth Solomon