Which would you rather be? A software engineer with a fast-rising San Francisco startup or a Billboard-topping songwriter?

Jacob Critch of St. John’s doesn’t have to choose. He’s both.

Critch’s professional title is “Founding Engineer” of Carebrain, which helps nursing home staff contact doctors if there’s an emergency outside office hours. The system, which also provides notes and takes care of billing, is already being used by major care homes in the U.S.

As well as working on engineering and developing features for this startup, Critch is a songwriter with a special passion for K-Pop, the highly popular musical genre that originated in South Korea. His songs have placed in the top 10 on Billboard charts in Japan and South Korea, and one song was on a No. 1 album in Japan.

The 27-year-old says he loves both halves of his career and feels they complement one another.

“I love making music . . . but I wouldn’t be where I am in startups right now if I wasn’t passionate about it,” he said in an interview last week. “Startups are the most fun you can have in the [business] space.”

A graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Critch was still in university when he began working for the startup InspectAR, which exited in 2020. It used augmented reality to help electrical engineers and electronics technicians to quickly assess and improve the state of printed circuit boards.

Though he only worked there a year, it was enough to convince Critch that he liked startup life, especially early-stage startups in which every member has to get involved in every part of the business. He and his friend Rikki Lee Scicluna soon launched their own startup, Songflow, an online collaborative platform for musicians to record and edit music. It was a finalist for the Woodward Cup and went through Propel’s Traction and Growth accelerator for scaling companies in 2023.

Earlier this year, Critch got a call from Darryl Day, who had previously been the CTO at InspectAR and became one of the expatriate Newfoundlanders that founded Carebrain in the U.S. By the end of the call, Critch had been hired as the founding engineer, the company’s first hire. Carebrain is now in the Neo accelerator in Silicon Valley, which previously supported such digital luminaries as OpenAI and BlueSky, and Critch added that Carebrain has been drawing the interest of investors.

Critch was attracted to the company because its technology is simplifying nurses’ workloads within care facilities, reducing the paperwork burden so they can spend more time with patients.

“One of the reasons I [joined] Carebrain was I was already looking for something health-related to work on, since a person close to me is dealing with serious health problems,” he said. “I even reached out to local medical doctors, etc., to try to help prior to Carebrain coincidentally calling me.”

Of course, by this time Critch also had another career as a songwriter and singer. He began to sing and write songs when he was about 13 and got his first recording equipment. After researching the names of leading K-pop producers, recording specialists and record executives, he contacted several of them online. Though most of these entreaties went unanswered, a few did respond and he built up his connections in the industry. He has visited Seoul, helping his music career and satisfying his love of travel.

He is now represented by Universal Music Korea and publishes songs through a division called Melogram. You can find his songs on Spotify or YouTube.

Looking ahead, Critch is planning to stay long-term in Newfoundland and Labrador, though he won’t rule out spending some time in California. And he doesn’t believe he has to choose between startups and music, because they complement one another and “occupy different parts of my brain.” He points to The Chainsmokers, an electronic duo from the U.S. who not only top the music charts but also run their own venture capital fund. It is possible to excel in technology while having an artistic pursuit, he says.

“They involve very different parts of the brain,” he said. “There’s not a lot of overlap. Doing two things that use the same parts of the brain at the same time, that’s hard. But with this, there’s no overlap.”