The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation

Summary

Leap Academy Podcast with Ilana Golan

Episode: The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation
Release Date: December 3, 2024
Guest: Andrew Lacy, Founder and CEO of Prenuvo

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Leap Academy Podcast, host Ilana Golan sits down with Andrew Lacy, the visionary founder and CEO of Prenuvo—a pioneering health technology company capable of detecting cancer and over 500 other medical conditions through comprehensive MRI scans. This episode delves deep into Andrew's unconventional journey from law and consulting to entrepreneurship, highlighting the resilience and passion that fueled his transition into health tech innovation.

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Andrew's Background and Early Career

Andrew Lacy’s path to entrepreneurship was anything but planned. Originating from Melbourne, Australia, Andrew's early academic journey was shaped by a rigid education system focused on standardized testing, which led him to study economics and law despite his lack of passion for these fields.

Andrew Lacy [01:34]: “I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer. I never grew up feeling like I wanted to learn economics, but my score allowed it.”

Post-graduation, Andrew’s initial foray into the professional world was unfulfilling. He worked as a lawyer representing dubious clients and eventually transitioned into consulting at McKinsey during the dot-com bubble, where he gained invaluable insights into building tech companies from the business side.

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Becoming an Accidental Entrepreneur

Despite a prestigious resume that included an MBA from Stanford, Andrew struggled to secure a position at major tech firms like Google or Salesforce. His unconventional background—rooted in law and strategy consulting—didn't resonate with traditional tech recruiters who favored coding expertise and hands-on technical experience.

Andrew Lacy [05:00]: “People that had knew how to code or had experience really in the trenches. I felt like I had built experience with companies but in a much more low risk way. And that just really Wasn't valued.”

This rejection propelled Andrew into entrepreneurship almost by accident. Introduced to a fellow entrepreneur in the iPhone space, Andrew seized the opportunity to co-found a mobile gaming company—the first of its kind on the iPhone platform—which they successfully sold to Disney.

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Challenges and Resilience in Entrepreneurship

Andrew candidly shares the roller-coaster nature of entrepreneurship. Building a company brought unprecedented lows and highs, from falling out with co-founders to being kicked off the App Store. These experiences tested his resilience and underscored the intense emotional and physical demands of founding a startup.

Andrew Lacy [12:00]: “I never experienced more low points than I did building a company. I also never experienced as many high points. So you have this roller coaster experience.”

A pivotal element that helped Andrew navigate these challenges was the support of a co-founder and a resilient community. He emphasizes the importance of not going it alone and having a support system to lift each other during tough times.

Andrew Lacy [14:16]: “Having a co-founder is like having someone to pick you up if you're not having a great day.”

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Fundraising Struggles and Perseverance

Transitioning to his second venture, a vertical search company in Paris, Andrew encountered significant fundraising hurdles. The radical nature of their ideas led to widespread rejection from investors, many of whom dismissed the concept as unviable.

Andrew Lacy [29:30]: “We struggled to raise money, and still do, in my opinion, to raise money as a company. The more crazy the idea is that you're pursuing, the more people just reject it outright.”

Despite receiving numerous “no’s,” Andrew persevered, bootstrapping the company through bank loans and guarantees until they could establish a presence in Silicon Valley. This persistent effort eventually led to their successful acquisition by Disney.

Andrew Lacy [31:39]: “We ended up bootstrapping the company. We got bank loans and bank guarantees, and we ended up begging and borrowing our way to opening up a location in Silicon Valley.”

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Founding Prenuvo: A Health Tech Revolution

After selling his first company, Andrew sought a new venture that aligned more closely with his personal experiences and desire for impactful innovation. This introspection led him to Prenuvo, inspired by his own transformative experience with a comprehensive whole-body MRI scan.

Andrew Lacy [24:12]: “I came out, and every single organ of my body had been analyzed. I just had never seen anything like this before. And I’m like, wouldn’t it be incredible if we could bring this to as many people as possible?”

Prenuvo aims to revolutionize the healthcare industry by shifting from a reactive to a proactive approach, encouraging regular health screenings that can detect conditions early, often before symptoms arise. This preventive model promises not only better health outcomes but also significant cost savings for the healthcare system.

Andrew Lacy [36:19]: “The goal of the company really is to change this entire industry, turn it upside down from an industry that's very reactive, where we're afraid to learn about our health.”

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Vision and Mission for Prenuvo

Andrew envisions a future where Prenuvo's screenings become as routine as dental check-ups, providing individuals peace of mind and empowering them to take control of their health proactively. He highlights the societal shift required to embrace such a preventative approach, emphasizing the importance of changing the narrative around health and disease detection.

Andrew Lacy [36:19]: “We’re looking so routinely, we're going to find things very early. And we're going to find things so early that sometimes you don't even need medical intervention.”

This mission-driven approach not only aims to save lives but also aspires to transform the global healthcare landscape, making comprehensive health screenings accessible and commonplace.

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Lessons Learned and Advice

Andrew’s journey underscores several critical lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs:

1. Resilience is Key: The entrepreneurial path is fraught with highs and lows. Building resilience helps navigate the inevitable challenges.

   Andrew Lacy [12:00]: “There’s just been so many. I mean, you just have to have such resilience because there’s so many really low points.”

2. Embrace Reinvention: Andrew advocates for leveraging opportunities to reinvent oneself, especially when transitioning between cultures or industries.

   Andrew Lacy [07:34]: “Move country for me or city is like this opportunity to sort of reinvent yourself if you want to.”

3. Understand Fundraising Dynamics: Persisting through rejection is essential. Andrew emphasizes the importance of listening to feedback while maintaining conviction in one’s vision.

   Andrew Lacy [33:19]: “Entrepreneurship is about finding ways to accommodate these contradictory point of views.”

4. Mission-Driven Focus: A clear, impactful mission can sustain motivation and guide decision-making, even when facing external skepticism.

   Andrew Lacy [15:00]: “There’s something about going through that experience together. You’re giving birth to a new business or venture.”

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Personal Insights and Reflections

Andrew shares personal anecdotes that highlight his inherent curiosity and passion for learning—traits that have been pivotal in his entrepreneurial success. From dismantling the workings of a video camera in fourth grade to continuously seeking diverse experiences, his inquisitive nature has driven him to explore and innovate across various sectors and geographies.

Andrew Lacy [37:42]: “What makes life interesting is that every day is going to be a constant challenge. Everything is a constant challenge.”

Reflecting on his journey, Andrew advises future entrepreneurs to evaluate their timing and personal circumstances before taking the plunge, recognizing that entrepreneurship demands significant energy and commitment.

Andrew Lacy [39:03]: “Maybe getting started a bit earlier, but then probably be expect to fail and then get back on the horse and do it again.”

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Final Thoughts and Advice to Listeners

Andrew concludes with a heartfelt message about the privilege and risks of entrepreneurship. He emphasizes the importance of aligning one's personal circumstances with the demands of starting and growing a business, urging aspiring entrepreneurs to carefully consider their readiness for such a path.

Andrew Lacy [40:15]: “Everyone should evaluate themselves and whether that fits them or not, or how can they organize their life in such a way that they can really take a chance if that's something that is going to be really motivating for them.”

He also highlights the value of micro-entrepreneurship within organizations, suggesting roles like Chief of Staff as stepping stones for those looking to develop entrepreneurial skills in a structured environment.

Andrew Lacy [43:15]: “Successful companies have entrepreneurs at all levels. You can be a micro entrepreneur and learn those skills in a somewhat more safe environment.”

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Conclusion

Andrew Lacy’s story is a testament to the power of resilience, curiosity, and mission-driven entrepreneurship. From facing rejection in the tech job market to founding a groundbreaking health tech company, his journey offers invaluable insights for anyone looking to leap into entrepreneurship. By embracing challenges and maintaining unwavering belief in his vision, Andrew has not only built successful ventures but also set the stage for transformative impact in the healthcare industry.

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This summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and lessons from the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't had the chance to listen.

Transcript

[Andrew Lacy]

I became an accidental entrepreneur. I couldn't get a job at a technology company.

[Interviewer]

Andrew Lacy, founder and CEO of Prenuvo, a really transformative health company which can detect cancer.

[Andrew Lacy]

Prenuvo was one of the more interesting fundraising stories because we struggled to raise money. The more crazy the idea is that you're pursuing, the more people just reject it outright. Be very aware and conscious of all the ways in which you might handicap yourself and your potential for success. And one of those might be, I never experienced more low points than I did building a company. I also never experienced as many high points. Being an entrepreneur is very, very difficult. I've had falling outs with co founders. We got kicked off the App Store. I was completely drained.

[Interviewer]

But what helped you get up?

[Andrew Lacy]

I've always been a big believer in.

[Interviewer]

Andrew Lacey. If you want to hear somebody that is seriously changing the world, it's really incredible to see that. But it's also incredible to see how we started. So founder and CEO of Prenuvo is a really transformative health company which in basically one hour, using MRI, can detect cancer, stage one and 500 other medical conditions. That is amazing. But, Andrew, this is completely not what you studied. It's not how you started. Can you take us back in time for a second?

[Andrew Lacy]

I don't know if you can tell from the accent, but I grew up in Melbourne, Australia, so about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get. I grew up during that first.com boom. And I remember going online and looking at websites and I thought to myself, this is kind of cool. But I never really imagined that there were companies and people behind these things. That's how far I was from the startup ecosystem. And in Australia, for better or worse, the process of going to college is kind of simple. You do a standardized test, you get a score from 0 to 100, and then every single course you could possibly do had a score. And if your score was higher than score, you could do that course. You didn't have to write an application describing why you're passionate about becoming a doctor or a lawyer or studying accounting or becoming a speech pathologist or whatever it is you got the score you could go in. And the downside of this was, of course, when you looked at the score that you got, you're like, what's a cool thing I could do here? What's going to make me money? Or what's going to make my family proud? And pretty far down the list was, what actually do I think will I find fulfilling? So I ended up getting a pretty high score and that enabled me to go to probably one of the better universities in Australia to study economics and law. I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer. I never grew up feeling like I wanted to learn economics, but my score allowed it. So that's the school that I went to. I think the US is a bit different. Obviously people have to make the case for why they want to do what they want to do. But still, I think a lot of people, they don't put a lot of thought into where they decide to spend their early career. So I started working with lawyers during and post degree. I ended up representing a whole bunch of not wonderful actors, defended mining companies that poisoned the environment, and I was told to work for the gun lobby at one point and some developers that swindled a whole bunch of money for people. I mean, it was not a great experience. And I was just thinking to myself, wow, if this is my life for the next 20 years, I'm not even sure I want to like live that life. So I built up the courage to leave lore and I moved into consulting and I worked at a consulting firm called McKinsey. And there during this dot com bubble, there were a lot of big companies that wanted to get into digital technology but didn't really know how to do that. So they brought us in and we were supposed to be the experts. I didn't feel like much of an expert when I started, but we would do these highly compressed studies where we worked 80 hours a week trying to learn how to do product or trying to learn how to build technology. And it sounds kind of ridiculous today, but 20, 25 years ago, no one really knew anything, so people paid us to do this. And in the process I learned a lot about the business side of how to build tech companies. We've finally moved over to the U.S. i studied an MBA at Stanford and my dream at that time was to go and work at a Google or a salesforce. And on my resume was I was a lawyer, a former lawyer. I had done strategic consulting and I had an MBA from Stanford. And it turns out tech companies didn't value any of those things. So all the things I had worked so hard to put on my resume were completely useless to folks in that world. I think somewhat unfairly, but that's how they saw people with my background.

[Interviewer]

What do you think they were looking for?

[Andrew Lacy]

People that had knew how to code or had experience really in the trenches. I felt like I had built experience with companies but in a much more low risk way. And that just really Wasn't valued. So I became an accidental entrepreneur. I couldn't get a job at a technology company and I hung out with a friend of mine at a VCF firm and he introduced me to another entrepreneur who was doing something in the iPhone world. And I just thought it was so wonderful that someone really wanted to even hang out with me and hear my opinion about this thing. And so we started working together and a month in we decided that we would partner up and really grow this business. So I didn't start out being an entrepreneur of course when I got into it I started to realize what an incredible experience that would be and how it really matched my personality.

[Interviewer]

So you moved to a new country which is on its own, not that easy to do by the way. I remember the first time I got to drive in Silicon Valley and I would see the Googles and the Yahoos. These are real companies. Like it was really cool. And I assume you probably had a similar.

[Andrew Lacy]

I remember rollerblading along El Camino Real in Palo Alto and just being blown away, going by like the Yahoo office and the Google office that were all on El Camino Real back then.

[Interviewer]

It's interesting because you don't feel like you can find a job and you somehow stumbled on entrepreneurship, which I think objectives effectively is harder. Was there fear?

[Andrew Lacy]

Well, for me, I think you mentioned that I sort of. I've lived in different countries. I've probably lived now in six or seven different countries around the world. And a big part about that for me, every time I did that it was a real enabler to show up a different way in that new country. I personally felt like a lot of what held me back, held my own development and growth back was that. I'll give a simple example. Let's say I'm a very serious person and I would like to be more light hearted, tell more jokes. If all the people around me I've hung out with for 20 years I suddenly show up one day and I start telling jokes in my mind I'm going to be thinking, these guys think I'm really weird. This is not me. So moving country for me or city is like this opportunity to sort of reinvent yourself if you want to. Sometimes I've used that to reinvent my personality to some extent. I've gone from being very introverted and heads down to being a lot more extroverted and heads up. But also no one has any prior expectations about who you are and what you're going to do. And I think that's just super liberating. For taking risk.

[Interviewer]

You basically start from scratch to some extent. Obviously you have you, but you can define you because nobody knows you and there's no real expectations. So you're deciding to start this company. Talk to us a little bit about how this goes and what are some of the learnings from that first experience?

[Andrew Lacy]

Well, I should just say one more point about the context because I think it's really important. I think the one thing that the US does really well is it has a expectation that people do reinvent themselves. You know, I've lived in Europe, obviously in Australia as well. And I think if you were a lawyer and you went to your family and friends and say, hey, I'm thinking about quitting the law and learning how to program. Every single person is going to tell you you're crazy. In America you do that, you might still be crazy, but no one is going to tell you this. They're like, cool, right on. You're living the dream. And I think we forget that successful career change is not just about having the strength and fortitude within, but it's also the societal context is so important in creating an environment where people feel really comfortable doing that. So if you're in a place where that's not the case, then I definitely encourage you to think about possibly moving. And I think in all parts of the world that Tel Aviv, for example, and Israel is a very, I think, forward looking and entrepreneurial environment. In Europe, there are places like this all around the world. You don't have to come to Silicon Valley, but not every place has this environment that enables you to sort of take that leap as easily as you can in the us so you move.

[Interviewer]

From law to entrepreneurship. By the way, did you get weird comments about it from family, friends or was that pretty much you were young and it's okay?

[Andrew Lacy]

Well, I had gone backpacking, you know, as an Aussie around the world. So I think a lot of people just said, oh, this is Andrew's different type of backpacking. You know, he's going to head over to the US and he's going to be working instead of playing, but he'll be back, I think was the assumption. And I haven't been back now for over 20 years.

[Interviewer]

I can see you are the type that loves adventure. You're the type that goes on. Tell us a little bit about this company. What does it teach you? And again, it was sold for Disney. Right. There's definitely some ticking box of success, but I want to hear a little bit of what that journey was like.

[Andrew Lacy]

Well, for me, the thing that I found, I didn't know too much about how to build startups inside out. There were a lot of things that were really new to me. People would say things and then I would go and Google what the word was and try and understand what's a use case and how is that important. But I started to learn really quickly that what's really nice about entrepreneurship is that you're sort of like blazing your own path. And that means that there's just a lot of problem solving. And what I found was that when I looked back on my career, I was studying law. Well, what is law? Law is problem solving. How do you find the right cases to support an argument that you want to make to win the case that you're advocating for? Consulting is about going in and really trying to understand very quickly what are the issues and then suggest possible solutions. So I just found that in some ways, the startup world for me was the most concentrated problem solving environment that you could find. It's as if you love playing chess. I felt like I got to play chess every day. There was always something that would be intellectually exciting and it didn't really matter what it was. It didn't matter that I didn't know anything about the domain of the company at the time, which was mobile and we evolved into a mobile gaming company. It didn't really matter. I didn't know too much about product management or engineering. You know, I just had this insatiable appetite for learning and applying these problem solving skills to a whole bunch of new problems. And I think for me, that was a big unlock. I started to realize how actually I did have skills that would be really relevant to entrepreneurship and that my 10 years doing other things wasn't a complete waste of time.

[Interviewer]

Exactly. But tell us about a hard moment again. Entrepreneurship always has a lot of hard moments. So if you're willing to share from this company or another one, share a little bit about a hard moment and kind of that learning from it, because we grow a lot of muscle from these.

[Andrew Lacy]

A lot of scar tissue as well, to be honest. There's just been so many. I mean, you just have to have such resilience because there's so many really low points. I never experienced more low points than I did building a company. I also never experienced as many high points. So you have this roller coaster experience. I've had low points where I've had falling outs with co founders. The first time you get an inbound lawsuit and you just feel like everything is over at that point. There's been times back in those early days where we building these apps on the App Store and we got kicked off the App Store and we had to work to get back on. So all these things were just. I would go home and I would just stare at the wall and I was completely drained and just unable to feel like I could get up the next day and come to work. But you do. And then inevitably the next day is not as bad as the last day and maybe something great happens that day and then turns into the best day. And so there's this sort of yo yo which personally I feel is not great for health. Probably why I'm working in healthcare now. But it's tremendous for like resilience because the more you go through these ups and downs, the more I've just learned that doesn't matter how bad it is today. I've seen enough days where the next day is incredible or better or affects me a lot less. And I do think that's one of those crucibles of learning that if you're looking to get into entrepreneurship, there's no shortcut. People can tell you it, you can sort of understand it academically, but you have to go through those lows and those highs to realize that it's a roller coaster. And probably the biggest skill you learn through this is resilience. And probably like the biggest consequence for your health is a slightly higher cortisol level because you can't avoid that. It's very difficult to like be completely stress free when you're going through these big ups and downs.

[Interviewer]

I think we would use to call them the near death experiences. There's like moments where you feel like the whole world is collapsing on you, which like you said, eventually you wake up in the morning and you see it didn't collapse, but what helped you get up when it does feel like those hard moments can feel pretty suffocating, I would say.

[Andrew Lacy]

I've always been a big believer in having more than one founder of the company. I think a big job of having a co founder is to pick you up if you're not having a great day. And then when they're not having a great day, your job is to pick them up. So I think it's a very, very lonely ride if you're taking it alone. And if you don't have a co founder. You know, I'm in a number of groups now, entrepreneurial groups, and I think there's always people asking for advice, including myself. And then just having a community of people that have gone through that experience I think is really valuable.

[Interviewer]

But co founder is also tricky. Right. I know a lot of co founders that just pulled themselves together downwards. Right. So how do you navigate co founder and maybe talk just a little bit about how that worked with acquisition for you?

[Andrew Lacy]

Co founder is the closest relationship to marriage. 50% of all marriages end up in divorce. A certain number of marriages end up in accommodation. Right. Where you sort of live together but you're maybe not in love and then some of them are really happy. And I think probably the co founder relationship is similar, probably has similar stats too. So it's really hard. It's not a fantasy of everything. And if that co founder relationship ends up being a relationship of friction, it's almost the worst possible thing because then you don't have this person that you would normally confide in. The problem is with them. But I still think Net net, there's something about going through that experience together. You're giving birth to a child that is a new business or venture. And I think just because a lot of those relationships don't end up well doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire to like find that. I think when you go out there and figure out what to do, tell.

[Interviewer]

Me a little bit. You sell this company, the first company to Disney, for some ungodly reason, you decide to move to Paris and learn to code. Did I get this right, Andrew? Because that sounds like.

[Andrew Lacy]

Yeah, I was still on this path to learn things. And after we sold that company, I figured what I didn't want to do was jump into something straight away. So I said, well, what can I do? What's a fun problem solving thing to do that sort of will help me be more capable in the future if I want to do another company? And I thought, well, why don't I learn how to code? Because that's the one part of the startup business I never fully understood. So I was fortunate enough to just hire someone to tutor me one on one. Just like learning a language, tutored one on one. You can learn pretty fast. And so I really sort of got into it and I'm not really good at learning from books. I like to do things. And so most of my learning was applied, which is like, hey, let's pick a problem and see if we can solve this problem. And so we picked a problem at the time, which was a vertical search problem searching inside certain domains. And I just remember one day I looked up sort of six months into this process and I had a few other people working for me on this problem with me and I realized that I was sort of inadvertently had started another company. And that's sometimes how companies start to not with a lot of thought, it's just passion again for solving a problem, actually not even with a particular amount of thought for whether this problem deserved to be solved, which is, if anything, the problem with that second company. But that's how that came about. Back in those days, there wasn't a lot of entrepreneurship in France, so I found a bunch of misfits because it was not very common to get into entrepreneurship there. And we all sort of hung out in a little office there and we cranked out code. The French lifestyle is very funny because on the weekends or in the evenings, there's a lot of societal pressure to not be working actually. And I don't think this reflects startups today. But back then when we did that, and I remember if my website broke after 7 or 8pm, it was good luck finding any engineers on the team that could ever fix it. That was finally my graduation from coding academy, jumping online and trying to fix a website when I couldn't get in touch with anyone because probably all their friends and family telling them, don't answer the call from the boss, he's trying to get you to work too hard. So that was my sort of French experience in a lot of ways back then. Much harder to build a startup over there, but it was a fun experience to do it in the context of a different culture.

[Interviewer]

You alluded to it in the previous question, but I mean, you worked in, I don't know, Paris, Spain, Silicon Valley, Australia. I'm sure there's many that I'm missing. And you're definitely seeing some culture differences that are very substantial. First of all, how do you adapt? But also, what are some of these culture differences beyond their readiness for entrepreneurship or not wanting to work hard? Because for us it's like, yeah, midnight is normal, let's go. So how is that?

[Andrew Lacy]

And I don't believe that that's just because we are, I mean, we probably are those type of people, but it's becoming a more and more unpopular thing to say. But building a startup is really hard. And it's hard in the sense that you often have a limited amount of time and money to reach a milestone and you're competing against companies that have way more resource than you do. And so like, really the only benefit that you have is to move fast. That's the only way that you can really thread that needle. And moving fast implies working really hard and People these days, I think are looking for so like a way to do entrepreneurship somehow while maintaining a level of balance. If they can do it, they're better an entrepreneur than I am. I think it's really difficult. I try and find balance over my long term, work really hard for five years and take two years off. And the challenge is with different cultures. Some cultures are more open and excited about you making career shifts and reinventing yourself. But that's sort of at this macro level, at the sort of more micro level. We face so much pressure from the society that we're in. There are certain cultures out there. If you're working too late, all your friends who are out having beers or drinking and they're like, oh, look at you, you're stupid. Why would you do that? If you're the CEO, maybe you get more of a pass. But if you're working for the CEO, let's say you're an engineer, they're taking advantage of you, or it's your mother or your parents that are, you're working too hard. Why would you do this? You're going to kill yourself. And that sort of slowly erodes that entrepreneurial, I think, passion and drive. My thought process has been always being an entrepreneur is very, very difficult. Be very aware and conscious of all the ways in which you might handicap yourself and your potential for success. And one of those might be the people that you surround yourself with or the location that you decide to build a company or the type of company you build. And I just think this is sort of Olympic sports. You really need to have the least amount of handicap possible if you want to maximize your chances to change the world.

[Interviewer]

I think there is this thing to look for, the easy button these days because we see all these successes on social media. They all look like an overnight success. They just don't realize the decade that came beforehand of really, really hard work. So looking for that easy button just doesn't really exist. You can have freedom, but after, it just can't be at the same time.

[Andrew Lacy]

Yeah. And the stories that you see, the dramatizations of these startups I think doesn't do the field a lot of service because they do make it look easy. The form of success is dropping out of high school or college and going into a garage with three or four people and having some pizza and then shipping a product the next week. And all of a sudden you're a unicorn company. And it just doesn't really work that way. And by the way, for me, it highlights a truth that a Lot of people don't really understand, which is being an entrepreneur is not the best way in the world to make money if that's your goal on a risk adjusted basis. If you're a very, very smart person and you could be an investment banker or a lawyer or whoever, a stock trader, and you're really good at what you do, there's way less risk in that path. If your goal is to make money, I think it's very soul crushing. But I think it's really important to understand what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for like an interesting life here where you feel like you can build a level of comfort if you work hard and have a little bit of luck? Or is it mainly about money? Because when you risk adjust it. Not everyone is walking away from startups that they build like the people that.

[Interviewer]

You see on television and even I know people that sold for a lot of money, the companies, but it does not go to your pocket. So the majority of it disappears, even if it has a lot of zeros there. So we are seeing a lot of these stories, but it sounds very glamorous. Oh my God, they sold for multimillion. Yeah, but most of it did not go to the founder. So there's a little element there that I think is also some preconceived notion.

[Andrew Lacy]

There's also different startups you can build. There are cash businesses that don't require a lot of investment at one end. There are other ends where, like an Uber or something or where you just have to raise billions of dollars to build a company that's worth tens of billions. And the former company probably has a much higher chance of success and the latter company, it's one in a million that succeeds. It's also about what your individual risk appetite is. And sometimes people that build these very big companies, by the time the investors have taken their share, there's not often a lot left for those folks. But they've changed the world and maybe that's. And then they can pivot that into other ventures down the track. So there's lots of ways to look at reward, I guess.

[Interviewer]

So I want to actually take you there, Andrew, because at some point you decide we can talk a little bit about that second company, but you're basically starting the third, which is Prenuvo. And there was a little bit of a reflection of which idea do I want to chase next? Take us there a little bit, Andrew, because I think a lot of our listeners are exactly in that crossroad of what do I want to do next. And maybe I do want impact and maybe I do want to change the world, but I just don't know how.

[Andrew Lacy]

To give a quick summary of sort of my entrepreneurial journey. My first company was a mobile gaming company, one of the first iPhone companies. We sold it to Disney. It was a nice exit. Like most first time entrepreneurs, I attributed a lot of success of that company to me. I was pretty cool, I was smart, I figured this stuff out. And so when I was working on this second vertical search company over in Paris, I'm like, well, it doesn't really matter what I do because I've already figured stuff out so it's going to be successful. That was such a rude awakening, just how much of a slog that was and how much it wasn't really about me. I was not immaterial. But there are other forces at play that were much more important, like what the idea was and was there a market for it and just something as unpredictable as luck and being in the right place at the right time. So when I came back to the US I knew I wanted to do something else. And my starting point really was not to do something that was impact focused. But the agreement I made with myself was I will never do another company again where the idea is my own because I don't trust that I understand necessarily what is going to be a big impactful, world changing idea. So I just went out, I posted on my LinkedIn, I emailed all my friends and I said, I want to do another company. I don't know what I want to do. I want you to reach out into your networks and find people that have problems that you think would be interesting to solve and introduce me to those people. And so I got all this inbound and I was going and having coffees, but there were coffees with a purpose that, you know, I'm working in this field, you know, I'm working in banking some. I talked to doctors who have problems. I talked to a whole host of different people. And what I found through those conversations was that the ideas that both sounded big and interesting to solve also happened to be the ones that had more impact. And they tended to be the folks that I spoke to in the medical domain. And I actually explored three things there. One was a genetics company for babies, for pediatric genetics. The second was an Alzheimer's diagnostic where we take a photo of your eye and we can tell you where you're on the Alzheimer's spectrum. So a $50 product that would replace a $5,000 PET scan. And then one was someone who came to me, a friend of mine, and said, hey, there's this guy doing these really interesting whole body scans. Why don't you go and talk to him? Because he's been doing it for 10 years, and it hasn't grown anywhere, but it's really, really cool. So I just was out. I put myself out there. I gave a lot of advice in the process of just trying to figure out what was next. And I went and did this scan, sat down with the radios afterwards, and I was just completely blown away. As someone who grew up watching Star Trek and Star Wars, I don't know if you remember the bridge of one of these spaceships, all the buttons and knobs and everything. I mean, an iPad today blows away what they imagined the future was back then, but the medical devices that they imagined 50 years ago, we're still so far away from that today. And it felt like to me, this was the closest thing I lied down in a machine for 45 minutes. I came out, and every single organ of my body had been analyzed. I just had never seen anything like this before. And I'm like, wouldn't it be incredible if we could bring this to as many people as possible? And I left and mulled on it for a little while. And what I found happening in the days after I did that exam was I had this such tremendous peace of mind. And I didn't fully appreciate before then just how much I had worried about my health, especially as a hardworking entrepreneur, because we ignore diet, we ignore exercise, we have headaches, we don't sleep enough, there's random pains, and there's always that little voice saying, oh, you know, what if? Well, I figured out the way to cure the what if? At least for myself. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if every year I could do one of these? I never had to worry about that one thing that was weighing me down, that could really sort of unlock my potential to do whatever I wanted to do. So that's how this company got started is, you know, my own personal experience and sort of what it meant for me and my own health as an entrepreneur.

[Interviewer]

Not knowing what I wanted to do next, I think for me, was one of the hardest moments of my life. And it sounds like you took it with a lot of leaning in and very proactive approach of let me try to have as many conversations as possible. First of all, was that a hard moment for you, or was it a fun moment?

[Andrew Lacy]

In that story, I'm skipping the six months where I went to the Starbucks every day and sat down and stared at my computer thinking to myself, what should I do? And that was very depressing because every day I didn't come up with something that was interesting was sort of a day that I felt like a failure. I mean, again, in the movies, that's how it works. You know, you're at the Starbucks and the billion dollar idea comes from the napkin drawing that you made. I just don't think that's how entrepreneurship really works or should work. And it's so hard to build companies. Why do we expect also that the entrepreneur is going to come up with the idea? And so the big unlock for me was like saying, you know what, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'll keep going to Starbucks, but I want someone across the other side of that table talking about something I don't know and see if I can get excited about a problem that's keeping other people up at night.

[Interviewer]

Amazing. So the very first thing that you do is you test the product, which is fascinating, right? And then you raise a ton of money for it, which is pretty mind blowing because obviously you believe in it. So talk to us a little bit. How did that came about?

[Andrew Lacy]

Pranuva was one of the more interesting fundraising stories because we struggled to raise money, and still do, in my opinion, to raise money as a company. And the main reason for this is, I think, and I wear this a bit as a badge of pride now, is kind of like the more crazy the idea is that you're pursuing, the more people just reject it outright. And I think investors have a really hard time telling the difference between. I mean, you can easily tell a good idea from a bad idea, but it's really hard to tell like an incredible idea from the worst thing you've ever heard. So the tales of that distribution, it's hard to tell one from the other. I remember I saw Uber's first angel pitch. I saw WhatsApp's first angel pitch and I'm like, this is stupid in both cases. So it's just very hard to do. We talked to a lot of investors and we got a lot of no's. In fact, when we had that first clinic in Canada, which is where we started, we had patients coming in, they were super excited, they were jazzed. The business was actually profitable back then at a really early stage. And I went to investors and every investor had a doctor or every VC had a doctor on their investment committee. And all those doctors were like, this is stupid. You shouldn't Invest in it. And so we ended up bootstrapping the company. We got bank loans and bank guarantees, and we ended up begging and borrowing our way to opening up a location in Silicon Valley. So it looks kind of easy now, but in the early days, it absolutely was not. And even as we raised our Series A Round a couple of years ago, 95% of the people we spoke to was a no. And it's funny, because we are, I think, probably one of the more unique companies in Silicon Valley in that we count as patients of ours a large number of VCs, who swear that they'll use us every year for the rest of their lives, but will not invest in us. It was a real journey, finding the right investors that really believed and understood the vision. And we've been really fortunate to have great folks that have supported the company. But definitely it was not easy.

[Interviewer]

Incredible story. And I think you raised, what, 80 million right now?

[Andrew Lacy]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

What you're describing is, yes, it was hard, but you just continue to look for the few that will say yes. So, first of all, again, what motivates you to keep on looking? Right, because you need to, first of all, really believe in it. That's very clear, be very passionate, but also keep motivating yourself that there's going to be the people that will say yes. How do you do that, Andrew?

[Andrew Lacy]

For me, personally, the emotional damage of fundraising is the worst of all in the startup journey. I can deal with the ups and downs of product, market fit and all of the HR issues that come with hiring folks. And. But, like, when you go to investor, you're bringing that baby that you've created and nurtured, and you're putting on a scale and you're weighing it, and when 95% of investors are like, we don't like this baby, we're not going to invest in it. It is tremendously hard because that's what you have just spent oftentimes two or three years getting ready for that moment. It's really, really hard, to this day, still find it very stressful until you get one or two yeses, and then you're like, okay, cool, it's going to clear. But that could be 50 meetings in, and I don't have a lot of advice for it because I don't think I figured it out. It still affects me a lot. But I guess the one thing I've learned is, having done it a few times now, it doesn't matter how many yeses you get, it just matters. You get one or two and again.

[Interviewer]

Most people will stop at about 10, will say, okay, this is not investable. I don't want to continue. But you continued.

[Andrew Lacy]

There's a number of contradictions that you have to find a way to reconcile when you build a company. And I think one of them is that, of course, if a bunch of investors are saying no, it's really important to listen and try and understand why they're saying no. But you also sort of have to be prepared to have conviction and ignore a lot of the things that you're hearing. And that's the challenge. And in very many ways, entrepreneurship is about finding ways to accommodate these contradictory point of views. It's incredible to be mission driven. It's like such a powerful motivation for a company and for its employees. But you can be tremendously mission driven on horrible execution, or you can be great at executing, but, like, have a hollow mission. So you sort of need so many of these different things that in some ways are, like, contradictory. Because being mission driven is like sitting around the table and talking about saving lives and, you know, we're going to change the world and all these sorts of things. And then being able to go back to your desk after me saying, okay, I got to work on, like, 100 little tiny things that get me 0.01% of the way there. So the same is true, like, with investors. I think it's about listening and ignoring. And if you only ignore and don't listen, you may never raise money. And if you only listen and don't ignore, you may just get despondent and, like, give up. I see that all the time with companies that I advise.

[Interviewer]

And I think also sometimes you hear all these advice of experts, and the grass always looks greener on the other side, right? So you find yourself just maneuvering everything, and you need to know what you want to listen to and what you don't want to listen to. And that's a hard one, because when you're trying to raise capital, you're trying to be more receptive. And on the other hand, you need to continue.

[Andrew Lacy]

I do some angel investing, obviously, but I would say this about the company that I'm in as well. The most interesting business are ones where there's like, an information asymmetry when you understand something about a market that investors and other people don't. And Pranuvo is that company because we understood better than anyone else how mri, the technology that we're using, has evolved in the last 10 years. It's been around for 30 years. Just like cell phones have but like the cell phones of the last few years are totally different to the ones 20 years ago. And so we understood and we have this information that the average medical practitioner or investor doesn't have. And because we have this asymmetry, we have very little competition. But also because there's this asymmetry, it's much harder to get investment. So for me, sometimes when you struggle, one possibility here is that you know something that other people don't. And the best companies, like the most sort of world changing companies, are built from these asymmetric information situations. And when that collapses, all of a sudden, when everyone understands that, let's say whole body screening can potentially change the world, well, by that stage, it's too late. The companies that are working on it will have already been working on it for like 10, 15 years.

[Interviewer]

So what do you see for Pranuvo? How do you see that forming in the next whatever future? How do you see that disrupting health?

[Andrew Lacy]

The goal of the company really is to change this entire industry, turn it upside down from an industry that's very reactive, where we're afraid to learn about our health. It's a scary thing. I mean, the single biggest challenge my patients have to overcome in coming in is the fear that the health system has put in their heads that anything we find might be life threatening. And the world we want to create is one where you get a screening every year or so. It's like going to the dentist. We're checking to see how things are going. You will have disease, but because we're looking so routinely, we're going to find things very early. And we're going to find things so early that sometimes you don't even need medical intervention. You can just change your lifestyle. And if you need medical intervention, it's going to be cheaper and it's going to have be much more successful outcome for the patient and for the health system. That's the world that we're trying to create. You won't recognize it. I don't think in the same way. I think people in 30 or 40 years will look back at the healthcare system today and they'll just shake their heads and for me, that it's incredible to be able to change it, you know, work to change industry and save lives in the process. I just feel so blessed to being able to do that every day of the week.

[Interviewer]

Oh, it sounds incredible. And I'm so aligned with your mission. What do you think is something that maybe people don't necessarily know about you, that made you who you are? Or built you to who you are today.

[Andrew Lacy]

Andrew When I was in fourth grade, I remember a teacher brought in a video camera to videotape us. And I'm going to display my age here a little bit. But that was like the first time I saw a video camera and the woman was filming us. And I just felt it was so fascinating. All these knobs were spinning around, whatever. And I just asked, why is that? How is it working? What's going on here? Why is that thing spinning? And the teacher got so upset at me, I got detention. But I think that's me. I have friends that they build a company, they sell it, and then they start the same company again, plus or minus 10%, and then they sell that and they start the same company again, plus or minus 10%, and sell that. And it's probably a better way to be financially successful, for sure, but for me it just feels very boring. So I've just always had this curiosity for learning new things, and that's why every one of my companies has been a completely new sector. I've done different roles in most of them and I've been curious enough to experiment with. What does it mean even to do it in different countries around the world? I don't know. I just think that's what makes life interesting, is that every day is going to be a constant challenge. That's what most people don't know about me is, yeah, I got detention routinely for just asking too many why questions. That's cool.

[Interviewer]

Oh, I love that curiosity. And it definitely explains a lot of who you are. So what would you say to your younger self based on everything that you know about yourself and where you are?

[Andrew Lacy]

The simple answer would be that I sort of wasted 10 years of my time before I figured out that building companies was the thing that motivated me. So my first company, I was, I think, 31, which is still young, but in Silicon Valley speak, that's kind of old when it comes to starting companies. That's the easy answer. The reality is I don't think I would be successful if it wasn't for that experience. But for sure, you have a lot more energy in your 20s than you do in your 40s. You have fewer familial responsibilities. I still work quite hard, but I cannot work anywhere near as hard as I used to because I have a child to look after and, you know, I married and. And I just don't have the energy. So I don't know, maybe getting started a bit earlier, but then probably be expect to fail and then get Back on the horse and do it again.

[Interviewer]

And you still work until 3am as far as I could see.

[Andrew Lacy]

I do, but I less and less like what I see looking back at me in the mirror the next day compared to when I was 20 or 30 years younger.

[Interviewer]

Well, you are changing lives. And I think even from the first second that we chatted, like it's very clear that it's almost like that bigger mission. That's the adrenaline that keeps you going. What would you say to our listeners?

[Andrew Lacy]

I feel pretty privileged because I sort of always had a pretty good banner. The next best alternative for me was always going to be something where I could put bread on the table. So I could always go back to consulting. I don't think I'd go back to law, but I could. I guess in theory for me that's like a really privileged place to be. It sort of is very freeing and enabling of taking risks. I mean, everyone should evaluate themselves and whether that sort of fits them or not, or how can they organize their life in such a way that they can really take a chance if that's something that is going to be really motivating for them. It's funny, I used to volunteer at a prison actually in California where we did this entrepreneurial contest. And a lot of these people that we worked with were people that they might have been in prison for like 10, 20 years, like their entire adult life, some of them for quite serious crimes. But they all had this passion for the fact that their sentence was coming up and they had to figure out they didn't want to come back in jail, which is what usually happens. So what can they do? And so we taught them entrepreneurship and they all came up with ideas and they weren't VC fundable ideas. But for those people it's very difficult to get a job and becoming their own business owner sometimes is the best way, in fact the lowest way to like figure out how, you know, to put bread on the table. So I don't know, I think it's just such a personal decision and I'm always very nervous to say, well it's easy, you know, just quit your job and rent a house with five other people and just eat two minute noodles. And because like not everyone can do that. Hopefully many people have a time and place in their lives where that's possible. And if you're in that time of your life where that is possible, like I would think hard about whether that's now's the right time because you don't want to have those regrets when you are, you know, you have family or you have other commitments where it's like not, not quite possible to be able.

[Interviewer]

To do it, it just becomes harder. And I always say that it took me time to realize that even as a vice president, the difference between number one and number two is light years away. And I didn't really grasp it. I felt like, oh, I'm doing a lot of the things anyway. No, you're not. So I think not realizing that actually running the thing and being the person that all bucks stops here, that is a big difference.

[Andrew Lacy]

It is a psychological difference. But when I speak to my staff, I often talk about something that I truly believe which is successful companies have entrepreneurs at all levels. And yes, maybe the buck stops with me, but I would say the vast majority of the innovations that make products, you know, if you can make a product 1% better every week, it doesn't take long for it to be twice as good as it was before. And a lot of those innovations don't come from the top. They come from other people in the organization. So you can be a micro entrepreneur and learn those skills in a somewhat more safe environment and maybe one day thereafter you have the courage and sort of experience, then go and do it on your own.

[Interviewer]

Oh, I just love what you just said, Andrew. And I think it's true, right? If everybody drives themselves even within the organization, how much more are you able to do and how much are you able to grow yourself and the organization?

[Andrew Lacy]

I've said one role to look out for if people are looking for a stepping stone is like a chief of staff role in a high growth company because these are folks that basically assist senior executives and they have tremendous visibility into everything that's going on in the organization and they become sort of pinch hitters for problems along the way and solving them. And I've pretty much always had a chief of staff in my companies and many of them have gone on to create big meaningful companies. So that's maybe a great stepping stone for someone who is thinking about it but wants to maybe take two or three years and learn in as accelerated an environment as possible.

[Interviewer]

What an incredible tip. Thank you. I wish you so much luck. I'm just such a big fan of what you are all creating. To me, that looks like exactly where health needs to go. But also just really appreciate your stories and this really honest conversation. Can't thank you enough.

[Andrew Lacy]

No worries. It's been great talking. Thank you.