← The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
574: He's Building a $250M+ Business That Measures Success in Lives Saved | Andrew Lacy
00:51:55
In this episode, Andrew Lacy, founder of Prenuvo, shares how he went from two startup exits to building one of the fastest-growing health tech companies in the world—revolutionizing preventative healthcare with full-body MRI scans.
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- [00:02]
Nathan Chan
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- [01:51]
Andrew Lacy
Stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
- [02:04]
Nathan Chan
Andrew, welcome to the show. Most people only go to a doctor when something feels wrong, but you've built a company on the idea that waiting could cost lives. So what first made you believe that healthcare was backwards?
- [02:20]
Andrew Lacy
Well, like most entrepreneurs, it started with, you know, my own personal journey and I'm excited to share with you today, Nathan. So, you know, I'm a serial entrepreneur and I tend to believe that it's the greatest profession in the world, but it should come with a warning label. You know, I would say it's probably just as hazardous to your health as smoking. Because most entrepreneurs I know, and definitely including myself, we don't eat very well. You know, we exercise poorly, we sleep badly, and we have a lot of stress. And that described me six years ago when I had finished one venture and was about to start another. And I remember quite viscerally just looking in the mirror and saying, you know, I'm just about to, like, embark on another thing that could, you know, take two or three years, four years, five years. Who knows? How do I know I'm going to be around for the fruits of that labor? And it was just a simple question. You'd think there'd be a great answer to it. But as I went out there and tried to get that answer for myself, I just found there's a hodgepodge of different tests and there was no one that could really give you one comprehensive, complete answer. So I sought out a radiologist and who was doing these very complicated. And at the time, very. Took a lot of time, about two hours exams. And, you know, I imaged my entire body. And it was pretty unusual. Not a lot of people were doing it back then, but I just got such tremendous insights into my own health that it made me realize just how backwards the health system was. You know, this was the closest thing to Star Trek, you know, or Star wars or, you know, those science fiction movies that we sort of grew up with, where there was a machine that could just tell you everything that was going on inside your body. And I felt like this was that and I wanted to bring it to the rest of the world.
- [04:07]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So a few things I'd love to unpack there. So what was the venture that you were going to start? Was it. Was it Pronovo or like. Yeah, like.
- [04:18]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, I. So we sort of gone a little bit backwards through time. But, you know, six years ago I knew I wanted to do another company. And I had had a couple of exits before, but I had worked on. The second one was a really big slog, and it was an idea I was very passionate about. And, and. But it was a really bad business idea. And so. And so it took me three years to exit that company. And it was a lot of lost hair and a lot of stress, and I sort of lost faith in my own ability to figure out what company to do, you know, to come up with the idea. So I decided six years ago that I was just going to talk to a bunch of people and say, hey, I'm here. I learned something about building companies. Who has a cool idea that you Know needs a good problem solver to like help them solve. And I was working on a few different ventures. One was with a team of people in Australia in the field of Alzheimer's diagnostics. Another one was working on an infant genomic company. And then the third one ended up being the company that's now Prenuvo. So I was working on a few different things. Prenuvo came out of my own experience with healthcare, but I knew I wanted to do something in healthcare. I just didn't want it to be my idea.
- [05:36]
Nathan Chan
And you said you had a couple exits previously. Can you talk through the size scale?
- [05:44]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, I mean the first one was definitely life changing for me. It was the first iPhone focused company. It was a company called Tapulous and we started that when the iPhone had just launched and we saw underground hackers that were hacking into their phones to put apps on to do very innocent things like change the wallpaper on their phone. And we were the first companies to focus in on this space. I bought every underground app there was, you know, all the ways which we're addicted to the iPhone now. We pioneered some of those in the early days and I ended up selling that to Disney. So that was my first sale and it was, it was super nice, you know, obviously, and pretty rare that the first company you do is something of a success. And you know, of course I attribute a lot of that to just me being friggin great, which was a sort of stupid in hindsight. It was a lot about just having good timing.
- [06:42]
Nathan Chan
And then your most recent one perform.
- [06:47]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, so that was Tabulous. We sold that in 2011 and then I went to work at the Walt Disney company building mobile phone apps, bringing Disney IP to the mobile device. During that time I was managing a clinic, what do you call it, a studio over in Europe. And you know, through Concentrics to Europe, I met my wife, you know, on a trip through Paris. So I ended up moving to Paris and just wanting to. Wanting to learn how to code and ended up turning that into a company that was sort of voice activated, natural language search. What Siri does badly today. I felt like we were doing better 10 years ago. So that was the second company. It was difficult, it was very hard to monetize. I did exit it, but it wasn't a very. Think of it more like an acqui hire. And you know, that's where my hubris, you know, I thought the first success was all about me. And it turned out from the second company that it wasn't, you know, it was timing was really important, just being in the right market at the right time. And. And at that moment, I realized, hey, I want to keep being an entrepreneur for rest of my life, but I want to see there's a lot of ideas out there. I want to talk to people and figure out, you know, where I can be helpful as opposed to feel like as an entrepreneur, I can do everything.
- [08:07]
Nathan Chan
And when you work with the radiologist, what came back?
- [08:11]
Andrew Lacy
On myself. So, you know, I expected to hear horrible things, to be honest. And when I went to do that scan, that first scan with that radiologist where they looked at my entire body, I remember going out for a nice meal and a glass of wine before, because I'm like, my life is going to fundamentally change tomorrow. You know, I'm going to finally, you know, all of the bad decisions I've made in my life, you know, some of them were building companies and not looking after my body. Some of them were just, you know, growing up in Australia and, you know, having a bit too much fun as a younger person. It's always sort of like it's all going to come home to roost, you know, so let's have a nice meal. But then I, you know, I got out of the scan and sat down with this radiologist, and they told me I wasn't dying or anything. That was my biggest fear. And, you know, that there was a lot of wear and tear from the way I'd been living my life, but none of it was irreversible. And so the thing I got out of it was this incredible peace of mind. I never knew what that felt like before, to not really have that part of my brain thinking about my health, but either consciously or subconsciously, and it's such a hard thing to describe because all of us have concerns about our health.
- [09:20]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So you did your mri. Bit of wear and tear. Where. Where did the epiphany come from that this can be a preventative for health?
- [09:31]
Andrew Lacy
Yes, I. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and this radiologist was in Canada. So I flew back to San Francisco. I told my wife, hey, I got this thing. It's really interesting. I'm not dying. It's fantastic. Let's go out and have another nice meal. Let's celebrate that. But I couldn't, like, shake from my head the peace of mind, you know, it was just. It was so profound. I felt like I was walking around the streets of San Francisco and I was, like, seeing the world in color and everyone else was singing in black and white. It's a weird feeling. The closest thing to it, I think it's so like going skydiving. It's just like adrenaline sort of sticks with you for a few weeks. And so I went back on a plane the next week to that clinic and basically stayed there for six months. And I sat in 150 consults where 150 other people were told what was going on inside their body. And some were being told, hey, you know, you got cancer, you need to do something about this, or you have an aneurysm, you go to the hospital. Now a lot of people were told they have wear and tear, like me, someone given a complete bill of health. And it didn't matter what people were told, whether it was some horrible diagnostic, you know, outcome or nothing. The overwhelming sensation I experienced was just gratitude that for the first time in their lives, people understood the state of their health. And they would get up at the end of that thing and they would hug the radiologist. And I never had hugged a doctor in my entire life. Never felt the desire, the slightest desire. So there was some that for me was like the spark. It's like, oh, there's something here, you know, like, this is connecting to everyone that goes through it in a really special way. And you just kind of know, you know, as an entrepreneur that there's something that, you know, this is an important thread to pull out.
- [11:08]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So, so how'd you start building this thing? Right? Like, so, so you realize that you're onto something. You, you obviously spoke to a lot of customers, right? You, you start to, you know, do this MVP type test. But like, yeah, what do you do? Like, like, you know, if you find something, like, if someone has stage one cancer, like, like, how do you, you know, what do you do? Like, yeah, like, it's, it's this really kind of tricky thing because no one's ever done that before. Right.
- [11:37]
Andrew Lacy
Well, stage one cancer is obviously worse than not having cancer, but way better than having stage 3 or stage 4 cancer. So some part of it is, you know, the, the context in which we were finding these conditions was so much earlier that it gave people a lot more hope that they wouldn't have otherwise had. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's probably like the single biggest challenge for the company. And even in the early days, building that company was just, you know, a lot of people don't want to know about their health. They can afford to learn the answers, but they may not want to because we've been conditioned to be afraid of our Health. So, you know, I, it took me until my 40s to look in the mirror and say, you know what? It's probably better they should know, you know, And I try. I thought about canceling my appointment several times, you know, but I just figured at the end of the day I should know about it so I can do something about it. And that's a huge challenge for this type of business. Permanent health is a really hard space to build a business in for sure.
- [12:34]
Nathan Chan
So talk me through your first clinic. How'd you fund it? What happened? How long did it take?
- [12:42]
Andrew Lacy
Well, it was really, really hard. And it still is hard, believe it or not. I mean, we. So, so, you know, I kind of half moved to Canada to see if I could develop this business from one or two people coming in a day to like 10 people coming in a day. And we did a pretty good job at it. You know, we, we, we built this little business, was maybe doing three or four million dollars a year in terms of run rate and was, I think, even profitable or at least break even. And then we went out to get seed funding. And I mean, it is a very rare startup that's doing three or four million dollars is profitable, that's going to get seed funding. You know, that should be kind of a walk in the park. And I talked to a bunch of investors and we couldn't find a single investor that would do the deal. And, you know, the reason was that most every doctor out there was saying, this is a horrible thing and we shouldn't be doing it and it's going to cause more harm than good. And every investor had a doctor that they would ask their opinion of or had a doctor on their investment committee. And, and so it was really difficult. We had, on the one hand, we had this business that was having. It was economically cool going well. It was having this profound impact on people's, you know, health. You could see it. People were really, there's real product market fit, and yet there was no funding. So we ended up having to bootstrap the thing.
- [14:07]
Nathan Chan
And even like the first clinic, like you would have, you obviously funded an MRI machine. And you're gonna have to have like a, you know, a professional clin. They're like, like, how'd you get your first few customers to actually pay you? And talk me through, like, what did the first clinic look like? Where was it? Like, talk me through that. Like, can we go back to those moments?
- [14:34]
Andrew Lacy
Well, we were lucky because that, that radiologist in Canada had a clinic. So we sort of bought time on that machine. So we didn't have any of the capital eight lay. In the early days, we were mainly just focused on building that business. And it was me, you know, I think I hired a guy on. I don't know if it's Craigslist, but something like this, you know, in the early days, no, you know, it's hard to find people even want to work with you, you know, that believe enough the vision that they're willing to give it a go. So we had three or four people in the company, and we were all just on the phones calling leads, you know, seeing if we could get people to come in for a scan, trying to understand what the objections were, sitting around a kitchen table in the kitchen of this. This radiologist clinic. And it was just real. It was really tough. You know, a lot of people told us, A lot of doctors told us, go away. A lot of patients didn't really want to know about their health. They would. It was a brutal thing. We did hundreds of thousands of phone calls just trying to figure out how to, you know, prospect for people. You know, there was a small number of people that really wanted to do it and were coming to us. But to, like, build a market of people that aren't aware was a whole different thing, we learned.
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Nathan Chan
So did you run ads or like, you ran ads to a landing page and then, you know.
- [15:51]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we put together a little, you know, like a lot of companies do. We had a funnel where we had a landing page where people come to where we would give away, like, a guide to whole body screening. It was sort of a 20, 30 page document that I put together, you know, on how great it is and that people should consider it. And in offering that up, we got people's emails and phone numbers. So we did the same on. At the time, Facebook had these, like, lead ads that were kind of cool because it would automatically fill in the phone number and emails of those people. So we would then email them and we would call them, you know, incessantly in order to just get on the phone. And I would say. I would say we never were slimy about it. We always were like, if we're gonna win a customer, we're gonna win by sort of through educational selling. But you still had to hustle to get people on the phone to get past the first couple, two or three seconds where people might otherwise just say fuck off. But. But, yeah, so we ran this funnels. We ran. You know, we gave people things to get their contact details, and then we, you know, converted maybe 1, 2, 3, 4% of those people. It wasn't very high.
- [17:03]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So you eventually opened up in Silicon Valley during COVID How long was that? And, like, how long to, like, get to that? Because. Yeah, there's an interesting story there.
- [17:20]
Andrew Lacy
Well, it's pretty stressful because I put in a decent amount of money. When we couldn't get seed investment, we got a bank loan from a bank to open that clinic up. We were pretty comfortable that when it opened, we'd be able to build good business there. But the challenge was we didn't anticipate Covid, so. And Covid hit us a couple of ways. It slowed down the construction, so we were still paying for the clinic, but we weren't. It wasn't opening, so we didn't get the revenue. And then secondly, like most businesses, we weren't prepared for Covid, so we didn't have all this PPE that you needed to do to stay open. And that meant that we couldn't keep imaging people in Canada without the right ppe. But there was one thing that saved us. You want to hear what that was?
- [18:02]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. What was it?
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Andrew Lacy
I got Covid very early on. I was one of the first people in San Francisco to get Covid. And so I. It turns out there was a lot of Silicon Valley companies back then that were wanting to get the blood of people that had had Covid and overcome it in order to build, like, antibody tests. So I drove up and down Silicon Valley, basically in my car, driving up the back alleys of, like, biotech companies, rolling down the window, while a hazmat guy came out and basically drew my blood. And I didn't ask for anything in return except for masks. And those masks helped us keep the clinics open.
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Nathan Chan
Yeah. Wow, that's crazy.
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Andrew Lacy
So a lot of entrepreneurs sort of bleed for their ventures. I actually, at that, in that moment in time, I was doing a lot of bleeding for the company.
- [18:57]
Nathan Chan
Okay. So. So, yeah, so during COVID did that, like, obviously, you know, there was lockdowns, all those kinds of things. Did people want to do these preventative health scans?
- [19:12]
Andrew Lacy
Well, we started slow, but we still started. You know, we got two, three, four people in a day, and that was enough to sort of break even on these clinics at the time. I mean, we were sort of keeping the cost down, so. And interestingly, if you were worried about cancer back then, you couldn't get any screening at the traditional health systems. They had shut down all of their screening programs because of COVID so they weren't doing mammograms they weren't doing colonoscopies, they weren't doing, you know, anything. So we had a lot of people come to us, grateful that we're open and that we could sort of give them, you know, some level of peace of mind. So it was just fortuitous that, I mean, when you're a startup, you sort of have to decide to stay open. I mean, there's not. You have a lot of options, right? You stay open or you go out of business. If you're a health system, you know, I guess you have, you have a different calculus. You know, for them it was pretty easy to shut down these programs, but for us, you know, we had to keep open and we helped a lot of people as a result.
- [20:08]
Nathan Chan
And I first heard of you guys when Kim Kardashian shared about you guys and, and referred to Pernuvo as a life saving machine. And yeah, she had a story about her fiance. So talk me through, like, how did that happen and what did that look like? I don't want to go deep because people that are watching this always think, wow, that's the ticket. You get a Kardashian or you get a really famous celebrity behind your brand and things are going to go boom. Like, talk me through how that came to life and how you did it.
- [20:48]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, sure. I mean, it sort of relates to the way we run the business. You know, when we open the clinics in the early days, I'd be there in the clinic every day and I would always talk to customers. I want to understand how they came in, you know, afterwards, I wanted to understand what the experience was like. And so we always, from the very beginning were very patient focused. So we always, hey, I want to have the best. If you come in, if you trust me with your health, I want to provide you with the most clinically accurate scan. And we invest millions of dollars now doing that. Tens of millions of dollars. And I want to provide you with a really great clinical experience. And the philosophy there is very old fashioned. It's just, you know, if we provide you with a great experience, you can tell other people. If you tell other people, we'll get organic acquisition. Now why is that important when you're building a new category of product? It's important because that the acquisition costs otherwise are completely astronomical. You can't make that work. You know, trying to acquire people that don't even know your categories is, don't even know they have a need is just very, very, very expensive. You don't run Google AdWords because people aren't typing, they're not searching for you. You have to do this very top of funnel marketing which ends up being expensive. So that was never going to work. So you know, we always said let's just focus on providing great service. Maybe we grow a bit more slowly, but we got. The growth we're going to have is going to be very genuine and organic and reliable because we're, you know, because people tell other people about things that for them are really meaningful. And so that was, that's an important context, right? Because I don't think there's any shortcuts here. I mean to the extent there are shortcuts with celebrities, they tend to be, you know, go find some people and pay a lot of money to make that stuff happen, you know, and, and most startups don't have access to that. So, so, so that was always a fluster. Now when we opened up in LA and New York and some of these other locations afterwards, we started to get people in that themselves had really big audiences and we didn't really, if I'm being honest, there's a, to the extent that there's a secret I don't have, replicatable is like we just really believe in what we're doing. We think that what we're doing is saving lives and we see this, there's so many life saving stories that we get in and we share and people have a great experience and they want to share so we just remind everyone of just how important it is to, if you have a great experience, if you can share it with people, if that's your neighbor, that's great. If that's your sort of like Instagram followers, that's awesome too, you know, so we just started to get, get people in that had these really big audiences. They are much more high impact voices and they've just been so kind to us in wanting to share their experience with the world. So I don't have, you know, I think it is replicable. I mean I think there's just so many people in the startup world, they're looking for some sort of hack that's going to like go from zero to unicorn company overnight. And I just sort of believe that the enduring businesses are the ones that really focus on just providing a high quality service and people, people talk about it. So, you know, so the Kardashians are great, we know them well, they're fantastic people. A lot of celebrities have talked about us, we've like developed personal relationships with and you know, and these are not transactional. Relationships like we're there for them, you know, they're, you know, if they feel so inclined to share things with their audience, we're obviously like overjoyed about that. And you know, we oftentimes, if we're able to, we can tell them what the impact is, you know, because we can sort of track who came in because of a certain celebrity, you know, or high impact voice. So, you know, it's, it's a pretty genuine approach. It only really works because people believe in what we're doing. I don't think there's a shortcut there.
- [24:24]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I agree. Like, I think nothing beats building great product. When I've built companies, you know, any influencer, celebrity creator that I've worked with, it's come from usually them purchasing the product or the service and then reaching out to them and being like, hey, would you like to share? Like that's really cool.
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Andrew Lacy
And you can't. Look, there's certain products that are a little bit easier. Obviously we're in the health space so we are saving lives. Like our KPI is saving lives. So, you know, it's sort of a KPI a lot of people want to get behind. If, you know, if you're building the, you might be building like the best, you know, tax software the world has ever seen and probably like, you know, it's a little bit less exciting to the average person who's a high impact voice. So I acknowledge that some of it is the type of business that we're building. But I think, you know, there are other businesses that share those attributes, you know, wellness businesses or you know, businesses that focus around social impact. Where I think celebrities really want to, they want to have an impact and they want to align themselves with brands that are doing good for the world. So, so I would reach out to folks or you know, just make yourself available if you have any of these folks that experience the product and create an environment where people are encouraged to courage but not forced to share their experiences.
- [25:47]
Nathan Chan
Talk to me about, I guess, challenges as you've scaled, setting up multiple locations around the world, even the legal side, all of that.
- [26:01]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, it's, I mean it's. Healthcare is super regulated. In fact, we operate 22 clinics in the US and Canada and every one of those states has a different health system. Essentially, you know, the regulation is all at the state level. And so, you know, we recently opened in Melbourne, Australia and you would think that that would be a huge step for us, but we'd already done, we'd already gone into New York and you know, Texas and Florida and all of these sort of have differences that, you know, that is no sort of like less important than it is across the world. So, you know, I have a pretty healthcare. One of the challenges is it's really hard to build a business without a certain amount of capital just because the regulatory hurdles you have to go through are really high. I mean, you have lawyers to set up a bunch of companies. I think Pernuvo has, I don't know, 10 different entities, maybe even more now. I'm constantly signing documents, you know, for, you know, all of these entities that I'm, you know, that my legal team puts in front of me. You know, it's hard to keep track even what they all are. But, you know, that's the machinery that like runs healthcare definitely in the US So it's challenging and it's sort of not very well regulated. So you can actually do this the wrong way for a long time. But then if you get sued, you know, the company can, you know, can be sued out of existence. So there's not a lot of feedback and guardrails that you're doing it the wrong way until it's too late. So if anyone, any of your listeners are thinking about healthcare, I think there's tremendous opportunities here, but definitely starts with getting a good lawyer.
- [27:45]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And you said as well that, you know, it was really hard to raise money and that, that the traditional medical industry and doctors disagree with what you're doing. Can you talk me through that a little more? Why and also why you keep going?
- [28:10]
Andrew Lacy
I used to wonder that myself. Less so these days. Well, I think there's a little bit of context that's important. I don't know if, you know, I grew up in Australia, so I don't really remember this from my youth. But at least in the US about 25 years ago, you could go to a shopping mall and there was a business that would do a whole body screening of you. And they weren't using mri, which is what we use. They were using what's called ct. And today you can get low dose ct. But back then it wasn't low dose ct. So people were going and getting these scans. The scam was radiating their bodies. And the modality itself wasn't very good. It wasn't very precise. It would have a lot of false positives and a lot of false negatives. And so doctors universally hated it. And even the FDA stepped in and you know, and sort of like admonished these companies because they were, you know, the claims didn't match the reality of the service. So it sort of like, tainted the whole sort of, like, medical ecosystem, tainted their view of screening healthy patients, you know, with imaging. And 25 years later, we still have to. We start to overcome that. Like, so many physicians today will be like, I wouldn't send anyone to Prenuvo because of the radiation. And we're like. Or the MRI has radiation. And we're like, well, it doesn't have radiation. It's, like, very safe. So there's just, like, a lot of people that don't really understand how. How the imaging has evolved. And unfortunately, those people are. Have the ear oftentimes of the, you know, of the investors that are making decisions on whether to invest in you or not. I always. So why did I not give up? Well, it's actually interesting. I. You know, that first mobile company I built also I had trouble raising money. When we were raising money for building apps for the iPhone, every investor said, you should be building apps for the Nokia and the BlackBerry, you know, because that's 90% of the market. And I gotta be honest, like, I really love proving people wrong. It's a tremendous motivator. So, you know, with. I have a lot of enjoyment thinking back to those. All those people that, you know, turned us down in the early days of mobile, some of which are now, you know, like a year or two later after. After iPhone really took off for, like, starting iPhone funds at large, large VC firms and acting like they understood what was going on in the world. And those are the people that turned us down like, a year earlier. So I take a lot of joy in, like, proving investors wrong. And I sort of felt the same way about this one. It was so obvious this was going to be a big thing. And what was not obvious was how long it was going to take, you know, and every investor that turned us down, I'm like, this is someone else I can prove wrong, you know. And then we eventually found it. Some investors that really started really believed in us, and we had a lot of traction as a company. And even the views of the medical profession have changed a fair bit in the last six years. But now it's just tenacity, man. It's just like not giving up. It's wanting to prove some people right, you know, that's the motivator for the most part. And a lot of entrepreneurs have that.
- [31:24]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And, you know, you look at it now, this whole longevity space, you see people like, you know, Brian Johnson, like, really popularizing these concepts around health and longevity. You look even at Gen Z, I even look at like, you know, there's so many, even in Melbourne, dude. Like there's so many of these ice cold, immersive saa, you know, magnesium pools, therapy. Like all this is opening up everywhere. You, I read studies now that that is something that the younger generation are preferring to do than go out. You look at alcohols on the decline massively in the younger generation. Like there is a massive movement around health and longevity. Yeah, you look at it now, but six years ago, I mean, take Brian.
- [32:21]
Andrew Lacy
Johnson as a great example. I mean, probably 50% of the people then and maybe even now think the guy's crazy. And 50 cent of people think he's visionary. So I think the real challenge as an entrepreneur and I've sort of tried to, I do angel investing, so I try to like remind myself of this when I look at companies. Like, it's pretty. How you really make a lot of money investing in startups and as an entrepreneur is you build some sort of transformational generational company. The challenge is the transformational generational companies. It's really hard to tell them apart from the craziest, dumbest idea you've ever heard. So this sort of like normal distribution of companies out there, it's easy to tell the good from the bad, but it's really hard to tell the two tails apart. You know, I remember when Uber first, I remember seeing one of Uber's first pictures and I was like, this is crazy. Everyone in California drives, you know, like that. No one is gonna want to take Uber. Is that, you know, black cabs. It was back then, you know, they were like just doing sort of a black cars, no one's going to dumbest idea ever. Well turned out to change the world. So, you know, beware the idea that a lot of investors turn down. You know, it is possible it was a dumb idea, but also it's possible it's transformational. So what I like about the signal there is if you believe that this transformational and people are turning you down, then that sort of means maybe you're in one of those tails. That means you have a shot at building something that's really transformational.
- [33:49]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I love that synopsis because.
- [33:53]
Andrew Lacy
A.
- [33:54]
Nathan Chan
Lot of it is, you know, you said something interesting. You said it's more the idea than the founder, but it's often, you know, I think the founder, it's, it's that's, that's the person you invest in, right? It's that, it's that tenacity, right? To never Give up. I never forget the story of one of the founders of Uber. And apparently he was playing like Wii Tennis or something and it turned out that with some friends and, and it turned out that he was like in the top 10 in the world at WE Tennis or some sort of crazy game. And then, and, and he just, you know, he couldn't be beaten. Right, like, and that, you know, that will. To. Will it into existence, you know, like, yes, it is the idea, but also it's the founder as well.
- [34:42]
Andrew Lacy
Well, I think it's predominantly the founder sort of the opinion I've sort of come up with. And I don't mean in. In sort of like godlike way. It's just like the tenacity and you know, the focus on execution and so on. And I think people over, they sort of the real challenge is how do you find an objectively good space to like, apply that energy towards? Because I'm passionate about a lot of things that are bad ideas. And so I, you know, this is conventional wisdom, which is like, go build a company around something you're passionate about. And, and I think it's a false narrative in the sense like, of course, some of the biggest, most iconic companies came from people building things, things that they were passionate of. But I think that's the exception, not the rule. I think, you know, in my mind I would rather, I think about my own role as an entrepreneur. So I. The investment I make when I decide to trade a company is like, I'm investing time. There's always so much time I have before I'm too old or too tired to like, do this anymore. So I have to make this investment of time. I sort of think of this as like, I got one shot. I'm a VC with one shot at a time, you know. So what I like about not having to come up with the idea is you can start evaluate ideas objectively. And I went through a period back then before I started Prenuvo, but you know, in that year before I started, I wasn't doing anything except evaluating ideas. So I would like go to a Starbucks every day and I would like, if I did come up with idea myself, I. The commitment I made was I wouldn't spend more than one day thinking about it and then I would park it. And if it keeps coming back to me, okay, maybe I spend some more time. But you know, I can get excited about something and then, you know, like, just let it go. Leave it to go out in the universe and you know, and think about another idea tomorrow or Talk to another person, identify something else tomorrow. So I built this sort of discipline where I probably investigate like a hundred different ideas and probably 80% of them were not my ideas. And I thought about them like a VC because I knew I could get excited about, you know, anything. Like my passion was the building part. And the other thing I wanted was some idea that was, I felt like, had a meaningful KPI, you know, in this case, you know, saving lives. But you know something, it didn't have to be that, but I thought that was like very attractive about the health space. So it's this, is this discipline. I see so many entrepreneurs get so hung up on their first idea and then you try and talk them off the ledge and say, well, here's some as an investor, here's how I think about this. And maybe it's not such a great space or an idea as you think it is, but get, people are so invested in it, they don't even hear the, you know, they don't necessarily even hear the sort of, like the criticism doesn't land. So trying to do that in a really passionate, impassioned way was sort of something I focused a lot on, you know, before I started prenupo.
- [37:29]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, you do see that, right? People get so obsessed with that idea and they don't want to be told and they tattoo that idea to their body. And look, you don't really know until you go out there and you test the market. Right? Like, and you know, you, it sounded like you could see pretty quickly. You had product market fit, right. It was the hugging.
- [37:52]
Andrew Lacy
Well, that's, you know, by the way, if you, if you, if you are going out to the universe and saying, hey, I want to do. Yeah, I learned something about building companies. Who has some ideas that I can solve? When people bring you an idea, they also, I mean, you can't get an idea absent a value proposition, you know, like, hey, this is my problem in our business or in our industry. You know, I'm experiencing this. This is a real pain point. Someone should go and solve this problem. So you already get some real signal that you don't get when you're just sitting in the Starbucks, like doodling ideas that come from your own brain, you know, or you're doodling ideas where you have some need, but it's a very high class problem, you know, that doesn't necessarily reflect what's going on in the world.
- [38:36]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, and I think it's so hard, like you don't just come up with an idea from nowhere and then that's the thing. It's like working on the problem and then it goes somewhere and then it's one foot after the other. It's not like this thing comes to you, it's like, yep, that's what I'm going to do for a very long time. It just kind of, it's a series of steps and iterations and then before you know it, okay, this is, this is where I'm going. But you like with me and founder, I never thought that I'd be built. I'm 12 years in. Right. Like I, but when I first started it was, it was a magazine, it was some fun, it was doing some interviews and you know what I mean? Like, and I never thought. But you go one step after the other, then before you know it, that's where you're there.
- [39:23]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah. And you pick a space, you know, like, because there's always pivots and sort of twists and turns. So you know, what's a, what's a good space? And I mean can you become passionate about it? Because you do have to, you sort of like you both have to look at it and investigate impassionedly and then when you pull the trigger now you, now you sort of have to tap in your passion for that, for a particular space or develop it. So I don't know, it's, it's sort of the whole art for me is a bunch of contradictions, you know, but that's what makes it fun. You know, it's a real problem solving, building companies.
- [39:57]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it is, it's, it's a crazy, crazy, crazy life. So when it comes to the VC journey, you did end up raising money as you said. You've raised over 70 million including from Cindy Crawford, 23 and me's and not sure how to best pronounce her name. We interviewed her a long time ago. Yeah, but it wasn't easy. You know what, what's still your advice to founders tackling skepticism with, you know, mission driven, capital intensive businesses?
- [40:33]
Andrew Lacy
Well, you know, I would say in general entrepreneurship is sort of, I think of it as a career, not sort of a one off. I think a lot of people approach this like it's very high stakes because you're just doing it once and when you think about it as a career, then you start thinking about these relations that you build investors as actually having sort of like multiple iterate. They develop over time. You know, like the, the person that led my series A was a person that was an angel investor. You know, 10 years earlier in that, in the mobile Phone company. So, you know, and you just stay in touch. And by the way, I pitched two or three other businesses to him and he turned me down. So it wasn't, I still had to earn it. But like it's a, you know, you can start over time. You can pick up the phone or you can send an email and someone's gonna respond. So, you know, and a lot of people are really working very hard on their first company, sort of optimizing for their ownership or for Exit. And I sort of feel like those are really immaterial if you think about this as a career. Like your objective as a first time founder should be to get any investment at all, you know, at any, you know, as long as the terms are completely egregious, you know, whatever terms make sense, don't overthink it or over optimize for it. And if you have an exit that comes along, you know, go for it. Because the second you are a second or third, you know, second time founder, that's exit. The first company, you're already like in the top 1%.
- [42:02]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And when you, when you go at it a second time, you approach things so much differently. Right.
- [42:08]
Andrew Lacy
Well, the challenge of the second time is the one I lived, which is if your first one is a success, you develop a lot of hubris that it's all about you. And so then you go and say it doesn't matter what the idea is, doesn't matter, you know, like, let me pick the hardest space in the world because I'm so freaking great that you know it's going to be success regardless. And you know, so the, I was talking to an investor about this the other day and they said, yeah, that's why I never invest in like the second company when the founder exited the first one. So, you know, like, you need to have a little bit of time just to get over the hubris that it's all you. And then I think by the time you arrive at your third or fourth company, I think a lot of investors are willing to write the ticket because they figured you just figure stuff out by that stage, you know, and they're probably way less interested in the pitch. They're just more interested in the space and you know, who they're investing in.
- [43:00]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it's funny, I'm just thinking about investments I've made and founders that I know how well they do on their second company. Usually. No, usually from my experience, more often than not, if it's their second company, they do well. But you're right, it's always the ego. The ego. It's always the ego, dude.
- [43:25]
Andrew Lacy
And maybe that said more about that says more about me than. So maybe I'm not the, you know, that maybe that's not the average experience. But you know, I definitely had a lot of ego about it. I thought I was pretty great, you know, so at the time and you know, now I'm older and realize that I was, I was like, you know, I think there's a lot of things I do right as an entrepreneur but you know, that first company was as much about luck as it was my execution. And so don't discount, you know, discount that piece because it'll come and bite you in the backside.
- [43:56]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, but look, I think that's normal, right? Like for founders where you, we all have seasons where everything you touch turns to gold and you think this is always going to continue and it's never going to stop and you keep doubling down on growth and then you get slapped in the face and then you go through the really wartime seasons like you know, the hard things about hard things. Ben Horowitz like one of my favorite all time books, like it is, it is all a rite of passage. Like.
- [44:24]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, yeah, so, so I don't know, I would say like one advantage and this for me, it's so good and bad. It's bad in my personal life, it's good in my business life is that you end up having so many ups and downs even from doing one company for three or four years. I mean it's such a compressed set of experiences that you see like these incredible, you have the most people experience these incredible highs and these incredible lows. The first time you have a high, you bounce off the walls. You're going to the club, you're, you know, living it up and then when you have these lows, you were depressed and sort of, you know, like you can't imagine the world being ever being good again. And yet it is. And you go through a few of those cycles and what ends up happening is you build this resilience. You know, at least I did. I felt like, you know, whenever I've bad damn, like I just, it can't affect me as much because I know that tomorrow could be great, great, whenever, a good day. I can't really celebrate it as much as I otherwise would because I know tomorrow can, you know, something bad can happen tomorrow. So in business I think that's good because it's resilient. In personal life it's not so good because you probably don't Sell, you don't enjoy life as much. Right. Because you just kind of like level the whole time.
- [45:32]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. But with Prenuvo now, you are at a stage with the business where it's. While I'm sure there are challenging times, good and bad days, you've got such strong traction now, product market fit, you're out of that kind of, we're out.
- [45:54]
Andrew Lacy
Of the sort of existential threat category. But you know, you keep growing, your expectations, you know, and your desire to like have even more impact grows. So we're constantly, you know, we got a lot of challenges still. It's, you know, every day is still, you know, pretty long and full with a lot of, you know, questioning about what is we're doing, how should we evolve the product, how do we like move into new markets, should we focus on going deep with our existing customers or like acquiring more customers, you know, horizontally? So this and also the context in which we operate this preventive health space is growing so much and there's so many layers to it. You know, there's so many different interventions people are doing and people are just waking up to this idea that you can take control of your health. So it's all very exciting. So there's lots of things that you can do. And figuring out what to do is still a pretty stressful thing. So I don't know, I don't think you ever arrive. I know people I run on unicorn companies, decacon companies that still, I look at them, I'm like, ah, you know, I. They're not, they don't show up in materially different ways. You know, they're still, you know, they're stressed, they really work hard. You know, you never check out. I mean, I think that's just, that's just, you know, I don't think it ever gets easier. I think you're just, you know, your expectations or your hopes kind of grow with the company.
- [47:20]
Nathan Chan
So we have to work towards wrapping up in 20 years. What's your North Star?
- [47:26]
Andrew Lacy
I mean, I would love to have saved a million lives. I think we've made about four or five thousand life saving diagnoses now. A lot of people reach out and thank people in the company. It's hugely rewarding. I think what we're doing at Prenuvo is transformational in the approach that we have to healthcare. I would like to see a healthcare system rebuilt from the ground up around proactive health. I think it could be, it could save economies trillions of dollars. It could, like, have better outcomes for patients. So I think we're sort of 1% into that journey. And, man, it's so exciting to, you know, be able to work on something that's both impactful and, you know, potentially transformative. You know, I got a lot of energy for what's ahead.
- [48:14]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, well, look, it's. I love your mission. Right. I love your KPI, Right. I think any purpose, like any. Any brand or company that has such a strong purpose led KPI, it's really easy to get around. It's really easy for your team to get around. I think that's really, really incredible what you're doing there. So, one last question, Andrew, and that was just around. Any questions that you wanted me to ask you that I haven't asked you anything you'd like to share? Final words of wisdom.
- [48:48]
Andrew Lacy
It's funny, when I. When I talk about what we do at Prenuvo, I say, you know, people come in a little bit nervous about what we might find, but I feel like the most valuable thing we give the majority of people is peace of mind. And the challenge I have is, how do you describe peace of mind to someone that's never had it? You know, like, you can't intuit your way to it because it's a feeling, you know, there's no logical. There's no sort of rational way to talk about, but you can rationally talk about all of the horrible things that we could say. See? And I. And why do I talk about this? Because I often relate this to the entrepreneurial decision, like the decision to leave a job and start a company. And I have people that reach out to me from, you know, I studied law, so people from law firms. I worked at McKinsey, so people from consulting firm, you know, from. And they're like, hey, can you give me 50 minutes of your time just to help me think through this? I really think I want to become an entrepreneur. Can you help me think it through? And I will ask them, do you have, like, an Excel spreadsheet? And they're like, yeah. I thought about the pros and cons. I'm like, well, here's your problem, becoming an entrepreneur. You know, that. That feeling of, like, being in control and building something that people enjoy. You can't sort of, like, rationalize your way towards that. You have to take the leap, you know, because you can easily quantify all the downsides. I'll make less money. I'll work more. I'll be more stressed. You might fail. I could feel embarrassed, like, all of these things are easy to imagine, but how do you describe to someone like the agency that you have in becoming entrepreneur? So I think there's, you know, like, it reminds me of this company, Prenuvo, and this. How do I quantify peace of mind reminded me of, like, you know, this. The calculus of becoming an entrepreneur is similar. There's like this big unknown, and you sort of just want to. You have to take the leap and embrace this new world. And I, you know, I've not met anyone that didn't appreciate the entrepreneurial journey, regardless of what the outcome is.
- [50:46]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I agree. It's. The highs are high, the lows are low, but it's an incredibly rewarding journey and it takes a lot, a lot from you. But you wouldn't change a thing.
- [50:57]
Andrew Lacy
Yeah, for sure. So I hope maybe we encourage some folks to take the lead.
- [51:01]
Nathan Chan
Awesome. I agree. Well, that's why we're here. That's what we do with founder. So we will wrap there. But thank you so much for your time, man.
- [51:09]
Andrew Lacy
Thanks, Nathan. It's great to be here.
- [51:10]
Nathan Chan
Hey, founder fam. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is 100% free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful, successful entrepreneurs and founders in the world. Your feedback helps us grow, improve, and even bring on more incredible guests and insights. So if you have a second, please take a moment, leave us a review. It really makes a difference. Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch you on the next show.