The Challenges of Redefining a Venture

I think especially for, you know, founders or people who are in leadership or CEOs or whatever of early stage companies, I think one of the most challenging patterns that's, I think are things that involve either expansion or contraction of your. The identity of what you are doing. And what I mean by that is like, you know, the, you know, to build something, especially when you don't have full product market fit yet and so on, you need a lot of faith and you're, you know, selling the dream to people, whether it's investors, people who you want to join you, you know, to help build it and so on. And so you obviously need to have a lot of optimism and conviction around, like, okay, this is, this is the picture of the future and you rally people around that. And in order to build a great product, we together have to believe in that kind of definition of the future that we're all kind of gunning for. But we're getting feedback and data and the world is changing under us. And I feel like over time there have been both times when we wanted to narrow our definition where we were shedding part of our identity and part we wanted to expand it. That I think were some of the hardest moments because it feels like you meet, it feels like some people will feel that you break their promise, a promise that you made them, you made to them. Where people feel like, you told me that we were going to build a company in this box and that was the thing that was going to change the world and now you change me know, it's a triangle and that's not what you promised me. And I think that's one of the, like, it's something that's always a challenge for, you know, as a, as a founder, as, you know, someone who's trying to, you know, really the promise or really what you. The real goal is to build a company that is going to, you know, like, I want to build the most important health care company of our generation. Right. Like, that is really the goal and the path that might take might change a lot. And so like, I think two examples of like where I feel like those are that one, one, I'll give you one contraction one, one expansion one. Both of which were interesting and challenging. I think one was that, you know, we built this great genetics product that was, I think probably and probably still is like the best clinical genetics product on the market in terms of the simplicity of access, the quality of the genetics and so on. And we were trying to find how do you get it into the market in a way that scales to create, you know, a great business and a growing business and so on. And there are many paths to that, right? Like, we were like, you know, there's one path which was like, you know, more direct to consumer, where people just buy it out of their own pocket. One which is like the traditional clinical channel which is like, oh, you know, you convince doctors to order for people and then you bill insurance and goes through the traditional. Just be better at the old way of doing it, or there's going into a new market or new way to access the market through payers, through employers and other sponsors of like, you know, other people who care about large populations of people. And about three years ago, like, you know, we were. We had like, kind of this hedged approach that. Where we had more of a consumer side, more of a clinical side that was more of a traditional diagnostics company and one that was more kind of like these large institutional programs. And the first two were existing markets, but one that we decided were not great markets. They were not the way in which you were going to change the world. There was this other one that were like, we think this is the pattern that aligns with the future, but it's still very speculative. And I decided that we were going to cut that third of the company that was actually, you know, trying to go after those kind of like, legacy markets that were clearly not going to be the future for us. Then we were convinced we're not going to be our future. And so, you know, that was, I think, one of the most challenging things, you know, I've ever done in my career, which was to decide, like, you know, and a lot of these people were like, you know, so I had a, you know, I had to let some people go. I had to restructure a big part of the company, inject a lot of uncertainty, basically. There's kind of like, you know, a lot of safety and feeling like, okay, well, there's this old crank that exists that, you know, at least is survival and saying, you know what? Actually, I remember like, sitting, like, standing in front of the company and being like, you know, we're getting. We're letting go off the raft and we're swimming like, there's no more raft, and we're going. And so. And that was very scary and. But probably maybe one of the most important and impactful choices I've ever made that I think, you know, and obviously it was, you know, very challenging and, like, you know, to do it also with compassion and, you know, these are all people, you know, impacted People that I cared a lot about that, you know, were close friends and so on. And so, like, we wanted to do it the right way, but really there was kind of like, about, like, what is the right path for the company? And it was a contraction of our definition where it's like we were, you know, letting go part of who we were to try to be who we wanted to be. Right. And the other one that I think is kind of almost the opposite is what we did with COVID last year. And maybe we'll talk more about it, but, like, I felt like there's a very similar thing that happens when you redefine the canvas in a way that to people feels like, oh, this is defocusing. And it's letting go off our identity, you know, for a lot of people, like, you know, we, because we were doing amazing work in genetics, saying, oh, now we're also going to do things in infectious disease, felt like, oh, are we letting go of who we are? And it's like, no, actually, like, you know, what we want to be is, like, the best healthcare company in the world. And that touches a lot of things. Unless. And there's a whole redefinition of our identity that's much more broad that I think that was the right time to do that. And so I feel like those are the two types of patterns that I think are both challenging, but I think sometimes the most impactful ones that we can, you know, we can make.