In this interview, the founder of Appower recounts the two‑part origin of the company. After being acquired by Thumbtack, he and his co‑founder Brandon, former teammates at Setter, sought a faster‑moving environment and devised a disciplined weekly‑cycle for idea generation, risk de‑risking research, and month‑long launch simulations. They tested several concepts, including a hotel‑gym collective membership, which proved unviable. Midway through this experimentation, his father was diagnosed with incurable multiple myeloma. The founder struggled to navigate immunotherapy and CAR‑T clinical trials in Canada, facing outdated treatments, weight loss, and disqualification from trials. This painful personal experience highlighted the opacity and difficulty of the clinical‑trial marketplace, motivating the creation of Appower as a better, science‑driven platform to connect patients with trials.
Chapters
What was the founding story for Appower? And I guess, you know, what were the first steps that you took to start as a marketplace?
Super interesting. Kind of like 2 parts to this question. So got acquired by Thumbtack, lots of awesome people, spent a bit of time learning there, was kind of itchy for a smaller, fast, faster-paced team. So Brandon and I had worked together at Setter, started experimenting with different businesses, and we had a bit of a process here. We would every week we'd meet, we'd like pitch each other on ideas until the other person was excited. We do a week of sort of research. So trying to, for each of the riskiest assumptions in the business, go and de-risk them with second-party research. And then if we were excited about the business still, we'd spend a week, or sorry, a month just pretending we were actually launching the business. So we'd go and we'd literally sell the thing, we'd literally build the thing. And then we'd do a retro after one month. And we'd done this for a few different businesses. And it was really useful because it gave us a feeling for what a hard business felt like. You know, there are certain things that at one point we were trying to sell hotels on letting us turn their gym space into like a collective membership. So like you could have a gym in any city in the world. And it turns out that people who run hotels actually, you know, the GMs, they don't have an incentive to make all that much more money And so the sales were super, super hard. Anyway, it's really useful for us to understand what it felt like to be working on a very bad business. And then sort of halfway through this process, my dad got sick and my dad got multiple myeloma, multiple myeloma, incurable cancer, really interesting cancer in that right now there's a lot of immunotherapy that's proving to be super, super impactful for these patients. So I was like doing a bunch of research. I was trying to figure out how I could get him to have some of this immunotherapy. He's in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver, Canada, a few years behind the US. And his oncologist, I was trying to go back and forth and negotiate with him and explore these trials because nothing had been approved yet that was immunotherapy. And the oncologist got really frustrated and sort of demanded that we proceed with with the treatment he recommended. And that was really rough for a few reasons. One, my dad responded super poorly to it. Turns out it was an outdated treatment. He went from 190 pounds to 120 pounds. He's a 6-foot-tall dude, had a really rough go. And then also, I didn't know this, but he ended up disqualifying himself from a lot of the potential trials that were running for this CAR-T immunotherapy. And so overall, the experience was pretty awful and we'd been aware of clinical trials as a space and really me going through this experience had us go, hey, surely we could build something better here. Surely, like, I have a science background, I can read the papers and was still completely unable to get him into a trial.
