A New Chapter Begins.
Late last year I made the difficult decision to step down from my role at Lazurite (fka Indago), a company, I had basically invested all my energy and time (and money 🤦🏻♀️) over the past six years. There were definitely mixed feelings in the days and weeks following my departure as always is the case when a founder effectively leaves an organization, but I am proud of my team, my board, and my fellow founders (Eugene & Ilya) on how they navigated the change. It was a challenging time for the company and our industry with Coronavirus raging unabated and uncertainty was the word on everyone’s lips. However, with the passage of time and the benefit of 20–20 hindsight, I can say with my whole heart that it was absolutely the correct decision at the correct moment. When I started writing this, the news hadn’t yet broke but now, I am proud to say that Lazurite has achieved some amazing milestones: they brought on an absolute Rockstar in Leah Brownlee to take over my role, finished our latest $10 million financing round, and added some new firepower to the board in the form of Michael Salerno. However as with every chapter that ends, a new chapter begins.
When I left, I made a promise to myself (and my spouse) that I was going to be very intention about what I did next. As tempting as it was to rush headlong into the next opportunity, I knew I wanted to spend time doing some personal and professional reflection. And after much deliberation and more than a few twists and turns, I am excited to finally announce what I have decided to do next. As of about two months ago I joined a healthtech startup called HelpAround in a marketing role and as of a few weeks ago I accepted position as the Cleveland Community Coordinator at the Global Entrepreneurship Network or GEN (formerly Global Entrepreneurship Week).
Helping Around
In HelpAround, I continue my journey in healthcare, but I find myself back in the familiar world of digital and lead gen. Filling sales pipelines and funnels was the primary focus of my pre-Lazurite career and its fascinating return to the game and see what has changed. As the second member of the marketing team (and in many ways dual-hatted with as the primary BDR), I have my work cut out for me. But there is little else that I love more than a challenge, so I am amped to get stuck in. That said, one major difference from my previous role and one of the reasons I took the job (besides working with a Rockstar team: Shout out Paul Ciccero, Paul Stanley, & Yishai Knobel) is that I have now moved from medical device to pharmaceuticals. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my time in the operating room: watching procedures, talking with support teams, and learning from physicians, but as I spent more time thinking about what I wanted to do next and where I could make a difference, my mind kept drifting towards Pharma.
What is most exciting to me about HelpAround is that we work specifically with specialty drugs and those targeting rare and orphan diseases with the north star of helping patients discover treatments, get on therapies, and then stay the course until their “patient journey” is completed. As a person who suffers from several chronic conditions, this work is not only near and dear to my heart, but I have also seen the struggle that many of these patients go through for years as they fight with/against a system that seems designed to avoid helping them. There is much more to come on the work that we are doing at HelpAround (and what I am up to specifically) but I will leave that for another blogpost. The TL;DR is of the problem we are seeking to solve is best summed up on the following anecdote.
According to a recent Accenture report on patient support services, the Global annual spending on patient support services was $8.8 Billion dollars (2017) and is expected to increase to $18.68 Billion dollars by 2022 (16.2% CAGR). AT THE SAME TIME, the number of patients who were aware that patient support services even existed was when the report was initially released (2015) and when it was updated (2020) has remained flat and in some cases even DECREASED. This is within the context that the global pharmaceutical market is projected to reach $1.1 Trillion dollars by 2024. Fundamentally, the patient journey is broken and the status quo is failing patients on a massive level.
Cleveland & Community
On the opposite end of the spectrum is my role with GEN. In many ways, it is a continuation of the work that I have been doing outside of work for the past decade. Beginning with a fated 2011 interview in DUMBO at the Loosecubes office, the subsequent years at SxSW, GCUC, and the many amazing people I met along the way, the creation and support of the (entrepreneur) community has been incredibly important to me. Since arriving in Cleveland, if seems that if there was something entrepreneurship related, I would find myself pulled in — whether it was helping launch and scale Techpint, living in the Launchhouse accelerator houses, meeting with founders at Bizdom, or being part of the inspiration behind StartMart — I found so much energy, support, and friendship in this community. In 2015, I ended up putting on a rather successful holiday party as a small way to give back. Styled as a “corporate Christmas party” complete with the requisite tacky ornaments, cheesy music, and prodigious amounts of booze, this now annual event is a celebration for the community that spends its days heads down, hacking and hustling; a last hurrah with friends before the midwestern winter truly settles in. My little shindig has grown so much larger than I ever imagined which just further fanned that passion for community building.
The story for how I ended up in this role is much more straightforward. When Pauly Suchy moved to his new gig as the Manager for Startup Programs at Global Entrepreneurship Network, the Cleveland Community Coordinator position came open at just the moment I was really beginning to consider how my relationship to the ecosystem was going to change now that I worked for a fully remote company. Global Entrepreneurship Network was looking for someone willing to maintain a heightened level of engagement with both the community and powers that be as well as an interest in putting on events for the eponymous week and that ended up aligning exactly with where my interests lay.
What’s Next?
As for what’s next, I am still I am still wrapping my head around the ins & puts of what networking and other events will look like in a post-COVID world. I am starting to travel again and am itching to get back to my regular routine of coffee and beer meetups (please hit me up!). I fully remote these days but am always looking for places to crash/work to break up my routine. My holiday party will return for 2021 in addition to a least one Global Entrepreneurship Week event, but beyond that, I am still noodling things out. The only thing that I am absolutely certain of is that no one can be absolutely certain of what is coming next.
