We received pre-seed funding, valued at $1 million.
Then the race for demo day began with frantic product building and non-stop business development.
Unfortunately, my co-founder fell out of love with the idea after enduring months of business development hardship.
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How do you find a co-founder?
Back in early 2019, I left my job at IQVIA to join the London cohort ofEntrepreneur First.
Entrepreneur what?
By the end of this process, you should end up with a co-founder.
But I didnt really click with anyone.
Both my co-founder and I are techies in broad terms.
This really helped with both the technical and business discussions between the two of us.
Do you have a $1 billion idea?
Something we all learned fairly quickly in EF was the economics of venture capital.
Think Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Ill leave it to your judgement whether this is a healthy and sustainable business model.
Yes, thats a billion with a capital B.
Start me up!
Also, neither of us hated it, which is quite important, I heard.
I couldnt wait to tell all the people at the cohort about it, so I did.
And they all made the exact same face you just did when you read the sentence above.
This is bad news, because without the deployment and proliferation of AI,healthcare is doomed.
Then,manymorefollowedand amazing open source libraries were released likePySyftbyOpenMined, orFATEbyWeBank.
Hm… That was depressing to learn, but dont worry, itll get worse.
Sometimes you have days that feel like none of the days in your previous office jobs.
You feel amazing, fulfilled and working on something truly meaningful (at least to you).
Even better, sometimes things just work out.
The top
Then the rollercoaster continued and took us to this amazing top.
Roughly 30% of the initial EF cohort make it this far so we felt great.
I know its unlikely, but maybe this will all just work out fine!
I was also super excited that I get to finally build again after months of not coding.
We only had 2.5 months till demo day to:
Our plan seemed straightforward.
I am going to take care of the first one and my co-founder is doing the second.
However, the cracks started to show quite early on…
The business development process went from painfully hard (pre-IC) to near impossibly hard (post-IC).
Crucial final meetings with the key stakeholders did not happen.
So we pivoted and said:
Lets sell our federated ML platform to pharma companies.
Let them use it with their existing hospital relationships however they see fit.
This wasnt the worst idea to be honest.
Healthcare as we found out to our own detriment is built on trust and slowly evolving long-term partnerships.
Theres very little place for disruptive technologies, especially pushed by small companies.
Then they will take care of getting the tech to the data, i.e.
Then wed have our hard-wontractionin our hands for our discussions with VCs.
I finishedthe MVPand we started to demo it to large pharma companies.
Quite miraculously, none of them thought it was terrible.
In fact, some of them even murmured something positive about it during the call.
Instead, they all said, theyll get back to us after they had some internal discussions.
We could simply feel after these calls that we arent solving any of these teams top 3 problems.
What we offered was definitely in the top 10 or 15, but not even close to top 3.
And then, to make things worse (or better?
However it felt rather bad to give up on the idea at the very last minute.
So personally I wasnt disappointed, and I wasnt that surprised with our lack of progress.
Whiteboard sessions came and went, beers and many more coffees were had.
So heres a list of my top learnings.
What did I learn?
What do I miss?
Being a founder of your own deep tech company feels amazing on most days.
Here are some of the things I miss:
Will I do it again?
Although I might take a different funding route.
But thats a topic for another post… ## Also tagged with
