Andrew Lacy
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Because that sounds like... I was still on this path to learn things. And after we sold that company, I figured what I didn't want to do was jump into something straight away. I said, well, what can I do? What's that fun problem-solving thing to do that will help me be more capable in the future if I want to do another company?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I thought, well, why don't I learn how to code because that's the one part of the startup business I never fully understood. So I was fortunate enough to just hire someone to tutor me one-on-one. Just like learning a language tutored one-on-one, you can learn pretty fast. And so I really sort of got into it. And I'm not really good at learning from books. I like to do things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so most of my learning was applied, which is like, hey, let's pick a problem and see if we can solve this problem. And so we picked a problem at the time, which was a vertical search problem, searching inside certain domains. And I just remember one day I looked up sort of six months into this process and I had a few other people working for me on this problem with me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I realized that I was sort of inadvertently had started another company. And that's sometimes how companies start to, you know, not with a lot of thought. It's just passion again for like solving a problem. Actually, not even with a particular amount of thought for like whether this problem deserved to be solved, which is, if anything, the problem with that second company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
But that's how that came about. Back in those days, there wasn't a lot of entrepreneurship in France. So I found a bunch of misfits because it was not very common to get into entrepreneurship there. And we also hung out in a little office there and we cranked out code.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
the French lifestyle is very funny because on the weekends or in the evenings, there's a lot of societal pressure to not be working actually. And I don't think this reflects startups today, but back then when we did that. And I remember, you know, if my website broke after like 7 or 8 p.m., it was like good luck finding any engineers on the team that could ever fix it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
That was finally my graduation from Coding Academy, jumping online and trying to fix a website when I couldn't get in touch with anyone because probably all their friends and family were telling them, don't answer the call from the boss. He's trying to get you to work too hard. So that was my sort of French experience. In a lot of ways back then, much harder to build a startup over there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
But it was a fun experience to do it in the context of a different culture.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I don't believe that that's just because we are, I mean, we probably are those type of people, but it's becoming a more and more unpopular thing to say. But building a startup is really hard. And it's hard in the sense that you often have a limited amount of time and money to reach a milestone. And you're competing against companies that have way more resource than you do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so like really the only... benefit that you have is to move fast. That's the only way that you can really thread that needle. And moving fast implies working really hard. And people these days, I think, are looking for a way to do entrepreneurship somehow while maintaining a level of balance. If they can do it, they're a better entrepreneur than I am. I think it's really difficult.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I try and find balance over like my long term, work really hard for five years and take two years off. And the challenge is with different cultures, some cultures are more open and excited about you making career shifts and reinventing yourself. But that's sort of at this macro level. At the sort of more micro level, we face so much pressure from the society that we're in.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
There are certain cultures out there. If you're working too late, all your friends who are out having beers or drinking and they're like, oh, look at you, you're stupid. Why would you do that? If you're the CEO, maybe you get more of a pass. But if you're working for the CEO, let's say you're an engineer, they're taking advantage of you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Or it's your mother or your parents that are like, oh, you're working too hard. Why would you do this? You're going to kill yourself. And that sort of slowly erodes that entrepreneurial, I think, passion and drive. My thought process has been always being an entrepreneur is very, very difficult.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Be very aware and conscious of all the ways in which you might handicap yourself and your potential for success. And one of those might be the people that you surround yourself with or the location that you decide to build a company or the type of company you build. And I just think this is sort of Olympic sports.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
You really need to have the least amount of handicap possible if you want to maximize your chances to change the world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I don't know if you can tell from the accent, but I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. So about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get. You know, I grew up during that first dot-com boom. And I remember going online and looking at websites and I thought to myself, this is kind of cool, but I never really imagined that there were companies and people behind these things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Yeah, and the stories that you see, the dramatizations of these startups, I think, doesn't do the field a lot of service because they do make it look easy. Like the formula for success is dropping out of high school or college and... going into a garage with three or four people and having some pizza and then shipping a product the next week.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And all of a sudden you're a unicorn company and it just doesn't really work that way. And by the way, for me, it highlights a truth that a lot of people don't really understand, which is being an entrepreneur is not the best way in the world to make money if that's your goal. on a risk-adjusted basis.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
If you're a very, very smart person and you could be an investment banker or a lawyer or whoever, a stock trader, and you're really good at what you do, there's way less risk in that path if your goal is to make money. I think it's very soul-crushing, but I think it's really important to understand what are you optimizing for?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Are you optimizing for an interesting life here where you feel like you can... build a level of comfort if you work hard and have a little bit of luck? Or is it mainly about money? Because when you risk adjust it, not everyone is walking away from startups that they build like the people that you see on television.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
There's also different startups you can build. There are cash businesses that don't require a lot of investment. You know, at one end, there are other ends where like an Uber or something or where you just have to raise billions of dollars to build a company that's worth tens of billions. And the former company probably has a much higher chance of success.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And the latter company, it's one in a million that succeeds. It's also about what your individual risk appetite is. And sometimes people that build these very big companies, by the time the investors have taken their share, there's not often a lot left for those folks, but they've changed the world. And maybe that's, you know, and then they can like pivot that into other ventures down the track.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So there's lots of ways to look at reward, I guess.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
That's how far I was from the startup ecosystem. And in Australia, for better or worse, the process of going to college is kind of simple. You do a standardized test, you get a score from zero to 100, and then every single course you could possibly do had a score. And if your score was higher than that score, you could do that course.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
To give a quick summary of sort of my entrepreneurial journey, my first company was a mobile gaming company, one of the first iPhone companies we sold to Disney. It was a nice exit. Like most first-time entrepreneurs, I attribute a lot of the success of that company to me. I was pretty cool. You know, I was smart. I figured this stuff out.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so when I was working on this second vertical search company over in Paris, I'm like, well, it doesn't really matter what I do because I've already figured stuff out. So it's going to be successful. That was like such a rude awakening at just how much of a slog that was and how much it wasn't really about me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I was not immaterial, but there are other forces at play that were much more important, like what the idea was and was there a market for it and just something as unpredictable as luck and being in the right place at the right time. So when I came back to the US, I knew I wanted to do something else. And my starting point really was not to do something that was impact focused.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
But the agreement I made with myself was, I will never do another company again where the idea is my own. Because I don't trust that I understand necessarily what is going to be a big, impactful, world-changing idea. So I just went out. I posted on my LinkedIn. I emailed all my friends. And I said... I want to do another company. I don't know what I want to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I want you to reach out into your networks and find people that have problems that you think would be interesting to solve and introduce me to those people. And so I got all this inbound and I was going and having coffees, but there were coffees with a purpose. that I'm working in this field, I'm working in banking. I talk to doctors who have problems. I talk to a whole host of different people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And what I found through those conversations was that the ideas that both sounded big and interesting to solve also happened to be the ones that had more impact. And they tended to be the folks that I spoke to in the medical domain. And I actually explored three things there. One was a genetics company for babies, for pediatric genetics.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
The second was an Alzheimer's diagnostic where we take a photo of your eye and we can tell you where you're on the Alzheimer's spectrum. So a $50 product that would replace a $5,000 PET scan. And then one was someone who came to me, a friend of mine, and said, hey, there's this guy doing these really interesting whole body scans. Why don't you go and talk to him?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Because he's been doing it for 10 years and it hasn't grown anywhere, but it's really, really cool. So I just was out, I put myself out there. I gave a lot of advice in the process of just trying to figure out what was next. And I went and did this scan, sat down with the radials afterwards. And I was just... completely blown away.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
As someone who grew up watching Star Trek and Star Wars, I don't know if you remember like the bridge of one of these spaceships, all the buttons and knobs and everything. I mean, an iPad today blows away what they imagined the future was back then. But the medical devices that they imagined 50 years ago, we're still so far away from that today. And it felt like to me, this was the closest thing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
You didn't have to write an application describing why you're passionate about becoming a doctor or a lawyer or studying accounting or becoming a speech pathologist or whatever it is. You got the score, you could go in. And the downside of this was, of course, when you looked at the score that you got, you're like, what's a cool thing I could do here?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I lie down in a machine for 45 minutes. I came out and every single organ of my body had been analyzed. I just had never seen anything like this before. And I'm like, wouldn't it be incredible if we could bring this to as many people as possible? And I left and mulled on it for a little while.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And what I found happening in the days after I did that exam was I had this such tremendous peace of mind. And I didn't fully appreciate before then just how much I had worried about my health, especially as a hardworking entrepreneur. Because we ignore diet. We ignore exercise. We have headaches. We don't sleep enough. There's random pains.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And there's always that little voice saying, oh, you know, what if? Well, I figured out the way to cure the what if, at least for myself. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if every year I could do one of these? I never had to worry about that one thing that was weighing me down that could really sort of unlock my potential to do whatever I wanted to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So that's how this company got started is my own personal experience and sort of what it meant for me and my own health as an entrepreneur.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
In that story, I'm skipping the six months where I went to the Starbucks every day and sat down and stared at my computer thinking to myself, what should I do? And that was very depressing because every day I didn't come up with something that was interesting was sort of a day that I felt like a failure. I mean, again, in the movies, that's how it works.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
You know, you're at the Starbucks and the billion dollar idea comes from the napkin drawing that you made. I just don't think that's how entrepreneurship really works or should work. And it's so hard to build companies. Why do we expect also that the entrepreneur is going to come up with the idea? And so the big unlock for me was like saying, you know what? I'm not going to do that anymore.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I'll keep going to Starbucks, but I want someone across the other side of that table talking about something I don't know and see if I can get excited about a problem that's keeping other people up at night.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Prunuvo was one of the more interesting fundraising stories because we struggled to raise money and still do, in my opinion, to raise money as a company. And the main reason for this is, I think, and I wear this a bit as a badge of pride now, is kind of like the more crazy the idea is that you're pursuing, the more people just reject it outright.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
What's going to make me money or what's going to make my family proud? And pretty far down the list was what actually do I think will I find fulfilling? So I ended up getting a pretty high score and that enabled me to go to probably one of the better universities in Australia to study economics and law. I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I think investors have a really hard time telling the difference between, I mean, you can easily tell a good idea from a bad idea, but it's really hard to tell like an incredible idea from the worst thing you've ever heard. So the tales of that distribution, it's hard to tell one from the other. I remember I saw Uber's first angel pitch. I saw WhatsApp's first angel pitch.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I'm like, this is stupid in both cases. So it's just very hard to do. We talked to a lot of investors and we got a lot of no's. In fact, when we had that first clinic in Canada, which is where we started... We had patients coming in. They were super excited. They were jazzed. The business was actually profitable back then at a really early stage.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I went to investors and every investor had a doctor or every VC had a doctor on their investment committee. And all those doctors were like, this is stupid. You shouldn't invest in it. And so we ended up bootstrapping the company. We got bank loans and bank guarantees. And we ended up begging and borrowing our way to opening up a location in Silicon Valley.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So it looks kind of easy now, but in the early days, it absolutely was not. And even as we raised our Series A around a couple of years ago, 95% of the people we spoke to was a no. And it's funny because we are, I think, probably one of the more unique companies in the Silicon Valley in that we count as...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
patients of ours, a large number of VCs who swear that they'll use us every year for the rest of their lives, but will not invest in us. It was a real journey finding the right investors that really believed and understood the vision. And we've been really fortunate to have great folks that have supported the company, but definitely it was not easy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Yeah, exactly.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
For me personally, the emotional damage of fundraising is the worst of all in the startup journey. I can deal with the ups and downs of product market fit and all of the HR issues that come with hiring folks. But when you go to investor, you're bringing that baby that you've created and nurtured and you're putting on a scale and you're weighing it. And when 95%
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
percent of investors are like, we don't like this baby. We're not going to invest in it. It is tremendously hard because that's what you have just spent oftentimes two or three years getting ready for that moment. It's really, really hard. To this day, I still find it very stressful. Until you get one or two yeses and then you're like, okay, cool. It's going to clear.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
But that could be 50 meetings in. And I don't have a lot of advice for it because I don't think I've figured it out. It still affects me a lot. But I guess the one thing I've learned is having done it a few times now, it doesn't matter how many yeses you get. It just matters you get one or two.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
There's a number of contradictions that you have to find a way to reconcile when you build a company. And I think one of them is that, of course, if a bunch of investors are saying no, it's really important to listen and try and understand why they're saying no. But you also sort of have to be prepared to have conviction and ignore a lot of the things that you're hearing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I never grew up feeling like I wanted to learn economics, but my score allowed it. So that's the school that I went to. I think the US is a bit different. Obviously, people have to make the case for why they want to do what they want to do. But still, I think a lot of people, they don't put a lot of thought into where they decide to spend their early career.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And that's the challenge. And in very many ways, entrepreneurship is about finding ways to accommodate these contradictory point of views. It's incredible to be mission driven. It's like such a powerful motivation for a company and for its employees. But you can be tremendously mission-driven on horrible execution. Or you can be great at executing but have a hollow mission.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So you sort of need so many of these different things that in some ways are contradictory. Because being mission-driven is like sitting around the table and talking about saving lives and we're going to change the world and all these sorts of things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And then being able to go back to your desk after a minute and say, okay, I've got to work on like 100 little tiny things that get me 0.01% of the way there. So the same is true with investors. I think it's about listening and ignoring. And if you only ignore and don't listen, you may never raise money. And if you only listen and don't ignore, you may just get despondent and like give up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I see that all the time with companies that I advise.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I do some angel investing, obviously, but I would say this about the company that I'm in as well. The most interesting business are ones where there's like an information asymmetry. When you understand something about a market that investors and other people don't.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And Prunuvo is that company because we understood better than anyone else how MRI, the technology that we're using, has evolved in the last 10 years. It's been around for 30 years, just like cell phones have. But like the cell phones of the last few years are totally different to the ones 20 years ago.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so we understood, and we have this information that the average medical practitioner or investor doesn't have. And because we have this asymmetry, we have very little competition. But also because there's this asymmetry, it's much harder to get investment. So for me, sometimes when you struggle, one possibility here is that you know something that other people don't.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And the best companies, like the most sort of world-changing companies are built from these asymmetric information situations. And when that collapses, all of a sudden, when everyone understands that, let's say, whole body screening can potentially change the world, well, by that stage, it's too late. The companies that are working on it will have already been working on it for like 10, 15 years.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
The goal of the company really is to change this entire industry, turn it upside down from an industry that's very reactive, where we're afraid to learn about our health. It's a scary thing. I mean, the single biggest challenge my patients have to overcome is in coming in is the fear that the health system has put in their heads that anything we find might be life-threatening.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And the world we wanna create is one where you get a screening every year or so. It's like going to the dentist. We're checking to see how things are going. You will have disease, but because we're looking so routinely, we're going to find things very early. And we're going to find things so early that sometimes you don't even need medical intervention. You can just change your lifestyle.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So I started working with lawyers during and post-degree. I ended up representing a whole bunch of not wonderful actors, defended mining companies that poisoned the environment. And I was told to work for the gun lobby at one point and some developers that swindled a whole bunch of money for people. I mean, it was not a great experience.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And if you need medical intervention, it's going to be cheaper and it's going to be much more successful outcome for the patient and for the health system. That's the world that we're trying to create. You won't recognize it, I don't think. In the same way, I think people in 30 or 40 years will look back at the healthcare system today and they'll just shake their heads.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And for me, that it's incredible to be able to change, you know, work to change the industry and save lives in the process. I just feel so blessed to being able to do that every day of the week.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
When I was in fourth grade, I remember a teacher brought in a video camera to videotape us. And I'm going to display my age here a little bit, but that was like the first time I saw a video camera. And the woman was filming us. And I just felt so fascinating. All these knobs were spinning around. And I just asked her, why is that? How is it working? What's going on here?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Why is that thing spinning? And the teacher got so upset at me, I got detention. But I think that's me. I have friends that they build a company, they sell it, and then they start the same company again, plus or minus 10%. And then they sell that. And they start the same company again, plus or minus 10%, and sell that. And it's probably a better way to be financially successful for sure.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
But for me, it just feels very boring. So I've just always had this curiosity for learning new things. And that's why every one of my companies has been a completely new sector. I've done different roles in most of them. And I've been curious enough to experiment with what does it mean even to do it in different countries around the world? I don't know.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I just think that's what makes life interesting is that every day is going to be a constant challenge. That's what most people don't know about me is, yeah, I got attention routinely for just asking too many why questions at school.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
The simple answer would be that I sort of wasted 10 years of my time before I figured out that building companies was the thing that motivated me. So my first company... I was, I think, 31, which is still young, but in Silicon Valley speak, that's kind of old when it comes to starting companies. That's the easy answer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
The reality is I don't think I would be successful if it wasn't for that experience. But for sure, you have a lot more energy in your 20s than you do in your 40s. You have fewer familial responsibilities. I still work quite hard, but I cannot work anywhere near as hard as I used to because I have a child to look after and I'm married and And I just don't have the energy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So I don't know, maybe getting started a bit earlier, but then probably expect to fail and then get back on the horse and do it again.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I do, but I less and less like what I see looking back at me in the mirror the next day compared to when I was 20 or 30 years younger.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I feel pretty privileged because I sort of always had a pretty good banner. The next best alternative for me was always going to be something where I could put bread on the table. So I could always go back to consulting. I don't think I go back to law, but I could, I guess, in theory. For me, that's like a really privileged place to be. It sort of is very freeing and enabling of taking risks.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I was just thinking to myself, wow, if this is my life for the next 20 years, I'm not even sure I want to live that life. So I built up the courage to leave Lore and I moved into consulting. And I worked at a consulting firm called McKinsey. And there, during this dot-com bubble, there were a lot of big companies that wanted to get into digital technology but didn't really know how to do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I mean, everyone should sort of evaluate themselves and whether that sort of fits them or not, or how can they organize their life in such a way that they can really take a chance if that's something that is going to be really motivating for them. It's funny, like I used to volunteer at a prison, actually in California, where we did this like entrepreneurial contest.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And a lot of these people that we worked with were people that they might've been in prison for like 10, 20 years, like their entire adult life. Some of them for quite serious crimes, but they all had this passion for the fact that their sentence was coming up and they had to figure out they don't want to come back in jail, which is what usually happens. So what can they do?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so we taught them entrepreneurship. And they all came up with ideas. And they weren't VC fundable ideas. But for those people, it's very difficult to get a job. And becoming their own business owner sometimes is the best way. In fact, the lowest way to figure out how to put bread on the table. So I don't know. I think it's just such a personal decision.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I'm always very nervous to say, well, it's easy. Just quit your job and rent a house with five other people and just eat two-minute noodles. Because not everyone can do that. Hopefully many people have a time and place in their lives where that's possible.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And if you're in that time of your life where that is possible, like I would think hard about whether that's now's the right time because you don't want to have those regrets when you are, you know, you have family or you have other commitments where it's like not quite possible to be able to do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
It is a psychological difference. But when I speak to my staff, I often talk about something that I truly believe, which is successful companies have entrepreneurs at all levels.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And yes, maybe the buck stops with me, but I would say the vast majority of the innovations that make products... If you can make a product 1% better every week, it doesn't take long for it to be twice as good as it was before. And a lot of those innovations don't come from the top. They come from other people in the organization.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So you can be a micro-entrepreneur and learn those skills in a somewhat more safe environment. And maybe one day... Thereafter, you have the courage and sort of experience, then go and do it on your own.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I'd say one role to look out for if people are looking for a stepping stone is like a chief of staff role in a high growth company, because these are... folks that basically assist senior executives and they have tremendous visibility into everything that's going on in the organization. And they become sort of pinch hitters for problems along the way and solving them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I've pretty much always had a chief of staff in my companies and many of them have gone on to create big, meaningful companies. So that's maybe a great stepping stone for someone who is thinking about it, but wants to maybe take two or three years and learn more in as accelerated an environment as possible.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So they brought us in and... We were supposed to be the experts. I didn't feel like much of an expert when I started, but we would do these highly compressed studies where we worked 80 hours a week trying to learn how to do product or trying to learn how to build technology. And it sounds kind of ridiculous today, but 20, 25 years ago, no one really knew anything. So people paid us to do this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
No worries. It's been great talking. Thank you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And in the process, I learned a lot about the business side of how to build tech companies and We finally moved over to the US. I studied an MBA at Stanford. And my dream at that time was to go and work at a Google or a Salesforce. And on my resume was, I was a lawyer, a former lawyer. I had done strategic consulting and I had an MBA from Stanford.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And it turns out tech companies didn't value any of those things. So all the things I had worked so hard to put on my resume were completely useless to folks In that world, I think somewhat unfairly, but that's how they saw people with my background.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
People that knew how to code or had experience really in the trenches. I felt like I had built experience with companies, but in a much more low risk way. And that just really wasn't valued. So I became an accidental entrepreneur. I couldn't get a job at a technology company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I hung out with a friend of mine at a VCR firm and he introduced me to another entrepreneur who was doing something in the iPhone world. And I just thought it was so wonderful that someone really wanted to even hang out with me and hear my opinion about this thing. And so we started working together and a month in, we decided that we would partner up and really grow this business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I became an accidental entrepreneur. I couldn't get a job at a technology company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So I didn't start out being an entrepreneur. Of course, when I got into it, I started to realize what an incredible experience that would be and how it really matched my personality.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I remember rollerblading along El Camino Real in Palo Alto and just being blown away going by like the Yahoo office and the Google office that were all on El Camino Real back then.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Well, for me, I think you mentioned that I sort of, I've lived in different countries. I probably live now in six or seven different countries around the world. And a big part about that for me, every time I did that, it was a real enabler to show up a different way in that new country. I personally felt like a lot of what held me back, held my own development and growth back was that
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I'll give a simple example. Let's say I'm a very serious person and I would like to be more lighthearted, tell more jokes. If all the people around me I've hung out with for 20 years, I suddenly show up one day and I start telling jokes. In my mind, I'm going to be thinking, these guys think I'm really weird. This is not me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
So moving country for me or city is like this opportunity to sort of reinvent yourself if you want to. Sometimes I've used that to... reinvent my personality to some extent. I've gone from being very introverted and heads down to being a lot more extroverted and heads up. But also no one has any prior expectations about who you are and what you're going to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Prunuvo was one of the more interesting fundraising stories because we struggle to raise money. The more crazy the idea is that you're pursuing, the more people just reject it outright. Be very aware and conscious of all the ways in which you might handicap yourself and your potential for success. And one of those might be, I never experienced more low points than I did building a company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I think that's just super liberating for taking risks.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Well, I should just say one more point about the context, because I think it's really important. I think the one thing that the US does really well is it has a expectation that people do reinvent themselves. You know, I've lived in Europe, obviously in Australia as well.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I think if you were a lawyer and you went to your family and friends and say, hey, I'm thinking about quitting the law and learning how to program. Every single person is just going to tell you you're crazy. In America, you do that, you might still be crazy, but no one is going to tell you this. They're like, cool, right on. You're living the dream.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I think we forget that successful career change, it's not just about having the strength and fortitude within, but it's also the societal context is so important in creating an environment where people feel really comfortable doing that. So if you're in a place where that's not the case, then I definitely encourage you to think about possibly moving.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I think in all parts of the world that Tel Aviv, for example, and Israel is a very, I think, forward-looking and entrepreneurial place. environment in Europe. There are places like this all around the world. You don't have to come to Silicon Valley, but not every place has this environment that enables you to sort of take that leap as easily as you can in the U.S.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Well, I had gone backpacking, you know, as an Aussie around the world. So I think a lot of people would have said, oh, this is Andrew. This is a different type of backpacking. You know, he's going to head over to the US and he's going to be working instead of playing, but he'll be back, I think, was the assumption. And I haven't been back now for over 20 years.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Well, for me, the thing that I found, I didn't know too much about how to build startups inside out. There were a lot of things that were really new to me. People would say things and then I would go and like Google what the word was and try and understand what's a use case and how is that important.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
But I started to learn really quickly that what's really nice about entrepreneurship is that you're sort of like blazing your own path. And that means that there's just a lot of problem solving. And what I found was that when I looked back on my career, I was studying law. Well, what is law? Law is problem solving.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
How do you find the right cases to support an argument that you want to make to win the case that you're advocating for? Consulting is about going in and really trying to understand very quickly what are the issues and then suggest possible solutions. So I just found that in some ways, the startup world for me was the most concentrated problem solving environment that you could find.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I also never experienced as many high points. Being an entrepreneur is very, very difficult. I've had falling outs with co-founders. We got kicked off the app store. I was completely drained.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
It's as if you love playing chess. I felt like I got to play chess every day. There was always something that would be intellectually exciting and it didn't really matter what it was. It didn't matter that I didn't know anything about the sort of domain of the company at the time, which was like mobile and we sort of evolved into a mobile gaming company. It didn't really matter.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I didn't know too much about product management or engineering. You know, I just had this insatiable appetite for learning and applying these problem solving skills to a whole bunch of new problems. And I think for me, that was a big unlock.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I started to realize how actually I did have skills that would be really relevant to entrepreneurship and that my 10 years doing other things wasn't a complete waste of time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
A lot of scar tissue as well. Yeah. To be honest, there's just been so many. I mean, you just have to have such resilience because there's so many really low points. I never experienced more low points than I did building a company. I also never experienced as many high points. So you have this rollercoaster experience. You know, I've had low points where I've had falling outs with co-founders.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
The first time you get an inbound lawsuit and you just feel like everything is over at that point. There's been times back in those early days where we were building these apps on the app store and we got kicked off the app store and we had to work to get back on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I've always been a big believer in it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so all these things were just, I would go home and I would just stare at the wall and I was completely drained and just unable to feel like I could get up the next day and come to work. But you do. And then inevitably the next day is not as bad as the last day. And maybe something great happens that day and then turns into the best day.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And so there's this sort of yo-yo, which personally I feel is not great for health. probably why I'm working in healthcare now. But it's tremendous for like resilience. Because the more you go through these ups and downs, the more I've just learned that doesn't matter how bad it is today, I've seen enough days where the next day is incredible or better or affects me a lot less.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And I do think that's one of those crucibles of learning that if you're looking to get into entrepreneurship, there's no shortcut. People can tell you it. You can sort of understand it academically, but you have to go through those lows and those highs to realize that it's a roller coaster. And probably the biggest skill you learn through this is resilience.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And probably the biggest consequence for your health is a slightly higher cortisol level because you can't avoid that. It's very difficult to be completely stress-free when you're going through these big ups and downs.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
I've always been a big believer in having more than one founder of the company. I think a big job of having a co-founder is to pick you up if you're not having a great day. And then when they're not having a great day, your job is to pick them up. So I think it's a very, very lonely... ride if you're taking it alone.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
And if you don't have a co-founder, I'm in a number of groups now, entrepreneurial groups. And I think there's always people asking for advice, including myself. And then just having a community of people that have gone through that experience, I think is really valuable.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Co-founder is the closest relationship to marriage. 50% of all marriages end up in divorce. A certain number of marriages end up in accommodation, right? Where you sort of live together, but you're maybe not in love. And then some of them are really happy. And I think probably the co-founder relationship is similar, probably has similar stats too. So it's really hard.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
It's not a panacea of everything. And if that co-founder relationship ends up being a relationship of friction, it's almost the worst possible thing because then you don't have... This person that you would normally confide in, the problem is with them. But I still think net-net, there's something about going through that experience together.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
You're giving birth to a child that is a new business or venture. And I think just because a lot of those relationships don't end up well doesn't mean you shouldn't aspire to find that, I think, when you go out there and figure out what to do.