Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Andrew Lacy Turned Rejection into Health Tech Innovation | E58
Tue, 03 Dec 2024
Andrew Lacy stumbled into entrepreneurship after failing to land a tech job. His first company did so well that he eventually sold it to Disney. Believing he had business all figured out, he launched another company, only to realize that success wasn’t guaranteed. For his next venture, Prenuvo, Andrew took a more thoughtful approach, but investors repeatedly rejected the idea. Determined to make it work, he bootstrapped and secured loans to launch a clinic in Silicon Valley. Today, Prenuvo is revolutionizing preventive healthcare. In this episode, Andrew shares valuable insights on reinventing yourself, making bold career changes, and pushing through setbacks to bring innovative ideas to life. Andrew Lacy is an Australian serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the founder/CEO of Prenuvo, a pioneering health tech company using whole-body imaging for early disease detection, including cancer. In this episode, Ilana and Andrew will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (00:35) From Lawyer to Accidental Tech Entrepreneur (06:44) Lessons from His First Business (13:19) The Pains and Gains of Having a Co-founder (14:59) Starting a Company, Again? (17:24) Cultural Differences in Entrepreneurship (19:57) Tough Truths About Building a Startup (22:44) The Health Scan That Birthed Prenuvo (28:33) Dealing with Investor Rejection (35:11) The Future of Healthcare with Prenuvo (36:35) A Surprising Fact About Andrew (37:56) His Hack for Aspiring Entrepreneurs Andrew Lacy is an Australian serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and founder/CEO of Prenuvo, a pioneering health tech company using whole-body imaging for early disease detection, including cancer. He envisions a future where healthcare is more affordable and accessible, and where people embrace health screenings as tools for long-term wellness. Andrew also co-founded Tapulous, a key player in the early iPhone app ecosystem, later acquired by Disney. He has held leadership roles at McKinsey and Disney. Connect with Andrew: Andrew’s Website: https://andrewlacy.com/ Andrew’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewllacy/ Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
Chapter 1: How did Andrew Lacy become an accidental entrepreneur?
So you moved from law to entrepreneurship. By the way, did you get weird comments about it from family, friends, or was that pretty much you were young and it's okay?
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.
I can see you're the type that loves adventure. You're the type that goes all in. Tell us a little bit about this company. What does it teach you? And again, it was sold for Disney, right? There's definitely some ticking box of success, but I want to hear a little bit of what that journey was like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: What lessons did Andrew learn from his first business?
Chapter 3: What challenges did Andrew face with investor rejection?
Chapter 4: What is the story behind Prenuvo and its mission?
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.
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.
So you moved to a new country, which is on its own, not that easy to do. By the way, I remember the first time I got to drive in Silicon Valley and I would see the Googles and the Yahoos. These are real companies. Like it was really cool. And I assume you probably had a similar.
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.
It's interesting because you don't feel like you can find a job and you somehow stumbled on entrepreneurship, which I think objectively is harder. Was there fear?
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
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.
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.
And I think that's just super liberating for taking risks.
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Chapter 5: How does Andrew view the future of healthcare?
Chapter 6: What are the key factors to consider when starting a company?
Chapter 7: How important is having a co-founder in entrepreneurship?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you think they were looking for?
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.
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Chapter 8: What advice does Andrew have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
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.
I can see you're the type that loves adventure. You're the type that goes all in. Tell us a little bit about this company. What does it teach you? And again, it was sold for Disney, right? There's definitely some ticking box of success, but I want to hear a little bit of what that journey was like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. But tell us about a hard moment. Again, entrepreneurship always has a lot of hard moments. So if you're willing to share from this company or another one, share a little bit about a hard moment and kind of that learning from it. Because we grow a lot of muscle from these.
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