Andrew Lacy
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Andrew Lacy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So there's lots of ways to look at reward, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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