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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah, exactly.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I see that all the time with companies that I advise.
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.
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.
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.
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