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Adrian Aoun

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35
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2018-05-25
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2018-05-25
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1
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  1. “Focused on primary care, but we're working on launching dermatology, optometry, you name it, we want to go after it. And the third is it takes using things like AI or even other business models to make healthcare affordable to everyone, not just people in the United States, right? But to the people in the middle of Rwanda that are living on one or two dollars a day. If you want to make healthcare affordable to them, it has to look very, very different than it does today. So over the next five years, what are we focused on? Well, all three parts. We want to touch more lives with more services and make it more accessible. And five years is just the beginning of that journey for us.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so I'm going to go a little further out than five years in the vein of wanting people to look even further into the future. My goal is to build the first at scale healthcare system. Now, when I think of scale in tech, I think of Google with 3 billion daily users, Facebook and Apple with almost 2 billion. That's real scale. There's only 7 plus billion people on the planet. When I think of scale in healthcare, it comes back to, you know, Kaiser or the VA. These are people with, you know, order of 10 million lives. The way I think about it is if Kaiser was a tech company, you would have never heard of it and you wouldn't have the app on your phone. So what's it going to take to really get healthcare to billions of people on the planet? Well, it's going to take a few different things. It's going to take using technology to build a truly scalable platform to maintain quality. It's going to take billing out a lot more services than we have today.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The pain. Because here we can help people's lives. I mean, it's not a joke. You know, I didn't start a Photosharing company because I'm not sure it's worth the pain for me, right? I'm not sure going through hellish times is worth being able to help somebody with the photo filter. But I know here that these are actual lives being helped. And so when I go through that pain, I say, yeah, you know what, this sucks. This too shall pass. But at least it's worth it because hopefully we all end up in a better place.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, let me tell you the shit the fan moments occur almost every day in a startup. My friend Mike Cassidy always says, the odds of anything good happening to a startup are always less than fifty percent. And so, you know, every day you wake up and you know, today's going to be a good day. Oh, wait, no, it's probably not. Let's just remember that. Now, the thing that I always try to remember is that innovation is messy. And by that, what I mean is when you're changing the parameters of the game, you're in unchartered territory. Of course, you're going to do plenty of things wrong. There's no roadmap. There's no guide. No one's done it before. And so on a daily basis, I'm getting things wrong. There's no question. I think the key there is to be humble. I think the key is to remember that you're here for the right reasons. You believe in those core acts and those core hypotheses that caused you to want to go after this in the first place. In my case, it's really important for me to remember that this is worth it. It's worth”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “People say, Well, I was only here for the money. So thanks. Have a good day. And the truth is that almost every company has its ups and downs. We look at Facebook in the news recently. This isn't their first time they're having an issue. This is at minimum their 10th or 15th time where the company's in a dark spot going through. And I believe they'll get through it, but they're only going to get through it if people continue to say, well, I believe in the mission. I'm here for the right reasons. Yes, maybe we didn't get everything right, but we're going to do better today and tomorrow. And when you do that, when you build a team that's kind of actually there for the right reasons, you can weather storms much, much better. And you can kind of see to the end of your mission with a higher probability.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think that it's fine to pay up for talent in almost every way but money. And by that what I mean is give them the best opportunity, give them the best work environment, give them the best mission to go after the best way to make impact. I want to pay up for that. I think that right now there's a trend in Silicon Valley of engineers or commodity and they're super hot. And so we just need to pay whatever dollars we have to get the best coders. But the problem is that when you do that, you get people that aren't there for the right reasons. They're not there because they care about the mission. They're not there because they want to see the world the way you want to see the world change. And so what you find is that that works absolutely incredibly well during very good time. When the companies are doing marvelously well, sure, everybody's going to stick around. They'll do the work. Everyone's happy. But the second the company hits speed bump or road bump, the second it's kind of on a downswing, not an upswing. What you find is that those”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So recently I read sapiens, and it just does a fantastic job reminding us about what makes us as humans unique, which is our ability to collect around and believe in abstract concepts, right? So if we believe in this notion of the dollar, and then all of a sudden you have an economy, a currency, jobs, we believe in this notion of society. And then you have countries, patriotism. We all work together towards these abstract notions from the early days of believing in God to the future days of believing in blockchain and Bitcoin. The cool thing about humans is that we have that ability, whereas arguably no other species does.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Ownership. Others care about, yeah, but show me the pro forma. I want to understand the unit economics more and everything. All of those are fine. All of those are a great strategy. I wouldn't necessarily think of every company being a good fit for every VC so much as what you're looking for and what you need has presumably some people that are a good fit for it and others that aren't.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Try and take advantage of that to their own benefit. One of the nice things that Angel investors can do to help founders is to kind of give them almost a little more of a united front. It's kind of just a little check and balance on maybe a bad BC to say, hey, you can do that. You can try taking advantage of this company. But you know what? Word's going to spread. You know, me, my friends, other entrepreneurs, we're going to know that you did that. And that's not going to help you in the long term. And so it's a little kind of like maybe we should help keep people honest. Now the nice thing is that I think that the entire industry has done this over the last kind of five or ten years. And you actually see far fewer bad actor VCs than you did even a decade or 15 years ago. And so that's kind of great to see. Now, the other thing to understand is that there's not a one size fits all in terms of what VCs are looking for. Some people, really, they care about how deep is the technology. Others care about what percentage.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Absolutely. So, one of my favorite parts of getting this kind of information advantage of being inside, being an investor in all these portfolio companies, is that you actually get to see how VCs act in the good times and in the bad. And the only thing that really matters is how your VC acts in the bad times. VCs and good times, I'm not sure you should focus on too much. Now, the investors that I went with in Forward, people like Founders Fund or Postleft, Keith Ruboy at Costleft, who I know has been on your show. These are people that when times get tough have been good actors. And that's super important because the last thing you want is when you're on the floor having somebody kind of kick you. And so what I've unfortunately seen tons of is VCs that maybe aren't quite as experienced aren't quite as mature or frankly aren't just good people. I've seen them when companies get into a slightly tough situation.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Added value investor, and it's good for the company and it's good for them, then they'll go ahead and they'll give me an allotment and they'll be nice. And you know what? If the company needs to give that allocation to somebody else, that's totally fine too. Because my goal, again, is for that company and that founder to be successful, not because I'm hoping to kind of pad my coffers a little more.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And the rest of the companies, to be honest, you kind of don't care about the return, whether it's a double, a triple, a single, they lost your money, it all washes out because the things that get you a thousand X or 10,000 X return are all that matter. And so given that, what you quickly realize in the conclusion you quickly come to is that you want to be able to put as much capital. You want to be able to deploy as much capital as possible into those companies. So for example, a company I'm lucky enough to be an investor in ish, which used to be called context logic. And when I saw that investment, I said, geez, I would love to keep putting millions more into this company because it's clearly doing super, super well, and you want to kind of ride that way. Same with Pinterest, same with others. Now, because my primary goal is not to just focus on returns, I actually don't try and ask people for pro rata rights, et cetera. I figure, you know what, if I'm a helpful”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Asking yourself, well, why is she doing this? What's in it for her? And you start to Yeah, so because it's my own money, I'm lucky enough to not have to be super formal in that thinking, but there's a few things that I've noticed when I look back upon my portfolio. The first thing that I've noticed is that I'm incredibly bad at predicting which companies are going to do extremely well. I mean, if you had told me when I invested in Pinterest that it was going to do what it has, I would have told you you're crazy. But obviously, you know, I didn't understand that market. I still frankly don't. I invested because there's a great founder, great team, and he has a wonderful vision. And so when you look at that, you say, well, maybe as long as there's a person that I want to work with and they're going after a problem that I think matters, maybe you just take the bet anyway because your error bars are so large. Now, the second thing that I learned since looking back upon my portfolio is that there's a massive power law distribution of outcomes, right? Very, very small number of companies do incredibly well.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I can't imagine, at least from my experience, that there are really too many cons outside of potentially losing your money. But the reason I Angel Invest is not because I'm hoping to make a return. I've been lucky to be in a bunch of great companies, but the truth is that the reason I Angel Invest is twofold. The first is to pay it forward. And I think that there's almost a moral obligation in this community to do so, right? So one of the Angel investors in Wavy was Marissa Mayer. Now, Wavy was a surge company, and Marissa at the time ran search at Google. And I was thinking, I was like, how absurd is this industry where the person that I would pay some obscene amount of money just to sit down with and get their advice where she gives me money and then I get to pick her break? And I was thinking, wait, this makes no sense. Even if Wavy was the next Google, I'm not going to change Marissa's lifestyle, right? She obviously has done well herself. So then you have to start.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “At that, you say, Well, my main risk is merely am I willing to be patient? Am I willing to go after these very large outcomes that might take longer to get? As an angel investor myself, frankly, I love those. I'm not looking for the get-rich quit scheme. More what I'm looking for is things that are going to have massive, massive impact on the world. What are the next Googles, the next Apples? But let's go after the industries that are far less sexy. Let's go after energy. Let's go after construction. Let's go after education. Let's go after healthcare. And if those take longer, to me, that's totally fine.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It means that they're looking for a smaller return. They're often not. In fact, oftentimes being patient actually gives you a much larger return. But on an IRR basis, you might find that actually the investments are perfectly rational. But again, you have to take a significantly larger portfolio stance, right? You're typically writing bigger checks to hedge your risk. You need more of these companies, a larger fund. You're typically looking for returns over a much longer period of time. So again, you need to have funds that can last a longer life cycle. That being said, like I'm not so worried about the external risk of a regulator merely because, as I mentioned earlier, they move incredibly slowly and they're fairly predictable in that regard. And so I don't think O forwards entering into the healthcare space and then overnight the regulations on doctors' offices are going to change. I think that's highly, highly unlikely, especially since it's so fragmented across states. And so when you look”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so there's no question that when you go into a regulated industry, you're also likely going into an industry, which is just going to make progress slower. So there's no such thing as like a YouTube growth curve for something like Ford, right? There's no notion of we're going to be at a billion lives in three years. It just can't happen, right? Because at the end of the day, what we're doing is brick and mortar. It's actual healthcare. It's actual life and death matters, right? So when you look at this, yes, they're highly correlated with regulated environments where they're going to move a little more slowly, but I wouldn't think about it merely from this notion of regulation versus not. I would just think about it from this notion of how long term is the bet that I'm making, how long term is the investment that I'm making. And some people don't want that, right? Some investors, they want to know within one or two years this thing is taken off or this thing's gone under and that's totally fine. But some investors are much more patient capital. Now, I don't want you to think that just because they're patient.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “What I find is that actually the majority of the time things fall into that first and second camp. The thing is that in the world of Silicon Valley, in the world of technology, we are so used to just being able to do whatever we want online that any sort of regulation we look at and we honestly throw our hands in the air and say, ah, screw it, this is dumb before we even seek to understand. Now where I do agree is like it's an annoying process and long process to change regulation. So where we do find things to be difficult in our industry is when the regulation hasn't kept up with the modern advances, you know, whether it's the scooters in San Francisco this week and everybody figuring out how to regulate them or not, whether it's Uber, whether it's all these industries. And I would love to figure out better ways to adapt regulation more quickly. But I don't think that means we need it to be entirely gone. I don't think it actually is as prohibitive.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Our own LUD labs. And you know what? There's regulation around how we should run those labs. That sounds fairly reasonable to me, actually. I don't think there's any part of that that seems like that's a bad idea. Maybe, again, the paperwork could have been more streamlined. Maybe we could have created a website. Maybe we could have done it a little faster. Sure, there's still a tax. But to think, hmm, you should be able to run these blood labs that tell people, you know, some very profound information that could truly affect their lives, whether they have HIV or not, whether they're diabetic or not. So think you should do that without some level of standards and oversight, you know, probably not a reasonable idea. And then there's the third category. And the third category is the, wow, the regulation is so overbearing that I can't even bother entering this industry. And there it's crushing innovation. It's crushing progress. You know what? You probably see that in some industries. I imagine, I don't know for sure, but I imagine aviation is a good example of that, right?”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, so you know, I didn't have a background in healthcare before starting forward. And so I sat there and was, you know, I had a big X on my list of things to go after when I looked at healthcare merely because of the regulatory environment. But then, you know, I started to actually look into it. And I'm like, well, take a step back. There's tons of mom and pop doctors' offices. If they can do it, why can't we, what am I missing here? And what you start to do when you peel back layers of the onion is you realize that I would argue regulation falls into kind of three categories. The first category is, you know what, nobody really understands why we're still doing this thing in this day and age. It's a tax that you pay. But you know what? Get over it. It's some paperwork usually. It's not that bad. And of course, healthcare has got some of those things, right? There's filings we make where we're just literally shrugging our shoulders going, why do we bother? Right. Then there's the second category. This is the, you know what? The regulation is there probably for a good reason, actually. So we”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Had to raise an enormous amount of money even to have a foot in the race. Because could you imagine going to a doctor's office with no doctor? Could you imagine going to a doctor's office without the technology? Of course not. We wouldn't have ever had a chance at the ballgame, right? And so this is where I think as you go into these more complex industries, this lean startup unfortunately sometimes doesn't actually”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Actually, oftentimes is a systems problem, right? So when you think about healthcare, it's not just build the better doctor's office or build the better experience. Actually, it's also figure out how to navigate the thickets or the lack of innovation that comes from having your hands tied with all this regulation or all this kind of incentive misalignment. Only doing what the insurance company lets you do, only doing what the regulatory environment lets you do. And when you look at a problem that's a systems problem, oftentimes the right way to go after it is to disintermediate that system. The only way to do that is to vertically integrate. Straightforward, we are, in essence, the doctor's office and the hardware company and the software company and we employ the doctor's and we do the construction. You name it kind of soup to nuts, right? And the truth is that you can't go after systems problems until your MVP, your minimum viable product is a version of the whole system. And so on day one, I mean forward right out the bat.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “First off, I should caveat and say that Eric Reese is a friend of mine and is fantastic. And I think that the lean startup methodology makes a lot of sense for some companies and almost no sense for other companies. So let's just take a step back and look at when the internet five, ten years ago was super, super booming, all these consumer apps are coming out. Basically, these are technology companies typically for the sake of technology companies, right? They're creating new markets. They're existing purely in the digital sphere. And what you find is that it's incredibly cheap and incredibly easy to kind of push them out. But as Mark Andreessen says, software is eating the world, right? Well, now we're going from that kind of low hanging fruit into a whole bunch of new industries, right? Whether it's the healthcare, energy, real estate. I mean, you see tons of these companies now that are going after these highly regulated, highly difficult kind of markets. As you go into those, oftentimes this is no longer a simple consumer products question.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Go straight from bills that were putting up for legislation to literally having every single citizen in the United States vote on those directly at a website. Like, why do we even need politicians? Now, who knows if that's right or wrong? But again, what you start to see is this notion of technology empowers us to make decisions for our own lives as opposed to allowing others to do so. And as you do that, this notion of a consumer brand becomes far more important and far more powerful.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think that one of the cool things about the internet is that consumers are gaining more and more leverage. And so when you think about the history of why is it, for example, that your employer at least in the United States is paying for your health insurance, it's because they have the leverage, right? And they could do these bulk deals. They could get better rates. But over time, what you see is that more and more companies are getting created today in the consumer sphere in which we're basically disintermediating these things, right? So whether it was I used to buy cars from my local dealer who bought it from the manufacturer and now I can just go online and buy it from the manufacturer directly, whether it's healthcare, all these industries, whether it's kind of home professionals with thumbtack, what you start to see is that the internet is a democratizing force and it allows us to kind of be in charge a little more of the world that we live in. You know, I was recently at the TED conference last week, and even there was this notion of, well, why not?”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Okay, I know I have intuition. I'm a consumer products guy. I'm a consumer at my core. So I've got some intuition as to what should that doctor's office look like? How should it feel? How should it act? And that's where you start to bring in a little more of your kind of experience and your intuition. But again, you're kind of ping-ponging back and forth. So maybe I say, okay, well, what should the business model be? How should we charge our customers? And everything I learned about the healthcare industry is that incentives are totally misaligned. So then again, I started thinking, well, maybe what I should do is just go straight to the consumer and bypass the healthcare industry. So again, you're using this data and this knowledge from this kind of bottoms up approach to inform your almost top-down hypotheses, right? And that kind of ping ponging or that kind of interplay is, I think, what makes some of the best companies out there.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And kind of first principles reasoning. So if you look at forward, we did an analysis of the market, right? So I started with this notion of, well, you know, my brother had pretty serious health issues. I looked at the healthcare system. I said, my God, it seems broken. It seems broken to everyone, right? And then I said, but I want to go solve it. I want to do what I can to help in this world of trying to solve it, right? Which I know is going to take many of us in many years. But what is the part that I can kind of go work on? So we did the kind of Misi approach, right? You start to understand, you read a lot of books, you talk to a lot of people, and you start to map out where is the industry going, what are the trends, what are the current incentive alignment problems, what are the current technological problems, and you put it all together and you come to this notion of it really seems like if you can solve primary care, then you can kind of avoid an enormous amount of downstream cost. So that was really great.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Funny, yeah, he's great. So there's kind of these two worlds, right? There's the first world, which is let's just intuit everything. Let's just have this kind of dream inside of our head and let's pursue it. And then there's this other world, which is almost the kind of I went to business school or I'm a consultant and it's the what I think of as the Misi approach. You might have heard this term M-E-C-E mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive and it's basically you know if you work at McKinsey as a consultant I guarantee you you know what this means but it basically means can I deterministically map out an entire space of problems and understand what should the solution be where are the opportunities etc now if you look at forward forward's actually a little bit of both and that's the way I think it should be right so the same way that some people say oh I'm data driven and I say you know I don't want to be data driven I want to be data informed which means I want to take the data at hand and I want to use it to combine into this notion of intuition that I have”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “First off, Marco's awesome. He and I are good friends, and we've spoken about exactly this subject. You might get similar answers from us.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Fraction of, you know, it's a few percent of the United States. So when you think of things that can scale to billions of users and billions of lives, you might falsely come to the conclusion that maybe you don't want to be working on doctors' offices. But as it turns out, there's a new market getting created where the doctor's office is really the portal, the kind of front door to the new healthcare system. And so you might say, well, this market is going to get very large over time. And I think a lot of people identify that now. So I always try and focus on what is the thing again that”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, so one of the problems of just focusing on the market is that oftentimes you don't know what the market size is. So instead, again, I try not to focus on what is the given market. For all I know, I'm creating an entirely new market, right? The market for phones without keyboards was shockingly small prior to the iPhone, right? So I'm not sure I would necessarily take that lens. The lens I take is how much of a problem is this? You really want to get at the core of how much value can you actually create? So in healthcare, it turns out that it's kind of this funny thing where the healthcare industry is enormous, right? It's 16% of GDP in the United States. I mean, it's just insanely, insanely large, one of the largest markets. But on the other hand, the market for doctors' offices turns out it's not that big. I mean, the largest company you can even think about in the space is probably what? Kaiser? Well, you know, Kaiser has 11.7 million lives.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So we got a warehouse and we built one. Basically, think of it a little like building a movie set, right? It's built out a foam core, two by fours with literally no ceiling or roof so we could watch from the top and kind of start to understand us people come in and out this is how a doctor's office works. And then every day you would just come up with some new hypothesis you want to test, right? Hmm, I wonder if we should put some sensors there. I wonder if we should put on some music, whatever it happens to be. But again, it's all about this rate of learning. It's about how fast can you learn?”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Because if you don't know it, hopefully they do. Hopefully they'll figure it out for you. And then the second thing is aim to learn as fast as possible. So everybody says ship early, ship often. And that's valuable. Sometimes that's the right answer. Sometimes it's not. But actually the key insight there is you want to increase your rate of learning to be as fast as humanly possible because there's something you don't know yet. And once you figure it out, your product will be that much better. Your service will be that much better. So, you know, if you look at forward, we went from having our first idea to being fully in market with a whole vertically integrated doctor's office in just 12 months. But actually, the more interesting part is that 90 days into starting forward, we had a full doctor's office up and running with real doctors, real patients. And the reason we did it is we said, you know what? We don't know what the right answer is. We don't know anything about doctors' offices. So let's build one.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So there's the amount of lessons I have learned is numerous. I actually take the time to write some of them down, which is super helpful. But there's a few that are probably the most important ones. And one of the first is to always pick problems over solutions. And so I always try and start with this axiomatic principle of what is the problem and what is your key insight into the problem. Ignore how you're going to solve it because that part might change three times, four times five times as you pivot through or as you try and learn what is the correct solution. But as long as you have a meaty good problem that you know you believe in and you know you truly can understand, then you're going to probably head along the right path anyway. And then given that structure, then you say, okay, I understand the problem, but I don't know the solution. Have the humility to say, I have no clue whatsoever what is the right way to go about this. So what are some things you do? Well, first off, you'd hire the smartest people you can find period full stop.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. I started in the world of startups almost accidentally, right? I'm just one of these kind of nerd kids who was playing around with computers and then started kind of writing my own software, just all self-taught. And then a whole bunch of other people started asking me to write software for them. And then I ended up kind of stumbling my way into starting my first company when I was 13. And, you know, when you're 13, it starts as kind of a joke and nobody takes it seriously. But somehow that thing kept going until I was about 22 or so. And it kind of had a few different phases of life. But by the time I was 22, I actually sold it after selling it ironically is when I started to realize that there's an entire world of startups out there. And then I was kind of hooked for life, you could say.”

    2018-05-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source