YouSaid · the spoken record

TJ Parker

lines on the record: 77
first: 2023-06-05
most recent: 2023-06-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Hopefully, get the opportunity to keep being involved in building things that make people's lives better. I think it was super rewarding to build PillPack. I'm still young. I got a lot more in me. So hopefully still building and helping build things that make people's lives better.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd really like for 20 somethings that have never built a business to stop pontificating on how to build a business. Just kidding.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to give it to the first person that ever bet on you, which for us is Katie Ray and Zenshu. And Katie was the one that was running Tech Stars when we got into the Tech Stars. She bet on us before anybody else. And so it's hard for me to not give that kudos to Katie.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to think that people could float between different types of companies and jobs pretty seamlessly and it would be fine. I'm part of some of the earlier conversations, I think, that like you should really optimize for what your personality is best at. The likelihood that you're both really successful and really happy in a huge company and then also overly successful and really happy in a startup is unlikely. And so I think I've changed my tune on that one.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be a normal human, create normal relationships with your investors and your board members, text them, call them when things are good and bad, get breakfast, make David Tish buy you sushi, like do all the things that you do in great relationships in the rest of your life with your investors and your board members and it'll probably be fine.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that customers are ultimately going to shop healthcare like they shop everything else, and that until that happens, like healthcare is going to remain as fucked up as it is right now.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the negativity is probably a little overstated. When we sell the company to Amazon, my goal was to build and launch pharmacyand.com and make all those very non-data-driven nuanced decisions, like intuitive decisions to get that thing off the ground and then hand it off to an Amazonian and then knows how to turn the crank and really build like a scaled business in a way that I honestly just don't. I don't think Amazon is any worse than any other big company, but it is a big company and it comes with all the trappings of a big company. And I think for me, given the very beginning of our conversation where it was like, do you like stability and are you comfortable with authority and do you like predictableness or not? I am so far on this extreme that honestly like I don't think I would be super successful at any big company. I'm a startup guy. And so no, like functionally thrilled they'll be built and Amazon is a big company.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expensive taste, but I'm not going to go through a laundry list of things I bought. Probably the most technically the most lavish is we bought this, we bought like a 12 acre farm in the middle of Park City, which we're building. My wife is building like an amazing farm here. We're going to have a bunch of animals and a bunch of fresh produce in the backyard. It's a practical but quite lavish purchase and one that I'm excited to build.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I really don't. That might be true. I'm not saying that's not possible, but when we set out to start pullback, we just wanted to make pharmacy better. That was the ambition. And when we sold a company to Amazon, like, I deeply wanted to build a shoppable pharmacy experience. And we did that. The thing we built and the work we did at Amazon, it's the only big tech company that's actually providing healthcare and doing real things in healthcare. And so that's a legacy that I'm super proud of and really happy about. And economically, like, I don't ever look back and wish I had kept going and could have been so much bigger and so much better just super happy with the outcome.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, don't even remember. I don't remember crazily. I certainly remember where it was when we announced the deal, but I don't know where I was when the money hit the account.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, the moment that was more endearing was like, was it telling the team, which is the same exact time, right? No, that isn't the same time. That's later. Okay. So we told the team that was better. My dad was there. My mom was there. Like, all of the companies that traded in pharmacy and the public markets dropped by 15% in three minutes. So it was that moment was honestly for me was like was better than when the money hit my account. It was just like such a moment. When the money hit my account, it was just a lot of refreshing. Like, is anytime lots of money hits your account?”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're definitely not loaded yet. There's plenty of deals that blow up in closing, not typically for diligence, but more for government oversight reasons. But then we close in September. Then, yes, like a lot of money hits your bank account.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had three potential buyers each structure was different whether they bought the whole thing or most of the thing or whether it was all up front or there was some earnout and there were varying degrees of those things but I would say by and large every deal is going to have some of the money up front and some of earn out and so i think we announced in june no money then because like you haven't closed yet there's this whole like regulatory process and everything that takes some time so i would say like for entrepreneurs that moment from announcement to close it's a relatively stressful uh period of time”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a dance. By the end, yeah, I sat on the phone and said, I want a billion. That's definitely what happened. But getting to the first deal was a dance and it was about everything different companies valued, where the investors positions, what's an economic outcome that's good for everybody. And if we can't get there, we're just not going to do a deal. It's not like we had to sell the company. We could have raised another round and kept going. And so that was more of a dance. By the time it got to doing the deal with Amazon, like ultimately it was a phone call that was like, if you hit a billion, we're done. And they hit a billion and we were done.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then at that point, I knew we were going to sell the company to Amazon, and ultimately we did, and it was a great outcome.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be some unknown amount of time. And now instead of having six months of money in the bank, I've got two months maybe because we're selling the company in three days. I had two months of money is great. You perfectly timed it. I had to tell the board, obviously. I was like, I get a phone call on Thursday and I tell the board on a Friday morning. I pick back up the fundraise. Like I'm flying to San Francisco Monday morning. I'm going to New York on Wednesday. And then maybe I'll go to see if I can get a meeting in Seattle with some other potential acquirer by the end of the week. And that's what I did. So I got on a plane and I went back and met with all the potential funders not acquirers and told them what happened. I thankfully like we shared all our numbers in December, January, and we'd beat all those numbers in now, like April or whatever this was. And that's better than if we had missed them for sure. And it was kind of like, we're up for anything. We'll figure something out here, but we don't have a ton of time. So let's just be creative. Then I had the meeting with the company in Seattle, and it was definitely the best pitch in my life. And at that point, I knew we were still on the company to Amazon. Like all of our vision around what to do with pharmacy and how to make it shoppable and all those things, we were just super alarmed.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That same initial kind of retailer that had flied, they wanted to buy the company, got to terms that we were comfortable with and we spent some time with other acquirers, but it was clear that they were the lead horse and it was probably the right fit and the best option. And so this is early 2018. And we had, I don't know, six months of runway in the bank or something. And so normally that's when I would have raised around, right? Like Dre's 18 months, you'd then probably raise when you've got six months of runway left, something like that. And so we had started a fundraising process in January of 18. And then within a few weeks of that going, we got to terms with a potential acquirer and we assumed we were going to sell the company to that acquirer. And we shut down the fundraising process. We sort of full steam ahead on getting the deal done. Honestly, we were days, like not weeks from being done, like announcing this thing is done, like definitive agreement done. And it hits a snitch a snag and it's going to get delayed. The whole board thanks for selling the company in three days. I think we're selling the company in three days. And now it's not going to be three days.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shoppable e commerce experience and a bunch of stuff falls out of it that ultimately reshapes the dynamics. And so the combination of those two things, like the best place to do that is at a large retailer that already exists. And so it was pretty straightforward. And we made the decision assuming that the terms came to a place that made sense that we would probably sell the company and like the back half of 2017.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, usually when they call and say, hey, could we just buy the company? It's pretty clear it moved from a commercial thing to an acquisitive thing. I wasn't reading the tea leaves at the same time. But it was pretty explicit at that point. And I think we looked at where we were. And a couple things had happened. One, like, we were now like a version of scale, right? Like a couple hundred million in run rate or something like that. And we had very good sense of what our economics were and what it was going to take to build what we really wanted to build. And from that standpoint, like it was going to be pretty capitally intensive to scale this thing to the extent that we wanted to, right? Like it was doable. Like we could have definitely built an independent company, but it was going to be capitally intensive. And then probably more importantly, like when we started pullback, like it was a very simple vision, which is just made this as easy as possible for consumers. And I think as we started pulling on that string over the years, like we had all these incumbent issues and everything else, we were more ambitious, right? Like we wanted to fix the supply chain. We wanted to fix a bunch of other stuff in the industry. And we had gotten convinced that the best way to do that was to make pharmacy.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you zoom back to that moment, I think it was like mid 2017, early 2017 probably, we had just finished overhauling like all the software that powered the pharmacy. So when we started the company, we just bought everything off the shelf, right? And over time, we were ripping components out and ripping components out. But by early 2017, we had to rebuild and ripped out.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a personality that when things get really intense, like I'd get calm, the opposite doesn't tend to happen. So it was incredibly stressful, but I also felt like I was in my element. There was like an enjoyment. It's a battle and we're going to figure it out and we're like, we're playing a chess match here and certainly was stressed. It certainly was not sleeping well. But at the same time, there was an enjoyment to it. And obviously when we pulled it off, it solidified the business in a way that we couldn't have done it any other way. And similarly, this is one of those decisions that like, I think if you were a little too anxious and you want to make the decision, like you would have wanted to get ahead of this one, like you would have wanted to like, we should go do some BD deal with them. Like, let's figure this out. And I was like, nope, none of that felt right. It's not going to work. Let's just play this out and see how it plays out. And I don't think there was any other path to pulling this off than the one we took. But you could have also never like architected this path. It was just building something great for customers and when it mattered, those customers came and defended the access that they had.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by Friday night, that was the end for both. Elliot had found a new GPO, done all the tech work and administrative work to flip into it. And I had signed a new contract with Express Groups. And we had not lost a single contract, and we had solidified ourselves publicly as a company that was going to exist in the space in perpetuity. So it was as live or die as you're ever going to see. And yeah, that was what sort of make it moment for the business.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heard this story ever, but Elliot and I were sitting in a conference room with Colin. I'm sitting on my laptop. We're like the war room, right? We've got all the site design on the walls. This is just like a classic war room. I get an email from like the equivalent of our GPO for all of the other PBMs. Like you have a like a GPO-y type thing that sits between you. And they're like, hey, we saw this express scripts. This seems bad. Like actually, we're going to kick you out too. And so we were 48 hours from going from, I don't know what it was, 100 million in revenue to zero. Like zero. We have to now both I have to go figure out how to fix the express scripts thing and we got to go figure out how to like fix all of the other contracts like at the exact same time and so i'm sitting there i get the email like i don't say anything i just turn the computer around to elliot who looks at it we say nothing for probably three minutes and calling like hey guys like what's going on the two of us walk out and i'm like elliot you got to figure out this gpo thing i don't know how we're gonna deal with that but you got to figure it out and i was like i'll figure out express scripts and we'll figure it out”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these weren't like, oh, it'd be so sad to lose Pill Pack. I love the packaging. It was like, if we lose pill pack, like I'm not to put my mom into a home and we don't really know actually what we're going to do. And it was 1,500 of these, right? And so we built a whole website, fixpharmacy.com, had all the customer testimonials on it, had the explainer video, the customer video. And then we had all this wonky stuff for regulators if they wanted to drill into what was going on. And then we just did a massive PR blitz. So we launched the site. I think we had 40 articles in two hours. And we leaned super heavy on this actually is going to be really bad for these customers. This isn't like a David and Goliath, like hopefully one of the businesses wins and one loses. This is going to be super bad for the customers that are using this service. And then we ran a regulatory process and tried to do what we could do. And I think within 24 hours Express was at the table. And then it gets even crazier. So we're now like, let's five days later. We've got two days to get this contract fixed. Now it is a business negotiation. We're trying to find a path for it with express scripts. I don't think any”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early 2016 Express groups sent us a termination notice. Honestly, it looks the same as all the other termination notices we had received, and we had managed quietly and figured out. And we reached out to them the same way we did with the others and tried to get a meeting and try to help figure it out. We had two weeks, right? So termination notice states, like in two weeks, you can no longer serve ExpressScript's customers. Like you can't process transactions. For context, they are the largest PBM. So this was like 40% of our revenue. And as far as we knew in two weeks, like that revenue goes to zero. We spent a week just trying to get in touch with somebody and they were just radio silent would not even engage with us. And so we made the pretty aggressive decision to start a public war. And so Colin Rainey, who had started like three days before, designed a full explainer video that I taught today about what a PBM is, what they do, why this matters. And that we filmed a customer testimonial of one of our customers. And I think within two days had 1,400 or 1,500 like customer testimonials.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like literally impossible. Yeah. It's not just payment processing. They're the equivalent of, you can think about a PBM or honestly a payer in general as the demand aggregator in healthcare. They own that demand. They own the employer relationships. They have the Medicare relationships. As a startup, you could not have built what they had built unless you're building an entirely different company. You can't do it when we're building the equivalent of a retailer, like literally impossible.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got very lucky. We got this guy, Jim Messina, who was Obama's deputy chief of staff, joined our board, and he joined our board explicitly to help us navigate regulatory and incumbent issues like this. And he's very good at this. Through 2015, we got termination notices from all of the major PBMs, very obviously. And I would say every one of them But Express scripts we worked through in a very kind of private professional way with them. And NetNet, we maintained access. We maintained coverage, mostly because we were already serving their customers and their customers like the product and it would have been very painful for them to take it away was the sort of base of that.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I was horribly confident that this would be a non issue. I've run pharmacies before you. Just how you fill out the paperwork. You get a network with the insurance companies. Like, it's fine. And that's actually what we did. Like, we started a pharmacy and we got to network with all the insurance companies. And it was totally fine. So like 2013, 14, first half of 2015, like we were in network as a small little independent pharmacy like any other independent pharmacy and they didn't care, right? Like, why would they care? We're doing like very small amounts of volume. They didn't even know who we were, frankly. We filled out like very administrative paperwork to get a network. And then we got our Facebook ads turned on and the company started scaling and started growing really quickly. And of course, they see every transaction that you process because they are the transaction processor. And then things change quickly, right? Like we get to the middle of 2015. We went from $10 million run rate to $70 million run rate in six months, nine months and like that. Then they started really caring, right? And so now like everyone knows who pillpack is.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you are fucked. This is why I say you would have never started this company if you knew how the industry dynamics works. It's why I know a healthcare investor would have invested in this company. This is idiotic. There's no way.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the place we were woefully naive at Pill Pac when we founded the company was this, right? We didn't really understand why there were more e-commerce pharmacies. There's all these big winners in pharmacy. There's basically, there was no e-commerce player before Pillpack. Like they didn't exist, right? CVS and Walgreens, there's PBM-owned mail order pharmacies. There's no e-commerce business. That's weird. We should just build this. It'll be great. We're going to build a great customer experience and it's going to be awesome. And the thing is called PBMs, which stand for pharmacy benefit managers. And they are companies like Express Groups, CVS Care Mark, OptimRX, and they're the equivalent of insurance companies, but only for your prescription drugs. Historically, they were in two different businesses. One was managing your benefits. So how much is your copay? Which pharmacies can you use? How much is your out-of-pocket? Which medications are covered? Like all the things an insurance company does. And then the other half of their business was owning and operating mail order pharmacies. So they did home delivery for consumers.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that was market-ish. This was not 2018, 2019, but it was fine. Like, I've never once looked back and be like, oh my God, I got so deluded. Like, I could have so much more money right now. That's just silly. It worked out great. We raised around and we moved on and then we raised around a couple hundred pre nine months later. And so that one was probably way too frothy. And the one before was low maybe. But like at the aggregate, it was fine.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we raised that $9 million round in September adds on the probably like October or something like that. And I'd say within three weeks, it was a whole different situation. We turned the account on. Customers were signing up at a CAC that we were happy with. And we just started turning the knob and the business started growing. It was that straightforward. And from the back half of 14 through the middle 15, it was just scaling and we raised a $50 million round six months later or something.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accomplice, which is a fund in Boston and led the Series A from there. Fred left Accomplice and went to Excel, and he knew the company super well. Obviously, he liked the business, and he just knew that this was going to work. I mean, he took a flyer and he made a bet on Pillpak in September of 2014 before we had any real customer acquisition working. Like we were hacking our way to get some customers and the product was working. He then led the round in the kind of back half of 2014. We also let in the folks from slow ventures into that round to our early Facebook folks for this reason. We got VIPs probably September, October of 2014. So a bit faster than normal, but it still took six or eight months or something like that.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they told us at the time, like, actually, you can't advertise pharmacies on Facebook. Sorry, like, you can't do that. It's a picture of this, right? Like we're a new e-commerce pharmacy. Like, we're going to build an amazing digital experience and you lose the single digital channel that every company is building their business on the back of at that point. And we had us all this back and forth. And finally, we got them to agree that if we got this thing called VIPs, which was like this accreditation for online pharmacies, that then we could advertise on Facebook, which is great news. It's now, I don't know, March of 2014 or something. And we go, we contact VIPs. We're like, hey, we need to get this accreditation and accuse who we are. And it's like, cool, yeah, here's the process. And they sent us this long, like overview of all the things we had to do to get the accreditation. And on average, it takes about 12 months to get this accreditation. We're like, oh God, like we don't have 12 months to figure this out from a financing standpoint, we got incredibly lucky because, and this is not usually a lucky turn of events, but Fred at the time had been.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I talked a little bit about that sort of first bet, right? Where we started the company, we raised about $4 million between two quick rounds right out of the gate. And the bet people were making is that we can acquire customers. Everyone assumed we'll start a pharmacy. They assume we'll get a network with payers. Like all that stuff was a given. So if you jump forward, we started the company in 2013. We raised that around the middle of 2013. And we launched the product in early 2014. And for folks that were around at that time, the way you acquired customers was buying Facebook ads, like point blank, but that's how every DTC company was scaling. And so we assume like we're going to do the same thing. We're going to buy Facebook ads and hopefully the economics work and hopefully we can acquire customers in this category. And we launched, we got our ads turned on, and they were working, right? Like we were requiring customers at a number that was lower than we promised and we're like, oh my God, it's working. This is great. And out of nowhere, our account got shut off. We got suspended from Facebook ads. And we're like, this is not good. And they're wonderful customer service was very helpful. As you can imagine.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should go work at a big company then, that's fine. That's not the game we're playing. Startups are about pulling something off that's incredibly difficult and everyone doing incredibly well if you pull it off. And that's not cash. So it's just a different game.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all those things, and it is to care about winning or losing. And so it is like the biggest lever a startup has culturally.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't appreciate this nearly as much as I probably should have at the time. But incentivizing your team as much as possible on equity ends up being like the biggest lever you have from a cultural standpoint. But if you take kind of Pillpack pre-acquisition versus Pillpack as part of a big organization, Pillpack pre-acquisition, like I don't think I ever once had a conversation about leveling someone or promoting someone in a meaningful way that was going to dramatically change their comp. Like we bet on people, we gave them a big equity package the day they started and we expected them to deliver on that equity package. Everyone either won as a team or we lost as a team. There was no point in trying to go carve out some way for you as an individual on that team to win in a way that mattered. And so everything falls out of that. We're going to win or we're going to lose. We're all aligned like from an economic standpoint. You get to be a big enough company even if it's technically equity and it's stock. It is rational to care far more about like your own career pathing and the next promotion.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you just don't have your best people on every product, right? If you've got your head of product and your head of engine, your head of design, working on every product, they're going to be better, just like de facto going to be better products.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm far on this extreme, but I think stick with functional until it's so obvious that it can't possibly work that maybe there's an excuse to go to a GM focused org. And certainly if you've got like a manageable number of product lines, I wouldn't even have the conversation. It's just not worth a debate. It is going to make your business worse. And it might not do it right away, but it is definitely going to do it on the long term. Yeah, if you think about all the extra process that that creates, right? So if you have a GM focused org, like you now have to do all this work to make sure that all of your NGOs are leveled at the same level because ones in this team and one's in that team and then don't talk at all and they have no idea what the other team's doing. And so if they transfer from this team to that team, you have to make sure that they're both as competent.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Processness, I think it's all a byproduct of that single decision. You could not have built a company like Amazon or another large company without doing that, but it has all sorts of negative repercussions. And I think if you're a startup, like you're so far on the other side of that extreme that I think it's more of an unnecessarily intellectual exercise to think about going to GM than it is actually going to do any good for you. And you can build huge companies that are functional. Apple is like a functional org.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a function log is roughly what I described, right? So, if you look at the CEO and their exec team, each leader on that team is going to have a function. You have a head of engineering, you have a head of design, you have a head of product, you have a head of operations, a head of finance. It's very functional. It's like the most simplistic, straightforward, or design. It's where most companies are going to start. A GM focused org is where most big companies end up, right? So a GM-focused org is where you've got single-threaded leaders that in theory own a P&L, and under that leader, they have a head of finance, ahead of ops, ahead of product, ahead of tech. And so you end up having like hundreds of these GMs that manage a single P&L and have pockets of each of these functions inside of their business. Maybe somewhat controversially. I think the second you go to a GM focused org and not a startup anymore. Like you are a big company. Almost all of the downsides of a big company that people bemoan the amount of HR, the amount of overhead and decision making, like all the over.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“COOCFO legal HR on all those functions. Elliot, who is product in tech, Jeff, who was BD and Growth, and Colin, who was marketing and design. There was five of us in that meeting. And if you look at who the five were, like you're going to spend 85 to 90% of your time talking about product and growth. The combination of HR legal ops, like all the tertiary functions get 10 to 20% of the time in the meeting, it just made us focus on the things that are ultimately going to drive a startup success. But a startup is about product and growth. That is the only thing that matters. And who on that team shows up, I think, determines what you're focused on as an entire organization.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's less about being selfish in the sense of who you're recruiting. It's more be selfish who shows up in that weekly meeting that you spend three hours going through the business because a good rule of thumb is if you bring your head of HR and your head of legal and your head of finance and your head of ops and if you bring every one of the kind of leaders on the team into that room, you should take the three hours you have and divide it by the number of humans in that room and assume each one of them gets that amount of time to talk. And so do you really want to spend of your meetings talking about promotions and leveling and HR stuff being really thoughtful about who's in that room will determine what are you spending your time in that sort of most critical moment debating? So for us, and this honestly wasn't intentional, it was just, it was a byproduct of who was on the team. By the time we sold the company, we've got a thousand people. We're doing a few hundred million in top line. The entirety of that meeting was me, Avon, who was”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was a weird thing to begin with. And so I think that was the bet we were making. To come back to your question, at that moment in time, it would have been weird for us to go higher like a really killer CFO and like a really amazing head of ops. That would be awesome to build that exec team. It was like, we can ignore that stuff, actually. Let's go find the best folks to help us figure out customer acquisition. And I think you have this journey in any startup, right? So like you get customer acquisition working and then all of a sudden ops are imploding and now you got to go find a really killer operator. And I think to some extent have to be in reactive mode and less about we're going to go find like an amazing exec and they're going to build all this process and this function and be comfortable with this is the only thing I care about for right now. We'll figure that stuff out later.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always think about each round for a classic venture back company as trying to be superpress about the thing you're trying to prove on that round of financing, right? But what is the bet your investors are making? And do you have the right team to achieve that single bet, right? Like you kind of have to put blinders on and be really thoughtful about what that is. So for us, we raised the first round of financing. It was taken on face value that like I knew how to open a pharmacy. I knew roughly what the economics were because we were in a similar business before. I knew how to build the product ish because we had Elliot on the team and he had built products before. The flyer everyone was taking is, can you acquire consumers online for this company? And so the only thing that mattered post that first round of financing was can we actually acquire customers online for a pharmacy, which if you jump back to 2013, like starting a pharmacy is not what starting a pharmacy is today, right? There's Rowe and Hims and Pillpack and Capsule and True Pill. There's all this great activity in pharmacy. In 2013, there were not pharmacy startups.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tactically, we started the business, we had a head of ops that I had known for a long time, but was young, hungry, knew the business super well, and was actually the first person I hired. And he scaled that thing to four or five hundred people, like zero humans to 500 people or something.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the most difficult things as a founder is finding the balance between doing things that don't scale and having less experienced folks just cranking away and figuring things out versus when it's time to bring in some adults and when it's time to bring in kind of real operators. And I think we messed up that balance in bringing in a head of finance, bringing in a head of ops at the right time. And it was incredibly painful. We're at a deeply operational business and we probably waited nine months to a year longer than we should have to bring in a real operator.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're probably the more useful answer to your question is we made this certainly at the time a weird decision that we were only going to focus on the end customer like we in healthcare you've got payers you've got providers you've got other constituents you've got the end customer and honestly it's the reason that most of healthcare is as fucked up as it is that almost no one is actually building for the customer that is using the service and so we effectively put on blinders to everybody else but so everything we're doing is to make this easier for the customer and if we got to do weird stuff to make that possible That's totally fine. We'll do the weird stuff. And if like a provider or payer is upset about the way we're doing something, but it's better for the customer. Sorry, like we're building the thing for the customer. We're not actually building it for you. And that ended up being both incredibly critical and it enabled us to build an amazing service. We never strayed from was that the only thing we care about as a business is building for that end customer.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a number of run ins with incumbents around our access to their networks over the course of the business. And I think we knew this was going to be a problem back in, probably like middle of 2014 or something like that. And Ellie and I would just wrestle with non-stop because there are way to get in front of this. Is there a way to like get meetings and try to work through this productively before it blows up in our face? We batted around nonstop. And I think if you let your anxiety get the best of you, you would have made the call and just done something because you felt like you had to do something about it. But in reality, we just sat on it. We let it ride. But it ended up becoming like the make or break moment in the company. And I think it was the only way that we could have possibly hold off what we did pull off.”
2023-06-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source