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TJ Parker

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2023-06-05
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2023-06-05
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  1. “That's irreversible. We're going to work this one out until you're so frustrated that you feel so confident that it's the right decision that we'll know it's the right decision. I think sometimes people make all the decisions in the media instead of bifurcating these things. I think that's super critical.”

    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

  2. “Think if you're making really critical, irreversible decisions rapidly, that will really fuck it up. Like, I think you'll make a lot of really bad decisions. Honestly, I took as long as humanly possible to make those critical decisions. And honestly, to some extent to the frustration of my exec team throughout the course of the business, but a lot of times like in a very kind of mutually agreeable, productive way. Honestly, like the best articulation of this out of every one of my team was Elliot, who's my co-founder, who is amazing. And I'd say the bigger decisions that we made over the course of the business were a byproduct of going on two hour walks three times a week for six months. Like we were just batting these things back and forth for a very long time, sort of reticent to make the call. And I think that's super important too. It's like a bifurcation of decision making. If you can change your mind, just make those decisions as fast as humanly possible. Honestly, don't even bring them to me. Just let go. And if you're wrong, we'll change your mind and we'll do it the other way. That's totally fine. But if it's 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

  3. “Yeah, never backfired on us in a meaningful way. Certainly, there was a lot of goodness that came from it. So, no, this is the short answer, but certainly could have been burned.”

    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

  4. “Proven otherwise. We built a culture that assumed the best, that people showed up. We made bets on people, and then we assumed that they were going to execute and that they, and we trusted them.”

    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

  5. “Yeah, it's funny you ask that. When we were required by Amazon, we took all of our internal, the equivalent of Amazon LPs, like leadership principles, right? And we tried to mash them up one-to-one with what's the equivalent like Amazon one. And they actually almost all tracked sort of one-to-one, like customer obsession and all these things were dead on. And the one that was the exact opposite was we had this leadership principle at PillPAC, which was my favorite, which was assume the best. all your best relationships in life are about assuming the best in someone, not assuming the worst. And so if you start from that frame, like you'll get rid of 90% of conflict by assuming that people are trying to figure it out and everyone's doing their best. Amazon's equivalent was earned trust, which is literally like the opposite leadership principle. And I didn't actually think a whole lot of it. Like we just tried, we mapped him. Oh, yeah, the same earned trust, assume the best. In hindsight, that is literally the opposite culture, right? It's assumed the worst until you're.”

    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

  6. “It goes back to hiring great people and mostly getting out of the way and giving them the autonomy to make decisions. I think it is also being really explicit about which decisions are things that can be changed and need to be made really quickly and which decisions can't be changed and are really high consequence. And I think if you find the right leaders and you build the right exec team, they'll mostly be able to parse those two things if it's even cuspy on the bigger decisions that will be coming to you and you'll be working through it. But for everything else, like people should have the autonomy to go. Like you should be hiring real doers that know how to execute and then they should feel like they have the autonomy to make the call and go as fast as possible.”

    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

  7. “This game, it's the only thing that matters, right? It's like, how fast can you figure stuff out? You think about the game that Venture funded founders are playing, they're taking money and they've got roughly 18 months to figure something out that's really critical to getting to the next round of financing.”

    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

  8. “No, it's probably a little different than that. I think I thought I didn't really need the help of healthcare investors. I think I thought I needed the help of consumer investors. And so it was augmenting the things I thought I understood. And it was less about whether they'd say yes or no for me. It was when you look at the pill pack business, yes, it's a healthcare company. It's a pharmacy. We interact with payers. We do all the things that healthcare companies need to do. But I at least thought I knew how to do that. I'd been pretty involved in the space for a while. And the things I didn't know how to do were how to build a consumer brand, how to acquire customers, how to build world-class kind of consumer tech. And so it was more about augmentation and the people that I wanted to be pushing me on the board. And it was less about getting to a yes or no.”

    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

  9. “Because it can be bad. But again, I think it is about the difference between not totally grocking industry dynamics and grocking the customer. We took money from exclusively consumer tech investors.”

    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

  10. “Powerful. If you don't understand the customer, you're hose, so you can't be naive there. But I think important to not know all the reasons that the thing you're trying to do might not work.”

    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

  11. “Yeah, I always said that I think Elliot and I were in the perfect place personally when we started Pillpack and it got very lucky in that sense. I think we were absolutely not naive about the customer and about what the customer needed, what the customer wanted. We deeply understood that. But we were incredibly naive about the broader industry dynamics. We had no idea around incumbents and what they cared about and why all the things we wanted to do wouldn't actually work. And, you know, we looked at it and said, well, of course, we're going to make an awesome product. We're going to make this way better for customers. And we're going to put it online and we're going to acquire customers online. This is going to be super straightforward. Then we were just woefully ignorant about all the reasons it wouldn't work from an incumbent and industry standpoint. And I honestly think that's the perfect balance. It's like you got to understand the customer, but if you understand all the reasons it's not going to work, you're never going to start the company. If I had been working in pharmacy for a decade as an adult, there's no way I would have started pill pack because there were very specific reasons it shouldn't have worked. And I think that's where the naivety is really.”

    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

  12. “I was incredibly impatient. It was probably my biggest flaw is being pretty impatient. Once I was on that trajectory, I made the call. Like I didn't dilly-dally around these things a whole lot. The only delaying was really because it's hard, right? But I was very decisive on this stuff. I think it came from the fact that I was just generally impatient as an 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

  13. “Yeah, I was able to focus on the things that I thought I had to be good at, which was things like raising money and setting the vision and everything external. And we did have a big vision and it was a clear vision. As far as understanding who was good and not good, a lot of it was intuition and trying to read people. And then it's plausible that I completely made the statistic up. But at one point, somebody told me that the difference between the worst and the best hiring managers was roughly like if you're a terrible hiring manager, you're right like 40% of the time. And if you're an amazing hiring manager, like world class, you're right like 65 maybe 70% of the time. And my takeaway from that was like, I better be really good at changing my mind if I'm wrong. And that's the only way to get to 90 plus percent is if we hire someone, it's not going to work out, be really quick at making that call and trying again. When I took that to heart, and I definitely behaved that way as we built the team.”

    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

  14. “I think this would actually be way harder for me now. Oh, I started pillback, I was 26 and I had no preconceived notion that I had any idea how to do the tactical jobs better than the folks I was bringing in to do them. There was no way I knew how to acquire customers better. There was no way I knew how to run operations better. There was no way I knew how to be a finance lead better than the people I was bringing in. The only technical training I had was in pharmacy, which had very little relevance to most of the things that a founder's doing. So honestly, there was a beauty in being young and not having experience in this context.”

    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

  15. “Think it's plausible that there are a number of founders that are in the role and might be more comfortable in a different type of role. And a broad perspective, mine is very narrow, but I have come to terms with the fact that I think it's very hard for the classic overachiever that sat in the front row in every class and always delivered papers on time and always got A's in every one of their classes to go from that reality into a startup, which honestly rewards a very different type of behavior and a different type of tactics. And I think there are some folks that got swept up in the sort of perceived glamour of being a founder rather than the reality of that job. And so I do think there is a big founder fit in the gig. And I think being super honest with yourself about who you are and what you really enjoy and what environments make you happy is, I think, super important.”

    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

  16. “A thing that I believe now that I did not believe during the early part of the Pillpack journey, or honestly, probably into the last couple years, is that there are folks that are on the extreme ends of this from a personality standpoint. I think there are folks that truly are much more comfortable in uncertainty than they are when things are certain. And I think there's obviously folks way on the other end of that spectrum. And obviously a lot of folks are more in the middle. I'm super naturally comfortable in an uncertain environment. It's kind of my happy place. And so I think the advice I do have is like being really honest with yourself about where on that spectrum you are as a human because I think if you like certainty and you like predictability and you like that lifestyle, you honestly probably be happier at a big company. And if you like uncertainty, you're going to be miserable to big company. Maybe it might make sense to go do something that's a little riskier.”

    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

  17. “I think for me, it's really about giving them an environment to be kids is probably the biggest thing. I don't know if it's as much about predictability versus non-predictability, but the thing that we're trying to provide for our kids is the ability to go explore, be kids, to be able to have independence, and to grow independence early, which I did have in my childhood. We were like classic 80s, 90s kids that hopped on a bike and took off and came back before dinner. I'm trying to keep that because for me that was a magic of childhood was being able to go build forts in the woods and be gone for the whole day. It wasn't like my schedule is packed and I want to make sure I provide that for my kids. And certainly, hopefully, our environment is stable. For me, that's the thing I think about a lot is how do I retain a childhood that is, for the most part, now gone for a lot of kids.”

    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

  18. “I had this conversation with someone a couple months ago that made the comment that kind of stuck with me that we're always probably looking for the opposite of the environment that we had as a kid to some degree. For me, my dad grew up with almost nothing and worked incredibly hard to become a pharmacist, to give us a childhood that was way better than his. But it was like a very kind of leave it to be her childhood, right? Very predictable, very stable, just very classic. And I think I was always looking for a little more excitement, a little more risk in my life. And so I think startups were a great way for me to harness that, but led to me being very uncomfortable and very formulaic, stable environments.”

    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

  19. “Yeah, I think it's really important to understand the customer problem. I think it's less important in understanding all of the nuance of the industry and dynamics and other things that are going on. But I do think if you don't deeply understand the customer problem, it's likely you'll build the wrong solutions. That's where my expertise was unique. I don't think it was that I was a whiz kid on how pharmacy worked. I think it was that I spent enough time inside the pharmacy. I'd spent enough time in customers' homes that I did deeply understand that problem. And I looked at all the solutions that were out there and I felt like we could offer something that was a lot 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

  20. “But I think that it was for me, it just wasn't an aha moment. It was like, how do we combine my expertise in pharmacy with my interest in design, with my interest in tech? It was like, how do we put all these things together? And it was a very kind of iterative, natural process in hindsight, right? Obviously, that wasn't intentional going into it. But it really was the combination of all these things I was doing and I was interested in that ultimately became PillPAC. When you hear your...”

    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

  21. “Yeah, I'm a little bit more of a non traditional founder, right? I didn't go to an elite school. I didn't have the sort of normal connections that a number of founders do. At least that was my perception. That's probably not 100% correct. But it was a wacky background, right? I'm a pharmacist. I'm not like a normal entrepreneur in that context. And in hindsight, I think it was my perception and the actual reality. But that was the hurdle for me. I think once I made that jump from there, it was very natural. It was more like a snowball rolling down a hill. I think it's a lot like if you've ever been skydiving, like jumping out of the plane is really scary, but like once you're in the air, it's actually pretty chill. And it was like that for sure for me. Yeah, I picture for the first time at hacking medicine, which is an event that we started, so it's wacky, but we won the event, which is very exciting. It gave me the confidence, for better or worse. This was like the fall of 2012. I had been a pharmacist for about six months, so like fresh out of school. I think within a month or two, we were into TechSars, quit my job. It's kind of like January of 2013.”

    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

  22. “Core product, but then offer it to consumers and do it in a way that was really designed forward and aesthetic. I think for me, the big challenge is getting the confidence to think I could actually go do that. Could I actually raise venture capital? Could I find a real co-founder? Like getting the inertia to believe that I could do that. Why did you not have the confidence? And what gave”

    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

  23. “Doing the classic going down weird rabbit holes in the internet as a college student and buying and selling sneakers got really obsessed with design thinking about furniture and architecture and was just very interested in kind of aesthetic and then very separately got really interested in startups, snuck into MIT and they were super gracious. I didn't go to school there, but helped the MIT 100K, which was like their business plan competition at the time. When I showed up for the sort of first meeting with all the students and they're like, you don't go to school here. And I was like, nope. And they're like, we're not paying you. So if you want to do some free work, I guess that's fine. And then I actually started this thing called Hacking Medicine at MIT with Elliot, my co-founder, which was getting just doctors and designers and physicians all together to work on stuff in healthcare. And through that period, 2005 to 2010, my dad started this totally new pharmacy that was sorting and packaging meds actually very similar to pill pack, but they were selling into nursing homes and assisted living facilities. It wasn't a consumer business. And so I always had this idea, could you take this kind of”

    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

  24. “I am so excited for this. As I said, I feel like I know so much of the pill pack journey from the wonderful Fred Destin. So thank you so much for joining me to stay first. I am thrilled to be here. This is the first public thing I've done in five years. And obviously, I owe a ton to Fred as well. He's been on both of us when we were super young. So thrilled to be here. I am so grateful that this is the first thing you've done in five years. But I want to go to Pill Pack and that kind of founding aha moment. Obviously, we see the incredible journeys today and we see the accident. But in terms of that founding moment, what was that aha founding moment for you? Take me there. Yeah, so I think if you go way back, like I grew up in New Hampshire in a family that owned and operated, any of your classic mom and pop pharmacy. So I grew up in and around pharmacy. And I'd worked a ton of different jobs at my dad's pharmacies, worked behind the counter, helped check people out. Actually, was delivering meds to people in their homes and saw that experience. I just knew there was a lot of opportunities to make it better. It was super frustrating. It was really complicated. So I was in pharmacy school in Boston.”

    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

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    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

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    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

  27. “If I had been working in pharmacy for a decade as an adult, there's no way I would have started pill pack. And so we were 48 hours from going from, I don't know what it was, 100 million in revenue to zero, probably the worst board meeting we ever had. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stabbings. And I wanted to do this episode in particular for a long time. I'd had many great tales from David Frankel and Fred Destin about the Pill Pack journey. And this interview is the first interview that TJ has done in years and comes on the back of his announcement last week that he'll be joining Matrix Partners as their newest partner. Yes, I'm thrilled to welcome TJ Parker to the hot seat. TJ is the co-founder and former CEO of Pill Pack. TJ raised over $100 million in financing, grew the company to more than a thousand employees, and successfully sold the business to Amazon for a billion dollars in 2018. As mentioned, as of last week, he joined the world of Venture, the Dark Side as a partner with Matrix Partners. But before we dive into the show state, this episode is brought to you by T-”

    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