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- What's up, guys?
I'm standing here outside of the office
of one of our best portfolio companies, Truepill.
I'm here in Hayward, California.
Let's go check it out.
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So, Sid, tell me about how you got into startups?
You know, how did you get into tech, really early on?
- Yeah, that's, oh, you want to go way back,
okay. - Yeah, definitely.
- You want to go way back, alright.
- I want to hear about you, I want to hear
about your story, you know. - Let's see.
- I was actually a mechanical engineer
in college and-- - Oh wow.
- When I came out, one of the first jobs I had,
interestingly, was at Johnson & Johnson
and now we're back in healthcare, full circle.
And one of the rotations I had
was actually out in the East Bay.
So when I came out here, I met a bunch of people
that were in the tech industry and I'm sitting here working
in healthcare and I was like,
the folks out here are doing stuff that's so different
than what I'm used to and I got hooked on it,
I was like this moves at a faster pace, it's interesting,
but having a mechanical engineering background,
I couldn't get a job out here.
No one would hire you for a software role or a product role
if you didn't have a computer science or a
computer engineering degree. - Totally.
- So I thought, well why don't I
just start something myself?
Why don't I just start my own company and that's when
I started something in the contact space first.
- Yeah, that was Cardmunch.
- [Sid] That's right, that evolved into Cardmunch
and eventually got that started and sold that business
to LinkedIn and spent four years at LinkedIn
and really that's where I built my tech chops
from a product standpoint
and left LinkedIn. - Cardmunch
was so simple, right?
Because it helped you keep track of the people you met
by scanning people's business cards.
- That's all it was, yeah.
We took humans across the world and crowdsourced
being able to type those business cards in
and transcribe them into your phone.
This was before OCR and vision tech was good enough to do it
as it is today and back then
we just relied on hundreds of thousands of humans
to manually type in the cards.
- So Cardmunch and LinkedIn taught you a lot
about how to build software at scale.
- Yeah. - And then when you came back
to start something new,
how did you start thinking about that?
And how did you meet - Yeah, went back to the
- the Co-Founder? - Went back to the
drawing board and said, really,
I just want to start something again
and spent probably like a year, year and a half,
just kind of tinkering around with a number of different ideas
and really wanted to pick something in a space
that I could really kind of step back and say,
I want to spend 10 years on this,
I really want to spend something, working on a problem
that could last for a long time
and eventually got introduced to Umar
and Umar happens to be a pharmacist
and we really got into a room
and start talking about pharmacy stuff.
And coming from a software product background,
I just asked a lot of dumb questions really
to begin to get up to speed on the pharmacy industry
and we started taking a look at kind of,
the current state in the industry.
It was very clear that, okay,
this is something you could spend a long time on.
And if you can make a dent in healthcare
then you can really build a large business
and something that got us excited
and eventually placed the first bet
in Truepill and kind of launched.
- That's amazing, yeah I mean,
10 years is a really long time and that's incredible advice.
It's one of the first things that I always tell people
when they want to start a company.
Number one question almost always is,
is this something you want to spend 10 years
and/or, the rest of your life working on?
Is it a problem that's big enough?
- It's absolutely right and I knew this coming
in spending about a year and a half
just playing out with different ideas,
prototyping things and launching things.
If you get bored in three months, you will have no shot
at staying the course for several years
to build a really good business
and sometimes you just have to have
that rigor to be able to stick at something
for a long time and now I've seen it first hand.
We're only now a little over three years in
and I feel like we're only scratching the surface
and now 10 years seems like a short period of time
to spend on this business and that's what keeps
it exciting and fresh and new.
- So for people who don't know what Truepill is,
what is Truepill, what do you do?
- Yeah, the simplest way to explain Truepill is
is we're building pharmacy and healthcare infrastructure
for the world really and the best way to describe us is,
think about what Stripe did in the payments industry
and think about what Twilio did in the telecom industry.
They took these really complex stacks
and abstract it in a way that anyone
can really plug into it and use it.
And we asked the question of,
what would this look like for the pharmacy world?
Who would use it?
And we started with our first offering
which was a pharmacy API that plugged
into our own fulfillment center
and really the first two, three years
of the business has been scaling that effort.
With now, multiple locations
across the country doing pharmacy fulfillment.
So we think of our business as building the building blocks
for pharmacy infrastructure and wrapping it around an API
that anyone can plug into and use for their offerings.
- So you really couldn't do this,
in 2019 it feels like almost everything is accessible
by API today but that wasn't true when you first started.
- Yeah, in many ways
that's the founding story of the company.
When we talked to our earliest partners
and earliest customers, when we asked them,
how do you plan to get the medications out to patients?
In many ways they were picking up the phone
and calling mom-and-pop pharmacies
in multiple states. - That's a lot of work.
- And kind of piecing it together behind the scenes.
So they offered this amazing new healthcare experience
where you can get healthcare over your phone, online,
but then they would piece together
behind the scenes with individual pharmacies,
in multiple states they were working in
and we looked at that and said,
this is clearly going to be the future of healthcare.
It's going to be how healthcare is delivered.
In order to scale the pharmacy fees,
you do need to consolidate, you do need to think about
economies of scale and this is sort of, the best way
to tie it under one API and one technology umbrella
and be able to dispense medications at scale
across 50 states, which is what we do.
- Yeah and that's an incredible amount of work
to actually get going.
- Oh yeah, I mean, we spent probably, the first two years
just trying to scale up to 50 states.
Umar kind of taking board exams in, I think,
13 or 14 different states to get licenses, just to be able
to apply for the out-of-state dispensing license
and that took a better part of two years
and now that we had our first facility up and running,
well we should have about six or seven
by the end of this year dispensing across all 50 states.
- And so zooming out a little bit,
healthcare is probably one of the biggest line items
in the world, globally-- - Right.
- In terms of taking care of people
and in terms of actual cost to society.
How do you see Truepill interacting with that?
What kind of dent can you put in this universe?
- Yeah, we really think that starting
in the pharmacy piece was a great place
to start but really only the beginning
and when we come full circle,
you'll start to see us now launch a doctor network
and when we think about our doctor network,
we think about this very holistically,
in terms of doing telemedicine visits, asynchronously,
over video telemedicine as well
and extending into opening physical locations.
So you'll see us open physical clinics
and leverage that infrastructure for our customers.
- So that was a new thing too,
in 20--, end of 2017 the FDA came out and said,
okay guys, telemedicine is good to go.
And so at some point did you realize
hey, we really hit this idea at exactly the right time?
- Well I think telemedicine has been evolving
for a long time, ever since the internet came
about, telemedicine has been allowed.
I think we're starting to see where you can,
where you can take advantage
of things like asynchronous telemedicine,
where you don't need a physical consultation
with a patient or a video consultation
and you can prescribe safely for say,
a condition like hair loss.
- That makes sense.
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Telemedicine has incredible potential to change healthcare
and one of the things that's been crazy to me
to understand is that a normal doctors visit
could be as much as 200 bucks
and that's multiplied across all kinds of things
that you could possibly go to a doctor for,
whether it's routine, preventative,
like all kinds of things.
What does that mean for you and how do you think about it?
- Yeah, when you think about the cost of care
and the cost of providing a high quality clinical visit,
you can see a case where telemedicine, in many ways,
can cost one 50th of that, when you think
about the amount of time it takes
to actually provide a quality care
of consultation for the patient.
And I think right now what we're seeing
amongst our customers and partners is,
we're really just scratching the surface
on the different therapeutic areas that we can solve.
When you start thinking about sending you a test
in your home where you can do a self-diagnosed test
and mail it back to a lab or when you think
about bringing a patient into a physical clinic
to see a physician one-on-one in person
and then moving to telemedicine for subsequent visits,
really, what's exciting is there's no shortage of the types
of therapeutic areas that you can solve.
And when you think about the mass epidemics
in this country like diabetes
and cholesterol and hypertension, thyroidism.
These are things that impact 10s,
if not hundreds of millions of Americans today
and some of those do require a sort
of twist on telemedicine, where you do need
to get a blood test in certain cases
or you do need to see a physician in person
and that's the infrastructure that we want to build
to make telemedicine possible
on a broad scale across the board.
- That's awesome and so this is one
of the most powerful examples to me
of software coming along
and actually just making things better, cheaper, faster.
- It all started with
a simple API, right? - Yeah, you know it.
- Yeah. - Thanks Sid, that's awesome.
- Take care.
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