Bootstrapping A Healthcare IT Startup To 50 Million: Eliza Corporation President Alexandra Drane (Part 2)

Sramana: What path did you take from that upbringing?

Alexandra Drane: Throughout high school and my early college years I would work in my dad’s startups. He invested in a lot of technology companies and startups in the local area. I was a complete slacker in high school, and I went primarily to have fun. I was a good student of social behavior! I felt very lucky to get into Tufts, but I went there with the attitude that life is to be enjoyed, and I was really looking forward to the social aspects of it.

In my first semester I ended up getting mono, so I was stuck in bed. Out of boredom I started studying. I feel deeply in love with economics and ended up becoming a straight-A student. I found a lot of pleasure in a mathematical equation that could zero out, that had a defined answer. On other days I enjoyed debates on philosophical questions.

When I graduated, I thought very hard about what I wanted to do. My first reaction was that I wanted to go to a technology company. I then thought that perhaps I needed to do something new since all I had done was technology, so I looked at management consulting which are companies like Bain and BCG. I ended up choosing a company called CDI, which was a spinout of Bain. I chose it because instead of taking the $200,000 monthly fee they would take equity in a company. I was really excited to be able to work for major corporations while also still having the opportunity to get involved with startups.

The first case I got put on, my third day, was a healthcare case. I called my mom on the way home and told her that I did not want to do healthcare because it was boring. I wanted to do retail or automotive. After two days I was stuck hook, line, and sinker with the healthcare industry. After two years, I left CDI with two partners and a manager. We had found that we would go off and do this amazing work and then come back to the CEO of a healthcare plan or drug company and give them our strategy and they would tell us our thoughts were brilliant, but that they did not have the means to tackle the approach. They always wanted to purchase it from an existing company, not build solutions organically. We finally told ourselves that if we were as smart as we thought we were, then we should just go start those companies.

The first company I ever started was an early version of an incubator called Axon Group. It was 1995 and we built Axon Group around a concept we called value capital. The notion was that we would still work in consulting as a means of controlling our own destiny and not raising capital. By doing consulting, we thought we would keep a good hold on the context of the problems in the space as well as the contacts within that space. The reality is that it is hard to be a consulting and start a company. Ultimately, two of the four went off to do consulting and the other two focused on the startup. That was my formal move away from consulting toward entrepreneurship. I took off on that path in 1996.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping A Healthcare IT Startup To 50 Million: Eliza Corporation President Alexandra Drane
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