Bootstrapping A Healthcare IT Startup To 50 Million: Eliza Corporation President Alexandra Drane (Part 3)

Sramana: When you left Axon Group, what company did you create and what was the thesis behind that company?

Alexandra Drane: We founded Tesseract with the idea that we would use Web-enabled functionality to help with injury tracking. During our consulting work we had noticed that many times when folks come in to do technology they are not sensitive enough to the real life workflow. Many times they would automate to oblivion and would create something that would not organically mesh with how they would do their day to day.
We saw that with our first attempts to automate a dialysis clinic. When we went in there we were told to listen to the doctors interpretation of what they would want, but anyone who has worked in a dialysis clinic can tell you that the doctors are not the ones doing the work.

If you really want to create an automation mechanism that would create a process that would actually improve quality you had to work with the people who did the day-to-day work. Ultimately what we created that was successful was designed by the nurses and techs on the floor. Our hypothesis around injury tracking was that if you could design a system that went with coaches and physical therapist you could mimic the traditional methods and tools they used, like pen and paper, and then put on algorithms to mine the data that people were willing to enter in order to find patterns that would indicate which people had an increased likelihood of undergoing a certain type of injury.

We rolled out a highly sophisticated system that tracked the progress of an athlete over time which allowed us to track metrics. That allowed us to intervene early if they were at risk. Our first customer for that was the US Ski Team out of Park City, Utah. It was an amazing experience.

Sramana: How did you connect with the U.S. Ski Team?

Alexandra Drane: I was raised with the mentality that the world is an interesting place and that everywhere around you there is an interesting story. I was taught to always say thank you to the hostess at a restaurant and to take time to talk to people. In the healthcare space I think there are a lot of people who are mission driven. They want to make a difference they just don’t do a really good job of connecting those dots sometimes. In our space it is all about finding the experts, and being an extrovert once I find one person I ask for the names of 3 to 5 other people. When I go to a conference I don’t just take notes, I jump up as fast as I can and get in front of the speaker.

At any point, when we had a new product we would think about all the people that we knew. We would typically already know someone directly who needed the product or we would know of people who we felt would know the right people. I think that it is important for entrepreneurs than to have a rich ecosystem of people who are smarter than you.

Sramana: When you do that you listen to a lot of different inputs. How do you identify which problem to solve?

Alexandra Drane: That is a fundamental problem for an entrepreneur in general. For me, it is intensely personal. I think everybody is born with the potential to be an entrepreneur. If folks are nurtured enough to pursue what they love, they can do it. In my experience you should not start a company until you cannot not start that company! When you are ready to start a company you will wake up in the middle of the night to scratch out a business plan. With every single one of my startups I am focused on helping the human condition and I focus on solving the fundamental problems in that space. That is what I have done for the past 18 years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping A Healthcare IT Startup To 50 Million: Eliza Corporation President Alexandra Drane
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