Bootstrapping A Healthcare IT Startup To 50 Million: Eliza Corporation President Alexandra Drane (Part 5)

Sramana: Once you found the speach recognition technology that led to Eliza, what was your next step?

Alexandra Drane: At that time I was 28 years old. I knew I was not yet ready to be a CEO, but I wanted to be involved and knew I had to get a team who could help build this company out. It is key for entrepreneurs to know what you don’t do well and find someone tremendous who does that well.
I met with a lot of folks and ended up recruiting someone who I had a ton of respect for back then and whom I continue to hold in extremely high regard.

Sramana: How did you meet him?

Alexandra Drane: I had worked with Luke back at CDI. He was one of the employees there helping one of the startups by providing services for equity. He is very different from me, and we are incredibly complementary. I convinced him to leave what he was doing and come start Eliza with me. The next step was to formalize that we were indeed going to focus on problems in the healthcare space. We did that but we had to find the tangible problem to solve in this space.

Luke had been stumped by the same problems I had. His background had also been in the healthcare space, and he also encountered the problems that we know what people should do, but how do we interact with them at the right moment to convince them to do what they should be doing? That is a problem of technology, of communication, and of ad agency appeal when you are inventing approaches which the healthcare system is bad at. When Luke looked at the Eliza technology, he immediately lit up. He walked away from a great job to throw his lot in with 100% unproven technology and a 100% unproven approach.

Sramana: There was a R&D lab that created the technology, and then you found a team of people to build the technology into a company. Tell me how you turned that into a company structure?

Alexandra Drane: At that point Eliza had a nascent technology which was really just a built out concept. We were using limited angel funds. It was me, Luke, the founder, and another very smart engineer. We all hunkered down to do our tasks. Luke’s task was to push on the technology to see how it would hold up in the real world environment. Taking a technology to production is a tremendous task frought with opportunities to kill yourself.

My job was to figure out where to use this powerful tool. I went out, often dragging Luke with me, to meet with the folks whom I knew who I felt were movers and shakers in the healthcare space. We would sit down with people that we thought were luminaries and we asked them how they would use it. I had been involved in this space for a long time, so I had ideas as to how I thought it should be used. Over and over again, not one of those people felt it should be used in the way that I thought it should. They all immediately thought it was extraordinary and could help them increase efficiencies, and then they would describe a use case that had not crossed my mind.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping A Healthcare IT Startup To 50 Million: Eliza Corporation President Alexandra Drane
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