Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level did you get to with that company?

Brian Loew: Somewhere between $15 million to $20 million. We sold that in 2000. One of my Board members was the former President of the Washington Post. I was exhausted after that. He said, “Why don’t you go to the Washington Post for a while?” I did. I had this technology strategy role that was an interface between washingtonpost.com and the newspaper. That was a really interesting three years of my life and I made a lot of good friends there. Then I had the idea for Inspire. It was the marriage of two ideas. When I was up at Washington Post, I sometimes helped the internal venture capital group on due diligence. One of the things they were looking at was social networks – Myspace and a lot of the others.

We looked at about 40 social networks in every subject matter you can imagine. It was very saturated in social media. At the same time, my wife was at PhRMA. I went to a number of events with her. She runs science and regulatory affairs for pharma. I had met a lot of the heads of research and development at pharmaceutical companies with gigantic budgets. In that year, the total budget of US pharmaceutical industry was about $40 billion a year. That’s just for research and development. The pain point that they all had was recruiting patients for clinical trials. Despite large budgets and promising drugs, it was very difficult to find patients to participate in trials. Part of the reason for this is because in America, Privacy Law appropriately makes it impossible or difficult to buy lists of patients. You can’t buy lists of cancer patients, which is as it should be.

At the same time, because of that, there’s incredible friction and inefficiency in clinical trial recruitment. It turns out there are other areas of inefficiency and friction that I learned about later. I felt, “What if we could create social networks of patients and caregivers organised by disease category and let these people raise their hand and volunteer in clinical trials?” You would solve the privacy problem. You would let people help themselves. That was the simple idea. I got some friends together and said, “Let’s do it all over again.”

In contrast to the earlier business where I raised $30 million, I said, “Let’s start off small and raise half a million dollars from angel investors.” I also put some of my own money. We were off and running. At this time which was around 2006, there were no good social networks for health. If you went online looking for health information, you had encyclopaedic information from WebMD or the NIH. When it came to community, there wasn’t much. You had message boards on Yahoo!. There were a lot of disease-specific message boards but that was an unruly place.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew
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