Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you have the stomach and the resilience to stick it out, it gives you the ammunition and ability to gather up a lot of competitive advantage. It’s not easy to build up that kind of competitive advantage in a short order. It’s just a matter of time. If you can survive those years of crossing the desert, then you build a lot of competitive advantage, which is not easy to do in a short order.

Brian Loew: If I were to start today with Inspire competing against us, it may be impossible and it’s not because of the technology.

Sramana Mitra: It’s the network effect of it. It’s the community that you’ve built that’s hard to replicate.

What about survival in that period when you had five years of no revenue? It’s not a comfortable zone for any investor. How did you manage to survive?

Brian Loew: Our early investors were, fortunately, very patient. Our first investors were angels. They were people like you and me although wealthier than I am. They were typically investing amounts of money that weren’t going to prevent their kids from going to college. They weren’t professionals. They weren’t venture capitalists. They were patient.

A lot of them were investing not just because they wanted the financial return, but because they liked the idea. The other thing was that our original plan was to do a bigger round in 2008. It turned out that 2008 was the worst time in history to raise money. That was really painful. We tried to raise money in 2008 or 2009 but it was impossible.

We did raise a bit more from our existing angels and some new angels, but we had to tighten our belt. As I look back, those were hard years. In 2006, I had a baby. My co-founder had a baby two years before. It was tough. We weren’t paying ourselves much money. We both had wives who worked. We just tightened our belts.

Sramana Mitra: Was it just the two of you when you were going through this phase?

Brian Loew: No, we hired more people. In those years, we had about eight employees. Today, we have 30. It’s funny. In hindsight, it looks really hard and there were certainly times that were really hard. In a way, you look at it now and think, “That was crazy. How did we do it?” I think all the employees felt a sense of mission. Putting aside the money part, when all of us looked into the community and we saw what the patients were getting out of it, we felt that we were doing a good thing. We were helping people.

Sramana Mitra: How many were you on the team?

Brian Loew: I think there were about eight in the team.

Sramana Mitra: You were in the Washington DC area?

Brian Loew: That’s right. Then things began to pick up. We started learning how to make money.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that when you started seeing revenues coming?

Brian Loew: Probably 2011. We started getting better at understanding what customers needed. By the way, it wasn’t all us. It wasn’t that we didn’t know what we were doing before them.

Sramana Mitra: The market became more savvy and more comfortable.

Brian Loew: That’s exactly right. I remember this from the early days when I was doing my first startup in my 20s. I know you probably had this experience. You know when you’re selling into a big company something that’s new that they have never done before and you find an internal champion.

Sramana Mitra: Every time actually. The only way you can sell is with a champion internally.

Brian Loew: Exactly. You find that person. They’re often a little bit of renegade inside their company. Pharmaceutical companies are gigantic and generally conservative. They’re not risk-taking companies for the most part, especially certain kinds of risks. In the early days, these people were saying, “Let’s try this.” It evolved to a couple of years to where it became more mainstream where pharma companies are seeing this is a must-have. The fact that it all has happened in 10 years is amazing.

Sramana Mitra: That happened because you and your team stuck with it. I think part of the reason why entrepreneurs don’t manage to bring their ideas to fruition is because they don’t have staying power. Staying power is very hard because if you have to go years and years without revenue, salary, and funding, it’s difficult.

Brian Loew: I know. I can’t remember who said it. There was some entrepreneur who said, “The way you succeed is by not quitting.” I thought, “That’s so simple.”

This segment is part 6 in the series : Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew
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