A Case Study in Equity Crowdfunding: Cary Breese, CEO of NowRx (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2010, you gained some significant domain knowledge in the insurance domain. What happens next?

Cary Breese: I got interested in the broader startup industry. Although I had some deep experience in insurance, I was always an engineer by background. I was interested in technologies of various industries.

My focus has always been on looking at ways to streamline and automate processes and make them efficient and less labor-intensive. I looked around for various opportunities after I sold the insurance business. I happened to come across a company that was just starting.

An inventor had some technological ideas and a prototype for a better way to streamline how you would launch applications online, particularly inside Amazon Web Services. They were just starting around that time. This was around 2010 and 2011. AWS was starting to build these cloud environments.

It was pretty time-consuming and labor-intensive for developers to launch applications in these new cloud environments, particularly in multiple servers in various time zones. Those cloud environments in those days were prone to outages.

If you had a database on that cloud environment and you were experiencing some outages, the applications wouldn’t work. It was difficult to get it running and get it back up to work. This inventor that we came across had a unique way of looking at database technology, which has historically only been a single server mode.

He had the technology to make a database that could live in multiple servers across multiple cloud environments. It would be seamless to the programmer launching the app. We worked with that entrepreneur.

I ended up becoming the CEO of that company called Genie DB. The company was located in the UK, but we founded it again in the United States. We created a startup and were trying to raise money to get that company off the ground. 

Sramana Mitra: This was in 2010?

Cary Breese: It was in 2010, yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Can you summarize that journey a bit?

Cary Breese: We worked on it for about three or four years. We were able to get into the market and have a commercial product, but we weren’t able to secure sufficient funding to scale the business. We decided to wind that business down after about three or four years. 

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Cary Breese: We got together with the CTO at Genie DB who we had worked with for four years and decided that we wanted to do our next venture together. We had worked together so well in Genie DB. Even though that company wasn’t that successful, we had a great experience. We learned a lot and we decided that we wanted to do another venture together.

This time we took an interest in healthcare. We thought that healthcare was an industry that was known for inefficiencies and a lot of bottlenecks. We thought that we could give something back to the society by improving and streamlining the healthcare of the country. We started looking at various healthcare opportunities where we thought that there could be an innovation or disruption opportunity.

We were going into conference rooms and whiteboarding out ideas. We went through dozens of ideas. During that time, I went to a pharmacy. I had a sore knee at that time, and I went to the doctor. My doctor wrote our prescription on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

I proceeded to drive with that piece of paper across town to my local pharmacy. I stood in three different lines to get my medication. It took about half an hour. I walked out and called my CTO partner and asked him, “How come someone hasn’t fixed the pharmacy yet? I can get a car to show them my doorstep with a push of a button. I can get an Uber to come to take me wherever I want. I can get lunch ordered by DoorDash. Why hasn’t anyone fixed pharmacy yet? Why haven’t we streamlined this?”

He then replied, “ I can’t believe that you are telling me about pharmacy! My wife has just walked in the door complaining about her pharmacy experience.” Right there and then, we knew that this was a pain point that a lot of customers and patients were having. 

Sramana Mitra: When did this experience happen?

Cary Breese: This was in 2015.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Case Study in Equity Crowdfunding: Cary Breese, CEO of NowRx
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