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First-time founder and Harvard grad Carlos Reines, who was nominated by the World Economic Forum as Young Global Leader opens up about his tragic childhood accident and how that shaped his life-work today through RubiconMD — an eConsult platform that connects clinicians to top specialists. Now serving over 5,000 primary care physicians in 37 States, RubiconMD has saved over 2.5 Million days of patients waiting for specialist consults, which is almost 7,000 years.

Carlos talks about his struggles early-on when he launched RubiconMD and how, after many iterations, he designed a dialed-in hiring process to assemble a top tier team that not only has individuals with world-caliber credentials but that act as a team and feel connected to the mission of the company– democratizing and improving access to quality healthcare.

In this episode you will learn about:

• • • Healthcare innovation
    • Leadership
    • Leadership Mistakes
    • Building a startup
    • Managing and scaling a team
    • Raising capital
    • Company Culture
    • Effective Feedback

 

About Carlos Reines:

Carlos is one of the cofounders at RubiconMD. The company was founded in 2013 with a driving vision of democratizing medical expertise so that providers can offer every patient the care they deserve.

Originally from Spain, he’s passionate about leveraging technology to drive change in healthcare.

Prior to RubiconMD, Carlos led a division at Telefonica, one of the largest telecom companies in the world. He began his career at Siemens Healthcare.

He earned Masters’ in both Bioengineering and Telecom Management in Madrid, and an MBA from Harvard.

Connect with Carlos Reines:

Linkedin
Twitter
Website

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Full Transcription:

Carlos:  I think I always had an easy one because my dad’s name is Carlos as well. I don’t think they had to break that too much.

Tanya:  That’s great, so they followed the wonderful Spanish tradition on naming. 

Carlos:  Yeah, absolutely.

Tanya:  That’s Carlos Reines, Harvard grad and entrepreneur who raised $20 million for his startup RubiconMD, an eConsult platform that connects clinicians to top specialists. Now serving over 5,000 primary care physicians in 37 states in the US, RubiconMD has saved over 2.5 million days of patients waiting for specialist consults, which turns out to be almost 7,000 years.

Carlos:  I grew up in Madrid. Actually, all my family is in Madrid. I was born and raised there, lived in the center of the city for the first few years, and then we went to the suburbs when I was about 5 or 6. I’ve really been in Madrid most of my life. When I was 22 is the first time that I went to study abroad. Through different work experiences and educational experiences, I’ve ended up spending time in the Netherlands, in Germany, and obviously, a lot of time in the US.

Tanya:  If you were to describe yourself as a kid, how would you describe yourself?

Carlos:  I was the only child, only nephew, only me, no cousins, for ten years. My mother is the oldest of six. On my dad’s side, his uncle never had children, so for about ten years, I was there by myself. I was getting a lot of love from the entire family.

Tanya:  I can imagine. 

Carlos:  At the same time, I was dying to get some folks around. I wanted to have cousins. I wanted to have siblings. In Spain, there is a big tradition in Christmas that the Three Magic Kings will bring you games and toys, and when I was a kid and I would write my letter, I would never ask for any games or toys. I just wanted to have a brother or a sister. I wanted to have that for a long time. It never happened, so I grew up as an only child. At some point, my parents had friends that lived outside of Madrid, and their son moved to Madrid for college. He was about five years older than I am, and he went to live with us. For three years, all of us had – I had an older brother, and it was an awesome experience.

Tanya:  I can imagine. After all that time, it must’ve felt great to have company. 

Carlos:  Absolutely.

Tanya:  Something important happened when you were a child.

Carlos:  When I was 8, I was playing on the street with other kids. We were playing with slingshots. It was just kids who are the street, and I was hiding behind the car. Unfortunately, somebody was incredibly accurate, and they hit me in the eye. That was actually a pretty severe accident that triggered three very complex surgeries. Probably over the span of two years, I lived half of the time either admitted to the hospital or sitting in an ophthalmologist office. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t play with other kids. I had to be incredibly diligent with my eye drops. 

That was actually very tough. As an 8-year-old, all you want to do is to be outside and then play and not have to worry about anything, and I had to go through a lot of complications. Eventually, I had the surgery where the ophthalmologist said the best thing we can do is stabilize the eye, and this is something that you should reevaluate whether you can have more surgeries or there is any path forward maybe in 15 or 20 years as an adult. That was between age 8 and age 10, roughly. 

Tanya:  Wow! That’s brutal. How did that influence who you are today and shape your outlook on life?

Carlos:  I think it influenced me in many ways. I wish I didn’t have that accident, but at the same time, I’m very grateful for all the things that I’ve learned out of that experience. I think mostly on – probably on three different levels. The first is what I do now was definitely influenced by what happened to me, right? I decided to become a healthcare technology entrepreneur, and I started RubiconMD. This is, obviously, years later. This is only a few years ago, but out of that experience, I grew the motivation to want to fix healthcare because I had experienced myself just of not having access to the right care at the right time. I knew that somebody had to fix it. Eventually, that’s where I gained the strength to go pursue this mission that I’m working on now, so one was in shaping what I wanted to do.

I think, two, I’m also really grateful for a lot of the strong relationships that I’ve been able to develop, very close with really everyone in my family, so at the time of the accident, I felt incredibly supported. There wasn’t a day where I was at the hospital and I didn’t have either my parents, my uncle, my aunt, someone sitting with me. I think that is reflected in now it’s 20 years later or 20 or 30 years later; I have incredibly strong relationships with them, with everyone in my family and also friendships. I remember when this happened, and I had to go back to school. I couldn’t go out and play outside. I had to stay in the classroom, and I had to use my drops. One of my friends at the time would stay with me every single break. Instead of going out to play soccer or whatnot, stayed indoors playing with me. He was the one putting the drops in my eyes. Again, almost 30 years later, he’s one of my best friends now. I think of a lot of those relationships really solidified, and those are really priceless.

Tanya:  How did you handle the person, the child that caused the accident?

Carlos:  I didn’t, really. This happened when I was 8. At 8 years old, you barely understand what’s going on, what’s happening. I don’t think I ever saw that kid ever again or spoke to him again. Not because I didn’t want to. It’s just the following two years I was, basically, at hospitals and doctors’ offices, and after that, we never had an opportunity to reconnect. I think one thing that’s interesting is that you really don’t understand what’s going on, and I think, for me, it was probably, I don’t know, maybe five years later or so when I was growing up, when I was going through adolescence that I started to realize that I had gone through a pretty serious accident and understand a little bit of the implications. It was probably more difficult in those years than it was originally. As a kid, I was just cruising through life.

Tanya:  Yeah, I can imagine. Do you feel affected in any way by what happened to you today, or what is going on with your eye?

Carlos:  No, not really. The good news is that we are born with two eyes, so despite having pretty limited or not really any useful vision in that left eye, I can do everything normally. It didn’t stop me from being able to drive, being able to play sports, or have a perfectly normal life. I don’t think it’s put any restrictions into anything that I do, but I do think that I’ve developed a lot of capabilities that I probably wouldn’t have developed if I didn’t go through this. I think a lot of that is pretty well reflected and really helpful as I’m going through the entrepreneurship journey, which is a brutal experience. A lot of the things that I learned at the time, being able to work through challenges, jump through hoops, or remove any hurdles that are put in your way, I think the perseverance that you need as an entrepreneur, I think I found a lot of that in having to figure out life going through a lot of the challenges as a kid.

Tanya:  Yeah, I mean, that’s unquestionable that your accident was the training ground for your career. Not only as an entrepreneur, but in healthcare, you were firsthand affected by the problems that you’re actually trying to solve today. How did you get into your entrepreneurial journey?

Carlos:  It really started in 2012. Up until that time or before that, I was in Madrid. I was working for Telefonica, which is one of the largest telecos in the world, and I actually had a really cool job. I was part of this corporate unit. It was called the Global Chief Technology Office, and we would do technology projects across all of 25 countries where the company operates. We would be standardized in best practices, technology guidelines, choosing solutions; that everybody rolls out the same technology and be more effective. I got to interact with, really, all the areas of the business.

Then a friend convinced me to apply to business school and to apply to schools in the US, and in 2012, I found myself packing and moving to Boston to start business school at Harvard. Going in, I knew I had – so before that, I had worked for Siemens and Telefonica, two massive companies. I thought this is the perfect transition to try something else, to go early stage. Why not, to start something myself? I really spent my first year in business school going to a lot of the entrepreneurship events in Cambridge. There are startup weekends and hackathons virtually every week.

By going to a lot of those, eventually, in March of 2013, I met my co-founder, Gil, at a Hacking Medicine event at MIT where he was pitching the idea. He was also inspired by personal experience where his grandmother had a brain tumor. She was from Barbados, and she had to travel to Boston for surgery and then for the postop care. He was also frustrated with the limitations of accessing care, and the two of us worked together through that weekend. We found that this is an idea that made a lot of sense. We were excited about that we could execute, and on top of that, we got along really well. We had very complimentary styles, and we decided to start a company together.

Tanya:  Wow! That’s RubiconMD.

Carlos:  That’s RubiconMD, yeah. Basically, what we do – so the two toughest problems in healthcare in the US – probably number one is, obviously, the fact healthcare is an incredibly expensive sector with almost 20% of the GDP spent in healthcare. That’s twice as much as any other advanced country of their healthcare expenditure relative to the GDP with it actually achieving better population health metrics, and then on top of that, you have about half of the country who really struggle with access to care. We quantified that more than 50% of the population in the US have real challenges accessing a specialist, and that’s real unfortunate. We decided to tackle a dual problem by letting primary care clinicians submit electronic consults to specialists, so whenever a PCP has a case that’s a bit more complex, what they do is they access our platform. They type up a brief description of other patients. They ask a question, and they send it to a specialty. We have a top specialist review and get back to them with their impressions and recommendations in a matter of hours, and that allows the primary care clinician to make a much more informed decision and diagnosis, treatment plan, and next steps for the patient.

Tanya:  I mean, I think that, first of all, what you’re doing at RubiconMD is pretty amazing. I can’t tell you how many times I went to a pediatrician or a general practitioner and said what’s going on here? They send me to God knows who, and it takes time to get the appointment. You’re looking at months before you even get to loop back with the primary care physician. It’s frustrating, so that’s amazing. How many clinicians and primary care physicians do you serve?

Carlos:  Oh, we must have probably about 5,000 clinicians across the country. We are present in 37 states working really with all flavors of primary care. One thing that’s fascinating is that you just share your experience. It was frustrating that you probably wasted time and money and things that were not really necessary, but one thing is that you could afford it. Even if it was painful, you had access to care. About 60% of what we do is safety-net populations, uninsured, undocumented, Medicaid patients that are looking at wait times measured probably in months if not years. One of the things that’s really fascinating of what we do is that we are bridging that access gap for the most underinsured populations who are now through their primary care clinician getting access to the expertise of some of the best specialists in the country, and that’s where we are executing on our mission of democratizing access to medical expertise.

Tanya:  I love it. That’s amazing. How big is your team now? 

Carlos:  We are about 45 or 50 people, most of us headquartered in New York City. Then we have West Coast office in San Francisco, and we also have a few remote engineers based in Spain.

Tanya:  Amazing, all the key locations. I just want to shift gears a little bit. In terms of what it took to actually begin the company – well, first, what do you do at Rubicon? What’s your job? 

Carlos:  As the president and co-founder, I oversee the delivery side of things, so I work very closely with the product team helping inform a lot of the road map and future decisions with the input that I get from the market. I work closely with the operations team; help them build for scale. I work closely with the implementation customer success teams, and they are supported by what we called user engagement. It’s, basically, we’ve taken the approach in a loop – all the learnings that traditional tech companies have in their growth hacking teams and adapted it to bring it to healthcare so that we could do rapid experimentation and learning around the things that work for clinician engagement with technology. Those are the teams that I oversee. I think, as a founder, I can’t get out of being on the road a lot of the time, so probably a good portion of my time is still dedicated to business development and checking in with our partners.

Tanya:  Okay, yes, and aside your actual job, you have a bazillion other jobs. Your job is to just make the company successful, whatever it takes. When you start a company in the early days, it’s brutal. It takes a lot. What were the early days of RubiconMD like for you?

Carlos:  Yeah, so the early days were actually really hard and, at the same time, really fun starting the business. I was my first year of business school when I met my co-founder March of 2013 over that weekend at a Hacking Medicine event at MIT, and then we followed up, did a second hackathon about a month later. It was called 3 Day Startup, and we won best pitch. Then we said, well, this actually has a lot of potential. I think there’s an opportunity to build a business here, so shortly after that, we incorporated the company. That summer, I moved to New York, and that’s when we worked on developing the first prototype. We found one clinician who wanted to give it a shot, someone who had trained with Gil’s brother or had trained Gil’s brother in Connecticut, and we recruited maybe three or four specialist. That’s all we had at the time, one PCP, and I think one cardiologist, one dermatologist, one orthopedic surgeon. Not more than that. 

We built a prototype that I put together, a very simple MVP. It was just the front end. What the person would do is they would access the “platform,” platform in quotes. They would submit a consult. I would get that, and I would have to do everything manually. I would have to run those cases manually to the specialist. When I got their responses back, I had to go back and tweet the front end of the platform, so it was incredibly manual. 

We did that for probably about 200 consults, and then we regroup with this primary care physician in Connecticut. He said something that was fascinating. He said, “Well, first of all, this is the most doctor-to-doctor communication I’ve had in ten years, and on top of that, I’m not only learning things, but I’m also able to improve care for my patients who would have otherwise not had the ability to go see a specialist and maybe would’ve had to end up in the ED. I’m actually not only doing better care, but I’m also generating big cost savings for the system.” That was for us the biggest validation. We had a clinician who was getting a lot of value clinically, and his patients were benefiting a ton. That’s when we decided to raise a little bit of capital and start building a team and to actually build a legit platform.

Tanya:  What was one of the toughest moments professionally you had to deal with as a leader?

Carlos:  I think the first year was brutal for me because I was still in business school. We applied to an incubator. They said we’ll take you guys if you drop out of school. I was already going back. I was already starting projects with classmates. I was really using every class to apply to the business. We decided that it made more sense for me to finish business school, but that also meant that I was doing two things at the same time, right? I was starting a business from the beginning, and I was going through my second year of business school, and that was brutal.

I remember days where I would go to class in the morning, and then I had to get in a car, drive to New York. We were meeting with investors or a potential customer, or we were talking about the product and then drive back. Many days I find myself – it was midnight. I was dead tired, and I had to do a lot of homework and reading for the next day so eventually managed to go through both. I still got a lot of value out of school. At the same time, we continued to grow the business, but it was brutal. I remember the last days where I was like I can’t take one more class, one more case, or I’m going to break.

Tanya:  I can’t even imagine. That’s so crazy. At what point did you start to raise capital and really see your team grow?

Carlos:  The first capital we raised was when we – before we launched that really early pilot, we had some basic cost that we had to face before we could start operating. Things like liability insurance and funds to pay the specialists and just the basic things. The first time was actually pretty interesting. We had met this person through a friend of ours, and he was the former CEO of a very large health plan. We connected with him, and we was initially just an advisor. He started to give us his take on how this could fit into healthcare. What are the things that we should have in place? Eventually became a little bit of a more formal advice. We were checking in with him regularly.

We asked him, what would be your advice? We’re at a point where we need to raise some capital. Do you recommend us to start by going to a fund, going to a few angels? What do you think? He offered himself. He said, “Well, if I was interested, would you guys take an investment from me?” It was very natural. Of course we would, right? He had been incredibly helpful already.

That’s how we found our first investor. It was very natural, and then a lot of angels piled up on top of it. He obviously brought the credibility.

Tanya:  It was a strong signal.

Carlos:  Exactly, then we had other investors who were maybe stronger in tech but having someone who’s such a healthcare expert, a physician, a manager, CEO to back our model, it was a strong signal. Probably the first half a million dollars we had raised was through super angels. Then we started working with some of these early stage health IT funds that invested. That was our seed round. Which from the first check ‘til we closed it, we probably kept it open for about a year. We were just raising capital as we were getting more traction, and eventually, it was about 1.3 million that we raised with a combination of angel funds and one strategic investor that joined the round at the end.

Tanya:  At what point did you start thinking about RubiconMD’s culture?

Carlos:  That probably happened after we did our Series A. Our Series A was about a year and a half after we had closed our seed round, and that was the first time that we went through multiple hires. Right up until that time, it had been the three founders at the beginning and super-early employees that were part of the founding team so a very small team. When we started to bring more people onboard, it’s when we realized that the culture was going to be incredibly important. We didn’t get it right the first time. I think through the first iterations of hires, we brought people who were really good but maybe weren’t the best cultural fit for what we wanted to – where we wanted evolve. I think, as we were growing the team and through some of these successes or failures in growing the team, we started to realize the importance that having a strong culture would have for the company. Where we are today, I think culture is incredibly central for us. We dedicate a lot of time, resources, and attention to it, and I think it’s one of the key assets of RubiconMD.

Tanya:  Awesome, and what is RubiconMD’s culture?

Carlos:  We define our value system human, agile, innovative, and collaborative. I think that’s a good characterization of what you would see across the board in the team. First of all, I think I told you my personal story, and I shared a little bit about my co-founder’s personal story for why we do this. When I look inside the RubiconMD team, almost everyone or everyone has a reason why they’re doing this, right? They could be doing something else that’s maybe more comfortable, or it has more perks, but they’re all here because they are incredibly mission driven. They want to change the world through their skillset. I think that’s number one characteristic, very, very strong mission in the team. Number two, we’ve been able to attract really talented individuals that thrive really well in the craziness of the startup journey, right? You need folks that are the – that can function autonomously and that want to be pushed really hard and can solve really hard problems and collaborate really well with each other, so I’m very proud of the talent that we’ve been able to bring onboard. 

The third element of our culture is diversity. You would think that for a company that has to work really fast and that’s, basically, optimizing for having folks that are mission driven that you could expect that most of us would be the same or have the same backgrounds, and I think it’s quite the opposite. Some people refer to us as the UN of startups. We have so much variety in terms of countries of origin, backgrounds, races, gender. I think we’re about 60% female represented across the board, right? It’s not that we have just a very large marketing team with a lot of women in it. No, we have female representation across the entire company in leadership. Even at the board of the company we have female representation.

The beauty of this is that diversity has never been – we’ve never pushed for that. We’ve never even thought about or quotas or anything like that. It’s happened naturally. I think as we’ve been able to grow a more and more diverse culture, it also becomes a magnet for people who thrive in that environment, and that, in a way, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Tanya:  That’s amazing. I mean, the fact that it happened naturally and it wasn’t in response to what’s going on in the environment today in business, that’s amazing. What type of resources do you use to really keep yourself engaged and growing as a leader?

Carlos:  I put a lot of attention to it. There are several things that I do. Number one, inside the company, I think it’s incredibly important to encourage a culture of feedback, open, transparent, honest 360 feedback. We have that in place, but I particularly push really hard folks in the team to be very candid. That’s the only way I can learn about my limitations and work on getting better, so that’s from the inside.

Tanya:  How do they provide you feedback? Do you have a quarterly meeting or a survey that goes out? What’s the setup of that feedback loop?

Carlos:  We have a lot of things in place. This culture is so important. Our head of people in culture spent a lot of time working on it. Twice a year we do employee reviews. Those are reviews by their manager, but in between those cycles, we have peer review sessions so that we can get feedback from a personal level to the organization and from everybody. It is a time consuming activity. It takes a lot of resources, but I think it’s incredibly worth it.

Then we encourage feedback, and we enable multiple talents to provide it. There are folks that will be very comfortable providing direct feedback to a person and identifying themselves as the authors of that feedback, and there are folks who are more comfortable just giving in a more anonymous way. What we do is we have each manager collect feedback from different sources, and they package it up, and then they deliver it to an employee. Where somebody is comfortable and wants to provide more one-to-one direct feedback, they’re welcomed and encouraged to do that. If people prefer to provide it in a way that’s a bit more anonymous because they don’t want to potentially harm a relationship, that’s also fine. All we want to do is the people – make sure that people have enough content for them to understand what are the areas where they can keep improving, and also, what are the areas where they are doing really well and that other people appreciate?

Tanya:  Just curious, what was one of the pieces of feedback that you got that was impactful for you? 

Carlos:  I think, one of the pieces of feedback that I’ve received, it was very insightful is that there’s feedback on feedback, right? I spent a lot of time providing constructive feedback because I feel like I owe it to the employees. It’s my job to make sure that everyone here is getting better and better and learning new things every day. I have a very natural tendency to focus on the constructive feedback. Folks really appreciate to also learn what are the things that are working well? Not just to get the pat on the back but to be aware that, something they are doing, it’s actually very effective, and they need to keep doing it. That was a very important piece of feedback. That I should spend more time also on the positive feedback and reinforcing the things that are going well as much as I do on the constructive feedback, and what are the elements where folks need to work on to improve?

Tanya:  Really, encouraging not just for what needs to be improved but also what’s working, which makes sense. When things are working, you don’t put as much thought. They just work.

Carlos:  Right, and I think that’s a – that’s why I naturally go to how can we better? It’s that obsession with we keep growing, but I think it’s a very fair point to also recognize people when they do things well.

Tanya:  Yeah, absolutely. What was your favorite or your most influential leadership or management book that you read recently?

Carlos:  I’ve been reading a lot recently around hiring. Probably one of the most important and at the same time one of the most underrated functions at any company or qualities in many leaders is recruiting and talent management. I don’t understand why in many places HR remains a function that’s a little down or not properly respected. The most important asset for most of the companies and definitely for us is the human capital, the talent that we have onboard.

Tanya:  Without a question, yeah.

Carlos:  I’ve learned that a great employee who is mission driven, highly motivated, and whose performance is really high is incredibly valuable. I spent a lot of time reading about the topic either – in particular, two books that I found really helpful around improving the hiring processes and talent management. Those were Work Rules!. It’s a book by Laszlo Bock. He was the former head of people at Google. From that one, I took away – I guess one thing they did, it was fascinating, is that they mapped all hiring processes, and they understood the ratings that people had given. They map it out to how that correlates to the success of the hire in the job. After tens of thousands of hires, you start to see some interesting trends, so they have a pretty thoughtful framework for how to structure an interview. It’s very natural for us when we are interviewing someone to just go back to all right, this is the job description. I want to know what you did in the past, and then I’m going to make a decision on whether you’re a good fit for this job or not.

I think that’s short sided because that’s only one of the elements. I think in that book –we’ve tweaked it a bit, but our framework now is we look at a candidate. We want to understand what are their leadership styles? How would they fit with our culture? What’s their general cognitive ability? What’s their role-based knowledge for what they’ve done in the past, but also, what’s their role-based aptitude? What are the things that they’ve done in the past? Even if they weren’t exactly doing this job, how do they prepare them to do the work that we’re going to be asking them to do? We found that by having different categories and letting people focus on specific items of those we are being able to have a much more effective and less biased hiring process.

That was incredibly effective from that book, and then the other one that I also found very interesting is a book – I think it was called Who. It’s, again, a hiring method, and they take you through all the steps that you need to have in place before you go out and start searching for a candidate around properly defining the job and define what are the metrics for success?. Getting internal alignment in the team around what are the things that we’re going to be looking for as we start to bring candidates onboard? Really elevating the team’s ability to be better recruiters and better searchers of talent for the company.

Tanya:  That’s super interesting so trying to solve the hiring problem, which is a huge one and at the basis of building a team, really.

Carlos:  Absolutely.

Tanya:  Awesome, so last question, what is next for RubiconMD?

Carlos:  It’s been a little over 5 years since we started the business with about 5,000 clinicians using RubiconMD. When you look at the stats, they are very impressive. Primary care clinicians report that, when they use eConsults, 80% of the times they are able to significantly improve the patient’s care plan. Seventy percent of the times they are building capacity. They’re not just helping patients at one point in time. They’re learning things that they will use in future patient care, and they are avoiding more than half of the times unnecessary referrals, duplicate tests, unnecessary [36:20] cost. It’s been more than proven that this has a ton of impact on the quality of care delivered and the costs that are being taken away from the system and the patient experience. We’ve taken away more than two and a half million patient wait days. That’s time that would have stood in between the patient and the right care plan, particularly for the most underinsured population.

Tanya:  Carlos, let me just make sure I understand that, 2.5 million wait days you said?

Carlos:  Yeah, that’s correct.

Tanya:  In other words, 2.5 million days that patients avoided waiting to go see an expert and get the care that they needed.

Carlos:  Exactly.

Tanya:  Wow!

Carlos:  If they didn’t have eConsults, they would’ve had to wait all that time to get to the right care plan, if they ever were able to get to the right care plan, which in many places they can’t.

Tanya:  Wow! That’s almost a lifetime or more.

Carlos:  Yeah, the model is incredibly effective. It works really well. Five thousand clinicians is just scratching the surface. There are almost half a million primary care clinicians in the country, and this works really well. Healthcare is very fragmented, so incentives are not always aligned. As much as I would like to see all financial incentives be aligned towards improving outcomes, improving the patient experience, and reducing the cost of care, that’s not necessarily the case for a big portion of the system, but we’re working really hard to work through those challenges. We live in a world where five or ten years from now there shouldn’t be any primary care clinician in the country and why not eventually in the world who doesn’t use eConsults as part of their practice because these are incredibly beneficial for patient care.

Tanya:  Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense. How do people get in touch with you?

Carlos:  Anyone who wants to get more info on RubiconMD can find us online at rubiconmd.com, and for anyone who wants to contact me directly and get anymore insights, carlos@rubiconmd.com is my email. Feel free to reach out, particularly if you are a mission driven individual who cares about improving access to care. I’d love to connect with you.

Tanya:  Amazing, Carlos, thank you so much for spending the time and sharing your amazing personal story and what you’re doing with RubiconMD.

Carlos:  Thanks so much for having me, Tanya. I really enjoyed it.

 

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Born to a Greek father, but British mother, Anthemos had a pretty normal childhood, where his natural tendency was to be introverted, but with time, trained himself to be more extraverted. He loved to read or play video games, and despite his inclination to keep to himself, he had lots of friends. At 18 years old, however, something devastating happened. His mother passed away, after battling a long illness. As an only child, this rocked Anthemos to his core and took the following couple years to recover from the terrible loss. In this pivotal moment, something inside awakened where he developed a deep desire to use his life to make his mother proud.

Perhaps it was the realization that life is fragile and not something to take for granted or the grief from losing his mother that motivated him to venture into entrepreneurship– having nothing hold him back. After raising $90 Million for his startup, Zumper, which aims to make apartment renting as easy as booking a hotel, he shares in this episode the mindset and framework he used to break boundaries and push himself to accomplish what seemed impossible. Projected to help 70 Million renters this year alone to secure rental apartments, Zumper is positioned to be a true game-changer in a clunky, antiquated industry.

In this episode you will learn about:

• Leadership
• Leadership Mistakes
• Building a company
• Exiting a company
• Managing and scaling a team
• Raising capital
• Company Culture
• Effective Communication

About Anthemos Georgiades:

Anthemos Georgiades is the co-founder and CEO of Zumper, the largest startup in the rental industry, used by more than 26 million renters last year alone. As CEO, Anthemos has raised $90 million in venture capital from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Goodwater Capital, Breyer Capital and Foxhaven Asset Management, including a Series B round in Oct. 2016 when many start-ups were struggling. He has grown the Zumper team to 50 and counting and successfully completed the acquisition of apartment search platform PadMapper.

With a diverse background that includes consulting for Boston Consulting Group and serving as Economic Advisor and speechwriter in the 2010 British Election, Anthemos founded Zumper in 2012 after his own terrible rental experience. He discovered that the marketplace doesn’t work for renters, and the idea for Zumper was born with the goal of evening the playing field and increasing transparency in the marketplace.

Originally from London, he has an MBA from Harvard Business School, MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and BA from the University of Oxford. Anthemos lives in San Francisco, where Zumper is HQ’d, with his wife. He remains a huge Tottenham Hotspur fan, and wakes up painfully every Saturday morning to tune into the live English soccer games.

Connect with Anthemos Georgiades:

Website
Linkedin
Twitter

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Full Transcription:

Anthemos: Yeah, so I like to throw people because I have a British accent but a very long Greek name.

Tanya: That’s Anthemos Georgiades, Harvard grad and former BCG consultant who raised 90 million from top tier venture capital funds to build Zumper, a platform that aims to make renting places as easy as booking hotels, now serving 70 million people annually.

Anthemos: Yeah, my name is Anthemos Georgiades. The Georgiades part is pretty common. The Anthemos is even in the Greek world pretty weird. It’s like a super old Greek saint that my father knew about and convinced my British mother to run with. It’s pretty weird. I have a lot of Anthemos handles on social media because there aren’t many of us, but it actually doesn’t mean anything. I think it’s derived from the world flower, which my friends give me a lot of banter about. Yeah, it’s a pretty unique name. I hated it growing up as a kid because I think you want to be named after all your friends, of course. I was annoyed I wasn’t called David, but now when we grow up and you’re a little older, I think it’s quite cool to have something unique.

Tanya: Oh, it’s super cool, very memorable. Is your father have any relationship to Greece or a Greek descent?

Anthemos: Yes, so my dad was born in Nicosia in Cyprus, and he is a concert pianist. He’s Cypriot Greek, Greek Cypriot and has traveled around Europe playing concerts his whole career, and then moved to London in his late 20s and met my mother in London back in the day.

Tanya: Wow! That must’ve been so amazing growing up with that name. By the way, I think we all hated our name when we were younger.

Anthemos: Yeah, it’s hard isn’t it?

Tanya: Yeah, absolutely. What kind of kid were you when you were young?

Anthemos: I was an only child. I’d say this hasn’t changed. I’m a huge introvert who’s taught themselves to be an extravert. I was always more happy on my own than I was with outside people. I always had lots of friends. I was a very happy kid. It’s a very normal family, but I was always more happy on my own, to be honest, reading or playing video games than I was doing anything else and so grew up happy.

I think my life changed when I was 18 when my mother had had – she’d been pretty sick during my teenage years and died when I was 18 just before I went to college. As an only child, it was – I mean, I know people who lost their parents when they were 5 or 6. I think losing your mother at 18 is still tragic, but obviously, I’m so glad I had 18 years with her. As an only child, it reduces your family from three to two. It’s a pretty seismic event in my life. Yeah, it really changed the rest of my life in terms of my ambitions and how you really want to do your parent proud after you lose them. I had a really happy childhood until that moment and then spent the next few years recovering at college and seeing what came next.

Tanya: Wow! That’s one of those moments that you go through, and you have a before you and an after you. What were some of the grounding decisions that you made about that event that you took forward?

Anthemos: Yeah, it’s an interesting time to talk about it. I think I just crossed the point I was saying to my wife the other day where I’ve lived more of my life without my other in my life than with. I just turned 37, and I lost her when I was 18. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. I wish I had a really smart – like you wake up the next day and the tragedy hits, and then you change your life forever. It’s, obviously, as anyone who’s dealt with grief, never that simple. You go through many phases. It takes you a while for it to really sink in. Then it really becomes quite challenging, and it’s very easy to slip into depression.

When I look back on it, I think the single biggest thing it changed is my ambition. I was like many of your audience and many of your guests a – I was a nerdy, smart kid. I worked super hard. I was never smart enough to get away with not working, but I was always high in my classes. I got into Oxford, and I was super excited to go to college. I think I went from being a kid who got away with stuff before to being – after I lost her, I think my ambition really kicked in. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I had this bizarre drive to make your parent proud. Even though they’re no longer there, you still feel like they’re watching, and you really want to make them proud.

I went from a kid who got through life because I get through it with some studying to being one who was fiercely driven and played with various ideas about what I wanted to do with a career, ended up, obviously, becoming an entrepreneur. I think that’s the switch from being just a kid to being a kid who really wants to change the world and try and do something really positive. That’s the single biggest change losing my mother had on my life.

Tanya: Wow! If there’s any change that it could have, that would be – that would make her proud, and I believe that she is listening.

Anthemos: I love to hear that.

Tanya: We probably just can’t see her. Why were you talking about this recently with your wife? What in your life now is this – why is it bringing it up?

Anthemos: Yeah, I turned 37 a few – a couple of months ago. On my birthday, I realized that just from simple back of the envelop math that, obviously, I was now over twice as old as I was when I lost her. I’d actually lived more years now without her, and I was reflecting to my wife on that on my birthday just because – I no longer think about the event as sad. I think about it as I was so lucky to have my mother who was a wonderful feminist, incredible woman, had a career, brought me up to be very well adjusted, well, hopefully, well adjusted. I look back on my relationship with my mother not with any sadness but with amazing joy, and I also have a son now. I have a kid who’s almost 2, and it’s impossible not to join the things together because you think about yourself as a parent and what you want to do. If you could marry the fact that I just figured out the math and also the fact that I have a very young child, yeah, it’s not a sad thought, but it really struck home.

I was talking to my wife about it. She has two amazing parents who are still with us, and she can’t understand it really when I tell her how life-changing the event was and for good reason as she’s never gone through it herself. It’s hard to explain to people. Yeah, for anyone who’s gone through it in their earlier life, it’s pretty life changing.

Tanya: No, it is, and what I’ve noticed is, usually a life-changing moment like that, there’s either a conscious or unconscious decision that’s made.

Anthemos: Totally.

Tanya: In your case, it seems like something activated where you were driven to really make your mother proud, make your life count, and make the best out of the time that you have.

Anthemos: It was super unconscious. I think you’re right. I’ve talked to people about this who’ve also lost people who they were very close to. I think when you’re more mature so when you’ve maybe gone to college or I don’t know, that you’re later in your life, I think people can make more mature decisions that are very conscious. I think when you’re a kid, even though 18 is not a kid, I was probably – I think I was still pretty immature. It was definitely unconscious. I had no idea how to deal with grief.

I wasn’t sitting around crying for years on end, but I definitely felt lonely. I definitely felt this new drive. I didn’t know where it came from. Now I look back on it. The two are completely linked, but at the time, it was totally unconscious. I think it was – to be honest, I think it was a way to deal with grief that you – maybe even selfishly that you put your mind onto something else. You tell yourself it’s to make your mother proud.

The thing is also it’s just a selfish way of dealing with grief that you can’t sit around all day thinking about it, so you find a new challenge. Yeah, I think entrepreneurship was not the obvious choice at the time. I think I was way too risk adverse having brought up – being brought up in the UK. All your friends want to be investment bankers, and that’s what you should do after college. I definitely didn’t imagine I’d be a CEO, but now I’ve meandered to that path. There’s no way back, and this is the kind of solution to that, I think.

Tanya: Once you start in the entrepreneurial space, it is so addicting.

Anthemos: Oh, it’s masochistically addicting. I mean, I’ve worked jobs before. I was at the Boston Consulting Group after college. I worked 20 hour days for 3 years. I’ve definitely worked jobs that probably have longer hours, but as you know, Tanya, the startup journey is absolutely addictive even if – the hours are last, but the emotional burden is higher because you think about it 24/7. It’s hard to see a way back. I think it’s pretty hard to imagine doing anything else after this.

Tanya: No, absolutely, so how did you even begin your entrepreneurial journey?

Anthemos: Yeah, I originally thought that politics was the way to address the things we’ve been talking about and find purpose in life. Politics are super interesting. I did a couple of stints in British politics, a very short, 6 to 12 month [10:10]. It wasn’t for me for various reasons at the time. Maybe one day but I continued to move away from that. Honestly, it was just like I wanted to solve a problem, so I never woke up and thought, cool, I’ll be a CEO. That sounds fun. I actually just stumbled on a problem of apartment renting.

I run a startup called Zumper. It’s an apartment rental app. We’re used by over 11 million visitors every month. We’re the largest startup in the US in apartment rentals, and the mission of the company is to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel.

Tanya: Yeah, which by the way, I’m so happy that you’re tackling this problem. I’ve been in New York City renting for the past 13 years, and it is such a pain in the ass.

Anthemos: It’s pretty bad.

Tanya: It’s paper heavy, very process heavy, and it’s amazing what you’re doing at Zumper.

Anthemos: No, thank you. I just wanted this for the same reason you mentioned. I had that experience in the UK. I actually moved to New York originally with BCG and had the experience in New York, had the same experience in grad school in Boston, and it was always one of those things where it was the – it’s the single biggest outgoing expense of your life as a renter. You spend a third of your income on the rent, and yet, the process is the worst. It’s not On Demand. It’s not as easy as booking an Airbnb or a hotel. It’s impossibly harder than booking an Uber.

I kept in my 20s just find the same problem every time I moved, and I moved around a lot. Then, at grad school in Boston, I was just like you know what? I always thought someone else would solve this problem, and no one solved it. I’m just going to have a go at it, and candidly, 6 years on did I ever think I’d be sitting here with a company of over 100 people having raised $90 million, of course not. I spent a summer trying something out, and it started to work. Then it snowballed, but honestly stumbled into it. I wanted to solve a problem. I didn’t want to necessarily run a tech startup. It just so happened that running a tech startup as a CEO was the way to solve the problem.

Tanya: You started it you said when you were in Boston at grad school?

Anthemos: Yes, that’s right.

Tanya: Awesome. This is a total sidebar. Everybody that I know that went to HBS, Harvard, they’re so discreet about it. What is it about going to Harvard that you just under the rug, don’t really – you’re more reserved with it?

Anthemos: I think that’s generous, Tanya. I’ve met a lot of people who have said the opposite where they’re like – I think there’s a joke about how do you know someone went to Harvard Business School? They’ll tell you in their introduction. I’ve actually met a lot of people before I went there who were the opposite. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. I mean, I’m based in San Francisco now. I don’t think San Francisco, or Silicon Valley, or the New York or other tech communities particularly care where you went to college. I think they value your brain and your work ethic [13:15].

Tanya: Contribution, yeah.

Anthemos: The same for me, I grew up in London and went to Oxford, and the UK is very elitist, though. It’s still a class-driven society. It really matters where you went to university, and it’s changing, just to be clear. It’s absolutely changing where Silicon Valley – I went on a holiday with my wife a week ago, and there’s four new joiners sitting around the corner from me at work. I couldn’t possibly tell you where they went to college or even if they went to college. Who cares? Anyway, long way of saying with HBS and the MBA, yeah, it’s just irrelevant. It was a great two years, but I want to be – just like you, I want to be judged on what I do in my life and how you help people and grow people’s careers, not brands on resumes.

Tanya: That’s amazing. You’re almost seven years into Zumper. What is your job at Zumper today?

Anthemos: Yeah, it’s really changed from having pretty much had every role at the company probably except CTO to now I’d say I do three things now, to oversimplify the role. One is fundraising and just general [14:29]. I’ve raised 90 million for the company. We have a lot in the bank.

Tanya: Amazing.

Anthemos: We may go and raise more money in the future, so that’s on me.

Tanya: You also have the who’s who of investors. It’s not like you just raised – I mean, you have some serious credible people behind you.

Anthemos: We love our investors. We have Kleiner Perkins, Goodwater Capital. We have Jim Breyer and Breyer Capital. We just brought in Axel Springer and Stereo Capital. Blackstone invested. They’re one of our clients.

Tanya: It’s amazing.

Anthemos: We’ve got great investors, and we have a great relationship with them. They’re super pushy, as they should be. Yeah, so continuing to maintain those relationships and then grow the next generation is the first job of any CEO in a tech back company, assuming you want to continue to raise venture capital. The second one is culture, so increasingly, I obsess on the culture. How do we define the right hires? How do we motivate them? How do we retain all our best people? Culture and how it matches our mission is super important to me, and I think, ultimately, culture is the reason people stay at companies, not compensation. The third one is strategic alignment so super unsexy, sounds really boring, but we’ve got to make sure that what we tell the board is what we tell the exec team, is what we tell the engineering team, is what we tell the interns, and that we do not build products that we throw away tomorrow because they were like a crazy crackpot CEO idea. I don’t need to be in every meeting to do this, but making sure we run a really tight quarterly planning process is actually a really big part of my job now. I work a lot with our CFO on that.

Tanya: How do you get the team to stay aligned because, so many CEOs that I speak with, that’s one of the hardest challenges?

Anthemos: Yeah, totally. I think absolute full transparency is the best way. Even though there were various risks of being wildly transparent with your team, can stuff slip out? Can an investor find – oh, I’m sorry, a competitor find out something you don’t want them to? Yeah, sometimes but the benefits of being full transparent and trusting your team with the information far outweigh, at least at the moment, the downside. We at Zumper run a closely planning process. Ultimately, everything rolls into our mission of making renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. That distills down into five OKRs, which are a – it’s a one key management tool that some companies use. You may use them, Tanya, objectives and key results that John Doerr at Kleiner had pioneered, and that every initiative we have has to roll up into one of these five key objectives. Otherwise, we can’t do it.

Then we plan out a quarterly basis. Every beginning of a quarter, we do a full team-wide analysis of every number in the business in the previous quarter. We plan out every initiative and project a number in the business for the subsequent quarter, and then every single week we do a 20 minute check-in every Monday for every person in the team on progress against those initiatives. That drives a lot of alignment because an engineer might go back to their desk and really think to themselves is what I’m building aligned with any of the things I just saw in this Monday presentation? If not, I should really probably speak to someone.

Tanya: That’s amazing. I love that incredible structure that you set up. When you say transparency really drives alignment, that is always interesting to me. Are you thinking more of transparency like super – I mean, super transparent, like Bridgewater and Associates transparent where you table the meetings? You score people, and you give live feedback, and there’s a rating system. It’s like that level of transparency? Where do you draw the line?

Anthemos: Yeah, great question and absolutely not at that level. It’s a really good one. We are absolutely transparent with pretty much every single number in the business. I’m talking about radical transparency on our performance. If we have a crappy month, people need to know about that, and as long as you’ve got the right leadership team and you believe in the CEO and the C-level and the board, it’s fine. Growth is spikey. It’s not a linear curve for any company and so showing down months important, and I think you want to hire a team that comes in on the first of the next month and is resilient. They’re going to keep grinding.

I love your question about Bridgewater and the other kind of transparency. I’ve read a lot about Bridgewater, and I had a couple of friends who worked there. I think that’s transparency to the point of being ineffective, and you could even call it rude. I don’t want to sound too conservative because I love it as an approach. It’s a radically different approach. I don’t know if I want my team – and maybe running a hedge fund is completely different to running a tech startup, but I don’t know if I want my team spending that much time writing up notes or reading narratives of meetings they weren’t in. I’m just not sure that’s the right use of our time. Maybe it’s a pioneering approach, and we’re just being lazy. We have so many things on fire as we grow very quickly that that just seems like – it seems like a crazy use of time. I understand the reason to do it.

To be honest, it just seems like social decorum breaks down. I know there’s a trend for radical candor in the Valley as well. I really respect how radically candid Bridgewater are to each other, but I don’t if you’re like that with anyone else in your life. I don’t think I’m radically candid with my wife or my son, and so for me, it’s an interesting experiment. It’s not the way I run my company, and fair play to them, they may be trying to achieve something different in a hedge fund to what I need to achieve in Silicon Valley. I think that it would be very hard to track the level of talent we have at Zumper if I use that approach. I think that there’s a very different expectation from the top talent in Silicon Valley about how they’d be treated.

Tanya: No, absolutely, I totally agree. You’re right. In a startup, it would completely I think change the dynamic. In terms of culture, you said that’s absolutely something that you obsess about. What’s the culture at Zumper?

Anthemos: It’s obviously, incredibly hard to define. We have cultural tenets that we talk to the team about. I’d say the people that – I’d say the general culture here is it feels like a siblinghood. Now, I’m saying this as an only child, as I mentioned before, but I suppose that it feels like having siblings where it’s – even though there’s hierarchy and people report to people, in a meeting, it’s completely flat. The intern can tell the CEO they’re wrong. I think it’s like a siblinghood where there’s a lot of self-deprecation. There’s a lot of banter and humor. Yet, in meetings, we disagree all the time, but there’s no assholes. No one’s yelling at anyone. We disagree often, but we solve disagreements with data.

I’d say the thing I love the most about our culture is you’ll see our CTO walk over to our intern on the biz op side and work on something for 20 minutes at her desk. You’ll see our head of sales talking to a junior product person to fix something. That kind of collaborative siblinghood extends to every facet of how we think about the company, how we hire, how we think about providing lunches and breakfasts to the team, how we think about new office space. We’ve seen loads of new offices for our office move this year, and we’ve absolutely rejected offices which wouldn’t support that cross-collaboration or even just to the extent of maybe not having people on two floors and making sure that we remain in an office that’s open plan, which gets increasingly difficult as your grow. It’s super important.

The biggest lever you have as a CEO to culture is hiring. Your culture can’t change the same as you grow. It will evolve. Hiring people that fit, at least an aspirational culture of what you’re trying to grow is the single biggest lever you have, so I’m very attuned to how we hire and where we find people.

Tanya: Hmm, that sounds incredible. As a leader, as the leader of Zumper and as a leader, what has been the toughest moment that you’ve dealt with in your life?

Anthemos: In my career at Zumper?

Tanya: Mm-hmm, I mean, it could be at Zumper. It could be anywhere. As a leader, what has been the toughest moment that you had to deal with in your career?

Anthemos: Yeah, [23:08]. It was definitely at Zumper. In my 20s, I was – I don’t think I really lead teams before. I’d had many teams at BCG, and in politics, I had a few people occasionally reporting to me. Candidly, it’s crazy sometimes. I’m talking about the CEO stuff. You come up with an idea, so you name yourself the CEO. Then suddenly, two years later, actually, you have to be a good leader. It’s no longer an idea. It’s about leadership.

I think the toughest stuff has always been morale in the difficult days. As in now, we’re pretty big. We make pretty good revenue. We make a lot of users. I think 70 million people will use Zumper this year. We’re happy with where we are but never happy enough, but in the early days where you have very low funding, no funding, and – I remember many occasions around morale where competitors came out with products that were what we were trying to build. People try and mine our contact list to steal our customers.

I always remember flights I took where some bad news came out just before I got on the flight back home from a conference. I always thought about how I talk to my team where you as the CEO have to be balanced, where you can’t freak out in front of your team because that’s infectious. At the same time, you have to be honest. I think if you brush every competitive threat away as nonsense, your team don’t believe in you.

Tanya: Yeah, it diminishes what you say.

Anthemos: Totally, and so there’s this impossible medium and I’m sure you felt it too as a CEO of companies where you have to be authentic to the rest but also incredibly bullish and remind the team of the vision and that none of these things change. I remember two or three competitors in our early years, none of whom exist anymore, would – they were always a couple of years before us when we launched. We were always the kids in the group, and it was hard in the first couple of years to catch up with them. Now we’ve surpassed them. It feels great, but it was difficult in the first two years to keep morale high while you were so small. I think that’s the hardest days when you’re money’s running out. Your team is looking around thinking is this going to work out? How you turn up to those meetings is hard, and there’s no secret sauce to it. It’s reading the room and finding the middle grounds, and it’s not easy.

Tanya: I could so relate to that. I’ve had to do that many, many times. Are there any exercises or things that you would do before you would have to go have those tough decisions or tough discussions?

Anthemos: I wish had a – it’s a really good question. I wish I had a clever answer here. I think some other guests will probably have a great answer about looking in the mirror and rehearsing it. I’m the opposite where I’m incredibly close to my team, my executive team. Of the seven people who report to me, five of them have been here for over four years now. I think, actually, they’re five years now. I know these people very well, and I spent a lot of time getting to know them early on because we really wanted to get our exec team together as early as possible. I’d say that just – I knew these human beings, and I knew how different the people in the room were.

Because I think I understood what motivated the room in the early days, there was no rehearsal. I think I understood the context of the room really well before I went in. I guess some people would say rehearse and nail the speech. I’m much more like wing the speech, but really know who’s in the room of your team. If you’ve hired correctly, you’re working with people that will be able to balance outside shocks or slowing in funding and the kind of things that you’ll ultimately solve. No, to be honest, I just built a team that I really trusted, and a lot of the early team who went through the hardest days with me are all here now still.

Tanya: That says so much about you and your leadership style. How have you evolved as your business has grown over the past seven years and your team has grown?

Anthemos: I mean, I have not nailed this yet, but I’m getting better at it. I think the hardest transition for a CEO as you go from having raised maybe $10 million to having raised nearly $100 million or a lot more is getting out of the weeds and becoming a different kind of CEO. I think startup CEO is, by hook or by crook, grow, raise money, get customers, prove product market fit, and you have to be involved in six or seven different roles in the first few years. I think it’s really hard to step back because every – you were very successful if you continue to raise money at those roles because they worked. It’s very hard to let that go and trust that by hiring a seasoned exec team that you pass it off. They’ll do it, and you focus on strategy and hiring and culture.

That’s really hard, and when I read my upward feedback from my team, consistently – and also, to be honest, my downward feedback from the board, consistently in the last year and a half, that is the single biggest negative piece of feedback or opportunity to work on is just get out. Get out of the weeds. Trust us. Yeah, they’ll be mistakes, but focus on higher, other things. I’m 60% of the way there, but I’m not fully across. I’m getting there, but it is really hard. It’s a growing up pain, and it’s a nice one to have. It’s really hard to let go and just trust that stuff will happen.

Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely. That is a huge challenge, but it sounds like you’re on your way. If you could rewind ten years from now so ten years back, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Anthemos: Oh, man, girl, what a question. Probably, it’s going to be far harder than you possibly think.

Tanya: That’s a good piece of advice.

Anthemos: People tell you it’s hard, and you don’t listen. You just think, ahh, it’s hard for them because they didn’t execute brilliantly or something. I’m glad I didn’t go back and tell myself that advice. If I had, I don’t know if I would’ve done it. Now I’ve done it, and I think we’ve got through the hardest part. I mean, I’m so happy I did it. If I knew how hard the first three or four years were going to be, I probably would’ve done it, but I don’t know. I think my delusional optimism in the early days was amazing.

I think I’d go back and say it’s harder than you possibly think. It’s not as easy as TechCrunch and all these blog posts make it sound like. Surround yourself with amazing people inside and outside work to serve as a support network to you because your emotional state is going to go up and down 50 times a day for the next several years. You’ve got to have a support network inside the office and, equally if not more importantly, outside the office.

Tanya: How do you stay balanced?

Anthemos: Oh, I don’t do…

Tanya: Do you go work out, or do you – how do you keep it together because it can be brutal?

Anthemos: Yeah, it’s hard. It’s brutal. Definitely working with people that you love, which I’ve always luckily been able to do, where I literally cannot wait to come to work every morning to see these people because they’re so smart and talented but we’ve also become friends. That’s important but just finding the balance outside work. If you’re in a relationship, or you’re married, or you have a kid, I think it’s a – that’s one say to do it. I mean, you don’t do it for that reason, but just having a kid, for example, was an amazing reminder of what else there is in the world. I mean, I look forward to my weekends with my son more than anything in the world. Then, for people that aren’t in relationships, I mean, sports, like friendships, movies, literature, arts, they’re so important. You are so much better at your job if you have balance outside.

There are CEOs I know in Silicon Valley who work seven days a week for six, seven years, and I work super hard. I’m definitely on the higher working spectrum, but I can never work seven days a week for seven years, nor should I. You can’t see the 50,000 foot view if you’re working…

Tanya: No, you burn out.

Anthemos: You burn out and the companies don’t work out. I’ve seen these companies, and they don’t tend to work out. Anyone who says you can run a startup without working hard, there’s maybe 1% of really lucky people who have amazing product market fit [31:41]. I don’t think that’s true for 99% of startups. I think you have to work super hard. Saying that, that doesn’t preclude having dinner with your family, putting your kids to bed, seeing your kid on the weekend.

I don’t have a perfect formula. I’m definitely not a ten out of ten dad, for example. I try to be. I think just finding interests outside work is not just okay. It should be actively encouraged by any board members or any colleagues. It’s really important for your sanity.

Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely. Space, actually, even just a walk in the park usually comes – it brings a lot of great ideas and a lot of things that you hadn’t resolved but you have a solution for now.

Anthemos: Yeah, how many times you come back from holiday and it just – everything feels less stressful, or you go to bed a little earlier, and you wake up, and you solved that little thing you were thinking about last night. You wake up, and the solution is so clear. That stuff’s real, and it’s stuff you’re told when you’re 20. You don’t really believe, but your brain is an amazing organ. It is doing a lot of things passively, and you’ve got to let it operate on focusing on something that is at work. In the background, it’s processing the work questions. It’s so important.

Tanya: Yeah, no, 100%. What’s next for Zumper?

Anthemos: Yeah, so right now, I think most people that know Zumper or our other brand, PadMapper, that we acquired a couple of years ago know us as a search engine for apartments. We’re by some distance I think the largest startup in terms of audience now in the US and as people just looking for apartments and sending messages to landlords to go and visit. Our vision is very much to be a booking engine for apartments. Not just helping renters send messages, but how can we actually represent landlords directly and use software to prequalify renters, and then have them walk into an open house, and pull out their phone and actually leave a deposit and book the apartment like they’d book a hotel? I think, in two or three years’ time, if Zumper is equally well known as a booking engine for apartments as it is a search engine, that would be our homerun and would be fulfilling the true north of the company. Everything in the next two years is focused on two things, continuing to grow our monthly audience of millions of users and moving as many of them as possible into transactions, not just into [34:12]. They’re the only two things we’re really focused on.

Tanya: That’s a really strategic thing to focus on. That’s amazing. How do people get in touch with you if they want to say hi?

Anthemos: Yeah, Twitter is normally the best place and just @anthemos on Twitter, and we’re pretty responsive. Zumper is just the app Zumper on Twitter as well. Follow me on LinkedIn. I usually reply to stuff, and yeah, love hearing from entrepreneurs or our users. It’s very motivating to us as well.

Tanya: Amazing, Anthemos, this has been brilliant, and I so thank you for the time that you’ve given us today.

Anthemos: Oh, thank you for having me, Tanya. I enjoyed it.

 

 

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Former school teacher, Julie Clark hit the jackpot when she created enriching entertainment videos for her kids, in her basement. It turned out, other babies loved it too. Within five years, what was a fun side project grew into a $23 Million dollar generating business which had only five employees, that Disney acquired for $25 Million. Within a few years of selling to Disney, the company was producing close to $300

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