The two companies successfully exited twice, why can they succeed?

 

Alpha said: Turner and Weinberg are a pair of serial entrepreneurs. Their first company was sold to Google for $ 81 million. The second time they started a business, they transformed the healthcare industry. The company has nearly 2 billion. The US dollar was acquired. As successful serial entrepreneurs, what are their entrepreneurial experiences and the reasons for their success? Entrepreneurs are welcome to read the reference.

When Turner and Weinberg sold their company Invite Media to Google for $ 81 million, they were only 24 years old. Eight years later, at the age of 32, they sold the next company, Flatiron Health, to Roche for nearly $ 2 billion.

Flatiron Health is a medical big data company, and they started to work hard in 2016. Former US President Barack Obama announced the National Cancer “Moon Landing Plan” in 2016, which allows the use of data other than clinical trial data as a basis for new drug approval, because clinical trials usually cover a relatively small population and only use Clinical data may distort results. Flatiron can use technical means to collect much more effective medical information than usual, and the information processing is more refined and more targeted.

Over the years, I have studied a lot of serial entrepreneurs, who are usually able to create more than one successful business. The value of this research is that if they can succeed again and again, it is unlikely to rely on good luck or a good economic environment. On the contrary, my finding is that successful entrepreneurs have a set of methods to collect a large amount of information and test models and entrepreneurial hypotheses; they also have a large but non-redundant network of people that can be used to collide ideas, pool resources, and generate solution.

Turner and Weinberg made some early investments, contacted a large number of entrepreneurs in different fields, and opened up new perspectives, which gave them a clearer judgment on future trends, and finally decided to make Flatiron. Companies.

First venture

Turner ’s entrepreneurship started as a hobby and then transformed into a profitable business, involving food delivery, web design and snake farming. While it was in the business of snake farming, Turner realized the benefits of the Internet.

Turner atNot long after Wharton and Weinberg met, they took an internship with Video Egg, where they noticed problems in the online advertising industry. This inspired them to start a new company’s business.

With the willingness to start a business, the two founders planned a direction for their new business and observed how the capital flow and industry chain in the industry operated. After that, they studied the online advertising industry more closely and found that there is a serious mismatch between the advertiser ’s demand and the actual supply, as well as the accuracy of the actual advertising. This allows them to find the pain points in this market, first targeting the distribution and monetization of video content related to advertising. However, in the first year and a half of the entrepreneurship, the company’s specific business direction has changed several times, and it has gone from “we are exploring a certain field” to “we have found an effective model, began to hire a large number of employees, and develop some business.” . In that year and a half, their investors were very anxious, but they also helped them a lot.

Invite Media, their first company, was eventually sold to Google with a product called Bid Manager. Its model is to help advertising agencies and advertisers more efficiently and accurately connect, and is a universal advertising buying platform. Their business has become an important part of the online advertising ecosystem, and this ecosystem is a source of income for many Internet companies.

Google acquired the 3-year-old company and invited two co-founders and technical teams to integrate with the DoubleClick products they previously acquired. While at Google, the two founders also began to explore new business ideas, looking for the next business opportunity.

At this stage, they have a good performance record and credibility, have sufficient start-up capital, and are not less attractive to talents. In order to explore new ideas and business ideas, Turner and Weinberg began to invest in angels, and it was this investment experience that brought them into contact with many startup entrepreneurs and learned more about the healthcare industry. Based on these understandings, they later started Flatiron’s business.

Second business: from online advertising to healthcare

Founding Flatiron Health, the original motivation of the founder was personal, Turner ’s young cousin was diagnosed with leukemia, and the medical system ’s early misdiagnosis of his cousin and many other problems made him I believe that the automation of information flow in cancer treatment systems is an important issue.

Based on this, the two founders gave up some other seemingly lucrative directions in the healthcare field, such as insurance and medical accident handling. Instead, establish a digital platform that can structure and visualize the data of each cancer patient’s entire treatment process.

Flatiron hopes to combine the two worlds of digital and medical treatment, so that people can do better for the treatment of the entire cancer. The two founders were not from medical backgrounds, but they started to learn from doctors, patients, and people with treatment experience as much as possible. In the end, before Flatiron was officially launched, they had in-depth communication with at least 500 doctors, hospital administrators, insurance company practitioners, private clinic operators and other relevant personnel.

As a non-medical person, Flatiron created by Turner and Weinberg can obtain structured and unstructured data from medical institutions, and can use these data for complex analysis to better determine for patients A more effective treatment plan can even find some treatment modes that have not been previously available from this massive amount of information.

This is because they, as serial entrepreneurs, have a strong motivation and network to find the right people to learn, so they can quickly find problems and propose solutions.

What are the characteristics of successful serial entrepreneurs?

The Turner and Weinberg stories have many similarities to the success stories of other successful serial entrepreneurs.

Continuous entrepreneurs will tirelessly expand their effective network, and will have in-depth exchanges with various senior people (whether entrepreneurs or investors) in this circle, especially those who do not overlap with their own knowledge Entrepreneur. They are very curious and really interested in the way things operate in nature, which has even become an instinct.

At the same time, they have a strong action force, and they will organize all forces to realize it after seeing a direction, and they are not afraid to correct the direction and track after the cognitive update. The way they look for patterns is also very clear: is there a market segment with insufficient supply? At each node in the industry chain, is there any stagnation in the process, and what improvements can we make. Successful serial entrepreneurs will always act immediately after discovering these opportunities, and can draw up effective and fast learning plans based on intuition and experience.

This article was comprehensively compiled from Medium by Alpha Commune. The author is Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School.