OWN YOUR FUTURE – LIVE 2020 took place live (from our homes) on July 9th 2020. The video included here was recorded at that event.
Sandra Shpilberg is an entrepreneur and author of the bestselling book New Startup Mindset: 10 Mindset Shifts to Build the Company of Your Dreams. The book is based on her founder’s journey, starting, building and then exiting Seeker Health, a digital patient finding platform. Since starting the company in 2015, Shpilberg developed a breakthrough software product, filed a US patent, and built a team which served 60+ biopharmaceutical companies. Her first startup was acquired in late 2018. She recently began her second company, Adnexi, a strategic intelligence platform for the next generation of treatments. She’s originally from Uruguay, speaks fluent Spanish, and brings a global approach to her work and impact. She holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She advises founders and startups and has been on a journey to incorporate more mindfulness into work and relationships. She’s also a contributor at Hackernoon and at Arianna Huffington’s wellness platform, Thrive Global.
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Build the Company of Your Dreams. Focus on real results.
Widely recognized as an innovator and disruptor in digital health, Sandra founded Seeker Health, a breakthrough digital patient finding platform, and most recently authored New Startup Mindset. Listen closely here as Sandra shares her experiences and lessons from the perspective of a non-traditional founder. The learning – dismantle startup myths and focus on real results.
Video Transcript
Our next presenter is an entrepreneur, and an author of a rather new book called “New Startup Mindset: Ten Mindset Shifts “to Build the Company of Your Dreams”. She’s currently building her second startup called Adnexi, a strategic intelligence platform for the next generation of biopharma treatments. And prior to that, she was the founder and CEO of Seeker Health, a breakthrough digital patient finding platform which accelerates drug development commercialization for biopharmaceutical companies. She has an MBA in marketing and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s completed the UCLA Anderson School of Management, corporate and government certification. She’s featured contributor at Thrive Global and Hacker Noon. We are honored to have her today on Own Your Future webinar, so please put your virtual hands together even though we can’t hear you for Sandra Shpilberg.
Thank you so much for that, Ben. I’m so happy to be here. I’m gonna share my screen here, so I can share a couple of slides to guide the talk. Delighted to be here and talk about how to Own Your Future, which is really the most important thing that you could do for yourself, own your present own your future. So what I wanna talk to you about today is my startup story. Some startup myths that get in the way for many of us was starting and growing our businesses, and how to break free to actually own your future. So let’s go right into it.
So what’s a startup? A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And I highlighted extreme uncertainty, because today we are all under conditions of extreme uncertainty. So no matter what you’re doing you are working at a startup, right? We are all under these conditions of extreme uncertainty, and so what that means is that we have to act fast. We have to get information from the market, and we have to take the right step.
So there’s a formula out there, I don’t know if you noticed, but this great show of “Silicon Valley” on HBO, they do a really good job bringing satire to this formula that we see out there for startups. And the formula sort of says that you have to be male, likely Caucasian, Asian or Indian, you’re probably gonna be a programmer, you’re young, you’re going to say yes to a co-founder, and yes to venture funding, and you’re going to try to build a unicorn, right? Unicorn or nothing, basically. So if you don’t see yourself in this formula, can you drop me a little word in the chat thing? “I don’t see myself in this formula,” because you know, what’s the truth I don’t see myself in this formula, and yet, I have been able to not follow that startup formula and build a company that had revenue, has customers, was profitable, and then eventually got acquired.
And so I want to tell you that story, mostly so that you see a different way that this can get done, and that this can turn out for you and for anyone else that is working alongside with you. So I built this company called Seeker Health. Seeker Health was a patient finding platform, so we found patients for clinical trials, for biopharmaceutical companies, right? So this is a business to business type of startup, and I love a B2B startups. Why do I love B2B startups? Because generally, you need just a handful of customers to pay enough to sustain the company, right? And that’s actually a really good test of your idea, right?
Are you able to find three customers that will pay you a significant amount of money to use whatever service or product you have to offer? And so I built this company this way, I did not take outside funding at all. By the time I sold the company I owned 100% of the equity, and that was because instead of taking outside funding, I looked for customers, I look for early paying customers, first offering what I call a minimum viable service.
Back then it was these Facebook, and Google advertising campaigns that were compliant for finding patients for clinical trials. And then very quickly that grew into an entire software platform. I didn’t hire an expensive team, I didn’t hire these adults in the room, you know, that wanna get paid 200, $300,000 no not to that, I hired instead, blank slates who can learn the business, and serve our customers in the best possible way. I use the revenue that was coming from these customers to pay for the software development, so I didn’t have to go race. And I ran a profitable company from year one, we had profit year one, we had a lot more profit year two, and a lot more profit on year three. And I focused exclusively on acquiring customers, and improving the ways that we can serve them.
I’m also not the formula so I didn’t follow the formula, but I know I’m not the formula. I’m an immigrant from Latin America. I’m a woman. I’m not a programmer. I started my company at 39 years old, not 23, and I’m a wife, I’m the mother to two school age kids. And I know myself and I do need eight hours of sleep per day. I like to live a life where I get that amount of sleep. And so that’s the thing that I didn’t follow the formula, and I’m not the formula, and yet the company still grew, the number of customers went up, revenue went up, profit still went up, it all went up into the right like we like to say in startup land. And then in 2018, I received three offers to acquire my startup.
All these offers came from very large companies in my industry that were looking to build in this direction. And you know, for them, sort of the trade off was, “Well, should we buy a company that’s already built this, “or should we build it ourselves?” And one of the things that really, I think made the difference in my company being attractive to acquirers was the fact that we were profitable that if they acquired our company this would be an accretive transaction, meaning we would add to the profit their company, not subtract from it.
And this again shifts the formula, right? Because a lot of the formula in Silicon Valley is raise money, spend all that money, raise more money, spend all that money. Well, how about we get early paying customers, they pay for us to continue to build and grow, and then we still have a profit, right, that we can show for our effort. So I ended up taking door number three over here, and my company was acquired in September 2018. I stayed on for a while to integrate the company, and then I decided to write this book. And I decided to write this book primarily because as I built the company, I realized that I was doing things differently than a lot of the people were, especially here in Silicon Valley, which is where I live, right? People would always ask me the same questions, right? How much funding to raise? None. Who did you raise from? No one, and then how many employees you have? And I would say as few as possible.
And so I realized that I was quite contrary, and then that there was a new way, a different way to think about how to start a company, and how to grow it, and then eventually how to realize the value of what you built. And so one quick thing that I wanna tell you is that this book today is free on Amazon, on Kindle. So if you wanna go get it, you can just go to Amazon and search the title of the book, “New Startup Mindset”, and the book is completely free today, only today, July 9th, and it is because I’m celebrating the three months birth of the book being out there.
And so I think so far you get from me that you don’t have to follow the formula, and you don’t have to be the formula to own your future, but there are myths that get in the way. And so part of what I do in the book is clarify what these myths are and then to spill them. So I’m gonna pick a few, just a few, three of the many myths that I talked about in the book. So the first myth, it’s Unicorn or Nothing.
This is the myth that unless you have created a Facebook or a Google you are nothing and your company is nothing. And as you know nothing can be further from the truth, right? There are many companies that are built that do not reach a valuation of $1 billion, and yet, they are delivering a good service or a product to their customers. They’re making an impact. They’re making revenue. They’re making profit. They’re employing people, and they’re paying bonuses. And all that are things that we did at Seeker Health, and we were not the unicorn. So I like to say that right under unicorns, you have gazelles, lions, giraffes, elephants, and all sorts of really well fed valuable and real animals.
Myth two is that You Are Your Startup, and this is important to the spell because we usually think, “Okay, Elon Musk is Tesla, right? “And Sara Blakely is Spanx,” but you’re not your startup, you’re a human being and your startup is something you work on, and you might work on it for one year and be done with it. You might work with it for three, or five, or 10, or your entire life. But it’s important to break this myth because should your startup fail it doesn’t mean that you do, right? You move on and you work on the next thing, and you get up and you try again, so you’re not your startup you’re a human being. And your startup is something you’re working on for an impermanent period of time.
Myth number three, you need a co-founder, and co-founder is really popular here in Silicon Valley; however, there are some really great studies from the University of Pennsylvania that show that actually companies with a solo founder outperform those with a co-founder, and to me this makes sense, because a startup requires very quick intervention. There is a lot of quick decision making that needs to be made. And when the monster has two heads instead of having one that becomes more difficult, right? So one monster with one head then can decide which direction to go with the startup.
And myth number four, You Need Venture Capital. A lot of companies raise venture capital, and a lot of companies don’t raise venture capital, and many of the companies that don’t is, because they figured out a better way to fund their companies. The way that I funded Seeker Health as I noted was through early paying customers, and I am a huge fan of getting those. They validate your business. They tell you more about what they need, so you can build in that direction, and they pay you for the service or product that you’re providing.
All right, so I wanna now go into a couple of the mindset shifts that can help you begin to shift from this place of you know, I’m not ready, I don’t think I can do it, all of these barriers, and obstacles, and fear that many entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs face to a place where you feel like what is happening is perfectly okay, this is exactly how it is supposed to go. And the first mindset shift is called Beginner’s Mindset, and this is the concept that is perfectly okay for you to be a beginner at your startup, right? When I started Seeker Health, I had done a lot of things prior to Seeker Health, I worked at biopharmaceutical companies and, you know, I talked to a lot of those customers, but I had never incorporated a business, or filed a trademark, or filed a patent, I’ve never done none of that.
And so the beginner’s mindset is saying, you know what, there is a benefit to being a beginner, and that benefit is that one you’re more patient, more curious, more humble, but also you’re a bit free of expectations. Nobody expects me to know how to file a patent, and so I am going to go figure out how to do that in the best possible way. And so this comes from the book, and I say that if you think you need more experience before you start then try understanding that the most relevant experience will be to begin, and then to continue working on your startup.
If you believe that failure is embarrassing then try reframing that failure as an opportunity to learn, get up and keep going. And if you desire to be honored for your past expertise and accomplishments recognize that those are the raw material that you’re bringing to your startup. And if you hear a voice that says, “You’re not good enough,” then talk to this voice and tell them, “You know what, “I’m just getting started, I’m a beginner here, “so check back in a year and I’m gonna show you, “what I’ve been able to do.” Now, I’d love to hear in the chat from you.
What is stopping you today from starting or from growing, or from taking the next big step? And it’s not that I want you to focus on the negative, but I want you to see it, because the minute you see what is stopping you, you can then disarm it, right? You can then work on it. The second mindset shift is Single Deep Focus, and this was super important for me as I built my company, there’s a distraction monster out there, right? Lots of little things beeping our way, and so sometimes it’s very difficult for many of us to concentrate. And yet the vital organs of a startup they need our attention like we need air.
And so in the book, I talk quite a bit about how to tame the distraction monster, how to become super focused and create these periods of single deep focus, right? We can’t sustain that single the focus all day long, but we could definitely do it for two hours when we need to work on that pitch deck that’s going to go to 10 customers, right? And so those are the types of activities that really benefit from this single deep focus. And then finally, the last mindset shift, I love to invite you to enable for you is to welcome difficulties. In the startup way, in the startup land, right?
Difficulties are just the hurdles along the path. They are normal, they are expected. And even these closed doors they show you the way, they show you where the water is flowing, and where the water isn’t flowing. And maybe you should just back up and go in a different direction. And so the concept here is to welcome right, all of these in the book. I talk a little bit about distinguishing between an obstacle and a closed door. And it’s a bit of a deep topic, but it helps because obstacles generally help you become stronger and acquire a new skill, right, that you start up needs. while close doors are more of a message that is telling you it’s time to redirect, it’s time to take a step back, pivot 90 degrees to the right and go in that direction where there aren’t any closed doors. So there’s a lot more of this in the book, but the key concept is these difficulties are completely expected, right? And I wrote about this because as difficult things were happening in my startup I would often get off balance. And then I realized that they were happening pretty much every other week, and that I should stop getting off balance, and instead, I should stop, you know, working with them. If there’s an obstacle that’s gonna make me better, and it’s gonna make our startup better, or is this a closed door where I just need to say, “You know what? “The market is not ready in that direction,” and it’s gonna take a tectonic shift for me to move this door, but the market seems to be ready in this direction, so I’m gonna go there.
Perfect, so with entrepreneurship I think a lot of what I hear from you know, other entrepreneurs, people who’ve read the book is that many times what stopped them is this fear. It’s like a very, very deep fear. It’s a fear of failure. It’s the fear of success. It’s a fear of, you know, losing money, or making too much money, or, you know, hiring the wrong people or lots of fears. And I wanna ask you that if you need to be afraid of anything then channel all that fear into the enormity of what is possible, right? You can create a company, you can do it on your own terms, and you can be very successful, and make an impact at the same time. So with that, I’d love to open it up to questions and answers. I think Ben is gonna help me with that.
I’ll do my best.
Perfect so–
Yeah guys, if you want to throw them in. I know there’s a few questions already, if you got more, lined them up and we’ll knock them down. I do just want to remind everyone you already mentioned, but what’s the deal with you, we can get your book for free today? I wish to remind of that.
That’s right, that’s the deal. So today only July 9, because we’re celebrating the three month anniversary of the book. The E book format, right, the Kindle format display on Amazon, zero dollars just today until 11:59 p.m. Pacific.
I like zero dollars, we won’t ask for the business model around how you’re making money.
I’ll put the whole different thing.
Of course, there was a question from the beginning. It was talking about when you were starting your company, and you mentioned that you focused exclusively on acquiring customers. And there’s curiosity about what worked and what didn’t that process?
Yeah, great question. I tried a lot of things in that process of customer acquisition. I first started with my connections, because this was a B2B business. And I was building a solution for a problem that I was actually quite familiar with, and I had connections in the industry that could be my buyer. So I started with those connections, but then, you know, very quickly went through those, and so the things that really worked for my business were conferences which of course now in the time of COVID-19 are much more limited, but conferences where I would get a speaking spot, I would get 10 minutes to describe what our solution was. And then immediately after the conference I would be approached, you know, by five, 10 people who were interested in learning more, I would then schedule a demo with them, and then try to close them, right? Bring them into the sales funnel and close them. Number two, the thing that worked as well was content marketing, right? Very specific content that I wrote for LinkedIn, that I recorded in podcasts. I didn’t host the podcast, but there was a podcast host, and I was talking about the content that I was interested in talking about, and those have worked very well in terms of bringing in new leads.
Yeah, that’s great. You know, it’s interesting that first point, I think, has been brought up by a couple of different speakers today about just maximizing the potential of your contacts reaching out to every single person you know. I’ve heard that a few times today, so definitely something important to take away. Another question on here from Devin, how did you know that that was the idea that you wanted to start? How’d you know ?
Yeah, a great question, so let me take you back, so this is like the year 2015, I’m working at a startup a biotech company, after working at a medium sized biotech company for nine years. So I worked nine years at this company called Bio Moran medium size. Then I went to this tiny startup, and this startup really struggled to enroll patients that couldn’t find them. And yet, I knew that the patients they were trying to find were online, I couldn’t find good vendors to help me with this. I wanted to buy the system that I ended up building, and I couldn’t find it. And then it ended up happening that that startup, that biotech startup decided not to continue to pursue that drug, and so I was actually out of a job, like I actually got a severance package, you know, four months pay, whatever. And I said, “You know what, this is my sign.” You know, one, I have a really clear need in the market, what I wanted to be the buyer and I couldn’t find it, it doesn’t exist in the way that I wanted to buy it, so I can build it. And then two, this company has given me a couple months of salary runway so that I don’t have to worry, right, for the first four months as to where the income is gonna come from, right? I have four months to get customers. And so that really helps, but that’s how I knew, I kind of I sort of took those two signs just like, when else am I going to have as much certainty, and as much sort of like forward motion to go create this thing?
Yeah, fantastic. This one, it’s more of a comment than a question. It’s actually an answer to your question before about what’s preventing people, I’m just curious what your take might be, it’s from Tammy, I know she’s been with us all day, so thank you, Tammy. It’s been a long day. She says, “What’s preventing her “is choosing a business niche “that resonates with her new values,” she says she’s already had a long career in real estate, investing financial markets, but none of that matters to her anymore, she’s trying to find new places to , I’m just curious, what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, you know what, I’m kind of getting chills as I’m reading that because that totally resonates with me as well. Obviously, like one of the business niches that is easier to choose is something you’ve already worked on, because you can benefit from the connections. But if that isn’t going to speak to you, if that isn’t really aligned with what you think you need to be doing with your life then don’t do it, right? And then go into that new area, go into those new values that become important and resonant right now. And then begin to make the connections, right? I think you’ll be surprised like how quickly you begin to form something new, you know, around something that you never knew anything about. And the example I wanna give you is, you know, I was running a startup, but then I also wanted to write a book, right? And I ended up writing this book, and it had to go into this whole thing of like publishing a book, and promoting a book, and you know, getting on podcasts, or whatever it might be, right? But this was something that I felt really strongly about, and when you do, then you begin taking the right steps for the right things to appear, right? You begin seeking, you begin finding, and as you do that it doesn’t matter that you haven’t had a long career in this area. You can begin to pull it together.
Yeah, for sure. What’s the oldest thing we’ve heard since we were kids is do what you love and the money will come, right?
Absolutely, yes. And I mean, you have to be savvy, right, about it. Like you have to have that disposition. I think that’s one of the things that really helped me with Seeker Health, right? That I was coming from the business side, so I always had this position of, “Look I don’t wanna run a company “that has a loss every year.” That’s just like doesn’t make sense to me, I’m a business person, you know, like a company is revenue minus expenses equals profit, and there should be some profit to show at the end of the day. So of course, like, you know, there’s a way to work arrange that, so that that is the outcome.
Yeah, for sure. There is interesting questions just came in from Eric, kind of on the other side of the table here, he’s asking if there’s any advice for someone who is winding down an unsuccessful startup, just to avoid feelings of defeatism?
Yeah, I hear you, Eric, you know, a lot of startups fail, and I think the best advice that I can give to you is what myth number two was all about? You are not your startup, right? Your startup was there to provide a product or service to a market. And there are a lot of aspects there that we don’t control. Right, we don’t control exactly how the market is going to receive that product. We don’t control the circumstances that we live in like right now with coronavirus, right? A lot of budgets are slashed. A lot of difficulties are there in terms of making sales or getting traction from companies. And so all of that, Eric you don’t control, and therefore I think it’s good to have that, you know, kind of that inner sense of, “Here’s the pieces that I could control. “I tried my best, I gave it a shot, “and these were the pieces I couldn’t control “at the end of the day it didn’t work and that’s okay.” You know, here’s what I learned. Here is maybe what I would have done differently or not, maybe there’s nothing you would have done differently, but just kind of take your time to cleanse all that out. Right, so that then you can be ready to start working on something new.
Yeah, that’s really good stuff. Let’s jump back to growing businesses close to declining ones. Aaron was curious about again, about customer acquisition, he said something you were focused on, he’s curious how long of a window you might expect to acquire your first three customers. How long is too long?
Yeah, how long is is too long?
[Ben] Do you give up?
This isn’t really more relevant for my second startup, because the first startup was a little bit quicker, like just within the first month I had one customer that it looked like they were gonna come on board that kind of kept me really motivated to go get a second. You know, it depends, right? I would say in general like three to six months depending on your tolerance, right? Depending on your tolerance for three to six months of not having revenue, and also, depending on what market you’re working in. If you’re working to bring in like infrastructure type of software into big companies those sales cycles can be a year, right? But if you’re looking to bring in something that a person should be able to decide yes or no, you know, within a couple of days or a week, then you would give yourself a shorter period of time. But I think as a guideline I would say like for me, three to six months I need to see some signs of life, right If there are no signs of life, then either the product has to change, or differentiators have to change, something has to change because we tried it for three to six months and no one’s buying anything.
Yeah, that’s a great answer. Another really interesting one just came in from Ruben. Definitely specific to you. He says I’m a Mexican American just curious what roadblocks if any, you’ve experienced as a Latina in the business world?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I came to the US when I was 16, so I think I had the opportunity to get my college degree here, and, you know, all of my work experience has actually been here in the US. So I feel like I came kind of like early enough to erase most of my accent, you know, kind of like, I’m Americanized in a way, a little bit, but you know, that I think some of the are real. I saw a lot of that with my parents, you know, my parents came to the US in their 40s, and, you know, to this day, you know, my mom has a very thick accent. And people react differently to you like, a little bit of an accent like I have, it’s like, kind of cute and interesting. “Oh, where are you from?” but like when, you know, like, yeah, it’s kind of interesting to be aware of how people react. For me, mostly, I think my approach has been, you know, I am I don’t fit the mold, but I don’t wanna, I don’t need to throw that in your face every single minute, and so to the extent that I can, you know, speak in the most professional way, you know, dressed in the most professional way, while still be me then that’s kind of what’s been my approach. So I think there’s been, you know, I think when with the business, I don’t think that I felt as much discrimination at all from being a Latina. I’m also, this is my husband’s last name. So it also kind of like, you know, Sandra Shpilberg, I mean, that doesn’t sound like Latina at all. I think to some extent there was a little bit more about being a woman, right? And being this like woman CEO, you know, I was running a multi million dollar company, and kind of like making sure that people were gonna take that seriously. Like, I wasn’t creating this like lifestyle business that I do from my couch, right? Like this was a real thing. So I think I struggled more with that and making sure that people were gonna take me seriously in that regard.
Yeah, great. Well, we only got about, I don’t know, 90 seconds or so. So I’ll ask you one last question it comes from Hari, I believe is how you said, this was again an answer to you asking why people are having a hard time kind of getting to it and starting something and they say they’re overwhelmed by the landscape, and their question is, how do you focus?
Yes, great question, it’s very common to be overwhelmed by the landscape. I have a whole chapter in the book about talking to your competitors, because one of the things we’re most afraid of is our competitors, how many of them that are, how quickly they’re evolving? And I think it’s okay to feel overwhelmed by the landscape, but it’s also okay to understand that good companies are targeted companies, right? And so for example, I didn’t start a patient finding platform for a disease under the planet. I started a patient finding platform where the customers were mostly biopharma companies developing in a rare diseases and in cancer, and why? Because that was the area of the market that was underserved, and that was the area of the market that was growing the fastest, right? So that’s what I would tell you if you’re overwhelmed by the landscape, like who else is in here, then maybe try to find areas that are growing the fastest, areas that are underserved, areas where you have a differentiator, you’re bringing something that is going to be very good for that niche. And I think that one of the previous speakers talked about niches, niches are really important. Like the, all the big companies started by serving one piece of the market really well. That’s how success is built. Choose a small piece of the market and serve it perfectly.
Yeah, fantastic. Amazing, we’re unfortunately out of time, but I can talk to you all day. You’ve got such a great perspective on this. Everyone don’t forget, Kindle Store, Amazon, wherever you go to get your Kindle books, “New Startup Mindset,” it’s free today, or go tomorrow and spend some money on it, ’cause that’s even better for everyone of us.
Or you can buy the paperback or the hard copy.
Or buy the real book and then you’ve got it forever, or you can read it 100 times plus. Thank you so much Sandra’s, it’s fantastic.
Awesome, thank you. Bye bye.
