Startups

What can you learn from a patient entrepreneur?

As a patient, you are used to dealing with multiple complex issues on a daily basis. Then you add a business on top and you have to demonstrate you can cope.

On October 8, 2011, I said goodbye to my loved ones and didn’t know if I would ever see them again. 15 hours later I was in the ICU having become the 11th person in the United Kingdom to undergo an intestinal transplant at The Churchill Hospital, Oxford.

As part of transplant I had an ileostomy. This is where part of the intestine is brought to the outside of your body and your bodily waste is collected in a pouch known as an ostomy pouch. You lose control of the very thing you take for granted. On top of that, everyone wants access to output data and the only way of doing this is manually emptying into a jug. There had to be an alternative.

Over the next few months I hacked together a prototype ostomy sensor. It was solely designed to help me manage my condition, but then I realized that it could help other patients like me. 11Health was borne and suddenly I found myself as an entrepreneur. For me, the difference was that I wanted to develop a product to help others; the financial gain was a by-product.

Choosing an investor

Initially I could do everything myself, but then I needed outside investment. I was invested personally and emotionally, but could I convince someone to part with their money and back me? Often the first places to turn for initial seed investment are friends and family. Asking them may be easier than trying to find an angel investor. However, I chose to go down the angel route. If you go down this route, use your own network to find those individuals who will at least take the first call or the first meeting.

Getting noticed by someone who doesn’t know you is very hard. Use places like LinkedIn and other social media to do your research. Before you speak to someone or go to a meeting, know with whom you are dealing. What are their interests? Have they ever invested in things similar to your product before? In my case, Adam Bloom was a pharmacist; he had experience in his training of ostomy care and he manufactured one of the intravenous feeds I had been taking before transplant. There was instant empathy.

What I learned quickly was that passion and an emotional connection to my product can be a fantastic asset, but there needed to be more. You need to build a connection with your investor. That person is effectively your co-founder. Very quickly you have to decide if you can trust them and they you. It is not a dating game.

I knew there was a clear unmet need. I was creating technology to solve the problem. But when you raise money, there has to be a sound business model behind the product. Your investor(s) have to believe you can do more than come up with a great idea.

Managing emotion

As a patient, you are used to dealing with multiple complex issues on a daily basis. Then you add a business on top and you have to demonstrate you can cope. If you are a patient then any investor will ask about your health issues. How will they impact on the business? I knew the question would come up, but didn’t know how to answer it. In the end, I chose honesty and complete transparency. Do not hide anything: you will get found out. Just because you have health issues does not mean you can’t be a brilliant CEO. It made me more determined to prove I could succeed despite my health.

Every business has to demonstrate a potential ROI. As a patient entrepreneur, often that ROI is a mix of money and social impact. I would urge all patient entrepreneurs to be honest about this from the beginning. You may find that some people won’t invest on that basis but that is fine. Plenty will. Plenty of investors wanted to know that it was equally as important to me that my technology could change the lives of patients like myself as well as make money and be sustainable. Don’t be ashamed that your business is not solely about profit.

Learning to take emotion out of a decision is hard. It is especially hard when you are building a technology based on your own personal experience. Every day I strive to make our technology the best it can possibly be. However, as soon as you bring others on board you have investors — shareholders who have entrusted you with their money.

I have learned to think smarter. You have to learn to balance your emotion with sound business principles. However, I find that emotion plays a role in every decision I make. Sometimes you have to take the emotion out. For example, when hiring my second employee I interviewed four people. All had very similar technical skills and in the end I made a judgment based on which personality I felt would fit best. I could have had a person who might have been pushier, or slightly more experienced, but I wanted someone I could build a relationship with, trust, and who would be loyal to me. I was willing to forgo one or two extra courses on a CV in favor of the personality.

Balancing the patient with the entrepreneur

At the moment, I am going through a venture capital fundraise. I have learned that your personal story is really important. People want to hear your journey. However, that has to be combined with a vision of where you can take the business. In a number of meetings I had at the early stages, I learned that I had not thought big enough. I had been too focused on solving the unmet need relating to my own condition that I had not explained how my connected device could work across multiple conditions. I had been too focused and too narrow and that put some off. You have to be able to show vision and belief that you can achieve that vision.

At Stanford Medicine X, I was told that they receive over 30 new tech proposals a month. Amazing people who build great tech and then go looking for a healthcare problem that the tech can solve. However, the best companies are the ones that start with the problem and build their tech to solve it. Well patients know whether there is an unmet need. Really good patient entrepreneurs can then take that unmet need and expand upon it.

People often ask me if it would have been easier to sell something that I wasn’t so attached too. The truth is, I didn’t have a choice. I knew that I wasn’t employable. I had to do this myself. That itself provided a real focus and purpose. Many patients are in the same boat. You go it alone because you have to. Harnessing that passion is great, but it makes rejection sometimes hard to take. When someone tells me they don’t like my device or don’t think there is a use for it, then I take it personally. However, I have learned that the right response has to be based on facts and evidence as well as emotion.

Don’t assume that just because you believe in your product, everyone will. That is not real life. Do your homework when selling. Understand what problem you are solving and what they need to hear in order to say yes. Passion isn’t enough. I take every bad comment, bad tweet, rejection, criticism or disagreement personally. However, as a CEO my job is to take those comments and do better. Solve the issues quicker; prove that we can get it right, and show that we can overcome the challenges. That drive and determination makes patients special entrepreneurs in my opinion.

Photo: Flickr user Carolyn Hall Young


Avatar photo
Avatar photo

Michael Seres

Michael was diagnosed aged 12 with the incurable bowel condition Crohn's Disease. In late 2011 he became the 11th person to undergo a small bowel transplant in the UK at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford. More recently he is a two time cancer survivor.
He started blogging about his journey through Bowel Transplant and his blog has over 100,000 followers. Michael uses social media to develop global on line peer to peer communities.
He is the patient lead for the main UK health twitterchat #NHSSM, a member of the NHS England Digital Services user council & helped implement the first skype clinics in UK. In 2013, Michael founded connected device startup 11Health having developed sensor technology for ostomy patients. In 2015, he was announced as Stanford Medicine X first Patient-in-Residence.

This post appears through the MedCity Influencers program. Anyone can publish their perspective on business and innovation in healthcare on MedCity News through MedCity Influencers. Click here to find out how.

Shares0
Shares0