PillPack

“PillPack, which is a company I'm incredibly excited about that's raised two significant large follow-on, you know, funding rounds where where the founder asked me to take one of the common seats.”

“Having gone through at least two completely existential experiences, where truly the company could have gone out of business very quickly.”

“At the very beginning of PillPack, a very unknown fact is, we used the machinery and the robotic equipment, and it was pretty simple robotics, Out of his dad's pharmacy.”

“VCs have A huge portfolio and take financial risk all the time, but I always look at the folks who take human capital risk. It's what attracted me to pull back in the first place that Elliot Cohn, I knew had loads of options. He graduated well from MIT compute…”

“I mean, PillPack is a company that got acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars. Guess how many engineers they have? 45. This is a tiny engineering team that built a pharmacy operating system, which, you know, the incumbents have supposedly spent half a billio…”

“We would never have funded Deliveroo. We would never have funded PillPack. You know, in fact, Kareem probably would never have taken in any capital because you have to project yourself into sometimes a three or four year cycle before these unit economics reall…”

“To date, David has backed hundreds of startups, including the likes of, check this out, Uber, SendGrid, Twilio, ClassPass, PillPack, and many more. In total, these investments have gone on to create more than eighty billion dollars in value”

“On day one that I've met him by day four, I was shaking hands with him on a thirty million dollar check.”

“One of the leading seed-focused firms of the last decade, with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Glossier, Pillpack, Plaid, and many more incredible companies.”

“And through 2015 we got termination notices from all of the major PBMs, right, very obviously.”

“Actually, Ro launched on our infrastructure.”

“Almost all your best relationships in life are about assuming the best in someone, not assuming the worst, right? And so, if you start from that frame, like, you'll get rid of 90% of conflict by assuming that people are trying to figure it out and everyone's d…”

“We probably waited Nine months to a year longer than we should have to bring in a real operator.”

“We get to the middle of 2015, we went from, I don't know, ten million dollar run rate to, like, a seventy million dollar run rate in, like, six months, nine months, like that”

“There's all these big winners, and pharmacy, there's basically, there was no e-commerce player before PillPack. Like, that didn't exist, right?”

“The bigger decisions that we made over the course of the business were a byproduct of going on two-hour walks three times a week for six months.”

“If I had been working in pharmacy for a decade as an adult, there's no way I would have started a pill pack, because there were very specific reasons it shouldn't have worked, and I think that's where the naivety is really powerful.”

“We took money from exclusively consumer tech investors and We weren't out pitching healthcare investors.”

“And so, we were 48 hours from going from, like, I don't know what it was, a hundred million in revenue to zero. Like, zero.”

“I think the practical answer to your question is we raised like a nine on 30 post or something. With no structure.”

“My dad had started this totally new pharmacy that was sorting and packaging meds actually very similar to PillPack. But they were selling into nursing homes and assisted living facilities. It wasn't a consumer business.”

“One, like, we were now, like, a version of scale, right? Like, a couple hundred million in run rate or something like that.”

“All of the companies that traded in pharmacy in the public markets dropped by, like, 15% in, like, three minutes.”

“By the time we sold the company, you know, we've got a thousand people, we're doing a few hundred million in top line, the entirety of that meeting was me Yvonne, who was COO, CFO, legal HR, kind of all those functions, Elliot, who was product and tech, Jeff, …”

“The physical product today, which is now almost a decade later, is exactly the same as it was when we designed it the first time around.”

“By the time I got to doing the deal with Amazon, like ultimately it was a phone call that was like, if you hit a billion, we're done. And they hit a billion and we were done”

“In hindsight, that is, like, literally the opposite culture, right? It's like, It's kind of assumed the worst until you're proven otherwise.”

“That fund was an eighty million dollar fund, and I think our Proceeds from the sale was 15 or twenty million dollars gain, something like that.”

“PillPack returned fund two.”