Founding a Successful Healthcare SaaS Company from a Technical Founder’s Perspective
“I’m still excited about what we can do with the product. One of my favorite things to do is iterate on something… I have certainly had opportunities and conversations about moving up the chain into management or more into product strategy. I continue to say, no thank you. I enjoy figuring out what this product can do; what function can we ad; what can we do later, and what can we tie together now for more function, more efficiency, and more integration.”
At our recent Founders’ Story event, Tobin Juday, Co-Founder & Principal Product Manager at Updox, told local entrepreneurs and investors what it’s like as a technical founder to start an advanced technology business. It’s a compelling story, and Tobin is just the right person to tell it.
As Tobin was describing the journey, I relived our shared experience—and I’ve been reflecting on it since. Updox was founded in 2008, but we’ve been collaborating with the team there since before Rev1’s “day 1”.
How is it that Tobin and his Updox co-founders took some intellectual property designed to import faxes (faxes!) and built an incredibly capital efficient business (largely bootstrapped) that was acquired by a $2 billion company in a successful exit?
I’ll give you the top line. Updox was so successful because from the very beginning, they created a complementary team of people, a winning culture, and put leaders in the right roles that both played to their strengths and filled critical needs for the company. That started with the Tobin and his co-founders and continued as the company scaled.
Tobin says that he never wanted to be a CEO (although he had opportunities), and that with his co-founders at Updox, he didn’t have to be. “In a startup, there is room for all types,” he says, “It was great at Updox to be able to partner with our team where everyone was focused on what they wanted to do and what they did best.”
That’s the message for every founder in every startup. The most successful founding teams are complimentary. In the most investable startups, values are aligned, founders share responsibility and balance the workload, and most importantly every founder is in a role where they have the opportunity and priority to leverage their own set of skills, interests, and contribute to the needs of the company.
Working with Updox has been one of our most pleasurable experiences, and that’s attributable to the Updox founders and management team. Updox is a real-life case study of a success story here. Tune in.
