Year 4 Startup Learnings
17 September 2023
This is the first year that Loyal has felt inevitable.
There are still many ways we fail. For the first time, I feel like it’s our ball to fumble. The path forward is challenging but clear, and I feel confident in my and my team’s ability to execute.
This past year was also the first time I faced objective failure.
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Silicon Valley is a tiny sliver of the knowledge & wealth in the world.
This year, the music stopped. Rising interest rates and multiple venture capital-funded embarrassments (“The FTX effect”) have made fundraising for a weird company like Loyal much more challenging. I once raised $7M in a thirty minute phone call - it recently took me about three months to raise a similar amount.
I also objectively failed for the first time this year. I tried to raise a Series B in 2022. Despite excellent execution - a direct quote from a Tier 1 VC who later passed: “every time you pitch us, you’ve achieved the milestones you promised last time - that never happens” - I wasn’t able to pull it off.
I now realize this failure was necessary - in fact, I believe our probability of success from where we are today to launching the first longevity drug would be lower today had I succeeded in raising that round.
Failure forced clarity
I was forced to define what Loyal is at her core: a dog longevity company. My goal in life is to build The Aging Pharma, the company that helps make aging drugs a class of drugs as common and consensus as statins, and Loyal is my vehicle for this mission. But to do this, we first must build a multi-billion dollar animal health company. While I logically knew this previously, failure forced me to acknowledge and imbed this into every aspect of how I run the company.
Failure forced prioritization
It has always been my personality to parallelize. I was once a research assistant three labs concurrently and was still enrolled in my PhD while working at Longevity Fund. But while this has been an effective way to run my life, it is not an effective way to run a company. Failure forced me to learn how to prioritize our efforts and our resource allocation in a way I was never forced to learn in a resource-unconstrained environment.
Failure forced defining objective value
This year, I learned the difference between an important milestone for the company, and creating objective value. I redefined the company around two objectively valuable milestones: bringing the drug to market, and the company being profitable off of sales of this drug. These are objectively valuable milestones because you do not need to understand how a drug is built, how FDA approval works, or other technical concepts to understand that if the company achieves these milestones, we will be more valuable than we are currently.
Failure forced operational excellence
With less capital than I previously thought we’d have to bring this drug to market, failure forced us to become efficient. The team operates better than ever, because timelines and spend truly matter in a way they didn’t before.
Failure forced learning new worlds
Entrepreneurship is all about rejecting norms, recognizing social conditioning, and building for the future you envision, not the one prescribed to you. Yet this year, I realized I had allowed myself to fall prey to Silicon Valley’s social conditioning - that success is raising from certain funds, of the social hierarchy, that the best company builders and thinkers in the world are only here and only build in this way.
I had to go deeper into the forest and learn traditional capital networks for the first time. I met people with different values, fundraising styles, and operational perspectives. Seeing how they evaluated Loyal and ran their own businesses has helped me better understand how companies of all type are run, and this has made me more explicit in my values and the choices I make as a CEO.
Despite building Loyal for four years now, every year I understand this company and our opportunity better. I now feel clearer than ever on where we are going, the opportunity ahead of us, and who we need to be to execute on it.