Wednesday evening at the seventeenth floor of 1251 Avenue of the Americas there was a room full of founder who wanted to know one thing: how you get to one hundred million without losing your head.
Saad Alam, co-founder and CEO of Hone Health, told how he did. It wasn’t a big money story or giant rounds. It was the story of someone who learned to say no to easy business to keep up the only thing that matters: quality.
Hone Health is a longevity medicine platform. He scaled over $100 million revenue. In the last five years, he’s refused about $80 million in business. Not because he couldn’t. Because if he did, the system collapsed.
“The moment you build an infrastructure that allows you to scale, the level of operational complexity increases enormously,” explained Alam. “Whoever tries us fails. It’s too high. ”
The real competitive advantage is not the product. It is the factory behind it.
When you see a telehealth company, you see it simple: test, consultation, prescription. Actually, it’s so complicated that almost nobody does. The flow is simple on paper. Actually, you have to make sure people really take drugs. Testing every nine days. Infinite coordination. And every time you add a category of medicine (Alam has five), complexity does not increase in straight line. Explodes. Double, triple, quadruple.
“When you build that infrastructure,” he said, “then you can do things that no one else can do. ”
In the last two years Alam has finished building the Longevity Operating System. Parts of vertically integrated technology. All connected with artificial intelligence. Look at your tests and say what’s wrong. Look at the data collected in five years. Only they can do it, and they know exactly what medicines to prescribe. It’s business.
But all this doesn’t work if you say yes to $80 million business that you can’t serve well.
“We just said no,” he said. “It’s a tough rule. I don’t regret it. ”
The questions of the public were about what the founder always asks: how do you scale quickly without losing the people behind? How do you decide when you build the team? How do you maintain culture when everyone works one hundred per hour?
Alam has six values in his company. The first is “communicate candidly but kindly”. Don’t turn around the problem. Tell your team exactly what she thinks doesn’t work, but do it with respect. The second is vision: people have to believe where you are going. The third is calculated risk. He doesn’t want people who just want coasting.
“When you build a team of people who share these values,” he said, “You have no strange conversations. ”
On the question of equity, Alam made spatters. “The number really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you build the right team and that you all end up fine. All together. ”
The way Alam lives is supported by three pillars: family, impact, flow. Flow is something that few people understand. That’s what happens when Tony Hawk does a 720 on the skateboard, or when someone jumps from a mountain with wings. At the time of jumping, the brain stops thinking and time expands. Half a minute in the air seems to last two hours. The body and space synchronize perfectly, and time does not disappear, expands.
Work rarely happens, but it happens when you work with people you love, who really believe in what you’re doing. “I feel lucky I can choose who I spend time with,” said Alam. “And I am obsessed with building high quality teams where this happens. ”
At the end of the evening Alam told how his real goal is that everyone in the end is fine. All together in this search.
Alam’s final message was simple: it’s not the funding you win. It’s not the number of customers. It’s the team. It’s the system. It is the ability to say no to the eighty million business that you cannot serve well, because you know that so keeps up the only thing that matters.
It’s selectivity. It is to have the courage to stay small enough to stay good.
L’articolo How to build a hundred million dollars without throwing away what matters proviene da IlNewyorkese.
