Sandra Shpilberg is the Founder and CEO of Adnexi, a disease intelligence platform for the next generation of biopharma treatments.
Prior to this, Sandra was the Founder and CEO of Seeker Health, a breakthrough digital patient finding platform, which accelerates drug development and commercialization for biopharmaceutical companies. Seeker Health was acquired by EVERSANA in September 2018.
She’s the author of New Startup Mindset, a book on her non-traditional founder’s journey and lessons learned starting, building and exiting this company.
She’s a featured contributor at Thrive Global, InsightTimer and Hackernoon.
On today’s Show we Talk about
- What question should a founder or founder team should ask themselves about a company before starting it?
- How important is positioning one’s company?
- The temptation to take venture funding and the positives and the negatives of going down that path?
Connect with Sandra Shpilberg
https://www.adnexi.com
https://sandrashpilberg.com
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-shpilberg-b7b334/
Website https://www.sandrashpilberg.com/
CONNECT WITH SHAWN
- Shawn Flynn’s LinkedInAccount
- Silicon Valley LinkedInGroup Account
- Shawn Flynn’s FacebookAccount
- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Intro 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast, a show we sit down with Sandra Shpilberg, who is the founder and CEO of Adnexi, a disease intelligence platform for the next generation of biopharma treatments. Prior to this, Sandra was the founder and CEO of seeker health, breakthrough digital patient finding platform, which accelerates drug development and commercialization for biopharmaceutical companies. Secret health was acquired by Everson in September 2018. She’s also the author of new startup mindset, a book on her non-traditional founder’s journey and lessons learned started building and exiting a company. On today’s show, we talked about what questions should a founder or founder team ask themselves about the company before starting it? How important is positioned in one’s company and the temptation to take venture funding and the positives and negatives of going down this path? This is much more today’s episode. And Sandra offers our guests a special offer. If you write a review on iTunes, take a picture and message me We’ll put your name in a raffle to win a copy of her book, new startup mindset. All right, now let’s start the show. Enjoy.
Announcer 1:15
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech, learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:32
Sandra, thank you for taking the time today to be on the Silicon Valley podcast. Now I’m super excited for you to be here. I mean, I have your book right next to me. And I’ve already read it. And well, let’s just say I’m too excited to not start this right now. So, Sandra, to give our audience a little bit of background of who you are, can you tell us your career briefly up into this point?
Sandra Shpilberg 1:52
Sure, I’d love to. So, I always think of my career starting when I was an employee and my father’s hardware store. He had one of these mom-and-pop hardware stores where you went to get cable or paint or you know, sort of consumables, that kind of thing. And one of the really important things he taught me was to delight customers. That was his whole thing, right? Find out what the customer needs and give it to them with a smile, help them come back to our store again. And of course, years later, we immigrated to the United States of America, my mom, my dad, my brothers and I, we came to Brooklyn, New York, I continued my education, they are graduated from high school, went to college and then decided to get the type of job that an immigrant should have like a really solid stable job. So I studied accounting, web accounting, I got a job on Wall Street first in audit then in financial control. And then pretty soon I realized that I really liked accounting, but I didn’t want to do accounting for the rest of my life. I decided to get an MBA to transition, hopefully into something related to biotechnology or technology, an area that was innovative and exciting. And that’s what happened. I went to Wharton, then I ended up interning at Genentech, the mother of all biotech companies, wonderful internship and then I came back and continued working at Centocor. It’s a Johnson and Johnson biotech company. biotech was a great area for me, because here the products really are helping someone right. And that was really important to me, what I’m working on somehow needs to be related to a value, it has to have some value for someone that is receiving it. biotech really provided that along with of course, lots of innovation to go along with it. Then after that moved to the west coast started my job at BioMarin, which is a biopharmaceutical company back then it was a small biopharmaceutical company going after their first approval, their first drug approval, I was part of the marketing department. And that was a wonderful experience. I spent nine years at that company, really, I feel like those were like my formative years from a biotech experience. And then I noticed that I wanted to go to smaller and smaller companies. So I went to this startup called Nora therapeutics. And Nora was developing a few drugs for fertility treatments. And they are is where I noticed that there was an incredible need to find patients for clinical trials. That need wasn’t well served in the market, especially for small companies, and especially for companies working in rare diseases. It turned out that neurotherapeutics decided not to pursue their product any further. So I was actually out of a job. And I was going to smaller and smaller companies. And so I decided, you know what, this is the perfect time, I’m going to start my own company. That’s when I started secret health. Secret health was a patient finding platform to find patients for clinical trials specifically for rare disease. And initially, I started the company by providing a service and then I grew that service into a platform that was more scalable. I had this opportunity to start build the company and then I started getting acquisition interests of several companies that were looking to go into this market. They were looking to either buy or build so they were exploring the buy option for them, I ended up selling the company, the company was acquired by Eversana, which is a large life science services conglomerate in 2018. And then I went into the integration process with them, which was great. That was about a year and a half. And now I’m back out, I had learned so much in this process of starting building on exiting that I was really motivated to write a book. And that’s why I wrote this book, new startup mindset 10 mindset shifts to build a company of your dreams. One of the things I realized specifically in that time was that I had done almost everything differently than this Silicon Valley formula in quotations. And that it was important for me to show other aspiring entrepreneurs, current founders a different way to do it. So that’s why I wrote the book.
Shawn Flynn 5:43
Okay, there’s too many things to talk about right there, your acquisition, your exit how you did something, not conventional, not the Silicon Valley normal path. But your company. I mean, you started it, you built it, you exited it, you went through all those paths, can you go into a little bit more detail about those different areas, those different phases of your company’s lifecycle.
Sandra Shpilberg 6:05
love to start is very much embracing the sense of being a beginner, of course, I was bringing into this company, a knowledge of clinical trials, I was bringing my experience in biopharmaceutical as well as my contacts and my connections in that area, there was so much that I didn’t know and there was so much that I didn’t even know that I had to know, in start, it was all about embracing this beginner’s mindset that about half of the things that I was going to show up to do every day, I had never done before. And that that was going to be perfectly okay. Because I could learn right growth mindset, I can learn how to do these things. And I can figure them out at some point or another. So that was very much the start also has this feeling of like, you really don’t know if this is going to work, right? We’re just trying to figure it out. In start, really, one of the key things is to find the product market fit, right? What is it my customer really needs? I think my customer needs patients to enroll in a clinical trial. I think they want to find them on social media. But how do I really turn this into a product that they want to buy, and they want to buy it now, right without a lot of competition. So that’s what’s happening and start in build, I then we solidified a product market fit, hopefully, we have a product that we’re taking to market. And now we are replicating that process of selling and delivering the service product build become sort of more of this marathon, right, where you’re trying to get more and more customers to buy what you’re offering continuing to get feedback from them and adjusting as needed. But it really is more of like a replication effort of like, this year, we had 10 customers next year, let’s have 30. The next year, let’s have 50, right and so forth. Exit is its own whole thing. And it’s a very exciting process. I think it’s the process that requires incredible self-clarity as to whether or not this is the right time to exit the company, I exited my company in year three is considered generally relatively early, it takes much longer generally to build a company for me and really had to go through this whole internal process that was facilitated by a coach and what I’m thinking through, is this the right time to exit this company, or do you want to continue building it? Or do you want to bring in other financing options into the table, there’s sort of this component of parting at some point with the creation and letting it live on its own. So my company’s secret health now lives on its own without me, which at some point, will be considered an impossibility, right? How can this company operate without me? its creator, but at the end of the day, I think the exit is all about that. It’s enabling the company to operate without the founder.
Shawn Flynn 8:49
Even before the start build exit. Were there any times where you’re asking yourself questions about the company? And what were those questions? And maybe, I mean, does founders teams should they ask themselves questions before they start?
Sandra Shpilberg 9:05
Yeah, absolutely. I think you should definitely ask yourself some questions. I think probably the most important question to ask yourself is, am I the right person to start this company at this time? Right. So is this the best way that I can add value to someone else at this time? And I think for me that checked out to be yes, I had the half of the knowledge that I needed, the clinical trials, the biopharmaceutical contacts, and of course, I was missing the other half. And all founders are always going to be missing the other half. That’s one of the most important questions to ask am I the right person to be doing this today. Is this the best way that I bring value to others today?
Shawn Flynn 9:47
And what about the team? What questions should you ask the team members?
Sandra Shpilberg 9:52
team members are super important, especially those first few people that you hire, they end up becoming basically members of the family. For those team members, I was looking specifically for a growth mindset like similarly to what I’m speaking about today, I was looking for people who were looking to learn who were excited about the mission of the company. And who would perceive trying as a great thing to do, you could fail when you try. That’s okay, we get up, we learn something, we dust ourselves off, and we keep going. that’s mostly what I was looking for this growth mindset, I write in the book, a couple of other things that I started looking later on, one of them has to do with energy, this position. And its sort of like, a bit more unusual way to read someone, but what I’m looking for is the centered energy disposition. And that’s in contrast to either spilling your energy all over the place, there are a lot of people who are very enthusiastic, and they sort of start spilling their energy all over the place, and it doesn’t land very well on the team, especially on a daily basis. The contrast to that is somebody who is withholding their energy, and its sort of like apathetic, I’m removed. And so neither one of those are generally great team members, right? Because for the apathetic, the team is trying to get them to like get a little bit more excited and more involved. And for the person that’s spilling their energy and is over excited, the team is sort of looking at them sideways being like, what are you on? And what’s wrong with you, like, are you in touch with reality that this is a startup like, we have a great chance of success, we have a great chance of this maybe not really going the way that we all think of, that’s another thing that I started looking for. And then the third thing is towards the end, we use the disc, which is a tool that is used to basically assess the personality of somebody in a work setting. And what’s important about that is that generally, we want to create a balanced team. And so to do that, we need to understand well, what am I so I generally tend to be a driver, as somebody who’s really focused on goals. And somebody who is an influencer, who wants to influence people use my words, use my presence to influence, I need a counterbalance to that, and the counterbalance to that is somebody who is generally a more conscientious person who’s going to think more about like the complete wholeness and the wellness of the organization. And so as I was hiring people, I noticed that intuitively, I tended to hire those people, that would be my compliment, right? That would be my opposite. They were bringing that to the table as well.
Shawn Flynn 12:22
I’ve never heard anyone talk about the energy and the overflow disk. Yes, I have heard but not this energy. This is pretty fascinating. I mean, most of the startup founders, I come across it, we were friends in college, or we met at work or met at some event, and we decided to form a team. But the way that you really pictured the importance of all the different personality traits that fascinate you have your team; you’re moving forward to that first client. Now you haven’t had any sales yet. What was it like going into that first client meeting? to sell your company to them? What was going through your head? What do you learn in that instance?
Sandra Shpilberg 13:00
Yeah, I think that first meeting was part a terrifying part, super energizing. And part the best learning experience that I could ask for I’m in front of a group of customers, not unlike if I was trying to pitch a group of venture capitalists, it’s just that here, they happen to be the members of our company that wanted to consider our product to buy it to use it for their purpose. I say terrifying, because of course, it’s sort of like a high stakes type of situation. And I always say startups, you sometimes only need one or two things to go, right. But if you have like a bunch of things going wrong, at the same time, it can be really demoralizing. So here was my first customer. I really, really want this to go. Right. Right. So that’s kind of I think one of the terrifying parts, because I wanted to go right. Also, it was extremely energizing, because here I am, know what I created, right? What the team is creating what I’m creating is now in front of a legitimate company, who is actually considering this for use the best learning experience, because every question that they ask me during that meeting becomes something that now I can build right into the pitch deck into the product to the to preempt the questions. And after I’ve done a couple of those types of meetings with customers, then whatever I’m presenting is a lot more solid. So I was looking at it, this first meeting mostly as a learning opportunity for me to say, Well, what is this customer need? Where are we getting stuck on questions? What else do I need to build into my service and product to make this go smoother? The second time around that first customer bought what we had to sell? And not only did they buy it, they used it for two years, right? So they were one of my longest standing customers because usually clinical trials turned over. So generally like our product life cycle of enrolling a trial might be more like six months to nine months, but they ended up using what we sold to them for over two years.
Shawn Flynn 14:55
Okay, so you land the first client, you have traction. I’m guessing at that Point, angels were coming up to you possibly venture capitalists going, Hey, take our money. What was happening there? Did you want to take venture capitalists at that time where you say no what was going through your head, because most companies even before they have that first company, or customer are already out there pitching for investors.
Sandra Shpilberg 15:19
I didn’t pursue that route at all. I wanted to build a revenue generating a profitable company. That’s what I was after. I designed a service initially, that became a platform and that service generated revenue right away, and the revenue for that service was more than enough to cover the costs of the people that would deliver the service, when that question that you’re asking became really, truly relevant was about six months into the venture where we figured out that we had to really offer an entire platform, we couldn’t just offer the service, the service was part a, of a three part process that we had to offer to our customers. And so that’s when I needed to go build software, building software is not inexpensive. So I had to go hire a couple of software developers to go do that. And that was the moment but for a second, I said, well, should I go out to venture in show them we have some traction at that point, we had six customers, we had revenue coming in, we had a pretty solid monthly recurring revenue we could count on as well. And I said, well, should I should I or should I not, I decided not to for many, many reasons, I write all the reasons in the book, I’m gonna highlight a few just here. One of the reasons is that it didn’t seem to be a good use of my time, I had at that time, a close friend who was also starting a company. And he had to go on 70 meetings to get to venture capitalists to give them funding. Now, here I am an immigrant woman, first time founder. So how many meetings will it take for me, you know, to go on, if he had to go on 70 to get to, then how many do I have to go on? Maybe it’s not true things are changing. It’s very dramatic. I think the change that is happening right now in terms of investing and investing in female owned businesses, to me, it just didn’t seem like a good use of time, it seemed like instead of approaching 70, venture capitalists, I should approach 70 biotech companies, because my win rate was much higher there, right. And they would actually pay me money to deliver the service without taking any equity in the company. And so to me, that seemed like a much better deal. The second part of it was that, at the end of the day, venture capitalists are looking for a return on the business. And that was one aspect of what it meant to create the startup. But the most important aspect, the main reason why I was doing this was more mission driven, like I wanted to create a technology that would bring efficiency to this process of finding patients, especially those with rare diseases and cancer, for these clinical trials, because these clinical trials end up producing lifesaving medications. And the quicker we get that clinical trial enrolled, the quicker that drug reaches that patient that might need them needed. I was willing to make some tradeoffs there in terms of what the return needs to be, because there was another return to me, which was making an impact making a difference.
Shawn Flynn 18:10
That was very interesting about the whole time first return. I mean, I’ve talked to founders in the past that have had 200 meetings with VCs before they landed that investment. And you think about it, you have the hour meeting, you’re driving back and forth. The introduction, the time, there’s hundreds and hundreds of hours put into these meetings where maybe if they had used that time for customers, they would have been in a whole better position. Okay, you have customers, now you’re looking at your competitors out there. How did you go about finding your key value proposition in an existing market?
Sandra Shpilberg 18:42
The main aspect there was to really think very carefully through positioning the company and through the segmentation that was available there. And there was a very interesting dynamic in the market that I started to find out by actually talking to my competitors and trying to get as much information as I could to understand where they were operating. And here’s the dynamic, most of the companies that call themselves clinical trial enrollment. They didn’t want to enroll Rare Disease studies or cancer studies. Why? Because they were harder. They were more difficult to enroll. They wanted to enroll depression studies, pretty much everybody has depression. They wanted to enroll asthma studies. That’s one of the wanted to enroll because there’s so many patients and they’re much easier to find that became part of the attribute that helped us differentiate. We were focused on enrolling, right finding and enrolling these patients that had rare diseases, maybe think one in 10,001 and 200,000 patients and those that had cancer. Both of those were areas that were sort of our competitors were like we’re not touching that too difficult. And so here comes a start up and says we’re going to go right in there. And rare diseases to me was not scary at all because I had worked in rare diseases right by Moran and Nora therapeutics were Both Rare Disease companies, I’d worked in them combined for a period of 10 years, I knew what these patients needed, I knew how motivated they were to be in a clinical trial, when many of them have very few options for treatment. That’s what really helped the differentiation. So sort of the bottom line is, there might be competitors in the market, but look very carefully, because there’s usually a portion of the market that they don’t want to serve. It’s either maybe they don’t want to serve very small companies, or they don’t want to serve very large companies. They don’t want to serve companies that are doing this type of program or that type of programs so that segmentation becomes really crucial to do early on and to say, well, we’re going to play here where these people don’t want to play that much, then therefore, my competition will be less until they wake up to the fact that this is a thriving market.
Shawn Flynn 20:50
How important is it in as a startup to position yourself? What insights what advice thoughts can you share on this?
Sandra Shpilberg 20:58
This is super important, I think to position the company because many times when we see the success stories, right like Facebook, the Googles the zooms now, we think that they work for everybody, right, that they provide their service for everybody that is out there, right, all 8 million people in the globe. That is not true, especially when you think about how each one of these companies begins. Even Facebook began on college campuses targeting a specific age demographic, targeting a specific behavior profile. It’s very important early on to find that group of consumers that segment that acts the same way and is most likely to adopt the product or service as fast as possible. All companies should do that, especially in the beginning. Once you start to grow, you can say well, okay, like for secret health, we were really well positioned for emerging biopharmaceutical companies working in rare diseases and working in cancer. Well, now that we’re growing, we can grow we can go after Pfizer. We can go after those others, but It’s very important in the beginning to get traction, quick traction in a group of customers that really needs what you are offering today.
Shawn Flynn 22:08
Now many startups, I mean, they want that funding, so they can go out and hire as many people as possible. They want to grow a team. In fact, a lot of people brag about, Hey, I know you know, I’m going to increase my company by 20 employees next quarter, and we’ll have 100 employees. By the end of the year, it seemed like you did the exact opposite approach, you tried to keep it as small as possible. In fact, I remember hearing you’re hiring blank slates. Now. Can you talk to us and give us a little insight of your hiring and why, once again, do the opposite of everyone and instead of grow as fast as possible, keep it as small. And as I guess, family as you did?
Sandra Shpilberg 22:48
Let’s start with blank slate, blank slates are these individuals that perhaps do not have all the experience that is required to take on the job, but they’re smart, they can learn fast, and they believe in the mission, and they think that working at this company is a good thing to do with our limited time on this planet, right. So that’s what I consider a blank slate, probably the opposite of a blank slate is an adult in the room, which is why a lot of the startups at some point tend to hire very expensive managers, that leaders that are going to know what they’re doing, because they probably have done it before. Because I was bootstrapping the company. I certainly didn’t have money to hire adults in the room. But I don’t want them necessarily either. At that stage in the company, I found that the blank slates these people that were really hungry to learn were really excellent growing with the business. And to some extent, what we were doing at secret health wasn’t really being done anywhere else. So it wasn’t like I could find that I could write a job description that said, I need this prior experience. And the prior experience would exist, it really didn’t exist. At the end of the day, blank slates were what it was all about. Now, let’s go to the numbers. Every time I would go to these sort of like startup or founder type of meetups, people would always ask me three questions. How much money did you raise? Zero? Was my answer. Who did you raise them from? No one. And then how many employees do you have as few as possible? There’s sort of like this sense that more employees mean more traction, there is a perspective that if you are building a company, and now you have all these seats, filled that now the company can move much faster traction in the market, but it’s not always right, I was trying to build here a revenue generating a profitable company. So for me, it was very important to keep the team small, to give them really broad jobs, jobs that will make them really excited. They were learning so many different things in this job that they could take on, of course, their next step in their career. That’s really what I was looking for. So that’s why the team was small.
Shawn Flynn 24:48
Okay, now let’s move to the exit that acquisition, because you’re getting a lot of offers at this point. What did that process look like? How did the conversations even start?
Sandra Shpilberg 24:58
The first conversation started with a former colleague, who was running a marketing communications farm, he approached me and said, we are looking to go into this clinical trial patient finding space, we are interested in seeing what you have with the intention of contemplating acquiring it, I went through a whole process with them the letter of intent, the beginning of due diligence. And then towards the end, we started pitching this product together as sort of like a practice run of what the eventual marriage would be like, it wasn’t sticking like something about it wasn’t quite working out. So at the end of the day, they decided to walk away thinking that secret health revenue wasn’t moving as fast as they wanted it to move that was sort of the excuse and that they were going to postpone and come back to me. And I said, Let’s not postpone and come back to me, let me just be out of this exclusivity agreement. Because around that time, I had gotten a second inquiry, a different company, similar background to this company, who was also interested in acquiring secret health, I flew to them. And then we did this whole wine and dance, getting to know them getting to know the company, they put together their letter of intent. And there were certain times in that letter of intent that I really didn’t like, right. At that point. I said, you know what, I had to take a pause. And it happened to be that I went to this conference with everybody was talking about these executive coaches, and I had never had an executive coach. But I said, you know what, this is probably the perfect time for me to get an executive coach, so that I can think through whether or not this is the right time to sell secret health. First question, is this the right time to sell this company that you know, I’m creating? I’m still building and then to if it is the right time, then what would be the terms of this agreement that would make it minimize my sellers, remorse, so that those were the two objectives. I started working with Charles Rose, who’s an executive coach, and we went through this entire process. It took a number of weeks to sort of sort out through everything that was related to is this the right time? Is it not the right time, from an emotional physical Financial and spiritual perspective, looking at what happens if I sell cigar health now versus what happens if I wait another year continue to build. And at the end of that exercise, I came to the conclusion that we had built something of value. I was working very hard at it, and that this was a good time to entertain these offers. So that was answering the first question. And then we worked on the second question, well, if all went well, then why do I want offer to look like? And I think the main lesson there is to really ask for what you want. Because this deal is only consummated once you only get to sell this company once better meet sort of all the needs that are sort of dreams or expectations. And so some of them were financial, of course, and some of them had to do more with practical things like where the company was going to be where these employees going to be retained and maintained with jobs, which was important to me, because they had obviously dedicated three years to work in a secret health, and I want them to continue to have jobs and things of that sort. And then I was ready now to negotiate. I didn’t know if a third company would come along, but a third company came along, once they asked what I was looking for now, I was completely prepared with a list of points, I communicated that to them. I didn’t hear any strange noises, right, they didn’t hang up on me. Then from then on, we went on to negotiate the letter of intent first, then we went into a due diligence process that took about three months. And that due diligence process is very important process I write a lot about in the book, because I love founders to know what they need to do during that time. And then the agreement was drawn up, signed, the wire was made, and now secret health belong to Eversana and then I went on to help them into it the company.
Shawn Flynn 28:49
So let’s go back, you’d mentioned something that I want to dive into. You said you hired an executive coach. Now, I haven’t really talked to any founders that have done this before. But what was your experience? Hire an executive coach? I mean, it does sound amazing. But would you recommend it for other founders? When would you recommend it? And just give me some more feedback on this? I’m really curious.
Sandra Shpilberg 29:11
Yes, an executive coach, I think is fantastic. When there is a big decision, a big inflection point to think through. And it is important to have a person who can act, both as somebody who can help you think through all the potential issues or potential situations, the benefits, and also help align that to some values. The executive coach is not a lawyer. It’s not an accountant, right. But in my case, one of the reasons why I hired Charles Rose was that he had been a startup founder, he had sold companies. And that’s what my question of the moment was, Do I want to sell? What does it mean to sell this company? And if I do, then how do I want this deal to go and hiring an executive coach? I say yes, definitely, I would hire again, an executive coach, I think it’s important to choose somebody who’s walked in your shoes before, because not everybody has sold the company, not everybody has started or built the company. So I would say it’s very important to choose somebody who’s walked in your shoes before. It’s the timing of that is when you have one of these milestone decisions, one of these important decisions. I’m less a fan of having an executive coach at all times, that becomes more of like a corporate psychologist, and it can work. I mean, it might be nice to have that space to talk about the issues that are going on. But I think it’s really effective. When you have a specific question you’re trying to solve together, everybody stays really focused on that question. And then all the work that is being done between the coach and the coachee are for resolving that question.
Shawn Flynn 30:47
And now the transition phase, the company was acquired, kind of what were your roles? What were your employees? Because you’d mentioned it was very important for you that the employees still had jobs after? What was that transition period like that integration period?
Sandra Shpilberg 31:03
Yes. So the first few months, we continue sort of operating as it was and then set the goals for the integration, mostly the goals for us were in the beginning to transition all the back office to the acquirer. So HR, accounting tax, all of those things a buyer would deal with those things at a on a global basis, because they had many other companies and employees that they were working with. The second part that was really important was how do we extend the power of secret health to the current customer base, right are acquired was a large acquire had many, many customers that could use, what secret health had that became the main point of the integration. And then the final piece there is that there was also technology to transfer to the acquirer to make sure that they would continue to develop our platform and continue to invest in it. I would say like third workflow that was there. All the employees retain their jobs and we also hired a couple of other people. We hired; we began to hire the adult in the room. And now that we weren’t in a bigger company, that those are those in the room can then begin to take some of the work that I was doing managing the team, and they can inherit that work and continue it. That was the integration. It’s interesting. You know, it’s sort of like it seeing my creation, the team’s creation now be in the hands, right of sort of like a more stable, bigger parent, that’s kind of like the feeling to it. Like, here’s, here’s a bigger company that is incredibly more stable than a startup, even three years. And who will take this and now we’ll grow it. I did that for about 18 months, and then I left in April of this year.
Shawn Flynn 32:43
And you’d also talked about the due diligence being very demanding for being acquired. Can you talk a little bit about that acquire in what happened in that due diligence process?
Sandra Shpilberg 32:55
Yes, after the letter of intent get signed, generally, the companies will begin their due diligence workflows. And generally due diligence is in both directions, the acquirer will do a very extensive search and audit basically, of the acquiree. But then the acquiree also gets to do some due diligence on the acquirer to make sure let’s say that they have the cash that they’re talking about to acquire your company, and so forth, I’ll speak mostly about what I had to present to the acquire, think of these workflows is a complete audit of your company, anything that’s pretty much ever happened to the company that has a signature somewhere, needs to be presented back for review. And so the reason why I wrote about this in the book was that there is a way to prepare for this from the beginning, five years into the company is sort of too late to start organizing all of the information that is needed for the due diligence. But if you we’re doing it, as we’re going along, and building, their company that is much easier, choir is going to be looking for all the formation information, right, the articles of incorporation, anything that had to do with stock issuances, with directors, with minutes, all of those things, they’re going to be looking at the technology itself, if you are selling technology, and auditing that and seeing if they can make can continue to grow and maintain it, they’re going to be looking at every contract that the company has ever engaged in, they’re going to be looking at every employee, they’re going to be looking at every invoice that has ever been sent out of the company and into the company. Basically, bottom line for founders is that it’s really important to be organized, right? This information needs to be organized from the beginning, it’s really difficult to go back five years, even three years, and then put all this together. So from the beginning, organize your folders. You know, in my book, you have the list of what you need to keep and have these folders set up already so that when a data room, right, get set up for your due diligence, you are just simply moving folders over right? Wouldn’t that be a dream?
Shawn Flynn 35:02
Going back to your book, there’s one part in it, I remember that you said, allowing yourself to be found. Can you talk a little bit more about what you meant by this?
Sandra Shpilberg 35:11
It means that you are out there, right some in some way you are out there showing what your company is doing, showing what the company stands for showing some of the progress that the company has made, so that companies can find you. I mean, for the most part, the acquirers that came my way found us in some way in the market. The first one, of course, I had it more of a personal connection, right. So he already knew that I was working on this, that’s a different story, a company’s number two and number three, in my case, and then the number four that came about founders in the market, we were either going up against them, you know, trying to win similar business, or we were working with a company where they were providing a different service. So we have the same customer. And we’re providing service A and they’re providing service B. So they found this in the market. So that’s what I mean by allowing yourself to be found be visible, allow others to find your company.
Shawn Flynn 36:12
Now, Sandra, I also have to ask since selling a company, you’ve written a book, now you have another company, how is it different now from before where that first one you formed? I mean, you bootstrapped and sounded really like you had nothing in the bank. Whereas now after your last company, I’m guessing I don’t know the exact terms of your exit, but I’m guessing you’re in a better financial situation, starting the second company, what’s different?
Sandra Shpilberg 36:36
Everything. Pretty much everything’s different. I turned around, couldn’t really sit on a chair. After exiting my company, I had to go do something else. And so I had this other idea for a disease intelligence platform. That’s now called Adnexi. And I went ahead and I started this company, and pretty much everything’s different because with this one, I do have the luxury of taking more time to develop a product that can be a platform right away. And so that’s what we’re doing. We’re skipping through the let’s provide a service first because I need money to come in to buy the developers. And we’re skipping through that. And instead, we’re saying, let’s develop a platform, let’s put in the work to develop a platform first, and then take it and continue to maneuver it until it finds its right product fit. So I think that that’s the major difference. At this point, I’m still bootstrapping in the sense that it’s our own capital and our own sweat. Going into it. Hopefully, very soon, we’ll start having some customers to bring revenue into it.
Shawn Flynn 37:39
And in the past, I interviewed Sam Wong, who talked about mindfulness of a startup founder. What was your experience? Because in your book, you also talked about the mind body burnout? Can you elaborate on this?
Sandra Shpilberg 37:53
mindfulness is incredibly important. I’m a huge fan of the topic. And I think when I reflect back at the same time, as I was growing, as a company founder, I was also growing my abilities to be more mindful and use the right tools to reach that mindfulness, the job of a founder is pretty intense, you know, it’s, it’s lonely at times. It’s incredibly demanding. It is full of uncertainty, it has so much uncertainty that it is prone to create anxiety and right, because anxiety is generally that now being able to control the future, or know what’s going to come, mindfulness becomes incredibly important for founders to find a way to come down to relax, to be in the present moment to appreciate what that moment has to give us. When you read my book, it is full of mindfulness, right? There’s a guided meditation at the end of each chapter, which one of my editors’ question that was like, do you want mindfulness and meditations in a founder spot? And I said, Absolutely, this is, this is what founders need. This is a long road. And it requires daily, weekly, and monthly recovery. And mindfulness is part of that recovery, a huge fan of mindfulness, I think the more that we practice some of these tools, the better we are, in approaching what’s in front of us, basically, the end of the day, as founders, we’re trying to use our time, our body our skills to create something. And that creation process is intense on its own, there is no way to do it in a way that isn’t intense. And so what we need to recognize is that it is intense, and that we need recovery from it on a regular basis.
Shawn Flynn 39:35
Best part about this book is from my understanding, you’re already thinking about your next book that you’re gonna write that we are gonna have to get you back on for the launch of that. But for our listeners out there, can you give us some little teasers, maybe of what you’re thinking of writing about and the knowledge you’re going to share?
Sandra Shpilberg 39:51
So I have three ideas. That’s my problem, I have to choose one. Number one is a follow up to this book called founders dilemmas, right, or founders dilemma. And in that one, I want to go deeper into some of these key decisions that founders make early on in the setup of their companies, and help bring some data help bring some examples into what the choices are, and why would you make one choice versus another? Right? These are things like, should you have a co-founder? Should you raise capital, right? Should you run a profitable company or spend all the money that you get right? Like, what are some of these key decisions that you make early on, of course, many of them are changeable, but sort of thinking through how to make those first decisions. That’s number one, still in the startup world. Number two is completely different. I wrote many years back a memoir about immigrating to the United States of America. It’s a memoir is sort of like, you know, my feelings and my thoughts on this incredible change coming from Uruguay, a tiny country in South America to Brooklyn, New York and sort of being assaulted, right, my senses assaulted in every perspective, and sort of documenting what’s happened from then. And the growth, mostly the internal growth that has happened to deal with a massive change like that. So that’s a memoir. And then idea number three, which I’ve been really into lately, is all about inner journeys. We’re recording this episode during Coronavirus. Most people cannot be as social as they want to be. And so there’s a great opportunity to turn all that time and energy and go inward. This book I would describe seven different techniques to go inside of yourself to find generally that wiser, deeper part of you the sort of knows what the right answer is, in most situations, but many times we’re too busy listening to that part. That’s the third idea, Shawn.
Shawn Flynn 41:48
I look forward to finding out which one of those three you choose or if you decide to launch all three on the same day, who knows? But if anyone wants to find out more information about you kind of follow your journey and get on a pre order. Book Lister that what’s the best way to go about doing it?
Sandra Shpilberg 42:03
Yes, I have my website, sandrashpilberg.com. Lots of information there. And of course, the book is out wherever books are sold. It’s on Amazon, Barnes and Noble everywhere online. And those are great ways to learn more.
Shawn Flynn 42:17
And for our listeners out there, Sandra has given us an amazing gift. We do have a copy of her book that we’re giving away to an audience member who writes a review on iTunes about this could be positive or negative, but a review, please be positive. And take a screenshot email it to me at shawnatthesiliconvalleypodcast.com. We’ll put your name in a raffle and the winner will get a copy of the book. So with that, please share amongst your network. It encourages us to create great content like this. And Sandra, I have to thank you again for your time here on the Silicon Valley podcast. Thank you.
Sandra Shpilberg 42:50
Thank you. It was great to be on it.
Announcer 42:54
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