Reflecting on 5 Years of Curebase

I shared this internal message with the Curebase team last week. I thought I'd share it with the internet as well.

Hello Curebasers,

Today is my 5-year work anniversary. In days, that means I’ve been working on Curebase just about every day, including most weekends and many odd hours of the day and night, for the last 1,825 days. That’s a long time – enough time for me to get engaged, get married, have a baby, all while seeing the whole world switch from in-person to virtual.

Looking back, I wanted to share my personal reflection, especially for those of you who have been here briefly and might not know me very well.

I was 25 years old when I started this company. To say that now sounds a bit crazy, and it was. Since college, I’d basically been looking for something meaningful to do with my tech background, which led me from cancer research to EMRs and then out to the SF Bay Area to join an oncology software startup. When I stumbled on the idea for Curebase, it felt too important to pass up.

The idea came from my last job, seeing how clinical trials were run at the big, established cancer centers across the country. Patients had very little agency, recruitment was slow, costs were high, and drugs were getting delayed by years (or decades) to reach the market and get to patients. And it was happening on early-2000s (sometimes, 90s-era) technology – which is almost as old as I am. The problem seemed solvable with technology, so I set out to solve it.

I was lucky to have a chance to take the risk. For the first 6 months, I sought no funding and worked by myself as a solo founder. I bought the Curebase.com domain name for $3,000 of my own capital, and built the tech from my couch. I sent hundreds of emails out to potential sponsors, to get first customers, and spent some of my own cash on airfare to go visit them, desperately hoping they’d sign up. It didn’t look like much was happening, so my fiancée let me know, “if it’s not looking good after 2 years, you’ll have to quit.” 

Fortunately, Y Combinator gave Curebase the first real boost it needed to succeed, and afterwards, we raised $2.5M. We spun up our first marketing website and used the funding to add clinical services to our SaaS offering – a strategy we’ve continue to this day. Since then it has been a whirlwind.

My job has changed a lot in 5 years too. I started off as a solo hacker and over time, I’ve learned to delegate and build up leaders that I can trust, which wasn’t easy and led to my fair share of mistakes. This year has been particularly challenging – becoming a professional CEO of over 100 people and managing a Series-B budget is completely new to me. But facing new challenges is the norm at a startup, so for years I’ve focused on problem solving, continuous learning, and seeking advice with humility from from my peers, mentors, investors, and the experienced leaders we hire into the company.

Remarkably, what has never changed at Curebase is the mission. Unlike most startups, we never pivoted or changed our business model. 5 years ago it was clear that clinical trials could be reinvented with the patient at the center, and that’s still true today, now more than ever. The hard part has been executing towards the mission – that’s what we’ve been doing and are still doing. The original mission was real, the impact was real (and 60+ customers now agree), and there’s an incredible amount of meaningful work still to do.

I actually feel more motivated now than ever to run this company for another 10 years. I plan to see Curebase become the leader in delivering a new standard for clinical trials – patient-centric, fast, efficient, and diverse, with drug times to market reduced by 50% – and have Curebase support more than 1 in every 100 clinical trials worldwide. 

Growth is not easy, and thinking back on it all, I believe there are 3 things that have kept me motivated through it all:

1. A chance to do meaningful work that affects patients
2. A chance to work with teammates that I care about
3. A chance to learn and grow, with new challenges every year

Overall, the number one word on my mind at year 5 is “gratitude”. I wake up some days just feeling so grateful to have had this life experience and to have the chance to keep doing it. I feel that gratitude to the customers, investors, teammates, and family members (cough cough wife) who have trusted (tolerated?) me – and to the world, which has kept me in good health – in my attempt to do the crazy, big, hairy challenge of building a company to reinvent the infamously challenging clinical trial space.

If you read this far, thank you for reading and I appreciate every one of you for embarking on the journey with me! Your choice to be a part of something important, however challenging, means the world to me.