WORKOMICS: Let’s start by talking about your business in broad terms.

Anonymous: I can broadly say it was a medical device that allowed patients to collect samples at home. It started as a school project. We came up with what we thought was a pretty simple solution that could potentially save lives. We wanted to help people who were not visiting the doctor. There are so many reasons why people might not visit clinics: They have a fear of some sort, they have experienced abuse, they live on a First Nation reserve. We did sell our device direct online, but if you are someone who is not visiting the doctor, you don’t necessarily have the ability to pay out-of-pocket. So, selling to the healthcare system was a really big focus for us.

It’s probably important to put our mindset back ten years ago, when telemedicine was not really a thing. The world is so different now, after the pandemic. When we started, it was hard to get off the ground because in-person was the gold standard for establishing a doctor-patient relationship.

On the doctor’s side, in-person was perceived to be much better than a remote relationship, especially with someone that you had never met before. I remember having the conversation with so many doctors. Their view was always, “Oh no, patients can’t take their own samples because they don’t know how.” I would push back: why is it that people are smart enough to drive a car, but they’re not smart enough to figure out how to take a sample of some sort? I just felt they weren’t giving the average person enough credit. I’m sure people have taken samples wrong; you just have to know that it’s not 100 percent accurate. Nothing is.

On our side, we could see a lot of benefits to people taking care of their health at home — especially when it’s something most people don’t like, and therefore avoid. Our goal was to make it easier. You don’t have to go into the clinic; you can do it by yourself, at home.

Now, telemedicine is everywhere and we’ve seen that doctor-patient relationships can be established remotely. There are things that you can do with patients that are low risk — they don’t have to come into the clinic and the outcomes are fine. In the context of when we started our business, it was really different, and everyone was super nervous about this idea of having things done remotely.

WKO: What are some of the challenges of developing a medical device for the healthcare system?​

Anon: At first, it was a lot of hurdles around the medical device itself — the basics, like getting a medical device license, getting our quality system established, doing some clinical trials. The clinical trials were iterative, because we would learn about our device as we did them. In the beginning, we did a clinical trial and found something we had to fix. We put that trial on hold, changed the tooling of the device, and then came back to restart the clinical trial a year later. They were really long product cycles.

We were able to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of the device in clinical trials, but then we had to demonstrate that on a systems level. Those are totally different. We’re not just looking at the functionality of the medical device, but trying to demonstrate the outcomes you will get if you implement this on a mass scale. For example, if I distributed the medical device to a thousand people, how many of them are going to take their own sample and send it back? How does it compare to how many are going to come into the clinic if they are sent a letter asking them to make an appointment? We were able to do those studies and get data showing our medical device resulted in more patients getting the sample taken.

Then the next hurdle was the guidelines for clinical practice. We have this data, but the guidelines didn’t reflect that at the time*. I think the guidelines are just starting to recommend that sort of thing now.

We didn’t quite realize how slow the healthcare system can be to adopt a change. We just assumed if we do the work and we show an improvement, then why wouldn’t somebody want to embrace this better way?

WKO: Let’s rewind to the decision to start a business. Originally, it was a school project. You could have thought, “Excellent, I did a wonderful project, and now I’m going to go get a job.” But instead, you started a business to commercialize it. What led to that decision?​

Anon: It was always a purpose-driven business. For me personally, if we built something that could literally save somebody’s life, shouldn’t we at least try to make that happen? It turned out to be a very long journey, and quite painful in the end. But I am proud of us and our company and our little scrappy team. When we think about how many of our medical devices we put out there, statistically, we helped save someone’s life. That’s exactly what we wanted to do, from a mission perspective.

At first, my co-founder and I weren’t intending to go full-time. We were applying for grants here-and-there. Then we got a fellowship — a grant that allowed entrepreneurs to pay themselves for a year to see how far they could get. Normally, grants pay for a project or a study; you don’t often get grants that allow you to pay yourself. That’s what encouraged us to stop doing whatever jobs we had and take a risk.

Once we took on investors, it got a lot more complicated. I felt very responsible for other people’s money. In a lot of ways, having investment pushed us to keep going and to keep trying to reach for further milestones so that our investors didn’t feel like they had made a poor investment.

It wasn’t as simple as “we didn’t want to let them down,” because we wanted to achieve our own goals too. But because it’s healthcare, the next stage is just finding more investors. It would have been easier if the investment was to get us to market right away, but the path to market was so long.

I tell you all this knowing that eventually it didn’t work out, but at the time, we didn’t know that. It felt like a really big, open opportunity that we were running towards and working really hard to make happen.

WKO: You started the business because you had designed a useful medical device, but then you had to grapple with the additional complexity of regulation and getting investment. How did that feel†?

Anon: I spent a lot of my time fundraising as opposed to actually building anything. One of the things that I learned about myself is that fundraising and networking are not my natural skills. I did OK at it, but I had to work really hard. I’m naturally an introvert. I don’t like telling people things that I don’t know for sure. But when you’re raising money, part of the skill of answering questions is to give answers that are more aspirational. When people ask how big your market is, you want to go in with a really big number — that’s what investors want to hear. My personal tendency is to get down into more practical details. It’s not as inspiring when you’re an investor; you want to see somebody with a huge vision. I’m just not totally comfortable with that. I don’t want to feel like I’m spinning anything.

WKO: Did the feeling of spinning stories contribute to the decision to wind down the business? Tell us about the thought process for that decision?​

Anon: Entrepreneurs and investors have the term ‘zombie company’ for what they consider to be the worst outcome: a company that doesn’t succeed, but doesn’t fail either. If the company is not going to be a wild success, it’s actually easier to deal with a company that has an idea, puts it out there, and realizes very quickly that the idea is not going to work.

When you are stuck in the middle, your idea isn’t proven, so you don’t really know if you should put some more money into it. But it also hasn’t failed, so you want to keep it alive. What happens is that the founders are just running and running and trying their hardest. At some point, it just becomes too much work — mentally, physically, emotionally. I think that’s what happened to us, unfortunately.

One of the reasons I wanted this interview to be anonymous is because it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to reflect back and ask: Why didn’t we just call it? Why didn’t we realize sooner? Why did we spend years and years and years trying to make it work when it was so hard and we knew intellectually it was better to just fail quickly and move on?

We persisted for a few different reasons. We still believed in our mission — nobody else was doing what we were doing in the way that we thought was best. We felt an obligation to try and help those people. There was a feeling of not wanting to let the investors down because they believed in us. I worried about my employees. They’re all really smart and I knew they would land on their feet in the end, but I thought about them. I thought about myself! When you’ve been running a company for this long, what do you do when it’s gone? How do you think about re-establishing yourself? More than that, I think there was an identity piece for me. I think about myself as someone who works really hard, who keeps going, who does things other people won’t do, who won’t give up. I’m a scrappy person. It makes it harder to quit because you don’t think of yourself as a quitter.

If we had done a study and turns out that nobody likes our device, then it would have been easy. Because we kept getting positive signals with everything that we were doing, it was hard to know when to stop.

In the end, a lot of stuff happened at the same time: we were fundraising, I was pregnant, and my co-founder was experiencing some pretty serious mental-health challenges and eventually left the company.

Fundraising as a pregnant person is very terrifying because you know people are thinking, “I’m going to give this person money and she’s the head of the company and she’s going to go away.” (It really should not be this way, but it is.) As I was raising money, it all kind of came to a head. What are we telling people? What is the next stage this money is going to get us to? We were still balancing multiple approaches — government contracts, private buyers, direct online sales to individuals. You’re supposed to pick one market, but we were splitting our resources across three different businesses. One night, I just decided I didn’t have a good enough reason for people to give me money anymore. I still felt it was a good opportunity, but realistically, if I was an investor, I wouldn’t want to put my money into it anymore. It didn’t feel right asking people for money when I didn’t know how to give them the return they wanted.

As much as my co-founder was going through mental health challenges, I was going through it too. I was waking up every night with cold sweats and panic attacks. It was really hard, so one day we just kind of called it. We always told ourselves that if there’s nothing left to try, then we have to close down the company. I think that’s what happened: we tried everything we could, and it just didn’t work out.

I don’t even remember how I communicated to the board. The conversation with the employees was much more impactful, much more emotional. There were a lot of tears and shock. We told them what was going to happen. I wanted to support them as much as I could in finding their next positions. For example, an employee was getting a certification to become a quality auditor. We set aside some of our remaining funds to allow her to finish her course and be better-positioned for her next role. That was really important to me.

WKO: The way you’ve told the story, it seems almost coincidental that you decided to wind down the business while you had a new baby. But we know that the identity of motherhood is really intertwined with work.

Anon: Once I had a baby, I started thinking a lot more about how I am going to live a stable life to provide for my children. That’s in terms of money — I couldn’t continue on a low start-up salary and still ensure that my children had the resources that they needed — but also time. I do really regret not spending more time with my son in his very early life because of what was going on with the company.

One of the things that I do think about is how much of the story I should tell my children when they’re older. I think about how best communicate it in a way that encourages growth, as opposed to fear. I don’t want them to be afraid to take risks, but at the same time, I don’t necessarily want them to experience what I’ve experienced.