Harvard in Tech: Brian Corey, Co-Founder and CEO of Outpatient
I spoke with Brian Corey, co-founder and CEO at Outpatient, a digital health, medical task, and care coordination tool for families, medical professionals, and health systems.
The Founding Story
After graduating from HBS, Brian spent ~7 years in the mobile space. In 2011, he joined Facebook to help the company make its shift to mobile. While at Facebook, he worked on what later became internet.org. There, he was introduced to a startup called Premise Data, initially in the context of a potential acquisition. When the company turned down the acquisition offer, Brian joined them as COO.
After a few years at Premise, Brian’s world was rocked when his mother had a serious medical incident. It was so serious that his dad could not handle all of her care needs by himself, so Brian and his brother took turns flying home to help out, but it soon became clear that even that would not be enough. So Brian became a temporary but full time caregiver for his mom for several months, leaving Premise and putting his career on hold.
Through this experience, Brian was shocked by how unprepared he and society were in handling medical challenges and how unhelpful the current system and tools were for family caregivers. While on the hunt for useful products and good advice, Brian reconnected with a friend and former colleague, Pete Yewell, who had also experienced a similar life change in his family. After sharing their tips and tricks, complaints, and most importantly, their family health challenges and experiences as caregivers, they decided to come together to found Outpatient to simplify every caregiver’s work and life.
The Founder Journey
Don’t overthink. You can always think of a thousand reasons not to start something. For Brian, he became a founder out of necessity. He was a full time caregiver so had no job to leave, and he felt the problem so personally and so strongly, that he felt he needed to build a solution for himself and others.
Get diverse experience. Brian was grateful to get experience early on at large companies where he was able to see more facets of the company, move into different roles from, gain diverse experience, receive mentorship, and build his network (including many people he would later hire and work with at Outpatient).
Afterwards, he joined an early stage startup in a very different role in business development. He became comfortable early on with navigating steep learning curves and developing new skills. Founders are naturally generalists and must be comfortable diving into many different threads, driven by their curiosity.
By the time he founded Outpatient, he had had experience in almost every department as both an individual contributor and an executive. With this greater understanding of the many facets of building a business, Brian was able to operate more leanly and know what to look for in full time and contract hires.
Keep a steady hand. Every day can feel like the best and the worst day of his career. But in the longer arc of time (over several months), it is always amazing to see what the team has achieved. Startups are so difficult to build, so keeping a steady mindset and not getting too high or low is incredibly helpful.
Team Building
Hire people better than you. Always hire people you would want to work with anywhere and who you can learn from everyday. When the team is incredible, the company wins. The people are the biggest determinants of company failure or success. With experience, comes humility. Be humble and do not be afraid to hire people who bring more to the table then yourself: these people are the ones who will augment your company.
Hire through networks. Hiring people you have previously worked with helps to vet candidates much more deeply. Only so much can be shared in an interview process. In actually working with someone, you understand them, their work ethic, and their culture alignment much better.
Moreover, early stage startups can face uphill battles hiring talent before they establish their brand name. People who have worked with you, know you personally, and believe in you are more likely to join due to their faith in you as a leader.
Compete on mission and upside. As an early stage startup, you will not be able to compete with large companies on the basis of brand names and compensation. Be upfront about what you can and cannot provide. Lean into it and even make a joke to lighten the mood (Brian for example, starts off conversations with a light hearted “so are you ready for a pay cut?”). Also be upfront about your financials (especially for candidates further along in the process) and articulate clearly what equity means.
But very few great people are only motivated by one thing. Understand what your candidates value. Paint your value proposition at the intersection of vision and future financial upside. Does the candidate resonate with your mission? Is compensation paramount? Do they care about titles? Aim to understand your candidate’s priority stack through the interview process to double down on the candidates who have better values alignment with your company.
Federate decision making. Every company looks like a well-oiled machine from the outside, but the ability to federate decision making enables faster progress and more success. Clarity, where everyone knows the mission and what success looks like, enables less mess. Communication is the key to establishing clarity.
Through decentralizing decision making, you can move faster, find the best solutions, produce the best work, and get the people who know the most creating the solutions.
Federated decision making, however, is antithetical to most people’s natures and most structures in societies from families to schools. As a result, it is crucial to be intentional in implementing and driving these cultures.
Even in decentralized organizations, there can be some leadership involvement around major decisions. As a leader, even if you are not touching the product daily, make sure you understand it in great detail to be able to give the best advice to your team around key decisions.
Company Building
Focus on gross margin. When Brian first interviewed at Amazon, the interviewer asked him a question that has stuck with him since: what is more important, gross or operating margin? Over time, Brian realized, operating margin is what you control day to day, and gross margin is largely determined by more macro or industry wide structures. Pick an industry with strong gross margins to capture the tailwinds. With strong gross margins, you have more leeway in your spend for your operating margin.
Find your company culture. Looking back on his founder journey, Brian underscores the importance of understanding the difference between engineering led (often consumer) vs. sales led companies (often enterprise) and how to succeed in both.
Reflecting on HBS
Build a strong foundation. Prior to HBS, Brian had been an engineer and salesperson, but he did not have a strong foundation for making broader business decisions, analyzing incentives, or evaluating trade offs. Until HBS, he had been focused on jobs where he was responsible for himself, code, or customer revenue. HBS helped him elevate his frame of reference: what is good for an organization? It helped him gain an appreciation for the many elements of business from accounting to marketing and more.
Leverage your network. Although he only spent 2 years physically at HBS, Brian met some of his lifelong closest friends there. What HBS helped truly shape were that relationships he held are far more important than any business lesson learned. When asked what he would do differently looking back, Brian shares he would have spent more effort cultivating relationships with professors. They play such a unique role as orchestrators and facilitators, and Brian would have liked to take more advantage of their knowledge and willingness to help.
Life Advice
Be patient. Rome was not built in a day. Value relationships and learning over immediate career advancement.
Find your own path. Do what you’re best at and not what you should. Brian has made two critical, life changing decisions in “going after a girl” instead of doing “what he should” for his career. In both cases, he is so glad he did. Don’t let the herd guide your path. The faster you can know yourself, the faster you will make the right decisions for your career and your life.
