Sol Chen, co-founder of Clara Health, on building transformative healthcare companies
I spoke with Sol Chen, co-founder of Clara Health, a platform empowering patients to find the right clinical trial for them. Sol is a Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30.
Sol first found the inspiration behind Clara Health when she came across a flyer seeking breast cancer patients for a clinical trial on Brown University’s campus. She was surprised by the antiquated method for matching patients with client trials and felt that there was a substantial lack of trust, empowerment, transparency, and efficiency in this crucial, truly life impacting process. While there was a sharing economy model for things like transportation and hospitality, there was no analogous modern platform for clinical trials, a much larger and more impactful pain point to solve.
Sol shared her journey building Clara Health and insightful advice for aspiring founders and healthcare interested students.
Being an outsider in an industry is not necessarily a unilateral disadvantage: see where and how you can provide a fresh perspective. Healthcare innovation has primarily come from individuals with decades of experience in medicine, but these innovations have primarily consisted of siloed, incremental improvements to specific processes, rather than a fundamental disruption. Frequently, incumbent companies and individuals have tunnel vision when it comes to envisioning possibilities because they are particularly biased toward historical methods of operation. Sol and her co-founder came more from a different yet related background having worked in regulated technology industries. Through this unique lens, they were able to provide a fresh perspective and truly reimagine how clinical trials are done.
First, speak with as many people as possible to understand if you have a viable problem and potential solution. After her initial identification of the problem, Sol spoke with hundreds of people (who then referred her to more relevant individuals in the ecosystem) to better understand their workflows and pain points to determine whether the problem she was going after and the solution she aimed to create would be properly impactful. Doing this type of hands on, interpersonal market research is crucial to setting the foundation for the company strategy.
Hire when you cannot possibly achieve a goal without the help of others. In the early stage, it is important to ramp up the team gradually and intentionally. Moving from a team of 2 to a team of 5 is a much bigger jump than going from 200 to 500. Keep a lean management team and bring on additional team members only in key areas where you are lacking skills and experience. In healthcare especially, the learning curve is steep and long: for example, there is a 1 year ramp up process for a generalist sales person to develop into a pharma sales person.
Be intentional in fundraising and selecting investors. For the first year, Clara Health was primarily funded by free money from accelerators and pitch competitions. Their first checks came from student founder friendly funds Rough Draft Ventures and Dorm Room Fund. In this early stage, the team was careful about bootstrapping and not giving up too large a share of their company. Once they had their MVP and were confident in product market fit, they needed to bring on additional team members to build and sell a more fully functioning product. Unlike many other industries, in pharma, it is impossible and not advisable to sell a makeshift MVP. Given the immense impact and implications, the product pushed as well as the sales pitch must be substantially more refined, and to this end, more team members were needed.
Thus, at this point, Clara Health began to fundraise. They started in Boston (where they were based) but felt that the investors, in general, were overly focused on intellectual property differentiation and short term exits. Through expanding their investor outreach scope, they found that Silicon Valley investors were more aligned with their vision, particularly in creating strong, engaged, differentiated platforms and taking a more long term view on value creation and company building.
In selecting investors, Sol emphasized three key characteristics: 1) deep understanding of the market and conviction that their solution is fit to create change, 2) similar vision for the company and entrepreneurial empathy through prior operator or founder experiences, and 3) concrete value add immediately and in the long term through their networks and unique insight.
Motivate your team through celebrating wins and highlighting impact. Building a startup is incredibly difficult, and coming across unexpected challenges and temporary failures is inevitable and can sometimes feel like the only constant. To keep the team motivated through more difficult times, Sol emphasized the importance of taking the time to celebrate wins in the moment and afterwards. Moreover, through these obstacles, it is especially important to remember and immerse yourself in the why, the reason for building the company: the impact on people and, in Clara Health’s case, saving lives through enabling better access to clinical trials. In fact, the team has a dedicated Slack channel to share and view anonymized messages from patients and their families that they have helped to constantly remind them of their mission and why all the challenges are ultimately more than worth it.
Clara Health’s long term vision is to move from an information aggregator model (like Yelp) to a managed marketplace model (like Opendoor), where they will better be able to foster trust and guide patients along the full process of accessing and going through life saving clinical trials. The team also aims to better centralize and analyze data to provide historical as well as real time information for people as they navigate the clinical trial process in a more informed manner.
In healthcare more broadly, Sol is excited about the power of AI in enabling physicians to do more with their time. Too often the discussions around AI in healthcare center around replacing physicians, but Sol believes the true potential is more in augmenting physician capabilities through integrating AI in existing work streams, making every 5 minutes of a physician’s time count for 500.
