Announcing Matrix XII: An $800M fund to invest from concept to Series A Read more
As long as I can remember I’ve loved to work – particularly at small independent businesses. Growing up in New Hampshire, my dad ran an independent pharmacy. I helped with day-to-day tasks and also watched him grow the operation and make choices about how to manage the business. One thing that always stood out to me was how focused he was on the customer and the quality of the service he was able to offer because of that. Beyond trying to understand the pharmacy business, I was fascinated with tech and design. I had a Mac Cube poster on my wall and made money by buying and selling rare sneakers on internet forums. What seemed like wasting time on the internet was really a growing obsession with product design.
During school, I continued to explore my interests in tech, design, and entrepreneurship. While these weren’t obvious activities for someone going to pharmacy school, I found ways to incorporate them into my education. I took classes at MassArt, co-led the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and eventually co-founded a group called Hacking Medicine, where we channeled MIT's hacking spirit to challenge the status quo in healthcare.
After graduating, my co-founder and I started PillPack, a pharmacy designed to make it simple to get and take medications as prescribed. It was both an obvious choice – given my interests and background – and completely unexpected – given that a venture-backed pharmacy had never existed before. We focused on creating a service that customers would love as much as the best products they’d ever used. Following a $1B acquisition by Amazon, making PillPack the most successful DTC company and consumer brand of that era, I stayed on to build and launch Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Clinic, and helped establish the foundation for health at Amazon going forward.
After scaling PillPack and selling it to Amazon, I’m still fascinated by the potential to build experiences that increase people’s happiness and overall quality of life – especially in healthcare. I want to back founders who have deep curiosity about customers and the overall system and are willing to dig into really challenging details on behalf of providing customers with simple, joyful experiences.
The startup ecosystem is also where I belong. The make it or break moments in an early stage company are intense and stressful and also where I feel the most comfortable. In this next phase of my career, I want to stay tapped into the energy that comes from building something new and challenging at scale. I deeply care about the design of everything in my life and want this next phase to have as much intention and thought as I did as a founder. To that end, I expect to be selective about the founders I partner with, creating space to engage deeply and support them across whatever challenges they face.
PillPack
Amazon
MCPHS, PharmD