Felix Health’s Rise to $200M+ : Co-Founder Emma Stern on Taking Big Bets

Welcome to Between Tubernets, a show dedicated to highlighting Canadian voices. Together we're sharing authentic conversations with the people shaping the future of Canada. We hope you enjoy the show. Today we have with us Emma Stern, who is one of the co-founders and COO of Felix Health, a digital healthcare company that brings together assessment, prescription, pharmacy fulfillment, and ongoing care all into one amazing integrated platform. Welcome to the show. Are you ready for conversation between Tubernets? I am. Thank you so much for having me guys and we should hire you as a spokesperson. That was a very accurate succinct description of the business. That was great. It's not an easy business to describe. So absolutely thrilled to be here. We are so excited to have you here because I think Felix is a just an awesome company that you've built. But B, I wanted to level set for the audience that very few companies in Canada make it to that size and stage of 200 million plus annual run rate and even fewer that have females as founders. So in part of starting the show, Sam and I wanted to make sure that we are exposing that to Canadian more broadly. Thank you so much. So maybe you want to just start with four people that are tuning in that don't know you or your background. What do you hope they take away from the show? You know, depending on who the the the the listener, if it's an inspiring entrepreneur, I want them to take away that, you know, begin the rest is easy in a way. Like obviously there's nothing easy about running a business, but it is much more approachable and doable than people kind of think. If you just kind of put one fun front of the other every day, it's a game of just stacking, you know, efforts and it can seem really intimidating once when you look at like something that's, you know, been going on for six years, seven years like our business, but really just taking that plunge and jumping in is the only way to do it. So I would encourage people to to give it a try. And, you know, hopefully there's some little tidbits from my story and Felix's story that that can be useful to people who are kind of going on that journey. And also that Felix is awesome and that you should use it. Yes, yeah. A hundred percent. What were you curious to know just because we're going to talk about Felix a ton, but what was kind of your early life up until Felix started? Because I know you've talked about the past, you're like you have a traditional, a bit of a traditional path, and then it got a little untraditional. So if you could just walk over to that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's funny. I mean, I grew up in Toronto and I'm the product of two lawyers. And quite honestly, I never kind of had the quote unquote entrepreneurial bug. I mean, my husband and my co-founder, who happened to be best friends, both of them are like quintessential founders. They always wanted to run their own businesses. They were always looking for different businesses to start. They really kind of put entrepreneurship first. Oh, sorry. And then the business that became Felix or my husband's business kind of came together. I was quite the opposite where I, you know, had no intention necessarily of starting a business. It wasn't top of mind. It wasn't something that people my family had done in the past. So I didn't have a good model for it. I actually, after university went into investment banking, which honestly, I loved, which is a weird thing to say. I mean, most people were like, oh, the trauma. And like, there were like traumatic elements, like I spent a long time binding decks at two in the morning, but I definitely learned a tremendous amount. And I, you know, learned what hard work looked like. I thought I knew. I thought I knew after university and I didn't. And I'm very grateful for that gift because, you know, that has made my journey feel a lot easier than I think it can sometimes feel to be who hadn't kind of gone through the ringer at the ripe old age of 21. It also like helped me just understand businesses and what makes a business successful from like a, you know, brass tax metric standpoint. So that was a great, you know, four or five years. I ultimately ended up moving over from banking into startups. So that was kind of when I first got that kind of tech experience. I joined a business called 500PX as the chief of staff and the financial analyst. I actually applied for the financial analyst role and then I was lucky enough that the CEO who interviewed me who was wonderful and eating offered me. He said, yes, you can have this job, but also can you do this other job too? And that was probably like one of the luckiest things that happened to me in my career because that chief of staff role is so transformative. It really allows you to see how the sausage gets made in a business like that and a small growing, you know, startup. I got exposure to every facet of the business as opposed to just being part of one special purpose team. So that was, you know, a very fundamental step in becoming a founder, I think. And that business was ultimately sold. After I started working there at some point, I took over kind of all of operations for the business and kind of participated in the deal team to sell the business, having had a lot of M&A experience in banking. And after that business sold and I left, you know, I was just trying to decide what was next. I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I mean, I had always seen myself in more traditional business, but then I kind of had that startup, but suddenly and as I mentioned earlier, yeah, it is contagious. And as I mentioned earlier, my husband, who I just married at that time, but had been dating, you know, for eight years prior, he had started his own business and it was about five years and at the time and it was growing really well. And so living with someone who had a startup and that was a startup that was really working, also gave me a really false sense of confidence. I was like, "Oh, he can do it. How hard can it be?" And so I think the store's kind of aligned there. And when Kyle, my co-founder, who's also the CEO of Felix, came over for dinner and started talking about some interesting things that were going on in the healthcare space in the US and could something like this be done in Canada. I basically begged him to let me do it with him and he accepted. And kind of that's where the whole thing started. Obviously, the idea evolved a lot from those initial conversations, but that's where it was born. Before we get into Felix, just some personal questions on that piece because there's a couple things that come to mind for me is like, "One, working with your husband's best friend, like, how is that? And have there been challenges with that? Or how do you navigate it?" We were really thoughtful about it at the beginning, actually. I mean, I actually met Kyle and Mike the same night in a bar. And so I had known him for a very long time. He and I never set out to work together, as I mentioned, it just kind of the stores aligned to that moment. We were worried about it because we had never thought about it and had never done anything other than, like, going to parties and restaurants together. So I kind of structured it in like a back-out a little bit where I was like, "Look, let's try this for six months." - Dateful. - Yeah. - Yeah. Exactly. And I was like, "If not, I will." - Perfect. - Yeah. - Just like I'll say. - Yeah. - And you can do this. So that was there, just in case. We didn't obviously end up needing that because it ended up going great. I think the biggest casualty from that is that poor Mike, because I was like, "Where's my friend?" - No. - And he wears my shoes. - Exactly, he was just talking on the phone. - Oh, they're together. - Laughing all the time. And he's like, "But you know, he does yet to join into a lot of discussions, too. But I think that would be the only issue that's really come up. But it's not a real issue. He's fine." - What do you think some of those early, like, upfront conversations are that you need to have with that co-founder. - Oh, my God, it's the most important thing. - You were especially. - De-risking the friendships. - Yeah, right with them, too. - Honestly, I think it had been my friend. I would be much more concerned about it. I mean, it was Mike's best friend. So there was less of a sensitivity there, but there's definitely still one. And I think you're absolutely like honesty being super, super candid about what the person's looking for, any questions about equity, any questions about decision-making, all of that, I think needs to be worked out way, way, way of front because. - Do you find ambition, like, how big of a company do you want to build? - Absolutely. I've seen this in the past, where if someone, one person's looking to build like a lifestyle business and the other person's trying to build a rocket ship, like it's completely at odds. Look, I think at least it's been my experience that the number one advantage you can give yourself in doing a business like this. Is a co-founder. Like, I think that having someone to communicate with, someone to laugh with, someone to cry with, someone to be good at what you're bad at, and bad at what you're good at, or when you're tired, to be not tired and vice versa, like, is of the utmost importance, and it's like probably the defined, the key defining thing that has made our business successful. But yeah, you have to be so careful. And off-ramps are, I think, a good way of doing it, and just like having really awkward, difficult conversations up front that probably seem ridiculous at the time, because it's almost like you're. - It's nothing. Yeah, it's nothing. And it's also like, why are you planning for what's going to happen in six years, and this comes a billion dollar business, when, you know, it's on a lark right now. But I would encourage someone to find a co-founder, but I would also caution to be careful about it. - The other thing I wanted to pick up from your journey, and I'm sure like everyone else that listening's going to pick it up, is you hear so much, and I think it's like social media, and just what you hear in the news of these 22, 23-year-olds, becoming entrepreneurs right away and making it big. And we've lost sight of this, and learn on someone else's dime, do something traditional, work really hard, pick up the chops, and then start your own thing, and a lot of successful businesses get started, when people are in their 30s and 40s, versus like 22-year-olds. - Yeah, there's no one way to do it, but you don't hear stories like yours as much, because you are more quiet, and you don't have a big like creator persona online, and you're not like writing on LinkedIn, but I think it's such, that's why part of the reason I want to bring you on them, it's such a, it's missing, because we don't hear from people like you so often. - Yeah, absolutely. And so I started Felix when I was 28, and Kyle was I guess 33, and yeah, you have him as the boat, absolutely. No, that's crazy to think that if you didn't do it in your 22, then even as the boat, I think that Kyle actually had a business, two businesses, prior to Felix, that were successful, not really at Felix's scale, but definitely were great businesses, and so he brought so much knowledge of how to like put yourself out there, like he was a sales guy through and through at his first business in like a way that was so powerful, like he was not scared of, no, at all. He could like ask anyone for anything, he was not worried, I was a little bit more, I less like that, because of my career, but I also, you know, knew how to run a tech company, and I, you know, had all this banking and financial experience that was really useful, especially raising money. So I definitely, could not have been it when I was radio without a doubt. Obviously, I guess, if you're really technical, I mean, you've got this whole Mark Zuckerberg dream going on where it's like someone who's a hacker and they make this great tech digital product and then they figure out. - And there's people, yeah, coming out of end school, that's figured it out right away, but definitely path is, 'cause it's been our path. - Yeah. - And there's power to it. - Yeah, we've got so much knowledge and structure to our thinking, to how we approach things totally. And that learning how to work hard and without learning the fundamentals of how businesses work. - 100%. - And also just maturity around hiring a team, which is obviously the most important thing in my opinion, at least, that you can kind of mess up there is picking the right kind of people. And if I hadn't had the experience I had had, especially if 500 PX, with all the different executives there, and watching my husband go through it and having Kyle have that experience of having gone through it with so many different team members at his past businesses, there's so many, it's so hard to find people who are right for your organization, and I don't want to misquote it, but there's that quote that's more businesses die from suicide and homicide, do you know what I mean? Those big decisions on, just because someone was the best engineering leader for some great other big business and has a great CV, doesn't mean they're what you need now. And your stage of business, and the personalities around the table and with the tech colleges that you're trying to solve, they may not be the right for it at all, and so to rely entirely on someone's experience and not on what you know you're looking for, or need is a huge downfall, and those mishires and how long it takes to change hires, and that regular role can soak up so much time and resources that I think it can just sink a business. So I think that kind of EQ and right players and right positions kind of knowledge that we developed in our earlier careers was so crucial. - One thing that you had said in one of your entries that said with me that was when you were first starting, you were expecting to have to win over the doctors, and it turned out that what you really had to do more of was win over patients in Canada, just given how we think culturally about healthcare. How did you go about building that trust in the early days? - Being so careful. There have been 100,000 little forks in the road for us where we could go down path A or path B as it relates to how over the top we need to be from a regulatory perspective, from a patient safety perspective, from a quality of care perspective, and we are so extreme about going above and beyond on each of those categories. And I think that that is something that we don't necessarily see from some of the American counterparties, or from a lot of the other Canadian businesses kind of doing something similar to us, a very different approach to these things. And I can sit here with 100% confidence and say that we have been extremely proactive on all of those fronts, because there is no silver bullet there, it's just a lot of length, right? So you have to be make sure that everyone has a wonderful experience, you're not having errors, you're not having tech shortcuts that have users who don't go down the happy path, fall off a cliff and not be able to be serviced or supported. So it costed a lot more money, it was a lot slower, I think, because of that. But I think to use it is to understand how much superior it is from a patient safety and from both patient safety and medical outcomes, as well as the user experience point of view. And to have those things both be awesome, it can be tricky, because too many checks and balances can become toil for our user and vice versa. So we had to be extremely thoughtful. We did, I mean, most importantly, above all else, we brought on the world's most phenomenal medical director, so early on, Dr. Kelly Anderson, who, you know, we met through a connection, kind of, I met through a connection, like back when it was just the beginning of an idea. And we kind of, we were so excited to do this company, that we looked at each other and we're like, neither of us are doctors, we can't do this. So we heard about her, we'd heard Laura of her, because she was, you know, a real leader in digital healthcare at the time. And he kind of, Kyle actually went to St. Mike's where she was working at 5 a.m. one morning, and begged her to do it. And she said, "I'm gonna meet you at yes," 'cause she loved it. The idea and the premise and what we were thinking of doing. And that was transformative for us, was she allowed us, on one hand, as you mentioned, she helped, you know, we thought she was gonna help, as I said, to give doctors more confidence. But actually, she just gave her, right, I mean, I'm sure she did a lot of that, but she also gave everyone else confidence, because she was such a wonderful, respectable doctor, who speaks so knowledgeably, and, you know, so well about everything within our domain, that she gives confidence to investors, gives confidence to users, she designs a platform that is from a medical standpoint, you know, exceeding expectations. So that's being huge. And, you know, when it comes to the general population, doing the right thing over and over again, and hoping people notice, honestly. - Yeah, that's important. Did you find in building Felix and I'm also kind of in the healthcare space? - Oh yeah, I see this a lot, but that there is friction or frustrations, sometimes between the clinical side of the business and the commercial side of the business, or do you find that for the most part, everyone is aligned and sees eye to eye. And not in any like big way, but sometimes there's just like trade-offs between the needs of medicine, needs of patients, needs of the business. And it's like having a really grown-up conversation sometimes around those things. - Totally. And there's something that I had a recording for, very clear, I still remember three years ago, we had this conversation over coffee once. But the challenge we had all often had, you know, when things like customer support, where the idea that the customer is always right is a great one. And the customer is always right, but the patient isn't, because ultimately, patients require doctors, medical professionals to guide them, because they aren't. And so a person can believe that they should be getting ex-medication and it's totally appropriate and ex-wide. And it's so important for a good healthcare practitioner to listen to and factor in the desires of the patient. But ultimately, they have to make that medical decision because they have superior hearing knowledge. And so it is hard, I think, sometimes to counterweight those two things for sure. As it went to late, to things like marketing. Yes, we have a very complicated marketing environment here. - It's like a story. - And yeah, the regulatory gymnastics, if you like, are Olympic grade. But it's something that we put so much time and effort and care into that I think we do a really beautiful job of it, being able to reach Canadians, be able to connect with them through our marketing and our ads and all the different things we're doing, while doing so within the regulatory buoys that we need to for healthcare and for the other kind of regulatory bodies who govern Felix. And so, yeah, definitely. There's always a transition poll. We can't do exactly what we want to do. Obviously, ever, I do think that there is a way, there is obviously a path through that. - I mean, eight years in, you're figuring it out. - Exactly. - You know, when you guys chose to go with more of what you've dubbed like an asynchronous approach that's conditioned specific versus the traditional live appointment, that was very common. Why did you choose to do that? - So, what kind of existed prior to Felix is just a carbon copy of what exists in the traditional system that's not working, which is, they just created virtual walking clinics. And there's two big problems with that. One, or that we saw with that. There's a massive discrepancy between what patients think should be easily and quickly treated online and safely treated online or via digital healthcare and what can actually be treated. Like, the classic is, oh, I have a sore throat, I need an antibiotic. - Right. - Nope, that cannot, that's like the, probably the thing people are trying to get treated the most on digital healthcare. Yeah, because it's like, that's what happens. You're like, oh, I think I need an antibiotic. Like, let me go to, you know, X, Y and Z site. But that can't be, that's not, that's not a safe thing to treat online that way. And so we felt that having specific pathways allowed us to curate, okay, here are the, you know, now I think somewhere near 22, there are, like categories of care that can be treated safely and consistently and in a way that is very satisfying to the patient and the medical community via digital healthcare. And so there's no disappointment. Factored in for patients, right? There's no, oh, this is so dumb. Why couldn't I do this? Why don't, now I just have to go to walking clinic. What a waste. We've eliminated that. And, and now a lot of people are kind of trying to do what we're doing, but when we started, that was like, we're out and breaking, to even have categories rather than just connect with the doctor. And secondarily, we had like a matrix that, we had an idea for what we were trying to do that wasn't general care. We weren't trying to be like a walking clinic, like I said. We were trying to address categories, felt really into like the medical category of life, what medicine calls lifestyle healthcare, which is just category of things that don't treat pain or treating illness. So, for example, birth control, like you're not sick, and you're not necessarily in pain. You may be a little bit, but you're not, that would technically fall into lifestyle care. And all of our categories by and large do, well, almost all of them now, now we've expanded quite a bit. So we were trying to create a pathway for ongoing care that was the strong continuity of care, for these categories that required refills and required, most of the medical editions, you're on for a very long time, if not your life, right? You don't go, you don't take a round of birth control, like you would usually do by not x-ray. So there's a requirement to be able to have continued care, to be able to have the data stored, to be able to have make sure that the experience is for the long term. So we felt that our pathway and the way we designed that they certainly can just care a lot for that. The asynchronous care model, which is essentially that you come online, you select the category you're looking for treatment in, and you answer all of the questions that a doctor should be asking you, that before they write a prescription or decide whether or not a prescription is appropriate for you. The real truth of it is that when it's a virtual live appointment, like a video visit, or even an in-person appointment, there's no way to know, they're skipping, they're not asking all 22 questions. And you would be shocked by how many times we are finding patients, we're coming in, we're like, I've been on like combination birth control for 10 years, but then they've identified as having migraines with aura, which is a contraindication. They should absolutely be on a progesterone, only a pelvic, non-acombination pill. >> I think it's actually mixed. >> I will just die on that, it elevates care. It is, we have fewer errors. We have than any other platform and in-person care. We have a much safer controlled rubric, and our HCPs, our healthcare practitioners, are still doing their job and doing a beautiful job. But the platform that we've built is much more robust, and it'll allow it to make sure that anything that is unusual is being flagged in a way that is very hard for them, it's almost impossible for them to mess. We're making sure that every question is answered. And it gives us as a platform that's administering so much care, so much comfort, because we know that all these questions have been answered and they've been reviewed. From a more attack lens, user experience lens, we know that there is a consistency in user experience, right? If you go to a digital walking clinic, and you connect with a doctor via text or video or phone call, or whatever it is, one person might be having the best experience with the best healthcare practitioners asking all the questions that are chatting on the line for 45 minutes if that's what the patient's looking for. And then some burn might be ask nothing. And so you can't control that experience as well. So for a huge number of reasons, asynchronous was undoubtedly the right move for us. Now, because we've grown so much and we've so many more categories of care that have different requirements from a prescribing standpoint to be done correctly, there are synchronous appointments happening when needed in certain categories, but they're not, you know, the basis is always, you start with this, you get, it's also just efficient. Like, we have a huge access to healthcare practice or crisis happening in Canada right now. And we don't have enough doctors to see Canadians and having all of that work done up front by the patient on their own time, and then allowing the doctor to review it much more quickly. I mean, the time it would take for a doctor to sit there and ask all like 40 questions required for a prescription versus having them reviewing it in a very, in a very like easy to digest way. - And like that way too. - Absolutely. And on their own time, you know what I mean? So it just, it just completely transforms the amount of care that one practitioner can deliver. - Are there AI-enabled like tools or screenings that support the doctors in reviewing those, or is it still all have to be done manually by the doctors because of regulation? - No, we don't use AI for the doctor to screen. The way it's built from a platform perspective for the doctors is very efficient, but no, they can't, they can't have a doctor do it. - They can't have an AI do in front. - But our algorithms are supporting them in delivering to them the most important information that they need to see for sure. - But it's not doing like a pre-screen of the question responses for them. - No, but we do use AI in lots of cool places within the business. We do a lot of really, very successfully do a lot of AI chart audits, for example. So we audit the charts later and they do AI does a great job of being like, what went on in these conversations and synthesizing that, but right now the HTP's are doing all. There's a lot of other interesting places where we're building out really cool AI both for the doctors and for the patients, but we're not ready to talk about it yet. - Okay, soon. - Next time. - Next time, follow up. - Part two. - I find your business fascinating, 'cause I feel like there's almost like many businesses within the business because there's so many different patient segments who have like ED and then like menopause and weight loss and hair loss. So from a category point of view, I'm curious. I have so many questions. But A, like how do you assess when a category comes live and what to invest in? Is it like unmet needs, you know economics, the market size, and then how do you keep innovating, 'cause I feel like health and wellness changes so much. - And you know what, I'm so glad you asked like question what a great question because it's so true. We definitely feel that way. We feel like we got 20 different businesses. Because also we launched, we just had birth control ED, hair loss, and acne. So what was really interesting about that is that they were four different businesses. They were, was not. - Two different businesses. - Yeah, in fact, we only really were, we were buying large almost entirely doing birth control on ED 'cause it was so much bigger than the other two. And they took a lot of more of our time and they did not have one, there was not one user who did both, obviously. So it definitely was and they have very different messaging that appeals to them different places to reach them from a marketing standpoint, completely different needs, complete different refill schedules. They absolutely were different businesses. Well, okay, why don't you just do one, right? In the States, there were a lot of businesses that were popping up that were, you know, just doing male pattern baldness or just doing acne or just doing birth control. And we felt that healthcare writ large was a category in Canada that we wanted to tackle holistically. We didn't want to penal solve for the whole ourselves and do one category or one gender, which is what's happening side of the border. So we really wanted to do it. It was more ambitious, it was more tricky 'cause it was like, we didn't want to end up like speak to everyone, speak to no one. - It's like marketing, that's so hard. - It's so hard. And so what we did is we marketed each category completely separately. So we just had four different businesses. We had completely different. There, until very recently, there wasn't a single field that didn't exist. There was an ED ad, there was a birth control ad, there was a weight management ad, weight loss ad, there was a menopause ad, there was a, you know, we, and they were very different. They felt different, had completely different audiences. So yeah, it was just duplication of everybody. But I mean, obviously there were shared learnings that kind of flowed through, but by and large, yeah. - And then in terms of like bringing new categories on, like a peptide ad. - Right, yeah, of course. - I don't know, I don't know. - The way we all peptides. We all have them when they come here. - So like, how do you make those decisions? - There's kind of two different ways. One is, you know, we kind of looked at the Canadian population. We looked at, we're taking what people needed to take, how many people were affected by different, you know, ailments, and we had like a pretty strong matrix of, okay, what can we launch? And yeah, to your point, how many people were affected by this? Is the medication possible for us to be shipping out? Do the unicorn economics work, right? Is the category, like I said, big enough, do those two things come together to be able to support a cast, like a cost to acquire customers? Can it be safely treated online? Which is obviously the biggest one, probably. There's all sorts of things, you know, checks and balances that need to go through to find out whether a category can make it on to Felix. As we've grown, that list has grown because our, well, two things happened, one, you know, medications like the LP ones have really entered the marker, they didn't really exist. So we obviously jumped on that when it became available, but also we've added so much more functionality into the platform. So we added blood testing. So you can get your blood testing done, which unlocks certain medications. We added the ability to, you know, video visits, the ability to do different, different things that have allowed us to treat more categories. - But yeah, absolutely. Like when we started, we kind of had to go back and pick up all the categories that have existed forever, but it should be on Felix, right? So like the ED wasn't, you know, like Viagra wasn't new. Neither was birth control. Neither was a lot of these things, you know, so we were able to add them in. And then, you know, things like menopause, things like, and JLP ones are, or both categories were, there was like a more of a nascent marker, right? - Totally, yeah. - Like, finally people were starting to treat menopause in the way it should be treated. So we, and we realized that there was such a shortage of doctors and such a huge, a lot of patients who desperately wanted care for this. So it was an operator for us to do it. It's a very complicated category to administer. We were so thrilled to do it. And it's one of our, one of our very favorite categories. Each category, we think, okay, is, do we have time to do another category? Is there something that's undeniable and needs to be done like JLP ones? Is there a category that, you know, is there a population that's been broadly ignored, you know? - So I'm like, you're like a little venture fund in the back, 'cause you're actually like-- - Exactly, really old studio, exactly. - Yeah, either like Star of a Bat or continue to fund it. - Exactly. And we do, you know, we don't shut categories down, 'cause once you have some patients, you don't wanna leave them, you know, up the grid without a paddle, but we take things in and out of marketing. 'Cause it's no problem for us to continue having a category there in the background that just keeps shugging along with its 15 patients. - Say 15? - No, I mean, I, I mean, you wouldn't keep on at 15? - I mean, dedication too. - I would probably do, 'cause we bought a, I mean, we bought like the Herpes one, like there are some much, much smaller categories, but yeah, we keep them around. - Okay, it's such a cool. - Yeah. - It's Herpes uppers. Or how much time and attention and oxygening gets from a marketing perspective? - Yeah, so with the launch playbook for a new category, like what percent is repeatable versus needs to be net new? And as you move now more into complex care categories, how does that evolve? - In the early days, our platform was, that the way we built it, we were a little janky. So it took a long time, you had to build it from scratch. - Yeah. - So how long would it take in like the early days? - So I don't know, six months. - Maybe. - Okay. - I mean, divided all the categories, or not, right? Each category is different, it has its own idiosyncrasies, a little bit, but it depends. Now, then Kelly's team, we generally bring on a specialist, who is a specialized doctor in that field, who can shepherd along the category, who we work with to design the category with Kelly, and to design the treatment plans and the prescribing guidelines and all of that. So we'll find that advisor, Kelly will part with them, the quiz and the protocols basically, which they're actually really fast, they're so smart, they know exactly what they're doing. And then, now, the way the platform is built, it's actually very easy to spin up a technically, to spin up another category, but then you wanna make the marketing playbook for it, and all the ads and this and that. So we've done it probably, God, I'll play in this speaker, but I think we've done it most quickly in a couple of months, and then we've got categories that are more complex, and we're doing new things that we've done before, right? So things like our new longevity flow, which is really exciting, which is kind of our blood, it's really cool, but it's a different, yeah, it was totally, we had to set up the partnership with Life Labs, and get and make sure we could do all the testing, and there was all these things that we had to think about, that we'd never had to think about before. It depends on how it's hard to say. - How do you decide when to make those bigger investments in a new category, when it's still very early on? - Part science, part magic. There's definitely like what's working, like, a couple down on the what's working. So like, because we're doing a lot of drug response marketing, like we can, we get, you know, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can really see what's working, but then sometimes we can, like, no, no, this is, we just have a sense. - We're just doing it wrong. And then, and there have been many times in the past, like, I mean, ED was probably the best example, when we first launched, both controls flying off the shelf, and we're like, no, no, there was just nothing going to how we were messaging ED, which needed to be tweaked a little bit. It wasn't hitting, and then we just changed a couple things, and it just took off, like, crazy. - Wow. - So just 'cause we believe that if we have a tremendous amount of conviction in something, sometimes we're just not, Quite, we haven't quite nailed it yet. - The marketing, the messaging. - The marketing messaging, or maybe the way the product is working, maybe some slight detail. So there is definitely the rigorous engine of testing, retesting, promoting winners, killing one losers, but there's also conviction. (laughing) - Intuition too. - Yeah, intuition, excite mind about a category. - Yeah, yeah. - And just also looking around and being like, look, how could this not work? Like, sometimes you see in other markets that there's a huge company that's just doing that thing. And you're like, this has got to work. - And there's probably like a little science to like, yeah, like do you go at something early? Are you like patient? Do you end up like going a little bit late 'cause you've seen it tested in the States? - Yeah. - That's probably elements too of like learning what other people have done. - Yeah, totally. And it's kind of dependent on the category. - Yeah, totally. - Yeah, exactly. - Absolutely. - I feel like there's a few decisions in the trajectory of Felix that have like, step changed the business. And one of those I heard you talk about was pharmacy. And we've had a lot of founders on here talk about vertical integration. And how much it benefits the customer experience. Why bringing stuff in house is game-changing. But maybe just wanted to hear from you. Like, it added a ton of complexity to the business. Obviously, it's the right move. But what have been some of the benefits and how does this continue to evolve? 'Cause right now, do you have one mega? - We have two or almost three mega's. But yes, yes, it's not, it's not. Yeah, so when we started Felix, we didn't have a pharmacy that we actually ran, we partnered. I think God, we did that because, I mean, Kyle and I were so full of humor so the time we probably would've been like, "Yeah, we can run a pharmacy. What do you mean? That's how we're gonna be." - It's hard, it's hard. We have this phenomenal Tracy Phillips who is like a famous notorious person in the traditional Canadian pharmacy world. Like, she was, you know, on the College of Pharmacy don't tear her for years. She ran pharmacy for rex all for years. She's like, as good as it gets. And as knowledgeable as it gets. And she's actually being our advisor in pharmacy for, since we started. She helped guide us through the partnership and all the negotiations and understanding how pharmacy actually works. It's actually so complicated. And so we did not have a pharmacy originally. We, like I mentioned, we were Tracy, who's phenomenal. And she helped us set up a great partnership with a great central fill who helped deliver all the medication. They were awesome. And so grateful that we did that because I think the complexities for running pharmacy absolutely would have sunk us in minutes. - If you hadn't, how do we not stop the pharmacy? - Yeah, hard earned. - Especially if during the COVID years, you were also having to own all of the, like relationships, drug manufacturers. Like it would have been crazy. There were so many shortages, and it was just wild. So we did that. And then after a couple of years, we did decide to open our own pharmacies for snow and tarot and BC. And then in BC, which is a huge job for us. Like running a pharmacy is complicated, but we had learned so much by then from for herring. And built so much like software for them that we really understood the ups and flows. - You built your own custom software for that? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - What constraints led you to want to build your own from the initial? - I mean, margins, I think as well as just the customer experience. Like it was hard, yeah, absolutely. It was hard to not be able to control what the, you know, there's something called pharmacy counseling, which means every time someone gets a new medication for the first time, they get counseling from the pharmacist about it. So just if they indicate they want the counseling, participate in that ourselves, being able to make sure that the packages looked and felt exactly how we wanted them to or sent out it on time. If you know, in times when you do a lot of volume, because of an ad we ran or a promotion or whatever, it might be people to flex up and down and having like the pharmacy team being so connected to our marketing team and to our product team. And so they know when, having them know when well in advance when they need to staff up and when they don't, you know, that was just so important. It was so hard to go through. - Yeah, operationally you can sustain the growth as you need it. - Yeah, flexibility and nimbleness, customer experience, but also money. To be honest, but it was funny 'cause we thought we knew what it was gonna be like, we like, oh, we got this, we do it for years, it's easy, we're professional now. We were not ready. I mean, we were, I'm glad we did it. We had glad we burned the boats and we jumped in and we figured it out 'cause we got, you know, we could've put it off her and it was definitely transformational, but it was, it's very different. We have the most phenomenal pharmacy team, but they're dealing with totally different problems than our tech team are, you know, the Felix Health employees are like, my most doesn't work. And they're like, there's a ghost like, you know, or whatever it is, I've made that. I've gotten, you know, there's all sorts of, like what makes you really feel like a capital E entrepreneur? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's actually almost more authentic 'cause you're like, there's, you know, issues and the pharmacy and there's, they're real, there's floods, there's this. - We had a flood of, we had a flood of, we had a flood of one of our clinics and like, it's like stuff like that or like, slacks go off. - Yeah, you might be doing brick and mortar praises, it's a good way to be like. And also like the four years, you know, have different problems, they're like, there's traffic, if we're like, what? - Yeah, yeah. - I think it's like, that shouldn't matter. - Yeah. - It's just, yeah. - I feel like you've also added so much defensibility to the business now. Like in this like world of AI, like having the physical infrastructure just supports you guys so much more. - Yeah, absolutely. And our pharmacies are some of the big, in the categories that we're in, they are like the biggest pharmacies in Canada. Buyers and, you know, they're doing more business than even the traditional pharmacies. And so having that buying power, having that ability to develop those relationships ourselves with this wise, where the most important relationships and other relationships with our patients, obviously, which is the most important. It had to be done. - Yeah. - We had to do that. - What have you learned most from now owning more of your value chain? - A lot of respect for the people who are running the central fill we partnered for. We didn't respect their toil. Now we do. It's funny when I was in investment banking, I always, we were like helping someone do a fundraise or whatever it was. Being the analyst from the bank, I'd be like, okay, send us all this information and then they would take them two weeks to pull together and be like, what is going on over there? What if you have your data? - Yeah. - Or stop your fingers. - Have your data. - Being on the other side of it, I'm like, you know, when we do fund raises and things, I'm like, oh my God, how are we gonna find this exact thing that they're asking for? So I developed empathy for the clients too late there. Now I've developed empathy for the central fill too late. There was the intimidation factor and just like the mind share factor, we needed to be in a stable place where we had time to tackle something so major. But also like the value of it was so much more important once we were bigger. When we were little, things like having more buying power, having direct relationships, having, you know, being able to flex a volume, what volume? We had like 15 patients, you know what I mean? They were irrelevant then. So to have done that before would have been a huge mistake in a waste of time and effort. I think we ended up using hiring people who were, you know, in and of that world eventually. But I think we had perhaps a little too much heat for us at the beginning where we were like, we can figure it out. - Mm-hmm. - 'Cause as far as we started to feel like, - Yeah. - Like we didn't know, or at all. - Luckily we didn't transition right away. So none of this was fault by our patients. But I think it'd be like, surround yourself with the experts who have done it before as best you can. Same as starting any other business, I'd say. It's the same thing. But you should look at it that way, rather than just thinking it's a nothing burger and you can easily do it. - At this stage of eight years in where you guys are obviously have a brand name and everyone knows what Felix is. But I assume you want to continue to grow into that and become a bit more of a household brand as well. Are you guys doing anything interesting in that space of like making people really associate Felix with trust? - I think we're certainly trying. It's a great question. - It's so hard. - It's so hard. - We're at a stage where we're thinking about it too. And it's tough to nail. - Yeah, and you mentioned it earlier. Like my co-founder, Colin, we're relatively quiet. Like we're not out there like banging our drum on LinkedIn all the time. We're not like doing a lot of. - I find it refreshing. - Oh, thank you. - We're not trying to get features in every publication, every five seconds. But and I understand what people do. We just have never been like that. So we've all our approaches as being like, if your head down, make the product great, make everything awesome and people will notice. I guess I mean, I think it's worked up into a point but you're right. It's so important for us to become that household name to take the next leap into a kind of slightly different stratosphere of business. And we've some great role models to look at. Like the well-simples of the world who have done such a great job of that. Coming from a small tech, you know, challenger brand type perspective and taking on a real, really stable industry. Obviously, healthcare's a little bit different 'cause like it is, we don't have like, so obviously in our receipt of community and we've got like the universal healthcare system large which obviously has sensitive to. It is what it is and it's like, we don't have competitors advertising. Do you know what I mean? So we've got a competitor who, you know, can't serve us one in five Canadians and frankly, we're out there not. Like they're doing the best they can. We have a tremendous amount of respect for the system but we think that we play a very important role in supplementing it. And I think it's very happy to have a supplemented it which is unusual, right? It's like our incompetence in competing with us, they're like, this is great. - Yeah, yeah. - So I think that that is a difference that helps us but I think, you know, stepping outside of the screens, you know, going much more into, earning me into our home, yeah. - It's so funny 'cause that is a startup. Like you develop a mission values brand and then you're changing so much and so you think you need to like evolve it all the time but then we had an expert be like, no, no, back to the basics, we're peeping the same thing over and over and over again, keep saying it. Like don't think that you always need to like, reinvent the messaging or tweak this or like, redo your value props. Like the consumer will get it. If you, they need to see it from like multiple channels across multiple different ways. - You should've say it a couple different ways. - A couple different ways. - Say the same thing, just say to a couple of them. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - They also have to be in that moment when they're looking for that. - They're looking that way. - Yeah. - Yeah. - You know, we can talk about metaphors care 'til we're blue in the face but if it's a woman who's not suffering and you're not going through metaphors, they're not gonna hear it. - Yeah. - And then suddenly one day it's gonna resonate and so we should be there then totally agree with you. The other thing about Felix is that, I mean, you did a fantastic shot at the beginning summarizing it, but it's complicated. It's hard to understand and it's not a direct comp for anything that exists today. We challenge ourselves to keep repeating it in a different way so that people can understand what exactly we're doing. I mean, one of my best friends the other day was like, oh, I'm thinking about starting a GLP1. I just need to get my prescription and then I'm gonna use Felix. And I said, no, no, that's like a disaster. But the thing is people don't totally understand, so people think it's just a pharmacy aspect. Some people think it's just just the thing, so it's just complicated. So I think that it takes time, but I think being as loud as we can these days, turning some more of that traditional media is the way it's the way it's true. Yeah, exactly. It's like, honestly, like a few years ago, I thought that it was just a competitor to Maple. And it was the same product off of like Pucket Pills. But Pucket Pills are opposites, right? And people don't even, you know what I mean? So it's like different pieces of yours. Yeah, and I think a lot of the Puck Pills and Maple's other people who are in the space who came before us have tried to judge their model to make it look more like our model. Which we take as a compliment. But I do think that yeah, at our essence, we've designed it to bring the circle of care for our patient closer together onto one surface so that we can handle the whole thing for them. So being able to handle understanding what the medication, what the category of the education piece, the discovery piece, there's so many aspects to it that it was designed to all do together. And so I think when you started with only one of those pieces and then you tied tag on the other pieces later, it never feels natural. Our patients really feel the difference of that, I think. And as we continue to grow and expand, we find that more and more people are just actually using more and more things on Felix. There's a real lifetime with Felix that we're able to design, and it's just, that's just so at odds with a digital lock and clinic, it's just not the same thing at all. And when it comes to your growth, is that the area where you're seeing the most or is it still new categories also just adding patients? Yeah. I mean, it's about mixed ball. Adding patients is probably still the biggest, like growing our existing categories because we're not, you know, we're really in rapid category expansion mode right now. We're in rapid growth just because of things like GLP ones and longevity and some of these cat metaphors, these categories that are just monsters that we're still growing into. They get more and more adopted in the Canadian market. But yes, we definitely are still doing up to renters around across all. And it's like, they came later obviously, it was not very possible, and we're basically just birth control on E.D. It wasn't long ago. They're saying someone doesn't do that. Yeah, shocking. But as now that we've got so many different categories, people are seeing things that they need and that they'd like to engage with. And it's a great, it makes me feel there's nothing I like better than when you see patients cross-selling because it means that they love what they like and feel, like they like the experience. They want to continue. They want to deepen the relationship, and that's definitely our goal. Yeah. You guys should be very proud. Oh, thank you. Five years from incorporation to profitability is what one of the, I think, was a global male or a beta-kit article, that's what was stated. Is that what you thought would happen? How does that measure up to what you guys first thought when you started the company? About profitability? Reaching profitability. You know what? I don't think we ever had a stated goal around that as much as we did around growth. And like we were very kind of banged against the wall about this so many times and just debated every angle of it so many times. And, you know, there was a contraction in the capital markets, like there was a sense of, okay, now everyone has to be profitable. Stop growing, never be profitable. And there have been times when it's like, grow at all costs, you know, and it kind of oscillates. So if you're just purely listening to what you're getting from the investment community. And Kyle and I have been very specific since day one that we wanted to kind of always be growing but growing responsibly. So we never actually had this time when we were building money like crazy. We really didn't. We grew very organically. I don't want to say we grew slowly because we didn't grow slowly but we grew manageably where we were never just like, yeah, we never like grow at all costs, you know, we'll do whatever we can. And even like cap growth either to be profitable super. Exactly. And we were very, we always had really, really strong, it was a very lean team. And we also always had very specific controls around like CAC and LTV and payback period making sure that we were always acquiring customers in a profitable way. So in times like when we see a lot of opportunity, one of people are aggressive, we're running on ads, we will slip more into like the less profitable, you know, maybe not quite profitable lens. And times when we're a little bit less aggressive in market, it'll slip into the profit really. But we definitely have had the goal of always being near that line. So you know, if anything happened by tomorrow, we're profitable without, you know, having to lose and plug or anything like that, right? It's just a function of turning off like slowing slightly down the engine on growth. I think it's just a kind of people we are, we feel much better in that. Yeah. So like an investment banker. Yeah. Exactly. We just not like that. I also think that we've like always had all the money that we've ever needed to do to achieve our goals, but we've never like over raised. And so I think that happens often to startups, particularly in the US, what happens in Canada is where you get like almost a vanity raise, where you raise it a crazy valuation and then you have to grow into it. And then you actually, it's also hard to turn down that much. It's so wonderful. Someone wants to give me that much money and value, but they want to give me that value, right? Saying that my company's worth X and that feels really good. Yeah. The problem with that is that then the winds change a little bit, an interest rate shiver, whatever it is. And suddenly, you know, you are beholden to that and you can't raise again until you can prove that you're worth more than that. And you're actually in a really sticky position and down around like the worst thing that could happen to a business at that stage. So we've always raised very conservatively, we've raised from like many, many times turned down a higher valuation for an investor we'd preferred, just felt it was a better fit. So we've kind of not ended up in that space, which is great. And it's allowed us to grow at a rate, at a pace that we felt really comfortable with. When you raise the $53 million round shortly after the announcement that you were profitable, what made still going for like outside capital more attractive than using your own kind of cash to grow the business and what were the kind of the focus areas that just ability to grow quickly. And it suddenly started to participate in out of home as well, which is less like, you don't get your cash back as quickly. It's more of an investment. It was just that, like if we were only like self-funding, it would be a slow growth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we would have to, you know, we could stay profitable for sure, but we feel that this is like digital, yeah, digital health care is not like a tremendous moment in Canada. Finally, the two places out of the tube Canadians are excited and they're engaging with it. And we like, this is a land grab moment and we are grabbing the land. And so we did not want to let that that pass us by. So we wanted to be able to be as aggressive and remain very visibly like the leaders of that pack and not end up not. Was that round the first that you did part X? I think it was like half debt, half equity on that round. Was that the first time with for debt? It was all I think we did take venture debt, a much smaller amount of venture debt from SVB before. Yeah. And then they went to our business and then it became national bank. My question, my question was going to be more around is when you raise debt versus just equity, does that change how your decision-making or decisions on investments of how you use the capital? Yes, it does, I think. I mean, I guess the real answer is it shouldn't. You should just, if you're going to raise debt, you should use it and become a little leverage, but being levered, but honestly, that's not the truth. Definitely, feel we've already paid for that equity, that the cash we got for equity. You know, we've paid for it, we did an exchange, we're very willing to spend it. Whereas with the debt, we, it's more of a rainy day fund, for sure. Yeah, bustle wind. I would say. Yeah, yeah, we, and that's, we shouldn't feel that way, but we do. Yeah. Probably a safer, the way it sounds that you guys operate your business is probably going to save you some cuts along the way when unexpected things come up. Yeah, exactly, we just don't, yeah, I mean, it's, I've heard too many horror stories of, you know, banks are so nice and they've got great terms on our debt, like you wouldn't even believe them, but. Yeah. Would things go wrong? Yeah. Yeah. That changes real quick. Yeah. So I definitely, yeah, we definitely approach it differently, for sure. You said you were 28 when you started the business. Yes. And Kyle was 32. I'm curious. 33. 33. Curious to know how you guys have evolved from the like founder inventor that stands up the business in every function to CEO and COO and having to be very competent and hire people and make all those decisions. Things have changed so much. It's funny. I've had three kids in starting Felix and it's like each time there was a time when between Kyle and I were both doing, like we're the IC doing every single thing, obviously. And we slowly divested ourselves with things, but we kind of, we did hold on to for longer obviously not doing the things, but being like the head of that division when there was no executive in charge of it almost perfectly each time I went on that leave for, you know, a few months, not long because of just of the nature of the beast, I like divested myself of one of them. You know what I mean? Like I got a great VP of operations when I had one of them. I had a great, you know, CFO when I got another one, et cetera, et cetera. So slowly we've kind of peeled away those core competencies for myself, which is great because we've given them to people who are far better than the nice things are going really great on that friend with an amazing team. But I think that we, I mean, I'd be lying to say that we do anything other than just making like tough decisions, 98% of the time, that's really what it is at the stage, at least for me. There was a time in between where we were like really managing our executives, but now our executives are of a certain caliber and an experience level that they don't actually really need managing, they need direction, they need vision. Sometimes they need to talk the problem-solving, but ultimately I would say that we spend the vast majority of our time. Is there anything you did differently to hire really strong senior executives? Because it's always a tough role to hire for. It's hard. It's hard. I don't know if we did anything differently than else. We just spent a lot of time with them, probably very annoyingly long amount of time with them before we hired them. Obviously, we've made changes in our executive team over the years, and I've actually loved every executive. I haven't had a single person like that person was a mistake, but I do, I would say that like with anything in life and like with probably myself, like there are times, like there are people who are perfect for that stage, and they're not, but they're not less of a person. I don't know. I think we're so authentic. We're really authentic. people in the hiring, when we're hiring them. We encourage them to speak to everyone they can because we want them to know what it's actually like working for the business. I don't want them to have any surprises. - Yeah. And I assume are they more like entrepreneur executives where they are, or he's like you have the stereotype of the executive that like comes in and like does nothing and just, but they're all doers, absolutely. - Oh yeah, no that doesn't work, that doesn't work. - And if you try that it doesn't work. - I just listened to a podcast, Toby from Shopify. He's like after, he's like I fired my entire executive team and one go and then hired all the founders that were part of like companies at shop before I to be the executive. - Yeah, the entrepreneurs. I mean the entrepreneur executive, not the ivory tower. - No, we don't have anybody like that on us. It just, like our people are from like well simple like other startups and you know, they're awesome. I mean, the only executives who aren't are like Dr. Kelly and Tracy, technically I guess it's from Rexle, but she's really cool. And she owns her own businesses as well. - Yeah, no, absolutely, we need doers. And we are really hands on environment still. I feel like it's still, like I said, it's a very lean team. So we've got all of the executives who are still very much close to the work, definitely. - Are there areas in the COO role that you hold that you feel like you're not competent in or you're still growing in competence? - 100 results. - What would that be? It's easy to look at people from the outside and think they like know everything, have it together. So. - Kyle and I always joke that like, "Am I the COO?" because he's the CEO. So I'm the COO, but really I'm just the other co-founder. Like I have an amazing SVP of operations and amazing director of operations. We're doing that job more than I'm doing the job. I'm being the founder more than that to be totally awesome. So yeah, 100%. Like Kyle and I spend a time basically pairing on really tricky decisions, like any kind of decision. I think we both play more of a founder role than intracural executive role. And I think that we are very likely to be working with executives who are totally comfortable with that. - Yeah. - And I encourage that. We're a pain in that we're hard to get a hold of. We are, some may say we're indecisive, not indecisive that we change our minds or we're fickle, but it's just that we both feel very strongly and I think we're right, even though we be frustrating that like when new information appears, we change our minds, right? We think it would be foolhardy especially for, we're trying to move so quickly to die, like make a decision and then stick to it when new information comes to light and that is no longer the right decision. So we definitely spend a lot of time making decisions, going forward and then changing course if we do, but that's the point of a start of us to be a agile eye like that and to change things when you want to. So it's being great, it's being great to be able to have that same kind of ethos between the two of us and the same culture. I think that culture actually kind of permeates the whole business where people are very, people are very encouraged to make their own decisions to manage those teams however they want to. But also like if you make a mistake, if you change your mind, no one is going to be upset about it. The only thing to be upset about it if you knew, you changed, you realized, and then you didn't change it. Yeah. So yeah, it's an interesting, I definitely would never be able to get a job as a COO and it would also help you that much. - I have one other topic I want to cover on just as we're talking about teams and roles on chief of staffs because there's been so many articles, I don't know if you've seen them recently about how they're popping up, they're getting paid crazy amounts of money right now. Since 2020, there's been a 85% increase in chief of staff job role postings. As someone who in a prior life was a chief of staff, you also have a chief of staff at Felix. Why do you think one, like to start just like, why do you think that role has become so popular in today's day and age? - I think it's popular. I mean within the realm of startup specifically because founders are not like traditional executives, like you said, and we're dealing with so many weird, disparate issues all the time that is so great to have a, like I see a COO founder, amplifier there to make sure that we don't drop balls and to make sure that the trends continue to run on time and that we're supposed to be, or at least one of us is where we're supposed to be. Our chief staff matter is phenomenal. We've had a couple of chief of staffs over the years 'cause it's not a forever role. We try to keep it 80 miles to two years because we want them to move up and into other exciting new roles. We don't have assistance, we don't have EA's, we don't have any kind of admin support, which is a decision that we kind of revisit constantly and then we end up staying the same continuing to do that. It's kind of unusual for a CEO and a CEO running a business of the scale. But we feel like, we just, we worry that it's gonna like just formalize everything a little too much and that I like to keep our calendars very fluid where we like change, make a lot of changes. Like we really go where we're needed through today. So whatever kind of plans I have for the day, you know, the chances of it actually going like that are slim to none. Unless you're in our like first three hours, or at least I'll speak for myself. Unless you're a podcast episode. Unless you're a podcast, but unless you're like between 9 a.m. and 11, Chase, sorry you're getting (indistinct) Yeah, exactly, it does and it's fine because let's the point in like, you know, one and one's are great, but they don't have to happen at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Like, yeah, I'll hold something like this. It's those little decisions that let you operate with speed because they like those decisions stack up and you don't see it in the moment. The moment's like, okay, I'm moving this, but then over time, over weeks and months, you've like probably orchestrated things differently. Totally. So it's just like, it's like you see the result. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't even, and like I actually like, people are gonna shame me for this, but I actually don't even do one or one anymore of my direct reports. That's because I had to cancel them so very much. I realized with the scale of the people who I bought reporting into me and the teens I've got, and how busy they are, I'm like, call me. When you were problem, don't wait 'til it's the one I don't want on Tuesday. Sure, yeah. First of all, there's important call me immediately. Call me something, which they do a lot, which I love. And then also, you know, let's talk whenever you need to talk and sometimes it's once a week, sometimes it's twice a week, sometimes it's once every two weeks. I guess I'm really tired of be, or so I just, I'm not organized enough to show up to the one on one's own time. And if I do, there's almost always something else I should be doing that's kind of more time sensitive. But that's where Matt is so wonderful as he was stuff. Like he makes sure that the things that need to happen, every way we actually do happen. And like we want a big team of people who need some structure and some stability. And he definitely makes sure that happens. But I don't know why I think maybe it's because why it's so fashionable right now, chief of staff. It's such a great thing to have as a leader, to just have someone who's kind of like a little clone of you running around and being able to be where you can't be and make decisions for you. So when you trust, like, it's like a little, he's like a little external hard drive. He's amazing. He makes great decisions. He has encyclopedic knowledge of the whole business. - Yeah. What's more important to you when you hire, is it judgment or drives? - Judgment. - Judgment. 'Cause you just said like he makes great decisions. - Oh my God. Judgment for me is like the almost, like, next the only thing I hire for it to be honest. And I think it's really hard to teach. - And like discernment. - Discardment. - Absolutely. - Yeah. - Without a doubt. Like I talked about earlier, like learning how to work hard, knowing how to work hard. I do tend to try to hire people who do because they don't want to. - It's just like misalignment culture. - Yeah, if there's a misalignment of culture of what hard work looks like, it can be a challenge. But I think that that can definitely be taught. Unless someone's like fundamentally the kind of person who doesn't like ever want to be, have their feathers ruffled, then that's difficult. But like, no judgment. - In terms of Felix's long-term orientation and your and Kyle's end goal with a company, what does that look like? Like what are you guys thinking about five, seven years from now? - We still feel like there is so, so, so much to be done. We're still feel so much like we're in the earliest innings. Not just of the categories we're already in, which we think we're just scratching the surface of today, but also all the other things that are healthcare-large in Canada that we want to transform. So, I don't know what the end goal is. It is an IPO, it is an acquisition. Isn't just staying as we are, but we do know that we're not close to that goal. (laughing) It still feels like we just started. We have a lot of energy behind the things that we've got coming down the pike and the things that we've kind of just more recently launched. - Do you see yourself going beyond what we've called like the lifestyle health issues into the more like actually complex care? - Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely we do. And what we're not sure of is will we step outside Canada ever? I don't know, it's like we debate a lot. We often feel like it'd be really exciting and fun to do, but then we continuously are like, no, but there's still so much to be done in Canada. There's so much to be done. - Is there a lot like hymns in her? It's like, do they dominate a lot of like U.S.? - Didn't they also come here? - They're here. - They're just not. - They're just very quiet. - Yeah, I don't know what's going on there. - But yeah, you want to continue to build. - Yes. - We want to get, yeah. - It also like it's a good takeaway for people too. Like it takes a long time to build a really good company. Like I think there's just like a misconception that it's like flip it four years. - Yeah, yeah. - But building something along with longevity takes time. - Yeah, the impact that you guys want to have too. - Exactly. I don't know if it's just like ego or what it is or maybe we're just like crazy founders who are high on their own supplier. I don't know what it is. But we just feel like there's so much that we can have such a big impact on for Canadians and their lives. And like we're so passionate about healthcare space. Like we just, it's so important to people. And I mean, I loved working at companies like 500 PX where photography is great. It's a photography business. And you know, I have a lot of friends who have businesses that are like B2B software business. And like, yeah, you can be passionate about it, but you only be so passionate about like inter-office communication. Like there's a limit. Right? I won't mind how. Maybe there isn't. Maybe there isn't. - You should have more people. - Yeah, I mean, there's this not my passion. But so I just, I feel like there's nothing more personal than healthcare and there's nothing more important than health like at the end of the day, obviously. And I think that it's something that everyone can get excited about. And you know what you actually, I asked earlier that like hiring executives are attracting the right kind of talent. The mission of Felix attracts the right talent. It retouched right there, had a person just because who want to like is and there's no question that health care in Canada is complicated and hard. It's patently obvious, but there's also nothing more gratifying than making a difference in health care in Canada, I think. So the person, the kind of people who want that challenge and want to have that effect are that passionate or they kind of self-selected. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. For anyone that's super ambitious and wants to start a company, would love to hear from you because you did it as you're having your first and then you have three daughters. Yes, three ladies. What are the trade-offs that are needed in life to be able to build a family and build a company? It's interesting. I think that I actually became a better decision-maker and a better leader once I had at least my first daughter. Maybe now, maybe now I have too many and it's the scale of shifting against a number at home, yeah. I put everything in perspective. There was too much of me. I was like hovering. I was in everyone's business. I couldn't, I felt the things that weren't that I was harder to discern between what's really important, what's not, what's a type one decision, what's a type two decision. And I think that having a kid, my first daughter made me have something else going on. A little bit. Yeah. Where it, like, is for something I really need to be with you. 100% and somewhere else to be. It also helped me for some reason. It like made me better multi-hasker. I was already a multi-hasker I think a little bit, but like, far more so. And a good way. And it just made my decision-making faster. I think because of that, just like scarcity of time, scarcity of attention. Like, I could decide between two candidates faster. I could decide, you know, I could decide between, you know, a tricky product decision more quickly. And I don't know what exactly the biological mechanism for that, why that is. But I do think that happened. Yeah. Now I obviously have three. So, not sure. That's not me. I mean, it is full of two things, but I do. I'd be totally honest with you. I have two amazing nannies. I do not do it alone. It is not me. That's crazy. I absolutely do not. I have two nannies. And do this sport with, like, cooking as well as cleaning, probably even more with cooking and cleaning than holding the kids also because I like to be with the kids and I don't really care about, yeah, it's like a little value. I haven't gotten a cooking bug yet. I haven't gotten the cooking bug yet. I had it and I lost it. Yeah. And so it's like it's so honest to hear from people that are just like, yeah. I was like into it when I like had a puppy and we thought our puppy was a baby, you know what I mean? When I was like 28. Well, you're not cooking like functionally at that point in your ass. No, I'm like, we're going to knock him down a Tuesday afternoon, which was fun, but like that is just like, not my wife. No, so yeah, I definitely don't do a lot of those things. I also, like, my husband sold his company when he were a couple years into Felix, maybe three years into Felix, and it was really tricky from a time management perspective during the time when he was working like crazy. He didn't have a co-founder. It was just him and he was, it was like a crazy, busy time. But then he wasn't working. Now he started a new company. So now he's getting busy again, but he like wasn't working for two years, which meant that he drove the kids to school every morning. He did a lot, definitely not everything, but a lot, jokingly, he did everything sometimes he did everything. He was phenomenal. So that it was amazing. Like that allowed for things to have for some of the trickiest years when we had the youngest kids for that to happen more easily, because if he had he's still been running his business or he's running his new business now, had he been doing that, I don't know, I don't know. Do you think that in households where it's like a two entrepreneur household, you do need to be a bit staggered in stage of company? I would recommend it. Yeah, definitely. I also think like, it's kind of like having a co-founder. He's kind of like my home Kyle. For sure. And it's like when I'm tired. Yeah, exactly. He, when he's like, we've been very lucky that there's been a yin and yang to it where it's like when he needs a lot of support, I happen and when I've needed a lot of short, he hasn't. And I don't know if it's actually just luck that we've lucked out and it works that way when I'm more time when he doesn't and he does. Or if it's just that you kind of naturally decide between you two, like through brainwaves, who is actually the person who needs to be at that meeting more than the other, you know what I mean? That more than the other person. So I think that you can definitely do it all. I think if you are wanting to have a business and have kids, like you're going to need help. Like either you have great grandparents who are super involved in our helping a lot, or you've got a spouse who isn't working, or you've got, or you're comfortable having, you know, hired help. Like, yeah, you got to figure that out. Yeah, you're certainly not gonna be, that's for sure. Forget it. And my days are like the most phenomenal people. I'm obsessed with them. They're angels and yeah, we would all be disaster with them, honestly. All right, rapid fire. Yeah, we'll move to some rapid fire. What's a piece of standard startup advice that you think is actively wrong? One on what? One on what? I also kind of have a beef with them. I don't know. I don't know. I think there's going to be a change to the one on one structure. I think it's like a status update. Yeah. And like, are you like, is it supposed to inform leadership? Are you supposed to like ask to be unblocked? But if you don't have anything, you need to be unblocked on. But also if you're blocked, call me another time. Yeah. Why are you waiting? Are we waiting? Yeah. It is a little unclear. The purpose for me. They're not for me. I get, for some people, like, who are more, like, regimented people makes a lot of sense to have that schedule, but for me, I'm just like, probably make sense in the early days when you have a new team member. I totally agree with that. When you're onboarding someone, you need to spend, like, my, how I work, I would say, and I, you know, you'd really actually have to ask someone who worked for me to get the true answer, but how I think I work is that, like, when someone first joins, I spend a lot of time up front, teach trying to teach and also understand each other. And so, you know, they make decisions, you know, I make decisions or understand what they're like, judgment is around X, Y, and Z and vice versa. And then I back off completely. And I'm like, almost like a negligent parent to that where I like, I trust them. I trust them completely. Yeah. To the point where it's like, and you still come to you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so, yeah, maybe one-on-ones. I don't know if that's like standard startup advice, though. Also, early days, why they don't make sense is you actually do want everyone else to hear the discussion in that one-on-one. And it's like sometimes you're peeing it. It's like a silo. We're making it silo. We're making it five different functions versus, like, if there's anything that important and critical, like group meeting. Like, say it at the group meeting. There obviously, there's like some totally weekly. Yeah, but there was a lot of people are adults. And like, it's like, sometimes I find that people just need to fill the air. It just becomes show and talent. Like, look at all the things I did. Or you're like, how are things going? And then they're like, okay, I have to complain about something. They're like, I guess this person was kind of rude to me. And now you've just, like, turned someone who was totally fine until like a minor about something that they didn't even feel was important enough to service. Obviously, it's important to create space and have time for your employees to talk to you about whatever it might be. But I think I'm very approachable at all times. So, I don't think I need to dedicate a time. Yeah. Yeah. Who is a CEO entrepreneur, you most admire? And why? Kyle. Kyle. Oh, he's fantastic. And he's like so much better at so many things than me. And we, you know, he's just being just absolutely incredible to work for. We're work with and I think work with and for working for side and what. What's one thing you would tell your younger self to stop doing sooner? Picking my split ends and meetings, which I used to do whatever I was. Whenever I was like, deeply, very healthy hair for someone. Thank you. I used to highlight my hair, though. And I used to sit there and I would, I was thinking I used to like this. And it wasn't because I was being like ignoring the person, but I was that's how it, like, I used to take off the processing, but it made me look like an idiot. And so that sounds like a non-answer, but it's an answer, which is that how you present, how you see in a meeting impacts how people think of what you're, what people think of what you're saying. Someone bring that to your attention. Yeah, actually, funnily enough, the CEO of the investment bank that I used to work for Jim. He was fantastic. He'd always be like, you need to stop doing that. But I didn't even really listen to him and now that I continue to do. And it wasn't until I like, you know, saw someone else doing something. And I was like, no, doing that. Oh, my God. Yeah. You can't sit there. Well, so the same thing happened to me. I was in management consulting and it was KPI. It always like used to go like this with my hair. And it was a female partner. And she was like, do not touch your hair because it looks like you could either look inviting like 30. Or you just look like such a girl. Like, do you just look like an idiot? It did. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to sit on my hair. Yeah, it sounds like bad advice, but honestly, or like to my former self, but it is important. Like, people like, how you present and how you are doing. How to language, pitching. Makes such a difference in how people like, listen, I'm. Agreed. Last question. Last question. What is the most expensive lesson you've learned building Felix? I mean, I think it was definitely, it had something to do with opening the pharmacies for sure, for sure. I'm trying to figure out which expense exactly would have been as well, just say the pharmacies. I'm so glad that and they're one of the best things about Felix, but we learned so much and we made so many mistakes just trying to figure out just having, you know, thinking that we could just do it easily and simply and not understanding how, how complicated it is. One of the pharmacies in BC, the one in BC, we actually acquired because, you know, it was during COVID and the licensing was really backed up to get a new pharmacy license, so it was faster to acquire someone. Oh, my God, it was at faster. Absolutely not. It was, like, the most difficult business you'll ever, and it was irrelevant. Like, we're talking about like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny acquisition, like the cost of one I see for a type thing. Wow. And it soaked up the amount of time that Kyle and I had to spend both of us dealing with this was unbelievably, truly unbelievable. So I think it would be in the trials and tribulations of opening the pharmacies. Okay. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, so much guys. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Between Tupor Nats. If you enjoy the show, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. We love to hear your feedback and do our best to get back to everyone, so feel free to leave your comments or reach out to us on any of our socials. See you next time.