Welcome back to Product in Healthtech, a community for healthtech product leaders by product leaders. Today’s guest is Jack Boren, managing director at EPIC Ventures out of Salt Lake City, Utah. EPIC invests in a range of verticals, including biotech, digital health, enterprise software, and cybersecurity. We recently sat down with Jack to kick off our series of talks with healthtech investors. Jack takes us behind the scenes at how they perform technology diligence at product-led companies. He also chats with us about remote patient monitoring, design thinking, customer experience, and more. This series is hosted by Ian Harris, President and CEO at Vynyl, a software development and design firm.
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Welcome back to Product in Healthtech, a community for healthtech product leaders by product leaders. Today’s guest is Jack Boren, managing director at EPIC Ventures out of Salt Lake City, Utah. EPIC invests in a range of verticals, including biotech, digital health, enterprise software, and cybersecurity.
We recently sat down with Jack to kick off our series of talks with healthtech investors. Jack takes us behind the scenes at how they perform technology diligence at product-led companies. He also chats with us about remote patient monitoring, design thinking, customer experience, and more.
This series is hosted by Ian Harris, President and CEO at Vynyl, a software development and design firm.
Want to be a guest or request a topic discussion: info@productinhealthtech.com
Get in touch with Jack: jack@epicvc.com
Ian Harris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianandrewharris/
Jack Boren: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackboren/
Ian Harris (00:07):
Welcome back to Product in Healthtech, a community for health tech product leaders, by product leaders. I'm Ian Harris, president and CEO of Vynyl.
Ian Harris (00:14):
Today's guest is Jack Boren, managing director at EPIC Ventures out of Salt Lake City, Utah. EPIC invests in a range of verticals, including biotech, digital health, enterprise software, and cybersecurity to name but a few.
Ian Harris (00:26):
We recently sat down with Jack to kick off our series of talks with health tech investors. Jack takes us behind the scenes to look at how they perform technology due diligence at product led companies. He also chats with us about remote patient monitoring, design thinking, customer experience, and so much more.
Ian Harris (00:42):
Let's jump right into the conversation.
Ian Harris (00:46):
Jack, I think it would be really great if we could start off by maybe having you give us a quick overview of yourself and maybe a quick rundown of EPIC Ventures and the types of investments that you're making, and a little bit about EPIC.
Jack Boren (01:04):
Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with EPIC and then I'll transition into me and where I fit into the picture.
Jack Boren (01:10):
EPIC has been around for, gosh, I guess 26 years now. We started in the mid '90s, first real venture heyday, and we started with what at the time was a very novel strategy, and that was investing venture capital dollars in anywhere besides major tech hubs, like Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York, Boston at the time, and we were really excited about Salt Lake.
Jack Boren (01:35):
And I say we; I wasn't here at the time. I was quite young but my partners were really excited about Salt Lake and that region and so we joined forces with one of the large financial institutions here locally, Zions Bank, formed a venture fund and started backing interesting entrepreneurs in a variety of different categories.
Jack Boren (01:56):
Very geographically motivated type strategy, riding on the backs of massive successes here like Novelle and WordPerfect in Salt Lake, and over the next 25 years have been able to be a part of some really interesting entrepreneurial exploits; everything from an ancestry.com 20 plus years ago, to a health catalyst more recently, or Collective Medical Technologies or Recursion Pharmaceuticals or Enstructure; list goes on, and I'm largely highlighting that we've stayed partially true to our geographical focus but we've... I'll also say we've expanded out past that and we invest outside of the mountain west and across the United States in a variety of different sectors.
Jack Boren (02:39):
I joined about 10 years ago at EPIC, and at the time we were starting to make a transition from, again, that generalist geographic focus to really zeroing in on some sectors that we thought we were good at, so we took a lot of data from both our past investment experience and from the networks that we had built over our investments, and zeroed in on a few sectors that we were most excited about; one of those healthcare, which we'll talk a lot about today, and that's the team I lead at EPIC.
Ian Harris (03:10):
Yep.
Jack Boren (03:11):
Another one's future of work and that is broadly defined. It's everything from HR systems to ed tech type platforms.
Jack Boren (03:20):
Another one's financial technologies, and then the last one's IT security.
Jack Boren (03:24):
I'll be quick to say, not being one of those categories doesn't mean you're not a fit for EPIC. We're still generalists at our core, so about half, maybe a little over half, maybe 60% will fit into one of those buckets.
Ian Harris (03:36):
So when it comes to health tech, just in particular, and obviously the audience here is really interested, I think, in that space, is this an area, a sector that...
Ian Harris (03:45):
I mean, was there some big thesis? Did somebody sit there and write a white paper about how health tech was going to be this great opportunity and you really needed to be looking for those companies, or did it happen because you were looking for great opportunities and you started to see a lot of good health tech company? Or was it somewhere in between?
Ian Harris (04:02):
Where did that come from?
Jack Boren (04:03):
Yeah, it was really in between. The genesis of it is we had made a lot of healthcare investments in a couple of different sub sectors of the healthcare ecosystem, and they'd done quite well so as we were looking at our historical portfolio and looking where executives had gone, what investors we had worked with, the natural networks that we'd already built, there's a lot of mass there already so we sat down and said, "Well, what's here? Is there something to do here in the future? And can we have a unique advantage in this ecosystem?" And it's hard to believe this with 2020 and 2021 as your backdrop but healthcare investing was not a really sexy place to be placing money six or seven years ago.
Ian Harris (04:44):
Right.
Jack Boren (04:45):
There are a couple of niche players, a lot of health systems that started to spin up their CDCs, and the bulge bracket funds all had some investments in the space but you could count on one hand, maybe two hands, the number of relevant VC firms that were healthcare specialists, and so it was a weird time for us to be stepping in. And what we saw as unique opportunity was first exactly that, right? Like, a lot less people really focusing on the space, but second, a really unique ecosystem in Utah.
Ian Harris (05:19):
So when you look at a company that comes to you or a founder that comes to you one way or the other, they come to you with a product that already exists, what are the things that you're looking at? I mean, are you doing demos of their product? Are you looking...
Ian Harris (05:30):
How are you determining whether they're onto something in terms of product market fit, in terms of quality, in terms... All that stuff. What's your process? How do you think about it?
Jack Boren (05:40):
Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's very stage dependent so product market like product diligence, for us at the earliest, earliest stages, really isn't product diligence, it's more founder diligence, right?
Ian Harris (05:50):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (05:51):
It's, do they have the correct perspective here that's going to provide them the opportunity to build a product that's not going to be one system dependent or one payer dependent, or one large employer dependent or whatever, but it's actually going to span multiple...
Jack Boren (06:07):
It's something that you actually scale to multiple partners, build a venture style outcome out of, so like that, at the earliest stages, we're really trying to focus in on, do they have the right mindset here? And as the thing scales up and you get your first partner, a product may be extremely bespoke for that specific institution.
Jack Boren (06:26):
And product diligence for us is great. We've spent all this time with a beta client or a co-development as like, you know-
Ian Harris (06:31):
Right.
Jack Boren (06:31):
A standard firm there, like co development partner here, right, "Did you build?" You know, like, "Great, you have the mindset for that but did you actually build the product that is then going to be replicable in a different system? And if not, can you make some tweaks that will enable the product to be replicable?" You know. "Is this maybe CHR dependent? Is this just a [inaudible 00:06:52] product? Is it just an EPIC product?"
Jack Boren (06:54):
You can have issues between transferring between the two. Can you sell on a fee for service market or is this more a value based care model? What's the actual market opportunity that you've built here? And that's going to be relevant with a few co-development partners.
Jack Boren (07:08):
Once you get past that number and you get to the five and the 10 customers, right, or maybe-
Ian Harris (07:12):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (07:12):
... 15 and you're in the mid-ish single digit revenue, low to mid-ish single digit millions of revenue, there's like...
Jack Boren (07:22):
Your product is your product. There's real data points that we can pull. There's less you can tweak.
Jack Boren (07:27):
I mean, you can tweak but there's less you could really tweak on the strategy there, so it's advanced to a point where we can really spend time with those customers and understand how they use it, what their workflow is.
Jack Boren (07:37):
We can look for clusters. We can see how broad or... We can start to think through what a sales cycle might look behind it, and it advances as the company grows.
Jack Boren (07:47):
So again, it's a very long-winded answer of saying it really depends on the stage, and we adjust our diligence to fit the maturity of the company at that specific time.
Ian Harris (07:58):
But it does sound like that idea that the thing has to be scalable, not just from a technology standpoint but from a sales standpoint.
Ian Harris (08:05):
If you want a high growth company that is worthy of venture investment, they can't have one or two customers probably, right?
Jack Boren (08:13):
No. It's a really interesting conundrum because you can get to a position where you might have a million or two million bucks in revenue.
Ian Harris (08:19):
Yeah. Decent revenue. You might even be profitable, right?
Jack Boren (08:22):
Right.
Ian Harris (08:22):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (08:23):
Oh, you might. You might. And you might have a five year contract with the system and you look at that and you're like, "This is great." And there are several thousand of these things and there are 5,000 hospitals or whatever there are in the US, so extrapolate that out and we're worth whatever in the future.
Jack Boren (08:37):
And then you step back and you really look at it and you're like, "Well, yeah, but that's like..." You built that just for Intermountain and there are all these nuances to how Intermountain works. They're like that, extremely difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Ian Harris (08:47):
Without giving anything away from a specific founder but we're sitting in our pitch meetings on our side of things, and I remember a pitch from a guy who was talking about some type of software solution he had built to help optimize the way a certain type of surgery worked within a health system, and he had all these big numbers about how that extrapolated out because there were this many of this type of surgeon all throughout the United States and this and that and whatever, and as we did a little bit of diligence, because it seemed great at first, we did a little bit of diligence, we realized that he essentially had the opportunity because he knew the guy who worked there, and that's why they were willing to go on the journey with him, to have him build this thing, and that nobody else was really going to be interested, and so I just remember that being a great learning experience or validation of our process, just thinking like, "All right, so, cool, you've got traction. You've got some revenue. You've got a co-development partner. Why don't we talk to five more of these prospective clients and see if this is a thing that they'd be interested in?"
Ian Harris (09:48):
Chris Rock used to do this bit where he'd talk about how when you go on a date with somebody, your first date or your second date, you're not really meeting them, you're meeting their representative is what he... You know, it's like...
Ian Harris (10:02):
And so they act like everything is good and they're showing you the absolute best of themselves. How important is it to you that an entrepreneur has a really clear idea of what the market looks like versus you being able to figure out what the market really is?
Jack Boren (10:20):
Yeah. You know, it's tandem for us, and first thing I'll say is I am the ultimate victim of that kind of interaction. I leave every pitch...
Jack Boren (10:30):
I mean, you can pitch me on a new artificial sweetener. [inaudible 00:10:32].
Ian Harris (10:32):
Yeah, and you're pumped about it, right? So you feel their energy.
Jack Boren (10:38):
[inaudible 00:10:38]
Ian Harris (10:38):
Yeah. Me too. All the time. I'm like, "Yes! This is awesome." And then I have to think about it.
Ian Harris (10:43):
A day later, I'm like, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute."
Jack Boren (10:46):
And I'll say the most important thing for me is touch points with the entrepreneur, and it seems like an obvious answer but we're all managing so much deal flow that you have to be really deliberate about spending a lot of time with them, managing the diligence you do on the market, on the opportunity, backhand or reference checks, whatever, backdoor reference checks, whatever, with actual time with the entrepreneur, and there's a balance.
Jack Boren (11:17):
There are data points need to pull together from both sides and you don't want to get trapped on the side of doing too much of your own diligence. I mean, you can't do too much, but only doing your own diligence and not spending enough time with them to get their perspectives on things, because you might get super turned off by the opportunity when you should be excited about it or you might get super excited without understanding they're not actually going to apply their business in the way that you think they should with this, or...
Jack Boren (11:46):
You know, so there's a combination, and for me it's best mitigated by spending a ton of time with the entrepreneur, and as you get information, as you get data points, validating that with them.
Jack Boren (11:55):
You know, following up in conversations, asking their opinion of the research that you pulled, how they think about it, how they might navigate specific situations. Try not to lead the witness where you think they should do something.
Jack Boren (12:06):
It's time with the entrepreneur, and if there's anything that's been consistent for us in determining whether or not we should have made an investment, it's how much time do we spend with that specific person? That is balance, right? I mean, especially in this day and age where there's just so many dollars going after a relatively few number of really interesting entrepreneurs.
Jack Boren (12:28):
So our timeline, the amount of time we have to really get to a decision, is a lot smaller than would be ideal, so you really have to pound that in to a finite couple of weeks, or maybe a week in some cases, but time with-
Ian Harris (12:42):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (12:42):
... entrepreneur
Ian Harris (12:43):
Sometimes you have the first meeting and you're very, very impressed and everything seems great, and I always like to have at least one, a couple more following, even if it was small dollar investments, because sometimes you realize that you come to really believe in the entrepreneur more, the more you are around them.
Ian Harris (13:00):
You like the way they respond to questions. You like the way that they incorporate things that they're learning as they go forward, and that's really powerful, and sometimes I find that I am less impressed as I meet with them again and again. It's like, "Oh man, every time, this seems to get more difficult."
Ian Harris (13:18):
As an entrepreneur though, if you were coaching an entrepreneur, somebody who's trying to go through the fundraising process, how should an entrepreneur think about that? Should they be really proactively...
Ian Harris (13:32):
Do you like it when they really proactively follow up with you and they're really pushing that conversation forward? I mean, what's your preference? And I know it's different for different people, but...
Jack Boren (13:42):
We just need to do a very bad job of hurting feelings. I think there's enough dependent on market timing as to whether or not a business is going to be successful, that at least I try to balance keeping a healthy relationship, not offending people with being respectful of people's time, right?
Ian Harris (14:06):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (14:07):
So on the one hand, I'd say... And I'll get to what I mean on that in a second but on the one hand, I'd say I do really appreciate when a founder's very proactive about following up with me.
Jack Boren (14:19):
On the other hand, in many cases, really, if I'm not being proactive about following up with them, it means I have other things on my plate that are, at this moment in time and for me specifically, a little bit more interesting, and I think one thing I can certainly do better and probably is true for some of my colleagues, probably not all of them but some of them, is just being really honest about what we really like and don't like, and honest about timelines and whether it's realistic that we're going to invest, et cetera, et cetera, and a lot of that is just oversight.
Jack Boren (14:51):
We're managing so much deal flow, managing so many different personalities that a lot of things fall through the cracks, but there's a piece of it that's like, "You're building your business. You're super excited about it. I don't want to be a wet blanket, all right." Like, "Keep you, you. You do you. Keep doing it. Here's some advice but I don't want to just slam the door in your face." Kind of thing.
Ian Harris (15:11):
Sometimes it's just not a good fit for us and that is what it is, and so you say, "Look..."
Ian Harris (15:17):
For one reason or another, I'll give somebody five minutes of my explanation as to why, from my perspective, and I usually tell them I hope that they're wildly successful and that this is a huge mistake and I hope that they do well.
Ian Harris (15:29):
Sometimes I think it becomes harder, for me at least, when I really like the founder but I don't like their idea or I don't believe in the projection of where they think they can get to in terms of how that... Or there's some other issue around that where it's like, "Well, I'm not telling you to go away forever. I'd love to stay in touch with you and..." You know, "Because if it's not this one, I think your next company might be the one because you seem great." And those ones I think become more difficult because you want to not lead them on but maybe keep them around.
Jack Boren (16:04):
It's never personal, right? We're just-
Ian Harris (16:06):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (16:06):
Like, we want everybody to be successful, and above all else we recognize that we are wrong all the time.
Jack Boren (16:14):
We see thousands of deals per year. I personally spend time on well over a hundred per year, I spend time. It's varying levels of time but I personally spend time on a bunch of these every year, and I'm wrong all the time.
Jack Boren (16:26):
Now, hopefully I'm right enough that it makes sense. Historically we've been right enough that it makes sense for our investors.
Ian Harris (16:32):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (16:32):
Right? But I love talking about an anti-portfolio.
Jack Boren (16:36):
There are plenty of those businesses where we just didn't get there in time or didn't have conviction over certain things and the founder totally proved us wrong. It happens all the time and we don't harbor any resentment [inaudible 00:16:50].
Ian Harris (16:54):
No, I love that. I'm cheering for people. I mean, you got to cheer for people.
Jack Boren (16:55):
Right.
Ian Harris (16:55):
It's good, you know. Good for the-
Jack Boren (16:55):
And there's nothing better than that happening and then us being able to work with them on their next venture, right?
Ian Harris (17:00):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (17:00):
Because we preserve that. That is what we're hoping for is that we build a relationship such that you leave an interaction with us and you're still psyched on who we are. We're still...
Jack Boren (17:10):
You can still call us. We'll still be helpful even if we don't invest, because like you said, hopefully we can work together on the next one.
Ian Harris (17:19):
One thing that I've seen, and I don't know if you've seen the same thing but I see a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly at the early stages, not actually asking for enough money, which gets to what you had just said previously, the sales cycles and some of these...
Ian Harris (17:34):
In just the sales cycle. Forget about actually implementing and how your actual contract works. And when you get to revenue, just the sales cycle is 18 months, 24 months sometimes, maybe longer. They might have a previous software solution or platform or something that you want them to replace and they might have three years or something remaining on their contract.
Ian Harris (17:56):
They could sit down with you and say, "Yeah, this is better. I like it. We want this. Come back to me in 36 months when our existing contract is up." Or, "In a year when we're starting to think about when that contract might be up."
Ian Harris (18:09):
And then I see companies asking for two million bucks or something, that's going to last them for 12 months or something; six months worth of financing or something like that.
Ian Harris (18:19):
Do you see that? I mean, companies not asking for enough money, particularly at the early stage being an issue. What's your thought on that?
Jack Boren (18:28):
Yeah. I'm going to expand it a little bit if that's okay.
Ian Harris (18:30):
Yeah. Please.
Jack Boren (18:32):
In a lot of cases, entrepreneurs, or the venture flywheel, let's say, has put a lot of entrepreneurs into the position of thinking that raising money is the best route and is a really important positive indicator for your success as a company. It's like big thing to be really excited about.
Jack Boren (18:59):
And then for us, obviously we want-
Ian Harris (19:00):
Right. It's validating.
Jack Boren (19:00):
... to see this place, right?
Ian Harris (19:00):
Right. Yeah.
Jack Boren (19:04):
We want you to think it's super validating that we're coming in to the business, but in reality what you're doing is you're taking out a mortgage. You're putting yourself in a position where you bring on a partner who has a very set timeline, who has to return capital in a set number of years, can deploy some, can continue to follow on for a certain extent in your business, but it's going to have to mark you to new investors if you need capital.
Jack Boren (19:29):
You're putting yourself into a different lifestyle, and I think the ecosystem by and large is set up that way and obviously VCs exist because of it, but I think oftentimes entrepreneurs should just sit back and ask themselves a simple question like, "Should I raise that much?" Right? So [inaudible 00:19:54]-
Ian Harris (19:53):
And, "Do I need money? And how much do I actually-
Jack Boren (19:56):
Too much money.
Ian Harris (19:56):
... need?" Right?
Jack Boren (19:57):
Totally. Totally. Right? And one of my favorite examples of this being done well was Collective Medical.
Jack Boren (20:04):
I had lunch with the CEO at the time, probably a couple times a year for three years; we've been friends for years but formal lunches all the time, essentially saying like, "Hey, when you're ready, we want to invest in you." And he's very explicit like, "We will raise capital deliberately to where we can prove the ROI for ourselves for taking on that dilution, with the right partners, to do the right things at the right time." So this is an entrepreneur that could have had obviously money from us but from a variety of different other firms at any given point over that entire three year span, and did not raise until they had... You know, after going through a specific cycle multiple times over multiple years and said, "Yes. Now it's time to raise for these specific reasons. Here's how we're going to spend the money, here's why we're comfortable taking on the dilution, and here are the partners we want to raise from."
Jack Boren (21:05):
And this is a fabulous approach, and as a result, these are people that preserved...
Jack Boren (21:08):
The employees of this business preserved much of their ownership in the company all the way through the end because they were deliberate about their capital strategy, and the last thing you want to see in an ecosystem is where so much capital is raised at such diluted prices that you get to the end of an outcome and the founding team doesn't own enough; doesn't own significant amounts of the business.
Jack Boren (21:33):
So first off, I'm a strong advocate of founders being extremely deliberate about when and why they raise money. Second off, if they are raising money, I completely agree with you that if you're going to hop into that flywheel and you're going to start spending heavy on growth, going into the red pretty substantially to build out your product teams, sell the product to add in different executives, whatnot, upscale this business, grow it to a level where we can raise capital in the future, give yourself a buffer.
Ian Harris (22:08):
Yeah.
Jack Boren (22:09):
And for me, that-
Ian Harris (22:09):
Have enough to get to that milestone and then a little bit too, right? Yeah.
Jack Boren (22:13):
Totally. Totally. And that, to me, is less a...
Jack Boren (22:19):
Well, it gets back to that budgeting thing. You know, that... Proving out your ROI.
Jack Boren (22:24):
The ultimate question for me is, does this company have a real handle on their cash burn?
Jack Boren (22:31):
They have a real handle on how they're going to deploy that capital, when they're going to run out of it in a variety of different scenarios, when we need to start fundraising again, and that, to me, is the most important thing. Like, can you comfortably say that we're raising this money, it's going to get us to this milestone plus three to six months of a real buffer; in this environment probably six months of real buffer, so that we can be in a position to, one, raise more money, two, run the business profitably, or three, sell the company. Right?
Ian Harris (23:05):
Yep.
Jack Boren (23:06):
Anyway, so the buffer's really nice, but again, being deliberate about the capital raise is the most important thing to me.
Ian Harris (23:12):
You touched on valuation a second ago. Do you think with all the new investors...
Ian Harris (23:16):
I mean, money's flooding in. You guys have been investing in health tech for a long time. A lot of funds are starting to deploy a lot of money in this space. We've had records, I think for the last three years, maybe more, in a row, probably more than that.
Ian Harris (23:31):
In terms of investment, what do you think about valuations? Are valuations out of control?
Jack Boren (23:38):
Valuations have been out of control for 10 years and they keep getting more and more so, but no.
Jack Boren (23:44):
I mean look, realistically our valuations are eventually driven by outcomes data, so by public markets, by acquisitions, by whatnot. Growth guys and gals need to be able to extrapolate out a certain type of return, and we're just building up into that ecosystem, so when you look at the last month-and-a-half of the public markets, to me that is the canary in the coal mine, where things will eventually start to come down on a pre-money basis for us.
Jack Boren (24:19):
It's still high and it's never an immediate change. It takes time for people to realize the world is different; the world is at least maybe a little different, but you're starting to see some pretty wild discrepancies between public market valuations and private market valuations of similar companies at similar stages, with very wide ranges, and that's going to trickle down to us.
Jack Boren (24:50):
For us at EPIC, we're very conscious about our entry's valuation. Some people aren't. We're very conscious about it. We try to be quite price disciplined. Again, at the end of the day, we're looking to work with the best entrepreneurs and we're willing to pay up for that where it makes sense, but at the same time, it's not lost on us that if we're coming in at too high of a valuation and exit opportunities are decreasing, it puts the strain on our model.
Jack Boren (25:18):
One thing I would definitely say is I think these kind of market conditions offer really great opportunities for entrepreneurship as market caps and public companies decrease and it's harder for them to rate debt or more equity and they have to make some layoffs, and you'll see that in some private large growth companies as well; some people will be spit out into the economy but otherwise would not be innovating.
Jack Boren (25:43):
They're in cush jobs. They're doing some pretty interesting stuff. They've got great safety nets. Life is just good enough that they're not leaving to start their own business, but some of these people will be pushed out and will be forced into a situation where they'll either get a new corporate type job or they'll do their own thing, or they'll start with a really young business and be much more involved in that phase of growth, and that, to me, is just like...
Jack Boren (26:11):
I'm really excited for that kind of stuff. Some of the best businesses are built in those times, and I think we're probably... There's obviously some bad stuff coming around.
Jack Boren (26:21):
I think we're probably coming into one of those [inaudible 00:26:23].
Ian Harris (26:24):
When you got to find the silver lining, I suppose, right?
Jack Boren (26:26):
Yeah. Yeah.
Ian Harris (26:27):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nobody likes to see layoffs and stuff like that but I agree.
Ian Harris (26:32):
I mean, even personally, I've been in the situation where I was with a startup that didn't make it and, you know, that happens. You spin back out and you do something else and the next thing is much more successful. That's a good thing. That's the process working I think, often, so I agree with that big time.
Ian Harris (26:49):
Thank you so much for spending time with us today. It's been really awesome to hear your stories and you sharing some of this information with us and your perspective.
Ian Harris (26:57):
If some of the folks want to get in touch with you or reach out to you, how could they do that? How can they contact you?
Jack Boren (27:02):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Jack Boren (27:03):
First off, Ian, thank you. This is great. Ian and Mark, really appreciate you guys setting this up. Always happy to be here.
Jack Boren (27:09):
You know, for us, honestly, if you want to reach out directly, grab me on LinkedIn. Or my email's simple. It's just Jack@EPICVC.com.
Jack Boren (27:16):
I will say, if you're pitching, come through one of my founders or advisors, LPs, whatever. Find somebody and get an introduction. A warm intro always makes it a better conversation and starts things out great.
Ian Harris (27:30):
Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Jack Boren (27:33):
Hey, thanks guys. Cheers.
Ian Harris (27:34):
Thank you so much for joining us today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, that like button, and if you want to reach out to us, you can hit us up ProductinHealthtech.com.