InQuicker Stories

How We Found Our Co-Founder

InQuicker started with a single founder in 2006. Our second founder joined the company in 2009. We bootstrapped from savings and revenues. Today, we are 16 people with over 100 healthcare facilities as customers, and millions per year in revenue.

First Impressions

At about 6:30pm on October 18, 2009, I was sitting at a booth at Carrabba’s Italian Grill in Chattanooga, TN. I nervously clasped my hands together under the table. In name, I was the CEO of a software company; in reality, I was also the janitor, salesman, in-house legal advisor, bookkeeper and everything else, so the CEO title felt like an awkward overstatement. As a matter of fact, I never managed to use it without wincing and fumbling the words a bit.

At this particular moment, I was making a first impression on the successful Dell sales executive seated across from me in the booth. From my perspective, the first impression wasn’t going too well; he was asking about things like sales pipelines and channel strategies, and I was trying to answer those questions in the context of the flooded inbox and messy excel spreadsheet that currently comprised my sales infrastructure.

This particular sales executive’s name was Michael Brody-Waite. Mike had a unique enthusiasm for InQuicker’s core product, and a strong passion for the broader issue of streamlined customer service in the healthcare industry. He had recently experienced the frustration of spending hours in the waiting room before seeing a doctor, and he had done some market research and created a business plan to build a similar product before he heard about InQuicker.¹

As our meal at Carrabba’s continued, bruschetta gave way to pasta, and sales gave way to bigger-picture discussions. Finally, Mike asked, “So… at the end of the day, what do you want to do with this company?”

I cringed internally. I hated this question. Because so many of my actions with InQuicker had been opportunistic in nature, I found it difficult to communicate long term goals for the company or for myself. I took a deep breath, and parrotted the only milestone I’d ever really been attached to: “Well, I’d like to see our service grow to 50-100 hospitals.”

By this point in the conversation, I had discovered that Mike was rarely at a loss for words, but this particular statement seemed to give him considerable pause for thought. “Why 50-100?”

I scratched my chin. “I don’t know. It seems like a reasonably big number.”

Mike thought about that for a while, then responded in the quiet, even voice that marries excitement, thoughtfulness, and confidence: “I think this idea and this company can do more than that.”

Next Steps

In the following weeks, Mike agreed to advise and assist me with InQuicker’s sales activities for a few hours a month, in exchange for a fixed monthly consulting fee. This may have been one of the most lopsided consulting agreements in history, as Mike’s amazing energy, focus, and relevant expertise led him to provide far more time and energy (and deliver far more value) than we anticipated.

On March 1, 2010, four and a half months after our first meeting, Mike left his job at Dell and went full time with InQuicker. Our service was used by 3 hospitals at that time.

Eighteen months later, on August 30, 2011, InQuicker surpassed 100 facilities under contract. Mike is now our CEO and co-founder, and one of my best friends.

The history of any company is a tangled mass of interconnected story threads and plot twists. I count my first meeting with Mike as the single most significant and positive event in the history of InQuicker.

What You Don’t Know Can Help You

In the taxonomy of the Startup Genome Project, InQuicker is a Challenger, with a heavy focus on enterprise sales; these types of startups require a considerable amount of enterprise sales expertise. In hindsight, it is obvious that an enterprise-focused startup in the healthcare space can benefit from having a balanced (tech & business) founding team.

If I had read the Startup Genome Project’s report before starting InQuicker in 2006, I would have been quite discouraged. I certainly perceive myself to be a poor solo founder for a startup focused on enterprise sales. Luckily, I was blissfully unburdened by this big-picture perspective. In 2006, I started a company that was focused on discovery and customer validation; the strength in enterprise sales came years later when I met Mike.

Every founding team has strengths and weaknesses which come to the forefront at different stages of a startup’s existence. It is quite likely that Mike would have been bored and unsatisfied during the early discovery and validation process that occured at InQuicker; in that respect, we now have a founding team that could not have been assembled intentionally at the beginning. It simply wouldn’t have worked.

Experiences such as this one have convinced me that long term planning is often extremely counterproductive. When we limit planning and maintain less mass, it seems that we eventually discover solutions that are far better than any we could have planned. As the tech founder, I was the fuse. Now that we’ve reached the scaling stage, Mike is the dynamite.

This, if anything, is the moral to the story: Go! Don’t wait for the perfect setup. Traction has a way of turning heads, opening doors, and making resources available.