How Two Founders With No Health Care Experience Built a $2 Billion Oncology Startup
Successful serial entrepreneurs know how to see around corners
By the time Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg sold their company, Invite Media, to Google for a reported $81 million in 2010, they were all of 24. Eight years later, at 32, they sold their next company, Flatiron Health, to Roche for nearly $2 billion.
Flatiron Health, a data-science software company, had emerged as an unlikely power player in 2016. Former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had just announced the National Cancer Moonshot, and Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which directed the FDA to permit data separate from clinical trial data to be used in support of drug approvals. Clinical trials are often not representative of the population, potentially distorting the results. Flatiron’s technology made smaller and more tailored approaches using vastly more information than was typically available possible.
Over the years, I’ve studied “habitual” entrepreneurs — people who have started several successful businesses. The reason they are so valuable from a research point of view is that it is highly unlikely that their success has been a result of mere good luck if they’ve done it over and over again. Instead, what we find…
