[00:00.000 --> 00:30.000] Hello and welcome to my biggest lesson, the show that brings you the key learnings from the most influential founders, executives, and investors in the Colorado Tech community. My name is Adam Burrows, and I'm Chris Erickson. Together, we are the co-founders of Range Ventures. An early stage venture for a base in Denver. You can find out more about what we're up to at range.vc. Our guest this week is Ashmear Aslan. Ash is the co-founder of
[00:30.000 --> 00:49.000] and CTO of Cured, which is a software company that designs and builds marketing tools and CRM platforms for the healthcare sector. He's raised $12.5 million for the company and they recently had a successful exit. Prior to Cured, Ash has deep history in health tech, working at Salesforce, Epic Systems, and Accenture.
[01:01.000 --> 01:11.000] Hey Ash, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks Chris. Great to be here. Excited to see you again and talk a little bit about what's been going on.
[01:11.000 --> 01:17.000] Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, what you've been up to at Cured and what you did before.
[01:17.000 --> 01:28.000] Yeah, sounds great. So similar to you, Chris, went to Northwestern. So graduated, actually went to medical school for a year and then dropped out and decided I didn't want to be a doctor.
[01:28.000 --> 01:38.000] Any more, but always had a desire to stay in the healthcare space, which is going to be the common thread throughout my career and ended up at Epic and then ended up at Accenture.
[01:38.000 --> 01:53.000] After my time at Epic, some strategy consulting focused predominantly in healthcare and life sciences and did that for too many years, I would say, traveling every week, but from there moved on to kind of the typical big tech.
[01:53.000 --> 02:00.000] Seeing to learn a little bit more about that and at this point like cloud and some of those things were relatively new, at least in the enterprise space.
[02:00.000 --> 02:20.000] So ended up at Salesforce and was there for several years and ran and managed their enterprise architecture group and we were focused on working with their largest healthcare customers in North America and then really saw an opportunity to build our own thing from there based on some of the wins and shortfalls
[02:20.000 --> 02:31.000] that I experienced during my time at Salesforce and that's where CURE came to be. So started that company back in 2018 and then CURE just got acquired about two months ago here.
[02:31.000 --> 02:34.000] So we're now at a new stage of company.
[02:34.000 --> 02:42.000] Congratulations on the acquisition. Before we get into that, we'd love to hear a little bit about what CURE does and what the origin story was.
[02:43.000 --> 03:06.000] Yeah, absolutely. So in the current day, the easiest way to understand CURE does think Clavio, but for healthcare. So we're predominantly a marketing automation platform and we took kind of the ideas that existed in Salesforce or MailChimp or any of these kind of industry agnostic tools and wanted to build that capability, but specific to the healthcare environment as all of us probably are aware.
[03:06.000 --> 03:14.000] Healthcare has some pretty different needs, not just from a security and regulations and compliance point of view, but also users are different.
[03:14.000 --> 03:21.000] They're buying, processes are different. You know, it's not like e-commerce company with a Shopify website that has like, why would I buy anything?
[03:21.000 --> 03:33.000] But Clavio is kind of the answer at this point. So, you know, I think it's a different challenge to things, but we really saw that that was a big opportunity because the large industry layers, I think we're failing to understand what the market really needed.
[03:33.000 --> 03:43.000] So we saw a space to bring a product, you know, with a generally like commodity set of capabilities, but apply it to a very specific set of industry problems.
[03:43.000 --> 03:49.000] That's really where CURE came from. And that's what, you know, we had built over less for four and a half years or so.
[03:49.000 --> 03:56.000] That's really exciting, interesting story and finding a specific need that people were ignoring, right, and going after that.
[03:57.000 --> 04:03.000] Before we talk more about the lessons you learned while doing it, you've been in Colorado since 2017.
[04:03.000 --> 04:12.000] What brought you out here and then as you've observed, you know, over the last six, seven years here, you know, how has Colorado Tech changed and grown since you've been here?
[04:13.000 --> 04:22.000] So I think like most emigrants from the Midwest was looking for mostly just a change in lifestyle. My wife and I are, you know, big outdoors folks.
[04:22.000 --> 04:28.000] And for those of you familiar with Chicago, there's just not a lot in Chicago born and raised there.
[04:28.000 --> 04:36.000] So, you know, was kind of an anchoring for a change of seagury on top of that and was fortunate to have some flexibility at that time at Salesforce.
[04:36.000 --> 04:41.000] So was able to kind of move over here into the Boulder area without too much trouble.
[04:41.000 --> 04:46.000] So I think that was like the initial motivation was just more personal than anything.
[04:46.000 --> 04:53.000] But I think maybe to the second part of your question, I think was quite surprised at the tech scene that existed.
[04:53.000 --> 05:05.000] I think there's some similarities at that time to Chicago where, you know, everyone was kind of second to the Bay Area or New York or LA, but had kind of some burgeoning interest.
[05:06.000 --> 05:17.000] And as we recently had new offices open from like Google or Facebook or Twitter or what have you and that was happening in Chicago when I left and the same things, you know, we're seemingly her and her adequate.
[05:17.000 --> 05:22.000] So that was exciting to see. I didn't even know at the time that Salesforce had an office in Louisville.
[05:22.000 --> 05:27.000] So it's kind of cool to see that there's a lot of big tech and taking advantage of the ecosystem here.
[05:28.000 --> 05:35.000] And then, you know, I think I got very fortunate to get introduced to folks like yourself, Chris and Maddie and Ryan and people like that, that match.
[05:35.000 --> 05:41.000] They can get kind of ingrained into that ecosystem even before I ended up leaving Salesforce to start here.
[05:41.000 --> 05:50.000] So I had some just familiarity and saw a lot of interesting things coming up with all the different startup weeks and some of the new companies that were being formed.
[05:50.000 --> 06:00.000] It seemed to be a lot of, you know, smart people who had maybe migrated over because they worked at Google or Twitter or whatever, you know, had kind of entered into this, this area.
[06:00.000 --> 06:07.000] And then, you know, that those are the people, you know, worked at Guild or Verbo or whatever these big kind of conglomerates are that exist now.
[06:07.000 --> 06:12.000] And that was exciting to see all of that over the last few years and it's only gotten bigger and better.
[06:13.000 --> 06:20.000] And so shifting to the current, are there any companies currently here in Colorado, you know, earlier stage that you're excited about?
[06:20.000 --> 06:27.000] Yeah. So as I mentioned, or alluded to, I should say, Matchstick is an investor in Cure or was an investor in Cure.
[06:27.000 --> 06:32.000] So, you know, got very close with a lot of fellow founders in that ecosystem.
[06:32.000 --> 06:38.000] And I think you and Adam share a lot of common investments on the range side with Matchsticks.
[06:38.000 --> 06:40.000] I think, you know, playing in the same circles.
[06:40.000 --> 06:49.000] So to speak, but, you know, there's a couple of companies that they've recently invested in that I've been fortunate enough to get a little closer with the founding teams on one of those two boxes.
[06:49.000 --> 06:52.000] And I think you all are familiar with them as well.
[06:52.000 --> 06:55.000] Kyle also a fellow Northwestern graduate.
[06:55.000 --> 07:00.000] This is actually just the All-in-Northwestern Colorado podcast is all we're doing here.
[07:00.000 --> 07:04.000] This is like an alumni event.
[07:05.000 --> 07:11.000] But yeah, anyway, met Kyle through, you know, a number of kind of Matchstick events and they do kind of founder retreat every year.
[07:11.000 --> 07:14.000] So we got closer through some of those experiences.
[07:14.000 --> 07:25.000] And, you know, similar, I think to my own philosophy, like he seems to have found a problem that's very obvious, but no one has seemingly wanted to solve it.
[07:25.000 --> 07:30.000] And using column is all in industry expertise and built a company that I think is really smart.
[07:30.000 --> 07:45.000] So I'm excited to kind of see where they go, especially, I think, bolstered by some of the success of someone like Lavio, right, who plays in a similar space and now kind of as established, you know, Denver as a place where, you know, e-commerce type technology is getting big.
[07:45.000 --> 07:46.000] Yeah, absolutely.
[07:46.000 --> 07:51.000] We're equally excited about what Kyle and the team of two boxes are building for a lot of reasons.
[07:52.000 --> 07:56.000] Well, Ash, well, let's shift over now to the biggest lesson and sort of why we're here.
[07:56.000 --> 08:00.000] We'd love to learn what the biggest lesson is that you've learned in your career.
[08:00.000 --> 08:07.000] You know, how did you learn it and given what you've learned, how does that change what you do now going forward?
[08:07.000 --> 08:14.000] Yeah, I've learned many lessons throughout my career at a various different point.
[08:14.000 --> 08:19.000] So I'll think I'll focus kind of on like what I've learned as a founder more than anything else.
[08:19.000 --> 08:30.000] And, you know, I think you may agree or disagree Chris, but I think like being a founder in its health requires like some level of stubbornness and like here against to be like, hey, I can like solve a problem that nobody else has solved.
[08:30.000 --> 08:33.000] And for some reason, I'm like the one I'm supposed to do it.
[08:34.000 --> 08:50.000] But I think what I've learned is for me as someone who's predominantly worked at large companies were like consensus building and kind of understanding how to get your entire team behind you was a huge part of really getting anything done because we were worn out of 10 or 100,000 people.
[08:50.000 --> 08:56.000] You know, it's quite different when you're a startup of five people or 20 people or 50 people or whatever stage you might get to.
[08:56.000 --> 09:04.000] I think as a founder, you have to be very clear in your vision and clear in the direction that you want the company to go.
[09:04.000 --> 09:10.000] And I think you have a tremendous amount of influential factors external to you.
[09:10.000 --> 09:15.000] That might be investors that might be advisors might be friends, family, whatever.
[09:15.000 --> 09:23.000] So I think what I've learned is, you know, that that initial stubbornness or kind of motivation that allowed you to start the company.
[09:23.000 --> 09:35.000] I think is also like your biggest weapon and continuing its success that like, if you have a powerful vision and you really think that's a problem you need to solve, you need to be very stubborn about sticking to it.
[09:35.000 --> 09:41.000] And a lot of people for any number of reasons will find mechanism to try to take you off that track.
[09:41.000 --> 09:42.000] That could be revenue.
[09:42.000 --> 09:43.000] It could be market factors.
[09:43.000 --> 09:46.000] It could be, hey, this other competitor is doing this thing.
[09:46.000 --> 09:47.000] You guys should do this thing.
[09:48.000 --> 09:57.000] And I think for a certain, I was influenced by those things along the way, but I think we always kind of centered ourself on the initial vision and mission of the company.
[09:57.000 --> 10:00.000] And sometimes you lose that, you know, in the day to day.
[10:00.000 --> 10:07.000] So I think as a founder, it's been valuable to kind of understand that you were right at the end of the day.
[10:07.000 --> 10:16.000] And I think, you know, the outcome of that was that we got acquired and someone believed what we built was valuable, which is, you know, kind of one of the ultimate signals, I think.
[10:16.000 --> 10:24.000] So to me, that was my biggest lesson is I'm by nature, like more of a consensus building type person, I would say.
[10:24.000 --> 10:30.000] So for me personally, it was sometimes challenging to be like, thanks for your input, but I'm not going to do it.
[10:30.000 --> 10:35.000] Especially when it's coming from, you know, people have a lot of experience and I've done this more times than I've done it.
[10:35.000 --> 10:36.000] That's interesting.
[10:36.000 --> 10:40.000] And I want to talk more about this because I completely agree with you.
[10:40.000 --> 10:44.000] You know, people say, you know, strong opinions loosely held, right?
[10:44.000 --> 10:46.000] I think that's largely bullshit for founders.
[10:46.000 --> 10:49.000] I think it's got to be strong opinions strongly held.
[10:49.000 --> 10:51.000] It's your vision doing that.
[10:51.000 --> 10:52.000] And it's interesting.
[10:52.000 --> 10:59.000] I had a similar approach in view, but I actually actually came more from the, I didn't have a problem, right?
[10:59.000 --> 11:01.000] Sort of just sticking to my opinion.
[11:01.000 --> 11:08.000] What were some, you know, examples or some ways you found to do that positively, though?
[11:08.000 --> 11:19.000] Because I do think thinking from my approach, I probably could have gotten the same outcomes and probably a better and maybe more inclusive or team-building way.
[11:19.000 --> 11:25.000] And I don't wish I would have not gotten the same, but I think I could have gotten it in a different way.
[11:25.000 --> 11:29.000] What were some strategies you used to do that well?
[11:29.000 --> 11:45.000] Yeah, I think what we learned maybe over the first two to three years of the business was often, to your point, I think, like we held those beliefs and, you know, that vision and even the execution of that vision really came from the founding team.
[11:45.000 --> 11:54.000] And obviously we had other folks as, you know, members of our leadership team and employees and what have you were responsible for actually doing a lot of the work.
[11:54.000 --> 12:07.000] But I think what we tried to pivot to is, at our level, really focus on like the strategic vision and the mission and then create a lot of autonomy for people to execute against that in their area of specialty, right?
[12:07.000 --> 12:14.000] So if it's a product person, like you tell me where the product needs to go and we can have a conversation on, do we agree or do we not agree?
[12:14.000 --> 12:23.000] But I think the challenge for us was like, we need to create a vision and in some cases that morphed into like OKRs and some more standard, templatized tool sets.
[12:23.000 --> 12:33.000] But ultimately the idea was to create that in a very clear way so that if you need to give your leadership team something to run with, they had a north star always to look back to.
[12:33.000 --> 12:43.000] So like, hey, if I want to change this architecture for the platform or I want to change our marketing strategy or go to market strategy, go for it as long as it aligns to this thing.
[12:43.000 --> 12:54.000] And I think it takes some time and some familiar to gain that trust on both sides, like between us as our founding team, between us and our leadership team and vice versa.
[12:54.000 --> 13:07.000] But I think as we put more trust and more autonomy on them to really decide how they wanted to execute against the vision, we as a group would said it became much more efficient and also much more successful.
[13:08.000 --> 13:14.000] And I think more importantly, they became that much more invested in what they were doing and where the company was going.
[13:14.000 --> 13:18.000] And I think doing that sooner is definitely better.
[13:18.000 --> 13:25.000] I think the challenge is like, you have to surround yourself with the people who can do that and have the same mindset as you.
[13:25.000 --> 13:28.000] And that's a different problem for a different day perhaps.
[13:28.000 --> 13:34.000] But once you've got that team around you, I think you really need to put a lot of trust in faith in those people to execute.
[13:34.000 --> 13:42.000] Yeah, one of the places where we struggled the most with this was making senior product hires, right?
[13:42.000 --> 13:53.000] Because I feel like, you know, often that is the place where this sort of letting go of opinions or decisions, right, really meets the road within the company, right?
[13:53.000 --> 13:57.000] At what point did you guys hire a head of product?
[13:57.000 --> 14:04.000] And how did you structure decision making and ownership between that person and the founders?
[14:04.000 --> 14:11.000] Because the reality is with founder led companies, they are the head of product until they are no longer there.
[14:11.000 --> 14:18.000] And I think that that leads to a lot of tension when you hire a head of product, right?
[14:18.000 --> 14:20.000] How did you guys navigate that?
[14:20.000 --> 14:31.000] Yeah, I think that's a really interesting problem because certainly like most of the ideas for the product, whether it was in the early days or the later days, like started or ended with me to some effect.
[14:31.000 --> 14:46.000] But I think maybe uniquely to the problem we were trying to solve is when I was looking for that person, which was a year and a half or so into the business, specifically wanted someone who came from kind of outside the world that we had come from.
[14:46.000 --> 14:59.000] So I didn't want someone who had been a decade plus in healthcare or had even potentially spent their entire life in marketing automation because I think the problem we were trying to solve in the solution we wanted to create, we wanted to do it in a novel way.
[14:59.000 --> 15:11.000] So my head of product, Catherine, actually came from like the home advisor, Verbo, where also she was like an expert in marketplaces and kind of very consumer oriented products.
[15:11.000 --> 15:17.000] And if you think about what marketing is like a consumer facing product at the end of the day, even though the user is not a consumer.
[15:17.000 --> 15:27.000] So I think how that helped is for me, it allowed me to like give her a lot of space to learn about the industry and having her outside her perspective.
[15:27.000 --> 15:37.000] I think a lot of secret ideas that I wouldn't necessarily have thought about because I was so ingrained in like, here's what I saw at Salesforce or Epic or provider organizations when I was at Accenture.
[15:38.000 --> 15:48.000] I think that was important to me like find someone who had a set of influences that were very different than my own because if it was just up to me, I was going to be like completely biased for everything I had seen.
[15:48.000 --> 15:52.000] So like I think it worked out great. I don't know that I knew that at the time.
[15:52.000 --> 15:59.000] Like it was kind of just a gut idea to be like, hey, I think it'd be better if we find someone who doesn't come from the same world as us.
[15:59.000 --> 16:01.000] And I think it turned out amazingly well.
[16:01.000 --> 16:12.000] But I think because she was an outsider to some extent, it actually allowed her to take more control more quickly because she could bring a totally different perspective than people on the ending team.
[16:12.000 --> 16:22.000] When you hired her, did you have any explicit conversations around this is how ownership or decision making is going to work?
[16:22.000 --> 16:31.000] Were founders with strong opinions or did you sort of figure that out after the fact that it just worked as you made a good hire?
[16:31.000 --> 16:37.000] Yeah, I mean, I think something that I said to a lot of people that I was hiring at that phase, right?
[16:37.000 --> 16:44.000] Who were going to be in leadership positions, whether by title or op, like there's 10 people like everyone's a leader in my opinion?
[16:44.000 --> 16:50.000] Well, I think what's important to me as a founder is I don't care what my title or role necessarily is.
[16:50.000 --> 16:57.000] Like I'm here to just make sure the company executes on its vision and like I can move around and do things.
[16:57.000 --> 17:02.000] So I was trying to find people who at some point would want the job that I have, right?
[17:02.000 --> 17:06.000] So I was like the CTO, but more like the chief product officer of the company.
[17:07.000 --> 17:17.000] And to me, it was like, if I'm bringing you on as a director or whatever the title might be, like your ceiling is to be a C-suite person of this company.
[17:17.000 --> 17:22.000] So like think that way from day one, you know, like if you want my help, I'm going to give it to you.
[17:22.000 --> 17:27.000] And obviously you spent lots and lots of times in the early days like coming up with how we want to work and how we want to do things.
[17:27.000 --> 17:35.000] But I think from the very beginning, I tried to give Catherine a lot of space and a lot of autonomy so that she could really figure out how she would work.
[17:35.000 --> 17:43.000] So you could really figure out how she wanted to like be a product leader at the same time as us solving the problems that we needed to in the product.
[17:43.000 --> 17:47.000] And I think to your actual question, I don't know that we had like an explicit discussion upfront.
[17:47.000 --> 17:49.000] I was like, hey, you can do whatever you want.
[17:49.000 --> 17:54.000] But I think what I did say that her is like, I want you to be the chief product officer of cure someday.
[17:54.000 --> 17:59.000] And that's like, I want you to think with that mentality, like sure, you're not that person today.
[17:59.000 --> 18:02.000] But like imagine that's the amount of control you have over the decisions we make.
[18:02.000 --> 18:04.000] And they're really kind of how I started it.
[18:04.000 --> 18:11.000] Yeah, I think that that reflecting back on, you know, some hires and some challenges we had there.
[18:11.000 --> 18:16.000] I think we didn't do a good job of saying, here's what this means today.
[18:16.000 --> 18:18.000] And here's where we want this to get to, right.
[18:18.000 --> 18:25.000] And I think we just started from the end state before building the trust, making sure they had the same understand the business.
[18:26.000 --> 18:43.000] And I think that that's something that folks externally don't necessarily always appreciate is the amount of ingrained knowledge that founders have about the things they've done about the industry is really critical to moving the product and the decisions in the
[18:43.000 --> 18:44.000] correct direction going forward.
[18:44.000 --> 18:54.000] And it's unfair to expect someone to step in immediately and be able to make decisions with the same level of autonomy and context because they just don't have those things.
[18:54.000 --> 19:01.000] You know, for me, it was important to have someone who I knew was going to challenge me, you know, like to your kind of the biggest lessons.
[19:01.000 --> 19:06.000] Like I knew I had to be stubborn and like what I needed this thing to be and how I wanted it to work.
[19:06.000 --> 19:11.000] But the actual how of those things, I wanted to be up to the rest of the team.
[19:11.000 --> 19:12.000] Right.
[19:12.000 --> 19:15.000] So like if you know what needs to do this, like you tell me how we want that to work.
[19:15.000 --> 19:16.000] I don't actually care.
[19:16.000 --> 19:18.000] You know, just like, let's make it go.
[19:19.000 --> 19:21.000] Well, Ash, we're almost out of time.
[19:21.000 --> 19:25.000] So I want to just real quickly touch on you guys are in the process of being acquired.
[19:25.000 --> 19:26.000] Congratulations.
[19:26.000 --> 19:27.000] Thank you.
[19:27.000 --> 19:28.000] Super exciting.
[19:28.000 --> 19:29.000] So one, congratulations.
[19:29.000 --> 19:31.000] That's a huge accomplishment.
[19:31.000 --> 19:33.000] What's next for you after this?
[19:33.000 --> 19:39.000] We've basically been acquired by a larger health tech organization named Innovator.
[19:39.000 --> 19:42.000] They're like a big healthcare data platform.
[19:43.000 --> 19:51.000] So our entire team, the cured team in its complete form will now be responsible for what they're calling like the experience pillar.
[19:51.000 --> 19:57.000] So effectively, we were going to own like all of the consumer facing capabilities that exist inside of this organization.
[19:57.000 --> 20:03.000] So I get to play ahead of product for all of those products, of which some of it is what we already built.
[20:03.000 --> 20:07.000] Like here, some of this is products that they had built that I'll be taking over.
[20:07.000 --> 20:19.000] So that's my new role and myself and my other two co-founders will kind of own our similar areas to what we own like cured, but now kind of within the confines of the Innovator family.
[20:19.000 --> 20:20.000] Awesome.
[20:20.000 --> 20:21.000] Well, super exciting.
[20:21.000 --> 20:22.000] Congratulations again on that.
[20:22.000 --> 20:26.000] And then where can our listeners follow what you're up to?
[20:26.000 --> 20:31.000] Most things happen on LinkedIn, so our cured LinkedIn will stay active.
[20:31.000 --> 20:35.000] So that's probably the best place where you can follow me directly on LinkedIn as well.
[20:35.000 --> 20:37.000] That's where most of our updates come.
[20:37.000 --> 20:44.000] And then the cured website has a blog and things like that that are fairly frequently published.
[20:44.000 --> 20:45.000] Awesome.
[20:45.000 --> 20:50.000] Well, Ash, thank you again for joining us today and best of luck with Cured 2.0 in the new company.
[20:50.000 --> 20:51.000] Thank you.
[21:05.000 --> 21:12.000] Thank you.
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