04/06/23

Being a Young Founder

interviewing my boss

The only credibility I could have was results.

David West is the co-founder and CEO of Proscia, a digital pathology software company. He is also my boss, mentor, and thought partner. He took me under his wing exactly a year ago to the day. I moved out east soon after to work with him. David gets interviewed a ton, but mostly about computational pathology or Proscia. Having the opportunity to work with such a remarkable individual on a daily basis, I couldn't help but want to showcase his character beyond his exceptional accomplishments. David is diligent, tenacious, and curious to a fault – it is my pleasure to offer readers a glimpse into his life. In this interview, we delve into his personal journey, the challenges he has faced, and the lessons he has learned along the way. I hope it will inspire others as much as David has inspired me and many others in the industry. 

An entrepreneurial kid, David found his raison d'être in undergrad, but his entrepreneurial journey started when he was in seventh grade.  "I've always been a nerd, as probably many founders are, and have always been somewhat entrepreneurial," David said. “My first company that I started was called Tape to Disk back in like, 2007.” David had a hobby in video editing and special effects, which led him to start a business that would convert VHS tapes to DVDs. He started small, serving his local community, but the business grew quickly. 

David’s entrepreneurial spirit stayed with him when he entered Johns Hopkins to study biomedical engineering. He quickly realized that the program was extremely competitive, with most students aiming for medical school. David, however, knew that he wasn't interested in practicing medicine, and felt like he didn't quite fit in with his peers.

"It was a bit of a hustle culture, if you will," David said. "People would brag about how little they slept, which I think was formative in many ways. But I also realized, well, there are so many smart people here and I'm not going to be a doctor. I was too entrepreneurial for that. And I was too much of an engineer for that."

David’s interest in a variety of subjects made him feel like a “jack of all trades and master of none,” but his breadth of knowledge also gave him an advantage in networking and getting involved in entrepreneurial ecosystems across the country.

Would you say you set out to become a founder? 

I don't know if I set out to be a founder, but I think it was inevitable. I think that a lot of my classmates were taking traditional routes – they were going to be a doctor or go into consulting or go into banking and do the whole rigid career pathway thing. Medical school, then residency, then fellowship. Finance, banking, private equity. I think at the end of the day, if I wasn't a founder, I probably would've been a product manager in tech, which is probably the closest you can get to being a founder. 

Did you have a moment early on building Proscia when you realized, “Holy shit, this is more than just an undergrad project. Like this has the potential to be a big company”? 

I think actually pretty early on. And that's why when we say the company was founded in 2014, we formed an LLC or a C Corp in 2014. But we were still very much a project for a few years, but I think we realized that it was very obvious that there was terrible software out there for a real industry that big companies were investing in. 

Now did I actually think we could be a real company? and compete in that market? and win in that market? and raise money in that market? I think deep down, there was part of me that kind of assumed it would fail because it is a high risk thing. And there were established big companies in this space, and I was very young and I didn't know what I was doing. 

Did you feel intimidated by that? Imposter syndrome? 

Definitely. I would say I was more intimidated by the fact that the people who we were selling to were really accomplished scientists or doctors. That (imposter syndrome) lasted a long time, especially in that the people that we were selling to and the people that we were raising money from tended to take traditional paths and were very accomplished. And I think that can be a bit of a clash when it's like: 

Who is this young person? They don't look like me. They're not taking a career path like I am. I put in the hard work. I did seven years in this PhD program. I did investment banking, then private equity, and then venture capital. Um, why can this person do it? 

I really felt that. And the weird thing is, very few people are gonna say, “who are you?” or “you're too young”. “I'm not gonna invest in this”. They're gonna say, “I don't know if I believe in the market” or something along those lines. Like that's the one piece of feedback that you're never gonna get – doubt about the founding team from an investor. They'll never explicitly say it, but implicitly mean it.

So you kind of have to get comfortable with a lot of Nos, and I pretty quickly realized like there were people in this space who were honestly not executing the way we were. Like I could tell the stuff we were building was way better than what else was out there, and we were starting to get some serious traction.

You could tell that there were people who had credentials that I didn't have, that could go further. The only credibility I could have was just results. That was it. I think I learned really early on, there was nothing that I could lean on that would give me credibility except results. I think it forced us to become very, very execution focused and results focused as opposed to credential signaling or building a hype machine.

From the lens of being young, would you say that you faced ageism while building Proscia? Because the entire founding team was very young, right? 

I do think that's one way to look at it. But I think I would say when I was younger, I was more bitter and would've called it ageism.

And in retrospect, with a more mature lens, I genuinely didn't have a track record. And it really took someone to believe in me. I was very lucky to have some friends and family that believed in me early on, you're always going to have the people that are close to you that can believe in you.

But also when we became a real company, having our early investors, Neil Cohen, who's on our board from Emerald, believed in us when we didn't have a track record. They saw something in us. I think they saw something in me, and saw something in the problem space and were willing to take a risk. 

So you gotta find someone who's willing to take that risk. Because I think genuinely, I don't know if I blame someone for not being willing to take that risk, because early on you stumble around. You're not perfect. And, if I could go back and do that again, I'd be way better at it. Experience does count for something, but honestly, so does passion and talent and risk taking and all the other side of the equation, that experience is totally orthogonal to.

Speaking of experience, did you ever wish you had other formal training anywhere, other jobs or startups, any other experience?

I'll say two things. In the perfect world, yes. Like I see what you're doing at Proscia. I'm like, that is fucking awesome. I wish I got to do something like that. Or, I see what some of my other friends have done in their careers and work around really smart people who had some experience and could have mentorship, and that counted for a lot. I had great mentors and that counted for a lot. But those mentors, I kind of had to make for myself and put around me and start with people that I trusted and that had trust in me and then build that out. Or people that were willing to take a risk, take a bet on me.

When you hit on that one thing, that is a real opportunity. You gravitate to it and it becomes obvious that you can't do anything else. Like that is the thing, and you can't wait for that. 

At the end of the day, I didn't have a PhD. I never had the opportunity to do that. I didn't have five years working at a startup or 10 years working at a startup or whatever it might be, or five years working at Siemens. Like some of the other folks who are in this space.

Take one of our biggest competitors for example: by the time their CEO was hired, he was running an AI group, but I had already been in pathology longer than he had. I kind of knew, and a lot of that was kind of stumbling around and trying things, but I was able to do enough of that early experimentation and be on the inside of that market in a way that I think you could have someone that has a lot of experience. But it's from the outside. Whereas at this point I might not have been a pathologist, but I was becoming a bit of an insider. 

What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of being super young as a founder? 

The strengths are that you're going to be open to new ideas and are more impressionable. It's hard to be, let me say this more definitively.

Pessimism and its corollary, skepticism are incompatible with entrepreneurship. I think a healthy skepticism is okay. But you have to be in default mode optimistic. You have to look for reasons to say yes instead of reasons to say no. That has to be your default mode.

Not to say you never say no, but your default mode has to be looking for reasons to say yes. I think it's easier to do that when you don't have the scar tissue that comes with experience and this system. 

If you could give your 18 year old self some advice, what would it be?

I think it would be to be fearless. To take a shot. I think when most of what you're getting is 99 Nos for that one, Yes. It's easy to let that block you from doing things that are worth taking a chance, reaching out to that one person who maybe could be on your advisory board or whatever it might be. 

Find someone who’s going to believe in you and someone who will appreciate the fact that you've tried and that you gave it a shot. That counts for so much. In retrospect, in some aspects, when I did get 99 Nos, I was, to a certain extent, blocked by fear. 

What's something you would've done differently if you were to build Proscia all over again? 

I'll tell you a story here and, and kind of back my way into this. I have a friend who is very successful as a biotech and healthcare investor, like wildly. As a pretty young person, and he's someone who is not a scientist, but is extremely skilled socially and politically. And was able to build a really tight partnership with someone who was super experienced and who had a lot of credibility and who could be the scientist in that partnership and be the credible person in that partnership. And so it's like you got the money guy, you can go raise money from LPs and you've got the science guy. You can pick investments. My rugged individualism got in the way to have recognized that I did had a credibility gap. Because I was young and I could have solved that.

What does success look like for you – as a person, not as a founder?

It's really hard to decouple those two things. I think Steve Jobs said it best

“We're here to put a dent in the universe.”

Everything else is just a byproduct of that or a signal for that, whether it's money or whether it's an exit or status. And some of that can be inflated, but like at the end of the day, what I get excited about, what matters is that I've made a dent in the universe.

And where I've tasted that before in small ways is thrilling. That's seeing a customer who's using your software is like the ultimate form of feeling like you’ve bent the universe.

What does life after Proscia look like? Is there a life after Proscia?

I had a friend who was just asking me this – could you do this for another 10 years? 

Every day is a lot of fun. Work does not feel like work. It sometimes feels hard and stressful, sure. It is definitely that. It feels like fun, creativity and challenge more than it feels like drudgery.

It makes it hard to think about what life could look like after. But I will say this.

What a waste it would be if I didn't try something again after this. I don't think this is my last thing. Granted, I've been doing this forever, I never did study abroad. I never took a vacation more than a week. I did this straight out of college. Six months before graduation I had an office and we were working and we hired our first employees. I'm almost 30. So it's been like eight years of just never a break. So I probably would take a break and I'd probably sit and I'd think. 

But all the shittiness and the pain and the slowness and the imposter syndrome of being a first time founder and a young founder, it's like one of our investors said, “well the young founder problem, it gets better every year, right?” And  yeah it gets better exponentially.

What's exciting you the most right now? 

It's obviously AI. It’s absolutely mind blowing. There's always that phrase, “You tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.” 

When I look at what's happening, having been in this space for some time, and seeing the rate at which things are happening right now, not just the hype, but the new things that are possible, it is accelerating and it's accelerating fast to a point where I think the folks who are nervous about this are justified on the basis of the pace at which things are moving. I don't think literally today what is happening with say, large language models or GPT-4 is in itself dangerous, I think it's a very impressive tool that's going to change and disrupt markets. 

I think the concepts of AGI and the singularity, if you will, were mostly science fiction. This is very much a in our lifetime phenomenon that we have to get ready for.

And it's happening faster than I think anyone, anyone smart would've said, we don't know when this is actually going to happen. 

What is your best piece of advice for young founders?

It only gets harder to take risks the older you get. If you adjust for the perception of how quickly time passes, your life is half over by the time you're like 24 or 25. Sam Altman said that. 

You don't have infinite time to do cool things. Steve Jobs said this in a somewhat more morbid way. He'd look at himself in the mirror and say, “Someday you're gonna die.”

There's no, “I'll do that thing tomorrow”, “ I'll reach out to that person tomorrow”, “I'll write that blog tomorrow”. Just do it. Just do it. Nike is better at saying it. Just do it. 

This piece is 6/50 of my 50 days of learning/writing. Subscribe to hear about new posts.