How Lifeomic CEO Don Brown grew to $3.5M revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is don brown his first company was acquired by eds in 1986 he founded software artistry in 1988 which became the first software company in indiana to ipo he then founded and served as ceo of interactive intelligence which went public in 99 and was required in 2016 for 1.4 billion he then started life omic in late 2016. he received a bs in physics in ms in computer science and an md from indiana university also received an msn biotechnology from john hopkins university in 2017. don are you ready to take us to the top no you bet all right a lot of history here you've seen patterns you've seen trends you've done a lot here talk to me about life will make what's the company do and what's your revenue model how do you make money uh well we're still trying to figure out the revenue model we're more concerned right now about uh building a cloud-based platform for precision medicine uh we all know that uh in order to treat people better we've got to utilize all this big data we're accumulating about them and that's what we're trying to facilitate at lyfomic and what it you know educate me here i don't know what precision i don't know what that means what what is that well unfortunately medicine is a lot of trial and error today you go in doctors will try you one one medicine whether it's a for hypertension or depression or whatever if that doesn't work or has side effects they'll try uh another uh the situation is even worse with serious diseases like cancer uh you know where you may not uh have the opportunity for uh multiple trials uh and so um we're starting to get better about taking information uh your uh dna sequence for example and uh using that to more uh specifically tailor treatments to you mm-hmm okay and and who do you envision i want to talk to you about how you got into this space but before i do that who do you envision really that really powering you from a resource perspective in terms of paying you as a customer so you can drive future growth will it be will be the end consumer that wants to make smarter decisions like a webmd almost or will be the other side well we're kind of approaching it from both angles kind of uh top down and bottom up we're working with large academic medical centers like at my alma mater the indiana university school of medicine they're they're loading up information about thousands of cancer patients to try to use our machine learning and other techniques to figure out who's going to respond to a particular treatment and who won't but along the way we started to get interested in kind of the patient side of things so we've developed a mobile app that uh we're rolling out for free to uh end users to try to kind of guide them along toward uh precision health from an individual standpoint any platform that's using machine learning or ai is only going to be as strong as the unique inputs you feed it so what of these inputs have you kind of monopolized maybe that's a bad word you know we don't want to get in trouble here but what are these assets have you acquired and how are you making sure they really help your your machine learn well the great thing about uh healthcare is that there's no shortage of data i so what we do is try to combine information from uh classic electronic medical records so what drugs you're on what diseases you've been diagnosed with uh those sorts of things um and then uh your whole genome sequence do i have to opt in for that though don how do you get that data well i it depends on kind of uh whether it's we're approaching from the top or the bottom when uh we're working with a large academic institution like iu they have this data from patients i see so they're sequencing cancers for example and the normal tissue from patients and then feeding that data into our systems uh if you come into us via a web app then uh it's up to you to bring that data either from a service like 23 and me or to go out and have your genome sequenced and uh upload that uh information interesting is that really the main input you're using it's your genome sequence i'm really it's a combination your your uh genome sequence uh tells us about the potential uh so for the most part um there are a few genes where you've been dealt a bad hand you know uh that's just uh the the luck of the draw but most genes uh really are affected by the environment and so it's that combination of your whole genome sequence and uh your uh environmental exposure mm-hmm no it makes makes good sense um pre-revenue today still exploring pricing well actually we just uh signed our first deal with iu with the school of medicine so uh we have a subscription model we basically charge based upon uh the amount of data and the sort of computational load that it what's the actual metric you're measuring computational load based off what metric well i basically it maps onto the underlying aws model oh i see so yeah uh the computational cycles as well as storage uh so uh it's uh kind of a one level of abstraction higher but it's largely the same thing of of compute and storage yep okay interesting and so i noticed on your pricing page you kind of have the opt-in which means it's going to probably you when you're trying to figure out pricing kind of as you go along here um how do you uh that conversation with iu um is it is it kind of a pilot thing do you go directly to a one year two year five year term how do you structure these early deals well we structured a two-year agreement with them that's renewable uh but we've been working with them for uh about a year already uh so that it's kind of a special case we already knew them they uh knew us uh but uh we're doing pilot uh sorts of programs with other academic uh institutions cancer institutes as well and as you move forward maybe not with iu but your ideal kind of target customer you're working with i mean are we talking really kind of million dollar acvs or 100 000 acvs i mean where what scale do you have to be at for your thing to really add value would you say uh well certainly there are small projects that can be in that hundred thousand dollar uh sort of range but on up into the multi-million dollar sorts of contracts i as i said we're starting off with these large academic medical institutions but we really think this whole notion of precision medicine precision health will filter down into corporate wellness programs uh so uh we plan to offer uh kind of a freemium model where uh uh organizations can use our mobile app and our cloud platform for free for their uh employees or uh members uh and then uh we have more specialized services that we can offer on top of uh uh what comes in the freemium version yep and uh so so it was year one kind of officially last year 2017 yep okay that's great and what's the team size today uh about 50 5-0 okay yeah and have you kind of self-funded this or did you decide to raise capital no i've uh funded it all out of pocket myself so far it feels good to be able to do that right it does it is nice well you know someone else might say don why are you risking your own capital you've had success it should be easy for you to go risk other people's capital what would you respond i you know when it's your own capital at risk you can do whatever the hell you want and you don't have to answer to anybody uh you don't have to be overly concerned about uh generating revenue uh so what i did was go out and hire cancer researchers bioinformaticians really strong cloud software engineers mobile engineers and really just try to tackle a big problem without being overly consumed about how we make money in the short term yep no that's a good place a good place to be and the 50 folks where is everybody based oh roughly a third across indianapolis research triangle park and the salt lake city area okay very good so three separate spots there and uh and help me understand kind of why get into this space it sounds like you've had some exits in your past you had some success what prompted you to jump into the space just intellectual interest i went through medical school a long time ago and uh i went over to the dark side of business you know started a little software company while i was finishing up med school you're talking interactive intelligence well there was two companies before that uh yeah interactive was uh my most recent one um and i i just always had a love for the life sciences i i i got involved you know did a master's program at johns hopkins and kind of re went back through biochemistry and cell biology all the cool stuff and you know just an opportunity to get in into a field super exciting because there's this convergence of cloud technologies ai and then all we've learned about how the body works and you know sequencing the human genome all those sorts of things that uh i think is going to usher in uh a revolution in health care mm-hmm now interactive intelligence i you know i want to spend a little bit of time on this because there's i'm sure there's some lessons here this was the kind of telecommunications right in cloud computing yes yeah so and you founded 1994 uh yeah somewhere somewhere in there that's right so so it's very rare you see a founder that goes from day one i think you and david launched it back then all the way you know up to ipo to the point where you were i believe taken private in 2016 by genesis um how did you have to change and adapt and learn through that what was the biggest challenge yeah it was it was a real learning experience because we went from i founded the company and so we went from one employee uh in the beginning to about uh 2300 uh at the end uh so yeah it's you know when you go through those stages it's like being in multiple companies uh every year or two it's a really a new company you know we expanded we had operations around the globe we made the transition from a client server architecture to an aws based uh cloud uh solution about uh four or five years ago so it was just a hell of a lot of fun a lot of uh business and technical challenges uh you know i did uh close to 80 uh quarterly earnings calls you know which is real experience i so you know just the different sorts of challenges all along the way you went through 99 in fact you took advantage of that as when you went public and i think you raised call 29 million then and popped 141 percent when you look back on that uh what are your takeaways oh well start with by the way start with what your revenue was when you went public oh my god i think we went public we uh we released our product in 97 and uh did 1.5 million dollars in revenue in 98 we did 9 million dollars in 99 when we went public we did 18 million dollars in uh revenue at least you had a revenue right there's so many people with no revenue so were you were you way overpriced or was the market actually pretty fair and bearish for you in 99 when you went public oh no it was it was crazy we bought popped within a year we had a three-quarter of a billion dollar market cap i mean what were you that something is like are you married i i was at the time okay when you're sitting there and you go home like dinner with your wife and you're going honey like look i guess you didn't have phone to point out like the stock charts but you said hey honey look at the print out look at my palm pilot look at the spike today i mean what was going through your head you know i didn't sell any stock i i i for for one thing it just felt unreal i and it just felt wrong on some level that i i just didn't feel right about selling stock at that sort of valuation uh so i just kind of uh rode along uh the stock price went from a high of i think 54 bucks a share uh back then to a low of under two dollars wow uh within three or four uh years my wife was not very happy at that point and you said you're not married now did you get divorced because of that uh well yeah somewhere along the way i put a lot of pressure on the relationship that's funny okay now you also were very acquisitive during your time i think doing maybe 10 acquisitions between 07 and 2016 one in which you bought an 09 acrosoft and then sold it again in 2016. um does that kind of strategy still work today in your opinion public companies can they be can they do a roll up and still create value we didn't exactly do a roll up we we did a few tuck-in acquisitions along the way i'm an engineer by uh you know by uh training and uh so i always think i can build something better than anybody else and that makes it kind of hard to do uh acquisitions at least for technology but we we acquired distributors in australia south africa germany uh you know where there were things like that that really made sense that added a lot of value to the company you're talking like call time in australia agora and german yeah it's interesting though so there's a big actually a lesson there i think you just said you acquired distributors like a lot of people that i have that listen to the show you know they don't think they think about building this product they never think about actually just owning the distribution channels that they're pumping their product through because then you own the channel you can put other products through it and it lasts a lifetime you recognize that early on uh yeah it made a huge difference we had an enormous success in australia for example um and uh to um acquire our distributor there and build out our own team it really propelled our our business uh in a major way interesting okay and then wrap up the story first 2016 what was total revenue and so so we can back into what the the the multiple was oh god um no why were you active in 2016 or no uh yeah uh we were acquired at the end of uh 2016. i think we were doing uh roughly 100 million dollars a quarter okay okay so and you've sold for 1.4 billion so call it kind of three between three and five x something like that pretty fair yeah yeah that's great and then then what i'm sure they try to get you to stay on and you just said i can't do this i'm a horrible employee i i know they they didn't even ask oh wow okay so you said fine i'm gonna take a break and go relax and you can only relax for a year before jumping into this i didn't yeah i didn't take a break i think they i think they thought i would take a break but uh i announced uh liphomic the day after the deal closed with uh genesis that's so funny very good don let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh oh uh exponential organizations number two is there a ceo you're following or studying right now oh i i certainly i'm a tesla fan so i follow elon's antics number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company oh um i i guess jira jira okay number four how many hours of sleep you get every night i i'm a famous insomniac so probably four or five okay we'll call it five there and then uh you said not married any kiddos [Music] i made kids oh you have eight yes holy mackerel eight k okay wow all entrepreneurs are now i'm sorry are they did they get the entrepreneurial bug are they all entrepreneurs or no i want one so far okay very good and uh how old are you i'm 62. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew [Music] oh i i you know the you can i do far more than what you realize at the time guys there you have it set big goals don's been through it all went through 99 19 million bucks in revenue went public then it got just unrealistic and just fantasy land he held on though to the stock was inquisitive in terms of buying up distribution partners and then ultimately exited and took that company was taken private for about 1.4 billion he didn't even take a break day after launch is a company called a life home like why because he's passionate about the space convergence of health care plus cal computing and really what he calls and i think the industry calls prescriptive health as they look to sorry precision health as they look to scale just signed a big contract with indiana university as kind of their first paid pilot we'll keep track don thanks for taking us to the top okay thank you