In 2019, Chris gave a warts-and-all presentation at Turing Fest about mistakes made and lessons learned on the journey of building and eploying a product resposible for people's lives in the healtcare space.
Two years on, we'll be catching uo with Chris once more to hear about the intervening period which saw the company skyrocket in ever sense, culminating in their recent acquisition by a US retail giant.
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The last time we had someone doing an interview like this at TuringFest with Magnus Nilsson from iZettle, and before that with Gareth Williams from Skyscanner. So so you're in some pretty lofty company. Tell us a bit maybe start with you a little bit and your quick background on you and, how how you started doing what you did with Current Health.
Yeah. So I come from a town on the West Coast of Scotland called Paisley. If Wendy's been there, I'm sorry. Did a degree in computer science, went to med school, started Current Health because I'm on grandmother. She had COPD, CHF, dementia, kept getting admitted to hospital for things that could and should have been managed at home.
So Stuart and I started Current Health to try and help hospitals, health systems deliver the majority of health care into patients' own homes rather than within bricks and mortar facilities. And when you started out so you had you had a CS background, then you had a medical background.
You didn't finish medicine. You were looking at what you're seeing in the system. You're like, we can do a better job of some bits of this. It showed the lights in telling me that I'm a medical dropout. Yeah. You thought All the best tech tech stories, man, are all about people dropping out of college.
I think being in it, you see the structural, financial, logistical reasons why our health care system, and this is true in the UK, it's true in the US, is fundamentally broken. And we thought we can be a part of changing how that healthcare is de leveled, you know, in the UK, the US and across the world.
And so it was and one of the key points, I guess, in the beginning of the journey of Current Health well, it wasn't called Current Health then, but we'll get to that, was when you met Stuart. So and Chris did a really good talk in twenty nineteen at at Turing about a lot of the mistakes made at the time and he was in this you were kind of on the rocket ship then, not on the crazy, crazy part which COVID related came after, but there's a great slide in that talk about an email that
you got from Stuart. Yeah. I think everyone looks for the perfect founding story and assumes that you have to meet people in college. That wasn't what happened with Stuart and I. Stuart literally just dropped me an email and we got together in Glasgow and we just got on really well.
He drives me up the wall. He's one of the most annoying people I've ever met in my entire life. But he's also ridiculously smart, way smarter than me. And we complimented each other really, really well. And through the last six, seven years, we've built a phenomenal friendship and a phenomenal company together.
Yeah. So the thing of there's an interesting thing sometimes where founders are like old friends, like childhood friends, all this kind of stuff, and sometimes you hear these horror stories where these friendships go south and the company goes or even if the company works, the friendship doesn't make it.
Do you think the fact that you guys met at the beginning of the like, the friendship and the company are sort of the it's a parallel story. Yeah. It's the founder relationship. It just there's so much shit to go through. I think, I didn't appreciate how important it was to have someone else there with you.
It's not just about the work. It's about someone who can share in the emotional and mental challenge of trying to build an organization from nothing. Stuart and I have had loads of ups and downs. I mean, we've had loads of arguments through this company but both of us are just very, I guess, honest and open with each other.
We both share the same goals and we've consistently got through every one of those challenges together. So the the company starts off in you and Stuart meet in the middle of twenty fifteen, I think. Yep. And then the company, you start building an MVB, which you had photographs of in the deck before, hilarious, compared to where it is now, but it also shows the magnitude of the achievement.
So when does it all begin? When do you feel like this is actually this is something that might actually work? I don't know if I've ever felt like that. I mean, truthfully, you're saying in twenty nineteen we were on the rocket ship. In twenty nineteen, it didn't feel that way.
I think things started to come together for us at the start of twenty twenty. Yeah. You know, we we got an FDA clearance. We won our first big, American health system, which was Baptist Health in Indiana. That was a huge moment for us to get your first big enterprise client to say, hey.
We want this. We're gonna pay for it. We like it. And from there, we just started to pick up more and more. COVID certainly produced some tailwinds for us. But we were in, you know, good possession as COVID started. But it was only at the start of twenty twenty for me that really felt like this is really truly going somewhere.
And then we grew dramatically. I mean, we basically five x ed our headcount since the start of twenty twenty to where we are today. Fifty two percent of our team have joined since May. Yeah, that's been wild. How many people are in the team now?
One hundred and fifty, one hundred and sixty. Big shout out to our talent team who are here somewhere. They've done all of that work and all of our team and our review and putting in huge amounts of effort to build the team that we have.
So you mentioned the FDA approval there. I think like because I've known you and and some people around the company through the story. I think when I heard the FDA approval was done, that was when I was like, okay, wow. This is this is now a thing that can go to the the US market.
This is not like we're gonna be the biggest x in Scotland. This is this is the real deal. These guys are going global. Yeah. I mean, I think we always, since the start, wanted to go large. Like, we didn't just want to stay in Scotland, wanted to build the company in Scotland, but we wanted to go global with what we were trying to do.
So we focused very quickly on, how do we grow in the US market? What do we need to get there? Getting FDA was huge. That was probably the single biggest professional challenge I've ever went through in my life. It was and the same for our team.
It was a huge amount of work. But once we got that, it was a vindication that what we were doing worked. But then there was the whole next challenge of, Okay, cool. You've got clearance. Is someone gonna buy it? Like, you know, just because you're cleared doesn't mean someone's gonna pay you any money.
Yeah. I saw the remember seeing the picture of the paperwork for the FDA? They still only take paper. Even through COVID, they're still paper. It was literally a pile of paper this high and it was like handwritten or something. So maybe back to a little bit the roots and the early days here.
So you guys you have to do clinical trials here. Somebody somebody somewhere took a punt on you. I mean, probably a long there have been a few punts on you along the way, but where's the where's the moment where some where someone there's external validation from someone saying, Yeah.
This is a thing that could could help things? Looking back now, I think our story is highly improbable. Like, for a team with no experience in building companies, no experience in health care, no experience in medical devices to take on and become a leader in the global market in the space that we're in and work with some of the largest health systems in the world is incredibly improbable and pretty cool.
The reason that happened is because a lot of people put faith in us along the way and You know, there's not one person. There are so many people who believed in our vision and had confidence we were gonna get there, but also a huge amount of tenacity on the part of our team.
The number of times I thought, shit. This is going sideways. Like, we are done. And the reason it didn't go sideways is because our team, took the knocks and just kept going and never gave up, not once. And we will never give up, you know, going forward.
Never have we said we're done. We're gonna keep going and we're gonna get this done and that's why we've we've managed to have, some success as we've we've grown. Some success. Nice. Modest. So maybe we should take a step back and say I think that's my mic.
About a little bit about the thank you. There we go. The the product. What what is what is CurrentHealth? What do you do? Who do you do it for, etcetera? Yeah. So we we evolved. We started life building a device to try and better monitor patients in their own home, And then we realized that in order to successfully deliver health care at home, you needed a whole platform around it.
You needed how could you actually operationally deliver that wearable to patients at home across vast geographic areas? And now we've went even beyond that. We are saying, how do we help a health care organization, be it a hospital, be it a pharmaceutical company, with everything they need to do to safely deliver care into the home for a complex population?
Healthcare providers are amazing at delivering healthcare, not at infrastructure, logistics, technology, and all of the different things that need to happen to say, hey, we're gonna care for this cancer patient at home instead of in the hospital. We're trying to bring all of that together and at one platform for them so that they can safely keep them at home at lower cost than in a hospital, achieve a better outcome.
And for me, if we don't shift more health care into the home, you know, we will not be able to sustainably deliver health care to our growing population as we go forward. So is CurrentHealth do you see it as a mission driven company?
Yeah. I mean, we you know, I think one of the coolest things from the last eighteen months forget all, like, the commercial stuff that we've done. The coolest thing is that we have managed to save lives, like, genuinely save lives. There are people who are alive today because of the work that our team has done with our health care partners, and that's phenomenal.
There's not many times you get to build a company and do that. We get to be a positive part of the worst part of some people's lives. And I think that a lot of the team most of the team believe and are passionate about that mission and vision, and that's what's driving us forward.
This is a really, really fucking hard company to make work so complicated in every domain. But when you, at the end of the day, get to see a patient who's still there because of the work that our team have done, I think that's really powerful.
Yeah. I mean, the complexities just thinking about it on a even on a, the top level, software, hardware, AIML, that's just before that's just in the product. That's before you get into all the manufacturing, etcetera. Then the people you're selling to are these gigantic labyrinthian labyrinthian organizations.
And then if anything goes wrong, people might die. Like, it's you picked by the hardest thing you you could choose to tackle. Yeah. Yeah. That's I mean, I think every building any company is hard. The challenges are just different depending on what they are.
But, I think we have a special responsibility to help our partners keep our patients safe and do so in their own home, and that is an obligation we take really, really, really seriously. I think building this I can't imagine doing anything harder, particularly over the last eighteen months.
And the the work that our team has done, you know, this isn't because of me. Like, this is because of our team and how hard they work every single day to do something that is impossibly difficult, with unbelievably, bad odds of, you know, like, every day.
So I'm just thinking back to, twenty twenty seventeen TuringFest twenty seventeen. It was the first time we did TuringFest at EICC, and we had, let's call it, a very modest expo area. And Chris had an expo space that he was not happy with, that he was very clear with me that he was not happy about it.
And, but something also happened, though. So you you were you were pretty pissed off, but it all it all kind of worked out because we turned up for the speaker dinner that evening, and one of the speakers that we had over in twenty seventeen was a guy called Kasser Younes.
Kasser was, at the time, his chief operating officer at Y Combinator. He's kind he's the guy who took Y Combinator from being, an accelerator program to VC and, you know, all of the amazing scaling that they've done. And Casper didn't show for the founder for the speaker dinner.
And the reason he didn't show for the speaker dinner is you. So how what happened there? Yeah. We ended up going for dinner. And, you know, to be honest, at that point, I didn't he's built an incredible company now in Sunnyvale, but I didn't know that much about Kasser.
But we got to talking and then agreed that we'd meet up in San Francisco a couple of months later. I was talking at the time about raising a funding round in Kasser, but nowhere else said, cool. I'd like to invest in that round.
You know, just like, this was like a Pete's Coffee, like ten in the morning. I was like, cool. Excellent. Let's do it. Yeah. And what was important about that is Kasser went on to make introductions to a whole bunch of different people for us, one of whom and this is, like, the the chain of events.
One of whom was a lady called Julie Yu, who's a GP at Andreessen Horowitz. Julie then helped us hire our CFO, who, along with the rest of the team, has been instrumental in what came after it. But that chain of events was critical to everything that came came afterwards.
So, really, it's all down to you, Brian. Like I mean, I didn't wanna say that, but But, no, I I on a serious point, like, this is exactly what the point of an event like TuringFest is. Like, it's not just the content and the talks, although it is amazing.
It's also all the little conversations that happen around it. Yeah. And, truly, one of the reasons why we were able to grow and do this is because of that one conversation at an event like this. Yeah. No. It's incredible serendipity, and it I I'm so happy that we could be a tiny part of it.
So you guys are you're you're growing. You've Castor's come in. Some other investors have come in. You've raised your you raised your first round here. Gareth got Williams got involved as well. So that was also good to see some ecosystem, you know, follow on go happening.
And then you've got you've got into the US, and then you're so you've had this, like, nightmare of, whatever, two years trying to figure out how to build the product. But the nightmares were only beginning because then you had to sell it in the US healthcare system.
Yeah. And, I mean, I think that the the funny thing is, like, throughout our entire journey, it's people taking a chance on something that for most of our lifetime looked pretty crap. Like, even you know, I remember when we went and pitched Gareth, and Gareth's first comment was, well, it's not Uber, is it?
And, you know, like, you know, our product, you really had to squint at it to see what we were trying to become, really hard. And that was true of these health systems. You know, I remember traveling, you know, and I'm this weird Scottish guy that don't have a clue what I'm saying.
And and we're like, hey. We're gonna, you know, do this thing. And most of them are like, you know, cool. Piss off. But one of them, Brett Oliver, who's the CMIO of Baptist Health, was like, I I believe in the vision. I think that's the thing that I didn't understand.
People don't just buy what you have today. They buy a belief in you. Like, people buy from people. I know people say that, but it's actually really true. They they buy a belief in where you're going and confidence in whether you can get there.
And the thing for Brett was, it wasn't about what the product was then. Like, they were pretty shared in their view that it was pretty shit at that point. But they believed in where it was gonna go, and they believed in our vision, and they had confidence that we would get there.
And they knew that to help us get there, they were gonna have to be a part of that. And they came on board. They bought, and Brett has you know, he's one of the people that's changed our business. You know, the the number of references he's done for us, And all of that's because he believed in our vision, and, you know, we've been good at executing on what we said we would do.
So when COVID hits that I mean, that was pretty terrible for almost everyone, but perhaps not for you. I I mean, I think, it became clear quite quickly that you know, health care gets a reputation as being an industry that doesn't move. It's conservative. It's slow moving.
It reinvented itself overnight. I mean, completely changed itself overnight, and they moved vast amounts of health care into the home. And we were perfectly positioned for that because we had gotten clearances. We'd gotten our first customers. We were starting to get good user feedback.
And suddenly health systems were saying, hey. How do we how do we get patients into the home? And it was just very good timing. And I guess it's been fundamentally, it's been a privilege to be part of helping them do that. I mean, my my fiance is a physician.
She's had some pretty rough moments over the last eighteen months. It's been a real privilege to get to help health systems make that shift to manage COVID positive patients at home to keep them safe and well, but also everyone else who still needed health care, who didn't have COVID, who couldn't get into hospital.
And we've been yeah. It's been cool. And then the, you know, the biggest sort of medical undertaking of, well, maybe ever is the development of the vaccines. You guys had a role in in that as well? Yeah. So we got to play a role in some of the COVID vaccine trials, which was interesting because I I was driving to pick Joanna up from work, and I got a phone call from a client that I can't name, saying, you know, we're awarding you a multimillion dollar contract.
So I'm driving at Fourth Valley Hospital screaming at the wheel, like, celebrating how amazing this is, and then thought, shit. We have to deliver this now. And at this point, like, you know, we had maybe, I don't know, done to, like, five hundred patients, six hundred patients.
So I phoned Richard Lennox, our CEO, and I was like, I need you to have ten thousand of, you know, devices ready in six weeks. You know? Cool. Hang up the phone. But we did it. Like, you know, we had no supply chain of our own at that point, really, and, you know, we now have a supply chain team of, like, ten people.
We've got our own warehouses. We've built a lot of our own manufacturing capability in Fife, by the way. Go Fife. And we got it done. Our team got it done, although there were, you know, some hairy moments on the way. And then so so the the roll forward to April, May this year, Tell us about Best Buy and how that all came about, and why is it consumer electronics company all of a sudden?
Yeah. Well, we had just done our series b, so we were not looking to be a wild. It really was not on the Yeah. On the on the cards. But delivering you know, health care is inherently physical. You have to reach out and go into the patient's home, and that's really difficult to scale as a company like ours.
Like, trying to build physical logistics, build physical in home support really hard to scale. Best Buy are world class at that. So they approached us and said, hey. We're interested in a partnership around how we use Best Buy's capabilities in supply chain and distribution and in home support to deliver a b2b service to health care providers.
You know, we'd love to partner with you. You provide the technology part of it, and we will do the physical part of it. And I was like, this is exactly what we want. And then he said, actually, we'd just like to buy the company.
So we were like, Cool. Okay. Interesting. And, you know, I think the thing is this wasn't, for me, about a financial outcome. This was, do I believe that with them, we can build a bigger company and have a bigger impact on health care?
And uniquely, they had capabilities we could not build on our own. Like, no matter the amount of capital we could get, we could never replicate that. Yeah. And I thought, let's let's do it. Yeah. So the everyone's gonna wanna know what what that whole deal looked like.
And I know I know there's some parts that you can't talk about. Suffice to say, it's one of the biggest and best deals Scotland's ever seen. So what's next? What's next for the com what's next for the team? What does it mean for the team?
I mean, I think for me, we're back to work. Like, we've got a ton of stuff to do, and we have a ton of goals. None of that's changing. We are still pushing forward. We're still hiring. We're still growing. You know, we're not changing anything about our operating plan.
And what we are doing is saying, how do we use Best Buy's capabilities to better deliver to our provider organizations? But for current health, we are still charging forward and and doing what we are doing with the full support of Best Buy. I I've been incredibly impressed by the Best Buy team and how aligned our cultures and and our goals are, But we are still pushing forward.
We're still current health. We're still hiring, building, growing in Scotland. You know, this is all about how do we do more and go faster and go bigger and go global with with what we're doing, not just the US and UK. Do you have a car?
What? Do I own a car? Yeah. Yeah. What do you drive? And who? The a three. Okay. And what did you drive when you started the company? A Ford Focus. It was k. Steadily. Just a benchmark to see what he's driving in, like, two years.
Roman Abramovich's yacht. So so if the I mean, I guess there have been so many good moments along the way, and I guess a huge exit is is a pretty good moment. What about what's been the worst moment? What's been the hardest day in in the history of CurrentHealth?
The hardest day. So we had a few periods where we were very close to our money. I mean, very, very close to our money. Trying to fundraise for a business that is in this space is really hard, because you're regulated. You've got physical hardware, which equals shitty gross margins.
You're trying to sell into enterprise, and you're doing it in health care. So, you know, investors are like, we're going somewhere else. Like, you know, you know, I think we also had moments where, you know, our product didn't work so great. You know, when we launched our g two, which was our our new wearable, a couple of moments at the start of that where we had some problems, we had to pull them back off the market.
That wasn't good at all. That was one of the worst days in my entire life when we had to withdraw our g two, for for a few days where we figured something out. And was that was that a moment where we thought, shit.
We're done? No. I think the interesting thing is the further into the journey you go, the more you realize that, the more resilience you have to those issues, the more you realize you can get through them. I think back now to issues we had in twenty sixteen where I was like, this is the worst thing ever.
We're fucked. And now I'm like, that was nothing. That was, like, it's just a Wednesday. So I think your, like, resilience to those issues and, I guess, your confidence you can overcome those issues grows, like, as you as you get through them. Also coupled you know, I I keep saying it, and it it probably just sounds like the the corporate lingo, but it's belief in our team.
Like, our team has overcome all of these challenges. So when you see our team executing through them every time, now I'm like, this is cool. Like, it'll be fine. It's it's all gonna be good. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess the experience, you've been through the storms.
So how bad can it get kinda thing. So the the and the immediate plans for Current Health, you guys have office in Boston? So we have an office here in Edinburgh. We have an office in Boston. We're growing both of them. Cindy's looking for employment.
Craig and Diego are out here somewhere. We're still growing, and, you know, our operating plan for twenty twenty two is what our operating plan was before all of this. Yeah. You know, we're not changing anything. We are pedal to the metal. Let's grow.
Let's build an even bigger company than we plan to off the back of the series b. And just we're we're getting a bit tight on time, but from what you've seen of of Scotland, of the ecosystem that, you know, we've produced, at this stage, a few world class companies that are that have changed the world in in in some really good ways.
Do you think the ecosystem itself is is developing? Do you think Scotland's a a better place to start a company than it was when you were getting going in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen? Yeah. I mean, I saw some people criticize us a little bit for selling, and I think that they are completely wrong because the thing that, you know, I hope one of the things that I hope happens from this is that our team go forward and start companies.
Like, you know, we've created a bunch of people who have experience in building and scaling a global company who can now go and start companies, who can go and start investing companies. And that to me is like you know, we saw that with Skyscanner.
Gareth invested in us, you know, was a mentor to me. We've got a bunch of Skyscanner people on our team. Like, that that's that's how that happens. I think the thing that Scotland has to change is we all need to stop focusing on investment.
Like, everything in Scotland is about being investor ready, about being able to pitch about wheels end up talking about revenue, like our customers, our product. Like, let's be revenue ready. Like, you know, not and the you know, people really focus on how do I go and pitch Andreessen Horowitz? How do I go and pitch Sequoia?
Like, you do that by building a business with great traction, great revenue, and they'll come to you. Like, that's not a problem, but you have to focus on revenue and product and basically nothing else. And, you know, fuck all this investor shit. Investor is a investment is a tool to grow your business.
It's not the goal. Yeah. And in Scotland, we focus way too much on investment as the objective. Chris, we are out of time, but, are you we're we've got happy hour coming up in a minute. You're gonna stick around for that? Of course.
So and if people wanna have a chat with you, you'll be in there. Of course. So give it up for Chris McCann and Curran Held.
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