StartFast Fund II had its first exit with the recent acquisition of Patient Pattern by PointClickCare. Our Vice President, Olivia Goldstein, had the opportunity to catch up with Steve Buslovich, CEO and Co-Founder of Patient Pattern recently to discuss the big news, and his advice for founders.
OG: Steve - great to see you and congratulations! Everyone is buzzing about the big news and I'm hoping before we dive in, you can share a little bit about what it is that Patient Pattern does.
SB: Sure, Patient Pattern is an integrated care management platform. We essentially service value based care organizations in the healthcare space that take risk for various patient populations. These are typically subsets of Medicare type plans, some of them are smaller, some of them are quite large and national. Ultimately, we provide the technology to help them run their plan operations, connect to the clinical teams out there, and then ultimately help them from everything with respect to the workflow, coding, quality, documentation, compliance and claim submission.
OG: This was your first private capital backed company and you faced the intense pressures of fundraising in a tightening market. What are some of the things you would advise other founders to be prepared for as they fundraise?
SB: I think it's fair to say that it's definitely harder to raise capital in this environment than it probably should be for successful companies. First, it's very important to navigate the rocky landscape by focusing on your customers. That's been our claim to fame that, despite any challenges, our customers have had a white glove experience. Supporting and knowing your customers is really what buttressed us throughout the years, but ultimately, through this period as well. Number two is both trust your team and spend time reevaluating the team that you have. This is the time to find the most talented team members that you can have and try to keep costs down by incentivizing them through equity offerings in lieu of salary. And number three, make sure that you have product market fit, and use this time to reevaluate whether or not what you're selling is incredibly sticky.
OG: And what role did your board and investors play in this regard?
SB: Having a strong board is obviously important. However, there's never the right answer - there's always differences of opinion. Though, I think it's important to understand that there are sharky waters out there. So your board can come up with alternative strategies, including internally supporting the company for a longer period of time to get great adoption & greater ARRs and then helping to find the right partners. And so that's where our board has been incredibly helpful in evaluating those alternative options.
OG: What can we expect next from your team?
SB: Well, right now we're merging with a very large strategic partner and ultimately are looking to grow our team. We're hiring fairly aggressively at the moment, across different specialties, product engineering, marketing, as well as customer support and customer success. We're looking to recruit across the country, but ultimately, it would be great if we can recruit folks locally and support the local ecosystem.
OG: I love that. Thank you, Steve. We're looking forward to seeing what's next.
