Data, Distance & the Decade Build: Web Sun on Scaling Komodo Health

What does it take to scale a healthcare data company over a decade—while bridging silos across an entire industry?

Web Sun, Co-Founder and President of Komodo Health, joins First Builders to share the company’s journey from an early idea with bold ambition to a global leader in healthcare insights. Over ten years, Komodo has grown into a category-defining platform that powers better outcomes by aligning payers, providers, and pharma through data.

In this episode, Web opens up about:
– The early insight that sparked Komodo and how he met his co-founder, Arif Nathoo
– Scaling a company across two coasts and two talent pools—even before remote was the norm
– The hardest leadership decisions that come with growing from 20 people to 200+
– What it means to reframe leadership every year in hypergrowth
– How to build trust in a system where collaboration doesn’t come naturally

It’s a conversation about playing the long game, scaling with intention, and shaping healthcare for the better.

Follow Web Sun
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/websun
Komodo Health: https://www.komodohealth.com

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Transcript

0:04

Welcome to First Builders, the podcast for those who shape companies from the ground up. I'm Amber Illig, the founder and general partner at the Council Capital, where we invest in early teams solving critical problems in essential industries. And I'm Rachel Choi, partner at the Council. This podcast is about a group of people more likely than average to become executives, founders, or the force behind unicorn companies. We explore the defining decisions that shape their path and what early Sage founders can learn from those moves. We call them first builders. Whether building teams, categories, or entirely new ways of working, first builders take on the most foundational challenges in company building. And today's guest has done just that across a decade of growth. We're excited to welcome Web Sun, co-founder and president of Komodo Health, a company that spent the last 10 years reshaping how healthcare data is used to improve outcomes across the system. Now, Webb has been in life sciences his whole career. He and his co-founder launched Komodo with the idea that better insights and not just more data could bridge the silos in healthcare and bring payers, providers, and pharma into better alignment. And Komodo now operates across multiple offices with a globally distributed team and scaled through the pandemic with co-founders on different coasts. Something that we're excited to unpack today. I actually worked at Komodo prior to joining the council across a few of those offices and had a chance to collaborate closely with Webb. So today's episode is extra special. We're not just former colleagues, we're friends, and it was actually the first conversation I had about working at Komodo all those years ago. Webb, well welcome to First Builders. So let's start with the beginning. You spent most of your career in life sciences. What originally drew you to the space? I think for me, a lot of it has always been very mission-centered. Um my grandfather, who my eldest is named after, he was a uh renowned life sciences professor uh for almost 40 years in Taiwan. And a lot of his mentees who came to the States to study and train um and ended ended up becoming mentors of mine kind of helped shape my path. And so I started off in life sciences. I also started off in research. And so I began my career in RD doing cancer research in both academia and then transitioned into doing cancer research in industry. And after a couple years of that, you know, wanted to see an opportunity to have a greater impact. And so that's when I transitioned into the commercialization side of a pharma enterprise, did that for a number of years, and then ended up um getting my MBA and then consulting healthcare and life sciences entities. And then how did um the idea for Komodo come about? What was like an early insight that you had that you're like, we need to build this? It's kind of funny, though. The first time I met Arif, my co-founder, our CEO, and we joke about it, was like a six-hour blind date, one of the best five days of my life, obviously. And um, I think the big thing here was we were all reflecting on the fact that across healthcare, across like life sciences, at McKinsey, they call them studies at my organization. We just called them projects. But for all of those projects and studies, you know, you would be brought in as a consultant to provide advisory services, and it would be on everything from help me better understand this disease to help me understand, you know, how I can enroll these clinical trials faster, to help me understand the market opportunity for this drug that I'm considering in licensing. And you just go on and on down the series of projects that you'd have an opportunity to work on as a consultant. And every one of those projects always began with, okay, I have a series of business questions that I need to answer. Now I have a bunch of stuff in-house. I know my data guys bought a bunch of stuff. I know my IT folks bought a bunch of stuff. And first of all, I don't even know what I have in-house. And so after those business questions, you would be sent around the enterprise to try to figure out who has what. And then you would waste weeks, oftentimes months, throwing really talented individuals at this problem of just munging together the data. And, you know, I'm a lot older than Rachel, and so many, many, many years. And so, you know, you you would have this experience of doing it in Excel, munging all this data together just to get it to a workable state where you could be two months into the process before you could even begin the process of trying to analyze that data to see, A, can I even answer those business questions? And then B, to what degree of confidence do I have uh around the recommendations I'm gonna make to my to my client? And so when we started thinking about that, we were like, there has to be a better way. 2014, we're operating at the at this amazing time when at the time the big catchphrase was big data in healthcare. Big, big data. You'd go down the, you'd land an SFO, you'd go down the 101, and there would be like billboards with like a heat map, you know, it would be like big data in insert industry. And so we started thinking about it and we said, okay, there has to be a better way to capitalize on the fact that data is becoming more available, uh, it's becoming more accessible, but it's becoming more available. I've got my whoop band on, you know, I've got my Apple Watch on other days. And at the same time, we have this real acceleration of technology capabilities, cloud, advanced compute, and now AI, you know, and we were like, there has to be an opportunity to do it better, to get insights better, to get you know, high-quality recommendations to our end customers without going through this labor, time, and cost-intensive process. And that was really the inspiration for saying, how do we build a company that operates at the intersection of data and technology to really understand disease and address disease better? Yeah. I mean, when I was in consulting for the record, we were still doing things in Excel too. So you know, like yeah, I think still today a lot of people are doing that. Yeah, I'm always amazed. I was I was um guest lecturing at Haas recently. They have an MBA and Ph uh dual degree program, and I've guest lectured in the last couple years. And this year we demoed MapAI, which is our analytics co-pilot slash digital consultant. And as you would imagine in this program, there's incredibly talented consultants and analysts from ZS Associates, uh the analysis group, Trinity, and they're all in this classroom. And it was, it was kind of cool. It felt sort of like nerd rock star status. But after the conclusion of the lecture, you know, we had this lineup of folks that were just like, oh my God, if I can leverage that AI, this will save me months of just labor-intensive work just putting all these things in Excel and building out my PowerPoints. I feel like everyone was at a place where they're open to new, better approaches and also kind of mind-blown by what's possible. Yeah, totally. There seems to be a lot of buzz around health data. It sounds like there was when you started and there still is today, especially with the onset of, you know, massivable AI. But Komodo is really early in this space, and it feels like you you picked a good time to start getting involved in the data space. What made you confident at the time, though, that it was a long-term opportunity and not just a trend? I think the biggest thing for us was just thinking about what the opportunity was to improve healthcare and to live our mission to reduce disease burden. To do that at scale, you would need to really have a comprehensive understanding of what's happening across the healthcare system, across hundreds of millions of patients. And the more we thought about it, the more we were like, okay, this is gonna go one of two ways. It's either going to completely fail very quickly and we'll blow through millions of dollars, or we have an opportunity, if we do this right, to have a massive outsized impact on reducing disease burden. You know, fortunately for us, the vision really started coming to life and we saw it coming to fruition, you know, just months into the journey. We started having customers saying to us, wow, you know, this is a really different way of thinking about it. I'm so used to bringing in my consultants and my experts and my clinicians to the table and forming these committees to try to answer these questions. And, you know, we see a future where you can use technology to answer these questions. And fortunately for us, we had some really invested early adopters, really excited uh customers that were ready to take that journey with us. Yeah, I feel like one of the best things about healthcare is that the problems are actually real. So you don't meet a lot of founders in healthcare that are building a company just to build it. So that probably helps with finding a long-term opportunity. Yeah. To not be interested in trying to make a difference. Yeah, definitely. And I remember, I mean, I remember you saying this a lot, RF saying this a lot about just like how you really want to democratize data insights, right? And it's really hard to do that because a system, the players don't want to collaborate together, right? Like I remember when I first started, like that was a big thing that, you know, was was reinforced. And how did you guys think about building that trust and that attraction to um to be able to actually um democratize those insights? I think the big thing is just understanding even within an enterprise, there's distrust. Even within an enterprise on the same teams in a given disease area, there's distrust. It's like, oh, you know, I don't know that my analysts know what they're doing. And so I'm gonna bring in this outside consultant to give me expert counsel. And so when we started thinking about that, we were like, wait a minute, if we created a platform and workflow capabilities that would enable collaboration, where you could literally create the cohort, study it, come to your conclusions, draw your own conclusions, and then share it with your colleagues, not in a PowerPoint, but in a way where they could actually iterate on your recommendations and insights, all of a sudden, you know, you would you'd be driving better collaboration. You'd be preserving institutional knowledge around what's happening in this disease category in real time. And so for us, it was really inspiring to see more and more of our customers of all different personas. You could have someone like today, you can have someone using Map AI who's a business, uh business leader, a marketing leader, a clinical leader, a medical affairs leader. They may not know anything about coding, but they can just use natural language querying and go into tell me how many gastric cancer patients there are in the US. Oh, you know, of this population, who's managing them? You know, what are the different specialties? Well, across those different specialties, you know, which patients have been tested, which patients have not. And A, that user will have the transparency around, you know, what conclusions are being drawn, how the recommendations are being generated, and then they can iterate on it, and then they can share it with their colleagues in the data science or advanced analytics group, and they can iterate on it and provide feedback in real time back to the business leader. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And getting into the motion of building Komodo, as you look back at year one, year three, and now year 10, what metrics mattered most to you at each stage and how did that evolve? Well, that's a great question because the reality is the metrics changed every year. And I'll say this one of the best things we did was when we raised our seed round of financing, we did this at every round of financing. When we raised our seed round of financing, um, we went out and we said, you know, this is the plan, these are the outcomes we're going to achieve. And what we also did in parallel was we had already mapped out what will a top decile series A fundraise look like. What will we want to have achieved commercially from a PowerPoint point of view, from a user point of view, from an NPS point of view, from a customer retention point of view? We did all of that. And then when we went out, went out and raised our series A, we went through the same exercise. We were like, whoa, we did all the things we wanted to achieve. And, you know, we believe we're gonna have a great series A fundraise. But as we're going into that process, we want to already be aligned around what are our series B success metrics and what are the series B outcomes that we want to have driven Komodo towards across every one of those dimensions. These are the kinds of things that I'm defining as success. And we were always um thinking one or two steps ahead as a company in terms of what we want in the next round of financing to look like in order for us to feel like we were well positioned to secure a what we were calling at the time a top 10% fundraise for that next class of uh companies. That's right. Yeah. And I love that you weren't, I feel like I hear from a lot of founders, they just want to get to the next stage. They're like, what do I need to do get it to get to series A? So I love that you were actually doing the work to figure out what will it take to have a top decile series A, series B. And I'm curious, how did you even get that information? Was it from VCs that you were working with, like them talking to people downstream? Or was it, I'm just curious, like where you were getting that some of that from? Yeah, you know, candidly, it was all of the above. You know, and the nice thing is I feel like in the startup community, uh, I don't know what other people's experiences have been, but our experiences, there's so many founders, there's so many investors, both folks that are on your cap table and folks that you're talking to, who are just incredibly kind and generous with their time, with their expertise. And I feel like at every stage of the process, there were always so many people that either were a step or two ahead of us, or investors that, you know, were willing to share their insights around what they were seeing in market. And it always helped us shape how we were thinking about the next fundraise or the one right after that in a very proactive manner. And so you would have the quantitative information. You can go into any of the databases. Oh, you know, last year, this is what privately helped companies, how they performed in their fundraises, and you have all these quantitative metrics. And then qualitatively, you could talk to their founders and they've just gone through a series A or just finished their series B, and you would get the qualitative feedback around where the market is, what people are investors are prioritizing these days. And it really helped shape our ability to stay, you know, one to two steps ahead of it as we were going through our journey over the course of the past 10 and a half years. Awesome. So each time you were facing a next fundraise, you were targeting to be in the top decimal. But was there any time where you did not meet the metrics you wanted to meet? And like how did you and the company really react to that? Very candidly, between 2014 and 2021, we were in this beautiful market environment where everyone was really just willing to invest in innovation, in growth. And as long as you continued to deliver the growth, you could have confidence that you'd be able to have a fantastic fundraise, you know, 18 months down the road, 24 months down the road. And one of the observations we had when 2022 happened, and it happened to a lot of companies, happened to a lot of founders, was you know, the ground shifts under your feet. You have to move very quickly because you go from a motion of invest in growth, you know, continue to prioritize top line and and all of a sudden, almost overnight, the end it feel it felt like the entire market um just shifted. They did a 180 and said, growth is great and that's important, but we really want to see path to profitability. And we really want to see companies that are generating free cash flow. And all of a sudden, that 180 happened overnight, and it was like, whoa, you know, do I set up my business to drive against the market opportunity that I see? Do I set up my business to continue to prioritize growth because I know, you know, the more that I drive my innovation into market, the more sticky it will be with the end customers that continue to grow with us on a from a dollar revenue retention point of view? Or do I acknowledge that, you know, I can't keep burning at this rate because I know that the next check may not materialize in this given market? Those were the kinds of things that were happening very, very quickly. Um, and you know, I think a lot of a lot of founders and myself included were like, wow, did I move fast enough? Did I course correct quickly enough? Did I course correct enough or too much? Those were the kinds of questions that we were navigating um all throughout 2022, 2023, and to a degree, even as we, as we currently speak. Yeah. Yeah. And I know for a fact you were not alone in that. Yeah. I'll say this. We had to recalibrate because it was interesting. It was like, oh, you know, this is a lot less fun than 2014 to 2021. And we kind of recalibrated. We said, you know what, what do we like doing at Komodo? We like working on hard projects. We like working on hard projects with um really cool coded uh fellow dragons. And when we kind of recalibrated and said, you know what, this is just a different problem that we're solving for, which is how do we continue to survive and thrive in a completely different macro? That for us was like a mental recalibration, which really helped us say, okay, this is just a cool, different problem that we have to solve for to make sure that we're continuing to drive the durability, the sustainability, and the ability of Komodo to continue to grow in a different environment. And so that kind of mental recalibration was really helpful in helping make sure we were making the right decisions for Komodo, both near term to get through this pocket as well as long-term to make sure that we weren't making short-term decisions. I can definitely attest to, you know, the solving hard problems with the committed people. I mean, every time that people asked me about like, you know, why I was staying at Komodo for so long, it was definitely the people like um, you know, Komodo was just able to bring in like very, very talented folks that were all willing to kind of just pitch in and say, hey, this is what we need to like figure out. And let's roll up our sleeves, let's figure out what we're solving for, and then you know, let's come to some conclusions as a team around what we have to do. It was always very uh strategic and always very collaborative. Yeah. And Amber, I don't know if I've mentioned this to you, but like Webb or Arif, like the other co-founder, like they would join in on those very tactical conversations with us as well. So it's awesome. Yeah. Curious, what were go ahead. Yeah. I was just gonna like uh switch gears a little bit. You know, you talked about like you had like some of those early customers um when we were first starting. What were some of those like early wins that you know really help Komodo kind of take off? And then, you know, what was um was there a moment in those early days when you're like, uh, I don't know, are we gonna pull this off? Like, is this gonna work? Okay. I think first off, a lot of companies go out and they start off with the SMBs, right? They go out to small customers because they can test it's lower risk. And even in our conversations with other founders, they would say, oh man, you know, you don't want to start engaging the Fortune 100s too early because then you're just going to be building for them because they all have very specific needs and they're all very demanding customers. Well, for better or for worse, we went out and all of our early customers were global, global, you know, top 10, 20, 30 companies in the healthcare ecosystem. And so I think for us, that was not usually the approach that companies would take. What it gave us was a lot of insight into where we could find common pain points across these large customers. B, it gave us a lot of feedback because as I just shared, they're they can work with any companies they want to work with, and they're not shy about sharing their feedback around what they need and what they want to do. And then I think to that, to that end, though, one of the things that we were very, very consistent about that I'm very proud of is we would basically take feedback. There was internally led product development, there was customer-led product development, but we we would put that together into a very consistent roadmap that we were very disciplined in executing against. And so I remember when we went to go raise our series A and our series B, our customers were like, wow, all of your contracts look exactly the same. When you talk about being a product-led company, clearly your product is winning in market because your first 30, 35, 40 contracts and order forms are all exactly the same. They're buying this product, these are the features, these are what's coming each of the coming quarters. And we were really disciplined in the way that we executed on that. And I think that was one of the things from an early wins point of view. We went right to the top, top customer prospects. We were able to win them over on our vision, and then we were able to stay disciplined on our product development, even as our customer base expanded across this cohort of like the best of the best brands and companies that you would want to be, want to have as customers and want to be working with as partners. Um, it sounds like the product mentality is probably what saved you guys early on. Um, because if you can get those Fortune 100 companies on board, it can be a huge super skill because it sounds like it, it really heightened the bar for you guys. Like it's like as soon as you bring one in, everything has to be done at that level. But it would probably be easy to get sucked into, oh, let's do this customization and then this one and then this one. It sounds like you had that mentality. Like, what can we turn into a product here? So that's super cool. I'll also say, you know, it provided a lot of validation when we started, you know, pursuing along with other customers. Um, and also, you know, when I when I th when I reflect back on that time, one of the things that was really exciting for us is, you know, you get all this feedback, but then you realize your customers are willing to work with you and you don't, you know, sometimes they're just, oh, this could be a good idea. And they're sharing it. And you're saying, does anyone else have that same good idea? Or is this just something where they're like, I think this could be a good idea, but you don't actually have to go build it. Those were the, those were the calls that we were making as we were putting together our roadmaps on a rolling basis and really staying disciplined and executing on it. Cool. And then so Rachel has mentioned to me that you and your co-founder were basically building from different coasts. And that was even before remote work became the popular thing to do. Did that end up giving you an advantage when COVID hit? You know, it's interesting. By that point, we were already six, seven years into the journey, right? And so I'll share a funny anecdote. Actually, maybe, maybe you'll enjoy this, maybe you won't. When we were going through our seed round of financing, it was pretty funny because so many prospective investors said, Oh my God, love the idea. This could be, this could be a game changer. You guys have to do this. But the only way that we'll invest in you is if you're co located, because there's no way you could possibly be successful if you're on different coasts. And I can't tell you how many times we heard that. It's sort of like, you know, the these commonly accepted notions. And then that at the time it was like, If you're not co-located, we can't invest in you, you know, because there's no way that'll be successful. We've never seen it before. It'll never work. Luckily for us, it did work out and it's worked out really, really well. And I will say your question was around pandemic. I'll say the advantages that accrued to us and started accruing very early were around our ability to tap into talent pools in two different locations where we had strong local leadership in the form of either Harf or myself. And if you think about it, going back to, you know, 2014 to let's say 2018, this was the technical war for talent, right? There were all these companies and there were all these prospective software engineers that would be like, why should I talk to Komodo? Like, I just got an offer for half a million dollars from Facebook and I, you know, I just graduated undergrad. And you'd be like, How am I supposed to compete with this? On the flip side, you had so many talented uh folks that were in fintech. You know, I just built this um algorithm to facilitate high-speed, you know, trading in the equities market, you know, or I, or they were in ad tech, and it was like, oh, you know, I just created this algorithm that will allow you to intervene at the moment of purchase when someone's trying to choose between a Sony or a Toshiba. It was like, for a lot of those folks, it was like, hmm, you know, I really like this mission to reduce disease burden. And I think I can take my expertise from this other market segment, bring it to healthcare, and actually make a difference, you know, by being in two places through those first, actually, obviously, the entirety of our journey. It allowed us to tap into different talent pools. I don't know that it necessarily set us up for success when the pandemic hit, but I do think we were better equipped than most to facilitate working remotely, to manage talent that weren't located in one of our home offices. Yeah. And even today I see a lot of opinions coming back from that time, that period. People are like, oh, I'm never now that we're out of the pandemic, I'm back to like everybody needs to be in person. Yes. But what I've seen as an investor is like, it seems like if you commit to in-person or you commit to remote, you can design the whole company around that and it can go well. But then I think it's the folks that start out one way and then end up wanting to switch to the other. They try to do like some really weird hybrid where people don't know what's okay and what's not. I think when you're not explicit about it, it it just becomes challenging to manage, especially as a former operations leader myself. You know, it it's just challenging. But it is challenging. People ask us, oh, are you going to return to office? Well, like, what does return to office mean? We have team members in 41 different states, and many of them were recruited when they were already. These aren't team members that were in SF and then left to move to a you know lower cost geography. These are team members that we recruited out of where they're currently based. And what does that mean? Return to office? It makes it very challenging to manage that expectation. Yeah, definitely. Uh then I uh you've been scaling Komodo for it sounds like a decade now. What's been one of the hardest decisions you've had to make as a leader? Um that's a great I I think okay. I think the hardest decision as we were scaling Komodo was um it was actually the restructuring that we had to do in 2022. Um you know, it was both macro forces dictated some of it. Um, but I will also say in retrospect, when you're growing a hundred percent year over year for five, six, seven, eight years in a row, what you're doing is literally taking everything you've built for those first five years, and then in your sixth year building another version of that right on top of it, right? So if you actually think about it, what that what does over the course of the first five, six, seven years of Komodo's journey is you're perpetuating company design decisions. You're perpetuating functional design decisions, these things that are set up in place because you simply don't have the time to revisit is this the right organization? Is this the right structure? Is it enabling us to be smarter, faster, more efficient? And in 2022, when we had to, you know, I mean, macro was crazy in 22, as we all know. And when we said, hey, we really need to think about is our organization set up, when we went back and looked at it, we said, wow, these decisions that were made sometimes five years prior, where you're just like, go, go, go, double, double, double. You're just doubling the size of all of those decisions that you made four years ago, five years ago, six years ago. And when we really took a look at it and said, okay, what do we always put first? We put the customer first every single time. Okay, let's go think about the customer journey and interaction model with Komodo. When we really took a look at that, we realized, wow, we are being incredibly inefficient in the way that we're deploying our resources. And our customers are having a really subpar journey with Komodo because they're talking to four, five, six different people that are all doing, in some cases, some overlapping forms of response. And so I think that was the hardest decision for us because I mean, in in many ways, when you're a founder and you prioritize culture the way we've prioritized it, you know, it was making decisions about your family. Right. And this is why I think one of the shifts that we've had to drive through as an organization is for, you know, for six, seven, eight years, everything about Komodo was thinking about and talking about and building out Komodo as a family. And, you know, in many ways, like I can't tell you how many dragons have come through my house, you know, and hung out with my family and know my kids. And, you know, now when we think about it, we really think about it with the notion of a high performing sports team. Because the reality is, you know, we're at a stage where we realize we really have to have to think about like how do we disproportionately reward our superstars to make sure they don't get that job at the company, at the next hot company down the street. And how do we make sure that we acknowledge if someone's not performing, if they're a family member, they're still your cousin, you're still hanging out. But if you're a high performing sports team with high performing sports team expectations and you're not pulling your weight and you show up to camp and you're not ready to go, then you have to have that difficult discussion. And so those were some of the things that I think were some of the harder decisions that we had to navigate through, especially as 2022 and 2023 kind of um dictated everybody's being challenged to find a path to profitability very quickly and to really show investors that, you know, we can continue to grow very aggressively, but do it in a much more efficient manner. Yeah, I love that switch from thinking about it sort of as a family where, you know, it's kind of like we accept you no matter who you are and you're always here no matter what. That's right. To a high performing sports team where it's like, you know, everybody every year has to earn their spot on the team and we have to have the best people on the field and on the bench. So I I like that uh switch quite a lot. And it helps the employees too, because they're trying to figure out what does this mean? Like when we go through these restructurings and I thought we were all a family. That's right. It helps prepare them for that moment, I think. And that first one was really tough, right? Because we've had this incredibly, I mean, we joke about it, it was like a perfect seven-year run. And all of a sudden you're like, what do you mean we're not set up the right way? What do you mean we have to get more efficient? What do you mean, you know, we're gonna restructure these parts of the org? And that became, you know, one of those discussions that where you just have to think what's best for Komodo and then move the company forward. Awesome. So, Web, you know, I'm I would always love to like understand like, you know, how has your leadership really evolved through that scale? You know, what was it like when you were working with just 20 people on the team versus what had to change when you hit 200 and then, you know, like 800 now? I'll say this. As a founder, every year is different. The needs of the organiz actually, I take that back. As a founder of a hyper-growth startup, the needs of the organization change materially every single year. One of the things that I think I shared this with you, Rachel, uh, when you were with Komodo. One of the things that RF and I do every year during our holiday shutdown is we sit down and we do a sort of self-assessment of how we thought the last year went, how we thought we were able to impact the organ the last year. We would then um align on what we need to achieve in the coming year, company objectives, you know, functional objectives. And then we will would align that to, okay, so then from a founder expectations point of view, what should we do more of and what's going to need to change? And I will say this every single year it changed in such a meaningful way. And it changed for us as founders, and it changed for our executive team. Um, I'll share this anecdote. You know, I was meeting with another founder of a very successful hyper-growth startup. And one of the things he shared with me was he was like, You have no idea, Webb. You are way too loyal. You are way too patient. He was like, every 12 months I turn over my entire executive team. All of my directs are gone almost every 12 months. And I was like, wow. And he said, Look, there's pros and cons. The pros are, you know, everyone on my exec team knows you perform or you're out. The pros are, you know, we have very clear expectations around what it means to be successful. And he's like, the cons are I have a very low trust executive team. You know, they're always looking over their shoulder. They're always worried, you know, is Amber gonna stab me in the back or is Rachel gonna try to take my job? Those are the kinds of things that they're anxious about. I think from our side, you know, one of the things that we looked at was, you know, we were, I think, A, I'm very loyal by nature, B, I'm very optimistic by nature. And so I always want to believe that people can continue to grow with Komodo through all of those windows of hypergrowth. And I'll share this. You asked, you know, what is the difference? How have things changed? Well, one obvious difference when you're 20 people and you're now 800 people, when you're 20 people and you're sitting around the table, first of all, there is that family feel. And, you know, it is like we're in the office, you know, at 10 o'clock and we're playing video games and ordering pizza and getting ready for the release. And when you're 200 people, 400 people, 800 people, it's just a different vibe, and that's okay. I think the other thing from a purely leadership point of view, manager point of view, it's very interesting. When you're 20 people, you have a pulse check on exactly where the team is. When you're 200 people, you start kind of realizing, wow, I don't know everybody and I don't really know where team is. And by the time you get to 800, you have to know your team through your leaders, and you have to know your team through metrics, through this is what I expect out of your group in the next quarter. And you have to trust, trust the process, trust the data in terms of, you know, what has the organization and what has each part of the organization delivered. And so it's just a very different way of leading a company and of running a company. Yeah. I love your uh your self-assessments that you and RF do. I think when you did mention that, so like I actually started doing that a little bit now too. Uh uh just like every six months. I would have like this Google Doc open and just try to like write for myself, like not in a performance review type of way, but just like really just more for like myself. And I was like, oh, this is actually really helpful. So I've been like suggesting that to others too. Well, that's awesome. Very cool. That's awesome. We'll need to catch up on that after so I can learn learn the best practices. Amber, we do holiday shutdown. So most years will have anywhere between I would say eight to ten days, sometimes eleven or twelve. And it gets you a lot of time to really just take a beat, think about what the next year needs to look like, and then think about what you need to do differently to ensure that you're driving the organization to that outcome. Yeah, that's huge. That end of the year reset is just like it's so helpful to step away and really like there's so much you can't see when you're in something. And then yeah, the insights come when you get that chance. So that's right. Yeah, that's awesome. Uh switching gears a little bit. So we're in a moment where a lot of people are just deeply frustrated with healthcare and the whole system. Where do you see Komodo kind of fitting into that conversation right now? I think well, that's a very broad statement around for sure. Broad and loaded, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think for starters to understand problems, to identify problem, sorry, to identify problems, you have to understand the problems, right? And so as an example, we all saw the uh tragedy that happened earlier this year. And I think if you go back to it, we have at Komodo our mission is to reduce the burden of disease. And we have this incredible information arbitrage where we have insights into what's happening across every part of the healthcare system. And so in this specific example, it feels like, you know, there was a disgruntled patient whose family had experienced some denials. Well, the beauty of this is we see so much of what's happening across healthcare that if we wanted to study that, or if somebody wanted us to study this dynamic for them, we would be able to say, this is what we see across all the top 10 national payers, across regional payers, across different disease categories, across different procedures. Um, if someone said, Oh, I'm running doge and I want to know, you know, is there waste or where can we detect fraud in the system? The beauty of it is it is I remember a couple of years back, you know, one of the practitioners in Florida who was accused of running a pill mill, you know, all those kinds of typical medical fraud. When we went back and we looked at it, we absolutely could have seen the multiple standard deviations in terms of what this provider was doing relative to their peer group and this geography. And so these are examples where I think it's, you know, one of our, one of our team members is an M MD by training as well. We have a lot of medical doctors that are also informaticists. Um, and I think one of the things, one of the ways they describe it is we love our mission. And we also believe that with everything we have at our disposal and the ability to democratize access to insights, it's a moral obligation in many instances for us to think about what we can do with everything at our fingertips and how we can both achieve our mission as well as work together to improve healthcare. Yeah. Are you seeing that the sort of requests that you get start to shift at all, like throughout this year as we've had, you know, issues like the tragedy earlier this year? Yeah. The requests aren't really shifting as much as what we found very interesting is we are at this really exciting moment in time. It's exciting for Komodo because if you think about it, we've been, our thesis has been going full stack, full vertical offerings since day one. Data, data products, platform, platform APIs, platform SDKs, all the way through to Insights Workflow, whether it be in app or through Map AI. What we have seen in this past, I would say, six to twelve months that's been really exciting for us is if you think about it, if you rewind the clock all the way back to 2014 when we started, at the time, Rif and I felt like we were just like pushing this giant rock up a hill. We were out there evangelizing. Like, okay, you've been doing your work the same way for decades in some instances, with the same legacy data aggregators that resell you data, with the same consulting firms that you've always gone to for, you know, five, 10, 15 years of your career. But there's a better way for you to get your answers in a high quality way, faster, better, more efficiently, more cost effectively. And for the eight, nine years of our journey, it felt like we were the evangelists saying, There's a better way, believe us, you know, we want to show you what we can do. And once you see it and use our capabilities, you'll believe it and you'll want to do it, you know, do more of it with Komodo. What's really transformed in the last six to 12 months, and look, it could be because of IRA. It could be because of, you know, companies struggling to bring you new molecular entities to market. The FDA is not approving them as quickly anymore. It could be because of competitive market saturation in traditionally high growth disease categories like oncology. It could be a number of reasons, or it could be my CEO is saying we're at a meaningful inflection point and we need a company position on AI and how we're going to get smarter, faster, more efficient. But there's a lot of forces that seem to be converging at the same time that are leading more and more of our customers and our prospective customers to reach out to us before we've even put them on a list and send out a note. And they're reaching out to us and they're saying, hey, I've heard Komodo is doing some really innovative work in healthcare. I've heard you all have some really innovative AI capabilities. Is this something you can help with? Can you help me get faster, better, more efficient? Can you help me reduce my dependence on external consultants? I'll give you an interesting stat, two interesting stats. Without naming names, I'll say number one, Deloitte went out and did a survey, industry survey, and it was life sciences and healthcare Fortune 100 companies. And they said, over the course of the last X number of years, how much of your spend with these consultancies has increased, stayed flat, or decreased year over year? And every single one of them said every year we're spending more, which I found really powerful. And then secondly, secondly, what was really interesting was a lot of these companies that are now deploying budget against AI, you know, they're being asked to say, okay, what can I do differently? How can I get more efficient? And I think that is the dynamic that we've really been struck by in the last six to twelve months, where you know, people are coming to us saying, Hey, can you help me? We think this is right in your wheelhouse. Um, and we would love to see if there's a better way for us to do the work that we need to do that's mission critical. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah, it's super exciting to see kind of that change there. So I mean, given that you're optimistic, I feel like I might know the answer to this, but I'm curious like about how hopeful you are for, you know, the future of you as healthcare. Or do you think that like kind of we're stuck in this um system that's like really resistant to change? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I was last month I was at uh HES Health Evolution Summit, and a lot of the innovation right now and a lot of the focus has been on AI as like clinical decision support. In pharma enterprise, we're seeing a lot of AI and drug discovery. I think there's an incredible opportunity to leverage AI from an insights point of view for assessing uh the healthcare system. And it goes back to, you know, in the earlier examples I had given. If these are the markers for fraud, how can we leverage technology? How can we leverage AI to improve the healthcare system and reduce fraud and you know, fraudulent expenditures across healthcare? How can we ensure that we're addressing uh health equity and making sure that patient populations across every zip code are receiving appropriate standard of care? These are the kinds of things that historically would be a multimillion dollar project and that would take months for a team of experts to execute on. You know, when I think about the future, I think about real-time, real-world data-driven alerting and proactive management of disease and proactive management of the healthcare system so that everyone is getting the care that they need and deserve. And we're flagging it when that's not happening. Let's zoom out a bit. Um, you're a huge Warriors fan, according to Rachel, a dad to three kids and a startup founder. What keeps you balanced or at least mostly balanced? I think a couple things. What keeps me balanced, number one, is family. I have three little kids, and so you know, when you have an 11-year-old, Devin, hi Devin, when you have an eight-year-old, Ryan, when you have a five-year-old, Serena, what keeps me balanced is spending time with them and really committing to being present for them. You know, I coach all their teams, uh, a good amount of their teams. It's amazing. And, you know, and lead Komodo. And I said, Well, something's gotta give. And so for me, oftentimes it's probably terrible for my long-term prognosis, but oftentimes it's sleep. Having said that, the one thing that preserves my mental sanity is working out. And so, you know, it's kind of crazy to me. I'll work all day, I'll make sure I'm present for my kids in that one little window around dinner time when I get them. And then once they're down, usually I'll finish work and or go out. You would not be surprised to find me at the gym somewhere between 10 p.m. to 11 30 p.m. Because sometimes that's the only time that I can get it in. And if I don't get it in, I will go crazy. It's amazing how much it helps. I know I have to do so I don't go crazy. That's education though, the 10 30 p.m. on a gym. Yeah. But I I get it. I mean, I'm similar in that regard, but on the morning side. So yeah. Okay. I've tried it. I'm just in the mornings, my body just doesn't work the way I want it to. It's too tight, you know. Yeah. Like I said, I'm old, so more challenging for me. Totally. Awesome. Well, you know, I know that uh you've given a lot back to founders. You mentioned that before, that you know, you and our have like always were able to find folks um that were a couple steps ahead of you. And now, you know, you guys are the multi-steps ahead of like other early stage founders. And I remember you mentioned that you just became an entrepreneur in residence at NYU. Yes. Yeah, I you know, that's probably one of the ways that you're giving back. What are some of the other like, you know, approaches that you have to mentorship and giving back as well? I think there's a lot of ways to give back, you know, being an entrepreneur in residence at NYU, sharing the journey, sharing lessons learned along the way, sharing, you know, everything from fundraising tips to hiring tips and everything in between with aspiring entrepreneurs and founders. That's one way. Another way is, you know, I'm part of different small group meetups here in the Bay where I meet with other founders. And we talk about, you know, where where they're at on their journey. We share, you know, some of the frustrations, some of the things that we're seeing, we share the ways that we're navigating it. Um, and then lastly, I would say there's also financially. Um, RF and I formed a uh a small venture fund with a couple other close friends of ours. And we support other founders that are usually at seed stage um in getting their startups off the ground. And um, and obviously that is that is its own job, so somebody else does the sourcing and assessment and all of that stuff. But we usually are happy to support when someone else is leading. And it's you know, it's another way that we're giving back to. I mean, we were so lucky early on to have so many seed stage investors that basically bet at the time on two guys in a PowerPoint. And so when we see teams that are going after it and they have a great idea and we know they're really committed to seeing this thing come to life, there's nothing more rewarding than uh supporting them as they're just trying to get that first check in the door to get off the ground. Yeah, that's awesome. There's a lot of ways to give back, is the short answer. But we try to do it in in a multitude of ways. Yeah, and hopefully we can find a deal to co-invest on soon. That would be awesome. Yes. Cool. Well, uh our next section is just a quick round of rapid fire questions. So basically just say the first thing that comes to mind. Um, what do you think is the most underrated founder skill? Am I just supposed to say one word or should I can I resist? Whatever. Yeah, you can do a sentence. Yeah. Okay. I think I mean underrated founders. A lot of people say the usual like grid, perseverance, domain expertise, leadership. I think there's elements of all of that, but I think the one thing that I've really observed as critical is the skill and ability to learn, grow, and adapt. At Komodo, value number two of just four values is seek growth. And I think internally, as we talked about earlier, if you're managing or leading a hyper-growth startup, your business is changing every single year. The needs are changing externally. Your competitors are constantly changing and evolving. From a macro point of view, the shift, you know, the ground can shift under your feet overnight in terms of you know what investors are looking for. And so your ability to constantly learn, grow, and adapt quickly is probably one of the underrated founder skills that I don't think a lot of people talk about. It's funny, even I just have to respond to that. Even during your conversation, I had writ written down like adaptability as a main theme that came across. So that's super cool. What's one tool or habit that you rely on every day? Every day, one thing I rely on at work is the notion of focusing on the big rocks. And so, you know, it's like, okay, in this jar, I've got all these things, but there's like two, three big rocks where if I handle those, then I I can make a big difference in terms of whether or not this week is successful. And so I think every week, and then over course of each day, what are the three to five things I want to do for that whole week? Because I think to me, it's very easy to get bogged down in your one-on-ones, in your weeklies, in the tyranny of the urgent, in the most pressing fire that has to get put out. And so I always think about okay, if I could only do two or three things this week, maybe four things, what does that what are those two to four big things? And at the end of the week, I want to say, did I do it? Because if I did those things, then I'll know I've made a big difference versus, you know, just running through my calendar and trying to do everything for everybody. Yeah. It's awesome. What's one book or podcast that stayed with you? I like the Builders podcast. Uh, I like how they go across sectors. I like how they cover uh you know very comprehensively, you know, the journey of all these different founders and entrepreneurs. And so that's one that I I like to dig in on um when I'm traveling. And what's a favorite Bay Area sports moment? You're gonna laugh. Rachel actually got it wrong. I'm a huge basketball fan. Oh my gosh. I am not a huge Warriors fan. You have season tickets to the Warriors. So someone said to me, they were like, wait a minute, you're a lifelong Celtics fan, but you're a Warriors season ticket holder. And I was like, that's weird. I didn't remember when we opened up Boston office. And I moved my whole family there. So as a basketball fan, I love going to Warriors games and my kids are huge Steph Curry fans. And so I'll share this. My least favorite Bay Area experience was probably the best moment for my children because that's when we all watch Steph Curry go supernova supernova in game six of the NBA finals in 2022 to eliminate my favorite team, the Celtics, for Steph's fourth title. And that performance was truly one for the ages. Awesome. Well, Webb, thank you so much for being here today. This has been a really amazing conversation. I'm sure we could extract amazing insights from you for the next hour. Where can we find where can folks that are listening in who have been inspired follow you and stay up to date with what's happening at Komodo? Yeah, I think the easiest ways are following me on LinkedIn, following me on Twitter. And yeah, before I jump, I also just want to say thank you, thank you for having me. Um, it's a pleasure to talk about the journey and hopefully it's helpful for founders that listen to your podcast and you know are wrestling with some of these, some of these challenges. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much for being on Webb. Of course. That was such a good conversation. And I felt like I learned so much more about Webb than, you know, than when I worked with him before. But yeah, the things that I really loved was how he always was like focused on building for that long term. He mentioned multiple times as they were, you know, raising seed. They were always thinking about like, okay, what's the top decile for series A and then top decile for series B. So like thinking about, you know, the next multiple phases and then tactically delivering on that. And the sec second thing also was the adaptability piece and how they had to evolve, you know, growing from a 20-person team to a 200 person team to the 800 person team now. Yeah, super interesting. The adaptability piece, as we mentioned earlier in the podcast, really stuck out to me because, you know, it came up when he was talking about how each year is a reset with his co-founder, they sit down and talk about whether all of their goals still make sense. Uh, they're constantly reframing after fundraises. They're like, they're not like, oh yay, let's just dwell on this capital that we just raised. They're like, oh wow, we got to start preparing for the next thing. Do our metrics need to change? And then even just that transition that they made from being a company that was thriving in like the 2014 to 2021 era where the market was more frothy to all of a sudden having to switch into this new, like, you know, hyper profitability focused world uh as a 2022 plus company, that's a big shift to make too. And it seems like he handled all of that really well. And then he even brought up later like adaptability is an under uh undersung skill that founders could have. And I totally agree. And then the other thing that really stuck out to me about him, which I thought was really unique, was he very much went against that Silicon Valley narrative that we hear all the time, which is that in order to be a top founder, you have to like give up everything else in your life. Like, you know, don't be dating, don't be, you know, how are you balancing a family? You know, could get rid of employees the second anything is going wrong with them, like fire fast. And, you know, all those things are like really extreme and probably not taken literally by everyone. But that is the narrative that's sometimes out there in Silicon Valley. And I got the sense that he really kind of wants to be remembered as a certain type of person and how he shows up as a founder fits into that. And then sometimes if there's a clash there, he will kind of readjust and being adaptable, he'll kind of like reframe it and figure out how I can still be the person that I want to be while, you know, continuing to l deliver on Komodo's goals. So I think that came across when he was talking about how he's an active dad. And like that doesn't mean that he's doing the same cookie cutter schedule as everyone else. That means he's spending time with the kids and being present at dinner time, but then he's doing things later on at night when he gets the chance. And then how he, it seems like when he first formed Komodo, he had this like idealistic view that like we're all a family. And then later he realized, okay, there's actually some toxicity that comes with that when the company's not doing so well or the market's not doing so well. So then he figured out, you know, actually this would make more sense to my founders and be most respectful to them while working toward business goals if we start talking about ourselves as a high performing sports team rather than a family. And then I liked what he said. I thought it was interesting. We've gotten different takes on different podcasts with different guests, but it sounds like he genuinely believes that people don't have to have a ceiling. Of course, some will, but he wants to give everybody that chance that as the company's growing to new phases, they could potentially grow into those phases as well. Yeah, definitely. And I definitely agree with like the family to the high performing sports team analogy for managing and leading a team. It gives people just a lot more understanding in this is a business. We have to deliver the results and we have to all ensure kind of like the performance as well. And I think it will allow people to actually perform better under those circumstances. Yeah. Totally. Well, thank you so much for inviting me on the show. I feel like Webb is a great example of a first builder who's really playing the long game, as you said. He's really thoughtful, adaptable, steady, and super committed to solving all the hard problems in healthcare. So that was exciting to learn from him. I know. I hope we get to co invest with him sometime. Yeah, exactly. That'd be great. Well, if you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, share it with a friend, and subscribe to First Builders wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, we'll see you next time.