Q2 of 2019 contains a special day for us as we turn 5 on June 2nd. The last 5 years have been a blink, and it’s remarkable to reflect on how far we’ve come. As we celebrate such a significant milestone for our business, I can’t think of a time that I was more excited about the work we’re doing and where we’re going as a company. I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of you that have played a role in our growth – we’re eternally grateful. This quarter, we also sat down with Matt McCambridge, Co-Founder and CEO of Eden Health, to talk about how they’re reinventing Primary Care as we know it. Our very own Nina Mermelstein shares her second installment of Coffee Chats With Nina, with a look at what entrepreneurs wish they knew before starting their companies. And I resurrected and updated something I wrote a while back, reflecting on how starting this whole thing in the first place made me much better at my job. Hope you enjoy!

— Tim Gordon, Founder & Managing Partner

An Interview With Matt McCambridge, Co-Founder & CEO of Eden Health

Matt McCambridge is the Co-Founder and CEO of Eden Health, a New York City based healthcare organization that provides high quality, technology enabled primary care services to employees on behalf of their employers. Backed by Greycroft, the company is in the process of expanding their footprint nationally.

Tim: Start off by telling us a little bit about how Eden came to be; what inspired you and Scott to found the company in the first place?

Matt: So many things in healthcare come back to a personal story that people working in it have felt in their own lives. A lot of the system is broken, and everybody’s been to the doctor, and confronted it in one way or another. So, for me when I was a kid, I had a really transformative experience with my sister who got very sick around the age of 14 and would end up in the ER over a dozen times. She had really complicated issues. She has all of these stories of waking up and doctors on staff saying “Oh she’s on drugs” or “Oh she’s pregnant” – and none of those things were actually happening for her. We then went on this nearly four-year process where she visited over 70 specialists. We would show up to a specialist, do all the same tests, all the same imaging procedures and then they wouldn’t even help you find the next person to go to. Over the course of 4 years and over 70 people, we saw the problems of the healthcare system day in and day out. We got lucky when a primary care provider coordinated her care and got the right prescription in the hands of my sister. She never went to the ER in the same way again. So we had this all too common healthcare experience where we confronted the realities of the healthcare system up close. That inspired us to build a primary care company, because primary care is the most fundamental building block of good and cost-effective healthcare. Along the way to building that primary care company, we found out that insurance was a huge impediment to people being able to get the kind of care that they need. So we combined those two and added mental health and that’s really the suite of offerings that we present to employers to create an entirely new environment for their employees when accessing care.

Coffee Chats With Nina: Understanding

the Entrepreneurial Mindset

Part II of an Ongoing Series — 5 Things Entrepreneurs Wish They Knew Before Building Their Companies

As part of my mission to get into the headspace of entrepreneurs, I’ve continued to have in-depth discussions over coffee with a variety of digital health founders and CEOs to hear about their experiences firsthand. We’ve covered everything from early successes and challenges to lifestyle changes and resources utilized.

In my first article, I shared the insight I gained on the initial phase of an entrepreneur’s journey (see Part I: Taking the Leap). Since all of the entrepreneurs I’ve engaged with have experienced some form of growth, whether it was in terms of fundraising, team size, customers or users, I also wanted to get a sense of the different obstacles they encountered in getting to where they are now. Furthermore, I wanted to understand if, in hindsight, there was any knowledge they wish they had to best tackle those challenges.

I asked all of the leaders a very open-ended question— what do you wish you knew before building your business? Since we still lack a time machine (I’m working on it…), I received a variety of candid responses to my question that I pared down into five themes that I’ve shared below.

How Starting My Own Company Made Me Better At My Job

It blows my mind that we’re going to be five. Five! I’ve now officially been running Aequitas Partners longer than anything else I’ve done in my professional career. Five has me a bit nostalgic. Reflective. Grateful. I’ve tried to be mindful and celebratory of milestones that we’ve reached over the years as the business has grown, but I’ll be honest – I’m bad at it. In quiet moments I celebrate these things, but it’s usually fleeting and then it’s back to work. It’s something I’m working on. As we close in on our fifth anniversary as a firm, I thought it fitting to revisit the first thing I wrote when I was “giving content a try.” As I read through what I wrote, it felt more relevant than ever, and reminded me of how incredibly uncomfortable I was writing it the first time around. Now felt like a great time to dust it off, polish it up, and drag it into 2019.