It's a long story, but I'll try and keep it brief. So now I am an investor with Polaris Partners, a venture capital firm located in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. We manage about 4.5 billion dollars, investing in startups mostly health care and technology firms. Prior to Polaris, I ran a business now known as UpWork, it was formerly known as O desk and Marketplace for talent, and helping to match freelancers and clients all over the world. So enabling the Internet to find the right worker, get delivery of the work, and pay the worker and built that business up. I was the CEO for about nine years and took it from the jungle through the door road and under the highway, merged with The Lance, the number two competitors in the space to create up work, which now is the world's largest online workplace, matching freelancers and clients, and then, prior to that I had another little start-up in Telebanc, that was Dropbox done wrong, and just prior to that, I was at IBM and I get to IBM via the acquisition of rational software. So that was a couple of billion-dollar acquisition by Rational and I became employee number 131,000 at IBM. So that's my career story. I've had lots of twists and turns, mostly in tech. I started on the sales side, then I ran a company, and now I'm on the investing side. The incidents and experiences that shaped my career throughout are all of that, there were too many to count or too many measures, but lots of phenomenal experiences with mergers and acquisitions and different turns along the way.

As I mentioned Polaris manages about 4.5 billion dollars, we're investing at a fund nine, which is $450 million, and we typically invest in the A and B round of companies, so they're not raw startups, it's not seed stage, they've typically had a product-market fit and they have some recurring revenue and they're looking to further validate and really nail that repeatable use case, and that's typically the B round, you've nailed the repeatable use case off, your go-to-market, and now you're looking to throw fuel on the fire. We invest in both health care and technology, on the healthcare side, it's pure biotech. So lots of technology called CRISPR, which is gene editing, we have the patent on CRISPR through a company called Editas Medicine and then all the way to healthcare tech, I just invested in a clinical child software company, and mental health on wellness company, and actually I just wrote a blog post about this, It's on LinkedIn, so if you go to my LinkedIn profile you can see it's called perfecting the pitch and what I typically look for is, a phenomenal team, I say, there are people, there's PowerPoint and there's Excel, and those are the tools that an entrepreneur has to showcase their capabilities. So it's about who are the people and what have they done before, what's their domain expertise or skill or knowledge. The PowerPoint is the place where you tell your story, and is it a compelling story, and is it solving a significant market need, where the existing solution is falling short, and then the excel, that's the proof point that clients are willing to pay for it, and that you can get this solution to market. So it's a combination of people, PowerPoint, and Excel typically in healthcare and healthcare tech.

I wanted to see who are the people, I want to see what experience do they have, are they domain experts in the field, did they personally have this problem and then created a solution for themselves and then I like to see, one, that a significant pain exists, I want to see that this is aspirin, not a vitamin, and some people push back on this and say, Facebook, when they started, it wasn't really an aspirin, It wasn't really solving a significant pain point, it was something that didn't exist before and other people have said that to me. Henry Ford asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse, they didn't know they needed a car. So what I'm looking for is mostly aspirin. Is it 10 times better than what exists today and is it solving a significant pain point, and then do lots of people have that pain, and are they willing to make that pain go away, and that shows that there's some semblance of product-market fit and once all of that is proven, then I want to see that it's significantly differentiated from the competition, it's like is there gonna be a wide moat around your castle or your business. Like others are not been able to fast follow or copy what you've done, it's got some defensible characteristics, and then I want to see, that you cost-effectively get to market. I'll say this all the time, you may come up with a better migraine headache medicine. Now, is there a significant pain, Yes, Nobody has to convince you to reach for an Advil if you have a migraine headache. But I do have to get known in a market where lots of migraine headache medication already exists and that's gonna be very expensive to get on the shelves in Walgreens, or CVS, or get known on Amazon because people aren't going to reach a no-name migraine headache medicine, they don't trust it, they don't know it and so I basically want to see all of those things. Pain exists, people are willing to pay to make it go away, lots of people have it, you can cost-effectively get to market, existing solutions are falling short, that's the story that I want to say. People have tripped me up on that, by saying "well, not everything is an Asperin, there are good vitamins too", and there was one company where it actually was a vitamin company. So you would do the DNA swab, spit in on and put it in a tube and they would customize a vitamin for you, based on your genetic makeup and your blood sample. So I may need more vitamin C or B than you, and so why should we take a whole vitamin C if you don't need that, you're just going to waste it, and it's bad for your system if you take too much of something. So custom made vitamins based on your DNA and I was like, okay, that's pretty good. We didn't desk, but I thought it was proved my aspirin versus Vitamin theory wrong.