How to Scale the Quality of Your Network

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When you think about a venture scale, and you go from having, to my point earlier, trying to manage a network of a hundred or 500 or a thousand consistently, it becomes really hard. We operate in new york city, so one is you have to manage quality of your network. And finding people who are really good cleaners, who are really consistent and are good with customers is quite difficult. So some things that we did to help us and find more efficiencies were,one, we actually invested a lot in the provider, like the cleaner ap,. A lot of times more so than the customer one. And that we did things to help them take notes on a client's preferences

Today’s episode is with Steve Gutentag, the co-founder and CEO of Thirty Madison, a healthcare company focused on widening access to specialized care for chronic conditions.

After previously starting two other companies with his co-founder Demetri Karagas, they launched Thirty Madison in 2017 with Keeps, a men’s hair loss solution. The team has since gone on to launch several new brands, including Cove (for migraines), Evens (for GI issues), and Picnic (for allergies). With the acceleration in telemedicine due to COVID-19, the company has tripled both their revenue and their team size in the past year, recently announcing $140M in Series C funding and a more than $1B evaluation.

We start our conversation by getting into the challenges of building an operationally complex business with a physical or real-world component. Steve shares the lessons he learned from building his first two startups, and figuring out what he was uniquely suited to build.

He also shares why they wanted to pick a business that worked with unit economics on day one, walking us through their methodical approach to figuring out if the idea for Thirty Madison would. From their conservative assumptions for each line item, to the unlocks that came from more inventive moves, Steve shares tons of pointers here — including why you should think of your own internal operations as a marketplace, and how unit economics won’t magically fix themselves at scale.

In the last part of our conversation, we get into building the team that’s pulling all of this complex work off. We talked about when to hire for industry experience versus a fresh perspective, as well as more granular hiring tactics such as the interview questions he asks to learn about a candidate’s journey as a manager.

You can follow Steve on Twitter @stevengoodday, and you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.