Not My First Guess
Starting & scaling a thriving health startup, with Eliot Brooks, co-founder of Thriva
How do you test a blood testing business, when none of the co-founders come from a clinical background? What happens when your entire investor pipeline disappears overnight? What do you do when customers just aren't buying? And what's it like scaling a health tech startup from 0 to 130 staff, and over a 100k customers?
The person to ask is Eliot Brooks, co-founder of Thriva and former COO. We spoke the week Eliot stepped down to make space to explore new entrepreneurial endeavours; after 7 years spent building the company.
Thriva have raised £11m so far, including £6m raised in 2019, and £4m in 2020 based on growth rates at the time of 100% year on year.
In 2022 they were number 7 on the Financial Time’s list of Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies.
In this episode we asked Eliot about:
- His path into entrepreneurship, and where the idea for Thriva came from
- How you test a health tech business in the early stages…. Can you be lean and agile? Do you need totally different approaches?
- Scaling a business- Expectation vs reality, what were some of the early guesses that had to evolve as they grew…
- Lessons learned fundraising as first time founders
- His plan to step down: why now? How do you phase yourself out as a founder?
- And much more…
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