Ariel Katz On Raising $70 Million To Arm Healthcare With Live Insights

Ariel Katz is the cofounder and CEO of H1 which develops a healthcare data analytics platform intended to help companies make smarter scientific decisions. The company has raised over $70 million from top tier investors such as Menlo Ventures, IVP, Lux Capital, Lux Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Lead Edge Capital to name a few.

• A new perspective on dilution when fundraising
• Building company culture
• Hiring CEOs
• Hiring and firing friends
• The future of H1

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About Ariel Katz:

Ariel Katz is the co-founder of H1.

H1 is the first company to arm healthcare organizations with live data insights to help fight diseases. The company provides real-time data from across the data universe to support the end-to-end therapeutic development process from fundraising to product development to product launch, helping healthcare and life sciences companies make smarter scientific decisions. Working with medical affairs and strategy teams who span all phases of the development lifecycle, H1 provides the complete picture of institutions, experts, scholarly content, markets, competitors and new opportunities through research grounded in actual data and clinical findings.

Connect with Ariel Katz:

• Linkedin
• Crunchbase

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW:

Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today, we have a great founder that has done it a few times. There are definitely a lot of lessons learned along the way, and we’re definitely going to be discussing them in detail today. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today. Ariel Katz, welcome to the show.

Ariel Katz: I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alejandro: So, born in New York City and growing up in the Upper West Side. How was life growing up there?

Ariel Katz: It was good. It was all I knew until I left New York City and realized that not everyone lives in New York City, and it’s a very big world outside of New York. I didn’t realize it. Growing up, I grew up in a bubble – Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Manhattan, so a lot of pros and cons to that experience.

Alejandro: How was it attending the same school, a Jewish prep school, for 12 years?

Ariel Katz: Most of my best friends have been my best friends since kindergarten, which is really nice. You have lifelong memories – 20+ years plus with the same people as you live through different journeys in life together, and those are lifelong friends, and there were so many of those created during that process. Lack of diversity was definitely a thing in my life. You don’t realize when you’re 12 years old, just being around the same people – again, lots of pros and lots of cons. I did like the institution all-in-all, and I got a lot out of it. I might do it again when I send my kids there in the future.

Alejandro: It’s interesting because your one of a kind. You don’t get to meet a lot of New Yorkers that have been born and raised in that state in New York City. For some reason, New York City is kind of like a big United Nations, and for you being born and raised in New York, I guess that you were exposed very early on to the drive and the ambition and to being with some of the best professionals coming from all over the world to work in the city. How would you say that has influenced you and also your vision about what you wanted to accomplish in the future?

Ariel Katz: It’s interesting. It relates to a different topic. If you talk to two investors, success is defined by different outcomes. If you talk to Sequoia, they will only invest if they think you’re going to be a hundred-billion-dollar business. If you talk to most other investors in the world, they’re okay with a billion-dollar business. So, the bar and the standard at which you measure yourself for success is all relative to every person and their background and their experience. With my background and my experience, the bar was set much higher. You’re not successful – as I’m getting into my psyche. I’m not successful unless I set a certain bar for myself, and that bar is creating an enduring, lasting, multi tens of hundreds of billions of dollars business. That was instilled at a younger age and what I was exposed to at a younger age, and the bar is much, much higher than I think for other people.

Alejandro: It’s easy to compare yourself to others, but how are you able to focus on yourself rather than focus on others?

Ariel Katz: By getting thick skin over time. When I first started ResearchConnection, I cared what others thought about me. Now, I don’t care at all. 

[Laughter]

Ariel Katz: I learned it over time. When you care what other people say, and you read all the junk, and never really focus on any.

Alejandro: Absolutely. In your case, it took a different trajectory going into colleges. You attended three colleges in three different years. So, how did that happen?

Ariel Katz: I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone that tries. You can’t develop lasting friendships as you leave every year. College is not a year. It’s three months, winter break, three months, and then the summer. I got into the University of Pittsburg, which in hindsight, I loved my experience there. Actually, I really loved my experiences at all those institutions. They’re all incredibly different. The University of Pittsburg is as far away from New York as my parents would let me go. It’s actually pretty far – it’s like a nine-hour drive. It’s a different world – the Midwest, a different world than New York City Upper East Side, Upper West Side. So, I loved that experience. I ended up going to Israel for a year and Jerusalem at the crux of the Israeli Arab conflict living in East Jerusalem. It was very different as well. I loved that experience and developed really great relationship and amazing experiences. Then I went back home to New York, going to Binghamton – all different reasons why I got exposed to it. It was a different experience. I wouldn’t recommend it, to be honest, but it was great to have all those different life experiences, and I met a lot of different people around the world in such a short period of time.

Alejandro: Also, in your junior year in college is where you started to think about what you could do, how you could fill a gap into a problem, perhaps with bringing a solution to market. That’s the time when you essentially launched your first company. How old were you?

Ariel Katz: When the idea came, I was 20 and then turned 21 during that time.

Alejandro: So, basically, at 21 is when you brought it to life. So, how was that process like for you guys?

Ariel Katz: I had no idea what I was doing. I was just working with friends on something that I thought was a lot more fun than going to class every single day. I knew I would enjoy this more than studying for tests, so at that point in time, I focused a lot more of my energy on ResearchConnection. Most people, when they’re juniors in college, they look for summer internships as the thing to do, and they really want to do that. I didn’t do that. I said, “I’m going to go raise some money and push as hard as possible to do so.” We ended up raising $50,000 family and friends’ round, and I spent all summer working on this thing. By the time we got back to college our senior year, I really cared a lot less about classes and just worked on this. It was the most fun time, honestly, ever. And my stamina’s going down until investors and employees. I would work from 7:00 am to midnight and only work. It was the most fun thing. I would get on the 7:50 am bus to campus. I’d get back on the 11:52 pm bus from campus, and I would have so much energy every single day to come in and work with the team. It didn’t feel like work. It was like I was hanging out with my friends, working on this cool project together. It was a really amazing experience to do that.

Alejandro: What were you guys doing? What was the business model?

Ariel Katz: It was B2B, SaaS. We pivoted, but the start of it was B2B, SaaS. We thought universities needed to have better ways to engage their students with research at their institutions. There are a lot of outcomes that show that students who get involved with scholarly research have a lot more successful careers and make a larger impact in the world. That’s how we started. We then pivoted to having it be a platform and database at universities for students that are looking to pursue Ph.D. programs could go to and find the right faculty mentor to work with on their Ph.D. and apply to work with them. So we pivoted from B2B to B2C. That pivot took place after we graduated and worked full-time. That was the idea for the business.

Alejandro: How did you get your university to buy your own stuff?

Ariel Katz: It’s a one-minute story. The university agreed with that philosophy that students should get more involved in academic research as their extracurricular activity instead of going to parties – objectively true and good in the world. The issue was that they invested in it before I came up with the idea to do that there. So, they invested tens of thousands of dollars into this office called Undergraduate Research Opportunity Office and built software to do what we were building. Half the university on the Provo side was not excited about us. Then, you had the entrepreneurship office saying, “You’ve got to be kidding. The students are supporting entrepreneurship on campus. You have to make this happen.” So, we leveraged that relationship plus the relationship with the Vice President of Research at the university and continuously pushed and said, “This is going to be the best thing not only for student entrepreneurship, but we’re going to build better software than an IT department at a university to eventually get the president to have pushed down supporting research connection and then being the first to check into the business. It used to be a joke. Binghamton paid me more than I ended up paying Binghamton in tuition with the contract that they gave us to pay for the software.

Alejandro: That’s amazing. And obviously, here, you’re talking about checks, and that is a nice segue into raising money. Here you are, 21 years old. What was the experience of being 21 years old, had not raised any money previously in your life, so you’re doing it for the very first time? How was that for you?

Ariel Katz: I had no idea what I was doing. This isn’t a while ago. The amount of resources that were available back then doesn’t compare to today. For example, you go to Y Combinator and download the YC standard document, which is how most early-stage entrepreneurs raise their seed round in financing. It didn’t exist back then. The amount of resources that entrepreneurs have today is much easier, to be honest, for just what’s open and available for free. I did a ton of reading, and I failed along the way a lot of times. But it’s like sales. You keep trying; you get 1 out of 20 – the 19 don’t really matter. So I got a whole lot of noes and a whole lot of nobody responding, and a whole lot of people hanging up on me, but we got a few to say yes, and only those few mattered. Once you get the few, the snowball goes down. You’re like, “Oh, yeah. I raised $50,000. Do you want to invest another $50,000?” It’s a lot easier to get that next $50,000 after you get the first $50,000. It’s true for anything in fundraising. I had a lot of failures, but that wasn’t the hardest round of financing I’ve ever had to do. We did friends and family for about 45K, and then we raised about a $600,000 seed round after graduation. Those weren’t so bad. They didn’t even take that long.

Alejandro: What was the total amount for the company that you guys raised?

Ariel Katz: About 620K, give or take.

Alejandro: Got it. Then, eventually, you grew the company for about four years. Then, you saw the full cycle because the company got acquired. So, tell us about this transaction.

Ariel Katz: We were in a position where we could either push hard to raise our Series A, which would have been tough. The metrics were almost there but not fully there to easily raise Series A. At that time, we were actually talking to someone to partner with. I got connected to him through one of our advisors and mentors, who was the CEO of Tutor.com, an online tutor marketplace for those of you who have students and have kids and need online tutors. He had a friend who was running education technology quote stage fund, and we were talking about partnering with him. She was interested in what we were doing, and we both had the same vision. He said, “Instead of you raising a round, what if we acquire your assets and focus it more on undergraduate education.” That was enticing for us. So we ended up going down that path and selling the business. The funds came from Gates Foundation, and it was championed and still being used by the University of Virginia and this growth-stage accelerator fund in D.C. called Jefferson EdTech Accelerator Fund.

Alejandro: Wow. Obviously, at this age where people are starting to get their first jobs, here you are selling your first business. So, I guess this gave you a lot of time to reflect, and in fact, you took some time off. Tell us about this time off and that time off was the segue to your next business. But I’m sure the time off gave you some time to really think about the future.

Ariel Katz: Yeah. It was actually really nice in hindsight. I was in my young 20s, time off. I met my wife, and I was able to spend a lot of time with her that year in summer. It was really nice. We traveled a lot and spent a lot of time in India. That’s how I ended up meeting Ian, my co-founder at H1. We both had a salesman that worked for me at research connection, and he worked for Ian at Ian’s company, Shore Group. He said, “If you’re going to India,” which I had plans to go to India for vacation for about six months, “you should meet Ian. He’s a good guy.” “All right.” I was getting coffee and meeting people and networking. I met Ian; I didn’t think much of it. I came back, and I started working on a side project with a couple of former research connection colleagues, and Ian called me on a Saturday. I remember it vividly. I was doing work on a Saturday, and he was like, whatever you’re working on, I want to acquire. I said, “What?” It was like three of us working on a project. He said, “I want to do it.” I was like, “I’m not interested in that. We haven’t had anything.” From there, we became friends. We worked together on some stuff for about a year, and then one day, it was the end of 2017 – I remember it was November of 2017. I put together this deck; we were excited, and I went to Ian, and I pitched him on the idea of H1. At the time, Ian was CEO of a big business, 20-million-dollar revenue business – relatively big. On slide 3 or 4, he was like, “I’m in.” And that’s how the whole thing started.

Alejandro: Nice. What happened next?

Ariel Katz: We started working on this thing. It was crazy. I brought back our former CTO of ResearchConnections, Zachary Feuerstein. There are a couple of people that I was working with on some projects, and we started working on it together.  I would just start growing the thing, building up the data asset. The vision for H1, at the time, was “I’ll just build this source of truth of information about doctors. I think that’s going to be useful to people. It could be useful for not-for-profits who want to fund medical research.” This was an ice bucket challenge – it was big. We were like, “The ALS Foundation is getting all this money to fund ALS research. Don’t they need to know what happens to the research that they’re funding that the donors care that the research that they’re funding works, or the Breast Cancer Foundation and the Alzheimer’s Foundation?” The short answer is: not really. Not sensitized to care, which is another story. What about the government? The government spends 40 billion dollars a year in funding medical research via the NIH, National Institute of Health. Don’t they care to know if that funding actually leads to positive outcomes? The short answer was: yes, but it’s really hard to sell to the government. Then, we said, “What about Pharma. Pharma is spending billions of dollars a year funding medical research. Don’t they care if they’re funding the right research and if they’re collaborating with the right healthcare professionals? And the answer was: yes, and they’ll pay for it.” So, we focused on that market. But it took a few months to figure that out, so that’s how it all came together. 

Alejandro: How would you say that H1 has evolved? What’s the business model today, and how do you guys make money?

Ariel Katz: B2B, SaaS. The idea for H1 has become much bigger. We want to build a source of truth of doctor information around the world. Anyone in the world that wants to learn anything about a doctor to work with, to fund for medical research, to collaborate, to recruit, to go see is going to use H1, and it’s starting to do that. So far, we’ve worked with life science companies, with pharma, biotech, and medical devices, hospitals, and health systems, and we’re starting to work with payers and insurance companies. And healthcare professionals themselves use the platform. And we have a vision for patients to eventually use it, too, as well as governments. We license access to the platform. It’s free for every doctor to use. They log in, download their profile, update it, network, do their thing, but we license access to the data to these life science organizations as well as these hospitals and health systems. They use it to find the right doctor to work with for medical research.

Alejandro: In you guys’ case, one pivotal moment was definitely Y Combinator. I’m sure there are a lot of people right now that are listening that are thinking about putting their application together and joining an accelerator, an incubator. Y Combinator, in my opinion, is the #1. What was the lesson there for you to learn on what is the best way to navigate, let’s say, getting into a Y Combinator?

Ariel Katz: Yeah. We have an interesting story of how we got in. The company was fairly far along. I had a term sheet for 6.25 million dollars to lead our Series A. I won’t name the investor. We had to sign it by October 30th. I went to a conference, and I was moderating a panel, and one of the people on the panel was a partner at the time at Y Combinator and still is. He came up to me after the conference, after the panel, and said, “Man! We do a bad job creating the best New York SaaS company.” “Yeah, we missed out. We’re too late-stage.” He shoots me an email the next day and said, “You have to come to Y Combinator. It will be worth it. Trust me.” I went back and was like, “No, we have millions in revenue ready; we have employees; I’m not doing that. We have 15 employees.” He said, “It will be worth it. Trust me.” We ended up going out to Y Combinator. Because we had a deadline for when we needed to get back to the investor – with YC, you submit an application, and then you go out for interviews. They told us to come before they were doing normal interviews to interview with them. So, we got an answer before everyone else got an answer in that batch. So, they invited us to come out early. We did our pitch. Which, by the way, we blew the pitch. It was a terrible pitch, but the numbers were so good at the business at the time – our cap was on fire – doubling revenue in like three months – that they didn’t really care. So we ended up going to Y Combinator. It was a very weird story. We filled out the application after applications were closed. They temporarily opened it. They then invited us to do interviews before anyone else was doing interviews. We got an answer before they even started doing interviews for the main batch. It was a whole situation. Very a-typical.

Alejandro: In your case, what would you say was the before and after of the company – after you guys graduated from Y Combinator?

Ariel Katz: To those who are applying, it was great. It completely changed our trajectory, to be honest. A couple of partners – I’ll give shoutouts: Jared, if you ever listen to this, that was great – and Harry and Arron. They were amazing. So, we were raising our Series A. It’s a funny story. Michael Sibal, who most people know, stood on stage and said, “Nobody should raise before Demo Day. It’s a fallacy that the best companies raise before Demo Day.” We then go meet with Jared, and he says, “Oh, you guys should raise starting tomorrow,” after Michael had said, “Don’t raise.” We were at a different stage in the company’s lifecycle. Then we made introductions to pretty much every VC. We created a list and made introductions. Then, we made introductions to people that weren’t on the list. As an entrepreneur, those are really hard meetings to get. I’m talking about Alfred Lin at Sequoia and Brian Chesky, Airbnb. [19:32] ended up investing to us to Lux, to every VC that you name off the top of your head, we met with – Benchmark, NEA, CodeTwo, and all of them. It was a really great process. It really short-circuited our network and short-circuited our exposure to the San Francisco community, and we loved the experience being out there.

Alejandro: That’s amazing, and I love Alfred. Alfred, in my mind, is definitely one of the best early-stage guys right now in terms of investment. In your case, it’s quite a unique story, too, because literally, technically, in one single year, you raised a seed, you raised an A round, and you raised a B round. That’s quite crazy.

Ariel Katz: Yeah. It was crazy. 

Alejandro: So how did you manage to do that because, typically, you wait 18 to 24 months in-between each financing cycle, but here, you didn’t wait at all. You just went all in and all out.

Ariel Katz: It wasn’t planned to happen that way. We did our seed. We planned to raise our A. We weren’t going to raise an A. We had the term sheet to raise an A before Y Combinator. That investor, I don’t think they’re super happy with the outcome because we made a lot of money at this point. We turned down the A. We did YC thinking we’d raise the A, and that would last 18 to 24 months. We raised the A in February. We announced it in April because COVID happened, and we didn’t think it was appropriate to announce it. We announced it in April. It was funny. Memo called me. A shoutout to Memo. Memo’s amazing – Memo Ventures. They called me around early Q3, and they said, “You’re going to get a lot of phone calls.” “What do you mean, I’m going to get a lot of phone calls?” “You’re going to get a lot of phone calls to raise your Series B. You’re at the stage where most companies raise their Series B.” Most companies raise their Series B between 5 million to 15 million dollars in revenue, so we were in that range. They said, “You’re going to get a lot of phone calls and emails.” “How do you even know?” “People talk. Trust me.” So, we ended up getting a whole lot of phone calls and emails. It would be like an email a day or two emails a day from a different VC and a different investor. Memo said they wanted to lead our Series B. They gave us term sheets to shred the entire Series B. We said, “Is this actually happening with [21:46] opportunity?” We had barely spent the money from the Series A. “But let’s take Vince’s opportunity to see if, again, we could change the scope of the business by partnering with the right people.” That was the strategy for Series B. We opened up the data room, and six days later, it was done. We did 20 pitches over Zoom. We got a few term sheets. We picked the ones that we thought were the best partners to again change the scope of the company and get to our mission quicker.

Alejandro: So, we’re talking about a Series B done in six days.

Ariel Katz: Term sheets signed, and then cash in the bank about a month later.

Alejandro: That’s amazing. In this case, you still had the money in the bank, as you were alluding to earlier. Why did you want more? Obviously, maybe you wanted the network of these people that were coming in on the Series B and how they could help you guys. Or what were you really looking for?

Ariel Katz: I always tell entrepreneurs this when they’re like, “What about dilution?” I tell them, “Do you care if you end up making $750 million or $500 million?” When I put it that way, they’re like, “No.” If anyone cares, they’re probably in the wrong business. I don’t care at all. Ian doesn’t care at all. So, we don’t care about that. We could re-up employees for any dilution that takes place from the financing, and we think that by getting partners around the table – all the company is, is like the average contribution amongst the various minds and scales going into the business. If we could get incredibly talented, well-networked brilliant, experienced people to help contribute to the scale of the business to achieve the mission, and we don’t care about the dilution factor, let’s not be stupid and let’s do what’s fair, but if we don’t really care about the difference between $500 million and $750 million or $200 million and $100 million, it doesn’t matter in the world, and we could re-up the people that might get diluted where the delta is important to them. Let’s just do that. So, that’s been our philosophy: if we can get the right people around the table and use a mechanism to do so, let’s do that. That’s the way we think about financing, and that’s the way we thought about the B.

Alejandro: Nice. In this case, how much money have you guys raised for each one?

Ariel Katz: About 70 million bucks.

Alejandro: Very cool. Obviously, part of this is really all about the people. As it comes to people, how have you thought about building culture, and what is culture. How do you guys think about culture at each one?

Ariel Katz: Culture’s tough. How do you define culture? Culture is what a person does when nobody else is looking. That’s how I think about it. What is someone going to do? How are they going to interact with the user? Are they going to shortcut writing beautiful code the right way to scale? Are they going to do what’s easier and not best for the user? Are they going to answer that support ticket on a Saturday? It is what people do when you don’t need to prod them and no one’s looking. That’s what I think culture is. If you add up those combined behaviors and how people behave, that’s the culture of an organization. That’s what I think about it. It’s everything. I learned a lot about culture from the ResearchConnection days. It was a core group of seven of us. There was so much dedication to the mission. It was insane. We would dream it; we would sleep it. I could call someone up at like Saturday at 8:00 am and talk about the business, and it was not like I was calling them about work. It was like I was calling them about this thing that we all believe in, that was bigger than all these other things. So, trying to keep that ethos at H1, which is harder as you scale. The global workforce, the global employees in India, Australia, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Florida – it’s a lot harder – it’s hard in your own environment, but it’s something that I think a lot about in terms of scaling that type of feeling.

Alejandro: How many people do you guys have now in H1?

Ariel Katz: We have about 80 employees domestically. And then we have about 120 based in India. We have about three to five in the Eastern hemisphere: Singapore, Australia, etc. Then, we have two people in Europe right now.

Alejandro: And many of those have been former CEOs. How do you get a former CEO enrolled in helping you push things forward with you?

Ariel Katz: The two most senior people in the business are Ian, who has been a CEO and writing his own business for a decade before, and Marc Eigner, CEO of Polaris, who ended up growing that business and selling it for 100+ million dollars in his career. He was semi-retired when we got him to come over to H1. It’s just very different what these people are interested in doing on a day-to-day basis. You don’t manage them. We’re all aligned in what we’re trying to achieve. And if we’re all aligned in what we’re trying to achieve, and we’re low ego in doing so, we’ll just all work together. Getting that has been my philosophy around how to work together with such senior people. We’ve made a few acqui-hires from more junior folks at the start of their own startups that might not have succeeded out of Y Combinator or whatever it is. For them, they want to be involved in the company where there’s dedication to the mission. They’re brought into the mission, and people work really hard, and you get that same type of feel when you’re at a smaller startup, and you’re having that feeling. That’s what works best, and that’s the environment that I’ve seen from former CEO founders really thriving at H1.

Alejandro: To expand on this, the saying goes that if you wait to hire and to look for people to that moment where you actually need it, you’re probably a little bit late. So they say it’s important to start building the network so that whenever you need to bring that person, you’re ready to pull the trigger. Obviously, in many cases, those people become your friends. When you are onboarding a friend, then it comes to the point that you realize that it’s not going to work out. How do you fire a friend?

Ariel Katz: The hardest thing about the job is that, definitely. You make them realize that it’s best for them more than it’s best than anything else. When you’re at that point, it’s best for that person for their life, not for the company, not for you – for them not to be doing whatever it is at the company on a daily basis. When they realize that, that makes the conversation a whole lot easier. That’s the way that I’ve been able to do it. Otherwise, it’s so hard. Sometimes, people realize that before you need to say it, but they don’t want to admit it to themselves, but there’s a lot of frustration. And other times, you need to force the action, which is very difficult. But that’s the best thing because when it’s at that point, it’s not healthy for anyone at the business – most importantly, that person, and it’s not good for that person’s life, in general, and what they’re trying to do in life. 

Alejandro: Absolutely. A lost opportunity. I think trying to put them in a different position to hope that it’s going to work out, ultimately, you’re creating more damage as the leader of the business. In this case, for you, for H1, Ariel, what does that world look like when the vision of H1 is fully realized?

Ariel Katz: I’m so excited for that world because they will solve so many problems that exist. I’ll go through some of the big ones that we all are familiar with. If anyone has ever been to vacation outside of their country where they live or state where they live and had to see a doctor, I know that was a tough experience, and you’re going to be using H1 in the future to find a doctor to go see. For those of you that have ever had to find a great doctor to collaborate with their fund for medical research, I know your pain. It’s a very hard decision. Who do you work with? Who’s the right doctor? Who’s the thought leader? Who’s the person that’s going to lead to clinical trials for you? You’d use H1. For those of you who look to recruit doctors to go work at your practice, to go work at your academic medical center, H1 is the place you’re going to be going to. For those of you that are experiencing the pain in life of a rare disease or rare tumor type, and you don’t know who’s the right doctor that could diagnose what’s going on with your body? It’s really painful, and you don’t know, and you don’t know where to look; you don’t know who to go to? You’d go to H1 to find out who that doctor is, all their work, how they could help you, how they’ve helped patients in the past. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the problems that have been solved if you have this global source of truth for every human in the world going to one location to find out information about healthcare professionals. Once we solve that, a lot of pain is going to be solved, and we’re excited about that because it’s not like sending photos. There’s a pain point around sending photos to people. But if you solve that, you don’t save lives. There’s a slight difference to if we solve and actually actualize our mission or close to it, we save lives and help people have healthier lives. That’s why it’s exciting if we can actually build this.

Alejandro: What a remarkable journey that this has been for you as an entrepreneur with these two companies now. Let’s say, Ariel, now you have the opportunity to go into a time machine, and you’re able to go back in time and have a chat with that younger Ariel that is still in your junior year in college, and maybe thinking about what’s going to be that company that younger Ariel is going to be building. If you had that ear, that amount of time that younger Ariel is listening, what would be that one piece of business advice that you would give to your younger self and why knowing what you know now?

Ariel Katz: That’s a good question. The advice I’d give to someone else is like, pick something that you really are passionate about. Otherwise, you’ll goof up on it, which I know a lot of people say that advice; but, it’s true – the advice I’d give to myself because I would only pick something that I would like. Otherwise, I’d quit and not do it is: don’t sweat the small things too much because of the ups and downs that are natural. If you think about this is all a marathon; it’s a 10-year, 20-year, 15-year dedication. Persistence and consistency are, to me, in my head, the most important things, and most people can’t keep up and don’t want to keep up because it’s really, really hard. It takes so much dedication and so much persistence, a lot of dark days and a lot of hard days and a lot of exciting days. So if you have that persistence and consistency, and you learn to not sweat those small things. Or if you just sweat the small things all the time: “This client fired us. This investor told us, no, and they told us they were going to say yes.” It doesn’t matter if you have the persistence to keep going. It really doesn’t. So I would say that’s probably the most important thing. It still affects me, but I’ve learned to get over the small things quicker.

Alejandro: I love it, Ariel. So for the folks that are listening, what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi?

Ariel Katz: Email me: [email protected]. I respond to most emails. If you’re interested in working at H1 and think you could contribute and are really passionate, email me your resume. I will review it, reach out, or I’ll send it to the people team. We’re interested in having really talented people come join.

Alejandro: Amazing. Well, Ariel, thank you so much for being on the DealMakers show today.

Ariel Katz: Thank you for having me.

 

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