Jon Lensing On Building A $1 Billion Telehealth Company That Provides A Full-Stack, White-Labeled Platform To Support Virtual Care Services

Jon Lensing’s journey is anything but conventional. It is packed with adrenaline and the kind of gut-check moments that define great founders. Inspired by his small-town roots and driven by a desire to change the status quo, he left behind a budding career in medicine to build OpenLoop.

OpenLoop has secured capital from top-tier investors like Nava Ventures, Techstars, Panoramic Ventures, and ManchesterStory Group.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Jon Lensing left medical school to fully commit to OpenLoop, driven by a mission to improve access to rural healthcare.
• A bold pivot during the COVID-19 pandemic transformed OpenLoop into a telehealth infrastructure powerhouse serving digital health companies.
• Jon narrowly avoided missing payroll when an investor backed out at the last minute, learning the importance of aligned capital.
• He emphasizes choosing investors who bring strategic value, trust, and shared ethos—not just money.
• OpenLoop’s culture prioritizes competence, grit, and adaptability, reinforced by continuous experimentation and strategic planning.
• Despite painful layoffs, Jon stayed resilient, rehiring many and reinforcing the need for clear communication during rapid growth.
• Jon envisions a future where OpenLoop powers personalized, passive, AI-driven healthcare at scale.

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About Jon Lensing:

Dr. Jon Lensing, a rural Iowa native, attended the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine to pursue a career in Plastic Surgery. During his time in medical school, Dr. Lensing realized there was another way to make an even larger impact on patients in need of care across the United States.

Combining his passion for medicine with his drive to bridge the healthcare gap, Dr. Lensing founded OpenLoop—an award-winning telehealth company headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa with the mission to deliver healing anywhere.

Prior to his medical career, Dr. Lensing founded GR Drone, an aerial surveillance startup and was Vice President of Research at SwineTech, an ag-tech startup focused on livestock health analytics.

Additional experiences include 7+ years of sales expertise and various research roles leading to numerous scientific publications on lymphedema and burn treatments.

As co-founder and CEO of OpenLoop, Dr. Jon Lensing develops and implements the company’s strategic plan, aligning it with OpenLoop’s overall mission and vision. He also ensures the delivery of high-quality telehealth services, adhering to regulatory requirements and industry standards.

Connect with Jon Lensing:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. So today we have an amazing story, you know, an amazing story where we’re going to be covering all of the good stuff that we like to hear—you know, the building, the raising, the scaling.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, on their end, you know, they did this crazy pivot, you know, that really propelled them to an absolute rocket ship. We’re going to be talking about… perhaps, you know, those times—the ups, the downs, you know, almost not making payroll, last-minute craziness, term sheets being pulled.

Alejandro Cremades: Again, a lot of adrenaline and a lot of inspiring conversation that we have here in front of us. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Jon Lensing. Welcome to the show.

Jon Lensing: Thank you, Alejandro. Appreciate you having me on.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born and raised in Iowa, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Jon Lensing: Yeah, you probably don’t hear many tech founders from Iowa, but I grew up out in the country on a gravel road. I grew up on a small little farm with some livestock, corn, soybeans growing around us at all times.

Jon Lensing: Small town, about 400 people. Had to drive about 20 minutes away to go to school. And, you know, that city where my school was—about 10,000 people.

Jon Lensing: My graduating class was about 65. So, you know, small-town America. Got to love it.

Alejandro Cremades: And how do you get this, I would say, like this spirit, you know, this ambition that you have? Because, I mean, when you are in a small town, not a lot of people, perhaps you don’t get to think as big, you know, because of the people that you’re surrounded by.

Alejandro Cremades: So what do you think has fueled that ambition, you know, that spirit that you have and that mindset?

Jon Lensing: I think the ambition comes from everything you said. It’s small town. The pond is smaller. There might not be as much ambition around. And I wanted to change that. I wanted to put Iowa on the map. I wanted to give back to my home state. I wanted to figure out a way that we could build the next,

Jon Lensing: publicly traded company right here in the Midwest and show that it can be done anywhere. It doesn’t have to be done just in San Francisco or just in New York. There are a lot of great opportunities and companies that could be built right in the heartland.

Alejandro Cremades: So then, how do you get to—you know, obviously your dad was a physician, OBGYN—and you decided to go into medicine, I guess following in the footsteps.

Alejandro Cremades: So walk us through how that evolves into all of a sudden becoming an entrepreneur. It’s quite the sequence of events there.

Jon Lensing: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. Like you mentioned, my father was a physician. He’s retired now. But he strongly urged us kids—I have three other siblings—not to go into medicine.

Jon Lensing: So far, two of us have not listened to that advice and have gone into medicine, me being one of them. I just enjoyed science. I enjoyed working with my hands. I enjoyed physics and math. And becoming a physician was sort of the logical step to combine that with the other side of just helping better humanity. I liked that aspect too. So it was a very clear path for me. I ended up going to school up in Michigan, studied sciences up there at a small school called Calvin in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Jon Lensing: I came back then to the University of Iowa for medical school, progressed throughout my studies there, fell in love with surgery, and planned on going into plastic and reconstructive surgery right after medical school.

Jon Lensing: And post-graduation, I actually yanked and dropped out of going to residency.

Jon Lensing: So I graduated from medical school but then discontinued the clinical training. And that’s really because of OpenLoop. OpenLoop had started off in the last few months before graduation as a passion project.

Jon Lensing: Really trying to think about how do we help rural America get better access to healthcare. During my time in medical school, I was seeing patients drive three, four, five hours one way to come in and get the care they needed.

Jon Lensing: And they would just delay that care for so long. So they would come in so much sicker because it was such a hassle to make it there, right? They’re from towns of 100 people, 200 people, no stoplights in their towns.

Jon Lensing: And so OpenLoop had started off as, how do we help get these small communities better access to doctors, to nurses, to therapists—these healthcare providers they desperately need?

Jon Lensing: And my plan was just to keep it as a passion project, keep running it on the side during the rest of my clinical training. But what it morphed into over the span of a very short few months was, we started generating revenue in the business. We started doing close to $50,000 to $100,000 within the first few months—per month.

Jon Lensing: And we started putting doctors in these rural areas, putting nurses in these rural areas, and really making a difference in helping. And so I said, okay, hey, I think there is an opportunity here.

Jon Lensing: Let’s jump into this full-time. I think I could have a much bigger impact on healthcare by building this business than I could just by being a solo practitioner in medicine. So, you know, after graduation, I jumped into this full-time, and it’s been four and a half years since then.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess for the people that are listening to really get it, what ended up being the business model of OpenLoop? How do you guys make money?

Jon Lensing: Yeah, so the original model was just staffing—in-person clinics and hospitals. And we took a cost-plus type of approach. Cost of the clinical labor, marked it up by 25%, 30%.

Jon Lensing: And that was our take. What was interesting—and you alluded to it at the beginning—is because of COVID in mid-2020, our original business pretty much went to zero.

Jon Lensing: We couldn’t sign any new contracts. I couldn’t get in touch with hospitals. Our previous sales cycle before that was averaging 45 to 50 days. It was really quick. But once COVID was really mainstream, hospitals didn’t want to have any of those conversations anymore.

Jon Lensing: We just could not sign anybody new. And so we had a hard pivot—180 degrees—into the digital health space.

Jon Lensing: And we did that because, because of COVID, telehealth was just booming and skyrocketing. All of these companies that were doing telehealth needed clinical labor. And so we applied the same sort of business logic—match the supply to the demand—except now do it within the digital healthcare ecosystem.

Jon Lensing: And that pivot was trajectory-changing for the business. But with that, we sort of shifted ourselves, molded ourselves to become more and more vertically integrated in the space.

Jon Lensing: And so now, our business model is on a per-patient-per-month sort of structure.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, that pivot is quite nerve-wracking because, as you mentioned, you guys already were generating really good revenue. I mean, as you said, obviously COVID impacted things, but you guys were able to see, hey, we’re able to create something meaningful here—$50,000 to $100,000 a month. It’s impressive.

Alejandro Cremades: So when you guys did the transition of the pivot, at what point do you realize, I think we may have gotten this right?

Jon Lensing: That’s a really good question. I would say, you know, we knew within the first two months of making the pivot that we got it right. And that was because every single sales conversation we got into, there was immediate feedback like, when can I sign this contract? How quickly can you guys get up and running for us?

Jon Lensing: And I mean, we were getting some of those early contracts signed within like 48 to 72 hours. And so we were revenue-generating from some of those contracts within 10 to 12 days of signing.

Jon Lensing: I think we went from zero contracts in the digital health space to getting like 15 to 20 new clients in the span of 60 days.

Jon Lensing: And that’s when we knew—wow—there is a market here. We need to be putting more and more of our efforts in and just relinquish any of the hospital and in-person stuff.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, there’s no such thing as a straight line. And there’s been ups, there’s been downs. But I remember one of those stories took place on a Thursday evening. And it could have been the end of the company. So tell us what happened.

Jon Lensing: Yeah, so this was a couple years into the business. It was either late ’21 or early ’22. I cannot remember now anymore.

Jon Lensing: But I remember the evening.

Jon Lensing: It was a late Thursday evening. We had about 50 to 60 full-time employees at the time. And in the morning, we were supposed to send out payroll.

Jon Lensing: We didn’t have enough money in the bank to cover payroll that next morning. And we had this term sheet sitting there from a big venture capital group that was a prior investor in OpenLoop.

Jon Lensing: And the term sheet was for an $8 million raise. This group was going to put in four or five million of that. But I didn’t like the terms. The terms were slightly unfavorable to us.

Jon Lensing: And I wasn’t sure about the group either—if they were the best fit for us. And so because of that, I waited until the last possible minute. I think the term sheet expired at midnight on Thursday—Thursday evening, Friday morning.

Jon Lensing: And I signed it at 11:55 PM. I just stared at that on my computer from the time business closed at like 5 PM until 11:55 and finally signed at the last minute.

Jon Lensing: Sent it back in. The next morning at like 6:30 AM, I get an email from the group saying, hey, we actually decided we’re not going to do this deal. We’re pulling the term sheet.

Jon Lensing: And so, you know, I woke up that morning wondering what the hell we were going to do. Payroll needed to be made in a few hours.

Jon Lensing: Otherwise, I was going to let the entire company go. I called up one of our board members. He said, hey, look, I have full faith and confidence in you guys. I’ve already invested in this business.

Jon Lensing: I think you guys will figure out a way to make it work. So he said, here’s a $200,000 check. Go cash it this morning, make payroll, and we’ll figure out the investment side of it later.

Jon Lensing: Thankfully, that all worked out. I walked into the business at 8 AM as soon as it opened. I cashed that check and we made payroll, and we saved the company at that minute. But, you know, hundreds of stories like that just throughout the rest of the business. But that one is just—it’s the most visceral. I remember that one the deepest.

Alejandro Cremades: What do you think you learned from that one when it comes to being able to be the best version of yourself—to be able to quiet those voices that are telling you the what-ifs, you know, that really make you ineffective?

Alejandro Cremades: You know, how did you go about that?

Jon Lensing: It’s a really good question. There’s a lot of different pathways that one can take to get to the desired endpoint.

Jon Lensing: And there are a lot of trajectory-changing nodes within that journey that can propel you in a bunch of different directions.

Jon Lensing: I think for us, some of the key things were:

Jon Lensing: Finding partners for our business that from day one resonated and believed in the thesis of what we were trying to construct. It’s really difficult to make a square peg fit in a round hole.

Jon Lensing: With this investor who pulled the term sheet—even though they were a small early investor and wanted to lead a larger second round for the company—they didn’t fully grasp what we were trying to do. They didn’t fully grasp the vision.

Jon Lensing: And so it was a bad mismatch from the get-go. I think it was two weeks after that, we ended up having an investor come in who led the round at better terms because they knew—from day one, even before meeting us—they had a thesis on the exact company that we were trying to build.

Jon Lensing: So from day one, it was a matchup—full strategic alignment on that. And then I’d say the second piece of it is, outside of just choosing good partners, is you have to always have your ears to the ground.

Jon Lensing: You have to have your ears to the ground in terms of where the market’s going, how conditions are shifting. But then you also have to have an ear to the ground in what your clients are saying, how they’re responding. And then you need to feel able to triage all that information and be opportunistic about the potential avenues in front of you.

Jon Lensing: If I had just stuck with the original product idea and straight-lined it through, we’d be nowhere near the traction and size that we are today. But, you know, we listened—my co-founder and I—to what our clients were saying.

Jon Lensing: Once that hit enough density, we added in some of those service lines, and we built that feature into the product, et cetera. Or we had a gut feeling, based on listening to the markets, of, “Hey, we think this is coming in six to twelve months. Let’s start building this sort of piece of the equation that we need to be able to deliver for what we think the market’s going to bear in six to twelve months.”

Jon Lensing: And being opportunistic about those pieces—I think we’d probably be a twentieth the size that we are today if we didn’t listen to those things.

Alejandro Cremades: So in total, you guys have raised to date $120 million, give or take. And I heard that the valuation is north of a billion, which is pretty impressive. Now that you’re looking back and you’re able to see all these different financing cycles that you guys have gone through, what would you say the journey has been and the experience of going through them?

Jon Lensing: Not all capital is created equal. Let’s put it that way, right? During the early stages, you want capital to be more passive.

Jon Lensing: Because during the earliest stages of a company, you might go through three, four, five pivots until you really find product-market fit. You may need to reconstruct your product from all the way back down to zero and rebuild it to enter a new market that’s going to resonate better. And so if you have too-active capital at the beginning, they can help dictate and push you down strategies that might not actually work.

Jon Lensing: Now in the later stages—once you have some early product-market fit—having more active capital becomes really important. An investor with a really good network is worth 10x just the capital that they put in. They can open doors for business development opportunities and add $100 million of revenue to the business with their connections.

Jon Lensing: On the strategy side, they can help dictate like, “Hey, here’s a brand-new market. Have you guys even thought about this?” And then follow-on capital—if you’re trying to build an absolute rocket ship that’s going to capture as much market share in as short of an amount of time as possible—

Jon Lensing: You’re likely going to need follow-on rounds of funding. And making sure those investors have connections either from their own pocketbooks, their own funds to follow on with additional capital, or that they’re very well-connected

Jon Lensing: to Series B, Series C, Series D, growth equity, pre-IPO investors, IPO investors—if that’s the route you’re going to go—making sure that they have those connections.

Jon Lensing: But, you know, outside of those tangible things is the intangible stuff. You want to make sure that they’re sort of cut from the same cloth that you as founders are.

Jon Lensing: Do they share in the same ethos? Do they share the same ethical and moral backgrounds as you? Are these people going to support you in the times of turmoil as well as the great times?

Jon Lensing: Do they trust you as a founder to direct the overall vision of this company? In surgery, in medicine, when a surgeon chooses their nurses or their physician’s assistants to assist them in surgeries, you want to think about: “Can I stand across the OR table with this person for the next eight to twelve hours of surgery?”

Jon Lensing: The same thing happens within a startup. When you choose your investors, it’s like, “Can I be in a relationship with this investor for what might be the next seven to ten years of my life—the most stressful times of my life?”

Jon Lensing: And so being eyes wide open when you’re choosing that capital—where you take that capital from—is incredibly important to remember. It’s going to be a roller coaster down the road, and you’re going to be locked in with this person for a number of years.

Alejandro Cremades: What’s one question that you would typically ask an investor to help you in filtering the good from the bad?

Jon Lensing: Investors are salespeople at the end of the day. They’ll sell you on a lot of different stuff, and they’ll sell you what you want to hear. I would opt to go do reverse diligence.

Jon Lensing: Don’t ask them for references, but go to their website, figure out who their portfolio companies are, and go find those founders on LinkedIn, connect with them, and ask them for a background on…

Jon Lensing: On that venture capital group. And I would always strongly suggest that people find a group that hasn’t had success—like a portfolio company that didn’t work out the way everybody would have hoped—and see how that investor responded to them in that time of stress and chaos, in a lot of ways.

Jon Lensing: Other than that, I prefer to spend an entire day with investors. I want to know them on a personal level. I want to know their upbringing. I want to know how they got into their position in their career. I want to know what makes them tick.

Jon Lensing: And again, I want the same sort of DNA that we’re made out of. All of our investors to date—the majority of them—sort of had this Midwestern ethos. They’re young investors.

Jon Lensing: They might be in their first or second fund. They have a chip on their shoulder. They have something to prove, and they need to make things work out for them. Same thing with us here at OpenLoop—my co-founder and I. It’s our first large-scale endeavor.

Jon Lensing: We don’t make much money from it, from a salary. We’re not independently wealthy because of this. And so the only thing that we have for ourselves is OpenLoop. We need this to succeed, and we’ll do whatever we can to make it succeed. And that’s the same thing with our investors.

Jon Lensing: So that’s what we look for.

Alejandro Cremades: So making it succeed—let’s talk about this. Because obviously investors too, they’re betting on a vision—same for customers and employees. So if you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of OpenLoop is fully realized, how does that world look like?

Jon Lensing: If I were to wake up in ten years from now, Alejandro, I predict that the majority of healthcare is done virtually—90+% of it is done virtually—and it’s done passively.

Jon Lensing: And what I mean by that is: gone are the days where you’d have to schedule your quarterly or annual or semi-annual visits with your PCP and go in there and review your health. Instead, we’re going to have so much technology in the next decade—from wearables like the Oura Ring, Fitbit, Apple Watches, smart mattresses like Eight Sleep, the Samsung Smart Refrigerator, all the cameras that are in people’s homes—

Jon Lensing: So that so much data collection is happening passively that we know individual patients at a very personalized level. Like, right, Alejandro, we might know every morning you step on your scale, so we’re trending your weights. We have all of the information from the Apple Watch that you’re wearing. We know how well you sleep. We know what kind of foods you’re eating based on what’s coming and going out of your refrigerator—your credit card hooked up—where you’re spending your money on food, et cetera.

Jon Lensing: We know those things. So instead of tweaking your health profile on an annual or semi-annual basis, we can now tweak it on a daily or almost hourly basis.

Jon Lensing: We can push you notifications to your phone like, “Hey, you haven’t had enough water today,” or “Hey, we noticed that over the past couple weeks you’ve been eating more and more fast food and you’ve been sleeping less. Your stress levels are high—let’s walk through some breathing exercises, let’s do some AI therapy and coaching to get you back to a really good baseline.”

Jon Lensing: And then, more so, it’s so personalized that we can send you every single week the supplementation and medications that you need. I could tweak your statin medication. I could tweak your beta blocker for your heart conditions on a weekly basis, depending on how you’re responding to different things.

Jon Lensing: And if that all comes to fruition, what I hope OpenLoop manifests itself in is becoming the operating system to enable all of that real-time care to patients—taking all that passive data collection, turning it into actual insights, pushing that back out, and making sure that care is actually delivered to the end patients.

Alejandro Cremades: So that would be a beautiful world. And obviously working towards that, you guys have been growing like crazy—5x, and north of that on a yearly basis.

Alejandro Cremades: But obviously with growth comes breaking things too. And I remember there was a story that you guys had in 2023 in particular, which involved employees, and it was not so fun. You guys were waiting on a few contracts, and that kind of threw everything off. So what happened there, and how did you guys work towards really embracing culture and come out of that stronger?

Jon Lensing: Yeah, you know, with every sort of company, you’re always going to have hiccups along the way.

Jon Lensing: There will be times of pain amidst the times of great success. And, you know, one of them was early 2023. We were starting to hit the hockey stick growth that you want to see.

Jon Lensing: We had signed some really large accounts with some guaranteed minimums in them. And so we felt very comfortable hiring for those contracts we just signed.

Jon Lensing: So we went on a pretty large hiring spree—added 100–120 people into the mix, maybe even more.

Jon Lensing: I can’t remember. But those contracts were delayed. Every single month, they’d say, “This is the month, this is the month.” But then that month would come and go, and no volume would materialize.

Jon Lensing: And even though they had contracted monthly minimums that they were supposed to be paying us, they weren’t paying them. And so we got to a pretty difficult decision a few months after signing these contracts that we’d have to let about 50 to 60 people from that group that we just hired go.

Jon Lensing: Horrible experience. I personally did those layoffs. It was one of the worst days of any founder’s life that you go through because those people trusted us. I had a lot of loyalty to them because they took that risk on us—an early-stage startup—and it just didn’t pan out, unfortunately.

Jon Lensing: So we ended up letting those people go. And then, I guess the silver lining out of all of it is, about four months after we let those people go, those contracts materialized.

Jon Lensing: The volume happened and came, and I was able to take a significant number of those individuals that we hired for those contracts and find different places for them in the organization over time. But still, highs and lows always. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions.

Alejandro Cremades: And also in that regard—how do you go about the culture, and making sure that things are done well? Because at the end of the day, the facts are always the facts, but the way that you deliver them and the way that you react towards them is really what matters. And I’m sure that people took notes. So how did you go about that to make sure that the culture, in the end, was embraced the way that it needed to be?

Jon Lensing: Culture is really difficult, Alejandro. You can try and say to make culture whatever you want it to be, but culture ends up becoming…

Jon Lensing: Culture is stemmed from the operating ethos of the people in it.

Jon Lensing: How do the top level—the C-suite, the VPs, the directors, the managers—all the way down to the individual contributors…

Jon Lensing: How do we all function as a unit? And the output of that is what culture will become. As an organization, the things that we respect and we reward in the business end up becoming the ethos of that business.

Jon Lensing: And so for OpenLoop, our culture is not for everybody. I think Reed Hastings famously had a slide in one of their decks saying that Netflix’s culture is not for everybody either.

Jon Lensing: Very few people will succeed here, but those that do are going to love it. I ascribe to that same sort of mentality. The culture here is one built off of competence, ownership, and grit—just straight-up perseverance.

Jon Lensing: The people here need to be able to digest massive amounts of growth. So working in the business to execute on that growth—but they also need to find and make time when they’re scheduled to work on the business.

Jon Lensing: What are the next three to four to five strategic things that we need to do to continue up-leveling at the same pace that we’re on? And so sometimes that can create a stressful environment for the wrong folks and can create some friction. But the analogy that I always like to use with my team is,

Jon Lensing: You know, while operating the core business is your fundamental duty, you still need to reserve 25 to 30% of your time to work on the business and the new strategy. And so we always have 20 to 30 other projects that are in the wings—things that we’re testing.

Jon Lensing: If we don’t like a test, we’ll discontinue working on it. If we like it, then it becomes a new product in the business, a new core service in the business. And trying to operate the core business but also find time for the strategy—it’s stressful.

Jon Lensing: And so the analogy, like I was mentioning, that I use is: if you do any sort of cooking, you’ll know that the best tool you can have in your armory as somebody who likes to cook is a really sharp kitchen knife—for prepping vegetables, cutting meats, you name it.

Jon Lensing: And for those that know, the only way that you keep a knife sharp is you put it to stone. You put it through a sharpener, and it’s abrasive—it’s friction-inducing. That’s the only way you keep a knife sharp.

Jon Lensing: In much the same way, if we don’t have some of this constant external stress on the business—these new projects, these new things that we’re testing—that means we’re not going to keep our knife sharp. We’re not going to keep innovating. We’re not going to continue to remain disruptive, and we will lose our edge in the market.

Jon Lensing: So I think people understand that. And that’s sort of the culture that we’ve built—one that strives to deliver the highest-impact service we possibly can while being one of the most innovative and disruptive companies in the healthcare space.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. I love it. So, Jon, let me now put you into a time machine. And I’m going to bring you back in time. You know, let’s say it’s that time where you were thinking about making a move and leaving behind your career in medicine.

Alejandro Cremades: And let’s say you’re able to show up right there when you’re about to really make that call. And you’re able to give that younger Jon one piece of advice before starting a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Jon Lensing: You know, I have very few—very few, if any—regrets, Alejandro. Mainly because if I regret something in the past, then part of me wonders: if I hadn’t done that or if I hadn’t gone that direction, would I still be in the same spot that I am today?

Jon Lensing: And so that’s why I don’t like having any regrets. The things that I did, the steps that I took, led me down this pathway to this point.

Jon Lensing: Instead—to reframe your question slightly—when I meet with some really early people thinking about jumping into entrepreneurism,

Jon Lensing: and they ask for advice, I say the most simple advice that I possibly can: if it’s calling you, you’ve got to do it. Entrepreneurship is not something where you dip your toe in the water, see how it feels, and slowly get in. If you want to do it, you’ve got to give it everything. You’ve got to jump both feet in the deep end, dive in headfirst, and just go for it.

Jon Lensing: Some of the most painful experiences that I’ve seen with founders and entrepreneurs are those that try to have one foot in, one foot out. “How do I have the safety and security of a really good W-2 job but then also try to make it as an entrepreneur?” You’re serving two masters then, and it doesn’t work out.

Jon Lensing: You know, there are exceptions to that case that I’ve seen—people who have made it work. But the most successful are hell-bent on the vision that they have, the passion for the company that they want to create.

Jon Lensing: And they go at it with 110 percent.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. So, Jon, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Jon Lensing: Shoot me an email. My email is pretty public—jon, J-O-N, at openloophealth.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Jon Lensing. Find me, let’s connect, let’s chat.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Easy enough. Well, Jon, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Jon Lensing: Appreciate it. Thank you, Alejandro.

*****

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