Five-Year Reflection

As I started writing this post, I struggled to answer the most basic question: When was Day 1?

Was it the day I incorporated the company for an idea that didn’t survive the COVID lockdowns? Was it the day I first learned about cell and gene therapy from a patient? Or was it the day I wrote the first line of code?

Regardless, it has been well over five years since those moments. As I reflected on the years since, I wanted to share three stories that encapsulate the journey so far and our values at Bluecord.

The Call

From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to help cancer patients. I had little knowledge of the space, so I pushed myself to speak with as many patients as I could. I read their blogs, reached out directly, and volunteered at cancer survivorship clinics. Luckily, people were stuck at home during COVID and didn’t mind jumping on calls with me. Over time, I spoke with more than 100 patients. One of them was Robyn.

My call with Robyn started like many of the others. I strolled around the block as I peppered her with questions about her diagnosis, treatment, and everything in between. She told me she had been diagnosed with lymphoma and had tried the standard-of-care treatments. None of them worked until she received a CAR-T cell therapy as part of a clinical trial. She is now in remission and enjoying her time with her adult children, who had recently moved back home.

I immediately thought of my uncle, who had passed away from cancer a few years earlier. I remember searching through the clinical trial database and looking for some kind of far-fetched hope. I could not believe that Robyn had not only found that hope, but a cure.

That was the first time I had heard of cell and gene therapy. I knew then that I wanted to help deliver that same hope to many more patients.

Houston, we have a problem

A year after the call with Robyn, we launched our first module on inventory management with Baylor College of Medicine. It received great feedback, and we were ready to build the next one for cleanroom environmental monitoring (EM).

I knew nothing about EM, but I decided to charge ahead and build the first version. I spent the next four months learning the domain and developing workflows that made sense to me. When it was ready, I presented it to users and asked them to test it out.

They hated it and asked to stop the project immediately. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Austin when I received the email, and I went numb. That drive back home to Houston was brutal. It was the closest I have ever come to giving up.

I took the next two weeks off to reflect. I realized my mistake was failing to talk to users enough. I then rebuilt the module with them involved at every iteration. Today, the EM module is one of our users’ favorites, and that approach became the foundation for how we build new features and products.

Thirteen Time Zones Away

Around two years ago, our growth slowed. After three years of building, we had reached out to most of the cell and gene therapy facilities in the U.S. We needed a new channel for growth. Desperately, I compiled a list of facilities outside of the US and began cold emailing them.

To my surprise, a week later I heard back from Zlatibor, the facility director of CTTWA in Perth, Australia. The demo went well, and he wanted to work with us. That’s when the fear set in. At the time, our infrastructure was not ready for internationalization. There were also the operational challenges of being 13 time zones and more than 30 hours of travel away. I was afraid of disappointing him.

Fortunately, Zlatibor and his team could not have been better partners. They were patient and eager to help us succeed. The security review and vendor onboarding process ultimately took a year, which gave us the time we needed to rewrite our architecture and strengthen our validation procedures for international deployments. The experience, though difficult and uncomfortable, forced us to develop our global expansion playbook, enabling us to scale and help more patients in the years ahead.

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I am so grateful for these past five years. I have met incredible people and been to places I never could have imagined. As I prepare for the year ahead, we have many new projects lined up and ideas to explore. In many ways, it brings me back to the earliest days. I wanted to remind myself to always have that desire to help patients, customer obsession, and willingness to take risks.

Because at Bluecord, it is still Day 1.