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Here’s your program.
Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart, and you’re watching part of my Failure Series. Instead of doing my usual interviews with entrepreneurs who talk about how they built successful companies and inspire you with the great wealth and the great achievements that they had, I want to understand about failure and setback which is why I’m doing today’s interview with Ryan Witt.
Now, this interview is a little bit different even from the failure interviews, because as Ryan and I were talking in our pre-interview, we realized the big reason why his organization didn’t work out is its inaction. My concern starting off here is that I’m not sure how to communicate inaction to you, the listener, but we’ll do what we can.
I was almost passing on it, Ryan. I said you and I spent about ten minutes going back and forth saying, should we do this or shouldn’t we?
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: The reason I said we should do it, the reason I want it, the reason why I thought it might not be a good fit is because you ran a non-profit. It was called Innovation and Choice, and non-profits are a little bit away from Mixergy’s main mission. You also had no big financial loss, but you lost two years. So that’s a good fit.
The big reason as we were talking that this didn’t take off is because of inaction, and inaction is hard to communicate in an interview. It’s hard to do it in an engaging way.
Ryan: Yes.
Andrew: The reason I decided to go for it is I said, well, if inaction is a problem that you faced, then chances are good that my audience is inaction or has faced it or will face it. And so, I’ve got to tackle it here in an interview, and we’ll do our best to make this as clear and as interesting to the audience as possible.
Innovation and Choice was a non-profit that you started, that was going to lobby first, and then it focused on education. Why don’t we go back to where the idea came from? You had a major life event happen. What was that life event?
Ryan: Okay. So my freshman year in college my grandfather had a non-small cell lung cancer. As it got worse, through my school I started to research more because I never wanted to be hypocritical with my thoughts. I always said that if anyone ever hurt my family that I would go after them myself. I thought, oh my gosh, my grandfather has cancer. How’s that a difference from someone attacking? So I have to learn this. I have to take this upon myself.
I was an economics major, and then I started learning more about biology and learning more about cancer. Eventually, I found a therapy for non-small cell lung cancer that was in pre-clinical trials, meaning that it was not being studied in humans yet, a very early stage. It had a 80 percent reduction in the same cancer as his, so at this point he had chemotherapy, radiation, and it seemed like it was his last hope. He did not want to go back to chemotherapy or radiation.
I called the researcher, and he said that I couldn’t get the drugs from him, but it was a two part therapy and that I could get one part in Texas at the clinical trial and one in China. A month later he died. I had finals, and I made the decision to study hard for finals, and then I was going to focus on getting the drugs during the summer. And that was the end of my freshman year.
That’s where it started, and three years later I learned about this Access Protocol to access experimental therapies outside of a clinical trial if you’re a terminal patient.
Andrew: I see. You realized, wait, if my grandfather had known about this, we could have gotten him this medicine, and we could have made it available to him, and he might have lived.
Ryan: Yes.
Andrew: All right. That’s a really big incentive to start something.
Ryan: Yes.
Andrew: Before that moment, did you imagine – this is painful for you to talk about. I can see it. I appreciate you going through this.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Now, it’s painful for me to talk about. All right.
Ryan: It’s still painful.
Andrew: Before that, what were you looking to do with your life, before this realization?
Ryan: Before that, I was interested in entrepreneurship. I’ve done stocks for 13 years, traded, and my cousin has her own company. My dad has his own company, and during the summer in college I interned for them, looking at structural problems within the organizations. Well, not problems but ways to improve and make things more efficient and effective.
I was looking to get into entrepreneurship, and I kind of am now, even after doing all this. I’m looking to get into medical entrepreneurship, health technology, medical technology but still entrepreneurship.
Andrew: Okay. You were going to be an entrepreneur. You’re a stock guy, so you obviously cared about money.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: And this major life event happened to you, which made you say, hold on, maybe I can put money aside for a moment. There’s a big crisis here going on. Someone else’s grandfather is going through this. I want to make things different in the world, so you set off to make a change. What’s the first thing that you do?
Ryan: The first thing that I did and I think you have to do this as an entrepreneur is you’re trying to solve a problem. The first thing I did was say what’s the problem in accessing compassionate use, which is this protocol to access these experimental therapies when you’re terminal.
Originally, I had this idea to get access to these terminal patients, these experimental therapies so that they didn’t have to fly to Texas or wherever, and then I pitched it at this conference at my school. This FDA guy was there, and he said, hey, this is already available as compassionate use. I said, oh really? That’s awesome. I don’t have to do this.
And then a couple of weeks, two weeks later my friend sent me an article, a New York Times article, and this guy, I believe his name’s John Thompson, he’s a patient with ALS. ALS is a neurodegenerative disorder, and this gentleman as his disease progressed, his wife was trying to get a therapy for him, and he ended up not getting it. Two years later she tried, and the FDA rejected her. The physician said, I’m not going to apply for it. I’m not going to be involved in this, and a pharmaceutical rejected it. She had all three of these points where she knew about it, but this was for her husband that she was trying to get this drug, that she was rejected. That’s when I had to say, well, this is something I have to do.
That’s when I said, I have to learn about this problem. I have to learn why is the FDA going to reject you? Why is a patient not going to know, and why could a pharmaceutical or whoever’s developing the therapy reject you? And that’s when you understand the problem. Well, what are the issues?
Andrew: Okay. All right. What’s next? Is this, by the way, when we’re talking about two years of your life that was spent on this, has the clock started ticking on the two years?
Ryan: The clock’s done on the two years. It started ticking . . .
Andrew: No, no. Go ahead. At what point did you start this two year adventure that ended up nowhere?
Ryan: I started when I graduated from school.
Andrew: Okay. At this point in the story, are you graduated yet?
Ryan: Yeah. At this point, my grandfather died a week after… Oh, I’m sorry. That was a week after my freshman year that he passed away, and it was after graduation that I spent the entire summer thinking, well, what am I going to do? Am I going to do stocks, or am I going to go for this? I had an opportunity to go for this and to try to solve this problem that was dear to my heart. I started that in August of 2009.
Andrew: Okay. What do you do next?
Ryan: Actually, I take it back. I started in June when I graduated. Sorry about that. How I started was my dad works in a political environment in Los Angeles, and one of his clients, he’s a CEO of a non-profit down there. He was able to get me meetings with legislators. That’s how I got to thinking, I can solve this legislatively. It’s a federal issue, and I wanted to understand the problem and do it right before I went to the legislators.
That’s when my next step was to go to pharmaceuticals and say, well, look, why would you reject them? I don’t want to just base this on what I see externally. I want to ask you.
Andrew: That’s a great step. What did they tell you?
Ryan: When I first went, it was really discouraging because I drove up from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and I said to pharmaceuticals, hey, why wouldn’t you do this? Why wouldn’t you not give access to these terminal patients, these drugs? I went up to ask that, and the receptionist says, who are you? Why are you here?
Andrew: You just go, not cold calling but cold visiting. You just knock on the door, and you say, somebody in this office is going to do it.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Is going to help me, is going to tell me what’s going on. Interesting. Now, you know that that’s not the way to get to the right person, but you’re thinking, hey, I don’t have any other way. Tell me what your thoughts are. I don’t want to put words into your mouth.
Ryan: No, that’s it. I think one of the hardest things is you feel such desperation. That’s one of the hard things as an entrepreneur and even as an entrepreneur dealing with terminal patients, trying to empathize with your user, if you will. It’s that these people are desperate. These people are dying every hour, every day, and if that’s your customer base, I wanted to empathize with them.
That means not waiting for an email. That means going up and saying, I can’t wait for a conference to go meet with this person or to somehow get to do it a better way. That’s one of the things that was an issue, that I felt like I faced is I put myself into this situation where you’re desperate. As when I went up to this pharmaceutical, I didn’t get a response.
Andrew: You walk over. The woman says, “Who are you?” You say, “I am Ryan Witt.” She says, “And? What do you do?”
Ryan: I said, and I was looking to speak with your CSO or your CFO, chief financial officer or chief science officer.
Andrew: Oh, you wanted to talk directly to the top?
Ryan: Yeah, because . . .
Andrew: When you’re down, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. All right. Okay.
Ryan: And so, that’s what I did, and she said, well, do you have an appointment? I emailed and they didn’t answer my email. They said, look, we’re not going to give you a meeting, and they had a security guard there, and they said, you have to go. They said you’re not going to get a meeting. That’s what they said. They didn’t say you have to go.
Andrew: What did you do next?
Ryan: I had a list of pharmaceuticals. Then I went to another pharmaceutical, and they didn’t even have a receptionist. They had security cameras there, so I couldn’t even talk to anyone. I waited there, and I waited for someone to walk in, and I asked them, and they said the person’s busy right now. I don’t know if I should have stayed, but I left.
I ended up having a meeting with pharmaceuticals later on in the cycle.
Andrew: I’m going to write a note here to come back and ask about the meetings later. You now drove how far to get to this area with all the pharmaceutical companies?
Ryan: Los Angeles to San Francisco, so maybe 500 hours.
Andrew: About eight hours.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Eight hours. You go there. Any results from all this, or are you just turned away from these companies?
Ryan: Turned away.
Andrew: Okay. All right. What do you do? Do you go back home after that?
Ryan: Yeah. So I went back home, and I had meetings with legislators that were getting set up by the person that was helping me, the CEO of this non-profit in the valley, San Fernando Valley. I want to be clear, not the Silicon Valley.
Andrew: Let’s hold off for a second. You drive back after going up there. I imagine you were full of hope, right? You were thinking, for sure you were going to get a meeting.
Ryan: Yes.
Andrew: Okay. At the end of that, when you have to drive back the eight hours, what are you feeling at that point?
Ryan: It’s a lot of discouragement. It’s really hard. I don’t know, but I’m feeling like, why am I doing this? Why am I going to this trouble? At that point it’s still real close to my heart. I feel a lot of frustration and angry, to be a hundred percent honest.
Andrew: Angry at who, at them or yourself?
Ryan: I want to say them because I felt like I’m going up there, and I didn’t pound on their door. I didn’t say, you have to meet with me. I said, is there a chance I can meet with them? I felt like I was being very pleasant about it and very respectful about it. There was this urgency, so I didn’t want to do an email, but it was very discouraging.
I thought, how do I get around this? What do I do? I have to learn, but at the same time I have a meeting with a legislator that is getting set up, and I have to write these documents. So you know what? I’m just going to go up, what I know from my background and what I can see right now.
Andrew: Okay. It discourages you, but you’re not feeling like you’re going to give up at that point.
Ryan: No. No.
Andrew: Okay.
Ryan: Definitely.
Andrew: Tell me about this person. Let’s fill in the gap. You had some guy who was helping you out from the San Fernando Valley, as you said. Who is he, and how did you bring him on board?
Ryan: He works with my dad. My dad, he’s a video producer, and my dad’s done videos with him for years. He was the CEO of an organization called the Economic Alliance, and he was helping me out. I hope no one gets in trouble, but that should be OK.
Andrew: Can you give his first name? Are you comfortable giving his first name?
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. His name is Bruce.
Andrew: His name is Bruce. Your dad helps you get Bruce. Bruce is on board. He’s going to give you a little bit of experience, a little bit of guidance, a little bit of work. He’s also going to be on your board of directors.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: By the way, at this point do you officially have an organization, a non-profit?
Ryan: No. At this point, Bruce said that you can intern for my organization, and through that we will get meetings with these legislators.
Andrew: Okay.
Ryan: I was leveraging his organization, putting my name out, Innovation and Choice’s name out on it, but I was not an official organization at that time.
Andrew: By the way, I should stop using this pen when I do interviews. I keep biting on it. It’s like, come on. Let’s get to the story. Bite the pen, not chomping on the bit, but chomping on the pen cap. All right.
He’s there with you. Do you feel bad about driving back home from San Francisco fruitless, without any results and a little insulted at the way they treated you, but you have something else going on. Bruce is going to help open up some doors. Specifically, what is Bruce planning for you?
Ryan: Bruce was planning for me, meetings with his connections with legislators, with Senator Feinstein’s and some people. They’re involved with her camp and people involved with Representative Brad Sherman who is in the valley, San Fernando Valley.
We’re setting up meetings with them, and he said, here’s a meeting. It’s on this date. Do what you’ve got to do. I had to write the content. I had to figure out what was the problem. I had to do proposed solutions. I had to do that. I had to figure out the time. I had these meetings set up.
Andrew: Okay. How many meetings did he set up for you, roughly?
Ryan: I had two.
Andrew: Two meetings. Okay. So the prep that you needed to create for it was . . . did you actually physically need to hand them a document that you had to work on?
Ryan: Well, what I was doing I was writing up a proposed solutions to the problems that I felt were why patients didn’t know about it? Why they got rejected from it? I did as much research as I could to discover why, and I was writing a written document, yes.
Andrew: Gotcha. Okay. All right. You didn’t have any experience doing this, I imagine.
Ryan: Oh no. Yeah.
Andrew: You got some guidance still from Bruce?
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: You put it together. You go in. Who’s the first person that you talk to?
Ryan: I got a lot of guidance. I stayed up all right the day before. I was really anxious about the meeting. The first person I talked to is someone from Senator Feinstein’s campaign, and the first thing he said to me, and I love the guy because they do have a good heart. But the first thing he said to me was, who are you?
I don’t know if I was presupposed to this, but that kind of got me a little frustrated, too, because it’s like, I always wanted this to be about the issue and not about who I am. I didn’t want this to be about how many constituents are here? What’s the power? I wanted it to be something where it’s the logic behind it.
Andrew: You were hurt because he cared about who you were?
Ryan: I was hurt because it wasn’t like, who are you? Tell me about you. It was a who are you? Why am I meeting with you? Does that make sense?
Andrew: He’s like, well, who are you? What are you bothering me with?
Ryan: Yeah. That’s what it seemed.
Andrew: Kind of like the way I treated you when I started the interview. I said, Ryan, what the hell’s the story here? Who are you, and why should I put you up in front of my audience?
Ryan: Yeah. But, I mean, the thing that I realized after a while is that nobody’s a bad person. Nobody’s out to get you. Everyone’s just dealing with their own constraints. I want to put something good for your audience up. You want something to be good for your audience. And this legislator, they have their own constraints. They’re pitched with issues every single day. They have people banging on their door every single day.
Andrew: But at the time you didn’t know that and you were hurt.
Ryan: Yes.
Andrew: Believe me, I understand the feeling of being hurt. I understand. One of the reasons why I aspired to do big things in my life is because there’s a part of me that also feels very small in this world. And so, by doing big things I can overcome that. Now, when people insult me or when I feel insulted or feel slights, like I ask someone for something and they don’t return the email. They don’t even consider what I’ve said.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: I feel like they’re putting me in a small place, and they don’t think that I’m big enough, like they’re hitting me on a vulnerability spot. I completely understand how you’re feeling in that moment, especially coming off this trip to San Francisco. So he hits you with that.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Your response to that is what?
Ryan: My response to that is I said, “I’m Ryan. I graduated, and I’m working with the Economic Alliance on this issue, and I’m here to tell you about it.” I went in and I told him about it. I told him about the problems I saw, the solutions I felt could happen, and I handed him my executive summary with proposed solutions, background, et cetera that I threw together.
At that point how it works is they basically take it. It’s hit or miss. You don’t know if they’re going to stick it in the trash. That’s one of the hard things about doing this is one of the things about entrepreneurship is you want to be big on feedback to figure out this is my target.
Andrew: Right.
Ryan: This is my target audience. It’s a legislator. It’s not all that different, but they don’t give you any feedback. You can’t say, why weren’t you moved by this?
Andrew: Right. You do want that feedback so that you can come back and have a better phone call.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: You can have a better meeting. I see. You don’t have any of that. How much time did you have with him?
Ryan: I had lunch with him, and Bruce was great enough to give me the entire lunch to talk with him, and that was, maybe, an hour.
Andrew: How persuasive did you feel you were?
Ryan: I feel like I was pretty persuasive to one of the people in the dinner, I mean, the lunch and the other person not so persuasive.
Andrew: Okay. What made you feel persuasive with one of them and not with the other?
Ryan: Well, one of them I remember her saying, I’m pretty sure, that her mother was a nurse, and she was really intrigued, and I could tell she was really listening to the problem. And it seemed like it resonated with her much more.
One of the things is when you’re the only person doing something, you read real deep into things. Before I did this, I was reading super into the people I was meeting with. It’s like, I don’t know. I had this big plan, this big grand plan to persuade the other person who was more persuasive in the Feinstein camp, but that’s the person who ended up just not sitting back and not really caring as much.
Andrew: I see.
Ryan: It seemed.
Andrew: So you didn’t meet with the politician in either case.
Ryan: No.
Andrew: You got to meet with one of their assistants.
Ryan: Well, not one of their assistants. There are field directors of the area.
Andrew: Gotcha.
Ryan: And there are legislative directors. Well, I got to one of the legislators. I met with their health care writer, who writes all the stuff for their health care bills. That’s actually the person that they would forward anything to, anyway.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Great. You had this. Bruce put it in front of you. You did okay with it, maybe not knock it out of the park, but you didn’t strike out.
Ryan: No.
Andrew: What’s next?
Ryan: What’s next is I had another meeting with another legislator, and I’m trying to get traction. Right now, I’m building up a website. I’m putting up content online. I’m trying to get a petition going. I’m trying to get signatures by each of these meetings and more and get traction and get more constituent traction. What’s their values? What’s their constituents? So the plan was to go door-to-door and to really get constituents going.
Andrew: Did you go door-to-door?
Ryan: Interaction, yeah.
Andrew: Okay. All right.
Ryan: It’s like, one of the things is when you’re doing something, you don’t know how to do it. You’ve never done it before. I thought okay, well, I’ve seen people do petitions. I’ll go door-to-door. I’ll try it out and see how it goes.
Andrew: All right. Let me ask you something.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: One thing that I noticed when you don’t know what to do, your answer is just go and like brute force you’re going to go door-to-door. You’re going to knock on the door, right?
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: I see some people their approach is I’m going to put a system together that’s going to automate this whole process of going door-to-door. I will find a way to Robo-call people or Robo-email them or get them all to come to my site.
Ryan: That’s right.
Andrew: They’re more process oriented. I see other people in my interviews they’re more mentor oriented. The first things they’re going to think about is who’s done this before, and I’m going to find those mentors.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: You don’t have that. For you it’s, I’ve got this energy in me. I’ve got to apply it somewhere. I’ll go knock on doors. That’s the thing. That’s the direction you’re going.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, one of the things, I think the mentor approach, I do want that. That’s one of the things that I think is better to do is to actually go out and to find people that have actually done that.
Andrew: Why not Bruce? Why didn’t Bruce say, hey listen, Ryan, going door-to-door is not going to get you enough signatures. It’s not going to move fast enough for you. Go do something else. Why didn’t he guide you at that point?
Ryan: Well, one of the things that was hard was Bruce was the CEO of this non-profit, and part of it was I didn’t want to bug him with his time. When you have a mentor, when you have someone who’s helping you out, it’s like, you don’t want to email them all too often. He seemed to feel like going door-to-door was okay. It’s something they can move in a small… If they’re a field director for Los Angeles, then if you’re going door-to-door, it’s hard to scale petitions. It’s hard to scale legislation. That’s why still today…
Andrew: Here’s the other thing. We’re talking about inaction. Other people would have just gone and sat in Bruce’s door, at Bruce’s office, just kind of hung out with him. Hey, Bruce, let’s go grab this beer. If you know that Bruce is into whatever fricking sporting thing he’s into, you go and you watch a game with him, and you talk girls and you hang out. You’re not that person.
When I said in the pre-interview that part of the issue here with this interview and with your story is inaction. Is this an example of that inaction, or is this just a personality difference?
Ryan: When I was talking about inaction, I don’t think that not bugging him was an issue. I think, maybe, reaching out to other community organizers may have been better as far as that, but the inaction that I really, definitely faced was when… You know how I said I was going to go door-to-door, or when I went door-to-door, I went door-to-door for a day.
Andrew: Oh okay. Why did you stop?
Ryan: It was easier to Facebook spam people, to be honest.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Tell me about the Facebook spam that you did.
Ryan: I don’t know. I guess I’m kind of embarrassed by that because Facebook spamming, it worked out all right. It’s like, it’s kind of the cheap way out. It’s not specific to the people I was meeting with, the constituency. As someone doing a new project, you’re constantly deciding, well, what needs to happen?
When I’m Facebook messaging people, I message people in . . . I met someone in a state in the East Coast. Gosh, what state was it? I don’t remember if it was New York or…
Andrew: How is it spamming people? Were you just randomly emailing them on Facebook?
Ryan: No. It was targeted. I was looking at who would feel like this is relevant, and I looked for people who were in these cancer forums who were dealing with it, who were dealing with any sort of terminal illness who might be interested in the petition.
Andrew: What did you do with them?
Ryan: I sent them a message linking them to my website, linking them to my petition, giving them a quick pitch. Why should you look at this?
Andrew: Okay.
Ryan: And I got responses, but interestingly I got more responses from going door-to-door by measuring by my website hits.
Andrew: So it was easier to Facebook spam, but it wasn’t as effective.
Ryan: It wasn’t more effective.
Andrew: It wasn’t even more effective. OK. What did you do next?
Ryan: Yeah. What I did next was I kept doing that.
Andrew: Kept doing Facebook spam.
Ryan: Yeah. It’s the cheap way.
Andrew: Even though you saw that it wasn’t effective, you said, at least, it’s something to do. I’ve got this energy. I’ve got this need.
Ryan: I had this energy and this need, and it was easy.
Andrew: It was easy.
Ryan: They don’t slam their door in your face. They don’t hang up on you. They don’t respond to you.
Andrew: Gotcha.
Ryan: That’s one of the things you can’t take. When it’s not as effective, I wish I didn’t take that road.
Andrew: All right. You know what? Believe me, we all go through cycles like this. We all have these issues. How long were you doing this, weeks, months?
Ryan: I was doing it for a couple of months while I was meeting with legislators, and what I was also doing was I was leveraging my meetings with legislators to meet with other people. I said, hey, pharmaceutical person, while I’m meeting with a legislator or I met with this legislator and I’m working on this proposed solution, I embellished. That got me tons of meetings.
Andrew: Finally, the pharmaceutical companies were willing to take you seriously because you said I’m talking to the legislators.
Ryan: Well, the pharmaceuticals not so much, doctors, I got meetings with doctors. I kind of expanded to the UCLA medical area and a couple of other medical areas. I got some responses from physicians. I met with them, and I said, look, why would you not tell a patient about compassionate use, this Access Protocol. What are the issues involved?
That’s what I was doing, and I leveraged the meetings that Bruce had set up to meet with other legislators. I said, look, I’m meeting with X, Y and Z. Can I meet with you?
Andrew: Okay. You’re now talking to doctors. You’re getting their feedback, and you’re getting them to try to, at least, tell their patients about the medication that’s available to their patients. You’re using those conversations to have conversations with other legislators, and we should say legislators, with their people, with important people.
Ryan: With their representatives.
Andrew: With their representatives. You’re still not accessing the pharmaceutical companies, but you’re getting some kind of progress, and along the way you’re still spamming. What’s next?
Ryan: Right.
Andrew: We call it Facebook spam but whatever.
Ryan: The interesting thing is people who were receptive, it’s not as much spam to them. It’s relevant content to them. That was through December, and there was a point around January where I was meeting with a representative to Henry Waxman, and I started to feel like I was embellishing too much. I wasn’t feeling traction with the legislators, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to try this out as a business and as an education business.
Andrew: Okay. You’re saying to yourself, wait a minute, this talking to politicians is a pain in the butt. They don’t take me seriously enough, and if they do, they’re not… Sorry.
Ryan: Yeah. Exactly. And I’m trying to figure out why. I’m looking at this and I’m saying, you don’t get feedback, like I was saying. Well, why aren’t they responding? Well, how do I know if you’re getting anywhere? And then, you see they respond to the media, and they respond to constituent phone calls.
I said, you know what? I’m going to educate constituents directly, and through this education I was educated. I want to empower them to go call their legislator.
Andrew: Gotcha. Okay. All right. Tell me about the inaction up until this point. You regret not taking more action at times. Tell me about the action until this point in the story that you wish you would have taken.
Ryan: Yeah. One of the things is when I’m by myself and I’m waking up every morning, I’m constantly asking myself at this point, why am I doing this? It’s kind of unfortunate because you don’t want to be doing that. You want to go gung ho when you go for something, but I’m by myself and I’m in my room. We’re doing stuff through my room, and it’s like, I could get a job. I could be making X amount of dollars a year, and I’m telling myself this.
You kind of break yourself down to the point where it’s like, you wake up and I overdid my motivations. My friends got mad at me. I became desensitized to everything. I stopped caring because I broke down everything, and I said, well, why do I even care?
Andrew: Like what? Give me an example of something you broke down and said, why do I even care about it?
Ryan: I went on dates, and I didn’t care about people said.
Andrew: On the date, but that could be helpful. Why was that a problem?
Ryan: Whenever I went out with people, I used to be so engaged with them and what they were doing. I stopped caring about them.
Andrew: I see.
Ryan: Because I said, what do I care about?
Andrew: Was this like a depression?
Ryan: It was like trying to get motivation. It wasn’t as much a depression. It was like, this doesn’t motivate me, so why am I wasting my time? And because I’m trying to empathize with my audience here, my customers, I guess, and realize that these patients die every hour. That’s 60 cancer patients die every hour, and using that as a motivation, I’m pitching that to people to sign a petition.
I’m saying, look 60 people die every hour. Give me five minutes. And then, internalizing that motivation, it broke me down. It broke me down to the point I don’t go out any more. I don’t do anything any more.
Andrew: Does that still matter to you that 60 people are dying an hour at that point? No. You were just done caring.
Ryan: At that point that still fueled me.
Andrew: Okay. So that fueled you, but conversations with friends did not fuel you.
Ryan: No.
Andrew: So far, I think you’re saying is pretty much typical of entrepreneurs. You go and you work and you care about your work, but you have dinner with someone and they’re going to tell you about what their kids are doing or they’re going to tell you how they’re going to go bike riding this weekend, and you’re like, forget the fricking rat’s ass. Where’s the challenge in this conversation? Where’s the point of this? What’s the importance?
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Is that appropriate to say?
Ryan: That is definitely, but what I’m realizing now is you can’t live life like that. I have to be balanced, and it makes me more of an effective person when I’m balanced, and I’m not backing myself in this corner.
Andrew: Fair enough. I just discovered that in my life, too. At the time you were imbalanced because you were caring still so much about this one issue.
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: That’s inaction in your personal life. When did you have inaction in this issue? Where didn’t you put enough action?
Ryan: The inaction, what I was talking about in the pre-interview, was a lot in why am I not going door-to-door when this is most effective?
Andrew: Why weren’t you? Tell me.
Ryan: I chickened out.
Andrew: Chickened out. Okay.
Ryan: I chickened out, and I said to myself again, by myself I said, why am I going door-to-door? I understand it, but I can just sit here and Facebook message people who care about this issue. What’s that?
Andrew: What else did you chicken out about?
Ryan: I feel like one of the things that I chickened out on was asking people when I pivoted. I guess, moving forward in the direction of the story, when in January I decided to do this as an education business and I was writing business plans, I feel like I was still chickening out on asking people to join me on getting people to come in and get involved and getting people to pay me for it.
This is January but back in September I asked Bruce, I said, can I raise money through your organization? And I did that through one email, one line and I never pushed it further. One of the things is I learned in January, I talked with other non-profit starters, you have to run a non-profit as a business. You can’t run it as this good intention project and make it work.
That’s one of the things that I was starting to realize in January is that I have to start doing things as a business, and I have to start thinking about how am I going to get paid, but I chickened out on it.
My buddy’s doing this type of entrepreneurship thing where I didn’t really push to motivate other people to join my cause, and I feel like it might have been better.
Andrew: Okay. Let me unpack what you just said. One thing you said is, Andrew, I pivoted and I decided I was going to educate people.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Let’s focus on that a little bit.
Ryan: Okay.
Andrew: What was the vision there?
Ryan: The vision there was to take the issues that I was telling legislators about and to educate patients about it.
Andrew: What do you do about it once you had it worked out?
Ryan: This is where things got kind of tricky in a business sense because in a business sense you’re looking at what’s the problem, what’s the solution and target audience and stuff like that. One of the things is going from legislation where you can really deal with a plethora of topics that all intertwine.
And then you go to a business where I would go to people who had some people or had some interest, and I’d say, what do you think about this? And they’d say, you really need to focus. You really need to fine tune this and focus on one particular problem. I was naïve in a sense where I went to the people and I said, “Okay, I’ll refine it but I still want to focus on all three of these things.”
Andrew: Okay. What are the three things?
Ryan: It wasn’t even about access anymore. I was learning about all these other things, and there’s this term, molecular medicine. It’s these new ways to diagnose and treat people at this molecular level, these new technologies. And this is where it gets kind of complex in combination therapies which is where you use two mechanisms of action at once as opposed to one mechanism of action at a really high dose. And the other thing was these access protocols to experimental therapy. I was educating patients on those three issues and the underlying factors in molecular medicine.
One of the issues that I found that I was facing is these things are so complex to ordinary people, and when I’m going to these people it’s right over their head. One of the things that we kind of faced in this pre-interview is people don’t quite . . . it’s hard to understand it. It’s hard to teach people about it.
Andrew: Who are these people who you are trying to teach?
Ryan: I was focused on constituents. I set up a systematic platform where I wanted to go into different cities and have teachers in different regions and have state directors. And have teachers teach these concepts to the general consumer in these constituencies because I was still focused on passing that legislation. I just wanted to motivate people to go out there and get active.
Andrew: Were you finding these people, getting to teach them?
Ryan: Well, at this point I said to myself that I needed to stop going out there and doing it. I need to get funding and hire people to do it.
Andrew: Okay.
Ryan: At this point around January through March I’m writing a business plan. I’m looking more at not going out there and doing everything myself because you can’t do everything yourself.
Andrew: That’s the way I’m feeling right now. OK. What did you do? Did you start looking for money first, or did you start looking for people first?
Ryan: I started looking for writing the business plan and looking for money because the thing is with a non-profit, you can’t just say here’s equity. Here’s the other part where I chickened out, okay? Here, I’m trying to get people to join me and I’m trying to get money, but I would talk myself out of it. Like I just said to you, I would say, well, I’m not going to ask my buddy to join me on this because I can’t pay them.
Andrew: Ah.
Ryan: I can’t give them equity.
Andrew: You can’t give them shares. Did you ever have a conversation with someone where you had to persuade them?
Ryan: Not directly.
Andrew: Never. I see. Okay. What about funding? Did you ever go after funding?
Ryan: Yeah. See, I kind of did that indirectly, too. I wrote a business plan, and I kept refining it and refining it. This is something I’m learning, too, is I kept refining it. And then, I said, well, it’s not good enough, or I’m unsure about this. I would go to people and say, well, I’m kind of, sort of, you know, doing this, and I’m kind of, sort of targeting this market.
And then, they would tell me to get more specific, and then I would pivot in my business plan. I would say, okay, well now I’m educating people on this, but I never overtly went to go sell them. I was very honest and candid with them in what I didn’t know. I don’t know. I feel like the big problem was I wasn’t specific enough.
Andrew: Actually, not being specific I understand. The other thing I understand is that you were selling them on not doing it. We’ve all done that. We’ve all had times when we are unsure of something, and in conversation with people instead of projecting the positive, we projected our own uncertainty.
Help me understand why you did it so that I can understand myself in that moment.
Ryan: Why I did that is I’ve always, when I’m in that situation, I’m trying to look from their perspective. And I’m trying to look, okay, well, why would a person join me in an organization if I can’t pay them and if they can’t get any equity, and they’ve never faced a terminal patient. So few people have faced this issue. Why is a person my age going to do this, or why is a person going to give me funding? I would pitch people on the business plan, but they would say, it’s not specific. You need a focus.
So I would say, okay, these were like advisors I would pitch it to, and they would say, you need a focus. And then, I would say, I’m not focused yet. So I’m not going to pitch it to these business people. It’s like waiting for this perfect moment where everything is really focused, and I feel like me as an investor would invest. I would talk myself through that process. Would I invest as an investor? Would I enjoy it?
Andrew: I see. All right. I understand everything you are saying here. We’ve all been through it. I’ve got to talk to others who are willing about how they snapped themselves out of it. I’ll ask you. Did you ever snap yourself out of it in the two years that you were working on this project?
Ryan: I don’t think I snapped myself out of the fact that I have to sell people on things, that I have to go and overtly sell these people on things. I don’t think that I did. I think I’m still realizing the fact that you have this front end of things and this back end, and on the back end you have to keep things by it.
I’m not sure yet what my focus is, but when you go to meet with people for investment, you say, well, this is my focus. I’m going to focus on this for a little bit. I don’t know. I’m still learning. I don’t think I’ll ever snap myself out of it. I’m still learning about it.
Andrew: Are you someone who has had this issue your whole life?
Ryan: I did, and it worked as more of a benefit to me in my past.
Andrew: How?
Ryan: Because take an argument or situations, I would always think things through and look at things from other people’s perspective. If I felt like I wouldn’t do that in that same situation, I wouldn’t every say it to anyone.
Andrew: I see.
Ryan: It helped me. It seemingly helped me in conversations because I would anticipate what people would say. I would anticipate people’s values and their judgments, and then I would already have kind of a pre-planned way to respond. It seemed to have helped me in the past. That’s why I feel like I did it.
Andrew: Okay. Here, you saw other people’s points of view, but you didn’t come back with responses to that point of view. You didn’t have an answer to it.
Ryan: No. I didn’t have an answer to it. I couldn’t think of why someone would join, and people would be so excited about other things. I feel like during the situation I’m getting all these downers, and I’m getting hit with all these rejections. Eventually, it gets to me whereas after going door-to-door, after doing Facebook stuff and after doing these emails and meeting with legislators and not getting traction, that you kind of just stop short.
When I started looking for money and started looking for people to join me, it’s like, I stopped short because it’s like, oh, I understand. I understand why you don’t want to join me, and you start the conversation but you stop.
Andrew: I see. Even when you knew there were certain things you could say, you didn’t because what’s the point? They’re going to turn me down anyway. It doesn’t make sense for them anyway.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. When you pulled the plug on this, how hard was that decision?
Ryan: Hard, really hard.
Andrew: Why?
Ryan: It was hard because it’s personal to me, and the thing I didn’t say yet is that Bruce had cancer, too, and Bruce slowly became terminal, too.
Andrew: Wow.
Ryan: He passed away in August of 2010. Before he passed away, my plan was to get advisors and then to get a board of directors and then to get funding and then to hire people. With less and less traction and more and more challenges, it made it harder to go forward with it. I think the ultimate deciding factor to hang it up was when I decided to pivot the education platform a little bit more. I made it more focused to education on only molecular medicine instead of access protocols and whatever.
I met with someone on it who was willing to help me with getting advisors, and I finally got some traction that I felt like I was going for. But I felt like it wasn’t something that was going to benefit Bruce or my grandfather. And then, I thought to myself, well, is this something that I want to do for 20 years? Is this something that I want to do for ten years? And that’s when I really decided to hang it up and to focus on other things.
Andrew: I see. All right.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: This is very painful. It’s painful because there’s a part of your story that I think is a part of all of our stories. It’s painful because you didn’t get to see what it was really like. I told you about some of my similar stories, but I’ll tell you one time that I failed that I was just especially proud that I failed. I was running for student body president in high school, and I said, everyone is going to know that I want this.
If I fail, they’re all going to know about it, and I just didn’t want to go and tell people that I was running. I didn’t want to put posters up, but I pushed myself just to do it anyway and just block out those questions in my head and block out any thought of how they were going to laugh at me if I failed or if I came across badly and if I didn’t win. But also even on the way over I looked like a fool.
I blocked it all out, and I put big posters up, and I told everyone as they were walking down the hall that they should vote for me. And many people said, there’s no way I’m voting for you. I’d rather have and they’d start talking about things they’d rather have instead of voting for me and having me as president.
I felt really proud that I could just push everything out there and that there was no question in my mind that I didn’t do enough, and that satisfaction of knowing that you did everything you could is very reassuring. I feel that sometimes, and I feel like you don’t have that here, that you don’t know what you could have done if you poured every ounce of yourself into this project.
Ryan: Yeah. I think that one of the things is that failure is a decision that, for me, I could go back to it, and I could have gone back to it and given more to it. I think failure is when you accept it, and you accept that I’m done with this because that’s something that’s always engraved in me. I want to do the best that I can, the very best that I can. If I don’t do it, I’m not satisfied.
The only thing that I’m learning is that you’re making mistakes all the time, and I’m constantly learning from it and constantly trying to improve, whether that’s chickening out on getting funding or getting people to join me or going door-to-door. Accepting the failures is kind of when you fail.
Andrew: It feels to me like… Tell me if you’d say this. It seems like it’s worse than failure here because failure is you give everything you’ve got and it doesn’t work out. Here, you feel like you didn’t. And so, in many ways it’s worse. There’s an action.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: Do you feel that, or am I putting words in your mouth? What do you feel?
Ryan: I don’t see failure as… I don’t think that it’s as much that I didn’t… I think when you said I gave everything I had that that’s very relative.
Andrew: Do you feel you gave it everything you had?
Ryan: I don’t.
Andrew: You don’t.
Ryan: I don’t think that we ever do, and kind of the thing I’m learning is that you can always give more. The ultimate thing is you just want to keep on going until you get traction and keep on going. That’s one of the things that I’m realizing. To be successful you just have to keep on going. It’s like, as soon as you’re moving at a slow pace, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a worse failure because I didn’t give it all because it’s more to accept the fact that I didn’t give it my all and to accept the failure, I think is the hardest part because I don’t feel like we ever give it all.
Andrew: I see. For you, if you could still be working on this, then you wouldn’t feel like it’s a failure.
Ryan: No.
Andrew: The fact that you ended it, that’s the part that hurts.
Ryan: Say that one more time.
Andrew: To you, the part that hurts is not the inaction. It’s not the lack of results. The part that hurts is that you stopped.
Ryan: Yes. The thing that I see is that we’re always making mistakes. We’re always doing something, and inaction is just one of those mistakes. What hurts for me is to stop because the users, the audience, the terminal patients for me, that’s at my heart. It hurts to put that on my shoulders and then to stop and accept that failure. That’s why it’s one of the worst failures that I can ever have.
Andrew: I’ve got to tell you. I’m seeing this in a whole other way. To me, what I’m seeing here is that you’re better off stopping. The thing wasn’t working, and why keep going in the direction that you were going?
The part that hurts me is these moments where you could have made a phone call. You could have done this. You could have done that, and you didn’t, and I get that.
Ryan: Yeah.
Andrew: I get that you didn’t. I just feel, to me, that’s more painful, but I want to experience your opinion and your feelings and your story and not impose mine.
Ryan: I mean, the thing is do you ever feel like… I feel like we could always do more every day in our work life, and the whole thing is tomorrow’s a new day and tomorrow’s a new opportunity. If I wanted to, I could keep doing this and do better tomorrow and not make those same mistakes and actually go out and go door-to-door and actually make those phone calls. And I could actually go out and persuade my friend right now, and I could do that. Does that make sense?
Andrew: Yeah, but I don’t see how it ties in here.
Ryan: Well, because since I can do that right now, that’s not so bad because if I made the choice to do that, then it’s not so bad that I didn’t give it my all in the past. I’ll just give it my all tomorrow.
Andrew: I see. There’s always another day. Tomorrow, you can always… I see. It doesn’t matter that that didn’t work out. You’ll find another thing to do, and there’s always another day to start fresh.
Ryan: That’s one of the things. Every day it’s fresh. If I didn’t go out and make cold calls that one day, I can go out and do it the next day. So, it’s not that I didn’t give it my all. The hardest thing is accepting failure.
Andrew: I see.
Ryan: And moving on.
Andrew: All right. I get that.
Ryan: And accepting the fact that you’re giving up on this and moving on. That’s been one of the hardest things for me to do is to accept that I’m going to move on.
Andrew: Have you had a chance to move on? What are you working on now?
Ryan: It’s been a long time to move on, and it’s hard to move on. One of the things that helped me to move on is to have faith in myself again, to regain faith that it wasn’t a lack in ability that made me fail at this. It was more a lack of experience and to have the forgiveness and to forgive myself for this failure. Those have been the two aspects that have helped me get past it.
What I’m doing now is I’m doing something that’s more aligned with what I want to do long-term, and that’s to develop better medical technologies to improve life. I want to help extend life. I’m looking for positions at medical technology companies to try and get involved with that.
Andrew: All right.
Ryan: That’s what I’m doing right now.
Andrew: How can people connect with you?
Ryan: They can connect with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle’s Ryan J Witt. They can email me if they want, witt.rj@gmail.
Andrew: All right. Ryan, thank you for coming here and telling your story so openly.
Ryan: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I love you.
Andrew: Thanks, man. By the way, the reason why I’m moving around so much in this interview is I overdid it the last two days. I know I’m going to go away later this month, so I said, pack your schedule with interviews because I want to put this stuff out there. I want to make sure that there’s an interview on the site, that it keeps going even while I’m away. I’m packing my schedule so much that I can’t sit physically and stare at the camera and sit upright the way that I usually do for as long as I have.
Yesterday, I did four interviews. Today, I’ve got three interviews plus we’re going to do two courses where I’m going to be on camera. I overdid it. I’m learning a lot here that I’ve just got to pull back a little.
Ryan: Man, yeah, you’ve got to stay balanced. You’ve got to keep it going.
Andrew: Thank you. I don’t want to brush over what you said earlier. Thanks for watching the past interviews and for being a part of this community. Thanks again for now coming on here and doing an interview with me.
Ryan: No, definitely, thank you for all you do and all the interviews you do. They’re inspiring and help tremendously.
Andrew: I appreciate it. Thank you, Ryan Witt.
Ryan: All right. Take care.
Andrew: Thank you all for watching.
