TJ Parker⚡️
@tjparker
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gp @matrixvc, previously founder and ceo @pillpack + vp pharmacy and health @amazon
Park City ⛷ Malibu 🏄♂️
Joined December 2018
Imagine being a 24 year old VC associate wearing a Bain branded Carhartt jacket in the Starbucks line and having an actual construction worker walk in and stand behind you in line. This is about as rich as it gets.
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That Nike post is the perfect articulation of the fact that as soon as all the corporations learned how to be “data driven” all the leverage had already shifted back to those able to make decisions based on taste, insight, and intuition.
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@michellehuang42 Missed the best one! . Elevators: press once to select floor, press again to unselect.
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Warehouse, our car storage and social club concept in Park City is almost open for business.
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The downside of not having real stress in your life for an extended period of time is you start stressing about really dumb shit.
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Find yourself a cofounder you can start a billion dollar business with. And then sell it. And then go to Alaska together. Every year. For like a month. Xoxo @elliotcohen.
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@isaachasson It’s… definitely not. an ikon pass is $1200 and gets you 7 days at every UT resort other than pcmr (deer valley, alta, snowbird, brighton, solitude, snowbasin, etc). Or if you’re dying to ski the worst resort in UT you can ski unlimited days at PCMR for $900.
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I’m not really the type to weigh in on the current thing or geopolitics, generally. But I’ve been sitting here for a couple weeks stunned by the amount of ill-informed support for hamas / palestine at best, antisemitism at worst, that’s been rampant across US cities,.
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Yesterday morning we lost our beautiful dog Quinn. She quietly let herself out, walked into the woods, laid down and passed away under some trees next to the creek. We’re heartbroken but glad she lived such a great life and went so peacefully.
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I’ve spent my career trying to make the healthcare system work better for normal everyday people, often fighting large payers & pbm’s in the process. The rhetoric over the last 36 hours has been appalling and disgusting. I’m stunned. I don’t know how else to put it.
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Annual reminder that tying health insurance to employment is about one of the dumbest things imaginable.
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For folks interested in what the market was like 2013-2018. pillpack rounds:. 500k on 3M (13).3M on 10M (13).9M on 30M (14).50M on 250M (15).50M on 330M (17).20M note w kicker to bridge m&a (18).B acquisition (18).
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We used to talk about “omotenashi” when designing experiences at pillpack. This is the best example I’ve seen.
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My $0.02 — don’t bring your co-founder / team to an initial meeting w an investor. It’s great to introduce them later in the process but early on cripples your ability to build a relationship. If they’re complaining about not being included you can show them this tweet.
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Probably the single best decision I ever made running PillPack and Amazon Pharmacy was to completely opt out of dispensing CII's (opioids, stimulants, etc).
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to make my own clothes. Been working on this with a couple friends for the last year or so and this week the first pieces started showing up. Full line available at Lazy Sun, soon.
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First airbnb, now block, reverting to functional orgs. If you're a small startup trying to move towards business units, just don't.
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Living in a ski town is the best. Awesome day with fresh snow, friends and family, food and drinks, sauna, and playoff football.
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Perfect Days, a movie about a guy that cleans toilets in Tokyo, is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. 10/10. highly recommend.
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Periodic reminder that you don’t actually have to post your opinions about politics on the internet.
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@sweatystartup Emergency braking, lane keep, etc became nanny features instead of driving aids and are making cars less not more safe. Car safety peaked roughly a decade ago.
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This is great. We need to find opportunities as a community to get younger kids working again. Was so formative for me to have a paper route at a young age and other jobs in high school. These opportunities are way too few and far between, now.
Somerville has launched a paid teen snow shoveling program for youth ages 13+ to assist with shoveling seniors and homeowners with disabilities out after snowstorms this winter. Sidewalk + Steps $20.Driveway (1 Spot) $20.Parking Spot on Street $25.
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The two things I’ve found the most enjoyable and rewarding in life so far are having kids and running a startup. It’s odd to me that most of the dialogue online about these things is how hard they are vs how fun they are.
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Everything passes, everything changes, just do what you think you should do.
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Meanwhile, @DavidSacks looking like he wrote the first amendment.
.@DavidSacks highlights that Elon Musk's two most controversial positions are defending the First Amendment and advocating for peace. @elonmusk: "It feels like we are living in the opposite world or something.". @DavidSacks: "There's an article in today's New Yorker calling you
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The only two parenting tips I feel strongly about:. Don’t let your kids have an iPad unless they’re on an airplane. Let your kids be independent and self directed as much as possible as early as possible.
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Folks in healthcare seem most excited about ai in the context of back-end automation. I’m far more excited about the opportunity to improve the customer experience and think the biggest winners will be here.
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My simple rubric for how to self select into the best tech career for you. Skip class as often as possible: founder .Sit in the back of the class: startup employee .Sit in the front of the class: big tech employee.
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Gonna have to agree. Whatever team got this thing off the ground and ran it for the first few years must have done a real bang up job.
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There should be a list of the 30 under 30 winners that make it to 40 without an indictment. "Free over Forty" or something.
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I was feeling better about spending time in San Fransisco up until I got chased by a homeless dude after grabbing a coffee yesterday morning. Though it was kind of nice to be called a little bitch. It’s been a while.
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I’ve fully come around to the thesis that automated AI phone calls are going to accelerate / force the adoption of actual API’s in healthcare. Which is great.
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It’s crazy to me that in the time Amazon has built a full pharmacy ecomm experience (search, browse, cart, check out, scaled same-day) no incumbents have bothered to build a real digital cx? Especially after losing their entire consumables business to Amazon? I don’t get it.
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In all seriousness, I hope SVB is able to sort this out. They were incredibly good partners to us at pillpack over the years. From a loan to buy our first pillpack machine 3 months in to bridging us during the m&a process.
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I had a paper route when I was 7 years old. out by myself 5-6a every morning. Left on my bike the second I had free time on afternoons & weekends. Was both very enjoyable as a kid and I attribute much of my success to it. Bring back free range kids.
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How do we normalize picking up the phone and calling >> scheduling calls?.
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The first thing you should do in any hotel room is turn the air conditioning down to 60.
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It would really be great if people (especially smart people) could stop quoting list prices for brand drugs. They don’t mean a damn thing. The net price is at least <50% of the quoted price and will keep falling as new competitors enter the market.
The large Wegovy trial for⬇️cardiovascular events: an absolute reduction of only 1.5 per 100 people in a very high-risk cohort, taking the drug > 3 years, at a very high price ($1,349/month), is not something to write home about.Reviewed in the new Ground Truths (link in profile).
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While we’re at it, let’s return to 1:1 conversations being default phone vs default zoom.
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I wish there was sliders for the algorithm on here. humor <—————————x->.optimism <—————————x->.politics <-x—————————>.etc.
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I have zero regrets. It worked out very well for everyone involved (founders, employees, investors). Cap table ended up ~60/20/20 (investors, founders, employees). Just build.
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You can build a great consumer brand, with a great outcome, without raising very much money. All it takes is 40 years.
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Formal meetings, especially on zoom, are about the worst possible format imaginable for making complicated, nuanced decisions.
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My wife is very good at Halloween costumes. Some of my favorites from the last few years.
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My favorite company principle at pillpack was “assume the best”. Amazons equivalent LP was “earn trust” which means roughly the opposite. Both cultures fully pivoted on this one variance.
it's a superpower to assume the best in everyone by default and assume by and large people mean well.
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My $0.02: clever consumer healthcare companies that focus on applying AI and automation to create novel / better customer experiences will create compelling companies with real durability.
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The only tenable way to re-create real privacy at this point is for someone to build individual AI's that spew enormous amounts of fake data (content, browsing, etc) on your behalf such that's it's impossible for systems to parse what is real vs. fake.
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Prescriptions shouldn’t have X refills. There should be start orders that are good in perpetuity and stop orders that cancel the rx. Would save an enormous amount of administrative overhead and result in better medicine.
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(One obviously the fact that focusing on company objectives rather than customers and products will forever be a bad strategy).
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Looking to hire hungriest MD you know. Ideal candidate is highly clinically competent with top tier education, actively looking to join a startup in the earliest stages. Needs to be a doer / builder. Early in career is fine. Well funded deeply ambitious company and team.
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Ex-Optum Ventures principal now patriots head coach wasn’t on my bingo card.
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Can someone explain to me why they don't offer LTE in MacBooks?.
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I can’t remember bringing homework home once as a kid. But I did have 3 jobs simultaneously as a 16yo. There are more ways to learn grit and how to work hard than doing fake work.
@micsolana Every successful person I have ever met was committed to homework (or the equivalent( by their parents *extraordinarily early* in their life. My Mom taught my algebra in third grade and insisted I read every night in addition to all of the assigned work.
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Since we’re on the topic, I’ll re-propose my favorite total healthcare overhaul:. Medicare for everyone under 65, privatize 65+ and pay into it throughout your life similar to life insurance. Creates the right incentive for private companies + long term health outcomes.
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One of the benefits of having children is the ability to eat a single chicken finger and slice of cheese pizza with every meal out.
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I distinctly remember when my anxieties flipped from worrying about getting fired by my board to realizing there was no way I could quit if I wanted to.
This interview with Ben Horowitz is over a decade old but feels especially relevant to what’s happening in tech today where many previously high-flying startups are now struggling. “[As CEO] I felt like I could die but I couldn’t quit.”
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This does remind me of the time that CVS trained their entire national staff of pharmacists to lie to our pharmacists to try to avoid transferring rx’s. That was a cool move.
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