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About the Guest:

Laurence Girard

CEO at Fruit Street Health

Laurence Girard is the CEO & Founder of COVID.MD in addition to Fruit Street Health (www.fruitstreet.com) which delivers the CDC’s Diabetes Prevention Program to commercial health plans and employers via group telehealth video conferencing with registered dietitians, wearable devices such as Fitbit and wireless scales, and a mobile application that allows participants to take photos of their food and receive feedback. The DPP resulted from clinical work conducted by the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group, which conducted a major multicenter clinical research study that was published in 2002.

Fruit Street is supported by 500 physician investors who invested more than $25 million into the company.

Laurence’s passion for entrepreneurship started at the Harvard Innovation Lab, the entrepreneurship center at Harvard University. Laurence is also an alumnus of the Kairos Society, a global network of social entrepreneurs focused on having a social impact.

About the Episode:

For this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, John had the pleasure of interviewing serial entrepreneur Laurence Girard. Laurence is the the CEO & Founder of Fruit Street Health, a telemedicine company that deploys a CDC diabetes prevention program around the nation.

Laurence reflects on how Street Fruit grew during the 2020 isolation and quarantine periods, touches on shutting down COVID.MD, the importance of a positive culture, and advice he has for others interested in entrepreneurship.

 

Entrepreneur Rx Episode 40:

Rx_Laurence Girard: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Rx_Laurence Girard: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx. I have the pleasure of speaking with Laurence Girard. Now, he has been paying me, Laurence, it feels like for, I know it's not, but it feels like for years. Laurence is the CEO and founder of Fruit Street and COVID.MD., in addition to a number of other new projects he's working on, Fruit Street delivers a CDC's diabetes prevention program to commercial health plans and employers via a group telehealth video conferencing using registered dietitians, wearable devices such as Fitbit and wireless scales. Laurence is an incredible entrepreneur, I was harassing him for ever since he went to Harvard, he's a Zuckerberg/Gates sort of protegé. Laurence, welcome to the show!

Laurence Girard:
Oh, thanks for having me. I don't deserve to be compared to them, and, and thank you for mentioning our COVID.MD. project, which was a, a temporary pandemic project where we wanted to have people consult with virtual doctors and get an at-home COVID test. But it turned out what happened with that was that we ended up focusing our efforts on diabetes prevention because the utilization of that product ended up taking off. So COVID.MD. is no more, but diabetes prevention is alive and well.

John Shufeldt:
Well, you know what? Let's chat about COVID.MD for just for a second. Not, not because it didn't work, but just because of your rapid pivot to add that to your armamentarium of things you're doing now. Thank God you didn't say it was to prescribe ivermectin, kind of like that, I'd have to, you know, I'd have to shut this off right away.

Laurence Girard:
Right!

John Shufeldt:
But talk about how quickly you pivoted to work on that once the pandemic started. Like, what was the time frame? That's pretty incredible.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah. I mean, I just remember March of 2020, just watching the news and everybody talking about telemedicine and COVID and all that kind of stuff. And I feel like every healthcare entrepreneur tried to do something to help with the pandemic, even if they weren't working on something that was directly relevant, because everybody felt this need to kind of have a social impact and kind of band together as a country. We're part of something called Startup Health, which has like several hundred healthcare entrepreneurs, and everybody wanted to do something with COVID. And so the idea was to allow people to take almost like a, you know, you would check your symptoms and then it would escalate you to talk to a doctor, and then the idea was that someone could get an at-home PCR test as well. And so we spent, we did a lot of work on that, but then once we were six months into the project, what happened was that the diabetes prevention program utilization skyrocketed because what happened was people were at home, they weren't eating well, they were stressed, they weren't exercising, they weren't sleeping, and so some of our contracts with large Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, we just started enrolling thousands of people, which made us realize that we should shut down the COVID.MD product, which was, it wasn't a separate company, which is a product of Fruit Street. And we should just focus on what we do well, and it just kind of brings you back to that lesson as an entrepreneur that focus on doing one thing really well, and that's what the most successful telemedicine companies do. And so it was an interesting experience where we had even recruited like tons of engineers and tons of talent who wanted to work on COVID.MD, and then we repurposed that talent for diabetes prevention. And so I think it takes a lot of self-awareness as an entrepreneur to be willing to launch a new product, but then kill it fast enough to not destroy your whole company, so it was an interesting experience.

John Shufeldt:
Well, you know, it's actually really interesting. And I mean, you're, you know, I've got a lot of gray hair on you. And I don't know if, that if I've always learned that one. You know, there's that old saying, you know, if you go after one rabbit, you have dinner, if you have after ten rabbits, you starve. And I always remember the story of Steve Jobs going back to Apple and killing 95% of the ideas people brought him and focusing on, I think it was five or maybe seven, but it was only a few. So obviously it's merit there and certainly was very smart of you to A to go down that path initially to see where it led, but then B, pivot back to what you were doing so well, which was the diabetes stuff.

Laurence Girard:
Right, right. Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
Now, as I recall, because as I was harassing you before we started, the, you raised a lot of money on LinkedIn because I was getting messages, it seemed like from you 24/7 when you initially started it, it was not a diabetes, or was it, was it diabetes-focused or was it more telemedicine general-focused?

Laurence Girard:
Yeah. So it was actually a telemedicine software product that we would license to dieticians and doctors as a software, as a service product, so they would pay us, let's say, $200 dollars per month for the software. Most of the users were dieticians because it would allow them to video conference, but then also monitor diet and lifestyle like the patients could take pictures of their food integrated with scales, Fitbit, blood pressure cuffs, but we also have primary care doctors that would monitor their patients remotely as well. So we did that for four years, actually from 2014 to 2018. And then we realized that instead of licensing software to dieticians, we could actually employ them and use the technology we had developed to deliver the CDC diabetes prevention program to large self-insured employers and health plans because they have such a big incentive to prevent type two diabetes, to reduce health care costs. And so we kind of repurposed the technology that we had built, and then the revenue just started increasing pretty quickly.

John Shufeldt:
Interesting. What do you see as the ... For Fruit Street? Where do you think it's going to go? What's your time frame?

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, well, we did about $3.9 million dollars from revenue last year. We have a large channel partner that has rolled us out to some pretty large customers, like we have a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan with 3 million members. We have one of the top five airlines as a customer as well, and so to that partner is driving all of the revenue right now. I don't think I can say exactly who it is, but they're driving a lot of the revenue. And I don't really plan for exits, I don't really believe in that because I think that at the end of the day, as an entrepreneur, you have to have a good product, grow your revenue, have happy employees, develop technology, and then if you get an acquisition offer, you can figure it out then, right? You cross that bridge when you comes to it kind of philosophy. I mean, I also think the market size is big enough for Fruit Street could become a public company, if you look at Teladoc acquiring Livongo, that was $18 billion dollar acquisition, right? Which, just shows you the market size, the problem of diabetes and obesity is so big that you could have a public company in diabetes prevention. But I think most startups end up getting acquired rather than going public, that's usually what happens.

John Shufeldt:
And why did you pick diabetes? What was the genesis of that?

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, well, when I was in college, I was planning to go to medical school, and then I was volunteering in an emergency room while taking a nutrition epidemiology course. And I just realized that a lot of the patients coming into the emergency room with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, so much of it was preventable through diet and lifestyle. And I read about physicians like Dean Ornish with his heart disease reversal program. And I just realized that diet and lifestyle was so important. But the history of the diabetes prevention program is really quite unique, it goes all the way back to a medicare funded clinical trial where Medicare spent $175 million dollars trying to figure out how to prevent type two diabetes, because that's what drives a lot of the health care costs. So they had about 3,000 patients with prediabetes. There's three arms in the trial, there was a placebo arm, another arm took metformin, and then the third was in a lifestyle modification program that consisted of 22 classes with a lifestyle coach covering topics like diet, exercise, sleep, stress management. And basically they published this research in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago, and it found that the lifestyle intervention was more effective than metformin in preventing type two diabetes. The lifestyle group reduced their risk by 58%, so that research led to Medicare and Medicaid, paying for the diabetes prevention program, employers in health plans paying for the program. And then the CDC developed a national public health program where there's now 1,600 organizations delivering the program, and it also has support from like the AMA and that kind of thing. And so it's really the number one evidence-based program for preventing lifestyle-related diseases. And so when we go into an employer or a health plan, this is not Fruit Street's diabetes prevention program or .... diabetes prevention program, this is like 20 years of clinical research in the making. And so we're really part of a broader national effort to get the diabetes prevention program distributed, but they call it the Diabetes Prevention Program to get payers interested, because if someone develops type two diabetes, their health care costs go up by $9,600 dollars typically. But really, it's a diet and lifestyle change program. If you lose 5% of your weight or you reduce your hemoglobin A1C, you're reducing your risk for many different chronic diseases and not just diabetes.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I was listening to a Peter Attia podcast this morning actually, and they mentioned it 12%, that 88% of adults have metabolic syndrome.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
88%. Now, I mean, I see it a lot in the emergency department, like, like you did when you were working back in your college days. I was blown away by 88%, however. So it's elevated HBA1C, it's elevated blood pressure, it's, it's not BMI, but it's girth, circumference. I mean, just all these markers for ten to really poor health outcomes.

Laurence Girard:
Right.

John Shufeldt:
You're right, if you can get it early, and, you know, one of the things they talked about in this, and I didn't personally focus on this for myself for probably ten years, but if you can intervene early, it's about time people are interviewing, intervening when they have, quote, pre-diabetes, there's already been a lot of damage done.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah. So you've got it.

John Shufeldt:
Got to catch them early early.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, yeah. And in fact, that's why the Ad Council and the CDC and the AMA, they're running these national campaigns now where there's one-minute risk quiz videos with like puppies and cute animals and stuff to educate people because one in three Americans are pre-diabetic, but eight out of ten people with prediabetes don't know that they have it. It's very similar to hypertension, which is like the silent killer. And one day you just have a heart attack and that's it, right? And so we have to really raise awareness of pre-diabetes so people are aware of what it is and then help them to enroll into a CDC-recognized diabetes prevention program. I think also fatty liver disease is relevant, like people talk about prediabetes, but there's also this other epidemic that's not being talked about it, fatty liver disease, too.

John Shufeldt:
Oh, totally. I mean, it's this whole constellation of things that if you have one, it seems to portend for all the others. So diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease, and then all sequelae related to that. Yeah, I totally agree. So it's interesting. So what year were you at Harvard when you bailed out for a year and to do your startup, Zuckerberg? I mean, I mean ...

Laurence Girard:
Thank you. You're you're funny. Yes. I was in a program at Harvard called the Harvard Extension School, which is typically for older adults. But there's been a group of traditional college students that have pursued it. So I was in the bachelor's degree program there, and, so I graduated high school in 2010 and started taking courses there in 2011. Some of my professors were physicians in the psychology department that started the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where they teach physicians how to do these programs. But the same year, they opened the Harvard Innovation Lab on the Harvard Business School campus, which is really where I got interested in entrepreneurship, and just kind of started as a summer project at the Harvard Innovation Lab and got some physicians from the medical school to invest and some Harvard Business School alumni and the physicians actually named the company. So the name Fruit Street comes from the address of Massachusetts General Hospital, where the first physicians invested. So they, at first I hated it, but then I was like, oh, it's kind of like Apple computers and like fruit is healthy and street is like a journey. But the name is, I guess the branding around it, right? But, but, yeah. And then I, I was there for a couple of years in Boston and then I moved out to San Francisco, tried that twice, but I came back to New York where my family is, I, I'm just a native New Yorker. So now I've been here for, for quite a while.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah. You've done that, you've really done the typical entrepreneur journey. Start on the East Coast, move out to the Silicon Valley, that's, that's pretty classic. You know, it's funny, I always wondered where you got the name Fruit Street. And I thought with the diabetes, I'm like, well, fruit's not all that good for you if you're a diabetic because of the high fructose. But, but now I get it.

Laurence Girard:
Better than a candy bar, though, you know?

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's better than candy bar. So, yeah. Candy Bar Street, I don't think would have sold well for.

Laurence Girard:
No.

John Shufeldt:
The diabetes, diabetes prevention. So going back, how long have you been in Fruit Street?

Laurence Girard:
We were incorporated in May of 2014.

John Shufeldt:
All right. So wow. So eight years.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah!

John Shufeldt:
So what, what have you learned that you now that you, because this will be really important for people who want to, who are listening to say, you know, I want to be Laurence when I grow up. What did you learn along the path that you wish you would have known back in 2014, 2015?

Laurence Girard:
That's a very long list. But if I had to pick the top, the top three, I mean, I think that culture is absolutely critical. I love that book called The No Asshole Rule. It's like even if you have an A performer, but they're just a jerk to all of your other employees, you can ...

John Shufeldt:
Yeap! Got to go.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think culture is critical, it keeps people motivated and energized. You really need a small, motivated team and a start-up where they're really driven by the mission, but they also enjoy their work and they're going to be often working long hours. I think that's probably the, the number one thing. And then also the second thing is not just a good culture but like good talent. I remember when I was a younger entrepreneur, I used to think that like recruiters were the stupidest thing in the world. Like, why do they pay? Why do these entrepreneurs pay them 20% of their salary? Can I just find these people myself? But one of the best hires I ever made was because of an email, an email from a recruiter that emailed me randomly with someone's résumé, and that person led to the contract that is generated most of our company's revenue today. And so you have to have good people, but also good talent. And then I think the last one would just be work-life balance. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have worked less really, and had more balance. You know, it's not about working 100-hour weeks, it's more about a balance, right? You need to take care of your diet and lifestyle and live the Fruit Street lifestyle, and also be balanced as an entrepreneur and a person. Because if you're not balanced, you're going to find as an entrepreneur, you start being maybe a little agitated, maybe like meaner to people in your life than you would have liked. And that's not going to build that culture, right? So you have to be like a grounded, healthy version of yourself if you're going to be a leader to other people.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, there's that fine balance because my question was going to be, had you not worked so much, would it have worked so well? But you're right, if you're working too much, then you fall into the no asshole role and which doesn't work at all because then people lead, they don't follow you, and you lose all the great talents that you've worked so hard to recruit. So yeah, that is a fine balance. So those are the three. Now, let me ask you about LinkedIn, because ... positions listening know Laurence's name, how did she come up with that idea? Because I thought that was we never did that for MeMD, but I always thought that was genius. I thought that was really cool.

Laurence Girard:
Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I did drank the Kool-Aid in the beginning and try to pitch off the Silicon Valley, Sandhill Road, VCs when I was a naive 21-year-old, now I'm 30. But, you know, and like part of it was just getting rejected by those VCs, and still thinking that the idea was good and figuring out another way to get it done. But then as I got these individual angel investors involved and physicians involved and they started almost acting as like advisors to me, I thought, why don't I triple down on this? And, and the thought was to say, let's make, instead of going to a venture capital firm for capital and advice, why don't we make this more of a grassroots effort of physicians and individuals who want to have a social impact in healthcare? And so now we have more than 500 physicians that have invested over $33 million dollars in equity financing into the company where they've typically put in 25, 200K, which goes a very long way when you're building software, you know, it's not like we're building cars. You're just supporting a small team of software engineers. Like the whole team that built Instagram was like, what, 13 people or something, right? And it was a billion dollar something exit, right? So they're investors, but they're also participating almost like on this advisory board where we have an online discussion forum set up for them through software called Basecamp, where they're giving feedback and input. So we're basically crowdfunding capital for the company, crowdsourcing knowledge for the company, and then building a network of evangelists that have conviction around our social mission at preventing type two diabetes. But the thing that we've done in the last six months is that instead of going to physicians, we've made a really focused effort to get people involved with more diverse backgrounds in technology, finance, sales and marketing. So now we have people as investors and advisors from like Google, IBM, Accenture, Microsoft, Amazon, Health Plan CEOs, and those people are investing because they have a mom or a dad with diabetes or a spouse with diabetes, or they just have this personal connection to it. And it really just gets back to this quote that I like, which is the only thing that's ever changed the world is a small group of committed citizens. I mean, I'd rather have 1,000 physicians and technologists that are driven by the mission than one venture capital firm that might one day decide, you know what, this is not our favorite portfolio company, we're just going to write them off, right? So I think that you can't fail when you have this almost like social movement of people that want to see diabetes prevented compared to just a private equity group being an investor, so that's kind of been our approach there.

John Shufeldt:
Very cool because I've been, I've clicked through those links. So the very, one of it was compelling. You have a great message and I thought it was a really cool strategy to do that. So where are you, where are you headed next? So you don't want to, you know, you don't want to go after too many rabbits. So where's the next stop for you?

Laurence Girard:
Well, yeah, there's both of them Fruit Street and outside of Fruit Street. I mean, in Fruit Street right now, we've been mostly focused on selling to self-insured employers and health plans, but we're expanding into two new channels. One is getting physicians to refer their patients because Medicaid pays for the diabetes prevention program. So in states like Illinois, Fruit Street is a Medicaid provider, which is really exciting because they're specifically paying for it through telehealth. So we're starting to focus on that. More physicians can refer pre-diabetic patients and then also direct to consumer, similar to companies like Noom. But instead of marketing it as a weight loss program to focus on marketing it more as a diabetes prevention program and raising awareness of pre-diabetes. So we've been interviewing some of the top ad agencies to really make a big national push to get millions of people to become aware of pre-diabetes and then aware of Fruit Street. So that's what's happening in the Fruit Street universe today. But, you know, I have a couple other projects, too.

John Shufeldt:
Of course. Now you're still the CEO of Fruit Street.

Laurence Girard:
Yep. Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
Do you have the, I mean, so my, I always try to replace myself after eight or ten years. Do you have that MO as well or are you going to keep riding?

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, it's an interesting question that was brought up recently, you know, just because I think like if you look at bigger companies, sometimes you only have a CEO for like a few years just because it just takes so much out of you in terms of that work-life balance. I think right now I'm kind of enjoying it and just kind of keep going, and I think the key is to surround yourself with good people. Like we just hired an incredible chief operating officer who was one of our investors and advisors for quite a while. So I still have kind of unlimited energy to keep going, but just trying to hire some smart people to help me. But I mean, I'm really driven by the mission of it, which is why I have so much energy for it. It's like if you think about, let's say I spent 20 years of my life on this, maybe we would have a million people go through the diabetes prevention program and then you're preventing amputation, blindness, heart disease, dialysis. I mean, we get these incredible stories every Wednesday from the dieticians, it's called Wednesday Wins. And every week they share success stories with patients. And you hear things like this person lost 50 pounds. This person went to their doctor and they took them off of five medications. This person reversed their pre-diabetes, this person reversed their sleep apnea. And it's just that's kind of like the motivating factor, really.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's really hard. It's well, not hard, it's impossible to ignore because, because you're right, if you can get folks early to drastically lower their carbohydrate intake, get off insulin, start reversing their coronary artery disease and peripheral vascular disease, I mean, it's, it's literally going to save their life.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, no, for sure, for sure.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah. You said something of it was, actually really interesting because I started my entrepreneurial career with your message of, you know, I'm not looking for the exit, I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That was me. But you know what I, what I tell people now and where I've kind of learned is if you don't think of the exit when you start, you don't really have a direction where you're headed to get there. And so you're a little bit of a meandering ship along the way. Now, you don't say you've meandered much, but, but for me it seemed like I was doing more meandering as I was trying to find the, the exit, because I didn't really think of that when I started. But now, however, I try to, go back to that thought process you had and how, how you got there, because I don't think, I think that's atypical.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, well, I think that the way I look at entrepreneurship is that you're solving a problem for someone, right? And so, and if you solve a problem for someone, you have customers, right? And the more revenue you have, the more likely you are to have an exit, right? So I think that there's kind of like almost two types of entrepreneurs, right? There's, there's entrepreneurs that start a business to make money and then there's entrepreneurs that start it for maybe more of a social impact reason. When I started Fruit Street, it was because of this like almost like just really compelling thing where I wanted to prevent that patient from coming into the emergency room and dying from their obesity. I mean, there was literally a patient that died from obesity. And as a pre-med student, they had me like help them with the body, like literally. And I'm like, this is what obesity is. And so I felt compelled for non-financial reasons. And so I think some companies, that's what it is, and that's why you start it. Other companies, it's more financially-driven, and I don't think there's anything wrong with, with either. I think you can have one entrepreneur where like one time they start a company is because of the social mission and other times they think it's because it's an amazing business opportunity. I think it just depends on the person in the situation. I think as Fruit Street's become more mature, we definitely have identified an exit route that is highly likely. I mean, we've gotten a couple of acquisition offers already and so we kind of have learned the types of companies that are going to acquire us in the future. But I don't know that you necessarily know that from day one. You know, there's a quote that I love, which is a startup as a company that doesn't know what its product is or its customers are. So, so like, I don't know if you can have an exit strategy until you figure out what your product is and who your customers are. But it depends on the situation and the business, you know?

John Shufeldt:
That is very true. I mean, even after, even as your MVP, you're still kind of scrambling that, okay, is this really do I really have something here or it's going to take a few more pivots before, before it gets here. I mean, you know, I listened to a Zuckerberg interview recently, and there's no way when he was in his college dorm room doing what I call the Harvard face thing that he was, he was envisioning the metaverse at Facebook.

Laurence Girard:
That's right.

John Shufeldt:
That's classic. What advice do you have for folks who do grow up and say they want to be you or physicians, for that matter, who want to start their entrepreneurial venture? It sounds like you're saying find something you really believe in that matters to you and focus on that because then everything else falls into place?

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, I mean, it has to be a little bit of an obsession. I think that's a Mark Cuban quote, but you have to almost be like obsessed with it. I mean, you have to be willing to work on it 60 hours a week, right? I think it's okay if you think about an idea of part time and you work on it a little bit on the side, but at some point, if you really want to go for it, it has to be like your sole focus, it has to be like your baby because you're competing with people, we're like, that's, that's what it is, right? It's like it's like they have to do this, right? But I think don't do it because you think it's a good financial opportunity, do it because you think it's going to have a social impact, but also do some planning like don't just quit your job immediately, right? I mean, like print out stuff, kike there's the lean startup canvas where you lay out like the product, the revenue model, you know, the market size, the opportunity, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I think everybody should read the book Lean Startup. It's like a must read for anybody that wants to be an entrepreneur. So I think that's the first place I went to, read The Lean Startup.

John Shufeldt:
So I, it's funny you star that book because I saw, I Love Eric Reece, and that book is amazing. I wish he would have written it much earlier than he did because God knows I made pretty much every mistake in the book along the way. But I think for a lot of physicians particularly, they're going to have to start this as a side hustle until, like you said, they figured it out. Is it something they can really launch off of and turn that into their occupation and their avocation outside of medicine? And that, for a lot of folks, is, is a difficult, difficult leap of faith.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it depends on what it is, right? Because they also could just be the idea co-founder and you know, have higher CEO to like run it. I mean, I don't know, maybe you come up with a medical device, for example, or an idea for a pharmaceutical drug and they don't necessarily have to quit being a physician full-time. I mean, I think that every business needs like a full-time CEO, right? But I think that a physician can come up with an idea and work on it two or three days a week or even work on it as an advisor, but somebody has to be full-time. I've actually I've had Fruit Street investors that have started companies, and nobody's working on the business fulltime. And I'm like, the first thing you have to do is hire a full time CEO.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Laurence Girard:
Because you will not succeed, otherwise, right? It's okay if you want to be a co-founder, be an advisor, but you need a full-time CEO, otherwise you're guaranteed to fail.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally agree. Do you think you're ever employable again? I mean, are you ever going to be employable?

Laurence Girard:
Well, I've never had a real job, aside from being a cash register at a Harvard cafeteria, being a swim instructor, being a viola teacher. But aside from like, I've never had like a full corporate job. But sometimes I envy people that are employed because, you know, entrepreneurship is pretty hard. I mean, you have to worry about like meeting payroll and like all that kind of stuff. I mean, probably once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, I suppose. But you never know what the future holds in life, right?

John Shufeldt:
Yeah. I always tell people I'm probably unemployable after doing this so long. Okay, so where can people find out more about you?

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, just go to FruitStreet.com or check me out on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is definitely a good place to find me, as you've pointed out.

John Shufeldt:
Well, it's really the other way. We can't miss you on LinkedIn, or you can't miss us.

Laurence Girard:
Yeah, right, exactly.

John Shufeldt:
I'm sure everybody listening to this has been, is being pinged by you, which is really cool. So, hey, congratulations, Laurence. You have had, you have done phenomenal things. You're, you've got at least another 30 years in you, I can tell with that energy.

Laurence Girard:
Oh, thank you.

John Shufeldt:
So congratulations. You're killing it.

Laurence Girard:
Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

John Shufeldt:
My pleasure. Well, folks, thanks. Another, another phenomenal edition of Entrepreneurs Rx with Laurence Girard. Well, check out our show notes for all links to him and everything he's doing, including his new ventures, and I'll see you next time.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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Key Take-Aways:

  • Entrepreneurs focus on one thing, and they do it excellently well.
  • Concentrating on having a great business, happy employees, and technology development should be the roadmap for all entrepreneurs instead of exiting once they’ve achieved success.
  • Company culture is vital for a successful startup.
  • Good talent will enhance your company: it’s not only good people.
  • The only thing that changed the world was a small group of committed citizens.

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