Part 1:

As founders, Julia Regan and Aaron Gani have both climbed a proverbial mountain over the past few years — only to find there’s another mountain after you reach the first plateau.

The next summit from them is the one that you gaze up at when you introduce yourself less as a founder but more as a CEO — as one deals with larger capital raises, increased headcount and a formation of a board of directors (among other issues).

Regan founded RxLightning, a digital platform that expedites the specialty medication enrollment process. Gani is behind BehaVR, which uses virtual reality, cloud computing and machine learning as a means of digital therapeutics aid in addiction recovery and stress reduction, among other ailments.

On the morning of the third day of Endeavor’s National Selection Panel at the new Story building in NuLu, Regan and Gani took part in a fireside chat from which much insight could be gleaned — so much that I have chosen to turn their nuggets of advice into a two-part piece.

After all, Regan and Gani are two of the biggest success stories in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem in recent memory in terms of raising capital and creating a national name in their respective markets. They also both happen to reside in the health care space, which Regan called “notoriously slow.”

“In my business, my biggest competitor is still the fax machine … We’re in 2024,” Regan told the crowd. “That is crazy that the fax machine, still, in healthcare, is considered the [most secure] way for patient data transfer between parties.”

The rise of Regan’s New Albany, Indiana-based RxLightning has been anything but slow. It’s been well documented since its founding in 2020 and named one of our 2023 Inno Fire Award winners for the “On The Rise” category.

The company, which was one of our 2022 Startups to Watch, has raised approximately $20.5 million — including $17.5 million in 2023 — since its founding. On the Endeavor side of the equation, RxLightning joined a rare group of companies that jumped over the national round of acceptance and went to the top prize of getting the green light at the organization’s International Selection Panel (ISP) event in 2022 in Greece.

A former chief technology officer at Humana (NYSE: HUM), Gani is the founder and CEO of BehaVR, which also was named as a 2022 Startup to Watch (when it had raised $11 million total at that point from seed and Series A rounds). The company, based out of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, broke onto the health tech scene in 2016 — three years before being named an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2019 at an ISP event in Mexico.

“I had a great tenure there,” Gani said of his 12 years at Humana, “but I was desperate to start a business. I was going to die unhappy.”

In 2023, the company merged with New Jersey-based Fern Health to become RealizedCare, with Gani serving as the CEO. The company, which is focusing on tackling the issue of chronic pain through its modalities, has a headcount of 28 — with six employees living in the Louisville area.

Enjoyment v. pain

On the topic of raising capital, Regan admitted that she enjoys the process.

“There’s a thrill to convincing someone around what you’re going to do, with getting people to believe it,” said Regan, whose team self-funded the business for the first nine months of its existence.

“I didn’t realize you could actually raise capital with just a PowerPoint and just an idea,” said Regan, who did not start pitching to investors until it had its minimum viable product, resulting in two large union contracts right off the bat.

Regan, whose company has a headcount of approximately 40, also pointed out that her enjoyment of raising capital has been bolstered by the fact that her company has not had to deal with any major distractions with its original business.

And then there’s Gani, who scattered one-liners throughout the duration of the event.

“It’s very painful. It’s very challenging, and I hate it,” said Gani, to a laughing audience.

Gani did point out that 80% of its Series A round, in which he raised approximately $7.2 million in 2021, came from Louisville. He added that he received his first investment from John Willmoth from Poplar Ventures. Others included Chrysalis Ventures (David Jones, Jr.), Thornton Capital (Matt Thornton), Future Labs Capital (Mack Swhab), CompaniesWood (Phoebe Wood), and Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (Keyhorse Capital) among others based in the Louisville metro area.

That was before BehaVR raised $13 million in a Series B round in 2023 with larger investors such as Optum Ventures (Boston), Oxford Science Enterprises (UK), Accenture Ventures (San Francisco) — after it merged with OxfordVR earlier in the year.

“I bootstrapped for a couple of years, and built the platform and was figuring a lot of things out,” said Gani, who has overseen RealizedCare raise an additional $5 million since the merger with Fern Health. “And then we went out to get external capital, we just wouldn’t be here without the Louisville systems and investors. … For us it’s been a real challenge, because we’re doing something that’s like new on top of new on top of new.

“VR is still new — and was really new in 2016 — and I had no idea what I was doing, so that didn’t help. But fortunately, we captured a lot of fun learning challenges and had a lot of help from this community.”

Part 2:

Work-life balance.

A three-word “buzz term,” for sure, but can there be such a thing in the life of a founder?

That was one of the last questions that was presented to RxLightning Founder/CEO Julia Regan and RealizedCare CEO Aaron Gani at a fireside chat on the closing day of Endeavor’s recent National Selection Panel event in Louisville on April 19.

The question was posed by the moderator, an Endeavor Midwest team member, Tim Barr, Jr., based out of Cincinnati.

“Probably not well,” Regan said of her early attempts to allow her work life and personal life to exist in separate realms.

That has changed, though, recently with the hiring of an executive coach, Byron Morrison, who specializes in working with CEOs in Regan’s situation.

Through Morrison, she has embraced the concept of “push-pull days,” where sometimes you are in the fray (pull), while other times not.

“I always thought I had to do everything. And I always thought I had to be present for my team constantly, which I think I’ve been able to step back and see … that’s not necessarily what I want them to aspire to do, because it’s not healthy for everyone.”

On a push day, Regan most likely will not go into the office, and instead will run errands or take care of her family while still being accessible.

“[Those are] actually my most productive days, because I’m not in the weeds … I step back,” said Regan, who added that when she has her kids she leaves the office at 2:30 p.m.

When a CEO/leadership team member does find the right cadence, Regan said it was important to make a commitment to that.

“It’s very easy to get pulled back into the chaos of working and interacting with people,” she said.

Gani starts most days with an early morning workout, but always makes sure that from 5:30 p.m. on he is done with work and focused on time with his family.

He agreed with Regan on the importance of having those push days.

“You just got to give yourself a little bit of room to be like, ‘I’m not doing that today. I’m gonna go do whatever it is I need to do to preserve my sanity,’” Gani said.

During his opening comments, Gani mentioned that he worked out in a VR platform earlier that morning. One platform allows him to workout in different parts of the world, while another one simulated being in a boxing ring — which can often be a metaphor for a tough day.

One of those days where “I’ve got punched really hard at work,” Gani finds comfort and mindfulness in engaging with the same time of digital therapeutics that his company is selling to its clients. This includes meditating through VR, which like the workout platform, allows him to go to a beach or the top of a mountain or many other places far away from Kentucky.

“It seems like it would not make a big difference, but it does,” he told the audience. “The multi-sensory stimulation of being in a whole other place…”

To which, Barr asked the question we all wanted to: Are you not meditating with your eyes closed?

“You’re sitting on a mountaintop, looking at a sunrise and there’s nothing around and it’s peaceful and you’re hearing the sounds of nature, which [makes you] close your eyes,” Gani clarified.

Gani added that he frequently hears that people who have struggled to meditate through traditional means, have been able to have much better success when they have tried it through VR.

The power of delegating

When it was time for the audience to ask questions, the first one centered on the idea of letting go while scaling up his/her company.

Regan said that was a struggle for her at first, leaving her “constantly in a spiral,” That was until she read one of Morrison’s books, “Think Like a CEO,” that had her create an inventory for a week of how she was spending her time. The exercise made her realize how often she was over-scheduling, for one. To this day, she repeats the exercise every 30 days.

From there, Regan timestamps her schedule, as best as he can and then has someone hold her accountable for sticking with what she has planned, whom she calls her “accountability partner.”

“There’s a natural tendency — especially coming from a founder to a leader to say, ‘I could go fix that … but just because I could do it, if I have somebody in place, I should not be doing it. I should be allowing them to do it because if I keep undermining them, we’re not going to grow.”

Gani said he found the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) platform (used by many founders) very helpful when getting everyone aligned with his company’s values, long-term goals and short-term goals and the like — while also having a built-in accountability system. This helps his team and he always center their efforts around one key question: “What are the most important things right now? … Just to know if you’re delegating correctly and you’re able to stay connected.”

Written by Stephen Schmidt for KYInno.