How one founder navigated a highly personal product category and a major shift in focus – ProWellTech
On this week’s episode of Found, we speak to Rob Schutz, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Ro. Ro recently raised $500 million, bringing its total raised to date to near $1 billion. The digital healthcare startup now does everything from telehealth primary care, to operating physical pharmacies, but it originally began life as Roman, a startup addressing men’s health and, specifically, erectile dysfunction.
Rob told us how a windy path from founding a daily deals site in the heady times of Groupon, to teaching at General Assembly, and being an early employee at Bark Box (now just ‘Bark’) led him to meeting up with co-founders Zachariah Reitano and Saman Rahmanian and setting up Roman in the first place. He also detailed how the company evolved, first to address women’s health, as well, and eventually to providing much more broad-reaching remote primary care.
We talked about everything from managing the dynamics in a founder triumvirate (including declarations of love), to dealing with the ongoing complications of a rebrand, to operating a business in an industry with dense regulatory requirements that vary considerably state to state.
We loved our time chatting with Rob, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at [email protected]. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.
