July 22, 2020
Five Years of Teckro: We’ve Come a Long Way
And we’re just getting started
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Gary Hughes
CEO & Co-Founder
TeckroI’ve often heard people describe starting a new company as being so hard and the challenges so great, that it is something you really have to love to persevere and succeed.
Everything is stacked against you – if you considered the odds, you would never start a company.
It reminds me of an article penned by the late actor Richard Harris when he wrote, “How do you explain a love affair? It belongs to the heart, not the head, something to be embraced or spurned – there can be no middle ground.”
As entrepreneurs, we accept the challenge and dive head-first in.
When we started Teckro, we had a bit of an advantage in that it was our second technology start-up. The first company, Firecrest Clinical, beat the odds as we successfully operated for a decade. Then, ICON acquired the company in 2011, and we stayed on as part of the ICON leadership for a couple of years.
I can’t say we started Firecrest with a master plan or that it was intentionally the goal to sell the company to a CRO. But that experience as part of a global CRO gave me a deeper appreciation for just how broken the clinical trial process really was. There had to be a better way – a challenge we whole-heartedly embraced.
Balancing Optimism with Uncertainty
There needs to be a degree of optimism to start a new company. In starting Teckro, we believed in a better way for clinical research so that drugs could come to market safer, faster, and more efficiently. At the same time, there is also a degree of uncertainty in getting a new company off the ground. Some of the factors are relatively within your control, such as designing your management team, hiring your first employees, and building your first product.
Yet, the pandemic of 2020 – which isn’t something any of us would have thought of in 2015 – brings a new level of uncertainty. Whether a global health crisis or economic downturns, start-ups need a solid foundation to weather these storms. If there is anything certain for entrepreneurs, it is that these storms will come. It is how you prepare that matters.
Any company starting out needs to have a purpose and then justify to prospective customers, investors, employees and the market in general why you exist. It’s finding that business problem and then delivering a product or service to solve the issue. It’s painting a vision that others buy into about what the future could be like if there were a different way of doing things. For us, it was a vision that clinical trials needed to be simpler, more accessible and transparent.
How do you measure whether a vision resonates? I think we can look at the people from the industry on a journey with us, including hundreds of study teams from major pharma companies and thousands of research staff around the world. There are also our employees, coming from a mix of clinical research and software backgrounds who want to work for us. Validation that we are going in the right direction comes from the champions within our customers who tell us they can’t run a trial without Teckro.
Looking around the Corner
For all we’ve accomplished in the past five years, there is still much to do. Any CEO who isn’t looking around the corner isn’t doing his or her job. But as I’ve learned in my career, great things happen by surrounding yourself with great people.
To that end, I am pleased that Amanda Buckley is the newest person to join our leadership team as Chief Operating Officer. Amanda brings depth of knowledge in both the pharma industry as well as software best practices.
Five years is a milestone that we are all proud of. Yet, it’s a bit retrospective. With momentum behind us, it’s now time to look forward to the next five years and the great things still to come from Teckro. Never taking the odds for granted, it will be with the same level of passion, creativity and sense of urgency to help our customers deliver drugs that improve the quality of life and ease suffering for millions of people around the world.
