Year 5/6 Startup Learnings

15 December 2025

I incorporated Loyal in October 2019 as a 24 year old first time, solo founder. The goal was to bring the first FDA-approved longevity drug to market, starting with extending the lifespan of our beloved dogs.

Since then we’ve grown to over 70 people, raised $150M+, created the first regulatory pathway for a lifespan-extending drug, designed and enrolled the first FDA-enabling lifespan extension clinical trial, earned FDA conditional efficacy approval for two (!) of our dog longevity drugs, and been the recipient of unbelievable amounts of enthusiasm and support from the broader dog-loving community.

Behind all those sexy headlines are innumerable false starts, mistakes, and sometimes painful learnings. These are some of the learnings of the past two years.

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Limit your emotionally attachments

My “emotional attachments” are the parts of Loyal that I am irrationally bought into - the fixed variables of the company instituted by the founder.[0]

I try to limit my dogmatism (hah) to only the overarching vision of the company, and try to avoid becoming attached to any specific process or strategy to achieve that vision. In other words: holding constant the what, while being flexible on the how.

This philosophy may have saved the company early on. While my founding vision (dog longevity drugs) has six years later proven to be correct, the founding strategy I pitched to get there ended up being completely incorrect (gene therapy).

Empowered with the context that I was emotionally attached to the vision and not the specific strategy, the team quickly pivoted us to a drug portfolio that better serves Loyal’s vision.

As we have scaled headcount and scope, it has become even more crucial to be explicit with my team on what I am “emotional” about, and what are simply hypotheses or ideas. Inferences run wild in companies, especially about a CEO’s whims and desires - the most effective way to restore alignment is having the self awareness to know what level of attachment you lever to each part of the company, communicating it broadly, and ensuring you do not allow yourself to anchor onto strategies or tactics that are not actually core to achieving the mission.

You don’t know someone until they make a mistake

My absolute favorite interview question is tell me about a mistake you made. A passing grade is a candid explanation of their mistake, where they take radical accountability and demonstrate a learning mindset through how they applied those lessons to future decisions.

A failing grade is:

I can’t remember the last time I made a mistake!
I hired this person and it turned out they were crazy but there is no way I could have known before because they hid it from me…
It was a mistake to take my last job because my boss was totally incompetent and mean!

etc., etc., etc.[1]

You would not believe how many people fail this extremely simple test. And the rate of failure goes up with the seniority of the candidate.[2]

If they pass this test, the next one usually happens early into their tenure at Loyal. Building the first dog longevity drug is quite difficult no matter the depth of your expertise. For the right person this is exciting; for the wrong person, this can bring out insecurity and subsequent bad behavior.

Invariably, new team members make many mistakes early in their tenure. Just like the interview, I don’t particularly care what the mistake is[3], but I care a lot about how they handle it. Gold star: flag it immediately, candor, integrate the lesson without me having to hammer them about it, asking questions to better understand and calibrate. Principal’s office: me finding out about it before they tell me, defensiveness, blaming others, ‘this is the way I’ve always done it!’, etc.

Five years in, I’ve learned that you don’t truly understand someone’s psyche until they’ve made a mistake - so pay close attention to these learning moments when bringing in new talent and don’t ignore the data you generate from them.

Things are never as good as they seem, and never as bad as they seem.

We had our first truly existential moment in 2024. Think: sobbing-on-the-floor-convinced-we-were-dead existential.[4] When I called my board to give them the bad news, one simply said: things are never as good as they seem…and never as bad as they seem.

It was true. We went from bereft, to formulating a plan, to executing on that plan and resolution of the crisis in less than two months. By realizing that things were likely as not as bad as they felt in that moment, I was able to pull myself out of my emotions and into action within a few hours of the bad news.

I’ve also been guilty of overestimating how well something is going. Building a company from scratch requires extreme optimism in the face of highly probable failure. This is the only way you find the narrow path to success.[5] It also feels good to be optimistic/deluded - things are so often on fire, it’s tempting to stick your head in the sand and bask in unreliable signals of success.

For me, the key is maintaining within myself both a deep paranoia - to ensure I see around all the corners - and a deep optimism - so I can envision and build the future.

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Year 4 Learnings | Year 3 Learnings | Year 2 Learnings | Year 1 Learnings

[0] Very few things should be a truly 100% fixed variable in startups (or life), and changeable with data. Emotional attachments are items that are things that are reaching the limit to 100% fixed.

[1] These are actually answers I have gotten to this question, anonymized to protect the guilty.

[2] You do have to look out for false-humbleness, especially in executive candidates. Look for how polished their story is, how obviously on hand/prepared the narrative is, if it makes them look a bit too good. You can push through this by asking for more examples of mistakes until it’s clear you’ve gotten to an unscripted answer.

[3] Obviously, it depends whether it’s an honest mistake/miscalibration, vs. straight up incompetence, lack of care or integrity in their work, etc. - the latter are still flags on performance even if they handle the mistake otherwise perfectly.

[4] One day I’ll tell this story… but not today :)

[5] this is what the path to startup success looks like

thank you to Olivia Dean for writing the soundtrack to which I wrote this :)