Why I'm joining Felix as CPO

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining Felix this January, as Chief Product Officer.

So, why did I choose Felix??

In my life and my career, my objectives are actually pretty simple: do some good for the world; build meaningful relationships; and learn and grow as a person along the way. If I accomplish these things, I think I'll have led a fulfilling life / career.

When I set out to find my next role, these were my ultimate objectives. But, they weren't sufficient on their own. I needed to develop a more specific set of criteria to help me make the right choice.

This wasn't so simple.

I found it challenging to come up with selection criteria upfront, because they always felt arbitrary. Did these things?really?matter to me? Or did they just sound good?

Instead, I focused on speaking to as many companies as possible, with the idea that I could reverse engineer the set of criteria that?actually?matters to me and would therefore help me achieve my goals. Whenever I encountered a company that I felt a natural affinity (or aversion) to, I would reflect on why that was the case and use that to define / refine my criteria.

Ultimately, two distinct categories of criteria emerged:

• Objective criteria. These represent a set of objective attributes of my ideal company. They are helpful to filter down the list of potential candidates because they're easy to evaluate: a company either satisfies them or it doesn't — it's binary.?
• Subjective criteria: These are things that require me to make a personal value judgment. They aren't binary, but rather exist along a spectrum.

I was able to narrow it down to three companies (including Felix) that met my objective criteria:

• Consumer focused. I like the challenge of building for consumers because the product value needs to be self-evident. There's no intermediaries to sell your product, it needs to sell itself.
• A small team. I'm a maker at heart, so I seek out environments where I can spend more time building, and less time on the operational overhead that comes with a large org.
• First principles problem. I am most excited by 'first principles' problems which solve for some fundamental part of the human experience (e.g., health, wealth, relationships, etc.).
• Product market fit. I gravitate to companies that have established a beachhead, but still have lots of room to grow and expand. For me, this strikes the right balance between stability and greenfield opportunity.
• Something new. I'm most eager to apply my skills and experience to a completely new and unfamiliar space. New is exciting!

From here, I went deep with all three companies in order to evaluate them against the two subjective criteria that had emerged:

1. A meaningful mission
2. Good people

This process was a lot more difficult because, as spectrum phenomenon, these are much more abstract concepts. How do you define meaningful? What's a good person in this context? Moreover, all three companies met these criteria to an extent. Therefore, my challenge was first to unpack these amorphous concepts into something more concrete and measurable, and?then?to evaluate each company against them.??

A Meaningful Mission

An old adage among writers is to "write what you know." I believe the same is true in startups; it is way easier and more fulfilling to work on a mission that is personally resonant to you.?

Felix's mission is to help Canadians live healthier and happier lives, by tackling three key problems:

• The stigmas that prevent people from seeking care.
• The strain on our precious healthcare capacity.
• The complex and opaque nature of the healthcare system.

While I'm grateful to live in a country that guarantees access to medical care,?I've had personal experience with each of these problems as I've navigated my own mental and physical health journey, and the feelings of isolation and desperation that follow. But, I've also experienced first-hand just how impactful the right treatment can be, once you find it.

Given my experience, I can think of few more meaningful missions than to help other Canadians navigate their own health journeys with a little more ease, and a little more grace.

Good People

As part of my process, I focused primarily on evaluating leaders because they disproportionately shape the culture of the organization, and the people they choose to hire are a reflection of their values.

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of startup leaders are smart, hardworking, and ambitious. These are must-haves to do the job. So, I focused my evaluation on some less common attributes which are really important to me:

• Kindness and compassion.?The success of every startup ultimately hinges on people — your employees and your customers. As startups grow, it is natural to create abstractions to help you reason with people at larger and larger scales (think org charts, demographic segments, etc.). These abstractions can be helpful tools, but they're ultimately just models. As such, they do not capture the complexity and nuance of the people they represent. In a startup, truly compassionate leaders never lose sight of this fact as the company scales. Rather, they embrace this underlying humanity as a critical and necessary consideration in their most important decisions.?
• Curiosity and confidence.?A feature of many startups is disruption. Disrupting an existing paradigm requires balancing two key attributes: curiosity and confidence. Curiosity is the humble acknowledgement that you don't have all the answers and are eager to learn; confidence is the conviction that you can build something better than the status quo. Good leaders maintain this balance as the company scales, and resist the temptation to let their success breed overconfidence and diminish their curiosity.
• Authenticity.?Startups are volatile, a series of dizzying highs and terrifying lows. Authentic leaders remain true to themselves and their principles throughout this volatility, especially when things are at their lowest. It's easy to be kind, compassionate and curious when things are going well, but it's the hard times that really put it to the test.

Throughout my conversations with Felix, I consistently observed strong indicators of these attributes: compassionate leaders who sincerely care about patient outcomes; an enduring curiosity to learn from people with different skills and experiences; and, a level of authenticity that felt rare, especially in such a potentially contrived context as an interview. There was a mutual level of trust and vulnerability that I've never really experienced before when interviewing for a job.?

I ultimately chose Felix because, more than any other company, it satisfied my criteria. But, remark that the criteria I developed was just a means to an end, in service of my ultimate goals: do some good for the world; build meaningful relationships; and learn and grow as a person along the way. That's why I really chose to join Felix.

If you're exploring what comes next in your career, hopefully my process helps you figure out what's really important to you. If my criteria resonate with you, you might want to consider applying to Felix — we're hiring!

Avrum