Patrick Quigley, CEO of Sidecar Health, discusses raising $175 million to make health insurance affordable. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Patrick Quigley, CEO of Sidecar Health, discusses raising $175 million to make health insurance affordable. He brings over 20 years of experience to Sidecar Health, along with previous leadership roles at Katch and QuinStreet, Inc.
because insurance is just a math equation right it's the cost of a claim times the likelihood of that claim plus a margin and so if we could introduce a product that has a lower claims cost that will translate immediately into a lower insurance cost and so that's what we did yeah i mean cycle health is um is we're a health insurance company but we're totally different than every other health insurance company what we do is we give people the money they need to pay for care when they need it [Music] alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so super excited about the guests that we have today i think that we're going to be learning quite a bit when it comes to building scaling i mean exiting i mean you you name it so i guess without further ado i'd like to welcome our guest today patrick quigley welcome to the show thank you very much for having me really appreciate it so
originally you were born in let's say connecticut but not really connecticut because you feel more like you're like part of a cleveland you know at least that's right so how was like how's life growing up there patrick well so i moved around a lot but i am from cleveland all of my sports teams allegiance are cleveland i'm a die hard cleveland browns fan um i have a very fond affinity for cleveland i live in los angeles now and i joke with my wife all the time that we should move back there that's amazing and how how was it there because i know that you were exposed to uh you know the duke university there very early on your father you know was very much involved there so so how was how was life growing up and and also like why why engineering because it seems that that problem-solving thing has been something that has you know come with you along the way in your professional journey
quite a bit yeah yeah well i mean growing up in cleveland was great i mean people are wonderful the weather is terrible but it's just a great city uh yeah you know the two great months may and september are absolutely tremendous um yeah you're right so my my dad was is a physician um and so growing up with him i you know i got exposed to healthcare um and you know he was uh he was on staff at duke um and so that's how i learned about duke really early on but the reason i wanted to go into engineering is actually a different story my grandfather actually gave me a hundred dollars of ibm stock for a gift a long time ago and so i used to i used to um you know check on that as a child like how is the stock doing how's the stock doing and for those of you that remember kind of the 80s like ibm kind of missed the whole pc thing and so their stock just crashed so even though they had great tech
they they're they they were unable to kind of perform in the market and so in watching that i learned like hey i always i want to be an engineer but i always want to be in the business side of an engineering company and so i chose to go to duke because they had this unbelievable program between their engineering school and their business school and so i went there to go do that and of course you know life is different i got there i did engineering school and after three years i was like well maybe i should know something about business before going to business school so i left and i didn't actually go to the business school program i just completed engineering but that's kind of how i ended up there well look duke gave you everything i mean it gave you obviously some knowledge it gave you the access to really understand what you needed to do next but more importantly it gave you the
opportunity of meeting who is now your wife so it doesn't get better yes yeah so my i met my wife there we met in a community service program she's one of the first people i met at duke um and yeah no we've been together we're just selling uh celebrating our 21st wedding anniversary wow actually this month congratulations that's amazing so so let's talk about you leaving duke because after duke you know really getting that that idea that you needed to know a little bit more about business you end up being mckinsey and you know one thing that is amazing is that some of the best entrepreneurs that i interview are those that have a background in consulting for some reason and i find that maybe it's like the way that you are able to structure big problems into small problems and then tackle those but in your case i mean you had a pretty nice journey with mckinsey i mean you helped them with
their branding you know uh initiatives as well so how was that journey for you and what did you really get from that experience yeah it was incredible working with uh at mckinsey um when i was coming out of school you know as an engineer again i always wanted to be on the business side so i never had heard of mckinsey actually one of the deans there suggested i learned about it and as i met more and more of the people oh my i was so blown away at how smart everyone was so i was like i figured i could go there like everybody's smarter than me i'm just gonna learn constantly i'm gonna constantly try to like see like you know i'm they're gonna put me in places that frankly a 22 year old should not be you should not be advising the board of any company when you just graduated from engineering school and so it was a great opportunity to go and just learn about how the top companies in the
world have grown and succeeded and where they made mistakes and so it was all about learning and uh you're right um i had an opportunity to help launch their consumer branding practice 20 years ago but that was one of many things that i got the privilege of getting to work on and one of your colleagues actually i mean talking about business you got you know quite a quite a master's you know in in in business before even attending warton which is where you did your mba but leaving you know mckinsey was obviously a pivotal moment for you uh and that's because you received the call of one of your colleagues so so what happened there yeah one of the things i learned at mckinsey was that really everything is about people it's not necessarily about what you're working on it's about who you're doing it with and so i got connected up through one of the partners that i worked with at mckenzie i'm
a kinsey a former mckinsey guy that was starting a business out in california a gentleman by the name of doug valenti a great leader and um i had a privilege of going out and meeting with him and and learning about um about what he's doing and it was one of those wonderful experiences where he he actually pitched the company to me on a napkin in a restaurant in palo alto and so um i decided to uh to leave mckinsey and i remember him telling me he's like hey if you want to come join me that's great but i'm not moving you and i'm not going to pay you much of anything so it was a it was actually kind of a really amazing kind of like jump in uh you know full-on i at that point i was i asked my wife to marry me and i got try to convince her to move to san francisco with me and so we get out there and it was the opportunity to build a company from a napkin which ultimately 10 years later we
took to a public offering so i feel really privileged to have been able to take kind of some of the learnings that i had and kind of growth and applying it to building something as an engineer i love to build things and what does it what does it feel like or or what does it look like when you're part of a you know a rocket ship like that i mean being one of the first employees being part of the founding team and then you know like ringing the bell and taking the company public for over a billion bucks i mean it's quite an accomplishment and i think that that's a a wealth of knowledge you know that that opens your eyes you know to a whole other level to how business really needs to be conducted so i guess how is it like when you're part of a rocket ship like that well i mean when you're on a rocket ship sometimes it doesn't feel like a rocket ship right it's just a lot of work right so to
join a startup and you know i mean you know this is you're an entrepreneur as well like you just got to be willing to do whatever it takes you have to understand what the mission is and you you have to do is like like i literally helped drag get cables dragged into the first office so we could have phones right and um you know anything that you need to do to get things done is how startups work and it's fun it's fun about people you know you go from just a few people at doug's house to you know uh uh you know our first office i think we had it packed in on folding tables of like 100 people at one point before we got real space um and so it's just it's just fun to try to build something and be on a mission i mean that that was one of the first online marketing companies ever uh so what we did we felt like was was really pioneering it was exciting so what was your key lesson from the
experience…