We’re surrounded by opportunity. But not everyone has the courage to act to pursue those opportunities. It can feel like a mortal danger to venture out from what’s familiar to you. From personal experience, I can tell you it’s scary as hell. But I like nothing better than to build a start-up from scratch to help deliver the healthcare that people need.

In fact, I’ve now done this six times, and each time I’ve gotten my company started by working with ONSET. And each time I’ve had a successful exit. But none of this would happen if there weren’t people who see opportunities and have the courage to build something valuable to seize that opportunity.

Fred Khosravi
Founder, Access Closure

We’ve built a great business at Adaptive Insights, with almost 2,500 customers in something like 100 countries by now. But our biggest challenge at the very beginning was simply figuring out the business model. Adaptive started off as an incubated company at ONSET, and we had a fairly good idea of the solution we were going to provide to our customers. What required patience and experimentation was discovering and perfecting our actual business model.

When we got started SaaS was a very nascent concept. Figuring out the physics of a SaaS-driven business model, not only for our own benefit but especially for the benefit of our customers, took time, discipline and creativity. Way more than we’d anticipated. We really owe our success to having had the freedom to engage in the process of discovery around our business model.

Rob Hull
Founder, Adaptive Insights

Most people don’t know this, but when ONSET led Adara’s Series-A financing, we were doing something completely different from what’s been the foundation of our success. We got started doing natural language processing for social media sites, which was seen as being a really hot idea at the time. Actual customer contact, however, quickly showed us that we’d be facing a dead-end in that market. So a year into our Series A, we pivoted 180 degrees into the loyalty audience space.

Making such a dramatic change in our business was a huge deal, as you can imagine. But as a management team we had belief in the new direction, and our board and investors loyally stood by us and helped us engineer the change. For our business it’s been a happy, “up-and-to-the-right” experience ever since.

Layton Han
CEO, Adara

Arcot Systems was an “overnight success” that took us more than ten years to build. From the outside everyone sees the external rewards of an acquisition by a major public company, of course. But it’s impossible for them to see the insides of all of the hard work we put in as entrepreneurs for so many years, and through so many challenging chapters. Every startup hopes that they’ll have a sprint to success, but I think most successful startups are the result of marathons and not sprints.

It takes a particular kind of tenacity and perseverance to build a startup from the ground-up. You really need to go into it expecting to be in it for the long haul and realize that there’s no magic portal to success. We started life as an incubated company at ONSET, stubbornly slugged it out in the market for ten years, and through our unflagging belief got to a great exit and result in the end.

Ram Varadarajan
Founder & CEO, Arcot Systems

When I became CEO of Sadra there were a lot of challenges in front of us. We had a medical device that still needed a lot of work, and we had a CEO, namely me, who had never been a CEO before and had never raised financing. Our number one priority was on getting our product working and proving its efficacy in the treatment of patients with severe aortic stenosis, and this is where I placed my focus.

In the end, we got the company to a very successful purchase by Boston Scientific. It was truly a team effort all around, and I point to my investors as having been a major part of Sadra’s success. They supported me, and most importantly our company, when it was most needed.

Ken Martin
CEO, Sadra