Meet the creators of FitBit for medication, with Peter Havas of PillDrill, USA

My interviewee is Peter Havas of PillDrill, co-founder and CEO PillDrill, USA.

PillDrill wants to ease the way people take their medicine. Their first product is already very much beloved by the customers.

Peter has a long track-record of entrepreneurship. He started his first company at the age of 24, which failed unfortunately. He certainly learned from this experience as his second company, SandwichDirect.com, which was founded in 1999 was a success which resulted in the acquirer eventually becoming a 100 million USD company with Peter being its CTO.

In this interview Peter talks about his motivation why he started PillDrill, his take on whether you should be a subject-matter expert in a discipline to start a company, or if it’s better to have other traits. You’ll also learn why it’s better to sell directly to consumers first. In addition you’ll hear also about his connection to Brinc, an accelerator that was featured in episode 11 of this podcast. Peter will tell you also about the essential elements of his innovation and many more.

Enjoy!

• FitBit for taking medication and the problem it addresses – [2:30]
• What fueled Peter’s motivation to start the company? - [4:42]
• When there are enough stars aligning - [6:06]
• Earlier endeavors before PillDrill and what Peter learned from them - [7:14]
• The advantage of not having subject matter expertise in an area when you start out a business, according to Peter - [9:55]
• Why did the company chose to sell first direct to the consumer?- [11:36]
• “How a product makes you feel determines the relationship you have with it” - [12:50]
• Main investors in the company and the stages of funding - [15:07]
• The business model of the company - [18:30]
• PillDrill’s three core design principles - [20:50]
• Features of the app that help users keep being active and mobile - [24:38]
• Locations of prototyping and manufacturing of the product - [28:08]
• “Let’s only drop the balls that can bounce” – lessons Peter learned while developing the company- [31:00]
• If you could time travel and go back in time, what notes would you give yourself? – [33:20]
• Which book had the biggest impact on his career? – [34:16]
• Peter’s opinion on habits – [35:28]
• Some memorable cultural differences that Peter had to overcome throughout his career – [36:30]
• What is the best way to reach Peter? – [38:02]

• “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” by Jerry Kaplan
• FitBit 
• PillDrill 
• Brinc 
• Wired Magazine 
• Backer stores 
• CVS 
• Apple 
• LinkedIn 
• Amazon 
• Snapchat 

• Email: phavas@pilldrill.com

Episode Transcript

Balint: Welcome, Peter, to the podcast.

Peter: Thank you very much, Balint.

Balint: It was Bay, Bay McLaughlin of Brinc from Episode 11 of this podcast who introduced me to you. We should talk at some point also about your connection to Brinc and to Bay. Well, first time I'm thrilled to talk to you because with your product you want to solve a compelling problem. So, on your website I saw it that on the front page of Wired magazine called your product concept “FitBit for taking medication.” Can you perhaps describe how this analogy might have been formed by Wired and also the problem you're addressing?

Peter: Sure, happy to. In fact, that was one of my hopes when we started the company that someone would say or at least compare us to FitBit. And the reason that was one of my hopes is FitBit in some sense was the inspiration for the product.

My mother who is now in her 80s, both my parents are in their 80s, they're in Australia and I'm in the United States. A few years back she had both her  hips replaced, and to cut a fairly long story short, it was the connected nature of FitBit that allowed me to see her recuperation from her second hip replacement surgery because we shared our steps with each other. And what I loved about the FitBit approach was that it simply captures data around an existing habit rather than asks you to do something different to fit in with their paradigm. And to me that was a very compelling design imperative because intuitively I knew and have known for some time that people just don't change their habits. And the older one gets, the less likely one is to change habits.

So, in designing our product PillDrill, which essentially is a medication management system the result of which is that people actually take the medication they are meant to take, in designing it we wanted to come up with something as simple and as elegant as FitBit where you just capture data around what you're doing in the medication space and then we would use that intelligently.

So I was really flattered that Wired magazine made that comparison. It was something that, as I said, we were always hoping to get.

Balint: So what was your motivation for founding? I see that you have a personal connection. So you were kind of like scratching your own itch or at least in the family you had this issue regarding the unfortunate hip replacement, which prompted you to think how you could come up with such an idea. But is there some perhaps even more motivation? And how you found also the co-founders who also to some extent must have been also motivated to solve this problem?

Peter: Yes, absolutely. So, yes, the personal connection was I guess part of the emotional fuel to start the company. As I said, it's funny I used the line recently. I moved to America 15 years ago and a funny thing happened in the meantime: my parents grew up. So they are now in their 80s and with a view to just staying better connected with them and helping them stay on their medication routine I was compelled to jump into this space because when I… Honestly, when I looked at a solution for this scenario there was nothing elegant that stood out. So that was the emotional motivation.

But there was a more, I guess you'd call it more practical or more prosaic, entrepreneurial motivation, which is I'd spent the better part of 20 years on my last startup. And the reason I did that is because I think as an Aussie we're persistent, we don't like to give up and ultimately we made it a great success. And I really wanted to take all the learnings from that previous experience and distill them down into the core set of entrepreneurial learnings and see if I could do it better, stronger, faster next time around it. It seemed like it would be a waste if I had spent all these years learning all these great life lessons and entrepreneurial lessons and then I didn't use them again. So that was the, I guess the entrepreneur's motivation. So we had the emotional and the entrepreneurial covered.

And in terms of my co-founder, it's a guy I've worked with for nearly 17 years. It’s funny. I joke… I met him in Sydney in the year 2000. He walked into our office when he was sort of 19 going on twelve. And he was the quintessential boy genius programmer, brilliant technician. Over the years he and I developed an almost telepathic understanding of what was required and how it would be built. And, yeah, it seemed like it was a good reason or a good opportunity not to get the band back together but in some ways to keep the band going, and he was happy. He was ecstatic to jump on board because he saw this as a very real problem. Even though it wasn't as personal for him because he's a little younger than I am, he saw this as a real opportunity to do something great. So we had the existing relationship, the opportunity seemed right for a lot of reasons and those were enough stars aligning such that the rest fell into place.

Balint: If I may ask, you refer to your previous entrepreneurial venture that you had. What was it and how does it relate to your current endeavor PillDrill?

Peter: Sure. So, completely different. I had the crazy idea in the late ‘90s to sell gourmet sandwiches on this interesting new medium that everyone was talking about called the Internet. And just it occurred to me that you could not just replicate the process of standing in a sandwich shop or a deli and choosing ingredients but you could actually make it much better, you could make it visual, and fun, and much more informative. As you put the slice of cheese on your sandwich, you could have a real time calorie counter that told you exactly what you'd be doing to your body with that additional slice of cheese.

So, I started it in Australia, brought it to America, merged with a traditional bakery cafe chain in the early 2000s and then we grew that. We actually grew to a $100 million business.

Balint: Wow.

Peter: Yeah, I was really proud of what we were able to achieve there and not just that but the vast majority of our business was online, which in the food space is somewhat on the hood of what used to be the rule of thumb that if you could do double digits percentage wise in terms of total sales online, then you are doing well. We got it to well over 50 percent relatively quickly. So it related to my current business only to the extent that it taught me all the entrepreneurial lessons that one needs to know. Basically, it allowed me to make all the mistakes but lived to fight another day. And I think it was also useful because I had had no experience in the food industry prior to starting that company. And it taught me that if you're motivated enough and if there's enough drive there, then the absence of subject matter expertise should not be an impediment. You can learn all that stuff. And mostly you learn it by surrounding yourself with really good people who know that subject matter.

So the fact that you're not a food expert or you are not a doctor shouldn't prevent you from starting something in a space that requires that expertise because you can find that expertise. It's the drive and it's the overarching business lessons that are much more important.

Balint: I completely agree with it that most of the results, let's say 80 percent, is coming from your motivation, which is also related to the mindset that you have.

Peter: Exactly.

Balint: If you really believe in your idea and if you're driven to solve the problem, you had the emotional drive as you said it and yeah, you found also the right partner, the co-founder and later with PillDrill, and before you wanted to I guess explore the capabilities of the new Internet how you can, as you said it, visualize and communicate more than what was in existence at that time.

Peter: Yeah, and then just one other point because I think it's a useful thing to know. It's almost a reverse point which is it can be an advantage to not have subject matter expertise because you're not bringing the same stale thinking to a problem that has led to all the previously failed solutions from the past. It's the old story. If you keep approaching a problem the same way, you're going to keep getting the same results. So in the early stages of PillDrill I made a point to essentially keep the medical people away. When we were doing our customer discovery and what is the problem, who might be the customer, what resonates with them and what do they respond to. That was a very simple, practical, physical, psychological problem that didn't require medical expertise, so I actually think there's an advantage to not having subject matter expertise in an area when you start out.

Balint: I had one guest on this podcast – Damien Ng, from Backers, Backer stores. He was from Hong Kong. He had a similar idea. He is doing some innovations regarding retail while creating an outlet, a physical store for crowdfunded projects and he also said that he didn't have any experience in retail, and it was actually an advantage for him, just like what you said.

Peter: Yeah, I completely believe it.

Balint: And another thing that I noticed regarding what you said that one of your experiences was this how the online business works. On your website I saw it that you predominantly sell your product online. However, I see it on the front page that you say, “Now in CVS” so it's also available at least at one physical chain of stores, right? So it did help you.

Peter: It did. And just to be to be accurate, our relationship with CVS for the moment is online as well so we are available through CVS online. That's a precursor to being in physical store, which will happen in due course. We really want to make sure we get everything right before we do that because they're the giant of the industry, something like eleven or twelve thousand outlets, you want to make sure you get everything right before you start pushing numbers like that.

So, yes, we've learned so much by being direct to consumer out of the gate. And I think it's a truism that it doesn't matter how much testing of your product you do with your own internal teams, with focus groups, with beta testers, nothing really matters or nothing really counts until people who've paid you real money start using your product and you get real feedback. And we went through that phase so now I'm really pleased that we chose that route of direct to consumer out of the gate because we learned so much.

Balint: What is the feedback right now, if I may ask? Maybe you're not at $100 million revenue that you used to have with your previous company, which of course had quite some, as you said it, you were working on it for 20 years. You worked on it for quite some time. So you have a good reception?

Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, that wasn't a $100 million out of the gate. I still remember the first ever sandwich we sold online. It was quite an experience. You start with ones, you go up by increments of ones and that's how you get to 100 million of anything.

The reception to PillDrill has been phenomenal. We set out to make a product that people would not just tolerate but people would actually want to use. And I think in this way, well this will sound self-serving and that's fine, I am the spokesman for the company and we're really proud of what we built, but people actually love our product. And that's not a term you often hear associated with medication because it's a fundamentally negative space. Medication becomes more prominent in your life as one gets older and it's a reminder many times that you're not the person that you used to be. And then often times as you're getting prescribe more medication then you need some assistance in managing that and then you get some device that looks awkward, looks clunky, that again reminds you you're not the person you used to be and may as well advertise to people who come around to your home that, “Hey, look at this guy, he takes a lot of pills.”

So we really wanted to avoid that psychological dynamic. So we placed a lot of attention on the design of PillDrill, the aesthetics of the product. Because how a product makes you feel ultimately is how… That determines the relationship you have with it. And in this case, that relationship determines how effective the product is.

So we've really been validated in terms of our core hypotheses around the product and the reception has been phenomenal. People love it. The reviews of through the roof on every avenue whether you look at the reviews on cvs.com, Net Promoters Score, the anecdotal feedback, the language people are using is actually quite living and quite powerful. So the response has been phenomenal.

Balint: I guess also the investors love it if there is such a good response from the customers, from the actual users. And now that I mentioned briefly this topic, investors, Brinc was a seed investor into your company, right? And now this way we are back to the beginning of the interview. Can you tell us more about it, the connection with Brinc more in detail, and also the further rounds of funding?

Peter: Sure. So, Brinc, which is a company co-founded by McLaughlin as you mention, they were an investor in kind in the early stages of the company and what I mean by that is they funded a lot of services for us. They connected us with really good people whose help we needed to get the product launched, some good electrical engineers, they ultimately hooked this up with an excellent factory in Shenzhen who's been really good for us. And in return for a lot of their efforts, they're a small shareholder in the company. Bay and I go back a number of years to his time at Apple and to my previous life in the sandwich business. He at Apple helped us with an iPad project back in 2010 when we were initiating self-served kiosks in our stores. So Brinc’s been good. And they essentially helped us launch the product. They provided enough services that we were confident that we were launching the right product at the right time with the right manufacturing partners. Since then, my original investor who was an investor in the previous company as well, it helps to have a track record and it helps to have a successful track record.

Although, often you see in our industry that entrepreneurs who fail sometimes they still get back by the same investor who lost money because it's not always the entrepreneurs’ fault that the business doesn't do well, sometimes it's timing, sometimes it's much bigger competition. But in my case, I was fortunate in that I had a previous success with this investor, he really liked the space. He is a well-heeled angel rather than an institutional fund of any kind and I actually have a bias towards that kind of investor. And he has come back in on multiple occasions I think he's actually doubled down on four different occasions inside PillDrill. So, obviously, he's very happy with how things are going.

Yeah, we're fortunate in that we have more than sufficient investment to get us to each of the next milestones we are looking to achieve, really important because one adage that I often in fact even tell the team at PillDrill is that my job as a CEO is to simply keep the company alive long enough for something good to happen. And in order to do that clearly you need funds to do what you need to do.

Balint: If I got it right, you had the same angel investor investing in all rounds so far?

Peter: Yes.

Balint: Yeah, that's good. As they say, it takes some time to anyway find the right investor who is on the same frequency with you, thinks the same way, you get a good input from the investor. So you get support and you don't get hindrance. So I guess you, as you said it, he was happy with you, with your performance, with your previous company, you were also happy with the connection, so you just kept on going.

Peter: Exactly. And the connection ultimately is what matters most. Because it doesn't matter how successful the company is ultimately, there will be testing moments along the way. So you need to know that you can get through those with someone and ultimately that comes down to integrity and communication and we were good on both fronts. So we were happy to keep the relationship going.

Balint:  Yeah, and not only concentrating on the money, so that you need money at all cost.

Peter: Exactly.

Balint: Yeah. And what is your business model?

Peter: Business model? Good question. We're figuring it out. It's one of these things where the opportunity is so large in the space that we're in that our challenge is focus rather than looking for the opportunity. And what I mean by that is there are so many routes we can go from direct to consumer to retail, to health insurance, to pharmaceutical companies, to assisted living hospitals. And the approach I've taken, and it's fairly simple but it's just simple enough to work, is we've put our toes in the water on each of those channels and we're seeing which ones fit better, which ones feel better, in which ones does that product resonate best. So the business model is try out all the channels and see which ones fits, see which ones make economic sense and then focus on those. And we're still in the relatively early exploratory stages and as I said, we've got stuff happening in each of those channels. So in the next 6 to 12 months we will sharpen our focus and probably move to two or three of those rather than six of those. So, yeah, the business model is explore and see what fits, and then invest more time, energy, effort and money into those channels.

Balint: You seem to be very agile. I like it. You cannot anyway plan very much in advance into the future because you need to be agile. I love it. Even in my podcast when I look at all the marketing channels where I could be present, I cannot do it. I have a limited capacity so I need to explore and do small tests where I have more feedback, where I have a better traction. Like LinkedIn, I have a good feedback. So I try to put my effort there.

Peter: Absolutely. As the great philosopher of our time, Mike Tyson, said “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the head.” You got to roll with the punches.

Balint: That's a good one. Peter, what is the key component of your innovation? How do you see this? I mean you discussed it and I think I see it a little bit or maybe even quite a bit what the key innovation is, but maybe you could tell me and I don't even want to bring up my guess because I don't want to influence you.

Peter: Sure. So, there's two aspects to the answer. One is the result of the product and I touched on it a moment ago in terms of how the product makes one feel. And again, I'll start there. We wanted to make people love our product, not just tolerate it and not just like it but love it. And again, in the space of medication which is a fundamentally negative space that was a really high bar that we set. In order to get there we had to really think long and hard about the design imperatives that would get us there. So, obviously, we did what every company does when you're designing something new you look at what exists, you look at what you think is wrong with them, why they didn't gain as much traction as they had hoped to. And what we settled on ultimately were three core design principles: simplicity, flexibility and dignity.

By simplicity we mean it has to not require any meaningful change in one's world. We didn't want to say to people, “Look, we can get you to take your meds. All you have to do is change everything that you do.” Because people don't do that. So basically just seamlessly slotting into the physical flow of what they already do to take their medication.

In terms of flexibility, there's no one size fits all medication. Everyone uses different things. Some people use injections, inhalers, eye drops, unusual form factors, some people keep their pills in their orange bottles or cardboard flat backs. Some people like to decant into a weekly Monday through Sunday pill strip. We would determine that in order to succeed we had to fit any regimen, any form factor of any medication, so we made the system very flexible.

And finally, and I think most importantly, it needed to be dignified and I touched on it a little while ago that whole negativities cycle of someone comes to a time in their life where now they're taking more medication and they're being reminded they take more medication and now you've got a thing that's a constant reminder, and maybe even telling the world that you take more medication. We wanted something that was dignified in approach, that looked good, that was discreet that all of us. I'm not going to go as far as to say it's fun. I think that's overstating it and trivializing the dynamic but something that actually made you feel a little better. The reason you take medication is to be well. So let's at least extract that positive component out of this scenario and emphasize that. So those design imperatives leading up to people loving the product is ultimately what I think separates us. Because to succeed with consumers you have to be loved, in my opinion, in any space and I think we're well on the way to getting there.

Balint: Yeah, I see these three pillars that you mentioned reflected on your website in various parts of the website that you describe how people can use your device and also you have a cube and you can scan the correct side of the cube, which reflects your mood. So you make it playful as well.

Peter: Yeah and it's interesting because we think the product has a personality and we wanted it to be a little playful, serious but playful. We're not trivializing it because after all it's health and it's important. And that's actually a really important component of the system it's the one thing I check every single morning and it takes me one second, I open my app and I look at which mood my parents scanned because it literally takes me one second and my day is better when I know that my octogenarian parents in Australia are doing well. So yeah, that's a really important part of the system in terms of keeping us connected.

Balint: As for the usability of your product, how is the usability for people who are very mobile, who love traveling. I mean I love traveling, and I can imagine that when I get older I would like to keep on traveling. And how is it the usability?

Peter: So we were conscious of designing… Again, coming back to the flexibility point, conscious of designing something that worked equally well out of the home as in the home. Most of our existing customers are people who use the product predominantly in home and our research showed us that people take the same stuff in the same physical space at the same time each day. So the device itself is designed to be used in home but we put a lot of emphasis on having a very full featured app, both iOS and Android, and making it very compatible with the overarching system such that…I’ll give you an example. I'm out in the field and it's time for me to take my meds. The system actually knows that I'm out because I'm not on the same Wi-Fi network as my home network so it's funneling reminders and alerts primarily to my app rather than to the device.

So when I take my medication out on the road and I can log it through the app, like there are a number of other medications and apps and you can do that. So I log it whilst I'm out in the field and when I get home the system already knows that it's that the medication has been taken such that the device is not now reminding me to take something that's already been taken. And that's really important because one thing that makes users lose confidence in a system is when it's just dumb, it just doesn't know that something's happened. So a typical alarm clock will still ring whether you're awake or whether you're asleep. We're a little bit smarter than that because we know that the action has been taken when you were out and about because you logged it through the app. So when I come home, no need to remind you.

So we were really conscious of making a system each of whose components played well with each other. So we believe it's as useful out in the field as it is at home and one of the things that's actually surprised us since we've launched we've had a much higher number of younger users than we originally expected. And we think that's …Well, we know that's because our product works really well with younger people who unfortunately have severe chronic conditions so their issue is not forgetting to take their medicine. Their issue is the medication regimen is so complicated that they really need some help managing it. We have one young lady who just recently had a lung transplant. But prior to that transplant, she was taking 27 different medications twice per day. And just to keep that straight was impossible for her until she found PillDrill. And happy to say that the procedure went well and she's now a little more mobile and using all aspects of the system from the app to the hub to the cube to everything. So yeah, really important that all aspects of the system work well together.

Balint: Yeah, I love it. I mean the impact that you make this is why I think it's really great that we can feature you on this podcast so that the listeners hear about it, maybe they can even spread it because everybody has some connection with old people. And this is great help to help with their workflow but not disrupting their workflow.

Peter: Exactly.

Balint: Yeah. Regarding the manufacturing and the development when building the company and also basically creating this product. Where do you manufacture now and how was the development? Where was it done, and the manufacturing? You mentioned Brinc and that you got connected to Chinese factories, manufacturing companies. Can you elaborate on that?

Peter: Yes. So one of the things Brinc helped us early on, they chaperoned us around a number of manufacturing facilities in China, mostly in Shenzhen which as   you know is close to Hong Kong where Brinc is based. And it made sense for us. We met some good people, some good companies and we ended up doing business with one of them, with whom we're still doing business. They've done an excellent job for us. And what I also made sure we did was early on in our evolution as a company I brought someone in internally, who had some skills across the manufacturing of hardware.

This is new to me, personally I've not been in a business before that manufactured hardware, and I knew that we needed someone on board internally just to make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle were coming together at the correct time. We were really fortunate that we were able to get someone from the Kindle division of Amazon, a guy who'd worked on each version of the Kindle but was now looking for a new challenge because the fifth version of any product is never quite as exciting as the first version. So he was ready to do something new and the whole PillDrill mission resonated with him. So he came on board and from an internal perspective manage that process. But yeah, Brinc was really helpful in introducing us to people, just the fact that they would vouch for a factory, for example. I mean a lot of people in America think that you jump on a plane, you go to China, you find a factory, you do a deal and then you’re done. Not quite that easy. You need to know with whom you're dealing and just to have a trusted source in the middle referring us to the right partners was extremely helpful.

Balint: Did you do to the development, some part of it, in the U.S. or you moved completely to China even during the prototyping phase?

Peter: No, we did pretty much everything in the U.S. And when I say that, in the early production runs, I'm not sure I'd consider that prototype, I'm not sure there's even an exact definition of what constitutes a prototype or not. But the early production runs were all done in the Chinese factory as well. But, essentially, all the design, all the R&D, that happened in the US.

Balint: OK. So then, it worked out quite well then.

Peter: It did.

Balint: During the journey, during developing this company, can you maybe talk about some of the mistakes that you've made. I mean I look at mistakes maybe quite differently than many people so I look at it as a learning step. Maybe we shouldn't even call them mistakes. It's like big learnings or things that you realized maybe too late, or you think that your previous steps helped you so much that you could avoid most of the problems and well, apparently, most of the fatal problems.

Peter: Yeah. In fact your final phrase there I think is the key. In my mind, there's two categories of mistakes. There's those that kill you and those that don't. Or I don't know if I coined the expression but I’ve used it with the team a number of times, “Let’s only drop the balls that can bounce.” Mistakes happen. Mistakes happen every day, they happen all day every day. It's important to try to limit those to the little mistakes. That's not always easy. There's a lot of on-the-fly prioritization and redirecting of resources. But I'm happy to say that all the mistakes we made along the way had been in the category of relatively minor, certainly nonfatal. Some of the fatal ones are obvious. You don't want to run out of money because once you run out of money, the music stops and the startup game is over. So you always have to be… Essentially, as we all know one of the primary roles of the CEO is to make sure the company is well financed and the best way to raise money is to go and raise it when you don't need it because when you need it it's too late.

And something like that young entrepreneurs hear but they don't truly believe until they live that moment. So yeah, happy to say we've made a ton of mistakes but they've all been relatively minor and most importantly, they've all been fixed really quickly. And that's the other thing that's very important. Identify your mistakes quickly and act. Don't allow them to linger. A lot of people live with some optimality far too long and that can be anything from hiring mistakes to you chose the wrong business partner, and acknowledging one's mistake and addressing it and moving on is really challenging at a personal level and I think that's one thing that sets good entrepreneurs apart from mediocre entrepreneurs, the ability to acknowledge the mistake and actually deal with it head on and resolve it. So, happy to say, many mistakes, none of them fatal.

Balint: Yeah, I would keep this quote in my mind, “Let's drop the ball that bounces,” for the nonfatal one. That's a good one. So Peter, let's now move to the last round of questions I would suggest. This means that I will ask you for questions and it would be great if I could get some relatively short answers. So the first question is if you could go back in time when you were younger in your 20s, what information would you give yourself?

Peter: Oh, two answers, both short. Firstly, I wouldn't because the making of the little mistakes is actually part of the fun. You want the full experience of the ride, the ups and the downs. But if there's one thing I could say to myself is get a good mentor, someone with whom you can sit down and be truly honest and get some wisdom back from them.

Balint: Yeah. I also consider it very important. Many times I get my mentors actually from books. This I think it's extremely good because I read a book and if there are exercises, I work myself through the exercises or if there are no exercises, I take notes and that helps a lot, but also in person mentors are also invaluable who have been there where you are going to. The next question. If you had to name a book, what book had the biggest impact on your career, or even one or two books?

Peter: Oh, interesting and timely question. I'm actually rereading the one that kind of kicked it all off, it's… I don't know how well known it is, it's called Start Up by a guy called Jerry Kaplan and it started in 1987, a guy who had the idea of inventing a pen based computer which eventually was kind of copied by Apple in the form of the Newton. It's the reason I really like that book. It was such a great story of the rollercoaster that is the startup ride and it kind of made me fell in love with… That's a ride that I wouldn't mind buying a ticket on at some point. It was just a really fun, well-written book with actually a lot of insights as well, you mentioned you get some of your mentors from books. This was good because there were a ton of mistakes that these guys made, just a great book to energize someone who's thinking about punching their ticket on the startup ride.

Balint: Did you read it at an early stage?

Peter: Yeah, I read that back in probably the mid-90s, well before I started the sandwich company.

Balint: So it definitely influenced you. So the third question. I'm amazed by habits. Do you have habits? Work related or even non-work related.

Peter: I'm sure I do but I don't consciously try and structure my life too much. I'm not one of these… I'm not really a checklist type person. Except when it's a scenario that requires specifically a checklist so I'm not one of these get-up-at-the-same-time-every-day person and immediately hit the gym and… No, I like to be a little more freestyle than that. So, yes, I'm sure I have habits but I don't focus on them.

Balint: So, you're not like Bay.

Peter: No. We're very different. But that's good. Life would be boring if we are all the same.

Balint: Yeah. Exactly. The fourth question. In your work if you had to pick one or two cultural differences because you've worked also with China and you are very multi-cultural because of your roots to Australia and also some Hungarian roots. What kind of differences were memorable that you encountered, that you run into?

Peter: Oh that's a challenging question because yes, there are cultural differences that you see, there are those that you don't really see until you spend more time with people. There's less of a tendency certainly in the Asian culture to talk up your business. Americans tend to be somewhat… What's the right term, effusive or maybe even braggadocio about what they're doing. The Asian culture is a little more demure than that. So often getting people to even really tell you the truth about their business but not in a negative sense, in the positive sense, like “Tell me how good you are,” because there's no reason to be embarrassed about that. I want to know what your success is. So trying to sort of pull that out of people can be and was a little challenging at times. But honestly, I think culturally most people deep down are a little bit the same. They want the same thing, which is… And that's another great quote from Einstein many years ago, “We only really need two things which is our basic necessities taken care of and something to be enthusiastic about.”

And I think that kind of cuts across all cultures and I find when you get people enthusiastic about the thing that they're enthusiastic about, then that cuts across cultural lines.

Balint: It's a very, say, simplified view of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Peter: Absolutely.

Balint:  Yeah. The very basic one, the bottom one and the top one, the self-realization, self-actualization. Yeah. So, to close off the interview, before completely closing it off, what is the best way to reach you for the listeners?

Peter: Oh, probably email. Yeah, I'm not as cool as the cool kids on Snapchat or anything like that. So I'm going to stick with the email, which is phavas@pilldrill.com.

Balint: P-H-A-V-A-S@pilldrill.com.

Peter: Correct.

Balint: All right. I appreciate it very much, Peter, this interview. I think it was really, really information packed, for me at least, learning about PillDrill and also your previous steps that led you to PillDrill.

Peter: Great. Thank you, Balint. Thanks for the opportunity. I had a lot of fun.

Balint: Thanks for listening.