TJ Parker: Building PillPack, The First E-Commerce Pharmacy, to Amazon's $1B Acquisition | E1022

There's all these big winners in pharmacy. There's basically, there was no e-commerce player before PillPack. Like, they didn't exist, right?

(instrumental music) TJ, I am so excited for this. As I said, I feel like I know so much of the PillPack journey from the wonderful Fred Destin. So, thank you so much for joining me today first.

I am thrilled to be here. This is the first, uh, first public thing I've done in, like, five years. Um, and obviously I owe a ton to Fred as well. He bet on both of us when we were super young. So, thrilled to be here.

Man, I am so grateful that this is the first thing you've done in five years. But I wanna go to PillPack and that kind of founding aha moment. Obviously, we see the incredible journey today and we see the exit. But in terms of that founding moment, what was that aha founding moment for you? Take me there.

Yeah. So, I think if you, if you go way back, like, I grew up in New Hampshire in a family that owned and operated kind of your classic mom and pop pharmacy. So, I grew up in and around pharmacy. Um, and, you know, I actually started school as a business major, and pretty quickly realized that it was, I thought it was important to have a technical background, like some specific expertise, and so switched to pharmacy. But as you can imagine, I never had ambitions to work, like, behind the counter at a, at a CVS. Um, just knew there was lots of opportunity in and around pharmacy. Um, and I'd done every, I'd worked a ton of different jobs, uh, at my dad's pharmacy, so worked behind the counter, helped check people out. Actually, I was delivering meds to people in their homes and saw that experience. Um, I just knew there was a lot of opportunities to make it better. It was super frustrating. It was really complicated. Um, so I was in pharmacy school in Boston, um, and doing the classic going down weird rabbit holes on the internet as a, as a college student, and was buying and selling sneakers. Got really obsessed with design, thinking about furniture and architecture, and was just very interested in kind of aesthetic. Um, and then s- very separately, got really interested in startups. So, um, kind of snuck into MIT, and they were super gracious. I didn't, I didn't go to school there. Um, but helped run the, the MIT 100K, which was, like, their business plan competition at the time. Um, and I showed up for the first, uh, for, like, the, the, the, the sort of first meeting with all the students, and they're like, "You don't, you don't go to school here." And I was like, "Nope." And they're like, "I mean, we're not paying you, so if you wanna do some free work, like, I guess that's fine." Um, and then I actually started this thing called Hacking Medicine at MIT with Elliot, my co-founder, um, which was getting just doctors and designers and physicians all together to work on stuff in healthcare. Um, and through that period, kind of like 2005 to 2010, um, my dad had started this totally new pharmacy, um, that was sorting and packaging meds, actually very similar to PillPack. Um, but they were selling into nursing homes and assisted living facilities. It wasn't a consumer business. Um, and so I'd always had this idea, like, could you take this kind of core product but then offer it to consumers and do it in a way that was really kind of design-forward and, and aesthetic? And I think for me, the big challenge was getting the confidence to think I could actually go do that. Like, could I actually raise venture capital? Could I find a real co-founder? Like, just getting, like, the inertia to believe that, that I could do that.