What do online flight reservations and digital pharmaceutical prescriptions have in common?
Both innovations led to the disruption of their respective industries. And, as of Wednesday morning, both will have listed Scott McKay as a key technologist on the responsible founding teams.
ZappRx, Boston’s "Uber for Medicine" dedicated to simplifying the current prescription process, will welcome McKay onto its leadership team, on which he will assume the role of CTO to further design the company’s digital prescription mobile checkout and management software.
The addition keeps up the startup's September momentum, when ZappRx closed its seed round of $1 million led by Atlas Venture, and moved into investor Hakan Satiroglu's ed-tech incubator in the Back Bay — mere weeks after the company's New York City pilot fell through due to a glitch in the App Store.
McKay joins ZappRx with a wealth of experience in software architecture. In 2002, McKay helped start ITA Software, at which he served as the principal software engineer and was responsible for building, designing and implementing the online reservation systems that now power Orbitz and Priceline. After raising a $100 million Series A round in 2006, ITA sold five years later to Google for $700 million.
Though McKay stayed on for a few years with Google post-acquisition, he craved more.
“I suddenly became one of thousands of engineers at Google,” explained McKay. “When you’re in a company of around 33,000, everyone is kind of invisible at some point. I like being at companies where everyone makes a notable difference.”
A long-time Boston resident, McKay broadened his job search to the city’s startup scene, where he was quickly pursued for the CTO spot by two young, promising companies – both, as it so happened, within Atlas Ventures’ portfolio.
“We couldn’t be more excited that Scott chose us...It was kind of a, ‘May the best startup win,’ scenario,” joked Barry.
According to the new CTO, the other company tried to woo him with a gift of top-shelf bourbon, a chauffeured car ride to its offices and a new offer, promising a fatter salary.
The perks still weren’t enough to persuade McKay away from ZappRx, however, and the mission that lays at the heart of the company.
“I wanted to go build something that really makes a positive difference in people’s lives,” explained McKay of his reason for choosing ZappRx. “When you go to startups that are really small, they’re more uncertain. Engineers typically don’t like uncertainty, but the prospect of being able to really do some good made up for it.”
“It’s great to have someone on board who shares that vision,” said Barry, of McKay’s commitment to what the five-person team at ZappRx calls "#RxO." In other words, the prescription-obsessed company culture, characterized by a drive to make a difference in the world through ZappRx's scope. “[McKay] has the passion to do the right thing. It’s critical for a team to have that passion.”
McKay also made mention that the company’s stellar leadership team factored into his decision. Barry brings a diverse background of entrepreneurship, finance and healthcare IT, as well as a tenacious, risk-taking spirit to her position at the company’s helm. Brought on in September, Chief Strategy Officer Jenelle Mazie also has spent over a dozen years driving business development and dazzling companies within the e-prescription space.
“It’s a very small team, but it was also very clear that a couple of people – Zoe and Jenelle – had the chops to make it a sustainable company,” noted the CTO.
With the edition of McKay, ZappRx's leadership is a triple threat of talent. Given the attention the company has seen from one of Boston's most desired technologists and investors, ZappRx seems to have caught on to something big.
