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Molly Bonakdapour really wanted to work at a startup.
She was an equity research analyst at JP Morgan in New York City, but in her effort to find a small company with big ambitions, she landed a role as a senior analyst at 7Wire Ventures. That position is what led her to Livongo Health in 2014.
"I joined Livongo when I was 24 years old, when I had no sense of what a startup was or what venture capital really was," she shared in the latest episode of "The Cornfield Capitalist" podcast. "It opened my eyes to the opportunity of how to really scale a business and what that can mean for someone who joins that type of company early on — what problems you get to solve, what areas you get to be involved in when you, frankly, have no business being involved in making certain decisions, except for that there's no one else to do it, so you get to."
After more than three years with the startup, Bonakdapour found an opportunity with Columbus, Ohio-based Drive Capital in late 2017. Less than two years later, Livongo Health went public in 2019, only to be acquired by Teladoc in a landmark $18.5 billion deal in 2020.
Bonakdapour admitted she'd love to say she knew it would be an $18 billion company, but she only knew it had a different way of thinking about scaling access to health care.
Now, she's using that experience to invest in other health care companies at Drive Capital.
"I wasn't looking to leave Livongo; it was actually a really hard decision to make," she said. "But finding a venture capital firm that had a very similar thesis and really wanted to invest in other companies that were identifying that same competitive advantage was just super compelling to me, and ultimately, something that I couldn't say no to."
