Family Dinner Recap: Grant Gochnauer

How does a small team thrive amid surging customer requests for new features or the challenges of losing the majority of your engineers in a month? For Northwestern alum Grant Gochnauer ‘02, the answer was agility and persistence—qualities that helped him grow his company Vodori into a $7.5 million-funded global SaaS company serving over a hundred life sciences clients.

During Family Dinner at The Garage on Wednesday, January 23, Gochnauer spoke to Residents about his whirlwind experience as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Vodori.

“Sometimes people ask me, ‘What do you attribute your ability to be 19 years into this business to?’ I’ll tell you that if I didn’t have the absolute trust and relationship I have with my co-founders, we would have been dead like five times over again,” Gochnauer said.

Vodori, a Chicago-based software company, specializes in empowering medical device and biotech companies with a suite of content management tools designed to accelerate the launch of commercial content while ensuring strict compliance with regulatory guidelines.

If it sounds complicated, it’s because it is.

“Life sciences is highly complex. There’s so much information, there’s so many nuances and regulations and different people involved,” Gochnauer told the Residents. “Domain expertise is one of the hardest things to teach.”

Despite the challenges, Gochnauer recalled a time he and his co-founders successfully onboarded an entire new team of engineers all at once to grow their business after other team members left, with some new members based in the U.S. and some overseas in Ukraine.

Gochnauer and his co-founders built a curriculum with various exercises to help communicate their industry and product-specific knowledge.

“As a small startup and a small team, one of your other superpowers is your agility and your ability to respond and iterate quickly,” Gochnauer advised the Residents, many of whom are part of lean startup teams themselves. “We can bob and weave way faster than [others] can.”

When Gochnauer and co-founders Scott Rovegno and Stacy Wolters first started Vodori in 2005, the startup ecosystem in Chicago was in its infancy. He said they had to get resourceful.

“I moved back in with my parents, worked out of the basement, that whole typical story,” Gochnauer said.

However, Vodori was not always primarily a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. After building up the service business of Vodori with about 60 employees, the co-founders began to receive feedback from customers that the life sciences industry as a whole was more interested in one particular product out of the entire suite of products that Vodori was selling.

Gochnauer decided to lean into this “reimagining” of their company, promising their clients features and then working to build them out in real-time. He spoke to Residents about the intensity and productivity of this period of his life.

By being transparent with clients and maintaining long-lasting relationships built upon trust, Gochnauer and his colleagues successfully delivered these capabilities and converted their platform to become the enterprise SaaS software provider it is today.

In his final advice to Residents at The Garage, Gochnauer emphasized the importance of leaning into a community of founders to help shoulder some of the challenges that one can face in their entrepreneurial journey – as well as to help celebrate the wins.

“In the moment, you’re thinking ‘I am unique.’ There is no one else going through this problem, this pain, anxiety or doubt,” Gochnauer said. “Find a founder community, especially somebody who has been there and seen it and can turn around and be like, ‘That’s totally normal.’”