Casana’s Pivot Playbook: How a Former Cybersecurity Founder is Revolutionizing Home Health Monitoring

Successful pivots in tech rarely follow an obvious path. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Austin McChord shares how he went from building a cybersecurity unicorn to developing a health-monitoring toilet seat.

Finding the Common Thread

After taking Datto public and joining General Catalyst as a VC, Austin discovered an unexpected parallel between his past success and future opportunity. “These products work best when forgotten about,” he explains. “Datto was offering, you would set it up, deploy it, and then it just runs in the background. And the same is true with this seat.”

This insight helped bridge the seemingly vast gap between cybersecurity and healthcare. The core principle – technology that operates invisibly in the background – remained constant, even as the application changed dramatically.

Recognizing the Market Moment

The pivot’s timing proved crucial. “COVID is really what made a lot of this possible,” Austin notes. “All of a sudden, people became so much more comfortable doing health stuff at home, and doctors became so much more comfortable thinking about readings and data that people generate at home.”

This shift in healthcare delivery created an opening for innovative home monitoring solutions. But capturing the opportunity required navigating unfamiliar territory.

Redefining Success Metrics

The transition demanded a complete reset of traditional tech metrics. “If we were a software company, that would be an enormous amount of money, and we would have had to demonstrate a ton of traction,” Austin explains regarding their funding. “In med device, we raised this money on $0 in revenue, and that’s not uncommon.”

This mirrors broader industry patterns. Austin points to Moderna’s journey, noting they were “around for over a decade before selling” their first product.

Learning to Trust Contrarian Instincts

The pivot taught valuable lessons about balancing expert advice with founder intuition. “The places that I’ve stumbled most are the places where I’ve been talked out of something, or experts have said, don’t do it this way,” Austin reflects. He admits, “We assumed time following some paths that we potentially didn’t need to follow, and I should have fought a little bit harder on the contrarian opinions.”

Building the Future of Home Health

What started as an unconventional pivot has evolved into a vision for transforming healthcare delivery. “This product, unlike almost anything else you could work on, we’ll directly save people’s lives when it’s in the market,” Austin states.

Looking ahead three to five years, his goal is clear: “There’s hundreds of thousands of seats in the world, and they’re saving lives every month, every week, every day.”

For founders considering similar pivots, Casana’s journey offers crucial lessons about identifying opportunities in adjacent markets, leveraging transferable principles, and maintaining the courage to pursue unconventional paths – even when they lead to unexpected places like health-monitoring toilet seats.