After graduating with a BS in Commerce from the McIntire School at the University of Virginia, Andy started his career at Host Marriott Corporation (now Host Hotels & Resorts, NYSE: HST) in the Treasury, Asset Management and Acquisition and Development groups and completed transactions valued at approximately $1.5 billion. He then moved to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford Business School where he got that entrepreneurial itch. As his friends headed off to Google, Facebook, and other high flying tech companies after graduation, Andy and Chris Hendriksen, his business school roommate, founded Blue Canyon Capital which was formed in September of 2006. Blue Canyon Capital then purchased Valued Relationships, Inc (VRI) in Dayton, Ohio. Andy became CEO and served in that role for five years. After a fourfold growth in revenues, the majority of VRI was sold to Pamlico Capital in 2014. VRI investors received a gross return of approximately 9x their investment. Today Andy lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Stephanie where they are devoted parents to their daughter Grace’s legacy, younger daughter Ava, and their pup, Butler.
Andy Schoonover
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-schoonover-6261557
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchoonoverAndy
Member since September 30, 2021
- About
I wanted to start something completely different outside of an existing entity.
Homeward out of Austin. They are totally rethinking the way we pay for homes. Paga out of Lagos, Nigeria. They are trying to disrupt the payment system in Africa. ICON out of Austin. They are 3D printing homes which could potentially change the way we care for the homeless.
My daughter had to get tubes in her ears. After the 15 minute procedure we were hit with and $8,000 bill that our insurance company refused to pay. I was tired of getting screwed by health insurance companies so I started looking into creative ways to operate outside the system. The culmination of that was CrowdHealth.
The hardest thing to do is to get people to change their behavior. They can have a terrible experience with an industry of companies (i.e. health insurance) but will stick around because the know evil is perceived as better than the unknown good.
Paying attention to what others think. If it really is disruptive then most people will think you are crazy. If they don’t think you are crazy, then someone else has already done it.
You can have conviction for your product or service but also be humble.
A startup is like a life raft, unlike an aircraft carrier, a bad person or two will doom the mission.
The path to success is littered with failure. Failure is not an if, but a when. Do you fast, do it often, and make sure you learn from those failings.
