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Last week at CU Boulder’s renowned Entrepreneurs Unplugged event, SomaLogic founder Larry Gold chatted on campus with Silicon Flatiron’s Entrepreneurship Initiative Director Brad Bernthal and Foundry Group co-founder Brad Feld. This colloquial Silicon Flatirons fireside shed light on Gold’s keys to success as he revisited the darkest days and the best ones of his career in front of students and entrepreneurs. While he said he never allowed the ideas of risk and failure to stop him, he said he learned over time that entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic and tend to underestimate the amount of time and money required to achieve success.

Gold started off the night by recounting how he helped start the MCDB department at CU Boulder in the early 1980s.  In 1987, though, he was fired from the department by the president.  He said at first it was a terrible experience but in time he saw how his own drive to make money for the department got in the way of doing what was best for the school.  This realization helped him develop a professional standard for himself that continued to change during his time at NeXagen.

Following his time at CU Boulder, he founded NeXagen in 1991 which then became NeXstar Pharmaceuticals. When Nexstar merged with Gilead Sciences in 1999, the combined company formed an organization focused on products that treated infectious diseases. Through these experiences of founding yet another company and going through a merger he learned to decide whether or not something matters with what he called the ‘bus principle.’  Here’s how Gold described it: “if a bus hit you today and you died, would anyone care?  If in any part of your life the answer is no, stop [doing] it!”  “Do something that you truly want to do.”'

Gold reminded the audience that you must “notice when you have something that can create change in the world.”  It wasn’t until 1999 that he founded SomaLogic, the second of businesses.  Unlike his past investments in Nexagen this project was born to innovate and he knew that it could revolutionize modern medicine.  To Gold, every day he spent at SomaLogic was his best day because “every next experiment would be the winner,” and he was creating change.

Gold said that all people have an immense hunger for novelty and maintaining an entrepreneurial mindset feeds that hunger.  He told Feld he wants people to “build a life where they want to build it” because success starts with personal happiness (referencing Boulder).  In his finale, Gold left his audience with a sense of boundlessness; he said that a successful entrepreneur knows himself well enough to define success as an unconditionally prosperous mindset because whatever the probability of his or her success may be, it is always exactly enough.