When Dan Leibu graduated from Concordia, he thought he would go into academia and become a university professor.
“Somewhere in the midst of my graduate studies I realized that it wasn't really for me at the time. I wasn't finding it very motivating,” he says.
In 1997, he threw his hat into the ring at a start-up called DocSpace, quickly fell in love with the technology industry and has mostly worked as a serial entrepreneur ever since. It’s where he met Michael Serbinis and together pioneered cloud-storage technology.
He and Serbinis have now turned toward the healthcare sphere as co-founders of League, helping employers, pharmacy retailers, healthcare providers, and payers to deliver integrated and personalized health experiences at scale. Millions of people across the world now use digital health platforms powered by League to access, navigate and pay for care. Most notably in Canada, League provides the digital infrastructure for Loblaw's PC Health.
Why the health-care space
“Health and wellbeing is something that’s very relatable and something that I think is very important to each of us.
“Our belief is that the experience of accessing health services today is very challenging. At the end of the day, there’s a huge onus placed on the individual and sometimes at a moment when the individuals are in real need.”
A challenging moment in his career
“The dot-com bust was hugely informative, seeing people lose their jobs or their homes, having to make really tough decisions and say ‘no’ to clients.
“It’s kind of the flip side of the heady success. It’s an important perspective to have to know the cost of failure, not in a sense that it makes you fearful, but that it makes you a little bit more respectful of some of the implications of the decisions that you make, the work that you do and why it matters.”
Motivation for starting another start-up
“I came to realize that what I personally really love is the process of creating and building things, particularly in the early stages.
“I’m passionate about the process. It’s full of its challenges, but it’s really rewarding.”