Meddi CEO Jiří Pecina: founders must be a little bit crazy

Jiří Pecina, head of the telemedicine group Meddi, believes a true founder has to be “a little crazy,” but needs someone beside them who won’t let them go off the rails. He shared his path from a bicycle business to a global medtech company at the Forbes “Best Czechia” conference in Karlovy Vary.

The Brno native is not yet fifty and hasn’t had to work out of necessity for twenty years. He started doing business at thirteen: together with a classmate, he opened a bicycle repair shop in the Starý Lískovec district. By his account, within a month they realized they were earning more than his mother, who worked as a nurse.

At the turn of the millennium, Pecina moved from bicycles to cars and built the Eurocar dealership network, selling his stake to Wood & Company in 2008. He then invested in several projects in the U.S. and Europe, and more than ten years ago began developing the telemedicine platform Meddi together with his wife, Alena Ingrid Pecina. It lets patients handle health issues online, without a visit to the doctor.

The start was hard: “For the first four years of development we didn’t send a single invoice and kept hearing that it was strange,” the entrepreneur recalled. Even so, Meddi today has more than nine million customers worldwide, and its clients include major insurers and the payment system Visa.

The founder’s secret, according to Pecina, is luck and a dose of madness: you have to immerse yourself in the work, study the market and not do everything just for a future sale. But next to such a “crazy” person there must be someone who guides them and helps see things through. In his observation, successful companies are usually backed by a man and his partner — as with Meddi, where his wife helps him.

Alena Ingrid is in charge of Meddi in sixteen countries and made the Forbes list of the most influential women in Czechia. “You need people around you who are better than you and still firmly grounded,” Pecina stressed.