His startup, CourMed, has gotten backing and support from Microsoft, Google and Amazon Pharmacy.
By Ana Paula Tirado
Sep 23, 2021
6:00 AM
Ask Derrick Miles about his path to becoming an entrepreneur and he’ll tell you about why he walked away from a successful 15-year corporate career that saw him rise to vice president of a large health care system in North Carolina.
Frustrated by the pace of innovation at a big company, he called it quits at age 37 during the Great Recession in 2009, expecting to quickly make a mark on his own.
Instead, he ran into obstacles that a corporate climber wasn’t prepared to scale.
“When I became an entrepreneur, that was the first time ever in life that I failed,” the 49-year-old says, thinking back on the shortcomings of his younger self. That failure even led him to consider suicide when the trappings of success began to fall away.
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