Across my career in technology and healthcare, I’ve started a business from scratch, worked with founders from day one to exit, turned around struggling businesses and helped transform companies into category leaders. I’ve always loved the earliest days of building products and services that can meaningfully change lives. Going from an idea to something that makes a material difference is hard, but so fun.
As a Board Partner at First Round, I work closely with founders in these early days, providing guidance wherever I can for what matters most to their business. Whether it’s making introductions to the first few customers, thinking through development priorities, refining sales strategy, helping with key hires, or defining ways to experiment more quickly, I apply principles from 30 years as a product and business leader along with the curiosity needed to keep learning what works.
Most of my time at First Round is in the healthcare space, as I spent 12 years as Chief Innovation Officer at Penn Medicine in my prior role. My team at Penn had the opportunity to design, test and implement 150 technology-enabled interventions across a broad spectrum of care delivery. We scaled novel solutions that decreased readmission rates, ER utilization, morbidity, hospital stays, and clinician burden while increasing adherence, screening, patient engagement, quality of life, and use of high value sites of care.
I also enjoyed coaching faculty entrepreneurs as they spun out new businesses based on breakthrough research and outside startup founders as they navigated the process from pilot to partnership. I had the privilege of building relationships with incredible clinical and operational leaders at health systems and payers across the country, forming a network of mission-driven people determined to drive meaningful change in an industry where there’s still too much cost, inefficiency, inequality and suffering.
Earlier in my career, I built and led the innovation program at Intuit. I spent time diving deep into why some of our new efforts went to the moon, while others failed to thrive. After five years of redesigning entrepreneurial practices, which were also applied to existing businesses, Intuit delivered shareholder returns 33x the S&P 500. It was a fun way to wrap up an 18-year run at the company, which I started as the product manager of Quicken, helping it grow into the top selling consumer software application at the time with 14 million consumers.
Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky to learn from some of the best, from Scott Cook, Bill Campbell and Brad Smith at Intuit to leading behavioral scientists at Penn to remarkable founders who showed me how hard things could become possible.
I received my MBA from Stanford and graduated with honors from Harvard College as a John Harvard Scholar. Outside of work, I’m usually throwing sticks to my dog Addy, trying to catch up with my three kids who are off at college and beyond, going on adventures with my wife, Rachel, finding the best new restaurants and chocolate that can be found, and then doing my best to work off those calories.