Re View Summit Recap

Last week, we brought together 30+ of these founding CEOs and our Venture Chairs for the inaugural Re View Summit, a two-day event focused on the best practices for successfully scaling businesses. The event also provided invaluable opportunities for attendees to connect with their peers and Venture Chair advisors in person, encouraging stronger connections to Redesign Health and our community at large. 

The summit featured presentations from inspiring speakers who have overcome similar obstacles when building companies, who shared their tried-and-true methods of success.

Chip Heath, bestselling co-author of four books, led an interactive session designed to hone and elevate a startup pitch. Chip leveraged his experience helping over 560 startups crystallize their strategy and mission to share best practices for delivering a compelling pitch — whether to investors, business partners or potential recruits. He discussed the SUCCES model for effective pitches, which stands for simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories. His presentation highlighted what Chip calls the curse of knowledge, and the importance of stepping back from one’s area of expertise in order to explain something in a straightforward, simple way. He emphasized that with founders and CEOs, it's especially impactful to focus on the emotion and passion that motivated them to solve this problem in the first place. Framing the opportunity by what came before this solution, paired with personal stories, can be incredibly impactful.

Attendees put Chip’s insights to the test by breaking out into small groups to practice pitching their companies to a variety of audiences, including investors and partners. This experiential learning activity enabled an opportunity for feedback from their peers who shared strengths and opportunities for improvement.

As the Co-Founder of Welly Health PBC, Eric Ryan is well-versed in what it takes to build a successful business in the wellness space, previously co-founding Method Products and OLLY PBC, among other ventures. He joined us at the summit to lead a masterclass-style session on the necessity of building a team with both artists and operators, in order to instill operational rigor while enabling creativity in a business —a critical balance for business success. 

Obsession, according to Eric, is integral to every part of the experience, and he prioritizes getting a product as close to perfect as possible before launching, rather than launching fast and then figuring out much of the details. Before launching something, he asks for feedback from a close circle and also leverages consumer research for insights in order to iterate as much as possible. He believes that as a business, you either win on experience or you win on convenience and price — and that in this day and age, experience is often what really stands out, given the wide-availability of inexpensive products available online conveniently delivered within days to your doorstep.

We closed the summit with a fireside chat with Lily Sarafan and Venture Chair James Quarles. Lily shared critical, tactical learnings about growing and scaling a business from her experience building and scaling TheKey, a company with over 10,000 employees that's changing how the world lives and ages at home. 

Lily shared a few key takeaways applicable to many business leaders:

• In her experience, Lily has seen greater success from focusing on prioritizing a specific population and/or challenge, rather than trying to tackle more opportunities and spreading her team too thin. 

• She prioritizes hiring for culture fit rather than optimizing for clinical experience alone. She shared that “Healthcare can be taught, but a disposition for human connection cannot” — something that’s especially important in home care.

• Lily also emphasized the importance of providing customers an opportunity to share feedback after each interaction with her team through a communications hub.

In addition to these engaging workshops and presentations, the summit featured intimate dinners and networking events. During a Creative Tensions dialogue exercise, attendees were challenged to respond to healthcare and entrepreneurial related this-or-that questions to reveal where they stand on the topic by where they stood in the room, with the option to share their opinion. A Jeffersonian-style dinner encouraged attendees to have deeper conversations with questions designed to spark engaging dialogue. 

We believe that in-person community building engagements help form invaluable connections amongst leaders facing similar challenges and opportunities. We look forward to witnessing the impact these CEOs and founders will continue to have across the healthcare ecosystem.

If you have the drive and entrepreneurial background to transform health from the ground up, join us as a CEO and help lead and build a company from pre-launch to market scale. We're hiring!