WVV Investor Spotlight: Matt Maurer, Principal Partner
I’m Matt Maurer, Principal Partner at WVV Capital (WVV). WVV is a venture capital fund formed by four corporate partners: Advocate Aurora Health, Foxconn, Johnson Controls International, and Northwestern Mutual. We blend the best of a traditional fund with a unique relationship with our corporate partners. I’m writing this post to share a bit more about my background and our approach and philosophy toward innovation in healthcare.
From startup, to startup-supporter, and over (and over) again
It can take hundreds (thousands?) of repetitions to build the muscle memory needed for durable startup investing, so I feel lucky to have gotten my start earlier than most. While studying aeronautical engineering at the University of North Dakota, I founded an advanced-materials tech startup — which exposed me early on to the weird and wonderful world of venture capital. Not long after, I helped create the first venture fund on the planet run entirely by students — and would come to lead as its President and Managing Director, all during undergrad. This early experience on both sides of the investment table helped me win the Alan K. Ruvelson Venture Fellowship (named after one of the founding fathers of venture capital), and thus completed my first lap around the track going from founder to a role defined by supporting founders.
I quickly moved to the Bay Area to experience the excitement of Silicon Valley, and found my way into a new startup as a product manager (without really knowing what a PM was). Around 2013 I decided to try my hand at founding another startup of my own — this time in healthtech — which kicked off a 10-years-and-counting journey into healthcare. I built Stroll Health, a digital health company which reverse-engineered healthcare pricing to allow patients and providers to find affordable in-network care. Stroll was acquired by eviCore, and from there things got really interesting. Within months, eviCore was acquired by Express Scripts, and four months later, Express announced it would be acquired by Cigna. I suddenly found myself inside a global health services company with 70,000 employees and over 180 million customer relationships.
I worked inside Cigna for a couple years, fascinated to see behind the curtain of a giant corporation and understand the motivations and strategies that drove such an organization forward. Since ‘startup’ was my native language, part of my role became partnering with and supporting tech startups to help them navigate the many layers of the enterprise — all the while gaining a new level of empathy for what it truly takes to be a startup founder on the outside, trying to partner with behemoth healthcare institutions. That concluded lap 2.
To begin lap 3, I embarked on another tour of duty in the startup trenches by joining Robin — an early healthtech startup I’d been advising since inception — to drive strategy and business development, and help the company grow from a few dozen to nearly 1,000 people.
Finally, my journey once again came full circle, back to venture capital when I joined WVV.
What does disruption mean in healthcare?
Having now worked in healthcare for a decade and trying to drive change at literally every company stage (from 7 people, to 70, to 700, to 70,000), I am continually reminded of two constants: the amount of true human impact that is possible in healthcare, and the endlessness of the learning curve. As a person driven by curiosity, the latter can be nearly as motivating as the former, and I could easily spend another 100 years in healthcare finding no shortage of worthwhile problems to solve, or industry nuances by which to be perplexed.
Whether you’re just scratching the industry’s surface or you’ve spent years here, you always have good reason to lament the complexity of healthcare and the Rube Goldberg-like set of incentives it is built upon. However, there is historical grounding and logic as to why the industry operates the way it does today. Thus while most successful startups in this space often begin orthogonal to the status quo, they often discover that healthcare needs to be complemented, augmented, and evolved, more than overnight-disrupted.
This is the main reason I was compelled to join WVV. Having spent time as a small startup trying to scale corporate mountains — as well as a corporate director trying to shepherd startups to help us build faster — I know firsthand the gaps that naturally exist between the two poles. And, for healthcare in particular, carefully bridging these gaps is a complex endeavor, but usually the fastest way to make a meaningful impact. With Advocate Aurora Health — one of the largest not-for-profit, integrated health systems in the United States — as one of our corporate partners, we have a direct link to the institutions and infrastructure powering our healthcare system. This allows us to not only better identify startups we think can make an impact, but also help plug them directly into the complicated fabric from which our healthcare system is woven.
The future of how healthcare is delivered
In the healthcare space in particular, there are a few macro trends we’re keeping an eye on these days — one of the largest focusing on how and where care will be delivered in the future. The COVID pandemic forced us to accelerate the adoption of telemedicine, and as society continues to get more comfortable interfacing with these technologies, it opens up huge potential for founders to tackle problems surrounding healthcare access, adherence, and efficacy. We’re now beginning to see the second- and third-order innovations that can stand upon a strong general foundation of telemedicine.
For example: Bend Health and Blueberry Pediatrics, two of our portfolio companies which WVV led the seed rounds for, are taking a novel approach to making specialized care for childrens’ mental health and primary care (respectively) more easily available with a tech-first, scalable approach. Whereas only a couple years ago innovation in telemedicine was defined by the video call, we’re now going far beyond that simple step and introducing custom remote hardware, specialty applications, remote data collection, and models of care that allow us to better utilize our human capital to care for one another.
And the most exciting part? It is still early days.
This all relates to our thesis around how healthcare can be more efficiently provisioned in order to deliver the optimal diagnostic, assessment, and intervention — or prevention — within the optimal healthcare environment. Which care can be delivered virtually, and which needs to remain in person? Which are best suited to a hybrid approach? Where can AI actually be deployed to leverage its strengths? How can everything a hospital has to offer be amplified through technology and afford greater efficiencies? These are just a few of the questions driving us forward as a fund, and an ecosystem.
If you’re working on a healthcare startup that is taking a tech-first approach, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, or drop the WVV investment team a line at info [at] wvvcapital [dot] com.
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