#PowerToThePerson Interview — CRV’s Kristin Baker Spohn Chats with Wheel Co-Founder and CEO, Michelle Davey About Powering Clinicians Through a Pandemic and Ruth Bader Ginsburg

By Kristin Baker Spohn, General Partner, Enterprise

Our #PowerToThePerson Interview Series features frank discussions between our investors and the wonderful founders of companies that CRV backs. These mini interviews are all 12 minutes or less in length because we know none of you have a spare 30 minutes or an hour slot in your schedule, but you might have 12 minutes free between meetings. We aim to fill that void with lively discussions with some of our favorite entrepreneurs. Our most recent segment featured Cribl’s co-founder and CEO, Clint Sharp in a discussion with my colleague Max Gazor.

Today we want to introduce you to another exciting company, this time in the healthcare space. Wheel has raised over $66 million and is providing everything companies and clinicians need to deliver care virtually. The company was founded in 2018, by CEO Michelle Davey and her co-founder Griffin Mulcahey.

CRV invested early on in Wheel, and Michelle, back in 2019, just a year after the company launched. Michelle and I began working together back when the company only had around a dozen employees. Today Wheel has over 120 employees.

I sat down with Michelle to discuss everything from the future of healthcare to our mutual fondness for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Below are a few highlights from our conversation, but you can watch our full discussion over on CRV’s YouTube channel.

Michelle and I discussed a number of topics including:

• Why she started Wheel.
• Some of her proudest moments at the company.
• Her advice to other entrepreneurs …and why she doesn’t do all the financials for the business anymore.

During our chat Michelle also spoke about her personal journey with healthcare and how early one she saw the potential for virtual care and telehealth to help solve those issues.

We also discussed the importance of having an investor-founder partnership where you can compare notes often and how the pandemic has impacted Wheel’s value proposition to clinicians, but Michelle wasn’t the only one doing the talking. I also spent some time discussing the qualities that Michelle has that I often look for when investing in high performing entrepreneurs.

As is likely the case for many founders, there are a lot of things that keep Michelle up at night including her drive to hire amazing talent and constantly striving to fuel her industry with more innovation.

We also talked about why I think Michelle is such a powerhouse.

This year has been a busy one for Michelle. Wheel just recently closed its Series B and last month she made Insider’s list of the, “30 young leaders forging a new future for the healthcare industry in 2021,” so I’m incredibly grateful that she was able to speak with me and share her words of wisdom with other ambitious founders. We look forward to continuing to support Wheel and Michelle in their journey …and to connecting with other driven entrepreneurs who are building game changing early stage software businesses.