Welcome, Nicole and Peter
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the additions of Nicole Bell and Peter Bridges to our team at Curai. Nicole will be joining as our Chief Business Officer and Peter will be joining as our President. The two of them bring a depth of transformative experiences in the healthcare industry that will accelerate our growth.
In his famous commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs tells a beautiful story about how his decision to take calligraphy classes changed the way people interacted with computers forever:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great…
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac… If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
While Steve used this point to talk about the serendipity of following your interests, there’s something else to be gleaned from this story: that innovation comes from bringing the best people and ideas from disparate worlds together. When we look at our healthcare system and the digital health companies trying to innovate it, we feel like it continually lacks this kind of radical cross-disciplinary merging of ideas. I’ve often remarked to people near me how deep-rooted mimetic behaviors are in healthcare. One company acquires one and their competitors follow suit. Another company talks about value based care, the rest pile on. Rarely do we see people bring the equivalent of Jobs’ calligraphy into healthcare and when they do, it’s often cast aside.
Put differently, in a system as broken as ours, we need new ways of thinking about how to build a better future. For a company like ours to be successful, we have to be exceptional at such a wide array of tasks: delivering great care, building great products, driving technological innovation, and finding the right partnerships. Most importantly, we’ve got to find new ways of taking steps forward in all of these areas. Instead of relying on serendipity, from the genesis of our company, we’ve tried to engineer this intellectual diversity into our company’s gene pool. We don’t know anywhere else in the world where a meeting between an exceptional clinician, an accomplished healthcare operator, and a world class AI researcher sitting in the same room is just another Tuesday, and it’s something that makes our organization a unique and special place to work. It’s a much harder path to bring exceptional people from so many different areas together, but we’ve designed the company to take on hard problems to succeed over the long term.
It’s with that context that we’re so excited to have Nicole and Peter joining our team.
Nicole joins from Amazon where she previously led Business Development and partnerships for their Care product. As she likes to tell me though, Curai is her fifth journey in pursuit of transforming primary care, and she brings a wealth of experience from those efforts ranging from Regence BlueCross BlueShield to Cambia Grove. There’s not a lot of people who know this space better than she does. Nicole is someone who thinks big and dreams forward with unbounded optimism. From our very first conversation, it was clear that her belief in Curai’s model was based on the idea that an order of magnitude more technology forward approach was needed to actually fulfill virtual care’s promise of better care at lower costs.
Peter joins us from Ginger (now Headspace Health), where he was their Chief Commercial Officer and led their commercial efforts. There are few people in the digital health world who have built more successful commercial teams and efforts than Peter has. He brings a deep expertise and history in partnering with employers, health plans, and strategic partners from his background at Aon and Hewitt Associates. I’ve met few people in healthcare who listen and learn as deeply as he does and it’s part of why he can bring such wonderful insights; he brings a lifelong set of experiences and knowledge of a space, and pairs it with a deep humility and desire to learn about new things.
These two additions are deeply exciting to us. As a young company with a great product and technology that is early in our commercialization journey, we believe they will be multiplicative to our business. While we certainly expect they will help us offer better access to care to more people, I am most excited about what I have already seen them do — push our team to think differently about how we approach everything at Curai. Nobody has ever built an AI-enabled physician practice at scale before, and getting this to work requires novel approaches to product positioning, how we work with healthcare organizations, payment structures, and developing strategic partners. That kind of radical new thinking only comes from blending the best of many worlds together; with folks like Nicole, Peter, our other executives, CTO and co-founder Xavier Amatriain and Chief Product Officer Meghan Oliver, and the exceptional teams underneath them, Curai is uniquely suited to deliver the world’s best healthcare to everyone.
