An Entrepreneurial Journey Beyond the Entrepreneur

By Trevor Price, Oxeon Founder and Chairman

Welcome…Sonia!

In reflecting on the 11 wild years since we founded Oxeon, along with introspection on my own time as CEO, and in thinking about my broader career and life, I’ve found myself framing Oxeon within the context of what I believe constitutes the entrepreneurial dream; that is, turning a concept into a successful, high-impact mission-driven business with palpable core values, a vibrant culture and incredible people. The piece of that entrepreneurial dream yet to be fulfilled is for Oxeon to thrive beyond the Founder stage and exceed anything ever envisioned for the business.

To realize this final piece of the dream, Oxeon needs a CEO who leads with passion, grit and a strong work ethic as I have for 11 years, but it now needs something different and something more. Oxeon now needs a true Chief Executive, a proven leader equipped with the right kind of experience to manage, operationalize, lead and scale the platform for greater and greater impact.

To find that person, in late 2021 I kicked off what Seth Blackley named “Oxeon’s most important executive search.” Today I am proud, honored and thrilled to announce that Sonia Millsom is the CEO of Oxeon. She is responsible for the Oxeon Holdings platform and for our three operating entities: Oxeon Search, Oxeon Investments and Oxeon Venture Studio. I will now step into a Board Chair role with Oxeon, as Sonia and I collaborate to build the firm’s first Board of Directors.

Sonia Millsom and I have known each other for years, and she has always been a “firm favorite” here at Oxeon. Really, she is an industry favorite. Sonia is a highly respected leader, innovator, strategist, operator and manager. More importantly, she is an even better human being — with a spirit of generosity and a deep commitment to Oxeon’s objectives of serving the vulnerable and championing diversity.

Sonia brings to Oxeon a very rare combination of experience across all three of our operating businesses. She has built and led top-performing teams. She has worked in equity-financed entrepreneurial companies. She has led strategic growth and operations at health tech and tech-enabled service companies, with extensive experience in value-based care. Sonia’s leadership will substantially expand Oxeon’s contributions to the transformation of our healthcare system. I am truly honored that Sonia would undertake this journey and commitment, and I look forward to learning from her and supporting her in any and all ways that I am able.

Founding Oxeon

I always knew my time leading Oxeon would come to an end. I set things up that way when I formed the company.

Being a multigenerational company was a foundational pillar of what I envisioned as the firm’s potential legacy. I also viewed my own legacy as an entrepreneur and Founder as inextricably linked to this aspirational goal. There was particular urgency here, as I saw Oxeon as possibly my last “entrepreneurial at-bat.” I wanted to start and build something that truly made a longitudinal difference to the people that worked there and more broadly to our society.

When forming the company in late 2011, I specified that by 2028 I would no longer be CEO and I would dilute myself, versus selling, out of all equity ownership in Oxeon with the exception of one share for symbolic purposes. I have been told that specifying this at the founding stage of the company was crazy and overconfident. Looking back, I would have to agree, and it was certainly neither the first time I have been called crazy nor overconfident. In reality, I had no idea whether the company would survive a single year, no less 11 into 2022, or the full 16 to make it to 2028. In retrospect, it really was pretty absurd, but lots about Oxeon has been pretty absurd.

I have sat on Boards as an investor, been part of many CEO executive search mandates, started nine companies off of the Oxeon platform and eight companies before Oxeon. I was the CEO “transitioned” by investors in one of those. As a result of these experiences, I know that companies go through different stages of maturity that require different types of leadership, management and vision. I have had a front-row seat to transitions that went well, and to those that did not. While Oxeon has neither investors nor a Board to make a “transition” decision for me, coming to that conclusion on my own actually felt more complex, yet ultimately more healthy and liberating.

I have always respected those who consider the company as more important than the individual and I have tried to model that behavior. I know that Oxeon has emerged from the “figuring it out” phase of entrepreneurship; I am so proud of our people and of our many accomplishments.

There is no question that regardless of multiple twists and turns, Oxeon has stayed true to our North Star of building a totally unique platform centered on the fundamental belief that exceptional leaders and executive teams are substantially more important drivers of impact than great products and huge markets. We have never wavered from using our North Star to fulfill our mission to Make People Healthier, while holding ourselves to Core Values that include Intellectual Curiosity, Spirit of Generosity, Collaboration, Grit and Emotional Intelligence (EQ).

Out of this core principle, our mission and our values, Oxeon has:

• Built a mission-driven executive search firm that has placed more than 1,000 executives across a generation of transformative healthcare companies, while maintaining an average client NPS over 90 and Employee Engagement over 80.
• Made seed and angel investments off of the Oxeon balance sheet in more than 100 companies. Of the 20 largest investment and executive search contributions, 11 went from founding/seed/series A stage to Unicorn status post Oxeon’s team build and financial contribution.
• Created and funded, using pretax profits from the executive search firm, a venture studio that has “founded” and launched nine companies. Three have been acquired and the remaining six, owned in large part by current and former Oxeon employees, have an aggregate market cap of over $1B, are led by great CEOs (as part of our diversity commitment, four of the six are women!) and management teams, are backed by great investment firms and are delivering exceptional value-based healthcare to the people who need it most.

To have been able to do all of this while positively impacting the health of millions of people is proof to the founding entrepreneur that Oxeon is an incredibly unique and special company; an amazing place to have called “work” for the past 11 years!

Looking back, I would certainly change many things that I did and many decisions that I made, but I would never change the journey. As I look forward, I know that with Sonia leading as CEO Oxeon will be in the best possible position to reach its full potential and to deliver on the promise of this platform, for the good of millions of people.

What is Next?

That picture is definitely part of it; however, for most people who know me, they recognize that I may be genetically incapable of retiring. Perhaps more importantly, the relationships I have formed with many of you and the work that we have done has and will continue to be so meaningful to me. So this is not retirement, per se. This is about doing fewer things better and by “fewer things” I mean more of the things that I find energizing and that I am passionate about and that have maximum impact. I am deeply committed to helping Sonia build Oxeon into the company that we all know it can be. I will support her as the Chairman of the soon-to-form Board of Directors. More importantly, I view myself as a member of Sonia’s team, as a deeply committed Oxeonite and as a passionate believer that the healthcare system is at the very beginning of its critically important transformation. I look forward to supporting her, our Oxeon colleagues and all of you in continuing to drive that transformation.

In the coming months, my primary focus will be to support Sonia’s transition, to collaborate with her in building a Board of Directors and to recharge my batteries a bit. In the future, as Chairman, I will look to maintain relationships and support Oxeon executive search leaders with their critical mandates. I love the work, the relationships and the outcomes of building great teams. I also intend to work closely with our venture studio. Being an entrepreneur and creating companies checks all the boxes that I outlined above.

I feel very fortunate that Sonia and I are collaborating so effectively to implement this transition for Oxeon, from “Founder & CEO” to “Real CEO.” For now and in the foreseeable future, I want to focus my energy on ensuring its success.

My Deepest Thanks to Each of You

I cannot think about Oxeon without thinking about Megan, Charlie, Tess and Catie. They all, and especially Megan, have sacrificed so much over the last 11 years. It is impossible to express how much I needed and appreciated their love and support. It is not easy to be married to or to be parented by an entrepreneur, especially one like me. I am looking forward to maximizing our remaining family time before the kids head off to college and then I am looking forward to making the most of being empty nesters.

I intentionally did not include anyone’s name in this other than Sonia’s, my family’s and in giving attribution where attribution was warranted. There are so many critically important people to the Oxeon story that trying to thank all of you publicly will only lead to me missing someone and I would feel horrible.

Yes, I was the Founder of this amazing company but we would not be what we are today without so many great Oxeon employees, both current and former. I really cannot express enough gratitude and appreciation for all you have done and for all you have endured. Mostly, for all the joy you brought to “work.” We had so much friggin’ fun, so much success and we have had such an incredible impact. We had our cake and ate it too.

To our clients, to the companies that allowed us to invest in them, to the teams that inherit our venture studio companies, to the investors who have entrusted us to work and co-invest with them and to the universe of executives that interact with Oxeon and take our phone calls, the vast majority of you do your work with real purpose and mission. Quite simply, and from the deepest part of my heart: Thank you. I really don’t know how else to say it.

A skeptic would have said that people with little to no executive search and investing experience, many of whom did not have entrepreneurial experience either, would have virtually zero chance of building what today is Oxeon; disrupting an industry, producing best-in-class investment returns and starting nine companies from scratch with zero outside funding. Damn it, we did it. To the skeptics…(I am demonstrating professional maturity here as anyone who knows me knows exactly what is going through my mind). I hope to write more about Oxeon, the ultimate Little Engine that Could, in the coming weeks and months. I hope that the areas of focus that made a difference for Oxeon will be helpful to other entrepreneurs. Oxeon has touched and impacted so many people, I am most certainly at the top of that list. I appreciate all of you welcoming Sonia and supporting her leadership of this amazing place that I love and that has made me so proud.