Laura Schneck: My Three Favorite Things About Working at Redesign Health
Laura Schneck, Strategic Partnerships
We’re introducing our “My Three Favorite Things About Working at Redesign Health” series, where we ask Redesign Health employees to share why they love what they do.
Our first piece is from Laura Schneck on Redesign’s Strategic Partnerships team. Her team is focused on improving the practice and experience of healthcare by accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies and creating transformative healthcare companies. The Redesign team is growing. Come join us!
I came to Redesign to continue forging a path at the intersection of healthcare innovation and new business development. I started out at Bain working with the largest, most established players in the healthcare world, then moved to Moderna in its scaling years and had the opportunity to play a role in pivotal moments for the company. After Moderna, I wanted to venture even earlier stage, to the very first part of company formation — from idea, to product, to market. I joined Redesign as it was just getting started, when the full team could sit around one table and interview me.
I connected with Redesign after meeting Brett Shaheen, founder and CEO, through a friend at another venture firm who was impressed by Redesign’s early work and vision. I was excited to contribute to their mission to redesign health for everyone by developing technologies, tools, and insights that lower the barriers to change in healthcare.
When I first joined the team nearly three years ago, I worked on launching new businesses. Then as we started venturing into more complex business models where working with big players in the industry was critical, I founded Redesign’s Partnerships function. I’ve now been working on the Partnerships team for two years. For the first year or more I was flying solo in the role, but now we’ve grown to a team of four, with plans to at least double in size by the end of the year. Our team’s mission is to fuel company creation and growth by accelerating adoption of Redesign’s Operating Companies and identifying opportunities to launch new healthcare businesses with partners.
From where I sit, I work across the full spectrum of Redesign’s ever-growing 30+ Operating Companies as they mature from idea stage to market, and with a broad swath of the healthcare industry’s most impactful companies.
My three favorite things about working at Redesign are:
#1 — The shared ambition and impact we’ve been able to have in such a short time. I feel fortunate to have experienced the massive impact that both biotech and digital health innovations can have on people’s lives. In biotech, being part of one successful drug launch in one’s career is nothing short of heroic. Meanwhile, at Redesign, we’re aiming to launch a new company every two weeks. The dynamics in these two sectors of the industry are drastically different, but in both cases, we aspire to push healthcare forward by getting the best people together around a common goal to create something new that helps people heal. The ambition that Redesign has shown from the early days through to now is astounding and all the incredible people we’ve hired along the way are a testament to the enormous potential of this model.
#2 — The unique vantage point presented by working with a broad spectrum of companies in different stages of development. Helping Redesign and its companies navigate the complex and evolving healthcare ecosystem gives me an extraordinary perspective. I’m able to hear first-hand what the biggest players care about, the problems they haven’t been able to solve on their own, and also how new entrants and disruptors are making moves in healthcare. This perspective informs the companies we’re creating and our positioning in the outside world. When it comes to actually launching operating companies, we don’t have to go through convoluted bureaucratic processes to get things off the ground, which is refreshing. We actually have the latitude to launch what the market needs.
#3 — As the platform grows, we have the opportunity to develop companies that heal people and encourage equality through healthcare. The problems presented by the healthcare space are so complex, sometimes it feels hard to know where to begin. In many ways, Redesign is tackling these problems practically and systematically. We have guidance from our renowned group of Venture Chairs, advisors, and employees across the organization from a wide variety of backgrounds. I am grateful to be in their company as we work on issues so elemental to quality of life for so many people.
Laura Schneck has worked across the healthcare industry, from early-stage biotech to large pharma, and with academic researchers, hospital systems, payers, and pharmacy benefit managers. Before Redesign, she was part of the team at Moderna that grew the company from a few hundred to nearly 1,000 employees, built out a pipeline of 20+ drug candidates, and initiated over a dozen clinical trials. At Moderna, she helped define the company’s early portfolio strategy — building the investment case and clinical development plan for dozens of new assets across infectious disease vaccines, oncology, and rare diseases. In 2018, she shifted focus to financing, helping the company raise more than $1.2bn in her time leading Investor Relations. Her work culminated in running the end-to-end process for Moderna’s IPO, the largest to date in the biotech sector. Prior to Moderna, Laura was at Bain & Company in their New York office, advising healthcare clients on R&D strategy, governance and operating models, and M&A activity. She also spent time at Merck & Co., contributed to various early-stage life sciences initiatives in New York City, and conducted research at NYU Langone and the VA Hospital. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Brown University with B.A.s in Human Biology and Economics.
