Reflections from 2019 at Oxeon: A Year of Lessons and Triumphs

By Trevor Price, Founder and CEO at Oxeon Partners, and General Partner of Town Hall Ventures

To Make People Healthier. This has always been Oxeon’s mission. It goes beyond  “Recruiting Impact Rockstars” or an executive search mantra.  It is meant to be different than “Generating Top Quartile IRR for Our Valued Limited Partners” or an Institutional Investor website homepage. With enormous respect for all single threaded entrepreneurs, it is also different from “Build My Company to the Greatest It Can Be”, which is the objective of any entrepreneur who starts a company and pours everything into it.   

I don’t mean to take anything away from great recruiters, investors and entrepreneurs, but our Raison d’Etre is different. It always has been and always will be. And 2019 was a perfect case study on how that manifests in our work and our impact. We have never done more mission-fulfilling work at the same time as setting up the internal foundation for years to come - and a year like this is worthy of reflection.

To understand Oxeon, it is important to visualize what the business is really all about. Our work is driven by the mission To Make People Healthier. To accomplish this, we see our engines as a three circle Venn Diagram. One circle is Retained Executive Search. One circle is Venture Capital and Growth Equity Investing. One circle is a Venture Studio, where we create de novo companies. All three circles focus their work in healthcare technology and services, with a special focus on the transformation of the healthcare system from Fee For Service to Value-Based Care.

We fulfill our mission in each circle, but it is in the overlap of the Venn Diagram where Oxeon maximizes its ability to drive mission-fulfilling outcomes. I hope, in the following words, to shed some light on this and also celebrate what has been a year of incredible pride for the entire Oxeon team.

You see…I almost killed this company in 2017. I took a successful company that had done a great job building the leadership teams of many great healthcare tech and services companies and I made a series of ill-advised decisions. “Not thoroughly vetted” would be a gentle way to put it - maybe how my mother would word it as it was her son that f’ed up. But “just flat out wrong” is probably the best way to characterize it. Ultimately, those decisions failed and it left the company facing some very complex scenarios. We made hard decisions. We shut down three underperforming businesses (thank you for the advice, Jeff Leerink!) that we had unsuccessfully attempted to launch. We laid off almost 20% of our workforce. We restructured our equity, and took on a bit of debt to get us through. Most importantly, we looked our colleagues in the eyes and waded into the fundamental question of whether our investments in Oxeon’s Mission, Core Values, Culture and People would pay off. Meaning -- would the people of Oxeon rally in light of the situation and align in remedying the situation and getting it right in the future? Or would they walk? They would be justified to do the latter. I prayed (in an agnostic manner) that they wouldn’t.  

And rally the team did. We leaned on our Core Values and 5 years of testing and quantifying employee engagement and now, across all aspects of the firm, we are stronger and better. We refocused. People stepped up to take on big impact roles. What emerged out of the destruction that I created in 2017 and early 2018 was a company for the future; a leadership team created by those who lived up to our values, a team motivated by clarity and focus, cultural alignment across the company and, ultimately, an interwoven platform - a Venn Diagram, so to speak - that maximizes our ability to deliver on our mission-fulfilling model. 

Daily, we combine the relationships, insights, and expertise of a recruiting firm, an investment firm (originally directly off our balance sheet and now through Town Hall Ventures), and a venture studio, where we create companies from scratch. Each is impactful, but it is the overlap of the circles where the mission-fulfilling impact really happens.

Let’s start with the Executive Search firm, which is led, and largely driven by, Mia Jung, Tom Keefe, Patrick Sullivan and Michael Cullen. In 2019, we completed over 100 C-Suite retained executive searches for healthcare technology and services companies. Those mandates resulted in a 93 Net Promoter Score and enabled us to identify and recruit best-in-class executives to step in and fill an acute human capital needs being felt by high impact healthcare companies. These searches ranged from the Chief Digital Officer at Mayo Clinic; the Chief Medical Officers at Iora, Signify, Eleanor, Paladina, Bright Health and others; the CEOs of Prime Therapeutics, Eleanor Health, ONS and others; the Chief Financial, Marketing and People Officers at Intelligent Medical Objects, and many more. That work supported investments by leading firms like General Atlantic, Oak HC/FT, Frazier, NEA, Warburg Pincus, and many others. But most importantly, each of these placements substantially improved the leadership teams of these companies and thereby enabled them to build better products and services — fulfilling our mission to Make People Healthier.

A by-product of each one of those 100 search mandates is roughly 200 conversations per search, with people who we network with or recruit, and yet who don’t get the ultimate job offer. Yes, you read that right; those searches together yield 20,000 conversations, give or take a few! Amazing executives doing amazing things that we get to have unique and incredibly interesting conversations with and that ultimately result in unique relationships.  

Oxeon Partners was ultimately a pure entrepreneurial endeavor; we set out to disrupt the traditional Recruiting/Executive Search industry that is highly transactional and where compensation is largely or entirely commission-driven, and where incentives lead to behaviors misaligned with our core values here at Oxeon. Our mission and values, no commission compensation, equity investing in our clients, distributing equity across all of our employees regardless of if they worked on the searches; it was all intentional to eliminate transactional relationships and hoarding information. Instead, each Oxeon conversation serves as the core of the overlaps in the Venn Diagram, to other parts of our business and accelerates and expands fulfilling our mission. 

In 2019, Town Hall Ventures was honored to invest in, and continue to partner and support, 15 amazing entrepreneurial companies serving vulnerable populations; the frail, the elderly, the complex and chronically ill, those suffering from disparities in healthcare access and/or quality. We coined a phrase to reflect these vulnerable populations as the G2C or “Government to Citizen” market, which accounts for 130,000,000 Americans covered by Medicare and Medicaid who consume $1,400,000,000,000 in healthcare spending annually. What an honor to support our incredible founding and/or  leadership teams, including but not limited to, Iyah Romm and Dr. Toyin Ajayi at Cityblock, Corbin Petro and Dr. Nzinga Harrison at Eleanor Health, Bob Sheehy and Mike Mikan at Bright Health, Dan Brillman and Taylor Justice at Unite Us, Si France and Matt Patterson at WelBe, Justin Dangel at Ready Responders and so many others. These companies are fundamentally serving those largely left behind by the US healthcare system and we have the honor to provide them with growth capital as well as value-creating/accelerating/de-risking support around policy and regulatory insights, market, product and business development and, of course, talent and organizational design.

The overlap between the Oxeon Retained Search firm and the Town Hall investment platform is really all about information flow from the 20,000+ conversations we have annually. It may be deal sourcing, conducting due diligence, product/market validation, business development relationships; there are so many other unique aspects of leveraging our conversations through the search firm as an investor. Town Hall is intentionally not a Lead Investor. We don’t price term sheets, set valuations, control Board of Directors. But as a syndicate investor, and the only one affiliated with a Venture Studio and an Executive Search firm, and a former Administrator for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid from the Obama Administration as a Founding General Partner, we serve our lead investor partners and entrepreneurs to accelerate and de-risk companies serving vulnerable populations. We have to earn the right to invest alongside great investors in great companies, and we earn that right with the depth and breadth of relationships with key people, business development and market access, policy and regulatory expertise from our Co-Founder and General Partner Andy Slavitt. We do everything we can to ensure that these companies serving vulnerable populations will be both successful and will Make People Healthier. If we succeed, we fulfill our mission, we are a value-add partner to help other investors deploy capital that benefit these communities, and we produce great investment returns, thereby further earning our right to be part of this societal transformation serving these populations.

So, the final circle in our Make People Healthier Venn Diagram is our Venture Studio, led by my Partner at Oxeon Holdings and in Town Hall Ventures, David Whelan. Healthcare has so many areas that can be addressed through innovation and entrepreneurship, and yet entrepreneurship is exceptionally hard in healthcare. Especially around vulnerable populations. Especially with complex payment/reimbursement models. Especially where talent and teams are more important than products and TAM. So Oxeon’s Venture Studio combines dedicated full-time entrepreneurial professionals, supported and integrated with the investment professionals at Town Hall, and the Executive Search professionals at Oxeon to build companies from scratch. We develop the original thematic thesis and point of view. We translate it to an early stage business model. We build the financial models, incorporate the company. We recruit the co-founding leadership team and raise the capital. Our relationships through Executive Search and our Strategic LPs in Town Hall often serve as the anchor clients and help us “birth” the companies. We have done this process many times, killing ideas along the way, but have birthed 6 companies in the past 4 years.

In 2019, Strive Health , an Oxeon Ventures Studio ‘18 vintage company, is transforming how we treat people with Chronic Kidney Disease and End Stage Renal Disease. A founding team of Chris Riopelle, Bob Badal and Dr. Shika Pappoe, with the investment support of NEA, Town Hall, Echo Health and Ascension Health Ventures, is uniquely positioned to Make People Healthier in this $130,000,000,000 industry. Watch out for this company doing incredible, mission-fulfilling work.

The Venture Studio launched two companies in 2019, the first being Eleanor Health, birthed in the first quarter in partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Eleanor, which is Greek for ‘Shining Light’ and a tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt, who believed that healthcare and civil rights were fundamental human rights, provides Value-Based Care solutions for those suffering from Opioid Use Disorder and Substance Use Disorder and will happily and successfully serve those on Medicaid. This is not your typical OUD/SUD solution company. Incredibly, they have already opened multiple clinics and are generating awesome clinical outcomes; Making People Healthier.

Our other business has yet to be formally announced, but let's just say that it's inspired by the troubling fact that if you're a woman of color in the US who lives in a community with high Medicaid utilization, you likely live in an OB desert and your maternal and fetal outcomes are the same as if you gave birth in Afghanistan. It is 2019, and this is a true statement in the United States of America. Appalling. Stay tuned here as we have an awesome co-founding investor, incredible CEO and great early anchor partners who are going to fundamentally change maternal and birth outcomes for under-served populations in this country.

So the overlap of the Venn Diagram?  Oxeon Search relationships help validate the ideas conceived in the Venture Studio including gaining product, market, pricing, GTM insights (we had done no executive searches for ESRD/CKD, OUD/SUD or Medicaid Maternity businesses!). They recruit the founding team. The relationships help tee up anchor clients; large payers, leading providers or self-insured employers. Town Hall is an instrumental and co-founding partner in the earliest stages of the company and opens access to policy and regulatory insights, strategic LPs and additional capital. The center of the Making People Healthier Venn Diagram are companies like Strive, Eleanor or our Maternity NewCo, and this is where the maximum impact of our mission-fulfilling work happens across all three circles in the Venn Diagram.

It would be impossible to talk about Oxeon in 2019 without talking about my incredible force of a Partner Mia Jung and her Oxeon team, who scaled our Break into the Boardroom initiative — largely during nights, weekends, and off the side of their desks. It is here that we Make People Healthier by developing and providing opportunities to high potential female executives to serve as Board Members at high profile/high growth venture and private equity Board of Directors. The program was not conceived or built to generate revenue but purely to have an impact. It has resulted in 20 women being added to venture capital and private equity boards and we know that as a result of that work those companies will then be more successful, and will Make People Healthier. BiB, as we call it, is a source of immense organizational pride.

The growth of A Healthy Dose has been fun to watch. Steve and I thoroughly enjoy talking with incredible people transforming the healthcare system. No scripts, no storyboards, no Green Room Prep, the opportunity to share the work and stories of our amazing industry colleagues to over 500,000 listeners is both fun and hopefully productive. Our guests are Making People Healthier and I hope some of their insights and ideas help others Make People Healthier.

Oxeon volunteered at numerous organizations serving needy populations, from running spa services for at-risk female youths in foster homes, to serving as “prom-dates/dance partners” at a center for vulnerable senior citizens. We hopefully helped them be a bit happier, which, by nature, adds to one’s health and we surely made ourselves healthier by giving back. 

We added amazing new employees and had others transitioned to the Oxeon Alumni Network, where former Oxeonites are celebrated for the work they are doing at Bright (Maura), Quartet (Morgan), Oak Street Health (John), Medical School (Liam), MBA/MPH programs (Schuyler, Ellen, Peter and Austin) and so many other incredible healthcare companies — continuing to carry on the mission to Make People Healthier!

It’s the end of the year, but Oxeon of 2019 is just getting started. My Partners Mia, David and Andy have brought this organization to heights and accomplishments we didn’t even conceive of several years ago. We have amazing leaders and managers working across the Venn — and I am deeply grateful to all of them. Our first intern, Michael Cullen, who used to maul our limited “start-up/bootstrap” food pantry in the summer 2012 - because the only thing poorer than Oxeon back then was a college junior trying to work in NYC - is now running and leading our operations and finance teams. Full disclosure, I shed tears in his recent performance review where we promoted him to run all operations and finance at the company. Our entire organization, at all levels, set all-time records for Employee Engagement, Net Promoter Score and delivered never-achieved results in revenue, EBITDA and enterprise value creation. While it has been neither always easy nor fun, great accomplishments never are. But the days that had laughs and fun, and resulted in pride and fulfillment WAY outnumbered those that didn’t. We have the best clients and portfolio companies; you inspire us to do more and to do better. We have incredible investors in our Funds and Co-investors in our businesses -- thank you for your collaboration and for including us with you. Thank you to all who take our calls and outreaches and engage with us to help fulfill the mission.

All disruptive entrepreneurial endeavors never stop iterating and evolving, never rest on their laurels or accept the status quo. As such, we know it won’t be a straight and risk-free path from here, but our little Venn Diagram of impact has never been more set up to Make People Healthier.