What Would Lisa Suennen Say?
By Susannah Fox, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Lisa Suennen I’ve lived long enough to have learned The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned But that won’t happen to us Cause it’s always been a matter of trust -A Matter of Trust, by Billy Joel If you’re in health care and you […]
When Zoe Barry was a kid, she had two things she wanted to be when she grew up, either a veterinarian or “someone who writes checks.” She gave the first a shot and ended up settling on the second. Today she is CEO of ZappRx and a shining example of how drive and intellect can […]
While talking to a fellow podcaster/healthcare innovation advocate last week, I had a sudden visual that came to my head which seemed to me a great metaphor for what happens to new ideas (aka “innovations”) brought to the healthcare system: a spaghetti colander. Here we are, we entrepreneurs, idea people, purveyors of the new/better/different, cooking […]
In graduate school, Karen Hong’s dream of becoming a biologist crashed into the inconvenient reality that she couldn’t stand working in the lab. Undaunted, Karen, pivoted into venture capital, and hasn’t looked back. As befits a future geneticist, Karen chose her own genes extremely wisely: her dad was a legendary wunderkind in Taiwan who had […]
Note: Thanks to Entrepreneur for first running my article on May 21, 2019 To Break up the Boys’ Club, Ladies, Why Not Start Your Own Venture Capital Firm? Women in VC roles can’t rely on public relations fixes, token nods or the chivalry of their male colleagues. They have to do it themselves. Elodie Dupuy […]
Rebecca Kaul had planned to be a doctor. But life and the HMO era got in the way. As a result she went down an entirely different and windy path through chemical engineering, public policy, consulting on information systems and reinsurance. And together these all led her right back to a different way of contributing […]
As I have mentioned before, I teach a class on healthcare venture capital at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. For the final, students are asked to pick a private company which they think would be a great investment and write, for all intents and purposes, an investment memo to justify their recommendation and highlight […]
A brilliant cardiologist and geneticist, Dr. Calum McRae rose to the top of academic medicine – then decided to reinvent it, from the inside. He just may be the person to do it. Born on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland, Calum was the son of a physician, and couldn’t resist the […]
Earlier this week I was on a panel at a major healthcare conference in Washington, DC and, while it covered a variety of healthcare system maladies, the main topic was healthcare pricing transparency. There were a few moments during the panel that raised my eyebrows and compelled me to set the record straight, both on […]
Dr. James Dromey was supposed to be a farmer in County Cork, Ireland and has the milking experience to prove it. But apparently cows were not his destiny, even though he was a farm family’s only son. Instead, James left the farm for the teeming metropolis of Galway and never looked back. Today he is […]
Lisa Suennen is a venture capital investor and the managing partner of Venture Valkyrie, LLC, which publishes the Venture Valkyrie blog and co-produces the Tech Tonics podcast. She is also co-founder of CSweetener, a women's healthcare mentoring organization.