What Would Lisa Suennen Say?
As a child growing up in Ethiopia, John De Souza witnessed the grim reality of poverty–families wishing for rapid death for their sick children because a cure was out of reach socially and financially. Later he was able to emigrate to the U.S. and was accepted to Harvard Medical School. But he could not fulfill […]
While I was time-wasting on Facebook or Twitter or whatever it was the other day, I came across a Kaiser Family Foundation quiz about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, now commonly known as the ACA. Since I spend at least 94.7% of my time dealing with issues related to the ACA, I figured […]
Attention to health is life’s greatest hindrance–Plato Let’s just say you own a car. You have undoubtedly purchased insurance for the car and if you are diligent and worried about value and performance, you also are diligent about maintenance. You get the oil changed according to schedule, you fill it with the right kind of […]
I frequently am in a position to tell young companies that our firm is not ready to invest in them because their business model is, at least in the current world, overly dependent on consumers paying for the product or service being offered. While there are a few examples of successful consumer-pay healthcare companies, they […]
Recently Steve Case wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post called Give Entrepreneurs Room and They Will Grow the Economy. For those not familiar with him, Case was the original founding CEO of AOL and he has been an active healthcare investor, among other things, for the past 7 years. My firm, Psilos Group, has […]
I set off for five straight days at the annual JP Morgan healthcare conference last Monday, but on the way drove the carpool to my daughter’s high school that morning in a last ditch attempt to act like a responsible and caring parent. My poor daughter gets completely abandoned during JP Morgan week every year […]
Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher–William Wordsworth So here it is, the last day of my winter vacation, and I am sitting inside watching people play ball outside at the Rose Bowl. It might not seem so crazy to those of you who either love football or live in […]
Last year about this time of year I wrote a parody of Twas the Night Before Christmas about the coming of healthcare IT and meaningful use. I decided to make these holiday parody songs an annual event. I figure I have years of material, as there are so many ways of ruining an otherwise joyous […]
No, seriously, I actually do know what you’re thinking. Or I would, anyway, if I subjected you to what has got to be the most alarming development in neuroscience that I have seen lately or ever. According to a story I read in Gizmodo entitled Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment, […]
Sometimes when I write this blog I have the funny punch line in mind before I find the story to highlight it; other times the healthcare story finds me and then I look for the humor in it. This is an example of the former. I have been saving what is one of my all […]
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.