An Update from Verana Health

Please find below an update I recently shared with the entire Verana Family. 

In 2017, I had a long talk with my wife about joining Verana, and we agreed that I would work intensely for a two-year tour of duty to set up the foundation and scaffolding for the company. I was signing up to travel between our San Francisco headquarters and my New York home. It was a hard decision because it would take me away from my family, but I couldn’t say no to the opportunity ahead.

I am so proud of the progress we have made together in just a few short years. We have deep partnerships with three leading medical associations, established the end-to-end legal infrastructure for data use rights, acquired a data ingestion company to accelerate our infrastructure build, raised over $130 million in funding, and we demonstrate outsized value to our customers every day. Most importantly, we have assembled a truly outstanding group of professionals. You are the brightest and most driven people I’ve worked with in my career. Together, we have rapidly created the largest clinical data networks in medicine with continuous data feeds across three healthcare categories, and potentially growing. You should all be incredibly proud of yourselves. This was not easy and no other organization has done this before.

As many of you have now heard from me for months, I want to travel less. With continuous meetings all over the country, I have missed my wife and three children, and they miss me. Then the pandemic hit. And, as all of you know, I ended up being infected by the novel coronavirus somewhere in all of my travels. In that three-week period of active infection, which can best be described as perhaps the lowest physical and emotional strength I have experienced in my life, my wife and I, and our children, made some decisions. I want to be closer to home. While I could not be more enthusiastic about the truly massive amount of impact to healthcare that Verana is already having, I need to be a CEO who is predominantly based on the East Coast.

With all that said, I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life: I have decided to step down as CEO and will transition into a Senior Advisor role. As one of the people who brought many of you on, I feel a great responsibility for this transition to happen in the best way possible. I have committed to the board of directors that I will help us find a permanent CEO and I will stay connected to this amazing company. I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished thus far and what this team will continue to achieve in this next phase of growth. As one of the founders of this amazing company, I will always bleed Verana orange and continue to provide strategic guidance.

I am as personally committed as ever to transforming healthcare and to Verana’s mission to empower physicians and accelerate research for better patient outcomes. And, while I feel good about these decisions personally, I will miss my daily involvement with Verana tremendously. I will miss my daily interactions with all of you more than you will know.

My three children

Some of my Verana family

Something special happens when you dream big and bring in others to dream big alongside you. You end up creating something larger than the sum of the parts. This idea that we have started together is now yours to nurture. You are the dreamers who will take it forward, and I can’t wait to watch it continue to grow.

Your biggest fan,

Miki