Can you give an overview of your career and how you got to Rymedi?
I started working when I was 13 in my dad’s cardiology practice, auditing his billing. I would check patient charts, verify that insurance was billed for the procedure, and then validate if it was paid. In my first couple of weeks on the job, I found $50k that his office had missed in billing, which resulted in no additional birthday presents. After college, I had a pretty great career in corporate real estate for Simon Property Group, the largest real estate company in the world, and Sleepy’s, a 50 year+ family-owned retailer based in New York. After Sleepy’s was acquired, I traveled around the world for a couple of months as I figured out what I wanted to do next. I decided that I wanted to work with early-stage companies, so I started working with a friend on his fifth startup and learned just how different startup life was compared to corporate life. I invested in my first startup in July of 2018, and one of my co-investors and oldest friends met Rymedi’s cofounders at a conference. They forced me to spend the time to learn about blockchain technology and how Rymedi was deploying it in healthcare. I graduated from the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business with my MBA and a concentration focused on technology commercialization. I have used this background in a variety of different roles and functions throughout my time at Rymedi.
What is your greatest Career Accomplishment?
I come from a family of doctors and public health experts, yet I never wanted to be a doctor and was a bit of a black sheep. However, because of Rymedi, I found myself on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, just like my siblings. Our team, in partnership with Clemson, built the most cost-effective mass testing program in the country. Dr. Birx came to visit our testing program and honored it as one of the best university responses to the pandemic. My older physician siblings were blown away by just how effective we were at delivering care. I don’t think there is a better feeling in the world than knowing just how great you are at delivering care and how people are being kept healthy by your efforts. Now, we continue to work with clients executing global public health campaigns, and they are asking me questions and relying on my experience to deliver on their goals. It is so rewarding to have a brain trust that I can call and leverage.
What are you working on currently?
My role is focused on working with customers to solve their problems. Most of the time, our platform can solve these challenges out of the box. Sometimes, there is some variability and nuances in these problems, so I really enjoy working with those customers to identify the enhancements we need to make and coordinating with our development team to execute them. We have some clients that are going live around the world using our platform, and it’s exciting to see months of work culminating in clients successfully deploying Rymedi.
What are your words of advice?
When I was a teenager, I shadowed the CEO of a direct marketing company in New York for the day. He provided me with the best advice I ever received, “the strongest employees make every decision as if they were the owners of the company. My advice builds on this twofold: Everything you do, do it well or not at all and proactively solve issues before they become a problem. I think this mentality builds trust with customers, and I always tell our customers that when they need something new or if something goes wrong, I want me to be your first phone call to solve it. As an owner of the company, I want our clients to know that we execute to the best of our ability and are trusted problem solvers.
