Inside the Health Moonshot Impact Board: Esther Dyson & Roger Jansen Get Candid on Health Innovation

Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW!

We think it’s fair to say that when people think of StartUp Health, they think about entrepreneurs and founders. Over the last 12 or 13 years we’ve supported more than 500 health tech startups and nearly 1000 founders, many of whom have been featured on this show.

Perhaps less well known is what happens behind the scenes at StartUp Health. In this episode we pull back that curtain a little bit, particularly as it pertains to our Health Moonshot Impact Board. We’ve got this advisory team of about 17 amazing individuals across multiple disciplines. These are people like Dr. Toby Cosgrove, former head of the Cleveland Clinic; Chuck Henderson, the CEO of the American Diabetes Association; and Sue Siegel, former head of GE Ventures – just to name three. You can see the whole Health Moonshot Impact Board here on our website.

Recently, we brought together our Health Moonshot Impact Board in real life at the Lake Nona Impact Forum in Florida. Not only did the team get to learn from luminaries like Jeff Bezos, David Feinberg, and Peter Lee, but they got to go deeper on ideas with one another.

In the spirit of encouraging a more radically collaborative impact board, we decided to flip the script a bit and have members of our board interview one another for this podcast. The hope was that this would lead to some unexpected lines of questioning and some uniquely candid moments.

The first conversation in this series is between Esther Dyson, legendary angel investor and founder of Wellville, and Roger Jansen, PhD, the Chief Innovation & Digital Health Officer at Michigan State University Health Care. The conversation was just as wide-ranging and unstructured as we hoped it would be, and it touched on some incredibly powerful topics.

We hope you enjoy.

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