Michael Wert

WHAT DOES OUR VALUE "DEFINING HEALTHCARE" MEAN TO YOU?

During a week-long summer camp in a remote wooded location just after finishing my junior year of high school, a sudden snap of bones and cartilage introduced me to our healthcare system. I experienced a compound, dislocated fracture (my tibia sticking out of my skin at the ankle, my fibula shattered into pieces), and I have modern medicine and remarkably dedicated clinicians to thank for a full recovery. Good health is the foundation that enables any of us to pursue our other audacious goals in life, and there is much about our current healthcare capabilities for which to be grateful.

However, over the months that followed, I began to see a system that was extraordinary in acute moments of crisis and yet frustratingly suboptimal in many ways. For example, I experienced first-hand how critical instructions could sometimes get dropped between nursing shifts during morning rounds, how many phone calls and days can be required to transfer records between hospitals fifty miles apart, how two highly trained orthopedic surgeons would have operated on me quite differently with no clear guidelines governing either choice, and the tug-of-war that often occurs between insurance policy and physician recommendations leaving patients in the middle to sort (e.g., post-operative rehabilitation). I could not help but notice a growing list of unmet needs. 

That gap never left me. It drove me through years volunteering in trauma centers and oncology wards in college, seeing the same systemic failures play out across entirely different settings. It drove me into healthcare investment banking and through an MBA and a summer internship at McKinsey & Company focused on moving the industry's incentives from fee-for-service to fee-for-value. And ultimately, it drove me into venture capital, where I have spent my career working alongside the founders building the solutions our system still needs.

To me, defining healthcare means relentlessly working to close these gaps. It means backing the companies that can make our system exceptional across healthcare's Quadruple Aim. The convergence of extraordinary science, rapidly advancing technology, and growing consumer expectations makes this a remarkable moment to build in healthcare. Much of it doesn't have to be as convoluted and opaque as it too often is. I believe we'll fix it, and I want to spend my career enabling the changemakers pushing us forward.

WHAT DOES OUR VALUE "DEFINING PARTNERSHIP" MEAN TO YOU?

Partnership is easy to claim and hard to practice. Any investor can show up for a board meeting when the metrics are up and to the right. What separates a true partner is what happens when they aren't.

I've sat on compensation committees navigating difficult executive transitions, audit committees working through regulatory surprises, and financing committees making hard capital allocation calls when the path forward wasn't obvious. Those rooms taught me that founders and CEOs don't need another voice with a strong opinion. They need someone who has seen enough to know when to push and when to listen, when to roll up their sleeves and when to get out of the way.

To me, defining partnership means showing up like that. It’s showing up not as a capital allocator who visits quarterly, but as a committed, present partner who takes shared responsibility for the outcome and earns the right to be in the room when it matters most.

WHAT DOES OUR VALUE "DEFINING LEADERSHIP" MEAN TO YOU?

The founders I most respect share a common trait: they are ruthlessly clear on what they are trying to accomplish and for whom in their mission, and then they let that clarity do the prioritizing for them. In healthcare especially, where the stakeholder map can be complex and the temptation to chase large adjacent market opportunities is constant, that kind of disciplined focus is what often separates companies that scale from ones that tend to stall.

But I think about leadership as much from the inside as from the outside. Developing a healthcare venture practice from the ground up – recruiting and maintaining a team, cultivating a network, making capital allocation decisions, partnering with boards and management teams, and earning people’s trust to be a first call in working through difficult decisions together – taught me that leadership is less about having the right answers and more about creating the conditions where the right answers can surface. That means asking better questions than offering ready opinions. It means developing people, not just focusing on KPIs and capital allocation. And it means being willing to say "I don't know, but I’ll go find out" in a room that expects you to know everything.

To me, defining leadership means having the conviction to articulate a clear mission, the discipline to protect it from distraction, and the self-awareness to know that the best leaders, whether running a startup or an investment firm or anything else, are usually the ones making everyone around them better.