About FoundHealth
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Rita Sharma
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Rita Sharma has a strong dedication to improving health
by empowering individuals. Early on, she realized that
the only viable path for her health was prevention and
wellness. She learned from her mother’s struggle with
Type 2 Diabetes that a chronic health challenge could
truly compromise your quality of life. In the end,
Rita’s mother died of kidney failure and her body’s
fight against the dialysis treatments. This experience
reaffirmed Rita’s commitment to empowering patients and
caregivers to manage their health challenges by deeply
understanding all their treatment options and connecting
to others like themselves—FoundHealth was born, in
partnership with like-minded and passionate team
members.
As CEO of FoundHealth, Rita Sharma brings years of experience at the nexus of healthcare and technology. Prior to starting FoundHealth, Rita was the Director of Strategic Marketing at LifeScan, a Johnson and Johnson company focused on diabetes. At LifeScan, she was responsible for shifting strategic and product development from simply measurement towards diabetes management, for both consumers and health care professionals. Prior to LifeScan, Rita led Healthcare business development at Handspring (now Palm). Through her work in management roles at healthcare organizations, Rita deeply understands the healthcare system from many key points-of-view. Rita received an MBA, with honors, from the Anderson School of Business at UCLA and a BS in political science from UCLA.
Gary Wu
Chief Technology Officer (Interim)
In work and life, Gary has a strong commitment to
excellence and rigor. A few years ago, his quest to
achieve optimal health and fitness led him to
exhaustively research several dietary regimes. His
process was rigorous—study the scientific evidence,
derive the core principles, put it into practice, and
finally, examine the results. Through this process, he
identified that the Paleo dietary principles gave him
the results he sought. To share his success with others
and urge others to look beyond conventional thinking
around nutrition, he
started Paleo for
Life
to allow others to access the intelligence and
benefits of this approach.
Gary brings his passion for health and engineering expertise to his role as FoundHealth’s Chief Technology Officer. He has the ability to move from hands-on software development to setting high-level strategic direction to achieve performance and scalability. Prior to FoundHealth, Gary served as Senior Director of Applications Engineering at Compiere, a Silicon Valley start-up focused on enterprise applications. He was previously at Oracle for nine years in senior engineering and management positions, leading development of complex enterprise applications. Gary received a BS, with honors, in computer science from the California Institute of Technology.
Board of Advisors
Vanessa Fox
Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle
Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer
acquisition from organic search. She shares her
perspective on how this impacts marketing and user
experience at Nine
By Blue
and provides authoritative search-friendly
design patterns for developers at
janeandrobot.com
. She’s
also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition
Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and
host of the weekly podcast Office Hours.
She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Her book, Marketing in the Age of Google, provides a blueprint for incorporating search strategy into organizations of all levels.
Mike Rosenthal
Co-Founder
Mike has a strong belief that solutions to health
challenges are out there in the world—they just need to
be found and presented effectively. This belief drove
him to look for solutions far-and-wide when his wife was
diagnosed with stage IV melanoma. He deeply researched
integrative approaches in medical, nutritional, herbal,
and other areas, met with thought leaders around the
world, and used the solutions he found to help his wife
put together her cancer "attack" plan. His wife has
been cancer-free for 3 years now, and is back to work
teaching 2nd graders. Mike channeled this experience and
his passion for finding solutions to health problems
into the formation of FoundHealth, creating a forum for
people to find and share health solutions.
Mike's passion for solutions extends beyond health, and into the business world where he continues to pursue a successful career. He is currently Senior Vice President at Asset International, a software, data and research firm to the financial services market. Prior to that, he was the Founder and Co-CEO of Siteler, a corporate services business. Before Siteler, Mike played key product and business roles at Handspring, later Palm. Out of college, Mike was in a two-year rigorous leadership program at GE, ultimately managing the Finance organization for a $25mil GE manufacturing subsidiary. Mike has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA, Magna Cum Laude, in Physics from Colby College. At Colby, Mike received departmental honors and was elected to the National Physics Honors Society.
Chris Wu
As an entrepreneur, angel investor and advisor,
Christopher believes that the best businesses have both
great business models and great social impact.
Christopher was drawn to FoundHealth by its compelling
vision of bringing together a holistic view of health
solutions and envisions a day when FoundHealth is "the"
go-to destination site for health solutions, and a
unique community of people with both expert and personal
experiences in each health challenge. Christopher
brings his background on starting new businesses and
scaling direct to consumer websites through social media
and online marketing.
Christopher is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Paper Culture , an online e-commerce company specializing in modern, eco-friendly stationery. He was previously the Vice President of New Ventures and Mobile at HP, he was part of the management team that built Snapfish to over 30 million users prior to its sale to HP, and led the launch of the first mobile data services in the US to reach 10 million people as part of Yahoo!'s first mobile team. Christopher is also an active angel investor and advisor. Christopher is a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and graduated with high honors from Harvard College.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank all the members of our extended team that have been critical to the success of FoundHealth:
Piyush Bisht, Shailender Chohan, Mohit Gupta, Molly Hartle, Carolynn Levy, Laura Lippay, Harsh Mathur, Todd Nemet, Van Nga Pham, Purvi Shah, Apurva Shah, Jack Sheridan, Sarah Showalter.
