Why I joined Oxeon

Some personal news! I am excited to announce that I took a new role at Oxeon as President, working alongside my friend, long-term mentor and two-three-time colleague Sonia Millsom, who stepped in as Oxeon’s CEO one year ago.

You may be wondering why I made the shift to Oxeon, a professional services firm, given my 15-year career as an operator. Well, let me explain.

A Year in Andalusia

My wife Valerie and me at Feria de Abril de Sevilla 2023

In June 2022 my wife, Valerie, and our two boys made the decision to leave our jobs and move to Sevilla, Spain.  We wanted to experience a new culture where we knew no one and (the adults) did not speak the language. The experience was life altering for the whole family. We had many incredible times together. It was the best thing we have ever done and also the hardest. One of the major positives was the chance to step back and reflect about what is really important in life. 

Professionally, I focused my energy on activities that would help me think about my next move. I read a lot, started writing again, advised founders in the U.S. and Europe and experienced healthcare delivery and culture in Spain firsthand.

Career History

In the past, I chose jobs by using an algorithm that weighs meaningful problems, impact-oriented roles and people. This formula worked pretty well and I’ve had an incredible journey so far thanks to hard work, quite a bit of luck and amazing bosses, mentors and colleagues at companies like Health Dialog, Iora Health, Mindstrong and Cohere Health. The education by fire was intoxicating. I built important relationships and learned how powerful of a role leadership plays in achieving results.

However, my time in Spain also made me realize I was worn out. Not because of the pace, travel, late nights or mis-incentives. It was because I was not seeing enough impact. My next role needed to tackle healthcare transformation at bigger scale and more quickly.

My career to-date was on the front lines of the post-ACA reform era where innovation was heavily shaped by leaders who figured out how to maneuver around the existing rules to try and improve healthcare. Below is one way I have thought about these approaches.

Many of these were often good strategies and I personally implemented some of them. In many cases these ideas were the only way to drive any kind of meaningful innovation and resulted in some important progress.

But these strategies were too often designed around principles that, in retrospect, limited the ability to drive impactful, system-wide, positive change. And without the right leaders in charge, the impacts could be harmful.

Why Oxeon

During my period of reflection in Spain, Sonia Millsom called me six months into her new role as CEO of Oxeon. She outlined the journey Trevor Price began in 2011, why he hired her to replace him as CEO, her vision for the future and some early wins she was seeing already. Oxeon has a unique business model that is a creative combination of an executive search business, startup studio and investment firm. This mix, the company culture, and trusted role the organization plays enables a powerful platform featuring leadership as the key effector arm for change, a bias toward partnership to break down silos, a track record for taking on the most intractable problems and an absolute focus on people as its competitive advantage. This was an exciting synergy of what I love most: coaching founders, connecting people together with big ideas and execution underpinned by leadership: not just for one idea, team or company. And personally, an opportunity to have a much larger impact on healthcare. 

My Role

As President, I will have two core responsibilities. First, I will have responsibility for the Oxeon Venture Studio, where we build companies with founders and support them in their journeys to make a transformative impact on health and wellbeing. What resonates with me as a builder is that Oxeon only helps create companies in those few circumstances when we have a unique point of view on an important problem to be solved. We are working on our tenth company right now and I am so excited about it. Second, I will be productizing and operationalizing the unique data platform that Oxeon has built across tens of thousands of proprietary interactions with the most talented change-makers in healthcare.

Does connecting people with big ideas for everyone resonate with you? If so, I can’t wait to hear from you: duncan@oxeon.com.

Vamos!