I’m a former serial healthcare entrepreneur, a venture partner at two VC firms, an advisor to private equity, an angel investor in multiple young companies, and a nonprofit board chair. I’m husband to a physician-filmmaker, father of three, avid reader, jazz lover, and cooking enthusiast. I actively advise many business founders, nonprofit leaders and board chairs and mentor others ranging from publishers, faith leaders, professional athletes, politicians, and recent college graduates. These activities inspire me and feed my soul. I fund an initiative helping nonprofits use AI for greater success. I also co-lead a private national collaborative of successful entrepreneurs who are active in their communities and am a member of a group of Silicon Valley CEOs. I’m a big believer in convening, continual self-improvement, and the importance of mutually beneficial relationships. This blog is intended to help me share what I’ve learned about leadership, management, startups, investing, and life from my successes and failures as well as those of others. I also hope to learn from reader responses to my posts, but that will be up to you.
 
About Me
 
As a kid, I always wanted to be a doctor, just like my grandfather. I was accepted into medical school but withdrew at the last moment, moved to California, and found a job as a college admissions officer. I enjoyed the teamwork, leadership, strategizing, marketing, making people decisions, and communicating about big issues to broad audiences. My goal shifted to making an impact not through healing but via leadership. I had no interest in business but was told an MBA offered the best management training, so off I went to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business
 
To my surprise, I fell in love with business, specifically the creativity and challenges of startups. After graduating I helped an entrepreneur start his healthcare company and three years later founded my own. Zitter Health Insights was a specialty market research and data firm that grew to about 150 staff (50 overseas) before I sold it to a large private equity firm. I also was CEO and co-founder of Vital Decisions, a telephone counseling service for patients with life-limiting illness that we sold to a different PE firm. Both exits were successful financially and taught me much about the importance of early decisions, hard choices, and luck. Unusually, I was able to start both companies with no capital.
 
Along the way I had the great privilege of creating and then chairing the first board for a non-profit organization that grew into America's largest jazz presenter, subsequently publishing several articles on board governance and effective board meetings. I founded, chaired, and funded a non-profit that convened the leaders of US healthcare from both sides of the political spectrum and across all industry segments, which taught me much about the value of dialogue and relationship-building among actors with competing interests. And for perspective, I’m married to an ICU and palliative care doctor who constantly reminds me that no matter how important I believe my work to be, nobody lives or dies by it!
 
I hope you find the information on this site useful in your work/life and that in any case you’ll provide me feedback so I can learn from you and make it more valuable.