Ed (00:01.39)
Hi, Ed Marx here. Welcome to another edition of DGTL Voices. So glad you are with us. I know you have a lot of choices and what you can listen to and learn from, and you've taken the time to be with us. So I just want to say thank you. Today, we have the CEO from Verato, Clay Ritchey. Clay, welcome to DGTL Voices.
Clay (00:19.972)
Hey, yeah, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Ed (00:22.318)
Yeah, and just to put a date stamp, as we're talking, we have the full solar eclipse going on. So if there's anything weird that happens, you'll know we can always blame the eclipse. So Clay, do you remember where you were during the last eclipse? I think it was like five or six years ago.
Clay (00:43.044)
It was 2017 and I don't remember at all where I was. I was probably spending too much time working and not enough time looking out.
Ed (00:49.71)
Yeah, so we're gonna do that as we're when we're done recording we're all going to take a couple minutes and head outside and check it out But Clay you and I first met really through mutual friends in the CEO community and healthcare It's a small world and I was introduced to you and I was like wow
How have I not met Clay before? He's such an interesting person and that's what I wanna dive into. You've been CEO at multiple places and just a, you know, excellent, full of lots of wisdom when it comes to leadership. So definitely wanna dig down into that. But before we get too far down the road, Clay, what are the songs on your playlist? Like, what do you like to listen to?
Clay (01:28.196)
Let's get to the real important stuff. I like that Ed. You know, I have two teenage daughters. So we've been listening to Beyonce's new Cowboy Carter album lately. He's playing a lot here. And of course the girls are looking forward to Taylor's Swiss new album dropping next week. But when I'm not listening with my kids, I've been getting into a lot of jazz lately. So...
I recently got re -equated with George Coleman. So I've been listening a lot of George Coleman. And then also I saw Lee Connors play once and he was playing with the pianist, Dan Tepper. And I'm really getting into his work. He's most recently did an album where he took the best of Bach and is doing it in a jazz form, improvising Bach. So anyway, so lots of jazz here, whatever, trying to keep up with the girls.
Ed (02:24.654)
Yeah, no, I love that. I'm gonna look those up. That's why we ask the questions. Like we are creating actually a digital voices playlist and everyone has sort of these unique artists that they like to listen to and make for a great, great playlist. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you sort of live by, Clay, or you lead by?
Clay (02:46.02)
Yeah, so I, gosh, one of the, a huge, I love reading about people, people who've done big kind of great things in their life. You learn so much from others' experiences. And one of the first biographies I read was on Teddy Roosevelt. And he's become one of my most just favorite people in all of the world. And in history anyway, and his mantra was, dare mighty things. And I really.
I really love that. When I build organizations, when I think about the type of organization that we want to have, we really challenge our teams to dare mighty things. The idea there is don't kind of settle for doing average or not taking risks, but live on the edge a bit and endeavor to do the hard things and do them well.
Ed (03:36.686)
like that a lot. And that's another little list that we're compiling as well as everyone's mantra and creating a little booklet out of that because again, you get these great insights from leaders such as yourself. So Clay, I already alluded to the fact that you've done a lot of it had a lot of important leadership positions in your career. Tell us a little bit about yourself personally and professionally.
Clay (03:59.908)
Sure. So I grew up an athlete and I feel like a lot of this kind of competitive nature, but also this idea of like being willing to put in the hard work in order to do something meaningful. Like, you know, if you're going to be a lead at something, you know, it's really hard, but you got to work hard at it. And I think that I learned a lot of that through being a three sport athlete as I was growing up. And then beyond that, I,
You know, I was an electrical engineer, so I've always been a critical thinker and enjoy solving problems. And that really allowed me to start my career as an engineer at General Electric. And then from there, after business school, I really got this bug around healthcare and how technology can really help transform healthcare and really help bend this cost quality curve. We've been fighting for decades.
And now I've been a CEO now three times in healthcare tech companies. And my most recent opportunity is I've been for the last almost over three years, the CEO of Verato, a healthcare identity company.
Ed (05:11.598)
So tell us about the three sports. What were they?
Clay (05:15.044)
Ah, yeah, so baseball, basketball and football. And so and I grew up in a small school, 150 kids in a grade. So it was kind of our duty to play three sports.
Ed (05:27.214)
Which are the three do you still play today? Do you do any of them?
Clay (05:34.148)
I do my, I play basketball still and my, uh, my daughter, my 14 year old is really getting into playing basketball as well. So I'm playing a lot with her. Um, I can't play it at full speed anymore. My, uh, my mind is too far ahead of my body. It's just a bad recipe for injury. But, uh, um, and, uh, but yeah, you know, the, the, the, the team's for the basketball is really amazing. You know, it's just a beautiful, uh,
a symphony of people kind of reacting to one another and helping each other be better. So I think it's a great metaphor oftentimes for businesses.
Ed (06:11.182)
Yeah, and especially because it's real time, you know, as opposed to like football was a set play and and you know, it's three or four seconds long. And some of the other sports, yeah, basketball is kind of like soccer where it's constant motion and you do have to really know your team and your teammates and their capabilities. And so that's a really good analogy with basketball.
So, Clay, you mentioned that you've been a multiple -time CEO. In 2010, I think you made your first successful exit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Clay (06:44.58)
Yeah. So, uh, you know, the hardest thing about becoming a CEO is, is if you're not a founder is getting that first opportunity. And, uh, I, my first opportunity to be a CEO is with a company called Equinox healthcare. And it was actually a provider of healthcare services, home infusion services, doing extraordinary things to people, you know, for, for patients and patient care outside of the, outside of the normal care setting, you know, inside of a hospital. And it really opened my eyes to.
first of all, how hard it is to be a provider, like just how hard it is to deliver amazing care and to do so, you know, in a very challenging setting, whenever you don't have, you know, all of the support structures that you might have inside of a structured care setting, you know, at home. And, and I really feel like that experience has been very seminal for me and helping me understand the complexities of healthcare and also just how important technology can be to delivering better care. I remember,
You know, in a home infusion environment, the whole goal is to get more, it's an arbitrage game. That's what I really learned at healthcare is an arbitrage game. You got to get more than your fair share of those services that you get more than your fair share of reimbursement for. So we were constantly fighting for nutrition patients. It turned out that nutrition patients on TPN really were the best.
long -term patients with an outsized reimbursement. And in order to really do a great job managing these patients, for example, we were early adopters of remote monitoring. We actually would buy all of our patients' Wi -Fi enabled scales so that we could have a high level of compliance to getting the weight and have an accurate weight. So anyway, so it was really, this idea really started percolating with me that...
you know, technology has a really interesting role here to play in how we deliver care in all care settings. And, you know, that led, you know, we ended up selling that business, you mentioned the exit, we sold it to a roll up that was happening at the time where another organization was buying up home infusion companies and we ended up being a part of that platform. But,
Clay (09:01.092)
Yeah, I still thank David Kennedy from Sierra Capital today for taking that first chance on me. Because it does. I mean, it just takes somebody to believe in you and give you that first shot. And then after that, you prove you can do something. And then it becomes obvious that you're a good choice.
Ed (09:20.43)
Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I never thought about it that way where, yeah, if you're a founder, you naturally become CEO typically. But if you're not a founder, you have to be hired into that role. And there's founders oftentimes to contend with depending on the age of the company and obviously board of directors and things like that.
And you sort of have to, and you're an outsider typically in many situations and you have to sort of work your way in. But you did the same at Imprivata and eVariant. Tell us a little bit about those two companies and just how all that came down.
Clay (09:53.572)
Well, you know what, in Imprivata it was a really fun time because we were about a $50 million business when I started there. And we were just kind of halfway through the high tech act and all of this huge rush towards digital transformation, moving from the paper records to everything being digital and in EHR. And at that time,
If you interview a med surg nurse, for example, they would say that the computer became the fifth patient in their four or five patient responsibility. And if you think about it, that was really one of the biggest inhibitors at the time. As you went digital, it was really becoming a productivity hindrance to our care teams. So Imprivata was all about...
digital kind of security and authenticating and being able to have secure access to that information. And we ended up being kind of a great spoonful of the circle of the health of medicine go down a bit for those care providers. Cause we made it, we made the security invisible so that you could tap in and tap out quickly and actually create a better experience is that that care provider is trying to adopt technology into their work flows. So, and.
And that's what I really realized in healthcare when you're dealing with these type of mission critical elements that the provider is always going to do what's the right thing for the patient and what is the easiest thing to do for the patient. So we realized that we really weren't in the security game as much as we were in the productivity game. How do we make it efficient? How do we really take the burden off the provider? And that was just a good example of like really my eyes opening to how technology can make a big difference in.
and workflow and how important is understand the workflow in healthcare whenever you're developing technology for healthcare. We grew that business over five X over four years and we took it public during that time period. And, you know, we had all of the fun of ringing the bell on Wall Street, but also all of the unpleasantries of being a public company. And, and eventually we ended up taking it private again to Toma Bravo, which is amazing.
Clay (12:12.356)
an amazing private equity partner. And we thought it was meant to be because we were here in Boston and Tohono O 'Brivo took us private in their 12th fund, they called it the TB12 fund. And you know, Tom Brady, TB12, we just thought it was clearly meant to be for us to partner with Tohono O 'Brivo. So that was a great ride. And then after that experience, I really wanted to have an opportunity to...
to get back into high growth opportunity again. And that's what led me to Verato. And Verato was a Goldman Sachs CRM for healthcare company. And I was really passionate about that opportunity because, you know, a typical B2C company is going to spend somewhere between 12 to 15 % of revenue on how they market themselves, engage their customers, really sophisticated way, how do we acquire?
how they acquire customers and create lifetime value from them. And when I thought about healthcare, I realized that we were spending somewhere between 2 % and 3 % of revenue. Think about the gap between 2%, 3%, and 12 % to 15 % in a typical B2C organization. And really trying to how do we engage our consumers and help create lifetime value for them. And at Evereint, we were at the forefront of thinking about how do we help...
Ed (13:23.118)
Yeah.
Clay (13:38.852)
healthcare become more sophisticated at the way they think about their, you know, the acquisition side of consumerism. And we also saw this kind of trend where, you know, all this investment was being made in population health and trying to anticipate those patients that are going to become maybe acute today, but become chronic as you start thinking about moving also to more of the value -based care. And it became clear to me that behavioral change was a key part of how we unlock
that real potential of all these investors were making in data around and using data to help us identify those patients at risk. And we really thought that at a CRM's platform, like we were building at E -Variant, would be able to really tap in and deliver the tools to help really deliver that behavioral change at the point of engaging the consumer and the patient. And we had a really fun run there. I ended up
having an opportunity to sell that business to health grades, which is now WebMD, and become a big part of their platform going forward.
Ed (14:53.902)
So Clay, I imagine some of the commonality between those first three companies as you're getting set to move to Roto is one of the conundrums or challenges I know I have when I was CIO of all these different health systems was the whole identity piece. It's like, and I loved Imprivata. We used it at several of the organizations where I came from. To your point earlier, it did enable a smoother workflow. So it was very clumsy and frustrating in the beginning.
But is identifying the, whether it's a patient or whether it's, you know, someone internally, an employee is like having the proper identification, like knowing who these people were. I mean, it seems like that's a common thread in a lot of these companies where you were, where you're going to run into that issue if your customer hadn't had that solved. So yeah, tell us a little bit. So you've had these experiences now. Why did you choose Verato?
Clay (15:50.5)
Right, you really hit it. So with all those experiences I had, one of the things I realized is that, you know, there's many things that are going to contribute to us realizing the full potential of this digital transformation, this journey that we've been on in the last 15, 20 years, another 15, 20 years ahead of us, I'm sure. But it was very clear to me that one of the most, some of the most important elements that I believe was holding us back from reaching our full potential with those investments was this basic...
concept of identity, knowing who is who and trusting that we know who is who. Because literally in a world where you don't understand who is who and you can't truly identify it in all the different applications I have and all the different databases I have and data sources I have, how can I trust that this data belongs to this patient and that is the same patient that I have over here data around in another data source until we can truly have a method of trusting that we know who is who.
then only then can we really bring those data sources together and have a complete longitudinal view of that person. And I really saw that as one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to come to Verato because Verato had the two things, the other things that you really need to make that work. So first of all, we had a huge problem that I thought was seminal. Maybe if we do this right, one of those kind of top 10 technologies that enables healthcare in the next 10 years in our decade. Second,
Verato really had a product, unique technology that was extraordinarily different and differentiated from our competition. If you give Verato a hundred identities you want to resolve, we're going to tell you 98 of them for sure. We know who they are. Two of them we won't know. If you give that to the typical competitive technology, they might tell you 70 to 80 of them and another 20 to 30 they don't know. So like, so that's so that we had something that was really differentiated. And then thirdly,
We had a really strong brand. People trusted us. And as you know, in healthcare, if trust goes a long ways, you want to think about kind of, this is important. These are important workflows where patient outcomes are on the line. So having that kind of trust is really important. So I think if you have technology that's really differentiated, you have earned the trust of the marketplace, and you're solving a really important problem that could be one of the most important things we solve in the next 10 years.
Clay (18:11.3)
Those things all came together in a really beautiful way at Verato. That's why I was super excited to come join the organization.
Ed (18:18.638)
Yeah, I know when I was CIO, even though we had pretty sophisticated systems, there were still plenty of times where it was kind of iffy because we, you know, maybe misidentified someone didn't have the right person. And not only is it a could it be a, you know, a safety issue, but also it's just frustrating from a patient experience point of view. And also internally, it just causes a lot of rework.
I was really excited. I know the news has been out for some time now, but being a clear is so I have to self disclose here. I'm a, I'm a consumer of clear when you, when you both came together in this partnership, that was pretty exciting to me. Can you share a little bit about the reasoning behind this partnership with clear.
Clay (19:02.02)
Yes. So one of our visions at Verato is that we want to be able to help manage identity across every touch point in the care journey. And historically, Verato is an amazing job of being able to manage that data, what's in your data systems, right? When it's already on your back end, if you will, we do a great job of helping you wrangle that data, associate that data with the right person. And therefore you can do all kinds of, you know, have trusted data that you can.
that they can really manage the care experience and all the analytics you might want to do around that. What CLEAR brought us in the partnership was the opportunity to take that, that offer, you know, the understanding who is who not only in the back end, but also to the front end. So that now every front door, it will be digital or physical that a patient walks into or a consumer walks into or knocks on that will be able to put the CLEAR technology in front of that, that allows you, first of all, to verify the identity through identity proofing.
in a very easy way to do it. I remember back when I was at Imprivada, we were doing identity proofing for EPCS, electric prescribing or control of substances. We were using knowledge -based protocols to do that. I remember I would go see a customer and the physician would just throw crap at me because it was so hard for them to get identity proofed and he couldn't be able to get their ability to do EPCS and it was causing all kinds of friction.
we were really happy to see that CLEAR had figured out a lot of good ways to make that much easier in today's world so that the high percentage of folks within five to 10 minutes were able to get identity proofed. And then from there, you've got their opportunity to do authentication along the way. And in the same way that we see your experience at the airport being transformed, we see that similar opportunity to transform your experience or how you might enter into a hospital systems portal or a physician's practices portal.
and be able to start really identifying who you are, trusting that identity and that security associated with that so information can be shared. And, you know, the other reason we think this is really important is that when you go back to the High Tech Act, the High Tech Act used meaningful use standards to get the whole marketplace to move. And when it came to patient engagement, they actually put the measurement for meaningful use on the provider, not the health system.
Clay (21:23.812)
So patients have, if you're seeing five or six different specialists and primary care physicians and throughout your care journey, that's five or six different portals you might have for many of these patients. So we thought, we really thought we saw this great opportunity to bring clear as a partner and to help really streamline that end to end process and have a good understanding of the front end and then be able to carry that through to the backend for all your historical data.
And now with Verato, we have one platform that gives you that end -to -end visibility, a true longitudinal view of identity.
Ed (00:01.294)
Clay, you've had this fascinating experience of being a multi -company CEO. There has to be one or two, probably more, but what are one or two common skills or traits of leadership that kind of took you through all of those?
Clay (00:18.251)
Great question and thanks. You know, one of the things I really tried to adopt is a lesson I learned actually in business school when I read an article, a case around Southwest Airlines and Herb Kelleher and how did he create such an amazing unique experience for flying that Southwest Airlines at the time completely transformed the way that experience he had in flight. And, you know, he really had this...
employee first culture that if you first take care of your employees and have an employee first culture, they will take care of your customers and then your customers will take care of your shareholders. And that's really the right way of thinking about how you build a great company and how you lead a great company. And I really have tried to embrace that thought along the way here is if we build cultures at Grotto and other places I've been fortunate enough to be CEO is how do we...
create a culture where we attract and retain the best employees in the world at what they do, that we give them the opportunity to take risks and to take child and to make some mistakes, but at the same time, we will do big, big important things. And if we do that right, then we know that they will take care of our customers. And then, you know, then our customers will, through word of mouth and through rewarding us with their business, we'll take care of our shareholders. That's the first thing that I try to do.
Um, you know, the second thing is I've really learned that it's important. It's one thing to say, always do the right thing, which is absolutely probably a secondary mantra for me. Like there's no real black, you know, gray or gray area. Like just do the right thing. And if we do the right thing, you know, almost always, you know, good things happen. So, um, but what I've learned is that it's also helpful to have, you know, so good definition of what, what it means to do the right thing. It's out of your organization. So.
At Verato, we have three things that we do. One, we tell our employees that we want you to make a difference in everything that you do, whether it be make a difference because we're solving big, hard problems in healthcare, or make a difference with the things you choose to do today to help our customers be more successful or help your coworkers be more successful. So make a difference. Second, we say be trustworthy. We just really want you to always do the right thing, have high integrity, be the best in the world at what you do.
Clay (02:43.755)
be a trusted advisor to all the folks around you. And the third thing is we tell our employees that we want them to be customer obsessed. So no matter what you do to make sure that you're over, we like to say that we want you to kind of under promise and over deliver. Whether that be your promises to your customer, your end customer or.
even the promises you have internally to folks that you work with, right, that are customers of you, maybe from an internal customer's perspective. So those are some of the things that I've tried to transcend over my three experiences. And, you know, doing that at scale is the hard part. But I think those are the things I've tried to bring.
Ed (03:29.134)
Yeah.
Ed (03:33.87)
No, I like those, Clay. Those are really good. And I can see it evident in your company. What would you say, let's fast forward 10 years, your daughters are now graduating from college and you're the speaker and the commencement speaker. What advice would you give new college grads heading out into the world?
Clay (03:53.355)
Yeah, I think the first thing I would tell them is, you know, make sure first of all, you have a tech, I'm going to rewind a little bit. Like, first of all, when you're thinking about what you want to do in college, make sure that you've got a technical degree. You know, it's one thing to major in marketing or major in philosophy, but also make sure that you're, that you have a technical degree that shows that you can problem solve. You've got critical thinking.
capable skills and something that can really not only can be put to work. Second is make sure you invest in getting an internship, co -ops, like go work as soon as you can in the area, in the field that you want to go pursue. And I think that the sooner you can do that, more likely you're going to be highly attractive to somebody who's hiring folks without a lot of experience coming out of college.
And then I think the third piece of advice I would give is be patient. Like, you know, you're young, you know, you can't break this, you know, actually doing anything illegal and getting yourself in jail. Like, you know, take risks and don't worry about making a mistake. But while you do that, make sure that you really dedicate yourself to being an expert at something like really build a skill. You know, one of my favorite movies when I was growing up was this.
movie called Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Dynamite, he basically learned that he needed to have a skill in life in order to be successful. And you got to have the skill. But what I've learned in your career is your career is built upon skills and on success. So take the time to build those fundamental skills. And it won't pigeonhole you. It'll just give you more options. But...
I find sometimes these folks coming out of college, they think about that they want everything now and they're not willing to be patient enough to build the skills to really have some success and from there build a career off of that momentum.
Ed (05:59.15)
I think that's sound advice. What about taking care of yourself? So how do you recharge your batteries and sort of remain fresh? Because Clay, you're building these companies. You have young daughters, a lot of stuff going on in life. How do you sort of take care of yourself and stay fresh as a CEO?
Clay (06:21.387)
Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, I'm trying to get really good at taking this thing, just like we tell our kids, and sitting it aside and having several hours a day where I'm not tethered to it. And it's really hard as a CEO, you think that you can't not, you know, how can you not be available? But of course you can. So I try to take two to three hours a day and be untethered from these devices that connect us with things that take the energy from us.
Uh, you know, second is I've gotten a little bit older and I found that, um, and we talked earlier, like it's really hard to play sports, things you used to do to stay competitive. I spent a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of energy on a regular basis. Now thinking about wellness and what that means for me, whether that mean my diet, my exercise, you know, what do I do to take care of me and to fill, fill myself up with opportunities physically to be, uh, to have a clear mind and perform. And then, you know, lastly is, um, you know, I try to feed my.
my, my, my, my spirituality, my, my, my, beyond just my physical wellness, but also mental wellness with, um, you know, whether it be reading, I'm trying to do more reading now than ever have before. Uh, then also reading things that are, that aren't always just about, you know, building a healthcare tech company, you know, like, like how can you go and learn from, you know, and truly immerse yourself in other things that are happening around us so that, so, so that it makes you a better well rounded person. Cause I, you know, you start realizing that.
The more well -rounded you are, the better you are at being a better parent, being a better leader in a company. And also, if you can recharge your batteries and give us an example for those around you, I think it also is a good example. So those are a few things I've been trying to do. And it's not easy, but I try.
Ed (08:09.006)
No, Clay, those are great. And in the time we had together, we learned some new jazz artists to listen to that are doing a variation on Bach. That's going to be super interesting. I'm definitely looking that up. And basically the overall themes, Dare Mighty Things from Teddy Roosevelt. And you shared a lot about your journey in terms of the hard work and the ethics that you learned growing up as an athlete and just with your...
technical degree and then how you got into healthcare and the different companies. We spoke a lot focused on Virato obviously, because that's where you're currently CEO, but important of the concept of nailing down identity. And then we talked a lot about leadership was my favorite part, sort of like the skill sets that you had to draw from across all of those. And you summarize them beautifully talking about developing people first culture, because people take care of the customers well when you do that and customers obviously take care of the business.
aspects and then the culture that you you sought to create and have created at Veranto, you know, everyone should make a difference number one be trustworthy number two and have this customer obsession and we sort of ended on some good advice for everyone whether you're graduating from college or or you're just recharging your batteries as it is today in terms of Deke Disconnecting yourself from the phone on a regular basis
keeping care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually. So we covered a lot of ground, Clay. Is there something we missed or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.
Clay (09:39.723)
No, well, great conversation. I really appreciated it. And thanks for the time. And, you know, for me, I just want to come back to this, like, you know, all this work we're doing with digital transformation, whether it be I'm moving my data from an on -prem data center to the cloud, or I'm truly trying to connect all my data sources so I can truly do analytics that I can trust and can really move the needle with how we think about.
of managing risk and outcomes for our patients or whether it be AI and getting ready for AI and how we really have trusted data that can train an AI algorithm to make sure it's going to give us the best answer as possible. None of those things can be done without trusting WHO is WHO and the basic concept of identity. And I think it's really given everybody an opportunity to rethink their identity strategy and really connect it to where they're heading, not where they've been.
where we're going as a healthcare community. And I think it's just an exciting time with all these opportunities with digital transformation to revisit identity and get it right. From there, everything else will follow.
Ed (10:46.382)
Yeah, I completely agree with that. First things first. Clay, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. And in the time, in our 30 minutes together, no one can see this because this is all audio, but we went from super bright outside and it got almost pitch dark. I was like, I do want to stop our recording, but it got like pitch dark and now it's brightening up again. Pretty phenomenal that we recorded this during the solar eclipse, which won't happen again for many, many, many years. So again, thank you, Clay, for...
for being my guest and thank you everyone for listening and sticking with us.
Clay (11:21.099)
Thanks, Ed.
Hi, Ed Marx here. Welcome to another edition of DGTL Voices. So glad you are with us. I know you have a lot of choices and what you can listen to and learn from, and you've taken the time to be with us. So I just want to say thank you. Today, we have the CEO from Verato, Clay Ritchey. Clay, welcome to DGTL Voices.
Clay (00:19.972)
Hey, yeah, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Ed (00:22.318)
Yeah, and just to put a date stamp, as we're talking, we have the full solar eclipse going on. So if there's anything weird that happens, you'll know we can always blame the eclipse. So Clay, do you remember where you were during the last eclipse? I think it was like five or six years ago.
Clay (00:43.044)
It was 2017 and I don't remember at all where I was. I was probably spending too much time working and not enough time looking out.
Ed (00:49.71)
Yeah, so we're gonna do that as we're when we're done recording we're all going to take a couple minutes and head outside and check it out But Clay you and I first met really through mutual friends in the CEO community and healthcare It's a small world and I was introduced to you and I was like wow
How have I not met Clay before? He's such an interesting person and that's what I wanna dive into. You've been CEO at multiple places and just a, you know, excellent, full of lots of wisdom when it comes to leadership. So definitely wanna dig down into that. But before we get too far down the road, Clay, what are the songs on your playlist? Like, what do you like to listen to?
Clay (01:28.196)
Let's get to the real important stuff. I like that Ed. You know, I have two teenage daughters. So we've been listening to Beyonce's new Cowboy Carter album lately. He's playing a lot here. And of course the girls are looking forward to Taylor's Swiss new album dropping next week. But when I'm not listening with my kids, I've been getting into a lot of jazz lately. So...
I recently got re -equated with George Coleman. So I've been listening a lot of George Coleman. And then also I saw Lee Connors play once and he was playing with the pianist, Dan Tepper. And I'm really getting into his work. He's most recently did an album where he took the best of Bach and is doing it in a jazz form, improvising Bach. So anyway, so lots of jazz here, whatever, trying to keep up with the girls.
Ed (02:24.654)
Yeah, no, I love that. I'm gonna look those up. That's why we ask the questions. Like we are creating actually a digital voices playlist and everyone has sort of these unique artists that they like to listen to and make for a great, great playlist. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you sort of live by, Clay, or you lead by?
Clay (02:46.02)
Yeah, so I, gosh, one of the, a huge, I love reading about people, people who've done big kind of great things in their life. You learn so much from others' experiences. And one of the first biographies I read was on Teddy Roosevelt. And he's become one of my most just favorite people in all of the world. And in history anyway, and his mantra was, dare mighty things. And I really.
I really love that. When I build organizations, when I think about the type of organization that we want to have, we really challenge our teams to dare mighty things. The idea there is don't kind of settle for doing average or not taking risks, but live on the edge a bit and endeavor to do the hard things and do them well.
Ed (03:36.686)
like that a lot. And that's another little list that we're compiling as well as everyone's mantra and creating a little booklet out of that because again, you get these great insights from leaders such as yourself. So Clay, I already alluded to the fact that you've done a lot of it had a lot of important leadership positions in your career. Tell us a little bit about yourself personally and professionally.
Clay (03:59.908)
Sure. So I grew up an athlete and I feel like a lot of this kind of competitive nature, but also this idea of like being willing to put in the hard work in order to do something meaningful. Like, you know, if you're going to be a lead at something, you know, it's really hard, but you got to work hard at it. And I think that I learned a lot of that through being a three sport athlete as I was growing up. And then beyond that, I,
You know, I was an electrical engineer, so I've always been a critical thinker and enjoy solving problems. And that really allowed me to start my career as an engineer at General Electric. And then from there, after business school, I really got this bug around healthcare and how technology can really help transform healthcare and really help bend this cost quality curve. We've been fighting for decades.
And now I've been a CEO now three times in healthcare tech companies. And my most recent opportunity is I've been for the last almost over three years, the CEO of Verato, a healthcare identity company.
Ed (05:11.598)
So tell us about the three sports. What were they?
Clay (05:15.044)
Ah, yeah, so baseball, basketball and football. And so and I grew up in a small school, 150 kids in a grade. So it was kind of our duty to play three sports.
Ed (05:27.214)
Which are the three do you still play today? Do you do any of them?
Clay (05:34.148)
I do my, I play basketball still and my, uh, my daughter, my 14 year old is really getting into playing basketball as well. So I'm playing a lot with her. Um, I can't play it at full speed anymore. My, uh, my mind is too far ahead of my body. It's just a bad recipe for injury. But, uh, um, and, uh, but yeah, you know, the, the, the, the team's for the basketball is really amazing. You know, it's just a beautiful, uh,
a symphony of people kind of reacting to one another and helping each other be better. So I think it's a great metaphor oftentimes for businesses.
Ed (06:11.182)
Yeah, and especially because it's real time, you know, as opposed to like football was a set play and and you know, it's three or four seconds long. And some of the other sports, yeah, basketball is kind of like soccer where it's constant motion and you do have to really know your team and your teammates and their capabilities. And so that's a really good analogy with basketball.
So, Clay, you mentioned that you've been a multiple -time CEO. In 2010, I think you made your first successful exit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Clay (06:44.58)
Yeah. So, uh, you know, the hardest thing about becoming a CEO is, is if you're not a founder is getting that first opportunity. And, uh, I, my first opportunity to be a CEO is with a company called Equinox healthcare. And it was actually a provider of healthcare services, home infusion services, doing extraordinary things to people, you know, for, for patients and patient care outside of the, outside of the normal care setting, you know, inside of a hospital. And it really opened my eyes to.
first of all, how hard it is to be a provider, like just how hard it is to deliver amazing care and to do so, you know, in a very challenging setting, whenever you don't have, you know, all of the support structures that you might have inside of a structured care setting, you know, at home. And, and I really feel like that experience has been very seminal for me and helping me understand the complexities of healthcare and also just how important technology can be to delivering better care. I remember,
You know, in a home infusion environment, the whole goal is to get more, it's an arbitrage game. That's what I really learned at healthcare is an arbitrage game. You got to get more than your fair share of those services that you get more than your fair share of reimbursement for. So we were constantly fighting for nutrition patients. It turned out that nutrition patients on TPN really were the best.
long -term patients with an outsized reimbursement. And in order to really do a great job managing these patients, for example, we were early adopters of remote monitoring. We actually would buy all of our patients' Wi -Fi enabled scales so that we could have a high level of compliance to getting the weight and have an accurate weight. So anyway, so it was really, this idea really started percolating with me that...
you know, technology has a really interesting role here to play in how we deliver care in all care settings. And, you know, that led, you know, we ended up selling that business, you mentioned the exit, we sold it to a roll up that was happening at the time where another organization was buying up home infusion companies and we ended up being a part of that platform. But,
Clay (09:01.092)
Yeah, I still thank David Kennedy from Sierra Capital today for taking that first chance on me. Because it does. I mean, it just takes somebody to believe in you and give you that first shot. And then after that, you prove you can do something. And then it becomes obvious that you're a good choice.
Ed (09:20.43)
Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I never thought about it that way where, yeah, if you're a founder, you naturally become CEO typically. But if you're not a founder, you have to be hired into that role. And there's founders oftentimes to contend with depending on the age of the company and obviously board of directors and things like that.
And you sort of have to, and you're an outsider typically in many situations and you have to sort of work your way in. But you did the same at Imprivata and eVariant. Tell us a little bit about those two companies and just how all that came down.
Clay (09:53.572)
Well, you know what, in Imprivata it was a really fun time because we were about a $50 million business when I started there. And we were just kind of halfway through the high tech act and all of this huge rush towards digital transformation, moving from the paper records to everything being digital and in EHR. And at that time,
If you interview a med surg nurse, for example, they would say that the computer became the fifth patient in their four or five patient responsibility. And if you think about it, that was really one of the biggest inhibitors at the time. As you went digital, it was really becoming a productivity hindrance to our care teams. So Imprivata was all about...
digital kind of security and authenticating and being able to have secure access to that information. And we ended up being kind of a great spoonful of the circle of the health of medicine go down a bit for those care providers. Cause we made it, we made the security invisible so that you could tap in and tap out quickly and actually create a better experience is that that care provider is trying to adopt technology into their work flows. So, and.
And that's what I really realized in healthcare when you're dealing with these type of mission critical elements that the provider is always going to do what's the right thing for the patient and what is the easiest thing to do for the patient. So we realized that we really weren't in the security game as much as we were in the productivity game. How do we make it efficient? How do we really take the burden off the provider? And that was just a good example of like really my eyes opening to how technology can make a big difference in.
and workflow and how important is understand the workflow in healthcare whenever you're developing technology for healthcare. We grew that business over five X over four years and we took it public during that time period. And, you know, we had all of the fun of ringing the bell on Wall Street, but also all of the unpleasantries of being a public company. And, and eventually we ended up taking it private again to Toma Bravo, which is amazing.
Clay (12:12.356)
an amazing private equity partner. And we thought it was meant to be because we were here in Boston and Tohono O 'Brivo took us private in their 12th fund, they called it the TB12 fund. And you know, Tom Brady, TB12, we just thought it was clearly meant to be for us to partner with Tohono O 'Brivo. So that was a great ride. And then after that experience, I really wanted to have an opportunity to...
to get back into high growth opportunity again. And that's what led me to Verato. And Verato was a Goldman Sachs CRM for healthcare company. And I was really passionate about that opportunity because, you know, a typical B2C company is going to spend somewhere between 12 to 15 % of revenue on how they market themselves, engage their customers, really sophisticated way, how do we acquire?
how they acquire customers and create lifetime value from them. And when I thought about healthcare, I realized that we were spending somewhere between 2 % and 3 % of revenue. Think about the gap between 2%, 3%, and 12 % to 15 % in a typical B2C organization. And really trying to how do we engage our consumers and help create lifetime value for them. And at Evereint, we were at the forefront of thinking about how do we help...
Ed (13:23.118)
Yeah.
Clay (13:38.852)
healthcare become more sophisticated at the way they think about their, you know, the acquisition side of consumerism. And we also saw this kind of trend where, you know, all this investment was being made in population health and trying to anticipate those patients that are going to become maybe acute today, but become chronic as you start thinking about moving also to more of the value -based care. And it became clear to me that behavioral change was a key part of how we unlock
that real potential of all these investors were making in data around and using data to help us identify those patients at risk. And we really thought that at a CRM's platform, like we were building at E -Variant, would be able to really tap in and deliver the tools to help really deliver that behavioral change at the point of engaging the consumer and the patient. And we had a really fun run there. I ended up
having an opportunity to sell that business to health grades, which is now WebMD, and become a big part of their platform going forward.
Ed (14:53.902)
So Clay, I imagine some of the commonality between those first three companies as you're getting set to move to Roto is one of the conundrums or challenges I know I have when I was CIO of all these different health systems was the whole identity piece. It's like, and I loved Imprivata. We used it at several of the organizations where I came from. To your point earlier, it did enable a smoother workflow. So it was very clumsy and frustrating in the beginning.
But is identifying the, whether it's a patient or whether it's, you know, someone internally, an employee is like having the proper identification, like knowing who these people were. I mean, it seems like that's a common thread in a lot of these companies where you were, where you're going to run into that issue if your customer hadn't had that solved. So yeah, tell us a little bit. So you've had these experiences now. Why did you choose Verato?
Clay (15:50.5)
Right, you really hit it. So with all those experiences I had, one of the things I realized is that, you know, there's many things that are going to contribute to us realizing the full potential of this digital transformation, this journey that we've been on in the last 15, 20 years, another 15, 20 years ahead of us, I'm sure. But it was very clear to me that one of the most, some of the most important elements that I believe was holding us back from reaching our full potential with those investments was this basic...
concept of identity, knowing who is who and trusting that we know who is who. Because literally in a world where you don't understand who is who and you can't truly identify it in all the different applications I have and all the different databases I have and data sources I have, how can I trust that this data belongs to this patient and that is the same patient that I have over here data around in another data source until we can truly have a method of trusting that we know who is who.
then only then can we really bring those data sources together and have a complete longitudinal view of that person. And I really saw that as one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to come to Verato because Verato had the two things, the other things that you really need to make that work. So first of all, we had a huge problem that I thought was seminal. Maybe if we do this right, one of those kind of top 10 technologies that enables healthcare in the next 10 years in our decade. Second,
Verato really had a product, unique technology that was extraordinarily different and differentiated from our competition. If you give Verato a hundred identities you want to resolve, we're going to tell you 98 of them for sure. We know who they are. Two of them we won't know. If you give that to the typical competitive technology, they might tell you 70 to 80 of them and another 20 to 30 they don't know. So like, so that's so that we had something that was really differentiated. And then thirdly,
We had a really strong brand. People trusted us. And as you know, in healthcare, if trust goes a long ways, you want to think about kind of, this is important. These are important workflows where patient outcomes are on the line. So having that kind of trust is really important. So I think if you have technology that's really differentiated, you have earned the trust of the marketplace, and you're solving a really important problem that could be one of the most important things we solve in the next 10 years.
Clay (18:11.3)
Those things all came together in a really beautiful way at Verato. That's why I was super excited to come join the organization.
Ed (18:18.638)
Yeah, I know when I was CIO, even though we had pretty sophisticated systems, there were still plenty of times where it was kind of iffy because we, you know, maybe misidentified someone didn't have the right person. And not only is it a could it be a, you know, a safety issue, but also it's just frustrating from a patient experience point of view. And also internally, it just causes a lot of rework.
I was really excited. I know the news has been out for some time now, but being a clear is so I have to self disclose here. I'm a, I'm a consumer of clear when you, when you both came together in this partnership, that was pretty exciting to me. Can you share a little bit about the reasoning behind this partnership with clear.
Clay (19:02.02)
Yes. So one of our visions at Verato is that we want to be able to help manage identity across every touch point in the care journey. And historically, Verato is an amazing job of being able to manage that data, what's in your data systems, right? When it's already on your back end, if you will, we do a great job of helping you wrangle that data, associate that data with the right person. And therefore you can do all kinds of, you know, have trusted data that you can.
that they can really manage the care experience and all the analytics you might want to do around that. What CLEAR brought us in the partnership was the opportunity to take that, that offer, you know, the understanding who is who not only in the back end, but also to the front end. So that now every front door, it will be digital or physical that a patient walks into or a consumer walks into or knocks on that will be able to put the CLEAR technology in front of that, that allows you, first of all, to verify the identity through identity proofing.
in a very easy way to do it. I remember back when I was at Imprivada, we were doing identity proofing for EPCS, electric prescribing or control of substances. We were using knowledge -based protocols to do that. I remember I would go see a customer and the physician would just throw crap at me because it was so hard for them to get identity proofed and he couldn't be able to get their ability to do EPCS and it was causing all kinds of friction.
we were really happy to see that CLEAR had figured out a lot of good ways to make that much easier in today's world so that the high percentage of folks within five to 10 minutes were able to get identity proofed. And then from there, you've got their opportunity to do authentication along the way. And in the same way that we see your experience at the airport being transformed, we see that similar opportunity to transform your experience or how you might enter into a hospital systems portal or a physician's practices portal.
and be able to start really identifying who you are, trusting that identity and that security associated with that so information can be shared. And, you know, the other reason we think this is really important is that when you go back to the High Tech Act, the High Tech Act used meaningful use standards to get the whole marketplace to move. And when it came to patient engagement, they actually put the measurement for meaningful use on the provider, not the health system.
Clay (21:23.812)
So patients have, if you're seeing five or six different specialists and primary care physicians and throughout your care journey, that's five or six different portals you might have for many of these patients. So we thought, we really thought we saw this great opportunity to bring clear as a partner and to help really streamline that end to end process and have a good understanding of the front end and then be able to carry that through to the backend for all your historical data.
And now with Verato, we have one platform that gives you that end -to -end visibility, a true longitudinal view of identity.
Ed (00:01.294)
Clay, you've had this fascinating experience of being a multi -company CEO. There has to be one or two, probably more, but what are one or two common skills or traits of leadership that kind of took you through all of those?
Clay (00:18.251)
Great question and thanks. You know, one of the things I really tried to adopt is a lesson I learned actually in business school when I read an article, a case around Southwest Airlines and Herb Kelleher and how did he create such an amazing unique experience for flying that Southwest Airlines at the time completely transformed the way that experience he had in flight. And, you know, he really had this...
employee first culture that if you first take care of your employees and have an employee first culture, they will take care of your customers and then your customers will take care of your shareholders. And that's really the right way of thinking about how you build a great company and how you lead a great company. And I really have tried to embrace that thought along the way here is if we build cultures at Grotto and other places I've been fortunate enough to be CEO is how do we...
create a culture where we attract and retain the best employees in the world at what they do, that we give them the opportunity to take risks and to take child and to make some mistakes, but at the same time, we will do big, big important things. And if we do that right, then we know that they will take care of our customers. And then, you know, then our customers will, through word of mouth and through rewarding us with their business, we'll take care of our shareholders. That's the first thing that I try to do.
Um, you know, the second thing is I've really learned that it's important. It's one thing to say, always do the right thing, which is absolutely probably a secondary mantra for me. Like there's no real black, you know, gray or gray area. Like just do the right thing. And if we do the right thing, you know, almost always, you know, good things happen. So, um, but what I've learned is that it's also helpful to have, you know, so good definition of what, what it means to do the right thing. It's out of your organization. So.
At Verato, we have three things that we do. One, we tell our employees that we want you to make a difference in everything that you do, whether it be make a difference because we're solving big, hard problems in healthcare, or make a difference with the things you choose to do today to help our customers be more successful or help your coworkers be more successful. So make a difference. Second, we say be trustworthy. We just really want you to always do the right thing, have high integrity, be the best in the world at what you do.
Clay (02:43.755)
be a trusted advisor to all the folks around you. And the third thing is we tell our employees that we want them to be customer obsessed. So no matter what you do to make sure that you're over, we like to say that we want you to kind of under promise and over deliver. Whether that be your promises to your customer, your end customer or.
even the promises you have internally to folks that you work with, right, that are customers of you, maybe from an internal customer's perspective. So those are some of the things that I've tried to transcend over my three experiences. And, you know, doing that at scale is the hard part. But I think those are the things I've tried to bring.
Ed (03:29.134)
Yeah.
Ed (03:33.87)
No, I like those, Clay. Those are really good. And I can see it evident in your company. What would you say, let's fast forward 10 years, your daughters are now graduating from college and you're the speaker and the commencement speaker. What advice would you give new college grads heading out into the world?
Clay (03:53.355)
Yeah, I think the first thing I would tell them is, you know, make sure first of all, you have a tech, I'm going to rewind a little bit. Like, first of all, when you're thinking about what you want to do in college, make sure that you've got a technical degree. You know, it's one thing to major in marketing or major in philosophy, but also make sure that you're, that you have a technical degree that shows that you can problem solve. You've got critical thinking.
capable skills and something that can really not only can be put to work. Second is make sure you invest in getting an internship, co -ops, like go work as soon as you can in the area, in the field that you want to go pursue. And I think that the sooner you can do that, more likely you're going to be highly attractive to somebody who's hiring folks without a lot of experience coming out of college.
And then I think the third piece of advice I would give is be patient. Like, you know, you're young, you know, you can't break this, you know, actually doing anything illegal and getting yourself in jail. Like, you know, take risks and don't worry about making a mistake. But while you do that, make sure that you really dedicate yourself to being an expert at something like really build a skill. You know, one of my favorite movies when I was growing up was this.
movie called Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Dynamite, he basically learned that he needed to have a skill in life in order to be successful. And you got to have the skill. But what I've learned in your career is your career is built upon skills and on success. So take the time to build those fundamental skills. And it won't pigeonhole you. It'll just give you more options. But...
I find sometimes these folks coming out of college, they think about that they want everything now and they're not willing to be patient enough to build the skills to really have some success and from there build a career off of that momentum.
Ed (05:59.15)
I think that's sound advice. What about taking care of yourself? So how do you recharge your batteries and sort of remain fresh? Because Clay, you're building these companies. You have young daughters, a lot of stuff going on in life. How do you sort of take care of yourself and stay fresh as a CEO?
Clay (06:21.387)
Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, I'm trying to get really good at taking this thing, just like we tell our kids, and sitting it aside and having several hours a day where I'm not tethered to it. And it's really hard as a CEO, you think that you can't not, you know, how can you not be available? But of course you can. So I try to take two to three hours a day and be untethered from these devices that connect us with things that take the energy from us.
Uh, you know, second is I've gotten a little bit older and I found that, um, and we talked earlier, like it's really hard to play sports, things you used to do to stay competitive. I spent a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of energy on a regular basis. Now thinking about wellness and what that means for me, whether that mean my diet, my exercise, you know, what do I do to take care of me and to fill, fill myself up with opportunities physically to be, uh, to have a clear mind and perform. And then, you know, lastly is, um, you know, I try to feed my.
my, my, my, my spirituality, my, my, my, beyond just my physical wellness, but also mental wellness with, um, you know, whether it be reading, I'm trying to do more reading now than ever have before. Uh, then also reading things that are, that aren't always just about, you know, building a healthcare tech company, you know, like, like how can you go and learn from, you know, and truly immerse yourself in other things that are happening around us so that, so, so that it makes you a better well rounded person. Cause I, you know, you start realizing that.
The more well -rounded you are, the better you are at being a better parent, being a better leader in a company. And also, if you can recharge your batteries and give us an example for those around you, I think it also is a good example. So those are a few things I've been trying to do. And it's not easy, but I try.
Ed (08:09.006)
No, Clay, those are great. And in the time we had together, we learned some new jazz artists to listen to that are doing a variation on Bach. That's going to be super interesting. I'm definitely looking that up. And basically the overall themes, Dare Mighty Things from Teddy Roosevelt. And you shared a lot about your journey in terms of the hard work and the ethics that you learned growing up as an athlete and just with your...
technical degree and then how you got into healthcare and the different companies. We spoke a lot focused on Virato obviously, because that's where you're currently CEO, but important of the concept of nailing down identity. And then we talked a lot about leadership was my favorite part, sort of like the skill sets that you had to draw from across all of those. And you summarize them beautifully talking about developing people first culture, because people take care of the customers well when you do that and customers obviously take care of the business.
aspects and then the culture that you you sought to create and have created at Veranto, you know, everyone should make a difference number one be trustworthy number two and have this customer obsession and we sort of ended on some good advice for everyone whether you're graduating from college or or you're just recharging your batteries as it is today in terms of Deke Disconnecting yourself from the phone on a regular basis
keeping care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually. So we covered a lot of ground, Clay. Is there something we missed or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.
Clay (09:39.723)
No, well, great conversation. I really appreciated it. And thanks for the time. And, you know, for me, I just want to come back to this, like, you know, all this work we're doing with digital transformation, whether it be I'm moving my data from an on -prem data center to the cloud, or I'm truly trying to connect all my data sources so I can truly do analytics that I can trust and can really move the needle with how we think about.
of managing risk and outcomes for our patients or whether it be AI and getting ready for AI and how we really have trusted data that can train an AI algorithm to make sure it's going to give us the best answer as possible. None of those things can be done without trusting WHO is WHO and the basic concept of identity. And I think it's really given everybody an opportunity to rethink their identity strategy and really connect it to where they're heading, not where they've been.
where we're going as a healthcare community. And I think it's just an exciting time with all these opportunities with digital transformation to revisit identity and get it right. From there, everything else will follow.
Ed (10:46.382)
Yeah, I completely agree with that. First things first. Clay, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. And in the time, in our 30 minutes together, no one can see this because this is all audio, but we went from super bright outside and it got almost pitch dark. I was like, I do want to stop our recording, but it got like pitch dark and now it's brightening up again. Pretty phenomenal that we recorded this during the solar eclipse, which won't happen again for many, many, many years. So again, thank you, Clay, for...
for being my guest and thank you everyone for listening and sticking with us.
Clay (11:21.099)
Thanks, Ed.
