This Entrepreneur Raised $65 Million To Build A Virtual Clinic Offering High-Quality, Science-Based Obesity Care

Entrepreneurship is a journey filled with successes, failures, and countless lessons. Evan Richardson, founder of Form Health, the national leader in science-based obesity care, offers an insightful look into building and scaling a business based on his experiences and hard-learned lessons from the ventures he’s led.

In this discussion, Evan talks about starting a company for the right reasons and how to think about adding value, whether by finding your business model or new revenue streams. He also reveals his views on being persistent about finding the ideal product-market fit.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here,

Early Life and the Roots of Persistence

Born in Kansas City, Evan grew up moving around frequently, thanks to his father’s career in the beverage alcohol industry. From there, his father shifted to the corporate world, traveling extensively from Kansas City to Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis, and Fort Worth, Texas.

These experiences instilled in Evan the ability to adapt to new environments, a skill he now sees as integral to his entrepreneurial success. Reflecting on his childhood, he recalls how challenging it was to reset his social structure and cultural values continuously.

Yet, this upheaval fostered a sense of self-reliance: “It teaches you to find your mission and motivation within yourself,” Evan shares. He found his friends’ groups changing constantly with the schools he attended.

This taught him not to depend too heavily on others’ perspectives for right and wrong or what he wanted to do. Moving frequently also forced him to develop independence and the ability to feel at home in diverse environments.

These qualities would later prove valuable in his entrepreneurial journey.

From Computer Science to Consulting

Evan’s love for computing began early. In sixth grade, he went to the library, got a book, and taught himself QuickBasic, setting the stage for his pursuit of computer science at Dartmouth. He remembers creating the first Hello World program and being proud of his accomplishments.

Throughout undergrad, Evan focused on math, writing code, and computing. In his mind, he was learning a trade and building his skill sets. Having something to fall back on seemed like a practical thing to do. Though, he was also keenly interested in it.

When Evan entered Dartmouth, he had a year’s worth of credits, which presented options like taking a year off to study abroad. Instead, he did a bunch of internships at computing workshops. However, he ended up in several “old-school” computing environments.

One involved writing C++ compilers for the DEC Alpha platform, a popular supercomputer platform in the 1980s. Evan quickly found the corporate tech world uninteresting and too slow-moving for his taste.

Evan’s internships involved outdated technology that didn’t match his passion for innovation. Feeling disconnected from the tech world, he shifted his focus to business and joined Bain & Company after graduation. He wanted to learn the basics of how companies worked.

Evan’s consulting experience taught him one of his most important business lessons: differentiation is key. “We helped companies do what everyone else did well, but that never truly differentiated themselves,” he recalls.

Evan recalls that as consultants, they talked about bringing in creative thinking and fresh perspectives, but essentially, their work was about benchmarking to industry standards.

They were just good at helping companies do what everybody else did well or bringing them to top-quartile performance.

This realization would later guide his approach to building businesses. Evan knew that merely keeping pace with competitors was not enough for long-term success. Carving out a niche and doing what others aren’t doing would be the key to real impact.

A Path to Private Equity and the Entrepreneurial Spark

After Bain, Evan transitioned to private equity at Berkshire Partners, where he learned the intricate financial mechanics of businesses and the financial engineering of deals to drive real value.

The industry offered a stable career and steady income, but for him, it lacked the innovation and fresh thinking he desired. “I saw the choice as sticking around and turning the crank on a money machine in the world of leveraged buyouts,” Evan explains.

Desiring something more fulfilling, Evan pursued an MBA at Harvard, a decision that gave him the “breakpoint” he needed to consider the next steps in his career. This eventually led him to Palo Alto, where his wife attended Stanford.

Here, Evan was first introduced to the healthcare industry, an experience that would greatly influence the rest of his career.

First Startup: A Lesson in Persistence and Timing

In 2011, Evan began at Castlight Health, a pioneer in healthcare navigation. After a couple of years there, he was ready to start his own business, drawing on his experiences in consulting, finance, analytics, and healthcare.

Evan’s first attempt at starting a company took him in an unexpected direction—financial services. This was a significant departure from the healthcare space he had just been exposed to. He founded a robo-advising startup, an area he thought made sense given his finance background.

However, the project was ill-fated from the start. “We weren’t responsive to the data we were seeing,” Evan reflects, pointing to critical mistakes in team-building, product-market fit, and execution. They missed identifying where the market had started to evolve.

The startup ultimately failed, leaving Evan with financial loss and a valuable lesson: setting arbitrary goals and timelines can be detrimental if they aren’t aligned with the realities of the market.

Evan recalls sinking $30K to $40K of his money into the venture and bootstrapping to build it. Hiring an offshore team came with managing time zone challenges. Despite the failure, Evan maintained his persistence, turning this setback into an opportunity to refine his approach.

Pivot to Healthcare and Grand Rounds

While his first startup crumbled, another opportunity emerged. Evan had been advising a friend working on a healthcare tech startup on the pieces of infrastructure they needed to put into place. Eventually, the company became Grand Rounds (now Included Health).

They brought in another healthcare care tech founder, the chair of interventional radiology at Stanford at the time. Their fourth co-founder had startup business-focused expertise.

The company focused on providing expert medical opinions to employers, allowing employees to get a second opinion on their healthcare. Evan joined the founding team, bringing his skills in product development to the table.

At Grand Rounds, Evan learned one of the most valuable lessons of his career: continuously expanding the value you provide to customers. “We started as a niche expert opinion company, but quickly realized we needed to expand,” he recalls.

Evan relates how they calculated the TAM when starting the company and estimated it was a multi-billion dollar market. A couple of years later, a fresh TAM calculation yielded numbers of a couple hundred million dollars. Evan and his co-founders needed a new strategy.

Since they had begun to gain insights into the quality of care and finding high-quality physicians, they decided to expand those insights into the navigation business. From there, Included Health expanded and added more services for employer companies.

Offering a wider array of services and expanding its market reach, Included Health’’s success resulted from its relentless focus on growth and value creation.

“Almost no matter what you start with, it’s going to be too small for your vision.” This expansion strategy was crucial to Grand Rounds’ transformation into the largest provider of NAB and tele-primary care and navigation services following its acquisition of Doctor On Demand.

Form Health: The Next Chapter

Evan’s experiences at Grand Rounds led him to his next venture, Form Health, which offers innovative, evidence-based obesity care through telemedicine.

Their clinical care model consists of one-on-one, personalized care from a dedicated ABOM-certified physician and a Registered Dietitian.

They develop individualized treatment plans that address nutrition, physical activity, and mindset shifts and, if appropriate, include a prescription for FDA-approved medication.

Form Health works with employers, helping them expand access to high-quality, clinical obesity care while managing costs. Since its founding in 2019, Form Health has provided care to tens of thousands of patients across the United States via its unique telehealth care model.

Form Health’s many strategic relationships with employers, pharma companies, and patients result from this model which drives long-lasting results for patients.

This approach is fundamentally different from the many players in the obesity space who are focused on handing out GLP-1s or potentially dangerous compounded medicine without the clinical care required for safe, long-term patient outcomes.

Building on the lessons from his past ventures, Evan has approached Form Health, focusing on scaling and providing long-term value while being flexible enough to adapt and pivot if needed.

Fundraising for Form Health

Evan reveals how Form Health has raised $65M in funding. Their $4M seed round was completed in 2019 thanks to Evan’s connections with folks in the early-stage venture capital and venture fundraising world.

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As Evan shared, Form Health has navigated the fairly challenging fundraising market for health tech companies, particularly in Q1 of 2022.

Evan credits their accelerated success to the explosion of patient perspective and awareness. Earlier, it was hard to convince patients that obesity is a disease that requires specialized care.

The world changed dramatically during COVID-19, and TikTok and Instagram alerted the world to solutions like Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications that can lead to significant weight loss.

In Retrospect and Vision for the World Tomorrow

Looking back at his journey, Evan points out that predicting how the markets will evolve is impossible. No one could have predicted the emergence of GLP-1s to treat obesity.

Incidentally, Form Health was on the scene and ready for that uplift when it happened. Unexpected moments like these play a material role in company growth and in founders’ personal trajectories. That’s been one of Evan’s most interesting takeaways.

Evan’s vision for Form Health is for every patient to have access to high-quality cardiometabolic care. In his perspective, the biggest challenge in the developed world is cardiometabolic, and problems like BMI, obesity, sleep apnea, heart disease, and diabetes are interconnected.

At Form Health, they treat the central cause of all those diseases: obesity. Evan’s fully realized vision for Form is to increase access to high-quality obesity care and lower the cost of care.

Evan advises entrepreneurs to work hard and prepare themselves for the future because they can never know what will propel them to the next step. It’s not about always making the right decision. He also suggests being flexible and not sticking to the first plan they set.

Not being ready to pivot means not being able to take advantage of the opportunities that come along. Being responsive to current situations and adapting is crucial for success.

In Conclusion

The persistent theme throughout Evan’s journey is learning from failure, adapting, and growing.

Whether it was his early lessons about differentiation in consulting or the missteps of his first startup, Evan’s path has been one of constant evolution, always seeking ways to provide more value to customers and the markets he serves.

Evan’s story proves that entrepreneurship isn’t just about having a great idea; it’s about execution, adaptation, and always striving to do things differently than the competition.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Frequently moving in childhood fostered Evan’s self-reliance and adaptability, which later became crucial for his entrepreneurial success. He emphasizes the importance of flexibility and adjusting to new environments and challenges.
• From his consulting days, Evan learned that merely keeping up with competitors isn’t enough. True long-term success comes from carving out a unique niche and offering something others don’t.
• Evan’s first startup, a robo-advising venture, failed because the team didn’t respond to market realities. This experience taught him valuable lessons about product-market fit, team-building, and the dangers of sticking to arbitrary goals.
• At Grand Rounds, Evan realized the importance of continuously expanding the value provided to customers. What started as a niche expert opinion service eventually broadened to offer a range of healthcare solutions, driving growth.
• Evan highlights that predicting market shifts is impossible, and often, success comes from being in the right place at the right time. Form Health’s success was partly due to being ready when public awareness around obesity care grew.
• Evan advises entrepreneurs to be open to pivoting from their original plans. Sticking too rigidly to an initial idea can prevent businesses from seizing new opportunities and evolving with the market.
• Evan’s ventures, particularly Form Health, are built around providing high-value care that addresses significant healthcare challenges. His vision is to create accessible, cost-effective cardiometabolic care for patients, driving meaningful, long-term change in the healthcare system.

 

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