Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Claire Celeste Carnes

“My career path was more of a winding road than a straight path, collecting experience in marketing, digital, brand, management, and technology that serve me well in this role,” according to Claire Celeste Carnes, partner at Providence Ventures.

Providence Ventures is the $150m corporate venturing unit of Providence St Joseph Health, the third-largest, not-for-profit health system in the US with 50 hospitals, 829 physician clinics, senior services, and more than 100,000 employees across seven states on the west coast.

Carnes joined the venture team in mid-2014, after six and a half years with Providence. She said: “I had most recently been managing our digital and telehealth teams, including direct-to-consumer and employer-based telehealth and websites and tools.

“I was fortunate because my experience and education was a fit for the role at the time that Providence was forming a venture team. Our senior vice-president of strategy and innovation had just joined and he recruited me due to my ability to manage our telehealth services to run in the black and my experience with consumer-facing digital marketing.

“The transition was definitely a change, leaving the management of a large team to join our venture team, but my background, experience with angel investing [on the steering committee of Angel Oregon], and my MBA were all components that provided a good foundation for me in the role.”

Prior to CVC, Carnes worked at a startup, Mac’s Place, that was acquired by Egghead, spent a couple of years in consumer packaged goods at Pillsbury and Procter and Gamble, and then worked for a decade at Intel Corporation in sales and marketing.

She added: “I meet with early stage companies, speak with other investors and health system leaders, evaluate areas of evolving healthcare technology, collaborate with our internal stakeholders on their strategic priorities and evaluating solutions, and advise and support our current portfolio companies.”

Carnes is board observer on three, Sqord, Avia and Binary Fountain, of Providence’s nine US-based portfolio companies.

Seattle-based Sqord raised a reported $2.3m seed round investment in late 2014 after Providence became involved in Sqord’s first large-scale pilot encouraging 7,500 children to wear a fitness tracker and measure the results.

AVIA, a Chicago-based accelerator and startup that helps providers select the best technologies, raised $6m from Providence, Jump Capital, 7Wire Ventures and Jumpstart Capital in 2014.

In October 2015, Binary Fountain closed a $16m series A round from Providence Ventures, HLM Venture Partners and Pioneer Venture Partners. Binary Fountain, which raised $5.7m in a January 2014 seed round also including Providence, operates a cloud-based platform that gathers and analyses patient feedback from a wide range of sources, such as social media, surveys and review websites, in order to help increase patient satisfaction and loyalty.

Carnes said: “The greatest successes have been those in which we are both a customer of a solution and an investor.

“Our Binary portfolio company provided a key solution for us in organising and making sense of social sentiment through natural language processing. In working closely with our organisation, also created a new product than enhances how physicians ratings and reviews are standardised and cleansed of personal health information, then displayed online, driving up both consumer engagement and organic search engine. This new product line not only helps us but has been a winner with other health system customers.

“I also worked early on to develop a process to standardise healthcare technology pilots so that we have a more streamlined processes. With hoops such as security reviews and contracts, I worked with various parts of our organisation including legal, enterprise risk, and information services to create a streamlined processes.

“We do not want a startup burning all their capital with legal firms just to get a contract signed for a pilot. We now have a dozen pilots going on at any one time, with clear metrics and timelines which helps both our evaluation and helps companies understand criteria by which they would be measured. This is our solution to ‘pilotitus’ where an evaluation goes on too long without a clear path to a full implementation.

“For any investor, not just CVC, I would also suggest that timely yes or no, is a courtesy. No one wants to hear a no, but it is much harder to have to follow up multiple times to hear the no, or just never hear back.”

Such a service-led ethos bodes well for the entrepreneurs and their backers.