Brian Meshkin, Managing Partner
Brian Meshkin's social entrepreneurship began as an award-winning youth activist. At 13 years of age following the tragic death of a friend in front of his home, he led the lobbying effort to pass the nation's first bicycle helmet law for children. Following this tragedy, he worked with the National Safe Kids Campaign (now called Safe Kids Worldwide), along with many others to advocate for similar efforts across the nation. Today, Brian has become an award-winning entrepreneur and technology executive. He has been recognized nationally and locally for his achievements, having founded and led some of the fastest growing technology companies in North America - ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and the Inc. 500. The Baltimore Sun selected Brian as one of five "Earthly Angels" for his positive impact. He was chosen as the 2016 Emerging Technology Company CEO of the Year by the OC Tech Alliance/OCTANe, as a 2016 Excellence in Entrepreneurship Winner from the OC Business Journal, and a two-time finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Previously, Brian was a Team Leader at the e.Lilly venture fund, a division of Eli Lilly, former manager of digital health for Johnson & Johnson’s largest product, and helped direct marketing efforts for Prometheus Laboratories. As a pioneer in big data and precision medicine, he founded Proove Biosciences which created the world’s largest clinical-genetics database of over 150,000 pain patients. Proove's R&D efforts involved leading academic centers across North America and won research awards from leading medical societies. In 2010, Brian became the youngest ever-elected school board member for one of the nation's leading school systems. He is graduate of the University of Maryland at College Park.
Khanh Nguyen, Partner
Khanh Nguyen has over 25 years’ experience as a technologist, 20 years of which as CTO and CIO. He started programming at a young age, was integral to the formation of the Internet backbone, and has worked with some of Southern California's most successful technology entrepreneurs. His accomplishments have been featured twice on the Discovery Channel. Most recently, Khanh was CTO of Proove Biosciences where he worked with Brian Meshkin and Laura Hunter as he led the team which built the cloud-based technology responsible for collecting, analyzing, and securely storing the world's largest clinical-genetic database of pain patients. Previously, he was with leading technology firms, Freedom Communications and Western Digital, as well as non-profit organizations like Michael Milken's venture to help build out technology infrastructures for educational institutions across the nation, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he developed a 200+ node supercomputer processing real-time data from one of NASA's first space-bound interferometer telescopes, which became the basis for the WIDAR supercomputer at the VLA interferometer telescope. As an entrepreneur, he has worked with former AMD CTO, Fred Weber, where he developed a big data marketing analytics system; Dr. Drew Pinsky of MTV Loveline, where he built an online collaborative community platform to address health issues with young to middle age adults which became the precursor to online social media websites, gaining over 1MM subscribers within 9 months before MySpace and Facebook reached 200k users; Guy Kawasaki of Garage.com Ventures; Softbank Ventures; Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink; and Bill Grossman's IdeaLabs. Khanh is a graduate of the University of California at Irvine.
Dr. Castro is the author of the book, Chat GPT and Healthcare, and an emergency room physician. With over two decades of experience as a physician, entrepreneur, and CEO of 8 free-standing ERs, a medical billing and physician staffing company, he has become a driving force for change. He is also an
Assistant Professor at UT San Antonio.
Dr. Cornett is a seasoned entrepreneur and clinical researcher. He founded Navitas Pharma (CV drug repurposing) and achieved a successful exit 3.5 years later to Gilead. Earlier, he worked at McKinsey, Eli Lilly, Razorfirsh, and Los Alamos. He earned his MD with Distinction in Research from the University of Michigan; and his neuroscience PhD from UCLA.
Pam is the former Chief Sales Officer at GE Healthcare with over 30 years of commercial experience, including KaVo Kerr, Nobel Biocare, and Ultrasound.AI. Pam currently serves as
Board Chair for HERhealthEQ, a non-profit advocating for health equity
Dr. Baron is Senior Vice President and Provost of the Western University of Health Sciences and serves as Chief Academic Officer of the university. Previously, he served for eight years in roles within the Department of Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine, including Vice Dean for Global Health, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosurgery, Vice Chair of the Department, and Chief of Service at Keck-USC Hospital. He is currently a professor at Claremont Graduate University as well.
Dr. Bingham spent 25 years at Eli Lilly, including serving as (1) VP over External Innovation (deals, alliances), R&D strategy, portfolio analysis, Japan R&D; (2) Co-founder, e.Lilly Incubator and Investment Fund – originated 9 companies, where he collaborated with Profound founder, Brian Meshkin. He earned his
PhD in organic chemistry, Stanford
Kevin Palisi has over twenty years of talent acquisition and organizational strategy experience in life sciences and healthcare. Mr. Palisi is the Founder and Managing Director of Ancora Search, a retained executive search firm focused on assisting innovative life sciences and healthcare companies build board, executive, and operating teams. Prior to Ancora, Mr. Palisi served as a Principal at Korn Ferry International in their Global Healthcare Services Practice.
Recently retired as transactional partner at
AmLaw 50 law firm - Perkins Coie LLP, Tom has over 41 years of corporate transactional experience handling structuring, financings, transformational transactions, and general corporate matters. Tom is AV pe-r rated and named by LA Business Journal as one of LA’s 500 most influential people.
Eric is a financial leader with Big- 4 accounting experience. He has served as CFO leading
early-stage growth and later-stage expansion.
Eric has led multiple fund-raising efforts and IPOs in healthcare, medical device, and biotech, including Aurora Spine and AlphaTec Spine.
Justus is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Momentum Metrix. He has over 15 years of experience in clinical trial project management, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, clinical study design, clinical pharmacology, modeling and simulation, regulatory, and statistics for pharmaceutical drug development
on over 100 new pharmaceutical products.
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