When Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, AM ’02, a professor, gynecologist, and director of a research lab in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, was working in 2014 to commercialize a tool that connects patients to community resources, her advisors had one question: Who will be the CEO?
Recognizing she lacked CEO experience, and shouldering a host of other commitments, Lindau needed her first hire to be the chief executive. And the job needed to be filled quickly. Two years earlier, in 2012, Lindau’s lab had received a $5.9 million award from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to roll out a technology linking patients to community services. The clock was ticking. It was a three-year award, and Lindau only had a year before the end of the study. Lindau and her advisors knew she needed to bring a CEO on board to build the business that would come to be called NowPow.
“They kept saying the guy is out there; you just have to find the guy,” she recalled. “‘The guy’ turned out to be Rachel.”
Six years later, the duo has grown NowPow into a 90-person startup supporting about 24,000 care professionals serving more than 7.4 million patients. Described as a personalized community referral platform to support whole-person care, NowPow makes it easy for care professionals (at health systems, health plans, and other non–health care agencies) to connect people to highly matched and highly qualified community resources that empower them to stay well, meet basic needs, manage illness, and care for others.
After partnering up to bring NowPow to market, Lindau encouraged Kohler to take a desk at the UChicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Kohler agreed. For the startup’s first two years, they operated from a few desks at the Polsky Exchange coworking space on 53rd Street as part of the inaugural class at the Polsky Incubator, a program designed to grow early-stage companies. During that time, the idea went from the research lab to tech startup, with the help of the Polsky Center’s mentorship and networking opportunities.
Photo by Lucy Hewett
