Wharton

Startup

Week

Sandeep Acharya is the founder and CEO of Octave, which is transforming premium mental health care into a standard practice. By partnering with major insurers, high-quality, affordable therapy is available to over 33M covered lives across 17 states. Under Sandeep's leadership, Octave has raised over $90M in capital, been recognized as a Top Startup by LinkedIn and been a winner of best places to work awards for multiple years.

Prior to co-founding Octave, Sandeep led strategy at One Medical for five years. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing commercial partnerships with employers, health systems and physician groups. The company subsequently went public and was bought by Amazon for $3.9B. Before One Medical, he spent his career as an investor, operator and consultant in the healthcare, retail, and technology sectors at Bain & Co, Bain Capital and Insight Venture Partners.

In addition to his executive career, Sandeep has been an active writer & speaker over the last decade. His posts on LinkedIn have earned him over 84,000 followers globally, and he has written articles for USA Today and Fast Company. He has been an invited speaker at HIMSS, Conference Board, National Business Group on Health, Behavioral Health Tech, and other conferences.

Sandeep is a recovering collegiate a cappella singer, karaoke enthusiast, and a long-suffering New York Giants fan. When he's not working, he enjoys writing and spending time with his family.

Gordon Ritter is the Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital Partners. With over 15 years of experience founding and building companies, he has been instrumental in shaping new markets including embedded web-based interfaces, server appliances, "On Demand" services for the SMB market and web-native application development.

In 2003, he led Emergence Capital's first investment in Salesforce.com. His strategic vision and investment acumen have earned him multiple appearances on Forbes' Midas List of top venture capital investors.

He currently sits on the boards of five companies, including the leading cloud life sciences company, Veeva Systems. Gordon invested in Veeva in 2008 when the company had 30 people and $2 million in revenue. He has played a key role in the company's development, and he is currently the Chairman of the Board.

Outside of work, Gordon is a strong supporter of various non-profits including the Golden Gate National Parks and Common Sense Media. He lives in San Francisco and cherishes spending time with his wife Amy and their four children.