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Back in 2014, when Sarah Blanchard became committed to landing her first CFO position, she kept a key criterion in mind: Her future company had to be mission-driven.

\u201cI ended up in digital health before anyone really knew what digital health was,\u201d explains Blanchard, who received her first CFO appointment from Omada Health, an early-stage health tech firm whose flagship product at the time was a diabetes prevention offering. \xa0

\u201cWhen you talk about a mission that can have a huge impact on the world and a huge impact on humanity and our economy, this was something that I felt lucky to be a part of,\u201d comments Blanchard, who admits to having had limited experience prior to Omada when it came to raising capital and being face-to-face with investors.

\u201cI had two choices: I could raise money from life sciences investors or I could raise money from tech investors, and they both tend to be creatures of habit\u2014they like to see patterns,\u201d observes Blanchard, who still seems to savor the dual challenge of opening the minds of two distinct groups of investors.

Notes Blanchard: \u201cI would spend lots of my time in trying to help life sciences investors understand how and why we could scale a healthcare company so quickly and at the same time help technology investors understand why ARR was not a metric for us, even though we were selling into enterprises.\u201d

Meanwhile, Blanchard\u2019s tenure at Omada endowed her with a degree of extra vigilance when it comes to company pricing models. \xa0\xa0

\u201cOmada had an outcomes-based pricing model\u2014which was really novel at the time\u2014meaning that we didn\u2019t really make any revenue if we weren\u2019t driving outcomes,\u201d explains Blanchard, who adds that the model was flawed due in part to the firm\u2019s assumption that the number of lessons completed by participants was a worthy \u201cmilestone\u201d and indicator of positive outcomes.

\u201cWe were focusing on driving people to complete lessons, but lesson completion, while it\u2019s correlated with weight loss, it is not weight loss, and it is not a reduction in the risk of getting diabetes, which is what we were all about,\u201d recalls Blanchard, whose efforts to repair the model ultimately involved tasking the company\u2019s data scientists with a mission to better expose the connection between participant weight loss and outcomes.

Says Blanchard: \u201cAfter we switched over to a percent-weight-loss-per-month model, we began getting paid for real outcomes.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney