"If the president of the United States walks in the room, what's your ask?" Bill Bradley put that question to Kneeland Youngblood decades ago.

More on Kneeland Youngblood and this episode: thedealtablepodcast.com/episodes/kneeland-youngblood

He did not have an answer, and it reorganized his career. Youngblood practiced emergency medicine for 12 years at Parkland and Plano before leaving the ER to build Pharos Capital Group, a Dallas and Nashville private equity firm focused on middle market healthcare that has now completed 33 investments and manages more than $650 million.

The turn came as a cold call to the emergency room. A nurse handed him the phone mid shift: Don Williams, the CEO of Trammell Crow, calling a doctor he had never met about a Texas tax policy committee. Youngblood took the seat, took the jet to Austin alongside the managing partner of Goldman Sachs in Dallas, looked around the cabin and understood that he had money and no leverage.

What follows is the mechanics of access. How to build an actual thesis for why someone should hand you a board seat before you ever meet them. Why he turned down the chairmanship of the Texas Medical Board to sit on a tax committee instead. How value based care went from a market of zero to roughly $300 billion, and why he expects $2 trillion inside 15 years. And why he took "M.D." off his business card on purpose.

Dr. Kneeland Youngblood is the founding partner, chairman and CEO of Pharos Capital Group. A graduate of Princeton and UT Southwestern Medical Center, he practiced emergency medicine for 12 years before moving into finance under the mentorship of Richard Rainwater, David Bonderman and Michael Milken. He has served on the boards of Gap, Starwood Hotels, Burger King, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Energy Future Holdings, Light and Wonder, the Milken Institute and Caltech, and has held mayoral, gubernatorial and presidential appointments including the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

KEY MOMENTS

00:00 "What's your ask?"

05:00 A family built on giving back

11:43 The Princeton advice that reset it all

20:52 Twelve years in the emergency room

25:32 The Bill Bradley question

27:32 The jet to Austin: "I had no juice"

29:55 Rainwater, Bonderman, and Milken

38:07 Founding Pharos, narrowing to health

58:07 Value-based care: $0 to $2 trillion

01:21:46 The greatest lie told to young people

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Pharos Capital Group: pharosfunds.com

Lane Carrick on selling a business, The Optima Advantage: amzn.to/48nLElW

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