Michelle Davey built Wheel from a bootstrapped clinician-matching service into the infrastructure behind virtual-first care for some of the largest healthcare enterprises in the country like Amazon Clinic.

In this conversation, she gets honest about what that evolution actually looked like. She talks about walking into a board meeting with the investor hockey stick chart and telling them they needed to change course despite it. About pivoting from SMBs to enterprise when every instinct said keep the revenue coming. About acquiring GoodRx's care platform and integrating it in only nine months. About over-hiring in 2021 and the dark days that followed when she had to unwind it. She also talks about her actual pajama time: blocking mornings for reading, then picking back up after the kids go to bed to catch up on what's happening in the market.

As Michelle puts it: "A lot of people get into being a founder because it seems glamorous. It is not."

In this episode:

• From Enzyme to Wheel: the three horizons of building virtual-first care infrastructure
• The board meeting where she stopped chasing SMB growth
• Acquiring GoodRx's care platform and building an EMR she said she'd never build
• Horizon 3: An AI-native platform powering programs like weight management, menopause, and longevity
• Her biggest mistake: over-hiring in 2021 and the layoffs that followed
• Hot take: "GLP-1s are going to be more disruptive to healthcare than AI"
• The signal she's watching: stagnation in large payer market values

About Michelle Davey

Michelle Davey is the CEO and founder of Wheel, the infrastructure platform powering virtual-first care for enterprise healthcare companies. She started the company in 2018 after spending 15 years undiagnosed with an autoimmune condition in rural Texas. That experience drove her into healthcare, but the perverse incentives drove her out and into tech, where she built her career across startups and gig economy marketplaces before finding her way back to telehealth in 2016. Today, Wheel’s AI-native Horizon platform is on track to power 3 to 4 million patient visits this year for enterprises including retailers, pharmaceutical companies, and digital health brands.

Presented by Aytza