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In this Healthcare Rebel Alliance series, Nick Soman interviews Phoebe Yang, a healthcare and technology leader, shares insights on her career journey, what drives her, and her dedication to transforming the U.S. healthcare system. From her experiences at Amazon to her role at Health Evolution, Phoebe discusses leadership, overcoming misconceptions, and the mentors who inspire her. Dive into this conversation to learn about her unique perspective on making a meaningful impact in healthcare and beyond.
You grew up in a small town in Arkansas, graduated from Stanford Law School, and went on to lead and work with some of the most impactful companies in the world. Did you expect life to unfold this way? What drives you?
Phoebe Yang: It would have been hard to have imagined back then how life would unfold. That said, growing up as the eldest child of a single parent Asian immigrant father who was an HBCU professor (and alum), you learn to expect the unexpected. What I did know was that, as I lived in a world where difference, hardship, and disadvantage were noticeable all around me, I was determined that my life would be one that brought people together, that lifted people up, that moved our collective interests forward in community. That is what motivates me: uniting disparate people, building and growing life-giving work, healing what is broken, bringing truth and meaning in hard places, enlivening what seems impossible, and finding solutions that matter and last.
Since leaving the FCC in 2011, your focus has primarily been on healthcare. Why?
Phoebe Yang: Like many in the work of healthcare, my family experienced a preventable yet fatal failure of the healthcare system that profoundly changed the trajectory of my life, so I come to this work of transforming the system with humility yet deep personal conviction. At the FCC, I worked on the nation’s first National Broadband Plan for the President and Congress. Our premise was that broadband technology would improve the lives of everyday Americans in areas such as healthcare, education, and energy. This was a pivotal moment for me—I wanted to use my experience in tech and digital to help enable better health and better care. In the U.S., the healthcare industry is crippled by extreme fragmentation, complexity, and opacity. Despite our economic and scientific muscle, our system is one of the most unaffordable and inaccessible in the world. This does not have to be so.
You serve on a variety of boards and funds. Do you think Amazon was your last full-time job? What are the best and worst things about your professional life today?
Phoebe Yang: Recently, I was asked to introduce myself at Health Evolution Summit where I co-lead a roundtable series on Courageous Leadership, and I shared that I am loving “the portfolio life.” The reality is that I am working as hard and as passionately as I did when I was at Amazon, but the difference is I am able to invest whole-heartedly in endeavors and people having the most meaningful impact on some of our hardest problems.
What I enjoy most is that I am able to draw on my deep operating experience across industries, from start-ups to the world’s most admired and valued companies, to work with people I believe have outsized potential for transformational and lasting impact. I value their work, and they value my ability to help guide strategic growth and direction, identify and leverage opportunities and risks, and cultivate extreme talent to drive growth for good. And I love having the choice to work with people whose values and standards are compatible with my own.
What I sometimes miss is getting to go deep and long with a single cohesive team of committed and talented people on an urgent and audacious mission. When I was at Amazon, my favorite Jeff Bezos quote was, “We hire missionaries, not mercenaries.” It was this notion of mission, and the people we galvanized for the journey, that fueled my business’s unprecedented growth in the industry most impacted by the pandemic. As we saw then, every company, whether they like it or not, is a healthcare company; and the things I learned about innovating and scaling in technology during multi-layered crises apply to innovating and scaling in nearly every industry. Doing this with people you admire and respect for a purpose beyond ourselves is what transforms an ordinary proud moment to the fulfillment of personal meaning.
You asked if I will ever return to a management role. Being asked that question almost every week the last couple of years, I will just say that I love what I get to do every day, and I am not trying to change that. At the same time, I have learned never to say, “Never.” Regardless of my “perch,” whether as an operator, a board member, or an advisor, I look for strong mission alignment, a culture of learning and high integrity, and smart, genuinely nice people.
What misconceptions about leadership would you like to clear up?
Phoebe Yang: Even the greatest “meritocracies” use what I call "false proxies" to attribute or assess merit, and this is no truer than in areas that are seen as the frontiers of innovation, where pedigree or bravado can be mistaken as leadership. In these moments, we as a society often afford the presumption of competence to those who carry one or more signs of pedigree or boldness. We value title over impact, position over posture, proverbial brass rings over values.
My experience has been that the leaders I admire most rarely correlate with these proxies for merit, and the most lasting enterprises often are led by the most understated people. I recently read that the highest number of Fortune 500 CEOs came not from Harvard or Stanford or Penn, but from the University of Wisconsin. For the last 12 years, the world’s largest company by revenue is not a tech company or an investment bank but started as a “5 and dime” in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Healthcare in America owes its origins and growth not to Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Vanderbilt, but to frugal and industrious Catholic nuns. The average age of a successful start-up founder is not 20s or 30s, but 45 years old; and GEICO, McDonald’s, Home Depot, TSMC were all started by founder CEOs over the age of 50.
True leaders build lasting enterprises, but, interestingly, they often haven’t built names for themselves. What I learned in my unusual childhood was that the most innovative and interesting things are almost never happening at “the center,” where everyone else is gravitating and angling to reach or where the loudest pronouncements are made. The most interesting and lasting ideas are usually generated by people quietly on the periphery, working to resolve some dissonant problem. These are the brilliant and socially intelligent ones, who often have the best insights into why “the center” doesn’t work, the acuity of vision to see where there may be some unsuspecting and scalable path towards fixing it, and the grit to making it so.
Who else in healthcare inspires you, and why?
Phoebe Yang: You are one of them, Nick. Ever since I learned about Decent in 2018, I have been impressed by your core purpose to deliver affordable health insurance for all. I have watched from afar your authentic, smart, and transparent leadership, even and especially as things got tough, and I am inspired by your tenacity to doing good at work and at home, for the long haul.
One of the great things about healthcare is its wealth of inspiring people, and those I admire most demonstrate not only brilliance, tenacity, and vision, but also integrity, authenticity, and courage especially in dark times. A few who inspire me are:
- Former Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin for her unwavering commitment to the health of our nation’s poor;
- Walmart CEO Doug McMillon for his high integrity and leadership wisdom to pursue the wellbeing of his associates, customers, and communities as the competitive advantage for his global business;
- Kaiser Permanente COO Janet Liang for her unadulterated spirit of principled servant leadership, even in the most invisible places;
- Larry Culp for his courage to unravel a century-old American industrial icon to unleash a new future of invention and growth in healthcare, aerospace, energy, and beyond;
- Entrepreneurs, C-suite leaders, investors, and other board members and advisors I get the privilege of working with every day—you know who you are. Maybe the best part of my current portfolio life is that I get to choose whom I spend time in the trenches with, and I choose people who inspire me in some way. And it makes all the difference.
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