Leadership Team

Chris Riopelle

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Chris has spent almost his entire career working to better the lives of under-served patient populations in a way that drives alignment and value for patients, providers, and payors. Chris entered the healthcare world in 1995 and joined GeriMed, a geriatric value-based care company that sparked his interest in both underserved patient populations and risk-bearing healthcare businesses. He spent 10 years in the kidney care industry in a variety of roles at Gambro and DaVita, culminating in leading a $1 billion division of the dialysis company. Chris also served as COO of LaVie Care Centers a $1 billion private-equity backed skilled nursing company, where he was part of a team that led the cultural, financial, and operational turnaround and sale of the company. In 2013, he was recruited to serve as CEO of NorthStar Anesthesia, a private-equity backed anesthesia management company that grew from $130 million to nearly $500 million in revenue.

After NorthStar was sold in 2018, Chris began to focus on the next chapter. He was intent on taking a large swing at a large problem, with a focus on chronic diseases and poor transitions in healthcare. He quickly narrowed in on a set of patients he loves who deserve a better patient journey – kidney patients. Co-founding Strive has allowed Chris to blend his professional experiences and his passion for serving patients in need. He is deeply committed to fundamentally changing how kidney care works in America and helping to build an amazing company while he’s at it.

When he finds some downtime, he loves to spend time in the outdoors with his wife and his daughter, mountain biking, skiing and boating. He and his family divide their time between Denver and Crested Butte, CO.

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Aaron Molitor

President & Chief Operating Officer

Aaron has spent his entire career in the healthcare world, working across a variety of segments. He started with Hospital Corporation of America in the early 90s, helping the company establish the infrastructure to take full risk and delegation of services from payors in the State of Florida. From there, Aaron moved to the payor world, where he spent the next 15 years working in markets across the country in leadership positions that spanned the Commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage lines of business, managing P&Ls of up to $3 billion in revenue. 10 years of that time were spent with Coventry Health Care in various corporate and market-based leadership roles around the country.

Most recently Aaron spent 7 years at Evolent Health focused on helping provider entities transform to value-based care models and scaling Evolent’s operations from early stage startup to post IPO operations. He served in various leadership roles, including as Market and Regional President over various Evolent businesses, Solution President of Health Plan Operations and COO of the True Health division.

When not working Aaron spends time with his wife and three boys, traveling, boating and supporting the Kansas State Wildcats, where two of his sons attend college.

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Evelyn Goodfriend

Chief Customer Officer

Evelyn brings 25 years of healthcare industry experience across payers, providers and tech-enabled solutions, including senior customer-facing roles at Accenture, Kaiser and Evolent Health. She has led diverse teams to turn around businesses, deliver growth and enter new markets in rapidly changing environments.

During her six years at Evolent, initially she served as a senior member of the Transformation team — the company’s consulting group responsible for architecting industry-leading value-based care organizations for large provider systems and physician groups. She was also a Solution President with P&L accountability for a portfolio of market and central operations.

At Strive, Evelyn leads the team responsible for account management, customer retention and expansion.

She has an inter-disciplinary undergraduate degree in Biology & Society from Cornell University and a Master of Business Administration from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Evelyn lives in San Francisco with her husband, Matt, and their two daughters, Charlotte and Gwyneth.

Will Stokes

Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer

Will has spent his career focused on the launch and growth of transformational healthcare businesses. Will started his career as a Strategy Consultant in Deloitte Consulting’s healthcare practice, where he worked with some of the largest healthcare companies in the country to make internal and external investments in clinical and business model innovation. He then joined Oxeon’s Venture Studio, where he worked to build healthcare technology and services companies from scratch. Will spent his first year at Oxeon as a primary architect in the build of Empiric Health, an analytics-enabled service that optimizes physician decision-making, developed in partnership with Intermountain Healthcare. Through his work with Empiric, he gained experience taking a company from concept to launch and was ready to apply this experience to a new problem in healthcare. After Empiric launched, Will set to work exploring the kidney care space, looking for ways to fill the gaps in care while aligning value in the system for all participants. From this work, the idea for Strive Health was born. Will led the initial funding and launch of Strive from within the Oxeon Venture Studio before joining Strive as Chief Strategy Officer, where he leads all things “go-to-market”, bringing Strive’s model to life through payor and provider partnerships.

When he’s not focused on healthcare innovation, he’s outside in the mountains, lamenting another disappointing Tennessee Titans football season, or planning the next trip abroad with his wife.

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Ted Shannon

Chief Financial Officer

Ted brings more than 20 years of financial leadership experience – including leading numerous acquisitions of both private, equity-backed and publicly traded companies – to his role as Strive’s CFO.

Ted joins Strive’s team excited by our mission to transform the way kidney care is delivered. Equipped with years of insights gleaned from overseeing high-performing businesses, Ted directs Strive’s strategic financial planning with an eye toward supporting the company’s future, long-term growth.

Before joining Strive, Ted served as CFO for Optum consumer businesses, helping lead them to over $1 billion in revenue. Before that, he helped spur Optum specialty and infusion revenue growth from $1 billion to over $15 billion in six years.

Long interested in corporate best practices, Ted earned a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and studied global finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Ted lives with his partner, Jana, and their trans daughter, Taly. His family splits their time between homes in Denver and Philadelphia.

Dave Thornton

Chief People Officer

Dave leads the strategy and processes related to building and retaining an exceptional team of Strivers. During his first year, he helped Strive grow its employee base by 600%. He’s also the architect of Strive’s corporate-culture initiatives and a champion of Strive’s DEI initiatives. 

Dave joined Strive from Evolent Health, where he served as Chief Talent Officer, helping expand the company from 20 to 3,500 people with an award-winning culture. Previously, he was with AOL for eight years. During this time, the company shifted to a media and advertising company, undergoing a significant cultural change. David brings extensive experience driving corporate values, culture and growth and is instrumental to Strive Health’s ongoing success.

Dave loves the outdoors and spends his time golfing, hiking, climbing and running when he’s not working. He enjoys spending time with his son and daughter and watching their basketball and soccer tournaments.

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Matthew Temba

Chief Technology Officer

Matthew is accountable for the Technology and Product teams, including Analytics, Data Science, Engineering, Informatics, IT & Security and Product Management. He’s also a mentor for Strive’s Women & Allies Employee Resource Group.

Matthew brings extensive experience as a technology and analytics leader at value-based healthcare companies focused at the interface between hospitals and their health plan partners.

Prior to Strive, Matthew held senior positions at Privia Health, COPE Health Solutions and Evolent Health, where he led teams to drive data-driven results by using predictive modeling, data flow design and visualization. He’s worked in customer-facing roles, leading value-based care transformation, as well as leading technical teams to build, improve and implement a SaaS analytics product for value-based care.

Matthew is a graduate of Morehouse College in mathematics and economics with two years of Ph.D. coursework in applied mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Matthew lives in the D.C. metropolitan area and is a proud Maryland native. He’s also an avid English football fan and steadfast Arsenal supporter.

Renee George

Senior Vice President of Market Operations

As the Senior Vice President of Market Operations, Renee leads thriving markets across the United States that are transforming how kidney care is delivered. 

For the past 20 years, Renee has served in various executive roles in health systems, physician organizations, and provider-sponsored health plans. She has extensive experience in various alternative payment models and is passionate about transforming how healthcare is delivered and reimbursed so that patient care is improved. She spent over 10 years advocating for payment transparency while serving as Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Mercy Health and later Premier Health. 

Renee received her Bachelor of Health Sciences degree in Health Administration from the University of Kentucky, where she graduated with distinction. She received her MBA with a concentration in Management from Georgia State University.

Renee resides in Springboro, Ohio, where she enjoys hiking, kayaking and boating with her husband and two daughters.

Eric Van Horn

Advisor

Eric Van Horn currently serves as Advisor to Chris Riopelle and the Strive executive team. Eric is a co-founder of Landmark Health and served as its Chief Business Officer for the past 9+ years and led its growth from launch to 600,000 lives and over $15B in revenue.

After the sale of Landmark to Optum, Eric acted as Chief Growth Officer of Optum’s Home & Community division. Prior to Landmark, Eric was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of CareMore Health Plan, representing the companies’ product-line growth, development and management, profitability, pharmacy and utilization management and network strategy, leading the company through the sale to Anthem.

Eric began his career in healthcare economics where he built financial forecasting and reporting tools and was part of the committee that discussed with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) the shift from demographic-based payments to Medicare Advantage payors to the current risk-based system. He’s also held positions leading network management, product and commercial sales. He received his BA in Quantitative Economics and Decision Sciences from the University of California, San Diego, and an MBA in Operations from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Eric has been a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and University of Southern California in the School of Public Health for the past 12 years.

He is an avid soccer player, volunteer soccer coach and referee, and is a board member of the PureGame, a non-profit focused on providing after-school sports and development programs for kids in underprivileged areas. Eric is married with a daughter and son — both in their mid-20s.

Alice Wei, M.D.

Officer of the Chief Medical Office

As Officer of the Chief Medical Office, Dr. Wei oversees clinical design of Strive’s entire service line – including heading up coordination between our operations and disease management divisions.

Dr. Wei’s career has long been shaped by a commitment to best-possible care delivery through growth and innovation – pillars that precisely match Strive’s transformative model.

Before coming to Strive, Dr. Wei served as a dialysis services consultant, a dialysis center medical director and chief of the Division of Nephrology for North General Hospital in New York. During her tenure as medical director for a dialysis provider in Harlem, the center earned multiple citations for delivering patient clinical outcomes that were among the best in the United States.

Dr. Wei earned her bachelor’s degree from MIT and her medical degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Medicine. She completed an internal medicine residency and research and subspecialty fellowships in nephrology, all at Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers in Manhattan.

Beyond work, Dr. Wei enjoys spending time with her husband, who is also a nephrologist, and their children. She can often be found reading, meditating or tending to her window garden tomatoes. When time allows, she also enjoys traveling and staying fit through both water and downhill skiing and land and SUP yoga.

Sumair Akhtar, M.D., MHCDS

Chief Clinical Officer of Strive Care Partners

Dr. Akhtar is Chief Clinical Officer of Strive Care Partners. He is a board-certified internist and practicing primary care physician at Strive Health. His expertise and career are focused on building and scaling care delivery models for complex patients.

Dr. Akhtar received his medical degree from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. He subsequently completed his residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He attended the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, where he received a Masters in Healthcare Delivery Science. He has over 10 years of experience as a hospitalist and primary care physician.

After completing his training, Dr. Akhtar joined Iora Health, where he was a medical director and primary care physician for Iora’s Las Vegas market. Thereafter, he transitioned to Caremore and Aspire Health, where he led the East Region as Regional Chief Medical Officer. He oversaw global risk Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid, high-risk commercial, and home-based palliative care business lines with markets in fourteen states. Most recently prior to joining Strive, Dr. Akhtar was Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota’s Chief Clinical Officer over its non-health plan diversified business. In that role, he expanded the home-based palliative care unit and launched an advanced primary care service line for Livio Health, a care delivery business focused on high-risk patient populations that was sold to Lifespark in 2022.

Farhad Modarai, D.O.

Chief Clinical Officer of Population Health

Farhad Modarai, D.O., is the Chief Clinical Officer of Population Health for Strive Health.

He has held several roles at Strive over the past several years from care model design to product management. In his current role, he partners closely with Market Operations to oversee the delivery and growth of value-based care for patients with kidney disease.

Dr. Modarai earned his medical degree from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now Rowan University). Dr. Modarai’s professional experiences span various healthcare settings including government, academia and community. Before joining Strive Health, he served as an Associate Regional Medical Officer at CareMore Health, Primary Care Physician at Duke University Health System and an Epidemiology Fellow at the CDC.

Amit Kapoor, M.D.

Chief Nephrologist

As Strive’s Chief Nephrologist, Amit serves as the primary clinical advocate of Strive Health’s clinical model. He’s primarily responsible for the performance of Strive’s partnered nephrology practices in delivering on clinical and financial performance expectations.

As a board-certified nephrologist with more than 16 years’ private practice experience, Amit is ideally positioned to help lead our work to transform the way kidney care is delivered.

In addition to working as a private practice clinician, Amit also serves as an associate professor at the Drexel University School of Medicine.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Amit attended medical school at Temple University School of Medicine. He completed an internal medicine residency at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School before returning to Temple School of Medicine to complete a fellowship in nephrology.

When he’s not at work, Amit enjoys playing tennis and spending time with his wife and three sons. He’s also an avid traveler who loves exploring the various countries of Europe.

Jon Kweller

General Counsel

Jon brings decades of experience practicing health care law for leading provider organizations to his role as Strive’s chief legal officer. Jon has dedicated his entire career to health law. He feels passionate about helping patients access the quality care they deserve.

Before joining the Strive team, Jon served as general counsel and chief legal officer for HealthCare Partners, which became DaVita Medical Group, and for Landmark Health, now part of Optum. He has also served in legal and compliance roles for an array of other leading medical groups, dialysis providers, and health systems, including Gambro Healthcare.

Jon earned his undergraduate degree from Connecticut College and his law degree from Cardozo School of Law. He also holds a Master of Laws (LLM) degree – for specialized graduate training – in Health Law from the Loyola University of Chicago.

Jon and his wife of more than 23 years live in Southern California and also enjoy spending time in Park City, Utah. Their son is an undergraduate student at Emory University.

Outside of work, Jon enjoys staying physically active through hobbies like hiking, skiing, and running.