Voices of Healthcare · #19
Halle Tecco
Founder
Rock Health
Halle Tecco founded Rock Health, the digital health venture group she launched as a Harvard Business School student to put startup founders and hospitals at the same table. She later turned her own struggle to conceive into Natalist, a fertility and pregnancy brand that Everly Health acquired, and she co-founded and chairs Cofertility, an egg freezing and family building company.
Volunteering for a Clinical Trial
Extra credit led her into health care. She majored in finance and minored in Italian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and her Italian professor offered credit to students who joined a Cleveland Clinic trial that used language learning as therapy. "I just wanted the extra credit," she recalled. Her mother worked as a secretary at the Cleveland Clinic for decades, but Tecco had never felt called to clinical work, and the trial showed her another way into the field.
A summer internship at St. Luke's-Roosevelt in New York City followed, with a doctor who used music therapy for PTSD and ADHD. For her, "it was the moment that I realized that healthcare was really big."
Starting a Yoga Nonprofit
In 2006 she founded Yoga Bear, a nonprofit that connects cancer fighters and survivors with online yoga classes designed for people in treatment. When she applied to business school, her essay said she wanted to combine health care and social entrepreneurship, and she followed through.
Spotting a Gap at Apple
The summer between her two years at Harvard Business School, she interned at Apple, which assigned her to cover its healthcare segment. Gaming and lifestyle developers were "using every native feature of the iPhone," while hospital apps were check-the-box projects outsourced to third-party developers. "This is bonkers. There is such a huge opportunity," she remembered thinking.
Launching Rock Health
She founded Rock Health in 2010, while still a student, and Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente were its first backers. "I was a very young, inexperienced person with a pitch deck, and they backed us," she said. It began by giving startups a little money, office space, and access to expertise, with Omada Health in its first group, and later raised a venture fund.
Its research arm started a few months in, at her husband's suggestion, and has tracked every digital health deal since 2011. Rock Health also built the Rock Health Summit, a CEO Summit, and a Women's Health Summit. She was its chief executive until May 2016.
Returning to School for Public Health
In November 2017, two months after her son was born, she started a master's in public health at Johns Hopkins, concentrating in women's and reproductive health. "I really do want to fix healthcare," she said of the decision. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, and in 2026 Columbia University Press published her first book, Massively Better Healthcare.
Building Natalist
"At the time when I was starting Natalist, I had been struggling to conceive," she said. The tests and supplements she needed sat in different drugstore aisles from different makers, and she asked, "Why don't we deserve to use products that have instructions in plain English and look nice?" She started Natalist in 2018 and launched it in 2019, and Everly Health acquired it in 2021.
Running the company taught her where she fit. "I'm not an operator. I learned that about myself at Natalist," she said.
Chairing Cofertility
With Lauren Makler, who had run Uber Health for eight and a half years, she co-founded Cofertility after the Natalist sale, and she chairs it. Its egg sharing program lets a woman freeze her eggs and donate some to a family that needs donor eggs.
Marriage and Family
She is married to Jeff Hammerbacher, a co-founder of Cloudera, and their son was born in 2017. In 2007 the couple co-founded Techammer, and she also backs young companies as an angel investor.
Links
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