Steve Kraus

Steve Kraus is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners in Boston, Massachusetts. He backs healthcare software and sits on the board of Qventus, which health systems use to manage hospital operations. A would-be journalist who found healthcare as a consultant, he writes Bessemer's healthcare benchmarks and co-hosts the podcast Heart of Healthcare.

Wanting to Be a Journalist

He grew up wanting to be a journalist, wrote professionally as a stringer, and interned at major newspapers in high school and college. On his first visit to Yale the first place he wanted to see was the Yale Daily News. "I was singularly focused on being a journalist," he said, but he burned out on writing in college and graduated summa cum laude without a plan. His mother, Eileen Kraus, a pioneering bank executive, was one of his role models.

Finding Healthcare at Bain

At Bain & Company he consulted for waste management firms, early e-commerce businesses, and the AOL-Time Warner merger. "It was at Bain that I found healthcare and I fell in love with healthcare," he said. He later worked at a growth-stage private equity firm and earned an MBA from Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar.

Joining Bessemer

Working as a speechwriter and in other roles on a campaign, he met Chris Gabrieli, who had built Bessemer's healthcare practice and became his most important professional mentor. He followed Gabrieli to Bessemer.

Current boards include Bright Health Group, Headspace Health, Groups, Qventus, AspenRx, HouseRx, Oshi Health, Folx Health, Mural Health, and Alcresta. He is an observer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, an advisor to Boston Children's Hospital and to Harvard Business School's Center for Entrepreneurship, and a member of the investment committees of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Rock Health. He is the author of Bessemer's 10 Laws of Healthcare and of Benchmarks for Growing Health Tech Businesses. The quality he most admires in a founder is "a chip on their shoulder."

Links

• Organization
• LinkedIn

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