CEO and Co-Founder
Terry Myerson
CEO and Co-Founder, Truveta
Terry Myerson spent 21 years at Microsoft, leading Exchange, Windows, Xbox, and Surface alongside Satya Nadella, before leaving in 2018. He co-founded Intersé in 1994, one of the internet's first website analytics companies, which Microsoft acquired in 1997. He holds a degree from Duke University and is based in Seattle, Washington.
18%+
Of U.S. Daily Clinical Care
50+
Healthcare and Life Science Customers
320
Employees and Growing
10M
Genome Project Sample Goal
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Rapid fire first concert, morning coffee, biking versus running |
| 06:00 | Growing up near Daytona Beach an early loss that shaped his outlook on life and time |
| 11:00 | Choosing Duke over the University of Florida Coach K's early championships and why the decision stuck |
| 15:00 | Pre-med to mechanical engineering to computers starting Interse in 1994 |
| 21:00 | How a competitor's website prompted a startup and how Microsoft came to acquire Interse |
| 27:00 | 21 years at Microsoft Exchange, Xbox, Surface, Windows, and working alongside Satya Nadella |
| 33:00 | Leaving Microsoft becoming time rich and discovering that investing alone was not the answer |
| 36:00 | COVID-19 and Providence Health the founding moment of Truveta |
| 40:00 | The business model de-identified EHR data, an unexpected email from Pfizer, and the CDC |
| 44:00 | AI in healthcare a superpower that does not erase accountability |
| 46:00 | The Truveta Genome Project the Regeneron partnership and the 10 million sample goal |
| 49:00 | What fuels Terry purpose, builders, and a 20-year horizon |
The Moment That Made the Problem Obvious
COVID-19 forced a lot of reckonings. For Terry Myerson, one landed at the level of the entire country: the United States had no reliable way to answer basic questions about what was happening inside its own clinical care system in real time.
"There wasn't time to run clinical trials to decide if a drug worked for COVID. We didn't know who was being most impacted by COVID and why. We weren't able to assess treatments."
The insight went deeper than the pandemic itself. Myerson describes an experience nearly every patient recognizes: standing at a fork in the road on a major medical decision with almost nothing to go on.
"There's just so many examples each of us face where we've had to make these life-altering decisions for ourselves or our family members without data. And I think it should be different. We should have the data to say: what have other people in my situation done? What are the side effects? What have the outcomes been?"
He makes it concrete with his own life: choosing between chemotherapies, or deciding on a knee surgery approach with a doctor who says honestly, you decide, I have no data. The name Truveta carries the same ambition. As Myerson explains it, veta means knowledge in Swedish. The name was coined by the chief marketing officer of Swedish Health Services, part of Providence, before the company was formally incorporated. Truth and knowledge, both a description and a destination.
From Microsoft to Mission: An Honest, Winding Road
The path to Truveta was not a clean narrative arc, and Myerson does not try to make it one. After 21 years at Microsoft leading Exchange, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and Windows alongside Satya Nadella, he left in 2018 as Nadella's cloud strategy rightly shifted the company's center of gravity away from the client group Myerson led.
"My group wasn't the center of the corporate strategy. The strategy was cloud and Office. Windows was a piece of that. It made great sense. And so the role I had wasn't on strategy."
What followed was a period of searching that Myerson describes with characteristic honesty. Someone told him he was time rich. He joined the Medtronic Venture Group and Carlyle Private Equity, tried golf, attempted a musical instrument. None of it was enough.
That entrepreneurial instinct actually traces back much earlier. In 1993, as a sales engineer in Washington, D.C., Myerson watched the internet emerge and could not convince his employer to build a website. His competitor built one instead. So he started a company.
"I tried to convince my company to build a website, and they wouldn't. And then my competitor built one. So I thought, I need to start a company and build websites."
That was early 1994. The company, Interse, evolved from web development into one of the internet's first website analytics and personalization platforms. By the time Microsoft acquired it in 1997, the team had grown to about 30 people. Myerson was 24, with no contractual obligation to stay. He stayed for 21 years anyway.
How Truveta Works and Who It Serves
The business model is elegant in its logic. More than 30 health systems, covering over 18 percent of all U.S. daily clinical care, contribute de-identified patient records to the Truveta platform. Pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers, government agencies, and academic researchers use that data to study outcomes, support regulatory approvals, and train medical AI. When a health system's data is accessed, that system is compensated.
Truveta's first customer arrived before the company even had a sales team. Pfizer's chief safety officer emailed the company's general inbox looking for a way to study COVID vaccine safety across the U.S. population.
"The joke we say in the company, which I think is partially true, is nobody was watching the mailbox because we didn't think anyone was going to reach out that way. But he had this vision that this would uniquely support safety analytics. And it's like, okay, we're here now."
Today, customers include Boston Scientific, which uses the platform to continuously track outcomes from its implanted devices, and the CDC, which Myerson describes as a huge customer studying public health on data that has rarely been available before. Health insurers have sold de-identified claims data for years, but claims lack clinical richness. Truveta's differentiation is the de-identified medical record itself: longitudinal, clinically detailed, time-stamped, and aggregated at a scale that surfaces meaningful patterns.
AI as a Superpower Without Erasing Accountability
Myerson's view on AI in healthcare is enthusiastic and unusually grounded at the same time.
"I look at AI as this incredible superpower that each of us has been offered, whether to write a press release or determine a medical diagnosis. But I don't think it changes the accountability. Ensuring it's great work and double checking it, that still lies with the subject matter expert you've hired."
He wants doctors to use AI. He wants lawyers to use AI. Both professions can process far more complex information far more quickly with it, but neither gets to use it as an excuse to hand off judgment. His longer-term vision for Truveta follows the same logic: today, regulatory-grade health insights are accessible mainly to sophisticated data scientists. He believes AI should democratize that.
The Truveta Genome Project: Closing the Genetic Loop
Myerson frames the next challenge clearly: genetics are not routinely collected during clinical care today, not because they are unimportant, but because the industry does not yet know how to act on them systematically at scale.
"We all believe our health outcomes are a function of our choices, our environment, and our genetics. But we don't have genetics data at scale. So we partnered with our health systems and Regeneron to create an incentive system, working with patients, obtaining their consent, and getting their genetic data sequenced."
The goal is 10 million samples, collected through routine clinical visits at member health systems including Providence, Swedish, Virginia Mason, and CommonSpirit. A patient undergoing a standard blood draw for a cholesterol test, for example, could opt in to have their genome sequenced at the same time.
Culture at 320, and a 20-Year Horizon
With roughly 320 employees spread across Seattle, Michigan, Virginia, Colorado, and San Francisco, Myerson says Truveta is the most distributed company he has been part of. He is candid that the cultural complexity comes from the hybrid workplace itself, not headcount.
"How do you build culture and passion and loyalty and intensity when so many of your great teammates are not here? That's the challenge, not size."
Five years in, Myerson describes Truveta not as a company built to sell, but as a project he plans to spend the next 20 years building into what he calls a pillar of society. That kind of horizon, and the culture it requires, is increasingly rare in technology.
5 Key Takeaways
🏥
Patients make life-altering decisions in a data vacuum
The founding insight behind Truveta is not a market thesis, it is a lived experience. A doctor says "I don't have data" at the exact moment a patient needs it most. Myerson built the infrastructure to change that.
🤖
AI accelerates. It does not absolve.
Myerson wants doctors and lawyers to use AI to process more complex information faster. But he is explicit that the subject matter expert still owns the outcome, a distinction worth applying to any organization adopting AI in a high-stakes field.
🧬
The Genome Project is a 10 million sample moonshot
Genetics are barely integrated into routine clinical care today. Truveta and Regeneron are building the consent pipeline and linked dataset to change that, starting with patients at Providence, Swedish, and Virginia Mason.
🏗️
Built for 20 years, not for a sale
Five years into Truveta, Myerson frames the company as a 20-plus-year project to become a pillar of society. That kind of horizon, and the patience it requires from a founder, is increasingly rare.
🎯
Purpose beat comfort every time
After leaving one of the world's most powerful companies, Myerson found he was, in his own words, bad at having free time. For certain leaders, purpose is not a bonus. It is the operating system.
Terry Myerson Truveta What Fuels You Shauna Swerland Fuel Talent Healthcare Data Real World Evidence Truveta Genome Project Regeneron Pfizer Providence Health Microsoft Alumni Satya Nadella AI in Healthcare Health Tech CEO Seattle Startups Duke University Data Privacy Executive Recruiting CEO Podcast
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Terry Myerson and what is Truveta?
Terry Myerson is the CEO and co-founder of Truveta, a health data company built by a coalition of U.S. health systems to make de-identified clinical data available for research, drug safety monitoring, and medical AI training. Before Truveta, Myerson spent 21 years at Microsoft, where he led Exchange, Windows, Xbox, and Surface alongside Satya Nadella. He co-founded his first company, Interse, in 1994, which Microsoft acquired in 1997.
Why did Terry Myerson leave Microsoft to start Truveta?
Myerson left Microsoft in 2018 after his product group moved away from the center of the company's cloud-first strategy. After a period he describes as unexpectedly directionless, the COVID-19 pandemic crystallized a problem he had long noticed: patients and public health officials alike were making major decisions without the clinical data to support them. That gap became the founding thesis of Truveta.
How does Truveta's business model work?
More than 30 U.S. health systems, together covering over 18 percent of daily clinical care nationwide, contribute de-identified patient records to Truveta's platform. Pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers, government agencies including the CDC, and academic researchers use that data to study treatment outcomes, support regulatory submissions, and train medical AI. Health systems are compensated whenever their data is accessed.
What is the Truveta Genome Project?
The Truveta Genome Project is a partnership between Truveta, Regeneron, and member health systems including Providence, Swedish, Virginia Mason, and CommonSpirit, with a goal of sequencing the genomes of 10 million consenting patients. Genetic data is collected during routine clinical visits, such as a standard blood draw, and linked to a patient's ongoing clinical record to help researchers understand disease risk earlier.
What does Terry Myerson think about AI in healthcare?
Myerson describes AI as a superpower that lets both doctors and lawyers process far more complex information far more quickly. He is clear, however, that AI does not change who is accountable for the outcome. He believes the subject matter expert, not the tool, must still own the responsibility for verifying that the work is right.
CEO and Co-Founder
Terry Myerson
CEO and Co-Founder, Truveta
Terry Myerson spent 21 years at Microsoft, leading Exchange, Windows, Xbox, and Surface alongside Satya Nadella, before leaving in 2018. He co-founded Intersé in 1994, one of the internet's first website analytics companies, which Microsoft acquired in 1997. He holds a degree from Duke University and is based in Seattle, Washington.
18%+
Of U.S. Daily Clinical Care
50+
Healthcare and Life Science Customers
320
Employees and Growing
10M
Genome Project Sample Goal
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Rapid fire first concert, morning coffee, biking versus running |
| 06:00 | Growing up near Daytona Beach an early loss that shaped his outlook on life and time |
| 11:00 | Choosing Duke over the University of Florida Coach K's early championships and why the decision stuck |
| 15:00 | Pre-med to mechanical engineering to computers starting Interse in 1994 |
| 21:00 | How a competitor's website prompted a startup and how Microsoft came to acquire Interse |
| 27:00 | 21 years at Microsoft Exchange, Xbox, Surface, Windows, and working alongside Satya Nadella |
| 33:00 | Leaving Microsoft becoming time rich and discovering that investing alone was not the answer |
| 36:00 | COVID-19 and Providence Health the founding moment of Truveta |
| 40:00 | The business model de-identified EHR data, an unexpected email from Pfizer, and the CDC |
| 44:00 | AI in healthcare a superpower that does not erase accountability |
| 46:00 | The Truveta Genome Project the Regeneron partnership and the 10 million sample goal |
| 49:00 | What fuels Terry purpose, builders, and a 20-year horizon |
The Moment That Made the Problem Obvious
COVID-19 forced a lot of reckonings. For Terry Myerson, one landed at the level of the entire country: the United States had no reliable way to answer basic questions about what was happening inside its own clinical care system in real time.
"There wasn't time to run clinical trials to decide if a drug worked for COVID. We didn't know who was being most impacted by COVID and why. We weren't able to assess treatments."
The insight went deeper than the pandemic itself. Myerson describes an experience nearly every patient recognizes: standing at a fork in the road on a major medical decision with almost nothing to go on.
"There's just so many examples each of us face where we've had to make these life-altering decisions for ourselves or our family members without data. And I think it should be different. We should have the data to say: what have other people in my situation done? What are the side effects? What have the outcomes been?"
He makes it concrete with his own life: choosing between chemotherapies, or deciding on a knee surgery approach with a doctor who says honestly, you decide, I have no data. The name Truveta carries the same ambition. As Myerson explains it, veta means knowledge in Swedish. The name was coined by the chief marketing officer of Swedish Health Services, part of Providence, before the company was formally incorporated. Truth and knowledge, both a description and a destination.
From Microsoft to Mission: An Honest, Winding Road
The path to Truveta was not a clean narrative arc, and Myerson does not try to make it one. After 21 years at Microsoft leading Exchange, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and Windows alongside Satya Nadella, he left in 2018 as Nadella's cloud strategy rightly shifted the company's center of gravity away from the client group Myerson led.
"My group wasn't the center of the corporate strategy. The strategy was cloud and Office. Windows was a piece of that. It made great sense. And so the role I had wasn't on strategy."
What followed was a period of searching that Myerson describes with characteristic honesty. Someone told him he was time rich. He joined the Medtronic Venture Group and Carlyle Private Equity, tried golf, attempted a musical instrument. None of it was enough.
That entrepreneurial instinct actually traces back much earlier. In 1993, as a sales engineer in Washington, D.C., Myerson watched the internet emerge and could not convince his employer to build a website. His competitor built one instead. So he started a company.
"I tried to convince my company to build a website, and they wouldn't. And then my competitor built one. So I thought, I need to start a company and build websites."
That was early 1994. The company, Interse, evolved from web development into one of the internet's first website analytics and personalization platforms. By the time Microsoft acquired it in 1997, the team had grown to about 30 people. Myerson was 24, with no contractual obligation to stay. He stayed for 21 years anyway.
How Truveta Works and Who It Serves
The business model is elegant in its logic. More than 30 health systems, covering over 18 percent of all U.S. daily clinical care, contribute de-identified patient records to the Truveta platform. Pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers, government agencies, and academic researchers use that data to study outcomes, support regulatory approvals, and train medical AI. When a health system's data is accessed, that system is compensated.
Truveta's first customer arrived before the company even had a sales team. Pfizer's chief safety officer emailed the company's general inbox looking for a way to study COVID vaccine safety across the U.S. population.
"The joke we say in the company, which I think is partially true, is nobody was watching the mailbox because we didn't think anyone was going to reach out that way. But he had this vision that this would uniquely support safety analytics. And it's like, okay, we're here now."
Today, customers include Boston Scientific, which uses the platform to continuously track outcomes from its implanted devices, and the CDC, which Myerson describes as a huge customer studying public health on data that has rarely been available before. Health insurers have sold de-identified claims data for years, but claims lack clinical richness. Truveta's differentiation is the de-identified medical record itself: longitudinal, clinically detailed, time-stamped, and aggregated at a scale that surfaces meaningful patterns.
AI as a Superpower Without Erasing Accountability
Myerson's view on AI in healthcare is enthusiastic and unusually grounded at the same time.
"I look at AI as this incredible superpower that each of us has been offered, whether to write a press release or determine a medical diagnosis. But I don't think it changes the accountability. Ensuring it's great work and double checking it, that still lies with the subject matter expert you've hired."
He wants doctors to use AI. He wants lawyers to use AI. Both professions can process far more complex information far more quickly with it, but neither gets to use it as an excuse to hand off judgment. His longer-term vision for Truveta follows the same logic: today, regulatory-grade health insights are accessible mainly to sophisticated data scientists. He believes AI should democratize that.
The Truveta Genome Project: Closing the Genetic Loop
Myerson frames the next challenge clearly: genetics are not routinely collected during clinical care today, not because they are unimportant, but because the industry does not yet know how to act on them systematically at scale.
"We all believe our health outcomes are a function of our choices, our environment, and our genetics. But we don't have genetics data at scale. So we partnered with our health systems and Regeneron to create an incentive system, working with patients, obtaining their consent, and getting their genetic data sequenced."
The goal is 10 million samples, collected through routine clinical visits at member health systems including Providence, Swedish, Virginia Mason, and CommonSpirit. A patient undergoing a standard blood draw for a cholesterol test, for example, could opt in to have their genome sequenced at the same time.
Culture at 320, and a 20-Year Horizon
With roughly 320 employees spread across Seattle, Michigan, Virginia, Colorado, and San Francisco, Myerson says Truveta is the most distributed company he has been part of. He is candid that the cultural complexity comes from the hybrid workplace itself, not headcount.
"How do you build culture and passion and loyalty and intensity when so many of your great teammates are not here? That's the challenge, not size."
Five years in, Myerson describes Truveta not as a company built to sell, but as a project he plans to spend the next 20 years building into what he calls a pillar of society. That kind of horizon, and the culture it requires, is increasingly rare in technology.
5 Key Takeaways
🏥
Patients make life-altering decisions in a data vacuum
The founding insight behind Truveta is not a market thesis, it is a lived experience. A doctor says "I don't have data" at the exact moment a patient needs it most. Myerson built the infrastructure to change that.
🤖
AI accelerates. It does not absolve.
Myerson wants doctors and lawyers to use AI to process more complex information faster. But he is explicit that the subject matter expert still owns the outcome, a distinction worth applying to any organization adopting AI in a high-stakes field.
🧬
The Genome Project is a 10 million sample moonshot
Genetics are barely integrated into routine clinical care today. Truveta and Regeneron are building the consent pipeline and linked dataset to change that, starting with patients at Providence, Swedish, and Virginia Mason.
🏗️
Built for 20 years, not for a sale
Five years into Truveta, Myerson frames the company as a 20-plus-year project to become a pillar of society. That kind of horizon, and the patience it requires from a founder, is increasingly rare.
🎯
Purpose beat comfort every time
After leaving one of the world's most powerful companies, Myerson found he was, in his own words, bad at having free time. For certain leaders, purpose is not a bonus. It is the operating system.
Terry Myerson Truveta What Fuels You Shauna Swerland Fuel Talent Healthcare Data Real World Evidence Truveta Genome Project Regeneron Pfizer Providence Health Microsoft Alumni Satya Nadella AI in Healthcare Health Tech CEO Seattle Startups Duke University Data Privacy Executive Recruiting CEO Podcast
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Terry Myerson and what is Truveta?
Terry Myerson is the CEO and co-founder of Truveta, a health data company built by a coalition of U.S. health systems to make de-identified clinical data available for research, drug safety monitoring, and medical AI training. Before Truveta, Myerson spent 21 years at Microsoft, where he led Exchange, Windows, Xbox, and Surface alongside Satya Nadella. He co-founded his first company, Interse, in 1994, which Microsoft acquired in 1997.
Why did Terry Myerson leave Microsoft to start Truveta?
Myerson left Microsoft in 2018 after his product group moved away from the center of the company's cloud-first strategy. After a period he describes as unexpectedly directionless, the COVID-19 pandemic crystallized a problem he had long noticed: patients and public health officials alike were making major decisions without the clinical data to support them. That gap became the founding thesis of Truveta.
How does Truveta's business model work?
More than 30 U.S. health systems, together covering over 18 percent of daily clinical care nationwide, contribute de-identified patient records to Truveta's platform. Pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers, government agencies including the CDC, and academic researchers use that data to study treatment outcomes, support regulatory submissions, and train medical AI. Health systems are compensated whenever their data is accessed.
What is the Truveta Genome Project?
The Truveta Genome Project is a partnership between Truveta, Regeneron, and member health systems including Providence, Swedish, Virginia Mason, and CommonSpirit, with a goal of sequencing the genomes of 10 million consenting patients. Genetic data is collected during routine clinical visits, such as a standard blood draw, and linked to a patient's ongoing clinical record to help researchers understand disease risk earlier.
What does Terry Myerson think about AI in healthcare?
Myerson describes AI as a superpower that lets both doctors and lawyers process far more complex information far more quickly. He is clear, however, that AI does not change who is accountable for the outcome. He believes the subject matter expert, not the tool, must still own the responsibility for verifying that the work is right.
