Patrick Spain

Patrick started First Stop Health because of his own unsatisfactory experience with the healthcare system and his desire to improve that experience for others. He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded four Internet-based companies.

After graduating from law school, Patrick worked for Extel Corporation, a manufacturer of telecommunications and computer equipment, first as a lawyer then as a business executive. Extel was sequentially owned by Dow Jones, Rolls Royce and JWP from 1979-1990.

Co-founder and long-time chairman and CEO of Hoover’s, Patrick led the company from a small book publisher in 1992 to a profitable, publicly traded online business information services company with $31 million in revenue in 2001 with a sale to D&B in 2003 for $119 million.

Patrick was also the founder, CEO and Chairman of HighBeam Research, which he started in 2002 and sold to Cengage Learning in December 2008. He also co-founded and serves as executive chairman of Newser, a news filtering and summarization service with an audience of over three million readers each month.

Patrick serves as a board member of Owler, a Silicon Valley-based company information service that uses crowdsourcing and AI to revolutionize data collection, quality and delivery. He also serves on the board of Occasion, a Chicago-based calendaring and payment platform for small merchants.

Patrick is a member of the Library Council at the University of Chicago and is a member of the Board of Governors of Opportunity International, the largest and best capitalized micro-lender in the world. He has worked in the technology industry since 1979 and has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in Ancient Roman History and a law degree from Boston University.