Wharton DC

Cherie Kloss is the founder and chief executive officer of SnapMedTech, the parent company for SnapNurse, the largest healthcare staffing platform in the US, and its technology brands InstaStaff and Paymint.

With more than 225,000 registered nurses serving over 1,000 partnered facilities, SnapNurse’s staffing technology fills short-term nursing vacancies in less than 48 hours, a departure from the 14-day average of traditional staffing agencies.

The company has grown exponentially since its founding in 2017. As the only business of its kind, the company logged meteoric growth during the pandemic, expanding sales by more than 77,000% in 12 months. SnapNurse’s Q1 2020 to Q1 2021 growth rate of 40,000% is one of the fastest growth rates of any company in any industry in recorded history.

Cherie, who served as an anesthetist for 18 years, founded SnapNurse to offer a more efficient ecosystem for healthcare systems and nurses to work together. She realized how broken the industry’s credentialing and hiring process was, so she created the company to ultimately help solve the world’s critical nursing shortage.

With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Cherie guides the SnapMedTech family, building technologies and service businesses around the automation of booking, credentialing, and payment processes crucial to healthcare staffing.

Cherie holds a BS in biology and premed from Westmont College and a master’s degree from Emory University School of Medicine. In 2021, Cherie was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National Award Winner.

Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He often jokes that his life’s ambition is to have the world’s most confusing resume and that he’s most of the way there. He is the Head of Research at Rose Park Advisors, a firm co-founded by his mentor Clayton Christensen that provides companies that are supported by the theory of disruptive innovation the capital investment and strategy that allows them to grow to make the world a better place. Gautam is also a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Picking Presidents: How To Make The Most Consequential Decision in the World (University of California Press, forthcoming October 2022), and the host of Nasdaq’s podcast World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda.

Gautam has been a professor at Harvard Business School and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Slate, Fast Company, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, and Systems and Synthetic Biology on topics including leadership, reforming the financial sector, military innovation, network-centric warfare, the security and economic implications of synthetic biology, and the TV show Mad Men. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and on All Things Considered.

Gautam was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies. He was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly, and a Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. He served on The Chief of Naval Operation’s Executive Advisory Panel and as a member of the New England Regional Selection Committee for the White House Fellowship and was a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership. He was a Jeopardy Champion.

At MIT, Gautam was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in political science focusing in International Relations and Security Studies, where he was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow and an NSF IGERT Fellow. He received his AB in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. Before his academic career he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector.

Gautam is a member of the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is on the Advisory Boards of Bionic Solutions and Fount Bio. He is an Overseer of the Boston Ballet and a member of the Museum Council of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.