Outstanding Directors 2022: Jodi Hubler
Other board service
Black Opal Ventures (2022–present)
BrainCheck (2022–present)
Marani Health (2021–present)
Launch Minnesota advisory board (2019–present)
About, formerly Central Logic (2018–present)
CaringBridge (2018–present)
Medical Alley Association (2018–present)
Governor’s Council on Economic Expansion (2021–2022)
Jodi Hubler says an “innate sense of responsibility” led her to board service. With a résumé that currently includes board service at eight organizations, it’s clear she takes that responsibility seriously.
As Hubler tells it, her path to board service was also a natural progression from her years working in venture capital. For 14 years, she led Minneapolis-based Lemhi Ventures, a venture capital firm funding health care companies. “After you’ve written the multimillion-dollar check, you serve on the boards and help shepherd those companies to that next inflection point,” Hubler says. During her time at Lemhi, she served on a dozen boards that received funding through the firm.
Her breadth of experience extends far beyond VC, which has made her an in-demand board member for several organizations in town. Earlier in her career, she honed her corporate leadership skills at Fortune 500s such as Cargill Inc. and Alcoa Corp. “I’ve spent my career at the intersection of industries under transformation,” says Hubler, who earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s in industrial relations from the University of Iowa. “Health care is absolutely being transformed—in, out, and all around.”
Lisa Lavin, founder and CEO of Minneapolis-based home health care company Ōmcare, saw Hubler’s expertise in action when the two served on the advisory board for Launch Minnesota, a startup-focused organization established by the state of Minnesota
“It was so clear to me that I was going to do everything I possibly could to get Jodi Hubler on Ōmcare’s board,” Lavin says. “Jodi is as brilliant as she is kind. She is both passionate as well as compassionate.” The two started on the Launch Minnesota board in 2019; a year later, Hubler was on Ōmcare’s board.
Hubler has “this light speed way of thinking,” Lavin adds. “She has the ability to connect the dots before the rest of the crowd even sees that there are dots.”
Sometimes, that’s meant making tough choices. For example, Hubler helped Ōmcare execs think through a decision to exit a subsidiary business that had become a distraction to the company’s larger mission, Lavin notes. It was a choice made after the onset of Covid-19. “We were trying to make a decision: What’s the best thing for us to do, especially in the midst of a pandemic?” Lavin says.
Based in Bloomington and founded in 2018, Ōmcare sells a customizable home health platform that provides “one-touch” access to telehealth services. The company’s offering includes a medication-dispensing mechanism that enables caregivers to visually confirm that patients have taken their medications.
“Jodi has the ability and grace to cut through the clutter and get to the core,” Lavin says. More concretely, Hubler played an instrumental role in educating Ōmcare’s leadership “on the art and science of corporate valuation and venture capital,” Lavin says.
Hubler played a similarly crucial role on the Medical Alley Association’s board. A trade group for med-tech and health-tech companies in Minnesota, the association had a long history of being device focused, says Sheri Dodd, vice president and general manager for Medtronic’s care management services division and former board chair at Medical Alley. When Hubler joined the board in 2018, “she came in from a very different perspective at the time, from the venture capital side,” Dodd says.
“That was her first contribution, I’d say, helping us think about things from the money side, and what is the value proposition of the work that we’re doing,” Dodd adds.
Aside from the boards she served on through Lemhi, Hubler assumed her first independent board position in 2018, when she joined the board of health care software company Central Logic, then based in Salt Lake City. The company, now based in the Twin Cities, has since rebranded to About.
It was a fitting start for Hubler, who sees her work as bringing health care organizations into the modern era. One of her favorite lines is that health care is at the precipice of “Star Trek technology on a Flintstones chassis.” In her view, it’s a matter of “digesting and processing that rate of change” in an industry that still relies on faxes.
“Every one of the organizations that I am involved with is at that intersection of change in the health care ecosystem,” Hubler says. Her aim is using her skillset and expertise to help them.
