Patrick Spain

Patrick Spain started First Stop Health because of his own unsatisfactory experience with the healthcare system and his desire to improve that experience for others. Spain is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or cofounded four Web-based companies. Co-founder and long-time chairman and CEO of Hoover’s, Inc., Spain 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. Spain was also the founder, chairman and CEO 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. Spain serves as a board member of Televerde a rapidly growing, socially responsible telemarketing service and InfoArmy a Silicon Valley-based company information service that is using crowd sourcing to revolutionize data collection, quality and delivery. Until recently Spain served on the boards of SmartAnalyst, a research company that serves the pharma industry and GuideStar, the largest and most trusted database of information on the not-for-profit sector. Spain is a member of the Board of Governors of Opportunity International, the largest and best capitalized micro-lender in the world. Spain has worked in the technology industry since 1979 and has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Boston University. He lives in the Chicago area with his wife and three daughters.