“Take care of your employees.They’ll take care of your business.”

Christopher Michalak

Chief Executive Officer

Chris Michalak brings more than two decades of healthcare, technology, and HR industry leadership experience to his role at Virgin Pulse. A purpose-driven healthcare technology and services leader, Chris’ expertise spans strategy, corporate development, operations, and talent development. He has deep knowledge of the rapidly evolving healthcare market and has successfully led software-enabled services businesses. As Virgin Pulse’s Chief Executive Officer, Chris is responsible for leading the company’s global growth strategy and helping clients unlock the full value of their healthcare investments to drive better health outcomes.

Before joining Virgin Pulse in 2021, Chris served as CEO of Alight Solutions, a $2.3B leader in benefits, payroll and cloud solutions. During his tenure, he led the company’s 15,000 employees across 29 countries and more than 3,250 clients, including half of the Fortune 500. Prior to Alight, Chris was global chief commercial officer at Aon Hewitt, where he also led the company’s global Client Promise initiative. This initiative established a clear set of commitments to all clients and put in place a methodology for assessing the company’s performance to ensure it met or exceeded client expectations. Previously, Chris was the CEO of Buck Consultants, a global HR consulting firm.

A firm believer in the correlation between health, wellbeing and successful outcomes at both the organizational and individual level, Chris serves on the board of directors of GENYOUth, a leading national youth health and wellness nonprofit dedicated to creating healthier school communities.

Chris earned a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing from Michigan State University.

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Richard Boylan

Chief Operating Officer

Richard Boylan has spent more than 15 years in technology leadership roles. He joined Virgin Pulse as a member of the founding leadership team in 2004. As Virgin Pulse’s Chief Operating Officer, Richard oversees all product and technical development, build, implementation, and operations for all Virgin Pulse’s products.

Richard’s been with the Virgin Group for more than a decade, and he’s worked on a number of Web-centric, technology-focused start-ups for various Virgin businesses. He led IT and Operations for Virgin Cars and Bikes, a UK-based car, truck, and bike retailer, which quickly became the largest online vehicle retailer in Europe. He also developed an operational and technical strategy for a Virgin-branded, pan-European car rental business, and planned and implemented a group-wide telecom and data strategy. Before joining the Virgin Group, Richard served as European Infrastructure and Database Manager for RL Polk.

Richard has an honors degree in business studies and information management from Liverpool University in the UK.

Wendy Werve

Chief Marketing Officer

Wendy brings more than 20 years of experience developing, leading and executing growth-focused marketing strategies for a diverse range of technology, B2B and SaaS software companies, from startup to IPO, mid-market to $1 billion+. She joined Virgin Pulse in 2015 as Chief Marketing Officer and is responsible for accelerating the company’s growth, expanding Virgin Pulse’s brand awareness, driving demand for the company’s personalized health, wellbeing and engagement solutions, and connecting the touch points with Virgin Pulse customers and users to ensure a consistent and positive experience. She leads overall marketing initiatives and operations, including demand generation, field marketing, corporate communications, brand and product marketing.

Prior to Virgin Pulse, Wendy served as Vice President of Global Marketing at SumTotal Systems, a leading human resources (HR) and talent management software provider, where she was responsible for elevating SumTotal’s brand and scaling the company’s global marketing strategy prior to its acquisition by Skillsoft. She brings extensive experience implementing marketing strategies that have propelled impressive growth for a number of market leading enterprise software companies, including Metastorm (OpenText), Plateau Systems (SuccessFactors/SAP), Appian, and webMethods (Software AG), which today remains one of the most successful software IPOs in NASDAQ history.

Wendy earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI.

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Ron Hildebrandt

Chief Product Officer

Ron Hildebrandt brings over 13 years’ experience building and marketing SaaS software products that improve employee productivity and well-being. Ron joined Virgin Pulse in 2013. As Chief Product Officer, Ron is responsible for the product strategy and delivery of Virgin Pulse’s enterprise wellbeing solutions, including its SaaS portal, mobile apps, and personal tracking devices.

Ron came to Virgin Pulse from Enkata, a successful, venture-backed Bay Area analytics and performance management company that he co-founded in 2001. There, Ron served as EVP and oversaw all product and customer-facing functions and led Enkata’s rapid growth. Ron has extensive experience bringing innovative products to market and ensuring that they solve mission-critical problems. Ron is passionate about increasing the competitiveness of companies by improving the brainpower and the health of their employees.

Ron has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Kim Stephan

General Counsel

As general counsel and head of People, Kim Stephan oversees all legal and employee-related matters at Virgin Pulse. Her legal responsibilities include corporate and commercial transactions, intellectual property, technology licensing and employment law. In addition, she is responsible for the People team, overseeing talent acquisition, employee experience and human resources.

Kim earned a bachelor of business administration in finance with an accounting emphasis from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Kim lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three children, and her personal interests include travel, reading, running, spending time in nature and food-both cooking and consuming!