About Us - Lucid Lane

Dharmesh Thakker

MBA

Dharmesh joined Battery Ventures in 2015 and focuses on early-venture and growth-equity investments in areas including cloud infrastructure, big data, security and next-generation enterprise applications. Prior to Battery, Dharmesh was a managing director at Intel Capital, where he led the firm’s global cloud and big-data practice and made early- and later-stage investments in companies globally. He also assisted in long-range strategic planning for Intel’s $14 billion datacenter group. At Intel Capital, Dharmesh was an active board member or investor with many successful companies including: Before joining Intel Capital, Dharmesh spent almost a decade in product management and go-to-market roles with enterprise-software companies like Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), Manhattan Associates (Nasdaq: MANH) and two other startups leading to their acquisition. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a BS in electrical engineering, Dharmesh also holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Eric Wolford

MBA

Eric Wolford joined Accel in 2014 and focuses on enterprise infrastructure companies. He leverages his infrastructure and IT experience in working with founders across the enterprise stack, from next-gen analytics platforms like Jut, to emerging cloud security and threat detection companies like Netskope and Vectra. Eric also co-leads the Accel Tech Council. Prior to Accel, Eric spent years in a variety of product and management roles at FastForward Networks, Inktomi and most recently, at Riverbed where he was president of the products group. There, he oversaw the growth of Riverbed’s flagship WAN optimization and app acceleration platforms, which grew to be a $1 billion+ business. Eric is from the Bay Area, graduated from Pepperdine, and has an MBA from NYU.

Toby Mautz

Director of Clinical Services, Central Region

Toby Mautz grew up in New Hampshire and attended Boston College for undergraduate and graduate studies. Toby has been an LCSW since 1996. His career has led him to working throughout the country in multiple roles. He has served as residential staff, therapist, wilderness therapist, clinical director, consultant, director of business development, chief operating officer, and program owner. His understanding and expertise in both clinical and experiential techniques have allowed him to develop into a highly interactive and effective clinician and clinical leader. Toby’s understanding of chronic pain is both professional and personal as his family has been impacted by significant injury and the challenges these create. His own life experiences and travel have greatly enhanced his own self development and professional work. Toby is the proud father of three and enjoy’s adventuring and staying active with his family and daughters.

Jill Miller

Director of Clinical Services, West Region

Dr. Miller earned her DSW in leadership, management and innovation from University of Southern California. She graduated with her MSW in clinical concentration from Loma Linda University. She is a licensed clinical social worker with a diverse background working with government, non-profit, for-profit, private practice, acute care and hospice settings. Her 29 years of experience include specialties with grief, loss, abuse and neglect, and trauma.

Her “why” is in honor and memory of her sister lost to suicide.

Jennifer Kljajic

Director of Clinical Services, East Region

Jennifer Kljajic earned her MSW from University of Hawaii with a focus on children and families. She is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist emphasizing neuro-informed care through Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.

Her “why” is in honor and memory of her brother lost to suicide induced by being fast tapered from opioids after taking them as prescribed for years due to a chronic pain condition in 2018. HHS guidelines published in 2019 advises against fast tapering due to the risk of suicide.

Roohina Diwan

Director, Clinical Services – Professional Practices

Dr. Roohina Diwan earned her MD at St. George’s University School of Medicine. She graduated with a BS in Biological Sciences with an emphasis on Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior from the University of California, Davis. Her passion lies in translating basic sciences and research into tangible solutions at the clinical level. Roohina’s most recent medical research at The Cancer Care Institute focused on patients with habit forming medications, such as benzodiazepines and opioids. She is passionate about working with members of the community looking for a comprehensive solution to the current opioid and benzodiazepine crisis.

Bill Shaw

SVP of Commercial Partnerships

Bill has been a healthcare leader for more than 19 years, with experience in both medical devices and digital healthcare. He is responsible for leading Lucid Lane’s commercial partnerships. Prior to joining Lucid Lane, he served as Chief Commercial Officer at Ekso Bionics, Global Vice President of Robotics and Advanced Technologies for Zimmer Biomet, Sales Director Roles at Salesforce and Intuitive Surgical. He has built multiple high performing teams that consistently deliver record performances. William received his undergraduate degree at The Ohio State University. William is on the board of Directors for Special Spaces, a charity helping kids with cancer.

Ahmed Zaafran, MD

Co-Founder, Chief Medical Officer

Ahmed is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Lucid Lane. He is a board certified anesthesiologist and still practices in the San Francisco Bay area. He trained at The University of Texas McGovern School of Medicine in anesthesiology prior to joining the faculty of the Stanford University School of Medicine from 2012-2021. In 2013, he completed his Certification in Entrepreneurship and Global Innovation through the Graduate School of Business (GSB) Stanford Ignite Program, which led to his role as the Director of Development for Stanford Medicine X-Middle East Region and as a team member of Stanford Healthcare Innovation.

Orlie Benjamin, JD/MBA

Senior Director of Marketing

Orlie brings to Lucid Lane 15+ years of leadership across a variety of industries, with expertise in digital marketing, experience strategy, brand marketing, partnerships, product marketing, analytics and pricing. Previously a key leader at Fortune 500 companies including Victoria’s Secret, NetJets, DSW, American Airlines and Scotts Miracle Gro, Orlie is seasoned in leading large scale solutions from strategy to implementation across many facets of marketing. Most recently, Orlie led growth initiatives at Scotts Miracle Gro with a focus on building new digital brands, providing leadership for venture capital investments and leading corporate strategic partnerships and licensing initiatives. Orlie holds a dual JD/MBA from The Ohio State University and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

Mohammed Pedhiwala

VP Engineering

Mohammed is a seasoned engineering leader, with over 23 years of experience managing software engineering teams and stacks involving large scale SaaS and cloud platforms involving highly available systems, data pipelines and ML workflows. Prior to joining Lucid Lane, Mohammed served as the founding VP for Linqia Inc. and Influencer Marketing Platform. He was the Senior Director of Software Engineering and Architecture at Shutterfly where he led the development of the product architecture and infrastructure. Prior to Shutterfly, Mohammed was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle. Mohammed’s expertise includes high performance server architecture, scalable microservices and software infrastructure and services, ML and ML workflows as well as large scale data infrastructure and pipelines. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

Jay Petrishin

Senior Clinical Advisor

Jay Petrishin, RN FACHE is a board-certified Nurse Leader with over 20 years experience focused on community healthcare and at-need populations. As Vice President of Clinical Services at Lucid Lane, Jay aligns healthcare administration, nursing and case management to improve member outcomes. Prior to joining Lucid Lane, he served as Vice President of Clinical Operations at Wellmed Medical Management, Director of Outpatient Medical Services at TIRR Memorial Hermann, and as a contract nurse for various companies, including developing wrap-around primary care clinics in Medicaid communities with United HealthCare’s Community and State Care Transformation Team. He began his medical career in the US Army while simultaneously earning his BS and MS in Health Sciences and Practice Leadership at The George Washington University. He completed his Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the University of Houston Health Science Center.

Barrett Larson, MD

SVP of Innovation

A board certified anesthesiologist with a focus on medical technology, Dr. Barrett Larson leads Lucid Lane’s clinical and product innovation efforts to prevent the development of opioid dependence after surgery. He has grown his medical career at Stanford University as a medical student, resident and, currently, as a Clinical Assistant Professor. As well, Barrett was Co-founder and CEO of Leaf Healthcare, commercializing the first remote patient monitoring system for pressure injury prevention, which was acquired by global medtech company, Smith and Nephew. Dr. Barrett has over 50 issued and pending patents and numerous peer-reviewed publications.

Amer Raheemullah, MD

SVP of Addiction Medicine and Behavioral Sciences

Amer is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Addiction Medicine in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department at Stanford University. He specializes in tapers and complicated withdrawal in patients with opioid dependence, chronic pain, and dual diagnoses through outpatient, inpatient, and perioperative settings. He has published chapters and peer-reviewed articles in these areas and is Director of the Addiction Medicine Consult Service at Stanford Hospital. He is board-certified in Addiction Medicine and Internal Medicine, and completed his Addiction Medicine fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine and his Internal Medicine residency at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.

Ramin Naimi

Chief Technology Officer

Ramin is a technologist with over 25 years of industry experience building products and services in fast pace organizations ranging from startups to large technology organizations such as Intuit, Yahoo!, AOL and 3Com. Ramin was the founding VP of Engineering at Mist Systems, an AI-focused wireless network platform backed by investors from Norwest Ventures, Lightspeed, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, which was acquired by Juniper Networks for $405 million. Ramin was previously VP of Engineering at Shutterfly Inc., where he was responsible for all eCommerce systems and consumer brands for the company.

Roger Hong

Chief Product Officer

Roger is an entrepreneurial product leader with over 20 years of product management, general management, and technology experience. He most recently served as General Manager at Shutterfly and Lifetouch Integration, responsible for critical customer-facing integration efforts and designing personalized customer journeys between the Lifetouch and Shutterfly businesses. He also served as the GM of Tiny Prints and interim GM of Wedding Paper Divas, responsible for strategy, operations, and $100 million+ P&Ls for these online cards and stationery brands. Roger holds a B.S. in Computer Science and a Master of Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

David Etheridge

Chief Operations Officer

David is an enterprise management executive with 25 years of experience defining and deploying operations management systems including at healthcare technology startups with valuations over $1 billion. After three years deploying telephony operations systems in the former Soviet Union, David returned to Silicon Valley to join healthcare technology startup Align Technology (Invisalign) in 2000. David was VP of Program Management at Shutterfly Inc., Livongo Health Inc., Realtor Inc., and Unison.

Beau Norgeot, PhD

Chief Data Officer

As Chief Data Officer, Beau incorporates AI and machine learning into Lucid Lane’s clinical platform to help optimize member treatments and outcomes. Previously Beau served as the Staff Vice President of Clinical AI at Anthem, building enterprise-class software products that delivered digital precision medical solutions. Beau has also worked at the Computational Genomics Institute developing distributed solutions for genomics big data along with clinical predictive models and web applications. He completed his Ph.D. at University of California San Francisco under the guidance of Atul Butte, the Chief Data Scientist for the University of California Health System, where he worked collaboratively with physicians to develop novel AI-driven research in rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and pregnancy. Beau is the author of numerous research publications, a creator of open-source software projects, a thought leader and speaker on AI in healthcare, has won multiple academic grants, is an Amazon Research Fellow and an ARCs Fellow, and has developed deep learning methods for precision medicine at Microsoft Research.

Adnan Asar

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Adnan has extensive experience and success in building fast-growing digital health, e-commerce, consumer and enterprise services at companies such as Yahoo!, Shutterfly/Tiny Prints, Livongo Health, among others. Adnan has built $100 million + companies in the consumer and digital health spaces that went public or were successfully acquired, and that were backed by investors from Kleiner Perkins, TCV and General Catalyst. He was the founding Chief Technology Officer at Livongo Health, where he was responsible for product and technology solutions for diabetes management. Adnan was previously Global Head of Technology at Shutterfly Inc., which under his leadership reached $1 billion in revenues, and was head of technology at Tiny Prints, which was acquired by Shutterfly. He was also the first engineer hired at Keynote Systems (now Dynatrace), which went public in the late 1990s.

Evan G. Pivalizza

MD

Dr. Evan Pivalizza is a Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director, Liver Transplant Anesthesia in the Department of Anesthesiology at UTHealth Houston.. Pivalizza’s specific clinical interests are in solid organ liver and kidney transplant surgery, neuro and spine surgery, orthopedic surgery, bariatric surgery and of course, acutely injured trauma patients. He serves as an officer for the Texas Society of Anesthesiologists, a Texas delegate and member of committees for our national body (American Society of Anesthesiologists) as well as on committees in the Harris County Medical Society, the Texas Medical Association and the board of the Gulf Coast Blood Center.

Len Wright

Advisor

Len Wright is Executive Vice President of Hospital Relations for USAP. He has more than 25 years of healthcare experience, primarily focused on fundamental operations and strategic growth initiatives. Prior to joining USAP, Wright served as founder, President and CEO of Global Physics Solutions (GPS). Under his guidance, GPS grew from a start-up to the nation’s largest medical physics management company, eventually being acquired by Landauer Inc., a global leader in radiation science and services. Prior to building GPS, Wright served in various senior management roles including senior manager of oncology national accounts with Genentech, the world’s leading Biotech Research and Development Company. He is a graduate of Texas Tech University.

Ed Han

Advisor

Ed Han started his career in investment banking but has spent the last 22 years working on start-ups in the Bay Area, including Danger, Beaucoup and Tiny Prints. Most notably, Han was a co-founder and CEO of Tiny Prints that started in 2003 and grew to over 300 people and $100M in revenues. The company was bootstrapped for over five years and eventually took on growth equity investors, Summit Partners and TCV. In 2011, Tiny Prints was acquired by Shutterfly for $333M. Since Shutterfly, Han has started a real estate investment fund and a couple of other start-ups that were acquired and is currently working on a new venture in the mental health category. He earned a BA from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Stanford.

Ronnie Lott

Former NFL Player

Ronnie Lott is an American former professional football player who was in the National Football League (NFL) for 14 seasons during the 1980s and 1990s.

Lott played college football for the University of Southern California (USC) and was honored as a consensus All-American. A first-round pick in the 1981 NFL Draft, he played for the San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Raiders, New York Jets, and Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL. Lott was elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2000, and is widely considered to be one of the best of the best players in NFL history. He is a mental health advocate who worked with the Pro Football Hall of Fame to establish a behavioral health program for current and former players.

Sherif Zaafran

M.D.

Sherif Zaafran, M.D., of Houston, is the President of the Texas Medical Board. He chairs multiple national committees on pain management, including the subcommittee Taskforce on Pain Management Services for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as well as the Pain Clinical Pathways Committee, Memorial Hermann System, Houston. Additionally, he is chair of the Government Affairs Committee for the Texas Society of Anesthesiologists and is vice-chair for the Harris County Medical Society Delegation to TMA. Dr. Zaafran studied biochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin and received a Doctor of Medicine from The University of Texas McGovern Medical School in Houston.

Vanila Singh

M.D. MACM

Dr. Vanila Singh is the immediate past Chief Medical Officer in the US Department of Health and Human Services and was Chairperson of the highly regarded HHS Inter-Agency Pain Management Task Force in conjunction with the DOD and the VA. She led this group to the comprehensive and approachable final report submitted to Congress. She is a clinical associate professor of Anesthesiology, Pain and Perioperative Medicine at Stanford and is a teaching mentor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Stephen M. Merz

Fache

Stephen M. Merz, FACHE, is Principal of Merz Healthcare Consulting and focuses on behavioral healthcare. Stephen’s career spans nearly 30 years in healthcare administration and behavioral healthcare. Most recently, Stephen served as Interim President and CEO of Diamond Healthcare, a national behavioral healthcare management company. Previously, Stephen served as President & CEO of Maine Behavioral Healthcare, an integrated behavioral healthcare organization and as Vice President & Executive Director of Behavioral Health at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Stephen’s work focuses on integrating behavioral health care services into the overall healthcare system. Stephen has served on national and regional boards, including the National Association of Behavioral Healthcare, chair of the Behavioral Healthcare Councils of the Maine and Connecticut Hospital Associations, and as Regent for Connecticut for the American College of Healthcare Executives. He has a BA from Cornell University and MHSA from University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Our team of world-class experts is integrating pain management, mental health support and technology innovation under one roof

Our mission

Our story

Management team

Adnan Asar

Ahmed Zaafran

Roger Hong

Ramin Naimi

Beau Norgeot

Amer Raheemullah

Jay Petrishin

Mohammed Pedhiwala

Investors

Investors

Board of Directors

Learn More

Dharmesh Thakker

Eric Wolford

Toby Mautz

Jill Miller

Jennifer Kljajic

Roohina Diwan

Bill Shaw

Ahmed Zaafran, MD

Orlie Benjamin, JD/MBA

Mohammed Pedhiwala

Jay Petrishin

Barrett Larson, MD

Amer Raheemullah, MD

Ramin Naimi

Roger Hong

David Etheridge

Beau Norgeot, PhD

Adnan Asar

Evan G. Pivalizza

Len Wright

Ed Han

Ronnie Lott

Sherif Zaafran

Vanila Singh

Stephen M. Merz