Michael McCullough (entrepreneur)

Entrepreneurship & healthcare investing

Dr. McCullough holds several concurrent investing and entrepreneurial positions. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Greylock Partners, a co-founder and Partner at Headwaters Capital Partners, and is a co-founder at Capricorn Healthcare and Special Opportunities (CHSO). Dr. McCullough is best known as an investor for his success in impact investing and global impact. Dr. McCullough is a co-founding angel investor and member of the Scientific/Strategic Advisory Board at Heartflow, Inc. Dr. McCullough was a founding board member at 2U Inc (NAS: TWOU), and was/is a board member/observer at the Dalai Lama Foundation, Metabiota, Noodle, KaeMe.Org, HeartFlow, QuestBridge, The Global Leadership Incubator (GLI), and Zipongo. Dr. McCullough serves as a consultant to venture capital funds on life sciences, impact oriented, and education focused investments at Greylock, Redpoint, NanoDimension, and Venrock. He is an advisor and/or early investor at Shmoop, Declara, Zipongo, and other life science companies. As an entrepreneur, Dr. McCullough was a founder and President of RegenMed Systems. He is most recently the Founder of the BrainMind Summit and BrainMind. Dr. McCullough was elected a venture fellow at the Kauffman Fellows Program in 2009 and a Kauffman Fellows mentor in 2015.

Social entrepreneurship

As a social entrepreneur, Dr. McCullough is co-founder/President of QuestBridge, a revenue-driven and self-sustaining not-for-profit NGO which places 2,500 talented low-income students into 40 top colleges annually (e.g. Stanford, Yale, MIT, Amherst, Williams, Princeton, and Caltech) on >$1.2 billion in aid annually.

Prior to QuestBridge, McCullough was founder and/or co-founder of the Stanford Youth Environmental Science Program (SYESP), the Quest Scholars Program, and the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program (SMYSP). Dr. McCullough is a founder/co-founder of BeAGoodDoctor.Org, S.C.O.P.E., the Courage Project, Global Leadership Incubator (GLI), and Happiness Science. He is a co-founder and board member of KaeMe.Org a nonprofit organization that works to reunite children living in orphanages in Ghana, West Africa with their families. Dr. McCullough places a special emphasis on sustainability, creating stable, long-term leadership for his non-profits. Since Dr. McCullough's co-founding of SMYSP at 19, all of his non-profits have survived and been in continuous operation. Dr. McCullough was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2004 and was named a top American social entrepreneur in 2006 before adding for-profit entrepreneurship and investing.

Medical career, teaching & medical service work

Dr. McCullough is an assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) with a special emphasis on teaching. Early in his career, Dr. McCullough served as an expedition physician, has saved lives on five continents, occasionally at substantial risk to his own, and he served the emergency doctor for the Dalai Lama and entourage at the Office of Tibet. Dr. McCullough is a founder at Dharamsala, India Clinical Internship, a founder of Roatan Clinical and Public Health Internship, and a founder of Nepal Clinical Internship. Dr. McCullough is a published researcher, writer, and speaker with a current focus on the mind, impact investing in the BrainMind space, and compassion.

Education and obstacles

Dr. McCullough's medical degree is from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, where he was the first medical student awarded the UCSF Chancellor's and Burbridge awards for public service. Dr. McCullough's surgical residency was at Stanford Hospital's emergency unit, when he created BeAGoodDoctor.Org Prior to medical school, Dr. McCullough was a Rhodes scholar and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford University, and concurrently studied diagnostic and neuro-imaging at the John Radcliffe Hospital there. As an undergraduate, Dr. McCullough studied Human Biology and Neuroscience at Stanford University, where he was the first undergraduate hired to teach at the Stanford Medical School (Neuroanatomy). McCullough paid his way through college a term at a time, and was forced to drop out repeatedly to earn money to return to Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 3 years and was awarded the Dean's award for public service. During these academic terms away from Stanford, Dr. McCullough was befriended by David Packard, whose Packard Foundation subsequently supported his early social entrepreneurship and social impact orientation.

Early life and medical challenges

Raised in rural Oregon, McCullough’s family were original Oregon settlers in the 1800s. McCullough was born 8 weeks prematurely and suffered a brain hemorrhage which was missed for nine years resulting in hydrocephalus, severe headaches, and a significant speech impediment which was corrected with life-saving brain surgery at age 10. At age 4, McCullough began playing chess, and at 6 played against chess master Arthur Dake in a public tournament. At 17, McCullough served on the Oregon Board of Education where he represented the K-12 students in Oregon and helped co-author Oregon's Action Plan For Excellence in Education, state graduation requirements and other policy. Following surgery, McCullough subsequently retrained himself to speak through high school. Following his brain surgery, speaking fluently initially also required McCullough to learn and adopt biofeedback and several meditation techniques at an early age. To overcome his stuttering, McCullough also used different accents when needed for public speaking, teaching, and stand-up comedy, which he used to help pay his way through college and medical school. In an interview with Reid Hoffman and book by Tim Ferriss, Dr. McCullough is noted for occasionally creatively saving lives in the emergency room, airplanes, roadside accidents, and remote overseas expeditions "off algorithm", and he attributes an important component of life growth to embracing challenging fears.