This week I have big personal news to share.

After 11 years, I've stepped out of the CEO role at Parsley Health and into a new role as Chair of the Board, Chief Health Officer and Founder. And of course, I'm still a practicing physician.

It's a huge milestone. And it has me thinking a lot about the longevity of leadership, and the longevity of a career.

When I graduated from medical school at Columbia in 2011, I never imagined that just a few years later I'd start a company that would change my life. One that would get my blood, sweat and tears, and nearly all of my attention, for 11 years.

I bootstrapped Parsley. Based on our first 40 or so founding members, we had three months of runway. I didn't know if we'd still be here in six months, let alone more than a decade later.

Other than having my three children (also this decade!), building Parsley has been the most amazing experience of my life. We built an organization from scratch, reached so many people and broke through so many barriers in healthcare. We became the first 50-state, telehealth-based functional medicine clinic. The first functional medicine clinic to go in-network with all major health plans, covering 150 million lives. And we've treated nearly 60,000 patients.

I'm so proud of all we've accomplished. And I also want to take a moment to appreciate my own stamina, resilience and longevity as a CEO. Very few doctors, and very few women, solo-found a venture-backed company, raise over $100 million and are still leading a 120+ person team all these years later, serving thousands of patients every day.

To do it, I had to live my own medicine. A Parsley-approved whole foods diet. Real sleep. My supplements. And taking self-care very, very seriously, from meditation, bodywork and acupuncture to retreats, therapy and coaching. In a future post, I'll share my full recipe for career longevity, and what it took to do this while having and raising three babies.

But today, I just want to honor this milestone.

Thank you for reading, for sticking with me and for being part of this community. Thank you for your support and encouragement. And to those of you who are our patients, thank you for your feedback and for sticking with us along the way.

Bringing this company into the world and running it has truly been a gift. I've learned so much about myself, about business, leadership, sacrifice, resilience and, of course, longevity.

So I'm taking a pause from my usual deep dive into longevity science, women's health and functional medicine to share this news with you. Below is the letter I wrote to our investors and community.

Here it is.

I am excited to share that last week I stepped out of my role as CEO of Parsley Health and into the role of Chair of the Board of Directors, Chief Health Officer, and Founder.

I believe that happiness is giving the world what you want most yourself, and the past decade gave me the chance to do exactly that. Building and running Parsley for the past eleven years has been the dream of a lifetime. I have had the privilege of working with some of the most talented, dedicated, and mission-driven people anywhere to serve nearly 60,000 patients with proactive, personalized, preventive, and functional care, in a model that represents what medical care can and should be.

Today Parsley is stronger as a business than it has ever been across every metric: growth, burn, margin, LTV, CAC, culture, and customer satisfaction and retention. That makes this the best time for me to hand the reins to a wonderful incoming CEO and support the company in a new way, while creating space and time for new projects and a greater focus on my family.

In 2015 I asked myself what I would want medical care to look like, feel like, and deliver. Based on that, I designed a model for care delivery that was proactive, personalized, preventive, and delightful in a way I hadn't seen anywhere. I had seen clinically how powerfully Functional Medicine healed and transformed health. But I also saw that it wasn't built to reach the scale needed to impact the people who needed it most. I envisioned a national service powered by telehealth, a beautiful brand and education platform that reached millions, a service that drove powerful health outcomes, and, one day, going in-network with insurance to make this kind of care, historically financially out of reach, finally affordable. Today, Parsley is all of these things.

Thank you to the team at Parsley Health, our Sprigs, every one of you, present and past. Each of you cared so deeply, devoted yourselves to excellent patient care above all, and showed the world what it looks like to go against the grain and innovate in healthcare, a field that's notoriously hard to innovate in. I am honored to have worked alongside each of you.

Thank you to all of our partners across healthcare: the payers, employers, health systems, diagnostic labs, supplement manufacturers, vendors, law firms, and technology companies that make up the ecosystem that makes it possible for Parsley to serve patients. Medicine is truly a team sport.

Thank you to our investors, advisors, and board members. You saw the future and gave your time, effort, and capital to seeing this dream realized.

Thank you to my husband David for cheerleading me and Parsley from idea to website to first money raised, never ceasing to support the vision, while along the way raising three beautiful humans.

And thank you most of all to our patients. You are my why. Every one of your stories of transformation kept me going, and still does. I saw patients on Thursday mornings throughout the whole journey. Whenever I didn't know what to do, I said to myself, "Just be a good doctor today and the rest will figure itself out." And it did. Every fertility win, autoimmune disease put into remission, gut healed, skin cleared, migraine resolved, blood sugar normalized, and heart strengthened reminded me of why I was doing this in the first place.

My life's work is guiding as many people as possible to better health. I got to do that through Parsley for the past eleven years. My motivation hasn't changed, but life has many temples. It's time to go build a new one.

Stay strong, stay curious, and breathe, Robin

As always, this newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any health decisions or changes to your treatment plan.