Patrick Spain
About Patrick Spain
Spain is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded four Web-enabled companies that transformed their industries. Presently he is the Chairman of First Stop Health an online and on-call telemedicine and virtual mental health benefit provider used by employers and their employees. 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 is CEO of Newser, a news curation and summarization service with an audience of seven million readers each month. Spain served as as chairman of the board of Owler until its sale to Meltwater in June 2021. Owler is a Silicon Valley-based company information service that is using crowd sourcing to revolutionize data collection, quality and delivery. He is also on the Board of a Chicago-based Occasion, an event scheduling platform for smaller merchants. Spain also served on the Board of Community Health, the largest free clinic in the U.S., for 6 years. He is also a member of the Board of Governors of Opportunity International, the largest and best capitalized micro-lender in the world. Spain serves on the advisory boards of several technology startup companies. Past board positions include service at Televerde a rapidly growing, socially responsible marketing services company, 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 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 splits his time between the Chicago and Austin, TX areas.