A founder can make an entrance with a funding announcement. Leaving the chief executive’s chair takes a different sort of sentence. When BetterNight introduced Inan Beydilli as its new CEO in 2025, Dave French welcomed him publicly, then added a promise: “Inan, I look forward to supporting you as we continue our journey!” The pronoun does some useful work. French’s role had changed; his connection to the enterprise had continued.
Today, French sits on BetterNight’s board. He is a co-founder and its former CEO, with a career that has taken him through accounting, operating businesses, private equity and, in one particularly entertaining detour, professional soccer ownership. The itinerary resists a tidy business-card description. An accountant’s career is supposed to contain columns. French’s contains a football club.
There is a thread through these different settings: participation at moments when an organization is changing hands, changing scale or changing leadership. That is the useful way to read his career. Follow the transactions and appointments, and a portrait emerges of someone who has occupied several seats around the business table.
Before the boardroom, the books
French graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor of science in business administration. He began his working life in the audit and tax departments of Peat Marwick Mitchell, the firm now known as KPMG, and became a Certified Public Accountant. His biography describes that qualification in the past tense. Accounting was an early profession in a career that subsequently widened.
Those beginnings give the later roles an interesting frame. An auditor examines how a business represents itself in numbers. A chief executive has responsibility for the organization producing them. An investor must decide whether to commit capital. French would go on to hold roles in each of those worlds. The titles establish the progression without requiring a romantic tale about his first spreadsheet.
Before joining Sleep Data, he co-founded Star Medical and served as both president and CEO. He also co-founded Rock Island Capital, a private equity fund based in the Midwest. BetterNight’s biography continues to identify him as an operating advisor to that fund. The word “operating” is worth keeping: it connects the investment role to his experience running companies.
A separate chapter in his earlier career included a principal’s role at Kessinger Hunter & Co. Put these appointments together and the sequence becomes less surprising. French was moving among professions concerned with ownership, management and the practical consequences of a deal. Then came an investment whose consequences could be followed on a scoreboard.
Six investors, one Kansas City club
In August 2006, the Hunt family announced the sale of its interest in the Kansas City Wizards to OnGoal LLC. French was one of six principals in the buying group. His fellow investors were Neal Patterson, Cliff Illig, Pat Curran, Robb Heineman and Greg Maday. Patterson and Illig, executives at Cerner, led the group.
The transaction had a significance beyond the change of names on ownership documents. The club would remain in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Prospective buyers elsewhere had been interested in moving it. For supporters, the question of where their team would play was rather more pressing than the elegance of the acquisition structure. A balance sheet rarely inspires a terrace chant.
French entered that group with existing business connections. Heineman and Maday also had founding roles at Rock Island Capital. His own biography accompanying the sale identified his investment background, his earlier executive work and his Missouri degree. The soccer transaction belonged to the same professional network as the rest of his career, even if the setting supplied considerably more noise.
It is an appealing episode because it makes the abstract business of ownership tangible. A local consortium bought an existing organization, and its location mattered. Employees were to remain with the club as the new group took over operations on September 1. French’s participation is a specific piece of that history, shared with five other investors. The sporting results and later development of the club were collective undertakings, with many people involved.
A new venture inside an older business
French became CEO of Sleep Data in August 2011. BetterNight’s virtual platform launched in 2018. Keeping those dates separate makes the business story clearer: the executive appointment preceded the new venture by several years. French’s involvement spans an established operation and the introduction of a different way to deliver its services.
That sequence also changes the familiar founder narrative. The starting point here includes an existing organization, employees and accumulated operating experience. A new platform can arrive with a new name while drawing on work already under way. The launch date tells one part of the story; the management history tells another.
By 2019, BetterNight’s platform had been deployed in California, Arkansas, Illinois and Nebraska. Those four states make a useful snapshot of its early expansion. The business had moved beyond its San Diego base, and the next financing announcement would explicitly put wider commercialization on the agenda.
French’s earlier roles help explain why this period belongs in an operating biography as well as a startup biography. He had already been a company president, a CEO and a fund co-founder. BetterNight added a new venture to that record, with the work of expansion still ahead.
The capital arrived in chapters
In 2019, Sleep Data and BetterNight announced a $6 million growth round led by HCAP Partners. The stated purpose included expanding the market for BetterNight’s virtual platform. The amount mattered, but so did its intended use: taking something already launched into a wider commercial setting.
HCAP returned with a Series B investment in March 2021. The terms were undisclosed. That distinction deserves to survive any attractive chart. There is a published dollar amount for the earlier round and another for the later 2023 financing; the 2021 announcement supplies a milestone without a public price tag. A blank space can be more accurate than an impressively confident bar.
The 2021 round also brought Hope Mago, an HCAP partner, onto the board. Financing changes more than the available cash. In this instance, it added a named investor representative to the company’s governance. French’s work as CEO was taking place alongside an expanding relationship with an existing backer.
HCAP’s announcement described commercial relationships with several types of partner organizations and said the money would support further scaling. That is the less photogenic part of a growth story: distribution, counterparties, agreements and the repeated work of reaching another market. Funding supplies a date for the timeline. Commercial execution fills the months between dates.
Individual announced rounds. These figures are financing amounts, not revenue or company valuation.
$33 million, with expansion attached
On February 28, 2023, BetterNight announced $33 million in growth financing led by NewSpring. Existing investors HCAP Partners and Hamilton Lane participated. For French, then CEO, the announcement joined an established investor relationship to a new lead backer.
The planned uses were explicit: continued national expansion through partnerships and further investment in technology. French welcomed NewSpring as a partner for the company’s next stage of growth. His language stayed close to the business task. Capital was being connected to expansion and the experience of the people supplying it.
There is a temptation to make a financing figure do the work of an entire company history. Thirty-three million dollars looks very obliging in large type. Here it is more informative when placed between the 2018 launch and the 2025 leadership change. It marks one stage in a sequence of building, funding and transferring executive responsibility.
The investor list also shows continuity. HCAP had backed the business in 2019, announced another investment in 2021 and participated again in 2023. That repeated participation is a documented feature of the relationship. It gives the expansion story a cast of returning characters rather than a fresh set of names at every announcement.
The founder stays in the conversation
Beydilli assumed the CEO role on August 25, 2025. BetterNight announced the appointment the following month, identifying French as co-founder and former chief executive. The company’s current team page lists French as a board member. The operating title has passed to a successor; the founder remains part of the governance.
The appointment placed someone with previous executive experience at Apria and HME Specialists in charge of BetterNight’s next phase. French’s public response welcomed that experience and expressed his intention to support Beydilli. It was a short exchange, but a useful last scene for a career story concerned with changing roles.
“Inan, I look forward to supporting you as we continue our journey!”
Dave French, welcoming BetterNight’s new CEO
Read back through French’s appointments and the present role has plenty of company. Accountant, president, chief executive, fund co-founder, operating advisor, investor, director: each puts a different set of responsibilities around the same table. His career has included starting businesses, buying into an existing one and helping finance expansion.
The soccer episode adds a particularly welcome detail to that ledger. In 2006, he was one member of a group taking responsibility for a club’s future in Kansas City. At BetterNight, he now participates from the board after years in executive leadership. Both episodes involve an organization continuing beyond a transaction or a title change. For French, the next chapter has a different seat, and a continuing place in the conversation.