A bell is a wonderfully economical way to announce that something has happened. It supplies a beginning, a noise and a photograph. On June 5, 2015, Evolent arrived on the New York Stock Exchange, four years after its founding. Frank Williams, its co-founder and chief executive, had reached the kind of milestone that makes a business biography look satisfyingly tidy. The company priced its shares at $17. They finished their first trading day at $18.86. There was plenty to applaud.
The photograph preserves the applause. Williams’s subsequent career makes a case for looking past it. There were years of operating work before Evolent, years of running it afterward, and eventually the gradual business of giving up authority. A company can have a ceremonial first day. Its founder gets no comparable ceremony for every sensible hire, useful conversation or decision to let somebody else lead.
That is where Williams becomes interesting: in the stretch between the occasions that come with photographers. His story connects an earlier public-company career, a new venture built with colleagues, a succession carried out in stages and a later role helping other founders. It also ends up, rather pleasantly, in Berkeley, with four children, an enthusiasm for the outdoors and a seat on the board of a jazz institution.
The apprenticeship before the ticker
Williams graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988, with high honors in Political Economies of Industrial Societies. He earned his Harvard Business School MBA in 1995. Even the undergraduate degree’s name suggests a willingness to spend time with complicated systems. The transcript of a career, however, is more useful than any joke about the transcript of a degree.
His early jobs included management consulting at Bain & Company and presidencies at MedAmerica OnCall and Vivra Orthopedics. He then became chief executive of the Advisory Board Company in June 2001, serving until September 2008. Its initial public offering came in 2001. He moved to the chairman’s role in September 2008 and remained chairman until August 2011.
Those dates matter because Evolent did not begin with a founder encountering management for the first time. Williams had already spent years inside an organization that sold research and technology, worked with institutional customers and employed a substantial team. During his leadership tenure, the Advisory Board grew beyond $450 million in annual revenue and 2,500 employees. It was an apprenticeship conducted at a scale where a good idea needs rather more than an enthusiastic explanation.
A customer must understand it. A colleague must deliver it. Someone must decide whom to hire when the work expands. By the time Williams started again, the ordinary machinery of an organization was familiar territory. Starting again would mean putting that experience to use with a different set of colleagues and a different company to build.
First, go and listen
The origin of Evolent included a listening tour. While at the Advisory Board, Williams met executives and heard a recurring message: their organizations were being asked to undertake more change than they felt equipped to manage. He described those conversations in 2014. The potential customers wanted shared infrastructure and a national network. Their interest gave a proposed business something more substantial than its founders’ own enthusiasm.
Evolent was founded in 2011 with backing from the Advisory Board and UPMC. Williams, Seth Blackley and Tom Peterson were its co-founders. That shared beginning is worth retaining in a profile of one person. Founding photographs have room for a group; biographies have a habit of cropping.
The early financing included $25 million from the two institutional backers. Another $100 million investment followed in 2013. By the time Williams discussed the company’s progress in 2014, it had 550 employees and was operating in 20 markets. An idea assembled through conversations was becoming an employer with a considerable number of desks to fill.
There is a practical distinction between hearing that a problem exists and hearing how a customer describes it. Vocabulary reveals where the friction lives. Williams’s account of Evolent’s beginnings puts those conversations near the center of the story. The invitation was to build something organizations would use, with enough consistency that it could work beyond a single relationship.
The people doing the work
By September 2014, Evolent reported that its workforce had grown from 330 to more than 660 over the previous year. Doubling a team is a deceptively compact phrase. The actual exercise includes recruiting, introductions, managers learning to manage and people discovering which colleague can answer a question nobody thought to put in the handbook.
Williams treated recruiting and employee development as part of building the business. In an early interview, he connected the company’s ability to recruit hundreds of people to deliberate investment in its people function. He also spoke about making an offering repeatable across different markets. The two concerns belong together: a company’s promise travels through the people responsible for carrying it out.
Employees from September 2013 to September 2014. A workforce doubled before the IPO arrived.
In 2015, Williams ranked first on Glassdoor’s U.S. highest-rated CEO list for small and midsize companies, with 98 percent approval. The category is essential to the claim. It was a particular ranking at a particular time, based on employee feedback. Its interest lies in adding another viewpoint to a founder’s résumé: the view from inside the organization.
That perspective continued into Evolent’s 2016 shareholder letter. Williams described employee surveys, communication, career paths, mentorship and training. The company said it had received more than 35,000 résumés that year. Attention from applicants made the recruiting task visible; the work of helping people develop had to continue after the offer was accepted.
Culture is an agreeable word to print. It becomes more demanding when it requires repeated conversations, feedback and expenditure. Williams’s public account placed those activities on the management agenda. It is a useful counterweight to the belief that an organization acquires its character once, at the beginning, and can thereafter leave it in a drawer.
The champagne can wait
When Evolent went public, Williams had already been through a listing at the Advisory Board. His explanation of the new milestone was notably practical. Capital and visibility could help the company do its work. Becoming publicly traded did not excuse it from looking after its employees.
In his 2015 reflections, he emphasized customer knowledge, an early investment in talent, early revenue and execution. He described culture as something the company discussed and measured each month. An ownership change could happen on a date in a filing; the habits of the people inside the company required continuing attention.
“Culture building is never-ending.”
Frank Williams, 2015
There was, of course, a public-facing side to the moment. Later in 2015, Williams appeared in a New York Stock Exchange advertisement. He also joined Fitbit chief executive James Park on a Rock Health Summit panel to discuss taking their companies public. For a few minutes, two executives whose companies had just acquired ticker symbols could compare the experience of becoming newly visible.
Visibility brings its own editing problem. Investors want to understand what sort of business they are looking at. Williams described the difficulty of fitting Evolent into familiar consulting or technology categories. His response was to explain the customers and the outcomes they wanted. The lesson travels well beyond any particular company: the label on a business can be easier to remember than the reason somebody buys from it.
A founder learns to leave
On October 1, 2020, Blackley succeeded Williams as Evolent’s chief executive. Williams became executive chairman. The successor was a fellow co-founder who had spent nine years as president, giving the change a long working relationship behind it.
The stages continued. Williams became non-executive chairman on January 1, 2022. In September that year, Evolent announced that he would not stand for re-election to the board at its next annual meeting. He would work with board chair Cheryl Scott, Blackley and the other directors through the handover. His board retirement followed in June 2023.
Succession rarely gets the space afforded to founding. It deserves some. Building a company creates relationships around the founder’s judgment and availability. Changing that arrangement requires other people to gain authority as the founder relinquishes it. Here, the dates record a sequence rather than a single farewell.
The sequence also gives Williams’s story a different ending from the permanent-founder narrative. Evolent could continue with its own leadership. Williams could take accumulated experience into other rooms. There is something refreshingly adult about a business biography that includes the process of making oneself less central.
Advice with an operating history
Define Ventures announced Williams’s appointment as venture partner in April 2024. His responsibilities now include working with founders from the perspective of someone who has occupied several seats around the same table. The investor wants to understand a business. The operator has to run it while answering the questions.
Williams described his aim as helping the two sides understand each other and arrive at workable decisions. He also emphasized shared responsibility in a partnership, especially when circumstances become difficult. It is easy enough to be agreeable when progress supplies the agenda. A more revealing meeting begins when it does not.
His professional affiliations include board or advisory work with companies such as Helix, Nayya, Foodsmart and Wellth. The newer venture role sits alongside that work. For a founder seeking advice, the attraction of an experienced operator is practical: the conversation can start with decisions, trade-offs and colleagues, subjects that tend to disappear inside a polished announcement.
Back at the bell, looking at the team
In July 2025, Williams posted about returning to celebrate Evolent’s tenth anniversary as a publicly traded company. He named members of its leadership team and applauded its 4,500 employees. His satisfaction centered on seeing the company’s commitment to its mission, values and talent carry forward. The founder was celebrating an organization being run by other people.
Outside that corporate frame, Williams remains a native Californian based in Berkeley. He has four children, enjoys outdoor activities and serves as an SFJAZZ trustee. The combination gives the résumé somewhere to go after the board meeting. A person can help build companies and still have a local institution that receives his time.
The 2015 photograph is still a fine photograph. Everybody has earned the right to look pleased. But the return visit changes what it represents. A decade later, the event could celebrate continuity, with colleagues carrying on the work. The bell has a straightforward job. Building something that other people can keep going takes rather longer.