Gerard Rivera’s case for doing one thing well

The career advice came from a basketball teammate’s mother. Gerard Rivera knew her as Mama Shaw. She owned a neighborhood business, she knew her profession, and she thought the young varsity player should consider following her into it. Years later, with a company of his own, Rivera would still give her credit. The origin story contains no garage, no midnight revelation, and mercifully little mythology. Someone he trusted made a suggestion. He listened.

Her name was Candace Shaw. Rivera grew up in Southern California, and his connection to her was personal before it was professional. That matters to the shape of his career. Again and again, a relationship appears before the next opportunity: an alumnus opens a door, a student brings an idea, a colleague becomes a co-founder. The people arrive before the business plan.

Today Rivera is co-founder and CEO of RIS Rx, the company he started with Stephen Hom in 2020. Its work centers on revenue protection and business operations. The title puts him at the top of an organization chart. The earlier stories are more revealing about how he got there: by learning a trade, running locations, teaching newcomers, and noticing where established processes could work better.

The student who stayed in the story

Rivera earned his doctorate at Loma Linda University in 2011. His first job after graduation put him in charge of a CVS location in La Mirada. In 2012, he joined Pacific Pharmacy Group at Newport Lido Pharmacy. A promotion followed in 2013. By 2016, he was overseeing seven locations as the group’s director of pharmacy.

Those steps gave him an education in running a business alongside the education on his diploma. Staff, service, and repeat customers were immediate concerns. He credited the group’s CEO, Jan Balthasar, as a mentor who gave employees room to develop. Rivera also described teaching as a reciprocal arrangement: students brought effort and fresh ideas, and working with them kept him learning.

Hom was one of those students. In 2014, the future co-founder was working with Rivera as a fourth-year intern. The two were already working together on expanding a local service, years before RIS Rx existed. It is a pleasing complication for anyone who imagines the teacher-student relationship as a one-way delivery system. The intern had an idea worth pursuing. The teacher helped pursue it.

Rivera also emphasized his ties to Loma Linda early in his career. An alumni connection had helped him reach Pacific Pharmacy Group, and he valued giving something back to the institution. The exchange was practical as well as sentimental. Relationships helped him find work, develop it, and bring other people into it.

A pitch with fewer moving parts

When Rivera and Hom founded RIS Rx in 2020, they brought experience from daily operations and from consulting with corporate executives. Rivera has described the value of seeing both ends of a business process. A budget viewed from an executive office can look very different from the transactions that make it up. Their company grew around connecting those views.

A document spelling out program business rules helped crystallize the opportunity for Rivera. He saw a system whose details could be examined more closely and whose inefficiencies could be reduced. The problem interested him because he understood the work underneath the figures. It was familiar territory presented at a different scale.

An industry challenge became a test of that approach. A major manufacturer was evaluating competing solutions. Rivera remembers other participants offering broad, end-to-end systems. RIS Rx made a more specific offer: improve a defined set of processes while allowing the customer to retain its existing vendors and operating procedures.

The customer could keep familiar arrangements. RIS Rx would fit alongside them. Rivera identifies that distinction as a reason the company gained a foothold. A buyer did not have to approve a wholesale reorganization before trying the proposed improvement. There is a certain courtesy in a sales pitch that leaves the furniture where the customer likes it.

For Rivera, the episode became evidence that the business had found a useful place in a crowded market. He recalls being the smaller contender in the room. The lesson he draws is about specificity: understand the job, make the manual work more efficient, and avoid asking a prospective client to change everything at once.

Then the company needed a bigger bench

On June 16, 2025, RIS Rx announced a growth investment from Summit Partners. The stated plans included further product development, a larger team, and expanded client services. Rivera remained CEO. The business he and Hom had started five years earlier was entering a stage with more institutional support and more organizational demands.

The announcement described an already profitable growth business. That detail puts the investment in context: Rivera was bringing a partner into an operating company with customers and a record of delivery. Capital was intended to help extend that work. The announcement did not put a public price on the transaction.

In October 2025, John Driscoll became chairman of the board. Rivera welcomed him as an experienced executive and a trusted adviser. Driscoll brought experience leading and growing organizations; Rivera’s emphasis was on what that experience could contribute to the company’s next phase. The mentor theme had acquired a boardroom address.

Rivera’s account of the period also includes an office move and a team that had reached 170 people. He was particularly pleased that much of the original group remained. A growing headcount is easy to put on a slide. The presence of colleagues who remember the beginning gives that number a more personal meaning.

He recalled being in the office at seven in the evening and seeing others still working alongside him. He took it as evidence of commitment to the company. His telling dwells on the people: the founding crew, the newer colleagues, and the willingness to keep going. The scene has the scale of an ordinary workday, which is probably why it says more about his pride than a ceremonial photograph could.

The word he chose was “calm”

In a 2026 reflection on the company’s plans, Rivera described a more defined leadership structure. Hom was concentrating on execution as COO. Mark Bivins led revenue, Chase Carpenter led marketing, Eric Reuland worked on operations, and general counsel Jason Liljestrom helped move contracts forward.

The names are worth keeping in the story. Rivera was describing how work gets distributed as a founder’s company grows. Sales, delivery, communications, and contracting each need attention. Giving people responsibility for them creates a different kind of organization from one in which every question eventually returns to the founder’s desk.

What pleased Rivera about the office was its calm. He paired that observation with a description of a busy business, including several launches in a single week. In his account, a steadier workplace was evidence that the underlying structure was holding up. It is an unusually domestic word to choose for a company’s progress. Most announcements prefer something louder.

“a deeply trusted advisor”

Gerard Rivera on John Driscoll’s appointment as chairman

His public discussions of the team also recognize people developing into new responsibilities: an intern learning to work with data, or a fellow moving into client success. That interest has an earlier echo in Hom’s path from student to business partner. Rivera’s career includes several reminders that the person learning the work today may eventually help lead it.

From the counter to the microphone

In May 2026, Rivera and Hom launched The GTN Edge podcast. They host conversations about the operational problems their company addresses, with guests including adviser Tom Doyle. The format gives the two founders room to explain their thinking together and bring other practitioners into the discussion.

It also extends a teaching habit into a public setting. A podcast asks an executive to do something different from signing a contract or presenting a forecast: explain why a problem deserves attention, listen to another person’s experience, and make the discussion intelligible to someone outside the room. Rivera now does that alongside the former student who became his co-founder.

He has also discussed the commercial effect of speaking publicly. Describing his work with the agency Thoughtful, he attributed $6 million in pipeline to people encountering his posts. Pipeline is prospective business, and the distinction matters. His point was that explaining the work in public had led people to start conversations about it.

A meeting with Jamie Dimon furnished another moment of perspective. Rivera described getting a few minutes to explain RIS Rx and later reflecting on the distance between his earlier working life and that conversation. He called it a career highlight. The pleasure in the account comes from being able to tell the story at all.

There is still a basketball connection

Basketball has a place in Rivera’s adult life, too. He lists volunteer work as a boys varsity basketball coach at La Mirada High School beginning in June 2017. It is a separate commitment from running RIS Rx, and a useful reminder that an executive biography can contain more than jobs.

Years earlier, advising students, Rivera had encouraged balance, relationships, and adaptability. His own path gives those ordinary words some substance. Mama Shaw’s encouragement led somewhere. An alumni introduction mattered. An intern’s idea was taken seriously. A business partnership lasted long enough to become a company, then a larger team with responsibilities of its own.

The focus of Rivera’s work has widened considerably since his first management job. The cast has widened with it. Yet the story keeps returning to a fairly modest activity: paying attention to the person nearby, and to the particular job that needs doing. That is how a teammate’s mother earns a lasting place in a founder’s biography. She gave him advice he could use.