The quiet engine room of a health-tech company
On any given morning at Wheel's headquarters on South Lamar Boulevard in Austin, the person making sure the company's leaders can actually do their jobs is Mariah La Mountain. As Executive Business Partner to the CEO and Co-Founder, she sits at the center of a fast-moving digital health company and keeps its executive leadership team moving.
Her title is deliberately modest, and the leverage behind it is not. Wheel builds the infrastructure that powers virtual care across the country, giving healthcare companies access to a tech-enabled, nationwide network of clinicians. That mission depends on a leadership team that functions under pressure. La Mountain is a big part of why it does. She is the primary support to founder and CEO Michelle Davey, and she extends that same steady hand to other members of the executive team, including the company's marketing and revenue leaders.
What makes her path interesting is where it started. La Mountain did not come up through business school or a management-consulting pipeline. She trained as an interior designer, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from O'More College of Architecture and Design in Franklin, Tennessee, a program that later merged into Belmont University. Her early jobs were in studios and on projects: an internship at Alabaster & Walnut Design, then a role as interior designer and project manager at Rockwell Interiors.
The pivot from designing rooms to designing how a company runs is less of a leap than it looks. Interior design is systems thinking dressed up as aesthetics. You learn to see the whole room, to understand how each piece affects the others, to sweat the details that most people never consciously notice but always feel. Those instincts translate cleanly into operations. When La Mountain moved into executive support, first at ICON Aircraft, supporting the EVP of Revenue and the VP of Global Sales & Marketing, and then into the world of founder support, she carried that eye with her.
January 2021 brought the move that reframed her career. La Mountain joined Wheel as Executive Business Partner to Davey. A few months later, in May 2021, she made Austin her home, pairing a new city with a new industry in the same year. It was a period of momentum for the company. Wheel would go on to close a $150M Series C in early 2022, bringing its total funding to roughly $217M and cementing its place among the most-watched names in telehealth infrastructure.
The role she occupies is one the tech industry has been slow to take seriously and quick to underestimate. The executive business partner is part operator, part translator, part gatekeeper of a founder's attention. In a company scaling as fast as Wheel, the CEO's time is the scarcest resource there is, and the person who protects and shapes it holds real influence over what the company can accomplish. La Mountain also handles the physical side of that equation, managing the Austin office itself: the day-to-day operations, the events, the supplies, the hundred small logistics that keep a workplace running.
None of it makes headlines, and that is exactly why it matters. Founders get profiled; the people who make founders effective rarely do. But anyone who has worked inside a growing startup knows the difference a great business partner makes. It is the difference between a leadership team that lurches from fire to fire and one that operates with a rhythm. La Mountain supplies the rhythm.
There is a broader story hidden in her resume, too, about where good operators come from. The assumption is that startup operations talent flows out of MBA programs and analyst desks. La Mountain is a reminder that it also comes from creative fields, from people who were trained to hold a whole system in their head and care about how it feels to move through it. A degree in fine arts turns out to be surprisingly good preparation for keeping a health-tech company on its feet.
Between her design days and health tech, she also spent time as an executive and personal assistant supporting an entrepreneur, and at ICON Aircraft in aviation, an unusually wide arc of industries for one career. The through-line is not the sector; it is the work. Wherever she has landed, the job has been the same: see the whole picture, handle the details other people miss, and make the person at the center of it all more effective.
Today that person is Michelle Davey, and the picture is Wheel. As virtual care continues its move from novelty to infrastructure, companies like Wheel are quietly becoming the plumbing of American healthcare. Behind the clinicians and the platform and the funding rounds is a leadership team that has to keep making decisions, keep hiring, keep shipping. Mariah La Mountain is one of the reasons they can. Not the loudest job in the building, but one of the load-bearing ones.
Consider what the role actually demands day to day. A founder's calendar is a negotiation with reality: too many people want time, and there is never enough of it. The person managing that calendar is effectively deciding, in miniature, what the company prioritizes. Say yes to the wrong meeting and the CEO loses an afternoon that could have gone to a product decision or a key hire. Guard the time too jealously and important relationships wither. Getting that balance right, over and over, is a skill that does not show up on any dashboard but shapes everything downstream. La Mountain has been making those calls for Wheel's leadership since the company was still in its earlier growth phase.
Then there is the office. When La Mountain arrived in Austin, remote and hybrid work were reshaping what a headquarters even meant. Running a physical space in that environment is not about supplies and seating charts; it is about giving a distributed team a reason to gather and a place that feels like the company. The events she hosts, the operations she keeps humming on South Lamar, all of it is culture work disguised as logistics. A company's values are transmitted less through slide decks than through whether the small things are handled with care. She handles the small things.
It is worth lingering on the design background, because it is not decoration on the resume. Interior design is a discipline of constraints. You are handed a fixed space, a budget, a client with strong opinions and vague requests, and you have to produce something that works and feels right. That is not far from what an executive business partner does: fixed hours in a day, a finite budget of a founder's attention, competing stakeholders, and the mandate to make it all cohere. La Mountain trained for years in the first version of that problem before she ever encountered the second. When she talks through logistics or reworks a schedule, she is drawing on a habit of mind built in design studios in Tennessee.
Her arc also says something quietly hopeful about career paths. The tidy version of a professional life moves in a straight line, each job an obvious sequel to the last. Hers does not. Fine arts to interior design to aviation to intuitive coaching to venture-backed health tech is not a line; it is a series of deliberate lateral moves, each one carrying forward the parts that transfer and shedding the parts that do not. In an economy that increasingly rewards adaptability over specialization, that kind of resume is becoming an asset rather than a liability. She is proof that the operator's craft can be assembled from unexpected materials.
What ties it together is temperament. The best people in support-and-operations roles share a set of traits that are easy to name and hard to sustain: they are organized without being rigid, reliable without needing recognition, and comfortable being the most important person in the room that nobody is looking at. They take satisfaction in the smooth day, the meeting that started on time, the trip that went off without a hitch, the crisis that never became one because someone saw it coming. La Mountain has built a career on exactly those satisfactions, and Wheel is better for it.
In Her Field