Moshe Pinto and the business of showing up

Moshe Pinto helped arrange a poetry group for people who turned out not to like poetry. Early in Wider Circle’s life, a survey had asked about interests. The answers sounded cultured. Attendance revealed a different preference. It was an awkward little lesson in the distance between the person filling out a form and the person who actually turns up.

The episode makes a useful entrance to Pinto’s working life. His résumé has the expected architecture: degrees, companies, executive appointments, a board chair. The poetry group supplies something those entries leave out. A business involving people must contend with their wish to make a good impression, including on the business itself. A questionnaire can be beautifully organized and still arrange the wrong afternoon.

Pinto co-founded Wider Circle with Darin Buxbaum in 2015. He led it as CEO until August 2022, when Buxbaum took that job and Pinto became chairperson of the board. Across those years, a founder with legal training and experience building companies made local relationships the center of his work. The familiar face, the repeated meeting, the person who comes back: ordinary ingredients, with demanding organizational consequences.

A lawyer takes the long way round

Before the neighborhood groups came law. Pinto worked at Herzog, Fox & Neeman in Israel. His education includes an LLB from Tel Aviv University, an EMLE from the University of Hamburg, an LLM from the University of Bologna, and an MBA from Stanford. Four universities in four countries make for a substantial education in changing surroundings, even before anyone asks what was on the syllabus.

The sequence matters because it complicates the tidy founder biography in which every childhood activity points toward a future company. Pinto’s documented route contains a profession with its own established destination, followed by another set of studies and another kind of work. Law, economics, and business appear together in the record. Entrepreneurship would give those subjects a less orderly place to meet.

Stanford places him in its MBA class of 2007. Around that period, a graduate course became the starting point for Spiracur, which he co-founded with Kenton Fong and Dean Hu. The collaboration belongs in the story alongside the degree. A university had provided a setting in which people with different experience could work on a shared problem and discover whether the project could live beyond the classroom.

A company begins in a classroom

Spiracur grew out of Stanford’s Biodesign Innovation course. Pinto served as its CEO from 2007 through 2010, then remained on its board from 2010 to 2015. The dates stretch a classroom origin across years of responsibility. There is a considerable amount of company life between an interesting assignment and an enterprise that still needs decisions made on a Monday morning.

A 2012 Biodesign alumni account named Pinto, Hu, and Fong together when discussing the company’s progress. It also described the long time involved in bringing university spinouts through their next stages. Seen from the distance of a short biography, a founding date can look like a single clean event. For the people doing the work, it opens a calendar rather than closes a chapter.

Pinto went on to lead HD+, now Outset Medical. In August 2015, Nephros appointed him to its board, citing his operating background and business experience. By then, his career contained both the chief executive’s responsibility for an organization and the director’s responsibility to help oversee one. He would return to that distinction in a more personal way at Wider Circle.

These earlier roles also make the next venture more interesting. Pinto arrived at Wider Circle with company building behind him. He had already worked with co-founders, held the CEO title, and served on boards. The new undertaking would still require experimentation. Experience could help organize the work; it could hardly dictate what a particular group of neighbors would enjoy doing together.

The neighborhood becomes the work

Wider Circle’s early pilot in Redwood City brought together groups of ten to twelve people with a facilitator. The ambition was small enough to picture: participants would leave with a friend. Even the scale of the experiment tells a story. Ten people can learn names. Twelve people can recognize an absence. A facilitator can pay attention to a room without addressing it as a crowd.

There was a less intimate question waiting outside that room: how would the idea become a business? Early reactions included uncertainty about whether Pinto and Buxbaum were starting a nonprofit. Their conference room occupied a building once used as a San Francisco 49ers training facility. The setting offers a pleasing coincidence: another team, in another line of work, trying to get people organized.

Pinto’s own writing gives the local idea a recognizable landscape. In his August 2020 essay about neighborhoods, he started with people encountered at the grocery store and coffee shop. He wrote about the exchanges, shared information, and sense of usefulness that grow around those encounters. His argument gave ordinary places a role beyond the transaction that brought someone through the door.

That is a particular way of looking at a street. The coffee shop has coffee, of course, and may be very proud of it. It also offers the possibility of recognizing someone from yesterday. Pinto’s attention falls on the latter. Repetition can give an encounter a history. An introduction has somewhere to go when people expect to see each other again.

There is an operational challenge inside that observation. The company’s model includes members who volunteer as ambassadors, sharing experience and helping their neighbors. A participant can take on responsibility within the group. That gives the organization more to coordinate than a list of invitations: relationships have their own continuity, and members have something to contribute after they have been welcomed in.

“Everyone needs a friend.”

Moshe Pinto

What $38 million had to build

On September 29, 2021, Wider Circle announced a $38 million Series B. AmeriHealth Caritas led the round, with Blue Venture Fund, Chicago Ventures, and other previous investors participating. Pinto was CEO. The announced uses were concrete: build the national infrastructure, expand the team, and develop the technology needed for the company’s plans.

The figure is easy to remember. The three uses deserve equal attention. Infrastructure connects locations to an organization. A team gives the plan people who can carry it out. Technology supports the coordination. In a business organized around local contact, expansion has to reach the next room while keeping the people already in this one engaged.

By the 2022 leadership announcement, Wider Circle said it offered programs in more than 320 communities. The count indicates geographic reach at that point in its history. It also brings the original experiment into perspective. A small group has a scale that participants can understand immediately. An organization responsible for hundreds of communities has another scale to manage behind it.

Those two scales make an unusual pair. An investor can discuss a national organization. A member can discuss the person they know. Both descriptions can be accurate, yet they require different kinds of attention. The business has to organize across locations; the gathering has to give people a reason to return to this particular location, among these particular neighbors.

Changing seats, keeping the partnership

The next milestone involved the founders themselves. On August 3, 2022, Wider Circle announced that Buxbaum, its president and chief operating officer, would become CEO. Pinto would become chairperson. Seven years after founding the company together, they changed the division of responsibility. The announcement assigned Pinto support for the senior leadership team and key strategic growth initiatives.

Pinto acknowledged Buxbaum’s support during his own time as CEO, then made a short commitment: “I intend to do the same for him as Chairperson.” The sentence puts reciprocity into a corporate transition. One co-founder had supported the other in the operating role; now that support would run in the opposite direction. Their partnership remained part of the company’s structure.

A founder biography often gives more space to acquiring authority than to moving it. Here, the move helps explain the career. Pinto’s work has included starting a company, running one, and serving on boards. The chairperson role brought those experiences together around a business he had helped create. The current Wider Circle leadership page continues to list him in that position.

The poetry group remains a useful small detail to carry through all these larger events. A company can have experienced founders, a plan for expansion, and an organized set of questions, then discover that the people in the room want something else. Pinto’s story has room for that discovery. Bringing people together begins with an invitation. The work continues when they arrive.