Before Richard Awdeh had a company that attracted private equity, he had a business plan and a year to explain it. After studying finance at Emory and working briefly at Goldman Sachs, he spent a year pitching venture capitalists around the country. That year sits between university and his next round of education. It is a small, revealing interruption in a résumé that could otherwise look suspiciously orderly.
Entrepreneurship was already part of his working life before CheckedUp, the company he would co-found with his brother Mark in 2012. He had tried the peculiar exercise of asking strangers to believe in something that existed, for the moment, chiefly as an explanation.
Years later, the explanation had become an operating company. Investors changed. The network expanded. Awdeh remained CEO. The question running through his career became how much of the original plan, and how much of the original founder, should change along the way.
The spreadsheet and the screen
Awdeh’s undergraduate combination was finance and computer science. It is a useful pairing for understanding the business he eventually built. One discipline asks how money moves and what makes an enterprise viable. The other asks how instructions become something people can use. CheckedUp brought the two questions together through digital displays, interactive software and a commercial network.
The company supplies its equipment at no cost to participating locations. Advertising supports the model. That arrangement gives the founder more than one constituency to satisfy: the people hosting the technology, the people viewing it and the businesses paying to appear on it. A screen is the visible object. The company behind it has to make several relationships work at once.
Consider the resulting management problem. Giving a device away removes one purchasing decision, but leaves installation, content, maintenance and service to organize. Selling advertising adds another obligation: showing buyers what they received. The useful way to read Awdeh’s background is as preparation for these overlapping questions. The spreadsheet and the screen keep turning up in the same conversation.
A brother on the other side of the table
CheckedUp’s leadership is also a family partnership. Richard is co-founder and CEO; Mark is co-founder and president. The distinction matters because a founder story can become misleadingly singular. Here, the second founder shares both the surname and the long stretch of work.
By the time Rockbridge Growth Equity’s investment was announced in January 2022, Mark was describing a turning point after the better part of a decade. Richard credited the team, services and technology built during those years. Their language placed the transaction inside an existing enterprise, with a history longer than the announcement.
There is something useful about keeping that timescale in view. Business coverage tends to photograph the handshake. The years before it contain the less photogenic work: getting the product into use, sustaining relationships, finding employees and figuring out which promises can be kept repeatedly. A sibling partnership does not make those tasks disappear. In the Awdehs’ case, it is part of the company’s continuing structure.
The useful embarrassment of Strategy B
Awdeh has offered a more instructive account of growth than a smooth ascent. He described an original commercial approach, Strategy A, that stopped fitting the market. Changing to Strategy B helped the company find product-market fit. The labels are almost comically plain. They also leave the central decision exposed: eventually, persistence had to include changing the approach.
He has described another adjustment inside the company. Early on, he was involved in virtually everything. As it grew, he learned to delegate and enable other leaders. His stated priorities shifted toward vision, values and scale.
“I listen carefully, encourage creative problem-solving”
Richard Awdeh, on his approach to leadership
These are his descriptions of his management, rather than a guarantee about every working day. Together, they suggest a practical definition of adaptability. A founder must be able to revise a strategy and revise his own role. Both decisions involve giving up something familiar. In one case, it is a plan that has absorbed time and conviction. In the other, it is the comfort of being involved in every answer.
Capital changes the assignment
CheckedUp partnered with Rockbridge in December 2021. The following October, it acquired Health Media Network. Rockbridge’s later account of its ownership emphasized investment in technology infrastructure, digital expansion and that acquisition. Growth had become a combination of building capabilities and bringing another business into the organization.
For a founder, those are different assignments. Building establishes a set of habits. An acquisition asks which habits travel, which systems should connect and what a larger team needs from management. The announcement itself can fit on a page. Making the combination function is an operating responsibility that continues afterward.
On August 18, 2026, Providence Equity Partners announced an agreement to acquire a majority stake. Varsity would join as a strategic minority investor. Richard and Mark would continue leading. Terms were undisclosed, and the announcement anticipated a third-quarter closing.
Providence’s stated focus on media, communications and education gives the proposed partnership a particular logic. Awdeh would be working with investors whose experience includes the commercial machinery surrounding content and distribution. New ownership was being proposed alongside continuity at the top.
The company enters the listings
There are public markers along this route. Awdeh became an MM+M Pinnacle Award honoree in 2024. CheckedUp’s Inc. record lists appearances in 2018, 2019, 2024 and 2025. Those dates give the growth story a longer outline than any single deal.
The awards serve different purposes. One recognizes an individual’s industry career; the other records a company’s place in a growth ranking. Neither relieves an executive of the next decision. What they offer here is a set of dated landmarks, useful for distinguishing a business that has accumulated a record from one whose story depends entirely on its latest presentation.
Awdeh’s response to recognition also includes public thanks to his team. That is ordinary executive courtesy, but in this story it fits the larger issue of shared work. A founder’s name is easier to put in a headline than an organization’s accumulated effort.
Ten minutes on a different stage
In May 2025, CheckedUp appeared at the IAB NewFronts, the marketplace where digital media businesses present programming and advertising opportunities. Its scheduled main-stage slot on May 7 sat among presentations by established media and technology companies. The audience for the business was broadening.
CheckedUp announced two original series, Inside This Life and The Pulse: Real Talk, developed with The Point Studios. It also announced programmatic advertising capabilities across its network. One announcement concerned what would be watched; the other concerned how advertising could be bought.
That pairing makes commercial sense: a media network needs both a reason to watch and a way for sponsors to participate. It also widens the CEO’s remit. Software, programming and advertising each bring their own vocabulary and expectations. Awdeh’s job increasingly involves translating between them, while keeping the same company coherent.
The quiet work of being counted
Another part of Awdeh’s public career concerns the rules around advertising. In November 2024, CheckedUp joined the Media Rating Council and designated him as its board representative. The council’s work concerns the quality and transparency of media measurement. It is a less theatrical setting than a programming launch, with consequences for how buyers judge a network.
Membership and accreditation are separate steps. In June 2026, CheckedUp announced accreditation for specified ad-delivery reporting. The distinction is useful: joining an organization establishes participation; accreditation concerns a defined service and its compliance with standards. An executive biography becomes more meaningful when those different commitments stay visible.
The Ad Council elected Awdeh to its board in November 2024, among 21 new members. That organization brings advertising and communications experience to public-service campaigns. The appointment places him in another kind of media conversation, one concerned with what communication can persuade people to do.
Together, the roles give his career a clear institutional dimension. Building a company is one undertaking. Participating in the organizations that shape a field’s practices is another. Neither makes the daily work glamorous. A measurement standard is unlikely to demand its own dressing room.
The olive tree has a longer calendar
In 2025, Richard and Mark also introduced the Awdeh Family Office. Richard explained its investing philosophy through the olive tree: resilience, longevity and different stages of growth. It is a notably patient image beside the deadlines of an operating company.
The metaphor has limits, as metaphors usually do. Trees do not hold board meetings, a considerable advantage. But it clarifies the horizon he says he wants: investment considered across generations, with room for both emerging opportunities and enduring businesses.
That longer calendar gives the early pitching year a different resonance. There was a plan to explain, then companies to build, then organizations and capital partnerships to navigate. The recurring task was to make a judgment about the next stage without pretending the previous stage had supplied every answer.
Awdeh’s career offers no tidy formula for when to persist and when to pivot. It does offer decisions to examine: a changed commercial strategy, a growing willingness to delegate, a company built with his brother and new partners joining while both remain at the helm. Changing course has become part of how he continues.