Selling a company makes an excellent final paragraph. There is a buyer, a date, a transfer of ownership. Richard Gliklich supplied all three when Quintiles acquired Outcome in October 2011. Then he spoiled the ending by starting another company. Four years after the sale came OM1, a new undertaking by someone who already knew how long an undertaking could take.
The intervening years deserve some attention. Gliklich remained at Quintiles, served on its executive committee through its 2013 public offering, and spent time at General Catalyst before founding OM1 in 2015. Read as a list, the sequence looks orderly. Lived as a career, it involved moving between organizations with very different demands: a research enterprise, a business he had built, a larger corporation and a venture investment firm.
Each move offered a plausible destination. He kept moving. That makes the return to founding the interesting event. A sale can establish that other people value what you have made. Deciding what to do afterward requires a different sort of judgment, for which there is no conveniently appointed buyer.
The first company took thirteen years
Outcome began in 1998 as a spinout from Gliklich’s Harvard-affiliated research laboratory. The institutional origins matter. This was an enterprise growing out of specialist work, carrying knowledge from one setting into another. Before it could become an acquisition announcement, it had to become a functioning organization with customers, employees and a reason to exist beyond the laboratory.
Gliklich was its founder, chief executive and chairman. Those titles describe a broad set of obligations, from deciding what the business should become to running the organization that would have to become it. The company’s history stretches across thirteen years before the Quintiles transaction. That is enough time for a new venture to acquire routines, relationships and its own sense of permanence.
There is a temptation to hurry past this interval. An acquisition offers such a neat piece of punctuation that everything before it can become a prelude. But thirteen years were the work. The sale was an event within that work, even if it would become the event most easily printed in a short biography.
From Outcome’s research spinout to its acquisition by Quintiles.
The financial terms were not disclosed. The consequential public detail is the change in scale and setting. Outcome joined an established organization; its founder became part of that organization’s leadership. The business continued, and so did his responsibilities. A signature had changed ownership without instantly clearing his calendar.
A sale, then a different seat at the table
At Quintiles, Gliklich became president of the Outcome division and served on the executive committee through the company’s 2013 IPO. Founding a company and operating within a larger one are different assignments. In his case, the acquisition led into the second assignment before the next venture came into view.
He then joined General Catalyst as an executive in residence. The move placed an experienced operator inside a venture capital firm, where his knowledge could inform investment and the development of other businesses. It also gave his career a chapter in which the central activity was no longer running the company he had founded.
That sequence is useful to keep intact. The familiar shorthand, “serial founder,” can make one startup seem to spring directly from another. Here there was time inside the buyer, then time around investors. The second company emerged after both experiences. Expertise had traveled through several rooms before it returned to the task of building an organization.
The record supports a modest conclusion: he had alternatives. He had led a business through acquisition and held a role in an investment firm. Returning to founding meant choosing another long project after already seeing what one could demand. The second beginning arrived with considerably more information than the first.
The next beginning had a name: OM1
Gliklich founded OM1 in 2015. General Catalyst, where he had been an executive in residence, subsequently led its announced $15 million Series A in 2017. Other participants included Glikvest, 7wire Ventures and Wanxiang. A chapter in venture capital had become part of the network around his next operating company.
In May 2018, Polaris Partners led a $21 million Series B, with General Catalyst and 7wire Ventures participating again. Dave Barrett joined the board. Financing changed the company’s resources and brought another investor into its governance. The announcement paired capital with continued product development, the ordinary but demanding business of giving a growing organization more to do.
December 2019 brought a $50 million Series C led by Scale Venture Partners. Rory O’Driscoll joined the board. OM1 also reported more than 400 percent year-over-year sales growth. That was a company-reported figure for that period, a marker of the pace at that moment rather than a permanent description of the business.
Scale’s investment account emphasized Gliklich’s ability to work across technical and commercial settings. It is an understandable attraction in a founder whose experience included research, a sale and corporate leadership. A technical idea needs an organization around it, and that organization eventually needs people who can argue sensibly about customers, costs and priorities.
In July 2021, OM1 announced an $85 million financing led by D1 Capital Partners, Kaiser Permanente and Breyer Capital, with existing investors participating. The numbers had grown, and so had the circle of backers. By this point, the company Gliklich started after his first acquisition had its own substantial financing history.
A bar chart makes the progression look pleasantly effortless. Four bars, each larger than the previous one. The organizational obligations disappear from view: boards, hiring, development and the need to turn money into something customers will value. The bars are milestones. A founder still has to work through the spaces between them.
For Gliklich, these rounds belonged to a second extended stretch of company building. OM1’s 2021 financing came six years after its founding and a decade after the Outcome sale. Put those dates together and the word “exit” starts to sound rather temporary. It marks a departure from one ownership arrangement, while a working life can continue through several more chapters.
The novelist in the professional biography
There is a revealing detail in Gliklich’s 2010 professional profile. Asked for his dream job, he named writing a novel. His words to live by were equally succinct: “You can make your own path.” He was then leading Outcome, a year before the acquisition that would become a major marker in his career.
The answer gives the formal biography a little air. Someone can run a company and imagine writing fiction. A professional identity need not consume every available ambition. Novelists, admittedly, get to decide when their characters change direction. Founders have boards.
“You can make your own path.”
Richard Gliklich, 2010
That same profile described him as curious and practical, interested in borrowing ideas from other disciplines while concentrating on work he believed could be accomplished. The pairing is appealing because the two qualities can pull against each other. Curiosity multiplies possibilities. Practicality asks which one should receive Tuesday afternoon.
His education had already crossed institutional boundaries: Yale, Harvard and a Charles A. Dana scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania. The subsequent business career continued the movement among settings. There is continuity in that habit, even when the job titles change. Knowledge acquired in one place becomes material for work somewhere else.
The price of a tidy ending
Years later, Gliklich described mixed feelings about selling Outcome. The board wanted a sale; he had reservations. The transaction increased his bank balance without producing an uncomplicated sense of completion. He remembered knowing that he would eventually start something again. That recollection makes 2015 feel less like an abrupt reinvention and more like a decision finally given a company name.
He has also spoken about resisting the temptation to follow a conventional career route, using the image of ducklings following the larger bird ahead. The image is funny because the procession is so recognizable: everyone moving diligently, with the direction apparently settled by whoever happened to start first.
His own route included a pause in his studies, a research enterprise, company leadership, an acquisition, venture capital and a return to founding. The route was individual without being random. Each setting gave him another way to pursue work that continued to interest him.
In June 2026, a DIA conference agenda listed him as OM1’s founder and director, speaking about technology, artificial intelligence and data quality. The company’s current biography calls him founder. Years after the financing announcements that introduced him as chief executive, he remained publicly engaged with the technical questions around the enterprise he had started.
That is where the career becomes more interesting than the résumé. The résumé can give you 1998, 2011 and 2015. It can identify the buyer and list the investors. Gliklich’s decision to begin again supplies the part those entries leave out: a company can be sold while its founder still has work he wants to do.