Sean Brecker serves as CFO of Oura, an award-winning and fast-growing startup that helps people track all stages of sleep and activity using the Oura Ring and its connected app. By providing daily feedback and practical steps to inspire healthy lifestyles, Oura has helped millions of people improve their sleep, understand their bodies and transform their health. The company has been making waves due to its recent company valuation of $2.5 billion.
Sean and I recently met to discuss his career journey–including how he became interested in investment banking, his switch from investment banking to wellness tech, what the next generation of CFOs should be doing now to ensure they achieve career success, and the rewards of working for a company in the healthcare space.
Sean Brecker was born in Pakistan but moved to London, England at the age of two. He spent his childhood years attending English schools but switched to attend The American School in London part way through.
It was at The American School that Brecker got a taste of what his future career of investment banking would be, not only from his fellow students but from influential teachers. Given that most of the families were expat families, where parents worked in investment banks or large multinational banks, oil companies and in politics, investment banking played a strong role in the lives of his friends.
“I started to have exposure to finance and specifically the capital markets at a pretty young age,” Brecker said. “I found it fascinating and always gravitated towards math. I had the most sensational math teacher, Miss Brooks, [who knew] that I wanted to understand how the markets work. I thought it was exciting, and I very naturally had a pull towards that world.”
Few kids are sure of their future career path as teenagers, but Brecker was. After graduating from The American School, he moved to the U.S. to attend college and pursued math and economics at Wesleyan University.
From there, he hit the ground running by starting his career on Wall Street for JPMorgan. He began as an analyst, spending most of his time in investment banking on the market side and specifically working as a trader.
Working at JPMorgan led to pursuing an MBA from The Wharton School and continuing his career as a trader. This time, he was trading derivatives in the world of fixed income, working for Lehman Brothers in London.
Each professional opportunity opened the door for something new and better; at Lehman Brothers, Brecker’s boss asked him if he wanted to start a derivatives franchise in commodities.
Brecker said yes, then recruited someone from Goldman Sachs and co-founded the derivatives desk. A year later, another opportunity came calling when he was told that he was doing so well that the firm needed to replicate that experience in Asia. Brecker moved to Singapore and spent seven years there. Following Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, he stayed to eventually work for another major player: Citibank.
To some, these might be career achievements that span multiple decades. Brecker was lucky to experience many career-building moments at a relatively early point in his career.
In 2014, Brecker and his wife moved their family of five (they had three young
children at the time) from Singapore to California to be closer to their families. Since there weren’t a lot of commodity trading opportunities in California, it represented the perfect opportunity to try something different. Without knowing exactly what that was going to be, his original plan was to take a year off to figure out his next steps.
Life had other plans.
Approximately one month into the year off, Brecker was recruited to Headspace by one of its founders, Rich Pierson. He was an old friend from when Brecker lived in London. Pierson and his co-founder moved the company from London to Los Angeles and originally launched it as a subscription-based meditation app. They bootstrapped it without having any investors and reached 20,000 subscribers.
But, when Brecker learned about the concept, initially he had doubts.
“I had heard through the grapevine that they were doing something in meditation,” he said. “When he explained the concept to me, honestly, I thought, ‘You’ve lost your mind. You had this amazing job in advertising that you left to start up this niche meditation app. How big could that be? How many people meditate?’”
The founders asked him to come on board and help serve as the numbers guy. Due to its nature as a start-up, it began loosely and became more structured over time as they considered raising capital. The team culture meant being willing to put one foot in front of the other and figure things out incrementally. They did that for the better part of a decade, with Brecker holding several different roles and growing his skills.
“I was the CEO for a few years, and I was the CFO,” he said. “Even when wearing this CFO hat, besides traditional roles of finance, accounting, and corporate development, I also had things like HR, growth, and science. When we launched a B2B business, I oversaw that, as well as corporate IT and risk. We went on to raise about $350 million. We got the business to about $3 billion enterprise value. It was just an incredible privilege working there, and honestly just the journey of a lifetime.”
That journey included a series of major life lessons and takeaways that Brecker would share with any future CFO.
“In meditation, we have this concept of the beginner’s mind,” he said. “I was forced to have a beginner’s mind as I transitioned from a career in investment banking to being an operator. Having a beginner’s mind translates into being intellectually curious. Read, listen to podcasts, learn, ask for advice, seek mentors. Do anything that you can do to improve your craft and to learn. The second tenet there is to remain humble and have the humility to know what you don’t know. Have the determination to go figure it out. It might sound simple, but that has really been the playbook that I’ve run in the last decade.”
Brecker’s own curiosity served him well as the opportunity at Oura surfaced organically. Oura is a Finnish company, though most of the C-Suite located in the San Francisco Bay area. The company develops the Oura Ring, a wearable device that has several sensors and proprietary software algorithms that measure various health insights. It initially evaluated sleep but has made significant strides around heart health, women’s health, fitness, movement and more. Those insights are shared via an app on the wearer’s smartphone.
Brecker had previously met Oura’s CEO Tom Hale as he previously served as president of SurveyMonkey [Momentive]. SurveyMonkey/Momentive’s CEO, Zander Lurie, is a mutual friend who had introduced them years ago. As the team was building out the B2B franchise at Headspace, they leaned on Hale on a couple of occasions due to his immense knowledge of software. In the fall of 2022, they both attended a dinner which was hosted by one of the Headspace investors and they were seated next to each other.
A few months later, Hale reached out to say that he was looking for a CFO and that he would appreciate Brecker’s insight. Brecker was already a huge fan of Oura and had been wearing the Oura Ring for a couple of years.
“It was the only wearable that stuck with me,” he said. “It was a combination of the level of insights that it gives you, plus the gentleness. It’s not super judgy. If you don’t sleep well or if you skip a day working out, it’s not making you feel terrible about yourself. That resonated with me, and so the product really stuck.”
After a few follow-ups to understand the business and where it was heading, Brecker got to understand the numbers of the business and look at its financial profile. He met 15 or 20 people as part of the interview process, and it was a team that he was excited about working with.
“For me, it really represented a learning opportunity,” Brecker said. “I had never been in a hardware business. In fact, I’ve never really been an operator that had physical components where one had to think about supply chain and inventory. The puzzle of figuring all that stuff out just seemed exciting. I took the plunge, and I joined Oura at the beginning of October.
He has recently completed approximately seven months with the company. One reason that the initial period has been so successful is due to the rapport he shares with Hale.
“We work really well together,” Brecker explains. “I have the utmost respect for him. He’s an incredibly smart, sharp guy. I’m like a sponge. I’m constantly learning from him. He’s been in the CEO role at Oura for about 18 months, and one of the things that I found so impressive is how quickly he has ramped up his knowledge and expertise around all things related to health. He can speak so eloquently about the physiology of what’s going on. I’ve learned a ton from him.”
Brecker views his role as one of a strategic advisor to the CEO and other members of the senior leadership team around capital allocation decisions. He likes to analyze how the company approaches something through risk-adjusted lenses; how to start with the right size bet and determine it is working; and how to decide to put more chips on the table. That approach has resonated with the Oura team.
Brecker also views his role as one of a storyteller.
“We’re in the world of finance, and even across my finance team, everyone’s just so fluent in the numbers of the business,” he said. “You forget that we have about 550 people at Oura, and not everyone’s the same way. There’s a real storytelling job to be done around how you communicate the financial story of the business. Creating that narrative and figuring out the right way to communicate was also important in the first 90 days.”
Brecker’s personal story is one that inspires him to work in another healthcare-related field following his stint at Headspace. It was there that he came to love health and wellness. One reason he has the desire to work in something healthcare-related is his family. Specifically, Brecker’s father passed away right before COVID-19.
“He had a series of non-fatal heart attacks beginning when he was about my age,” Brecker said. “I’m in my late 40s. His first heart attack that I remember was probably when I was eight or nine years old. I remember how scary that was to me that I could have lost him at that time. That was the first wake-up call for me about the importance of health and wellness.”
Health is something that is extremely important to his wife, too, who was an elite athlete at a young age.
“She was a championship figure skater,” he explains. “From an early age she took care of her body and treated it well. I’m happy to see that that DNA has been passed on to my kids. I have three kids, two sons and a daughter. They’re all great athletes. They really do think about what they’re eating, and they think about working out. My son is almost 15. He was walking out the door at 7 p.m. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m just going to go on a run. I’ll be back in 30 minutes.’ I would have never done that when I was a kid, so I’m pleased to see that. Like I said, I credit my wife, but I’m pleased to see that we’re raising a household of kids that care about health and wellness in the same way that I do.”
Their surroundings in Los Angeles also support a healthy lifestyle. Brecker loves being outdoors, hiking and getting in the water. They live close to the beach and have world-class skiing a few hours away. The family takes advantage of it as much as possible.
Another element that enriches Brecker’s life is his volunteer work. He says that his parents instilled and encouraged a strong work ethic that included giving back as the right thing to do. He currently serves on the board of CoachArt.
“My parents used to always say, ‘The harder you work, the luckier you get,’” Brecker said. “They would hammer that home repeatedly. It’s not only the right thing to do but it has fulfillment and purpose to one’s life. We did quite a bit of volunteer work growing up. It has been a passion for me.”
The organization provides arts and athletics programming to chronically sick kids. If a child is receiving care for an illness in a children’s hospital, there are great resources in the hospital beyond the medical treatment. However, when children return home, it may be difficult for them to resume normal extracurricular activities, play sports, go to art classes, or attend school. Since most kids who recover at home are subsequently homeschooled, CoachArt partners with volunteer coaches to bring this programming into the home.
“It has a transformational effect on the lives of countless kids,” he says. “It’s been a real privilege to be involved. It’s something that we got involved in with Headspace early on. Being on the board has been a huge privilege, and I couldn’t be more proud of the work that the organization is doing.”