Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Amber Walsh on Industry Insights, Fresh Perspectives, and Inspiration from the McGuireWoods Healthcare PE Conference 5-23-25
23 May 2025
In this episode, Amber Walsh, Partner and Executive Committee Member at McGuireWoods, joins Scott Becker to share insights from the firm’s annual Healthcare Private Equity Conference, from industry trends and “measured optimism” to lessons in perspective from astronaut Anousheh Ansari and keynote speaker Lance Armstrong.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by Amber Walsh. Amber is on the executive committee at McGuire Woods. She lives at the intersection of business and healthcare and law, private equity. She's an absolutely brilliant lawyer and person.
Amber, you had the experience last week of helping to chair the 21st Annual McGuire Woods Healthcare Private Equity Conference. Maybe you'll share with us today a few different highlights and thoughts that come out of your thinking and what you're seeing at the conference and in general.
Yeah, thank you, Scott. This is one of my favorite events that I get to help organize along with several of our other partners, Holly Buckley, Jeff Cockrell, yourself, Bart Walker, lots of people at the firm involved in this. But it's one of my favorite things that I get to participate in every year. We started the planning. Really, we've already chosen the dates for next year.
But really, the intensive content planning, about nine months out. And we grew from a first luncheon for a couple of hours to a two-day conference with nearly 1,000 attendees. And it's been in that format for several years. What I love about the conference is it takes some different forms every year. in terms of what the focus is and what the vibe is.
And very much in the same way that we talk about JP Morgan reflecting the vibe of the healthcare private equity industry every year in January, our conference does the same thing where you're able to get investors, healthcare company executives, those of us who serve the industry as lawyers, bankers, etc.,
all together to share our independent perspectives of what we're seeing in the market, but where we think things are going as well. And I would say that the overall characterization of what people are feeling is similar to what I've expressed to you over the past several months is measured optimism. That's a phrase that we continue to hear along with some other different themes.
But I love this opportunity to get together, kind of take temperature. And yes, our own feelings influence each other's feelings. That's just very natural. But I came away relatively positive on the investment community standpoint, but really thankful to have the opportunity for new perspectives. So in addition to measured optimism, for me, new perspectives was a theme that
settled on me throughout the conference including through our two keynoters one of whom you were able to moderate really in a wonderful dialogue thank you and take a moment sort of on what you sort of saw what you're sort of thinking i know we're talking about uh
Anousheh Ansari, who's this astronaut, CEO of XPRIZE, which is a fasting organization, entrepreneur, investor, advocate for women entrepreneurs. I mean, what a remarkable, remarkable person. Talk a little bit about some of the thoughts that you saw, some of the things you saw, et cetera, et cetera.
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