Rachel Hobert '16 captained Wesleyan women's soccer. Today she's the CEO of Huml Health, a company using wearables, voice biomarkers, and AI-driven insights to help treatment teams deliver better addiction and mental-health care. The connection between those roles is tighter than it sounds—and it begins on a Wesleyan sideline.
At Wesleyan, she learned that leadership isn't proven when you're winning—it's proven the moment after you lose. As captain, she had one rule: be frustrated for 10 minutes, then move. No sulking, no blame, no rewinding the play. Shift to the next rep. She leads Huml the same way. In a startup you lose deals, lose time, and lose perfect plans. The question is whether the team freezes or resets fast. Her job is to make sure they move with clarity and purpose, without carrying the past like dead weight. Learn from it and move on.
Balancing soccer with a full academic load taught her how to sort what matters. She didn't try to juggle everything perfectly. She learned which balls were glass and which were rubber. In company terms: trust, patient safety, and product integrity can't drop. Most else will bounce, and the team can pick it back up. That mindset keeps Huml fast, focused, and in control.
A lesson from coach Eva Meredith shaped how she builds culture. Injuries forced Hobert to lead from the sidelines, and she came to see leadership as protection, direction, and order—protect the team from noise and pressure, set a clear vision early, and create the systems and trust that keep everything running. It isn't about doing everything yourself. It's about hiring great talent, growing that talent, and building the environment where people can thrive.
Before Huml, she spent years investing as a General Partner at Hivers & Strivers, backing veteran-led startups. The switch from funding founders to becoming one was personal. When her sister relapsed in recovery, work stopped being about achievement and started being about contribution. Huml became the place where her skills and a real human need collided. Investor habits came with her: know what kills startups, recognize patterns early, keep financial discipline, and remember that people—not ideas—determine outcomes. Those muscles help her hire well, grow talent, and tell a story the team and partners can rally behind.
For readers new to Huml, she explains the product simply. Treatment centers still rely heavily on self-reports. Useful, but incomplete. Wearables and voice biomarkers add objective signals—sleep, motion, heart rate,
vocal effort—that show what the body is registering even when the mind isn't. The effect is already visible in the field. Across detox, residential, and outpatient care, Huml is surfacing trends days before something drifts off track. In one case, a clinician spotted a pattern of fragmented sleep in a patient who had been through treatment five times. That signal led her to uncover severe, untreated PTSD—the underlying issue blocking recovery. Without the biometric context, it would have been missed again. "This is the power of objective data," Hobert says. "Not diagnosis, but clarity."
Trust is the whole ballgame, and she treats it that way. This isn't a consumer app where a mistake means you miss a date. It's health data and people's lives. One breach and trust evaporates. You don't get trust by asking for it; you earn it by how you show up—clarity, consistency, zero gray areas around consent and communication.
Turning research into weekly tools follows one rule: does it help a clinician make a better decision in under 10 seconds? If not, it doesn't ship. Partnerships with clinical and technology teams—like Samsung Healthcare, Canary Speech, and collaborators at McLean Hospital—feed great science; Huml's job is to boil it down, fit into existing workflows, and use AI to surface trends, not replace judgment. Make it clear, useful, and trustworthy—that's what gets used.
Hiring at a young health-tech company looks a lot like scouting for a high-performing team. At Wesleyan, it wasn't about who had the hardest shot; it was about who lifted the level of the group. In startups, skills matter, but the real differentiators are behavior: bias for action, clarity in chaos, low ego, high ownership. One wrong fit can disrupt the whole system. The goal is a roster that trusts each other, communicates clearly, and executes under pressure.
Behavioral health care is full of pressure moments; she draws on an athlete's line she loves: be quick, but don't hurry. Speed without panic. Preparation builds confidence; confidence creates calm. When the team trusts its habits, it doesn't spiral—it executes.
Student-athletes often ask how to tell their team story in interviews for product or operations roles. Hobert tells them to be specific and honest. What do you do better than most? What did others do better than you? When did you steady the group instead of cracking? She looks for self-awareness, resilience, and independent thinking over a generic "teamwork" answer. Mission-driven tech needs people who add real value, raise the standard, and stay reliable when it matters.
Cross-industry roles—from hydrogen to fintech—left her with a simple filter: common sense. She's seen two-hour debates that should have taken ten minutes. The person who cuts through noise, explains value in plain language, and aligns the room earns trust. Most business is pattern recognition and incentives. See the logic, bring the best ideas across fields, and structure wins on all sides.
Looking back, she smiles at one more lesson Wesleyan athletics taught her without her noticing: how to function on wildly unreasonable schedules—and still laugh. Early lifts, sprinting across campus, protein bars as meals—it was onboarding for founder life. The humor matters. If the team can't find moments to laugh, they're doing it wrong.
There's no scoreboard in real life, so she made her own. It has two questions, and if both are yes, she calls it a win: Am I doing what I like with people I like? Am I excited to walk into work in the morning and just as excited to walk through my front door at night? If those boxes are checked, the rest takes care of itself.
