I’m the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Iris International, a thesis-driven investment firm focused on restructuring the critical industries we can no longer afford to get wrong.
Before that, I served as President and CFO of Sarissa Capital Management, CFO of Sarissa Capital Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: SRSA), and held senior roles across multiple alternative investment firms. I currently serve as an Independent Director at Amarin Corporation and continue to work across investment, strategy, and enterprise leadership.
That’s the visible part of the story.
Here’s the part most people don’t see.
For a long time, I built my career on endurance. In the investment world, pushing past exhaustion is often seen as strength. And for a while, it worked. I was performing at a high level professionally while quietly running on empty.
Until I couldn’t anymore.
I approached the problem the only way I knew how: like an investor analyzing a failing system.
I led the Burnout Reset and Resilience Study (BRRS-2025), surveying more than 850 professionals to better understand what burnout was actually doing inside organizations. The findings were hard to ignore.
Burnout isn’t a personal issue. It’s an institutional one.
It erodes performance, weakens organizations, and quietly destroys value at scale—yet it’s treated as something individuals are expected to manage on their own.
If strategy and capital can transform companies, then they can also be used to redesign the systems people operate within.
Today, everything I build is grounded in that belief.
Through Iris International, I’m focused on integrating fragmented industries into systems that actually perform—starting with healthcare.
Through The Bedrock Institute, we’re advancing resilience as infrastructure, not a perk.
And through my writing and media platforms, I’m contributing to a broader conversation about what sustainable high performance really requires.
I didn’t step away from high performance.
I set out to make it sustainable.
Because the systems we rely on most will only be as strong as the people sustaining them—and leaders are the ones who have the power to change both.
— Patrice