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Meet Lisa
Lisa Wuerden is the co-founder and CEO of Atlas Cove, a pre-launch, longevity-focused health and hospitality venture based in Lisbon, Portugal. With a background spanning global fashion supply chains, EU-level platforms, and B2B SaaS leadership, she is now focused on building evidence-based preventive health systems designed for long-term impact.
Lisa has never been especially interested in comfort for its own sake. What draws her, again and again, are systems, the messy, human ones, and the question of whether they can be made to work better. Her career reads like a series of deliberate crossings: industries, countries, disciplines. But beneath those moves runs a consistent thread: a willingness to start from zero, sit with uncertainty, and commit to problems that will still matter years down the line.
Today, that problem is health. Not in the abstract, and not as a trend, but as a lived system that too often intervenes late and explains little. Atlas Cove, the company she is building in Portugal, is her attempt to bring rigor, clarity, and long-term thinking to prevention and diagnostics, and to do so without losing sight of the people moving through it.
Inside the Machinery Early On
Lisa’s professional life began far from wellness clinics or medical models. In her early twenties, she was based in Hong Kong, working deep inside the global fashion supply chain, auditing textile and apparel factories across Southeast Asia. It was an education in scale and complexity, and in fragmentation.
Being that close to production showed her how disconnected the system was: brands and factories struggling to find each other, quality standards uneven, incentives misaligned. Instead of accepting that as immovable, she taught herself enough to build a B2B platform that connected brands with vetted factories. She ran it alone for two years before merging with a Dutch competitor, and soon after, the combined platform was taken over by the European Commission.
The experience offered a compressed lesson in entrepreneurship, from solo execution to EU-level policy-driven projects, but it also clarified something else.
“After spending time in factories and seeing how limited my real impact would be inside that global machinery, I decided not to build my career in a system I couldn’t meaningfully change.”
Learning to Build Under Real Constraints
From there, Lisa moved into B2B SaaS, not by following a prescribed ladder but by stepping into complexity and learning fast. She helped build the DACH market for an American mobile software company, then took on broader global marketing responsibilities. Her final SaaS role was at a Swiss HR software company backed by private equity, where she scaled a demand generation function from one person to a fifteen-person team and helped double ARR growth without increasing budget.
What mattered to her was not the title, but the pattern. She learned how to identify leverage, how to work within tight constraints, and how to build systems that could scale without excess.
“I don’t follow a rigid career ladder; my north star is the scale and quality of the problem, not the title.”
At the same time, another thread was quietly deepening. Health had become a serious personal focus after she encountered issues her own doctors could name but not resolve. When conventional care ran out of answers, she took responsibility, reading deeply, testing approaches carefully, tracking what actually worked. Over time, problems she had been told to live with resolved. What changed was not just her body, but her relationship to health itself.
When the Two Paths Converged
For years, Lisa lived in two parallel worlds: leading SaaS teams by day, studying prevention, diagnostics, and longevity by night. Eventually, keeping them separate stopped making sense. The gap between what evidence-based preventive care could deliver and what European health systems actually offered felt too wide—and too important—to ignore.
The most consequential decision came when she chose not to take another senior SaaS role, despite the financial comfort it would have offered. Instead, she decided to build a longevity-focused health venture in a new industry, in a new country, while raising a child. It was a clear-eyed choice, not a romantic one.
“That decision forced me to be explicit about my risk tolerance, my time horizon, and the kind of value I want my work to create.”
Starting Atlas Cove meant beginning again without corporate infrastructure or guaranteed income, while carrying real financial responsibilities. There were moments when returning to a well-paid operator role would have been easier. What sustained her was a discipline she had built over years: treat constraints as a design brief, look honestly at the numbers, decide the next concrete action, and execute.
Building Atlas Cove, Intentionally
Atlas Cove is still pre-launch, but its shape is already deliberate. Lisa is designing it as a longevity-focused health retreat platform, a place where people can understand and improve their health systematically, not as a one-off experience and not as a collection of tests without context. The model combines light, non-invasive assessments and partner-provided lab work with practical, evidence-based coaching across lifestyle, recovery, and mindset, in an environment designed for regular use.
She is building it with a specific person in mind: someone like her past self, ambitious, stretched thin, raising a young child, and running on empty. If Atlas Cove works as intended, it will help individuals course-correct early, while also raising the baseline of health literacy and preventive behaviours in the broader community.
Leadership, for Lisa, is less about charisma and more about clarity. She sets an ambitious direction, hires for curiosity and ownership, and maintains a high bar for performance. Skills can be taught; responsibility cannot. What drives her is not growth for its own sake, but systems that measurably improve health trajectories over time.
A Long View of Success
Looking ahead, Lisa’s focus is on opening Atlas Cove in Portugal and proving the model from the start: strong health outcomes, a calm and reliable guest experience, and sound unit economics. From there, she wants to deepen the data and insights layer, tracking outcomes over time and refining protocols based on what actually works. In the long term, she envisions Atlas Cove as a replicable platform for preventive health and behaviour change, a longevity-focused model that could adapt across Europe.
Her definition of success is quietly demanding. It lies in alignment: between the quality of the problem, the depth of impact, and the resilience of the business itself. It also includes being present as a parent, and designing work that supports rather than competes with that role.
Closing Reflection: Choosing Problems Worth Carrying
Lisa Wuerden’s career does not move in straight lines, and she is comfortable with that. What remains consistent is her willingness to enter unfamiliar territory, to learn quickly, and to take responsibility for outcomes. She is not chasing novelty, nor retreating into safety. Instead, she is choosing problems that justify the effort of carrying them, problems whose solutions, if done well, will compound quietly over time.
In a world drawn to speed and surface-level change, her work is rooted in something slower and more exacting: building systems that respect people, evidence, and the long view.
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