#15 - Dr. Iman's Incredible Idea

You know, a lot of stores have to align for a company to start. You have the right co-founder, the right idea, you have to be willing to take the risk, and so we leave and we start working on an idea. We've been working on it for a few months, like a year, and it's just not working. We made a big mistake here, what are we going to do, this thing's not growing, and we're actually running low on cash too.

Givening is hard, but the thing is it should be acceptable. This was the highest stress point I've had in my entire entrepreneurial dream. The thing with introductions, it takes like five minutes of your time, you can change someone else's life. What we realized, I come from a family of doctors, surgeons, and they were complaining about understaffedness.

So we looked into it, started doing the market research, realized what a big problem this is, and then that's when we're looking at it has to be a better way. Two years ago when it was just Roman and I, you were raising a seat around, just raising the initial $2 million. And at that time, honestly, there's two co-founders in an idea. Probably have to go through 75 to 100 meetings, and where are we now?

We just raised a $15 million Series A. So I want to start with, who are you? So give us your name and give us the name of your company and what your company does. So my name's Emana Uzaid.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Incredible Health. Incredible Health is the fastest growing, hiring platform for healthcare workers in the US today. Hospitals and health systems use our platform to hire permanent nurses today. In less than 30 days, they normally take some 90 days or longer.

And our platform has driven the efficiency of hiring by 25 times. The reason that matters is the healthcare industry employs in most number of workers in America today. It is the largest labor sector in the country, but it also suffers from the biggest shortages. Our demand for healthcare is a country keeps going up, but we don't have enough workers in the system.

And so it's becoming harder and harder to hire. I want to talk about the product because I'm intrigued at how you're doing this. Yeah. But first, I want to, there's a couple of things when I was looking you up.

That was interesting. One was that you're not a tech person who tried to just go solve this random problem that you didn't really understand. You came from the healthcare world. So you have your empty.

That's right. I am a medical doctor of background. And we were just talking right before this that you went through med school. Correct.

You went into management consulting. I went into management consulting. And the reason I didn't practice is because my interests were more around making an impact on a more macro level, impacting the entire health system or impacting an entire industry. And so don't get me wrong, like one-on-one patient cares great, but it just wasn't necessarily for me or where my interests played.

And so you realize that when that, hey, this is, I'm in medical school. I don't necessarily want to be a practicing doctor. When did you realize that? Probably two years before graduating.

And I was thinking about dropping out, but I didn't because my dad wouldn't let me. And maybe that resonates with the immigrants out there. And those of you with immigrant parents, I'm originally from Sudan. My parents are sitting knees and dropping out was just not an option.

And you come from a doctor family too. That's right. My dad's a surgeon. My two older brothers are surgeons.

So growing up the question is like, what surgeon do you want to be? Not like, what do you want to do? Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. You realize this and you realized it what in one moment or was this like a slow burn where you were like, I don't know if I really want to do this. Was there a day where you were like, this is not for me? It was definitely a slow burn.

And then it was just a decision point where I was like, I cannot do this for the next 40, 50 years. And that's got to be a pretty tough feeling to have a pretty tough realization to have. Yeah. What happens?

You break down crying that day? You're like, Oh my God, I'm so far in, but this is not what I want to do. Well, how did you deal with that realization when you had it? No, it definitely wasn't any crying.

It was more around. All right. Now it's time to figure out what to do instead. You went straight into problem solving mode.

I went straight into problem solving mode. And I mean, I'm no regrets. You know, that degree does give you a lot of credibility, whether you deserve it or whether I deserve it or not. I look different right now.

I'm talking to a doctor. Great. Yeah. I don't use much of that knowledge, but that's for my credibility.

And why consulting? Because most people, I know they go into consulting. They go into consulting for the money. They go into consulting because they kind of just don't know what they want to do.

And that seems like a reputable career. So it seemed like you don't strike me as the type of person who's doing it for just resume building or even just for money. Why did you go that route then? Yeah, I just I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I just knew I wanted to do more. I want to have a bigger impact at the time management consulting would give me exposure with a lot of different things. And it did. You know, I got to work with hospitals all over the country.

I got to work in operations and strategy and I got exposed to a whole new set of skills that I grew and a lot of smart people. And but what's the but it was very corporate. Yes, you know, very, very corporate. And that didn't sit right.

That didn't sit right with me. No, you're wearing a leather jacket right now. Yeah. Same super corporate.

Yeah. So at some point you decide also this is not for me. Absolutely. I knew it wasn't for me.

And so again, I'm like, OK, I need to just go explore and see what else is out there. That is actually what led me to apply to business school and I ended up doing my MBA or and during those two years, I got a lot of exposure to entrepreneurship. There were a lot of former entrepreneurs there were my classmates. They were classes around entrepreneurship.

There was just a lot of activity there. And again, the warden MBA gave me exposure to marketing and operations and strategy and finance and accounting and like all these other fields of business that I had no exposure to before. You're a believer in the MBA. I'm a you're anti MBA.

OK. So I believe that there are multiple paths to success, right? And for entrepreneurship in particular, there's two thousand different ways to reach the goals that you want to reach for me personally and for I'm sure several other entrepreneurs that MBA and warden business school or, you know, whatever does take whichever Harvard Stanford, whatever, it did help me in two or three different ways. So first, it's the brand and stamp.

Right. So when you are going into a venture capital firm or a hospital or you're trying to give someone to join your your team, having that stamp and that brand helps. I mean, at the end of the day, look, we're still in a world where brands and stamps matter where you went to school, where you worked still makes a difference. The second thing I got out of it was a network.

And I'll talk about that a little bit more later, but that that that is a network. You can bookmark that. That is a network that got me into Silicon Valley, that got me into, you know, the top venture capital investors that and so the network helps. And then the third piece is just some of the knowledge there did help.

I mean, I think some of my most helpful classes, for example, I took negotiations with Adam Grant, I am using that skill set and negotiating like every other day, you know, learning the basics of finance and accounting helps when you're running a business, learning the basics of operations helps. So there is the knowledge that you gain there as well. But it's not the only way that's my point. We want to put on it.

So I agree with what you said, there's two thousand different paths to success in entrepreneurship. The way I would say is two thousand different paths to the starting line to get success is really only one way to do it on friendship, which is to start something and start trying to get a customer and start once you get a bunch of customers get your operations to work and once you get that going, make some money. And so what happens before that is often where business school or mentorship or starting off being an affiliate marketer, whatever, there's a million different paths to the starting point where you have the confidence, you have the idea, you have the clarity of what you want to do or you have the guts to just go do it. And so that's kind of where for a lot of people who aren't quite there yet, great exposure, move to a different place, work at a startup, work at a big company, consult, whatever you got to do to get to that starting line.

But it's like, if you've ever done one of these races like Tough Mudder or Spartan race or something. So they have this gimmick where before you start, you have to climb this wall and it's like the obstacle before the race even starts. And like that's that first wall to me is the buildup of confidence, knowledge, know how, whatever to get you to just go. So that's how I think about that.

Yep. But even after the starting line, you're using using it. You know how to climb walls. Yeah.

But your point is right. So this is now the end of business school. I've got an offer to go back to McKinsey and I'm like, man, I really want to do this entrepreneurship thing. And where is the best place to do that?

San Francisco Bay Area. And although I've gained some knowledge, I've gained a network. I haven't actually done anything yet, you know, when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship, but you got the stamps. But I got the stamps.

So what I decide to do is I move to the Bay Area because this is the best place in the world for startups, especially technology startups. I become an employee at an early stage company that's venture back in healthcare technology. It's called the Live Core and I was leading product and that is where I learned to work with engineers and designers and data scientists and marketers and what it takes to launch a product to grow a business. I mean, I just learned so much.

You learn a lot as an early stage employee. So you were sort of 10 years in the making building up to be prepared to start incredible. That's right. And now just give people some context.

So incredible health, you started it how many years ago now? Two years. Two years ago, just raised a big flashy round. I did.

Yep. Give us the details. So you raise much money from recent Horowitz and the wave of like support that came out was pretty remarkable. So I wanted you on the podcast before that because so we had told me about you and how regular and then when I saw that that was the reminder of, oh, wow, I didn't actually know much about your company before and I started reading up and I was pretty blown away.

So what led you to your answer to value? You're working at a startup. Where did you say I know what I want to do? I know what business I want to start.

Okay. So like many stories, it's not that straightforward. So during my time as an employee at the startup, I meet who becomes my co-founder seems wrong, port, law, about MIT. He's been building software for the last 15 years.

That's engineer. I know high integrity. It's the best technical co-founder you can have. Right.

And so I convince Roman, like, hey, let's just start this company. And you know, a lot of stores have to align for a company to start. You have a right co-founder, the right idea. You have to be willing to take the risk all that.

Right. And so we leave and we start working on an idea. It is not incredible health. We are working on a completely different idea at this time.

We've been working on it for a few months, like a year and it's just not working. It's not growing. And it's just you two in a apartment or working space or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. Working on an apartment and it's not. And you're at the start of the year, you're like, oh, of course, it's not commercial. It's not hard.

By the end of the year, how do you feel that? Not great. Not great. I mean, I'm just like, oh my god, we made a big mistake here.

What are we going to do? This thing's not growing. It's a software tool. It's just not working around that time.

So this is where Wartan comes back in. Right. I had a professor named Adam Grant. Thanks, guys.

Now he's famous back. You know, when I was taking this class, he was, you know, just professor. Yeah. One of the youngest 10 or professors at Wartan.

And the thing with entrepreneurship, especially here in the Bay Area, and probably all over the world, is like, you do need the right mentors and advisors around you. And we're actually running low on cash too. And so I asked Adam, and Adam's a big believer in introductions. And so am I, actually.

The thing with introductions, it takes like five minutes of your time, but you can change someone else's life. Right. So I asked Adam for introductions to six or seven people. And he immediately does all these intros.

And who are these people? Why do you need these people? These are either former operators who've built startups and exited and or venture capital investors. And so your mind's, you weren't trying to raise money at this moment.

Was it more like, I should talk to some more people to help me? Yeah, exactly. He puts me in. So one of the introductions is the Hunter Walk, who is a managing partner and a fun-tier cold homebrew.

He's prolific tweeter first. He's the investor second. Yeah, Hunter's awesome. But yeah, I know his day job is managing director at the home room.

I'm me Hunter. Hunter doesn't invest. And what he does do is he introduces me to somebody James career. I know James.

All right. Oh, that's great. OK, so James career is five time entrepreneur, exited a bunch of times, and he's running this fund at the time it was included in accelerator as well. Today's just a fund called NFX.

And he James career. I will never forget this. You know, this is a Skype call. He's in Hawaii at some like angel investor conference or something.

I'm my apartment in San Francisco and we're just talking. And he's like, you know what? I really like you. Rome sounds great, too.

Join the accelerator, the NFX accelerator. And so accelerator starts a few weeks later. Two days into it. We're like, OK, we need to pivot.

And Roman and I go into this whole exploration self exploration self discovery, thankfully with the support of the NFX partners. Right. And James is good at pivots. If you ever heard of house party today, before that they were Muir cat, which was like really popular live streaming app right before Paris go blew up and kind of give them and for that they were something like life on air.

And James was working with Ben Rubin, founder and like helped them pivot to like, why don't you just keep it super simple and just do this one button that makes you go live streaming on Twitter and that took off. And I've heard this story from Twitter. I've gone to him several times just being like, hey, my shit's not working. What do you think?

And I feel like within like five minutes. I'm like, is amazing about clarity. It's why your shit's not working and what might work better. And you're like, wow, you're so much better than me.

This was amazing. Thank you so much. Was it ever you? Yeah, it's actually for me.

Pretty much. Yeah. So James Currier, Pete Flint, Gigi Y. Sleeve, the partners at NFX, I mean, they have been doing this internet tax startup game since the late 90s.

Right. So they've got 20 years on us and you see a lot in 20 years. You build a lot in 20 years. They made a gazillion mistakes that they can tell us not to make.

They've seen the trends. They've seen what works, what doesn't. Having access to really great mentors and advisors is very helpful. They have to be very high quality mentors and advisors, but they can end up saving you six months of time, two years of time.

I'm just a big believer now in getting the right tribe and the right people around you if they can succeed. 100%. And so you go there, you're like, we need to pivot. You do yourself discovery.

Is that like you go and you do a bunch of drugs and feel? What's your version of self discovery? No, it's me and Roman at co-working space just trying to figure this out. And what we realized is I come from a family of doctors, surgeons, and a lot of my friends are as well.

And they are complaining about understaffing. At the same time, Rome's sisters are nurses or he comes from a family of nurses. And they were saying, you know, it takes me two, three months at least to get my next job. And we're like, this doesn't make any sense, right?

And so we looked into it, start doing the market research, start doing the customer research, and realize what a big problem this is, how inefficient the entire process is, how is it that a group in such high demand has such a terrible job search experience, why it takes some two, three months to get their next job, and like, this doesn't make any sense. And then that's when we're looking at it has to be a better way. And so you're okay. And that line is really key.

Most ideas come from that. There has to be a better way. When you say that to yourself, if you ever find yourself saying that, just realize you've stumbled on the nugget of what could be a business idea, because this is a problem. And this current solution sucks.

And it has to be a better way. And like, if you just keep looking for those moments, you may stumble into your idea. So do you realize the shortage? What causes the staffing problem?

What causes the delays and the long timelines and the understanding? What does the root cause? Two root causes. Number one is just not enough supply.

There's just our demand for health care as a country keeps going up. We don't have enough workers in the system. But the second problem that's even more urgent is that the hiring tools and processes that these hospitals are using and health care facilities in general are using have not changed since like the 80s. And they're relying on external job boards.

Like, hey, I posted a job and hope something great happens. Or traditional recruiting agencies. Now, the issue with job boards is it's quantity over quality. Yes, you get a lot of applicants, but you're relying on humans to sift through all that, to screen through all those applicants to match into the right jobs.

You know, and it's when each hospital recruiter is trying to fill 100 jobs at any given time, that is crazy and efficient. And then the traditional recruiting agencies, they're also using humans to source into the screen. And as a result, you know, they're very expensive. They're charging $20,000 or more per hire.

And so that's not cost-effective for a hospital. Now, the thing is this problem we're tackling is very urgent for hospitals and for our health systems as a whole. Because when you're understaffed, you cannot deliver quality care, right? You need great health care workers to deliver their product, which is care, right?

And when you're understaffed, you're paying overtime, you're paying for contract workers, which usually costs two times more than your permanent workforce. And hospitals are thin-margin businesses and that eats into their margins. Coupled with that, you're burning out your existing staff because you're asking them to work overtime. And the harder your existing staff is working, the more likely they are to create medication errors, readmissions, patient satisfaction goes down.

Honestly, the more patient mortality goes up when you're understaffed, right? So this is like a hair-on-fire. And if you're a bitch, if they're working lead to, we're more on staff. Exactly.

Exactly. So the turnover is very high in this industry as well because they're getting burnt out. So this is a hair-on-fire problem for every hospital CEO and their entire C-suite. It is a problem for those running hospital units.

This is a significant issue. Yeah. And so you started to realize this and it's too passive. I want to figure out, okay, what did you do with that information?

Once you realize this is a big problem, how did you go about solving it? The other side of me is just like really fascinated with how hospital works. Maybe just because I just had a baby 13 days ago. Wow, and you're here, that's great.

And I'm here. Well, is it great? I think my wife. I think my wife.

My wife says it's not. Yeah. And so when we were there, the nurses were so amazing. Like we had to be with Kaiser here.

And I never forget her. She was so incredible. She was so thoughtful, so helpful. And we stayed like an extra night because we were like, why would we go home?

This is amazing. Like normally, I never want to be a hospital. But this was like such a great experience because of the nurses specifically. So like my interest is in this area right now.

So tell me a little bit about hospital work. So you said, hospitals have margins, hospitals have CEOs. Most people, I think they think about hospitals. It's just they think about the sort of, it's almost like a public school, right?

It's like, you go there, you get your service and you don't really think about hospital as a business. So tell me about hospitals as a business. So are hospitals for profit or non-profithetically? Yeah.

So there's 6,000 hospitals in the US. And just to be clear, hospitals aren't the only time of healthcare facility we have in this country. There's also urgent care and skilled nursing, surgical centers, huge industry. And hospitals specifically usually run on very thin margins.

3% is average. Well, we've only run hospitals 1% or less. A very well run hospital might be 5%. Margins.

They're 50% of the operating costs go to labor. This is a very labor-intensive industry. You need your healthcare workers to deliver the care. The doctors and nurses, all the other allied health professions are needed to make this work.

It's like a restaurant but worse. A restaurant's like 10% margin and 35% labor cost, 30% labor cost. This is even harsher in that sense. It is.

And who owns hospitals? Are hospitals usually independent, city-owned, is there franchises? Tell me about that. It's a whole range.

Most are non-profit. There are some for-profit hospitals as well. There are some that are publicly traded. I mean, the way I think about if I'm supposed to segment the industry is primarily three main areas.

One is academic medical centers. So Stanford Healthcare, Cedars-Sinai, USC, UCSF, these are all clients of ours. They're academic medical centers. And they're usually affiliated with university.

And then you have your large health systems, HCA, tenant, Providence, St. Joseph, you know, Adventist Health, also clients of ours. These are large health systems, some of which are publicly traded as well. And then you have lots of community hospitals.

Gotcha. So that's my healthcare in a box. Understand. And then you have a website and you're like, okay, this is what we want to do.

You're in an FX at this point. Where do you go from there? How do you get this thing off the ground? The other key point I want to just make really quickly, just before we leave the topic of ideation, right, is, yeah, you want to solve a significant problem.

There's probably three or four other criteria that you want to meet before you start committing ten years of your life to it. Hair on fire problems. That was your checklist. Yeah, hair on fire problems.

It should be ideally a huge market because if you just capture 1% of it, 2% of it, then you're fine. The third piece is whatever you come up with, your unique insight needs to be at least ten times better than what's already out there. Okay. Whatever it is, but at least ten times better.

Can't just be small incremental improvement. How do you judge that? Because everyone loves their baby. Everyone thinks their ideas are ten times better.

So what's a more nuanced way of thinking about it? Is it ten times better at one thing, ten times cheaper or on one axis? Is that the way to think about it? I guess for you guys, how did you come up with, yeah, this is ten times better, not two times, not three.

Yeah, it's either ten times cheaper, ten times more efficient, ten times better in NPS score or in my customer experience. So deciding in what way am I ten times better is a more intelligent way than just believing and just loving your own thing so much. Absolutely. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be ten times better technology, right?

It could be looking at it be a different business model or a different approach. It could be lots of different things that make it ten times better. Okay. So, a hair-fire problem, large market, ten times better solution, what was your other one?

Competitors. So ideally you don't want 500 competitors. You also don't want zero because maybe the market doesn't exist. The ideal is ten to thirty.

It's a little bit arbitrary. Combination of publicly traded companies are like incumbents. Maybe if you start off, but that's it. Yeah.

So you went down this checklist and you're like, okay, this idea seems to take all the boxes. Yeah. One more criteria. I mean, we talked about this a lot, the founder market fit.

What uniquely suits you as founders to solve this idea specifically? I mean, I think this was pretty natural. Yes. You and your co-founder.

We were very comfortable with healthcare. And did you think about the ideas that didn't fit that? Like were you like, I'm going to make a credit card or some other salad business? We thought of a lot of ideas.

And because they didn't meet one of those criteria, they were just filtered out. And how long did you spend going through ideas? Was this a week, two weeks, a month? You were under pressure.

Demo day was coming up. So we had maybe four weeks. Four weeks. And so what was it they had to like at the time?

Wake up and go to the like board or what was your guys' process during those weeks? Yeah. It was a lot of white boarding. It was a lot of talking to the NFX partners.

I was very helpful. My brothers were very helpful with the ideation phase. It was reading science fiction. Isaac Asimov, it was watching Black Mirror.

It was, you know, whatever it takes, whatever inspires you. And so you were doing this. How were you feeling during this time? Was this an energizing time or was this like a, oh my God, stress?

This was the highest stress point I've had in my entire entrepreneurial journey. Pivoting is hard. But the thing is it should be acceptable. A lot of NASA companies today were pivots.

Slack, Twitter, Twitch, which many, many. Right? And so I just started as a video game. Discord started as a video game.

Twitch started as Justin TV, which was a totally different thing. Group on started as a political activism platform. And they all pivoted into these really big, successful companies. So pivots can work, but like you said, very difficult.

And the further you go, the more difficult it gets. So like you guys are pivoting with two people. Sometimes I'm pivoting when we have 20 people working at the company. That's a very hard pivot to do.

Some people do it at 2,000 people. That's even harder. So you can pull off the pivot. And so where do you, like first time you come up with a name?

Because the name is incredible health. It's an incredible name. Where do the name cover? I know the NFX guys really care about names.

They care a ton about names. That's not Silicon Valley's like, oh, marketing? That's just something you do last. Like just engineering, engineering, engineering, whatever name you want to slap on it.

Like most people don't think about names. The NFX guys are like, no names, super matter. They do matter. James Scruggier has a whole talk, a whole rant.

Maybe he'll do it on your other podcast when he's on. Or language matters. Everything from the name of your company down to like the tiny copy in your app, your emails that you're sending out, language matters. It is often the first time users or customers clients interact with you.

So they were, we went through a lot of different names. James Scruggier was really helpful in this as well. We went with incredible health because it's unique. It sounds big.

It sounds amazing. You're an employee, an investor, a client. I mean, incredible. It's incredible.

So who came up with the name? I'm pretty sure we were in James Scruggier's garage just going through a bunch of names of me, Rome, James. Yeah. All those like other contenders are like the really bad names.

I mean, I honestly can't even remember. Fairly good health. Yeah, exactly. It was just, you know, you also look at domains and trademarks and this and that as well.

It was all stuff. It was all names that sounded over the top. And so where are you guys today? It was a sense of like the success so far.

You're obviously early on the journey a long way to go, but you've definitely gone enough. How much did you raise in the most recent round? Yeah. So we raised $15 million led by Jeff Jordan and Drieson Horwitz.

Jeff Jordan, if your listeners don't know, is probably the top marketplace investor in the world. He was a CEO of OpenTable, president of eBay. He was an early investor and board member right now at Airbnb at Instacart at OfferUp, at Lime, Pinterest. You know, he knows what he's doing.

Yeah. That's marketplace Jordan. Yes, exactly. So where are we now?

So we've been working on this for two years. We have grown across California. We have over 150 hospitals using our platform right now, including Cedar Sinai and Stanford and HCA and many others. And the reason we raised the series A actually wasn't because we needed it financially.

We were actually doing quite well. We built a California business at the point where it was profitable. And the reason we raised the series A is to take over the entire market to become a category defining market leading company as quickly as humanly possible. Man, the smile on your face when you said that, you were loving that idea.

That was the biggest smile I've seen for you so far. She's been raising the eyebrow a little bit as you wanted to take over the world. Yeah. So you.

And I will say this is our mission. It's one of the main challenges. Our vision is to help healthcare professionals live better lives. And our mission is to help healthcare professionals find and do their best work.

And that's what we're trying to achieve. The entire team is on a mission. I love it. Yeah.

No, there's different we have a couple of different models out there customize it per client. Yeah. You know, they can purchase a pack of hires or there's also subscription as well. They just get access to the platform.

And so is the key metric for you guys like how many people place per month or how many hires? Exactly. And what's your goal? Is it like what are you trying to get to that?

Is it a certain number? Is it a growth rate? How do you think about that number? Your metrics.

It's a monthly growth rate in number of hires. And so what do you want? Twenty percent per month or something like that? Yeah, exactly.

And so why twenty percent? How do you decide that? Every entrepreneur has to decide their own goals and sort of your fate will lie in both picking the right goals and then your ability to execute. But if you pick the wrong goal, you know, that's a pretty weird failure case because you succeed at hitting the wrong goal.

Yeah. So how do you pick twenty percent? I think every company, KPIs and metrics matter a lot. A company at the end of day is one giant project and it needs to have goals.

And so picking what the right metric is going to vary by company. In our case, this number of hires in other people's cases is going to be monthly active users. There's going to be one metric that is the most important. And then there's secondary metrics as well that also matter.

Picking the right metric matters because you won your entire team regardless of their function focused on that metric because every team has levers that influence that metric. In terms of what the actual growth rate number is. I mean, that's a function of your ambition, whether your venture backed or not. Yeah.

So how do you pick twenty just in your case? If we want to take over the entire market in less than, say, eight years, like that's the growth rate required. So work backwards from the end state of the week. Exactly.

And so what were the moments along the way because now everything sounds pretty good. And you told us about when you had to pivot and how tough that was and the stress of doing that when you have a demo day four weeks away where you're going to be on stage telling investors, this is what I do and you don't even know what you do yet. So that's certainly tough. Yeah.

But I think, you know, once you have the fun and once you have the clarity, once you have the team, once you have some momentum, things do start to work. Were there any other moments of doubt or rejection or any other real struggles that you guys went up against that you remember? Yeah, multiple. And we still, I mean, honestly, we still have them.

I think raising our seed round, the initial capital was challenging. The Series A was a lot easier because you have more proof points and we were fortunate enough to have all the top three venture capital firms in the world wanting to invest and so we were able to be very selective. The seed round eventually, so, okay, so we just raised a $15 million Series A, this summer 2019 is when we closed. Two years ago when it was just Roman and I, we were raising our seed round.

We were just raising the initial $2 million. And at that time, honestly, these are two co-founders in an idea. We have a couple of health systems or hospitals that are in contracting. We have some nurses on the platform.

There's not much going on yet. And probably have to go through 75 to 100 meetings to get that seed round done. By the end, it was oversubscribed, but, you know, yeah, it was grind. And the thing is with fundraising and one thing that entrepreneurs may not realize, especially those outside of the Bay Area, is that it is a little bit of a game.

There is a playbook and you have to know the rules of the game. How did you learn those rules? The best advisors and mentors in the world. Okay.

There's somebody out there listening to like, okay, there's a game, there's rules and there's a playbook. How do I find this thing? How do they get their hands on this playbook? There's a few ways.

Number one, go to nfx.com and read their content. Okay. Sure, they have multiple blog posts on how to raise. And number two, get the right mentors and advisors.

And the danger here is I notice a lot of people who call themselves mentors, advisors, experts in entrepreneurship, and there's a risk of them taking advantage of entrepreneurs. What you have to look at is their track record. Have they been CEOs? Have they exited?

What have their successes been? People track records, you know, you can look up online so you can figure out if someone's legit or not without even talking to them. And for you, when you reach out to these people, are you reaching out saying, hey, leave your mentor? Are you saying, hey, let's get a coffee?

Are you saying, hey, can you help me with a specific thing? What worked for you as far as recruiting those mentors to you? I usually do very succinct, concise emails with an ask. So having Adam Grant facilitate the introduction to help.

So we all, he was one of your former guests here facilitate intros helps. Warm introduction helps. Yeah, in fact, so he helped even more. So in our intro, he was like, hey, I was like, I want to have her on.

He was like, great, here's the intro. You guys should meet. I was like, great, I'd love to have you. You were like, great, I'd love to come on.

Let's schedule it for like two months from now. And so we did the best thing ever. You know, when you're emailing somebody, you usually BCC out the person who made the intro. You're like, okay, I'm moving you to BCC.

Now we'll take it from here. And he jumped back in from BCC. He was like, no, no, no, don't wait two months. You need to do this person.

Come on, let's do it. That goes, those little things can go a long way. Yeah, so and then there's an overall like context here that we can ignore. And that is a culture of Silicon Valley.

It's a culture of the texting in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a culture where people help. Yeah, pay for culture. It's a pay for culture.

Usually when you ask someone for something, especially if you're a warm introduction, they usually help. Without expecting anything back. Without expecting anything back. Honestly, that is, look, I'm really biased and I'm pretty strong opinions.

If you're building a technology company and you want it to be huge, San Francisco Bay Area is still the best place in the world to do it. So to the extent that you can get here and build your network here, that is a huge advantage. Yeah, I'm a, similarly, when I was about six, seven years ago, when I moved to San Francisco, I was sitting in Australia and I wanted to start a startup. And I just knew, well, if I can come to Silicon Valley, that's the makeup for startups.

I don't know why. I don't know what's better about it. I don't know what I'll get out of it, but I just knew I got to be there. It's like, I'm going to be an actor.

I've got to go to Hollywood. That's how I felt about it. If I want to do a startup, I've got to come to San Francisco. And of course, you can start anywhere in many great examples.

But if you don't have anything time, you've got to a certain place. Don't be afraid of just jumping in. In fact, the first thing I did was I just changed my phone number. I just changed it up to 650 area code, which I thought was San Francisco, which I actually powered up, so I kind of missed.

But I did that when I was sitting in Australia. And I was just a mentally made that ship. I was like, no, I'm there. I'm a local over there.

And then I just moved and I said, I'll figure it out after that. Because I believe proximity is power. And if you can get around people, if you can get proximity to the people you want to be like, things will just work out of osmosis. Just by being around those people, you will get better.

Yeah, absolutely. A lot has been written about the talents in the Bay Area, the capital in the Bay Area, the massive companies that have grown out of the Bay Area. One area that's not talked about enough is the information network in the Bay Area. And the Bay Area is its own network effect.

And when you can talk to CEOs or engineers or data scientists or marketers or whoever who are building some of the biggest companies in the world and the fastest growing, one 30 minute coffee can end up saving you eight months of time. These information networks and information exchange that's happening and it's happening thousands of times a day across the Bay Area over coffee, lunch, dinner, brunch, drinks, whatever. That is a lot of information being exchanged. And it could be tips on fundraising.

It could be huge higher. It could be APIs. It could be gross tactics. It could be lots of different information that's not supposed to be shared.

It's proprietary about competitors and so on is being shared. So you do want to like hook yourself into that scene. And the culture you mentioned I think is real because the analogy I give is, if you go to Vegas and you walk around the middle of the day and you'll see people holding this like two foot panic a lot of walking around outside. It is culturally normal to drink during the day, to stay up all night, to do all the things that people do in Vegas.

And people are burning that for this reason too. If you go to Burning Man, it's culturally okay to just hug strangers, go share food and there's no money. There's a culture of burning man that makes certain behaviors normal. It's San Francisco, Silicon Valley and general.

There's a culture that says it is totally normal to believe that you, average old you, can build the biggest company in the world, can change the world, can do anything. If you meet people here who work for a bank or work for a consulting company, they almost apologize when they make their intro. They're like, yeah, I work at whatever. But that's just for now.

I'm waiting to go to my next start. There's a culture here where the normal thing to do is to venture off, create a new idea and try to build a company. That's not really normal in most places. And just having that shift from being you're the outlier to your part of the norm is a pretty big cultural shift.

And if nothing else, you get that just by being here. It's normal to be a little bit crazy here. And that works in your favor. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Everyone else out there is like, all right, these guys are drinking the Kool-Aid over there. Yeah. Well, it's an expensive place.

That's the one knock against it. The cost of living, the cost of running a company here is very high. I mean, the only way I'm able to justify it is increasing your value. It might be two times more expensive, but your company might end up being 10 times or more valuable.

So you talk a little bit about NFX. What are some other things that you read, like when you go up your laptop and you open up some tabs, what are some things that you like to read that makes you better? Because I found that one of the things people really like on this podcast is when we share out like, hey, I go to this subreddit every day. Or I go to Hacker News and the Show tab.

Because that's where I get to see new ideas. I'm just curious, what are some things that you like to read some podcasts you listen to? What makes you better? And maybe other people will like those resources too.

I'm a big fan of reading content written by operators that have been successful or investors that have been successful. Operators, I mean, that's kind of an obvious one, right? For the investors, I mean, the one thing about them, I know VCs get a lot of, you know, criticisms. But the best ones, they're paying attention to entire trends, landscapes, markets, and sometimes what they write is pretty good.

A lot of it's not. So you have to pick and choose what matters. So who do you like to read? Yeah, a lot of NFXs content.

I think First Round does a pretty good job with content. I think Bill Gurlley specifically has a really fantastic blog. Are you big on books? And I've met two schools of thought when I've been doing this podcast.

One is people are like sponges. They're constantly looking for information. They read it, they just love it. And some people are like, yeah, I kind of like dismiss all of it.

Like I really don't read any blogs. I try to stay off Twitter. I just focus on like doing my thing. And so which camp are you more?

Are you more in response or are you more in like blinders? Honestly, I do both at different times. If you're seeking inspiration and trying to stay on top of things and yeah, you need to read the blogs, read the books. If you're just trying to get stuff done and move your metric from, you know, 15% to 20% or whatever it is, then you need to just focus on that.

Twitter and all that becomes a huge distraction. Let's finish out with a bit of advice to you when you were 21. So not specifically you, but the next you. So somebody who's today, or there's a smart person, they may be going to med school or they may be thinking about, it seemed like for you it was really important to make an impact.

But you didn't know how. It's probably really common. I wanted to do big things. I wanted to have big impact.

Where the hell do I start? And so what would you be saying to you like the 21 year old version of you who's thinking those thoughts? Yeah, great. Look, I've thought about this a lot actually.

And I have a whole framework that I'd love to share. Please. And it's a career framework particularly for those in business careers. I think there's only three things that you can aim for.

Number one is cash. Number two is skills and learning. And number three is lifestyle. And at any given time in a particular role, you can only optimize for one of those three things.

You're going to compromise on the other two. So if you're trying to optimize for cash, especially risk adjusted, then yeah, go to investment banking. Go to management consulting. You're optimizing for cash.

You're absolutely going to compromise on skills and learning. And you're going to compromise lifestyle, particularly those in investment banking and other finance roles. If you're trying to optimize on skills and learning, then go startups. Because you're going to learn the most and gain the most skills in the shortest period of time.

And that could be found in your own company. It could also be an early employee. And you're absolutely going to optimize on skills and learning. You're probably going to compromise on cash.

And you are probably going to compromise on lifestyle because you've got to work a lot. Now, if you want to optimize for lifestyle, you should just go join some giant corporation, like Google or Facebook or Microsoft or even in the non-tech world, Genentech. And you are definitely just going to work nine to five. You're going to optimize on your lifestyle.

And relative to the finance industry, you'll compromise a little bit on cash. They're still pretty good. And then you'll compromise on skills and learning because guess what? Not that much gets done.