#15 - Dr. Iman's Incredible Idea

you know a lot of stores have to align for a company to start each to have right c cofounder the right idea gotta be willing to take the risk and so we leave and we start working on an idea we've been working on for a few months like a year and it's just not working we made a big mistake here what are we gonna do this thing's not growing and we're actually running low on cash too pivoting is hard but the thing is it should be acceptable this was the highest stress point i've had and my entire entrepreneurial journey thing with introductions it takes like five minutes of your time but you could change someone one else's life what we realized i come from a family of doctor's surgeons and they are complaining about under staffing and so we looked into it start doing the mark research you realized what a big problem this is and then that's when we're like there has to be a better way two years ago when it was just roman and i we were raising a seed round just raising the initial two million dollars and at that time honestly just two cofounder in an idea probably have to go through seventy five to a hundred meetings and where are we now we just raised a fifty million dollar series a so i wanna start with the who are you so give us your name and give us the name of your company and what your company guys so my name jo aid i'm the ceo and c cofounder of incredible health incredible health is the fastest growing hiring platform for health care workers in the us today hospitals and health systems use our platform to hire permanent nurses today in less than thirty days it normally take some ninety days or longer and our platform is driven the efficiency of hiring by twenty five times the reason that matters is the health care industry employs and most number of workers in america today it is largest labor sector in the country but it also suffers from the biggest shortages our demand for health care as 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 wanna talk about the product because i'm intrigued at how you're doing this yeah but first i wanna there's a couple things when i was looking you up that was interesting one was that you're not a tech person who tried to to just go solve this random problem that you didn't really understand you came from the healthcare care world so you have your empty that's right i am a medical doctor by background and we were just talking you know right before this that you went through med school you finished but you never practiced right 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 an the entire health system or impacting an entire industry so don't get me wrong like one on one patient care is great but it just wasn't necessarily for me or where my interest 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 you know maybe that resonates with the immigrants out there and those of you with immigrant parents i'm originally from sudan my parents are knees and dropping out was just not an option and you come from a doctor family time that's right my dad's a surgeon my two older brothers or resurgence it's so growing up the question is like what type of surgeon do you wanna be yeah not like what do you wanna do exactly yeah okay you realize this and you realize it what in one moment or was this like a slow burn where you were like don't know if i really wanna do this was there 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 just like i cannot i cannot do this for the next forty fifty years and that's gotta be a pretty tough feeling to 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 wanna do well how did you deal with that realization when you had it no i mean it definitely wasn't even me crying it was more around alright now time to figure out what to do instead you would straighten into problem solving mode i went straight into problem a solving mode and i mean i'm no regrets you know that that degree does give you a lot of credibility yeah whether you deserve it or whether i deserve it or not i looked it right now yeah talk to the doctor great yeah i don't use much of that knowledge it does provide credibility and one consulting because most of people i know they go into consulting they go into consulting for the money they go into consulting because they kinda just don't know what they wanna do and that seems like a reputable career so it's seem 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 wanted to have a bigger impact at the time management consulting would give me exposure to 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 in a lot of smart people and but okay where's what's the best but it was very corporate you yes you know very very corporate and that didn't sit right that didn't sit right with me no yeah you wearing in the leather jacket right now you seem super corporate yeah so at some point you decided also this is not for me absolutely i knew it wasn't for me and so again i'm like okay 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 at wharton and during those two years i got a lot of exposure to entrepreneurship there were a lot of former entrepreneurs there who are my classmates there were classes around entrepreneurship there was just a lot of our activity there and again the wharton 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 for you're a believer in the nba because i'm i'm a you're an anti nba okay so i believe that there multiple paths to success for sure right and for entrepreneurship in particular there's two thousand different ways is to reach the goals that you wanna reach for me personally and for i'm sure several other entrepreneurs that nba and wharton business school or you know whatever it does take whichever harvard stanford whatever it did help me in two or three different ways so first it's the brand and the stamp alright so when you are going into a venture capital firm or a hospital or you're or you're trying to give in 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 yeah the second thing i got out of it was a network and i'll talk about that a little bit more later but okay that that that is the network we'll book mark that 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 right 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 a knowledge that you gain there as well so i but it's not the only way that's that's my agree the nuance i would put on it so i agree with when you said there's two thousand different paths to success in entrepreneurship the way i would say it is two thousand different paths to the starting line to get success really only one way to do a entrepreneurship which is to start something and start trying to get a customer and then start once you get a bunch of customers to get your operations to work and then 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 market or 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 wanna 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 get exposure move to a different place we're gonna start work at a big company consult whatever you gotta do to get to that starting line but it's like if you ever done one of these races like tough mud or spartan race or something so they have this gimmick where before you start you've declined this wall and it's like the obstacle before the race even it 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 you use still using you know you don't know how to climb walls yeah but your point is right so and this is now on the end of business school i've got an offer to go back to mckinsey and i'm like man i really wanna do is entrepreneurship thing and where is the best place to do that the san francisco area mh and although i've got gained some knowledge i've gained a network i've gained a brand i haven't actually done anything yet right you know when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship but you got stand but i got the stamps so what i decide to do is i moved to the bay area because this is the best place in the world for startups ups especially technology startups ups i become an employee at an early stage company that's venture back in healthcare technology it's called the live core i was leading product and that is where i learned to work with engineers and designers and data scientists end marketers and what it takes to launch a product to grow a business i mean i just learned so much mh you learn a lot as an early stage employee and so you were sort of ten years in the making building up to being prepared to start incredible health that's right and now just to give people some context so incredible health you started it how many years ago now two years so two years ago you just raised the big flashy round i did yep give us the details so you raised a bunch of money from andre h and the wave of like support that came out was pretty remarkable so i had wanted you on the podcast before that because so we had told me about you had 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 so what led you to when you're at silicon valley you're working at a startup up bridge the gap when did you say i know what i wanna do i know what business i wanna 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 cofounder seems room port lock went to mit he's been building software for the last fifteen years that's engineer i know high integrity this the best technical cofounder you can have okay right and so i convinced him i'm like hey let's just go start this company and you know a lot of stores have to align for a company to start each to have right c cofounder or the right idea you gotta 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 right 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 youtube in a apartment or space or our yeah yeah we're working in our department and it's not and you're at the start of the year you're like oh of course this is entrepreneurship it's gonna be hard by the end of you year how you feel in not great not great i mean i'm just like oh my god i'm we made a big mistake here what what do we gonna do this thing's not growing it's a software tool it's just not working around that time see this is where wharton comes back in right i had a professor named adam grant famous guy hey now he's famous back you know when i was taking this classes he was you know just professor yeah yeah one of the youngest tenured professors are wharton and the thing with entrepreneurs 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 ask adam and adam's is a big believer in introductions and so am actually thing with introductions it takes like five minutes of your time but you can change someone else's life right so i ask adam for introductions to six or seven people and he immediately does of these intros and who who are these people why do we these people these are either former operators who've built startups and exited and or venture capital investors and so your mindset you weren't trying to raise money at this moment was it more like need to talk to some more people to help me yeah exactly he puts me in into so one of the introductions is to hunter walk mh who is a managing partner and a fund here called homebrew he's prolific tweet first investor yeah hunter is awesome right yeah he's done all all all kinds of stuff but yeah i know his day job is managing director at the home i me hunter hunter doesn't invest and but what he does do is he introduces me to someone named james courier i know james alright coming on the podcast oh that's great okay so james courier is five time entrepreneur exited a bunch of times and he's running this fund at the time it was included an accelerator as well today is just a fund called n i need james courier i we'll 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 n fx accelerator and so accelerator starts a few weeks later two days into it we're like okay we you need to pivot right and the roman and i go into this whole exploration self self discover three thankfully with the support of the n nfl partners right and james is good at pivot if you ever heard of house party today yeah before that they were mee cat which was like really popular live streaming app right before periscope blew up and kinda killed them and before that they were something else life on air yep and james was working with ben and the founder and like helped them pivot to like he's like why don't you just keep it super simple and just do this one button that makes you go live streaming on twitter yep and that that took off and i've heard the story from two or three people well i've gone to him several times just being like hey my shit's not working what do you think and then feel like within like five minutes have like this amazing amount of clarity as to why your shit's not working yep and what might work better and you're like wow you're so much better this than me this was amazing thank you so much what it month you cut pretty much yeah so james carrier pete flint ge weiss levy they're the partner at n fx i mean they have been doing this internet tax startup up game since the late nineties so they they've got twenty years on us yeah and you see a lot in twenty years you build a lot in twenty years they've made a gazillion mistakes that they can tell us not to make right 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 right 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 so you can succeed hundred percent and so you go there you're like we need to pivot you do your self discovery is that like you go and you do a bunch of drugs in the field and what what's your version of self discovery no it's it's me and roman in a c working space just trying to trying to figure this out you're dragon yeah and what we realized is i come from a a family of doctors surgeons you know and a lot of my friends are as well and they were complaining about under staffing at the same time rome sisters or 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 what this doesn't make any sense right and so we looked into a start doing the market research start doing the customer research and we 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 we're like this doesn't make any sense and then that's when we're like there has to be a better way and say 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 stumbled it all in the nugget of what could be a business idea because this is a problem and this current solution sucks and there has to be a better way and like if you just keep looking for those moments you may stumble into your idea so so you realize the shortage what causes the staffing problem what causes the delays and the the long timelines lines and the the under staffing what is the root cause two root causes number one is just not enough supply there's just our demand for healthcare 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 healthcare facilities in general are using have not changed since like the eighties mh you know and they're relying on external job boards like hey i post 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 of that to screen through all those applicants to match them to the right jobs you know and it's when each hospital recruiters trying to fill a hundred jobs at any given time that is crazy and efficient yep and then the traditional recruiting agencies they're also using humans to source to screen and as a result you know they're very expensive they're charging twenty thousand thirty thousand dollars or more per higher and so that's not cost effective for a hospital now the thing is this problem more tackling is very urgent for hospitals and for our health system as a whole is when you're under staffed you cannot deliver quality care right you need great health care workers to deliver their product which is care mh right and when you're under staff you're paying over overtime you're paying for contract workers which usually cost two times more than your permanent workforce and hospitals are thin margin businesses and that eats into their margins mh coupled with that you're burning out your existing staff because you're asking them to work over time and the harder your existing staff is working the more likely they are to create medication errors read admissions patient satisfaction goes down honestly more patient mortality goes up when you're under staff right so this is like a and on fire if they were work to lead too which exactly exactly so the 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 it this is a significant issue yeah yeah and so you started to realize this yep and there's two paths i wanna go i wanna figure out okay hey what you do with that information once you realize realizes is a big problem how did you go about solving it the other side of me is just like really fascinated with how a hospital works but yeah maybe because i i just had a baby thirteen days ago thank you wow and you're here that's great and i'm here well is it great but that's the question i think my wife and my wife she says it's not yeah and so but when we were there the nurses were so amazing like we we had to be a at kaiser here and like literally there's a nurse laura that like i will never forget her like she was so incredible she was so thoughtful so helpful and we stayed like an extra night because were like why would we go home this is amazing and like normally i never wanna be in hospital but yeah 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 when they think of a hospital it's just they think about the sort of it's almost like a like a public school right it's like you go there you get your service and you leave you don't really think of a hospital as a business so tell me about hospitals as a business so our hospitals for profit nonprofit typically yeah so there's six thousand hospitals in the us and just to be clear i mean hospitals aren't the only type of healthcare care facility we have in this country there's also urgent care and skilled nursing and surgical centers and sure huge industry and hospitals specifically usually run on very thin margins three percent is the average wow relatively poorly run hospitals one percent or less a very well run hospital might be five percent mh margins they're fifty percent of their operating costco goes to labor yep this is a very labor intensive industry you need your health 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 yeah a restaurant is like ten percent margin and thirty five percent labor thirty percent labor cost yep this is even harsh on in that sense it is and who owns the hospitals or hospitals usually independent city owned is there franchises you know tell me about that i don't know anything wrong it's a whole range most are profit that are some for profit hospitals as well there are some that are publicly traded i mean the way i think of if i'm was the segment the industry's is primarily three main areas one is academic medical centers so stanford healthcare cedar sinai mh you know usc ucsf like these these are all clients of ours but they're they're academic medical okay and they're usually affiliated with university and then you have your large health systems h c tenant providence saint joseph you know venice 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 health care in a box understand once you have this insight and you're like okay this is what we wanna do in an at this point yep where do you go from there how do you get this thing off the ground the other key point i wanna just make really quickly just before we leave the topic of imagination right is yeah you wanna solve a a significant problem there's probably three or four other criteria that you wanna meet before you you know start committing ten years of your life to it hair fire problem that was one that was your checklist yep hair on fire problem it should be ideally a huge market because if you just capture one percent of it two percent of it than you're fine mh right the third piece is whatever you come up with your your unique insight needs to be at least ten times better than what's already out there eight like it needs to be faster or better or cheaper whatever whatever it is but at least ten times better can just be some small incremental improvement and how do you judge that because everyone loves their baby everyone thinks their ideas are ten times better so what's away what's a more nuanced way of thinking about it like is it ten times better at one thing like ten times cheaper or on one axis is that the way to think about it or like i guess for you guys how did you come up with yeah this is ten times out not two times not three yeah it's either ten times cheaper ten times more efficient ten times better end n p score or my customer experience so deciding in what way am i ten to better is more intelligent way than just yeah believing and it just loving your own thing so much that absolutely decide 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 different approach like it it could be lots of different things that make it ten times better right okay that's so hair fire problem large market ten times better solution what was your other one competitors alright so ideally you don't want five hundred competitors okay you also don't want zero because maybe the market doesn't exist right you know the ideal is i don't know ten ten to thirty i'm this a little bit arbitrary combination of publicly traded companies are like incumbents maybe if you start but that's it yeah and so you win down this checklist and you're like okay this idea seems to take all the boxes yeah more and more criteria i mean we talk about this a lot but founder market fit what uniquely suits you as founders to solve this idea specifically and for you this was pretty natural yeah you and your c founder we were very comfortable with healthcare care and did you think of other ideas that didn't fit that like were you you're like i'm gonna make a credit card or there were some other style of businesses i 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 kind of go into ideas was this a week two weeks a month if you're were under pressure demo day was coming up so we yeah that's helpful yeah maybe four weeks four weeks most and so what what was the day in the life like at this time you wake up you go to the whiteboard or what was your guys process during those weeks yeah it was a lot of whiteboard boarding was a lot of talking to the ana fx partners it was talking to you know family members that was very helpful my brothers were very helpful with the idea aviation phase it was reading science fiction isaac ass all it was watching black mirror it was you know what whatever it takes whatever inspires you yeah and so you were you're doing this and how are you feeling the during this time like was this a en time or was this like a oh my god stress this was the highest stress point i've had in my entire entrepreneurial journey wow pivoting is hard but the thing is it should be should be acceptable a lot of massive companies today were pivot slack twitter twitch twitch meant in many many right and so instagram instagram you just have to be bold like many things in entrepreneurship you just have to be brave yeah bold and just take the leap and pivot yeah for those who don't know instagram started as like a location check and service called bourbon slack started as a video game yeah discord started as a video game twitch started as justin tv which is a totally different thing group on started as a political activism platform and they all pivoted into these really big so central company so pivot definitely can work but like you said very difficult and the further in you go the more difficult to get so like you guys were pivoting with two people you know sometimes pivoted when we have twenty people working at the company that's very hard pivot to do yeah some people do it a two thousand people that's sure it's even harder so so you could pull off the pivot and and so where do you like first time you come up with a name because the name is like incredible health it's an incredible name where did the name come i know the nfl guys really care about names they cares ton of about name that's not silicon valley like oh marketing that's just something you do last like just engineering engineering engineering whatever navy wants slap out on it like most people don't think about names the nfl guys are like no names super matter they do matter james courier it has a whole talk a whole rant maybe he'll do it on your on podcast broadcast when he's on where language matters everything from the name of your company down to like the tiny copy in your app to your emails that you're sending out language matters it is often the first time users or customers clients in interact with you so they were we went through a lot of different names james k was really helpful in this as well we went with incredible health because it's unique it sounds big sounds amazing i mean who doesn't wanna be affiliated with the company called incredible health right now if you're an employee an investor a client i mean incredible incredible right yeah so who came up with the name of gosh i think i'm pretty sure we were in james courier garage just going through a bunch of names so me rome james yeah yeah and what was like the other contenders are like the really bad names i mean i honestly i can't even remember but it was really good health yeah exactly i think it was just you know you and you have to look at domains and trademarks in this and that as well yeah it was all stuff it was on names that sounded over the top and so where are you guys today it us a sense of like this success so far you're obviously early in the journey yeah a long way to go but you've definitely done enough where how much did you raise in the most recent round yeah so we raised fifteen million led by jeff jordan and reese h jeff jordan if you're listeners don't know if is he's probably a top marketplace investor in the world he was a ceo of open table president of ebay he was early investor and board member right now an airbnb at insta cart at offer up at lime at pinterest you know he knows what he's doing that marketplace jordan yes exactly so where are we now so we've been working on this for two years oh we have grown across california we have over a hundred and fifty hospitals using our platform right now including cedar sinai in stanford and h c and you know 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 the california business to the point where it was profitable the reason we raised a series a 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 and you said that you were loving that idea that that was the biggest smile as she you so far as she been raising an eyebrow a little bit as you like wanted to take over the world i love it yeah so you and i will say this our mission that's someone we mentioned our mission right our our vision is to help health professionals live better lives and our mission is to help health care professionals find and do their best work and that's where we're trying to achieve work the entire team is on a mission i it yeah so the the business model then is when you place somebody you take cut or how does how does incredible health make money yeah the employers paying incredible health when they hire with not in a subscription it's like no different we have a couple different models out there customize it per per client yeah you know they can purchase a pack of hires or there's also subscription as well you to just get access to the platform and so is the key metric for you guys like you know how many people placed per month or how many hires number hires exactly and what's your goal is it like where you trying to get to of that it you know a certain number is it a growth rate how do you think about that that number what do it's your met 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 and 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 know 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 this is one giant project right and it needs to have goals and so picking what the right metric is is going to vary by company in our case this number of hires in other people's cases is gonna be monthly active users there's going to be one metric that is the most important and then there's secondary and metrics as well that also matter picking the right metric matters because you want your entire team regardless of their function focused on that metric because every team has levers that influence that metric mh in terms of what the actual growth rate number is i mean that's a function of your ambition whether you're a venture backed or not yeah so how'd do you pick twenty just in your case if we wanna take over the entire market in less than say eight years like that's the growth rate you required love so it worked backwards from the the end state the way exactly and so what were the moments along the way because now everything sounds pretty good and you've told us about when you had to pivot tough that was the stress of doing that when you have o day four weeks away where you're gonna be on stage telling investors this is what i do and you don't even know what you do yet so that's definitely tough yep but i think you know once you have the funding 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 like i think raising our seed round the initial capital was challenging the series a was a lot a lot easier because you have more proof points and we were fortunate enough to have all the the top three venture capital firms in the world wanting to invest so we were able to be very selective the seed round eventually so okay so we just raised a fifty million dollar series a summer two thousand nineteen when we closed two years ago when we it was just roman and i we are raising our seed round we're just raising the initial two million dollars and at that time honestly just two cofounder in an idea we have a couple of health systems or hospitals that are in contracting we have some nurses on the platform but there's not not much going on yet yeah and probably had to go through seventy five to a hundred meetings to get that seed round done by the end it was overs subscribe but you know yeah it was a grind and the thing is with fundraising and one thing that entrepreneurs may not realize especially those outside of the bay area is at it is a little bit of 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 you know go somebody out there listening saying they're like okay there's a game there's rules and there's a playbook where the hell do i find this thing how do they get their hands on this playbook there's a few ways number one go to n x dot com and read their contents okay i'm sure they have multiple blog posts on on how to raise and number two get the right mentors and advisers and the danger here is i notice a lot of people who call themselves mentors advisors experts and entrepreneurship and there's the 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 can look up online so you can figure out if someone's with legit or not mh without even talking to them and for you when you reach out to these people are you reaching out saying hey plenty do your mentor are you saying hey let's get a coffee or you saying hey can you help me with a specific thing what worked for you as as recruiting those mentors to you i usually do very su concise emails with a ask the other thing that really works is warm introductions so having adam grant facilitate the introduction helped having alley who's a one of your former guests here facilitate intros helps like warm introductions helps yeah in fact so helped even so in our intro so he was like hey i was like i wanna have her on he was like great here's the intro i should meet and 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 you know when you're emailing with somebody usually bcc out the person who made the intro you're like yeah moving you to bcc now we'll take it from here and he jumped back in from bcc it was like no no don't wait two months do it like this weekend do it now yeah so that's the type of intro that like you can rarely get as somebody who will vouch for you not just in introduction but really say no no you need to meet this person you need to do this come on let's do yeah that goes those little things can go a long way now absolutely and then there's an overall like context here that we can ignore and that is a culture of silicon valley the culture of this of the scene in the san francisco bay area this is a culture where people help yeah pay culture it's a pay it for culture usually when you ask someone for something especially that came through 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 that if you're building a technology company and you wanted it to be huge san francisco bay area is still the best place in the world to do it mh so to the extent that you can get here and build your network here that is a huge advantage yeah i'm similarly minded when i about six seven years ago when i moved to san francisco i was sitting in australia and i wanted to start a start up and i just new well if i can come to silicon valley that's the mecca 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 gotta be there it's like if i'm gonna be an actor i gotta go to hollywood right that's how i felt about i wanna do a start if i gotta come francisco and of course you can start it anywhere and there are many great examples but if you don't have anything tying you down 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 to six five o area code which i almost san francisco but it's actually palo us so i kinda missed but i did that when i'm sitting in australia and i just to mentally make that shift i'm like no i'm there i'm a 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 to the people you wanna be like things would just work out of osmosis just by being around those people you will get better yeah absolutely a lot has been written about the talent in the bay area the capital in the bay area the mass companies that have grown out of the bay area one area that's not talked about enough is is the information network yeah in the bay area and the bay bar 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 these in the world and the fastest growing you know one thirty minute coffee can end up saving you eight months of time right these information networks and the information exchange that's happening and it's happening thousands of times a day across the bay area over coffee lunch dinner brunch you know like drinks whatever that is a lot of information being exchanged and it could be tips on fundraising it could be hud to hire it could be kpis it could gross tactics it could be lot lots of different you know even information that's not supposed to be shared that's proprietary right about competitors and so on is being shared right so you do wanna like hook yourself into that scene and the culture you mentioned i think is real because the analogy i give is okay if you go to vegas and you walk around the middle of the day vegas you'll see people holding this like two foot pin cola 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 man for this reason too if you go to burning man it's culturally okay to just hug strangers you know go share food and they there's no money there's a culture of burning man that makes certain behaviors normal it's san francisco the silicon valley in general there's a culture that says it is totally normal to believe that you just 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 you know i work at whatever bain but but that's just for like i'm i'm i'm i'm waiting to go do my next start you know like there's a culture here where the normal thing to do is to venture off create invent a new idea and go 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 is normal to be a little bit crazy here yeah and that works in your favor yeah absolutely alright now we're done with our bay area ranch yeah everyone else had the bear is like alright you these guys are drinking the ko over there yeah well it it it's inexpensive place that's the one walk against it for 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 the increasing your the company's value value exactly it might it might be two times more expensive but your company might might end up being ten times or more valuable and so you talk a little bit about n what are some other things that you read like when you go open up your laptop and you you know you open up some tabs what are some things that you like to read that makes you better because i 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 mo as you listen to what makes you better and then maybe other people will like those resources too i'm big fan of reading content written by operators that have been successful or investors that have i've been successful operators i mean that's kind of an obvious one right for the investors i mean the one thing about them and i know i know vcs get a lot you know criticisms but the best ones they're paying attention to entire trends landscapes markets and sometimes what their rights pretty good a lot of it's not so you have to pick in shoes so who what matters like to read yeah i love n this content i think first round does a pretty good job with content i think bill girly specifically has really fantastic blog and are you big on books and i've met two schools of thought when i've been doing podcast one is people are like sponge the constant looking for information they read it that they digest they love it and there's other people who are like yeah i kinda 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 in are you more of sponge or are you more in like just blind honestly i do 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 read the blogs read the books if you're just trying to get stuff done and move your metric from you know fifteen percent to twenty percent or whatever it is then you need to just focus on that twitter and all that becomes a huge distraction and so let's finish out with a bit of advice to you know you when you were twenty one so not specifically you but the next you so somebody who's today or they're a smart person they may be going 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 i it's probably really common of like you know i wanna do big things i wanna have a big impact but where the hell do i start yeah and so what would you be saying to like the twenty one year old version of you who's thinking those thoughts yeah great look i've i thought about this a lot actually alright and i have a whole a framework that i'd love to share please and it's a career framework particularly for those in in business careers i think there's only three things that you can aim for number one is cash number two 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 bank go to management consulting you're optimizing for cash you're absolutely gonna compromise on skills and learning and you're going to compromise lifestyle particularly those in investment banking and other finance rules if you're trying to optimize on skills and learning then go to startups because you're going to learn the most and grain the most skills in the shortest period of time and that could be founding your own company it could also be an early employee and you're absolutely gonna optimize on skills and learning you're probably gonna compromise on cash and you are probably gonna compromise on lifestyle because you gotta work a lot mh now if you wanna optimize for lifestyle you should just go join some giant corporation like google or facebook or microsoft or you know even in the non tech world gene tech and you are definitely just gonna work nine five you're gonna optimize on your lifestyle and you'll relative to the finance industry you'll compromise a little bit on cash but it's still pretty good and then you'll compromise on skills and learning because guess what not that much gets done right and you're not gonna have that much of bit of an impact if there's twenty thousand other people right and so decide what matters to you and what you wanna optimize on at any given stage in your life this isn't a judgment thing and people can pick whatever they want you know i have plenty of friends who are you know moms and dads and they're starting to pop out kids and wanna just optimize on lifestyle and that cool but just know know that's what you're doing know that you're compromising on other things if you wanna optimize on skills and learning which is what i pretty much optimize on all the time i'm just trying to learn as much as i can and as quickly as i can and gain as many skills as i can then absolutely go for startups and if you're optimizing on cash and you don't wanna take on any risk and yeah i just go into finance mh why do you pick to optimize for the learning skill side that just a lot of that has to do with how i grew up my values i have no problem with risk i'm generally quite risk taking education and learning was a big deal in my family it's one of my parents values it's prevalent throughout my family and it's just where my interests lie you like scratching the itch the curiosity and as a result i mean most people you ploy to startup up or also trying to optimize for skills and learning because i mean why else are they there mh right yeah you surround yourself other people who have made the same choice essentially yeah absolutely yeah that's good one i have a a similar framework you're either trying to learn earn lifestyle or legacy the last one is legacy which is that's around impact which i think you're also kinda doing right now yeah and so at any given time you switch gears so like when i was in my twenties i specifically said this is the time to learn and so i started one start and started and then i joined to startup and i you know i just kept doing that even though they weren't super high paying jobs and in fact i lost money and some of but it was like that's my business school i'm learning how your business so that one only cost me thirty grand no problem and then as i shifted this okay now it's time to cash in some of those chips let's earn a little bit yeah why are we earning but we're earning so that we can have you know some cash in the bank so that i can go on another learn sprint where i have enough supply saved up that i can go take some time and build whatever i want learn whatever i want do whatever i want and so switching gears depending on where you're at in your life is think pretty important for that yeah absolutely other question i would have for someone like you is if you weren't doing this company you're doing now what space or idea is most intriguing to you so if i could if i took incredible health off the table what piqued your curiosity a lot where you you're like yeah i don't know what i would but i would kinda go into this direction this interests me yeah great question the areas i'm uncomfortable is like the health care technology industry right so within i'll just answer the question just within that i think there was a lot of founder that are working on things that are patient facing i don't think there's enough found working on things that are more around the operations of it like there's a whole back end stack to the health care industry where there's just not enough innovation we're tackling one happens to be labor staffing right but there's compliance and revenue cycle and you know lots of different areas in the operational stack of the health care industry that there's just not enough innovation so i thought about idea ideas is that space but the thing that always scares me is the adoption health care already has you know certain rules and regulators regulations that i get hard to to be a compliant and be a system that that can be used but you said the hospitals you were going into the systems they were using from the eighties guessing it's like that for all there's essentially so how do you navigate that adoption like how do you get somebody to adopt incredible health you have to solve the real need and be at least at least ten times better that usually gets you in the door and then the other piece about the distribution of this is you just need fantastic language and we talked about that earlier and fantastic people who can get access and another thing is just don't be intimidated look it's all hard whether you're building an company in health care or tech or what whatever industry it's all hard they all have different challenges and but you know that's what makes it so exciting to and so if somebody wants to get in touch with you after this they hear this they're like wow she was great i wanna talk to him on what's the best way to follow you to get in touch with you shout out basically how people can more of you yeah i do wanna do a quick plug that we are hiring great especially here in the bay hiring for we are hiring in account management software engineers designers marketers any role product managers pretty much every all the key roles we're hiring for we need great people who are gonna join this mission and how to get in touch yeah i'm em anna incredible health dot com the website is incredible health dot com i'm also on linkedin and twitter and facebook so you know those are all channels that i check but okay great i appreciate coming in and tell the story and love what you're building very rarely do you find a business that is both like a super interesting business model like a lucrative wow somebody built the marketplace or staffing one of the biggest labor industries we have that would be a really valuable company and then the impact that that has or wow if we can get more awesome healthcare care professionals placed quickly that would be like the knock effects of that are huge and so i know that this has both these sort of the business fundamentals to be so juicy but then also the impact and i often find that you have to train and this is one where i feel like you didn't train you got both you got the impact and you got the business a cyber that's right one other thing is just to help out entrepreneurs specifically i believe in the power of intros one introduction can change someone's life if anyone wants introductions to these amazing mentors and advisors that have helped us on our journey whether it's a team man and effects it you know know james walk at obvious ventures also in a very experienced operator charles hudson at precursor jeff jordan and the andre team and h team like whoever right i'm happy to help and then quick plug just for the women entrepreneurs out there i am a win and the minorities i am a minority too it's hard it's harder and so i'm happy to help love it very alright thank you