Dr. Iman Abuzeid didn’t set out to disrupt the healthcare hiring system. But after she began listening more closely — especially to nurses — what she heard was an industry full of friction, delays, and burnout. Fixing that friction became the foundation for Incredible Health, a hiring marketplace now used by more than a million healthcare workers. In this episode, Dr. Abuzeid talks with host Jeff Berman about her strategic approach to expansion and how scaling allows her to have more impact — and stay true to her calling.
Table of Contents:
- Iman Abuzeid's path to entrepreneurship
- The pivot that led to Incredible Health
- The strategic framework that birthed Incredible Health
- Why Incredible Health geographically constrained themselves
- The story of landing their first customer
- Engaging with healthcare giants
- How slow expansion set Incredible Health up to scale
- Breaking down Incredible Health's business model
- Hiring advice for any leader
- Solutions to the nursing shortage in the U.S
- Lightning Round questions
Transcript:
Disrupting healthcare job hunting
IMAN ABUZEID: Founders are very good at just going straight to execution. It’s almost like a boat leaving a harbor. You want to make sure you end up in the right place, instead of ending up randomly in the middle of the ocean.
JEFF BERMAN: Dr. Iman Abuzeid’s first start-up fizzled out and left her stuck in the middle of that ocean. But the lessons she learned led her to an undeniable North Star in moving forward. That North Star: listening to the pain points of her customers.
ABUZEID: We spoke with nurses and really heard the urgency in their voice. It was almost like an emotional experience for them, in terms of just the problems that they were tackling.
BERMAN: Iman saw an opportunity to disrupt the way nurses get hired that would benefit everyone involved. That’s why she co-founded Incredible Health, a marketplace for healthcare professionals. Incredible Health now boasts more than 1 million healthcare workers on the platform and has reached a valuation of nearly $1.7 billion.
I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, we’ll hear how Iman Abuzeid’s strategic approach to scale fueled the massive growth of Incredible Health. But first, we wanted to hear how she ended up getting bitten by the entrepreneurship bug after graduating from medical school.
[THEME MUSIC]
Iman, welcome to Masters of Scale.
ABUZEID: Thank you so much for having me.
Iman Abuzeid’s path to entrepreneurship
BERMAN: We’re thrilled to have you. Like so many of the founders and leaders who have scaled companies in extraordinary ways, you’re an immigrant, you didn’t grow up here. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up.
ABUZEID: Sure. So I’m originally from Sudan, that’s where my parents are from. I lived in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates, in the UK. I immigrated to the U.S. when I was 24 years old, and I worked in management consulting in New York City, and then moved to Philadelphia to do my MBA at Wharton. And then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work in tech.
BERMAN: The paths out of management consulting are many. There are varied paths. Going down an entrepreneurial path is not what a lot of management consultants do. It’s taking on the risk yourself; it’s having to give yourself the advice that you might be giving to others as a consultant. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
ABUZEID: I went to medical school in London, so I’m an MD by background. And if we just go back to even that time period, I was always interested in having a big impact. Don’t get me wrong, working as a doctor is a wonderful career, and I recommended it to everyone. However, I really wanted to find a way to make an impact on a much larger scale. So after medical school, I moved to New York, worked in management consulting. The benefit of that profession is that it just, A, I grew a lot of skills, and, B, just exposed me more to business. And then certainly the MBA at Wharton helped me do that even further.
But for entrepreneurship, I genuinely believe, I think entrepreneurship is the epitome of what you can do with a career in business. I think it’s amazing. It’s like, imagine a small group of people can transform an entire industry. It’s magic; it’s the coolest thing. So, I was always just trying to find ways to get there.
BERMAN: What led you to move out to the Bay, and how did you end up starting on an entrepreneurial journey?
ABUZEID: So I have a belief that the San Francisco Bay Area is still the world capital of technology. If you want to start a company, especially a software company, it still is the best place. And that’s for so many reasons, right? The capital, the talent, the ideas, the network, it’s just a really amazing place to start a company. So I knew when I was finishing business school in 2013, there was only one plan: move to the Bay Area. And joined as a product manager at an early-stage healthcare technology company, and that’s really where I got exposed to software engineers and data scientists and designers and got to learn what it takes to actually build products that users love and how to grow them as well. And so after doing that for a couple of years, left with a star software engineer that I was working with, Rome Portlock, who is a total whiz, went to MIT, he’s a fantastic engineer as well, and we left to co-found a company.
The pivot that led to Incredible Health
BERMAN: That’s not the company you now have co-founded and you’re running. What was that company?
ABUZEID: Yeah, so we actually started working on another idea, and we worked on it for about a year, which didn’t actually work. It was actually an app that helped small and medium healthcare businesses like chiropractors, physical therapists, so on, retain their clients. So it helped them engage with them between sessions and so on. And so it was live, there was a revenue coming in, but we were really struggling with growing it. And so we made the decision after, gosh, a year of working on it, to pivot to a different idea.
BERMAN: And so just take us back, if you would. You and Rome are at a fairly early-stage company. How does it come to be that you leave and start a company together? What catalyzed that decision to do that with each other?
ABUZEID: I’m a big fan of thinking through, well, what is your goal in five to 10 years, and then work backwards from there. So I knew in my 20s like, hey, I know I want to start a company, so what’s the path to get there? One path is to get to the Bay Area, another path is start. You don’t have enough skills, so become a product manager first. So all of that, that was the ultimate goal at the end of the day. And then Rome, I encouraged him to join me on the journey. I don’t think he has any regrets around joining me on this trip.
BERMAN: Well, given where you are today, I have to imagine not. Okay, so you all are working at this other company. You come up with this idea. Do you start working on it while you’re there, or do you all leave, burn the boats behind you, and say, “We’re doing this, and we’re all in on this concept, we’re going to go build a company?”
ABUZEID: We left. So we were working on a company full time. Now, one of the things that happened around that time is joining a team called NFX. NFX today, it’s a seed and series A fund. At the time it was a fund, plus an accelerator. And so we joined their accelerator program, and that is actually where Rome and I made the decision to pivot. And it was great to work with James Currier and Pete Flint and Gigi Weiss Levy, in terms of figuring out what to do next. And so they were awesome thought partners as well.
BERMAN: Had you all raised money against the initial concept, or were you bootstrapping it? Where were you in your process?
ABUZEID: Yeah, we were bootstrapping. We didn’t raise meaningful capital until we started Incredible Health.
BERMAN: What was the point at which as you were in the NFX accelerator, you and Rome looked at each other and just said, “You know what? This really isn’t working, there’s a better idea”? Take us through, was there an inflection point where that happened? What happened there?
ABUZEID: Yeah. So essentially we’d been working on this idea for a year; it was called Lift League, by the way. Fundamentally, we came to the conclusion that small business owners didn’t necessarily prioritize or care as much about retaining customers as they did acquiring customers, and our product only helped with retention, not acquisition. And so based on that, we were like, hey, let’s just cut bait and change the idea completely, which I came to understand is actually very common in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area. There’s so many companies today that were major pivots like Twitter, like Slack, those founders were working on completely different ideas.
The strategic framework that birthed Incredible Health
BERMAN: Yeah. So the decision to pivot when something isn’t working is one thing, what to pivot to is a whole other matter. What was the idea for what is now Incredible Health, and what was that moment where you go, “Oh yeah, that’s the thing that we need to go do?”
ABUZEID: So one thing that we did at the time was really put together a much stronger ideation framework. And honestly, this is probably advice I give to a lot of founders. I think founders are very good at just going straight to execution, but sometimes we’ve got to think through our ideas to make sure we end up in the right place. It’s almost like a boat leaving a harbor, you want to make sure you end up in the right place instead of ending up randomly in the middle of the ocean.
So what we did was, and part of this framework is when you have an idea, really think through the market size, think through the competition, and then think through your unique insights. What have you figured out that is 10X, at least 10X smarter, better, faster, cheaper, more compliant, whatever it is, than what’s already out there? And then after that, if it’s meeting those three criteria, market size, competition, and unique insight, then go deep, really deep on the market research and the customer research. So we did that with a few ideas and ultimately decided to go with the Incredible Health idea.
To share a bit more about our thought process: At the time, the healthcare industry is the biggest labor industry in the country, by number of workers. So one in eight Americans works in healthcare. It’s also an industry where we have tremendous, huge labor shortages. Right? Our demand for healthcare as a country keeps growing, our population is aging, it’s putting more and more strain on the U.S. healthcare system, and we as a country have not done a great job of increasing the number of healthcare workers to meet that demand. So we were very familiar with that huge supply and demand imbalance. As far as just what else is out there, it was primarily just job boards, which is technology from 20 plus years ago, which are very tough when there’s big shortages because from an employer perspective, you’re posting a job and hoping it all works out, which is really tough when there’s huge shortages. And then similarly on the talent side or on the candidate side, the healthcare workers were saying, “I applied to 10 places, I usually don’t even hear back.” Right?
So there was a few unique things that we did with Incredible Health that we believed it was at least 10X better than what’s already out there. One was having employers apply to the talent instead of the other way around. So we really flipped the script, flipped it around. Instead of waiting for healthcare workers to apply to employers, have the employers apply to the healthcare workers. We also worked on automating the matching and automating the screening because of where software was at that time and still today, I mean, we have the ability to do that at scale. And so those are some of the initial insights, and so ultimately decided to pursue the idea based on that.
Of course, we did a little bit of customer research too. We spoke with health system executives, we spoke with nurses, and really heard the urgency in their voice. It was almost like an emotional experience for them, in terms of just the problems that they’re tackling with hiring in general.
BERMAN: I imagine that part of the advantage of the pivot also was you went from pitching software to thousands upon thousands of prospective customers who were not all that practiced in evaluating new software systems and what have you, and all of a sudden you’re pitching like Kaiser, you’re pitching huge healthcare companies that have this massive need for talent, and we have a talent shortage. So, was part of it also that you saw that your sales channels and sales cycles would be cleaner and shorter?
ABUZEID: That was definitely one of our learnings. And selling in the enterprise world, you are working with a more sophisticated set of buyers. And that meant for us, we really had to have an amazing business case and ROI and all of that had to be put in place too.
BERMAN: Yeah. So I’m curious, as you were looking at the marketplace and well, obviously there’s LinkedIn and obviously there’s ZipRecruiter and other platforms. What did you see that you could do 10X better than the existing platforms for job applicants, for recruiting, etc, in healthcare specifically?
ABUZEID: First was the vertical focus on just healthcare. One of the complaints our customers have, the health systems have, is that these horizontal marketplaces like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter and so on, are not necessarily customized for healthcare. The reason that matters is healthcare is a regulated industry, the healthcare workers have licenses and certifications and so on, all of that matters. So that was one piece.
The second piece was just the employers applying to the talent, instead of the other way around. So it’s a completely different experience. Healthcare workers, they absolutely love it, right? They create a profile, they sit back and relax, they get interview requests, so they get to decide which interviews they accept or decline. And we’re often described by healthcare workers as: “this was the best job search experience of my entire career.” We have thousands of five-star reviews across Google and Facebook and the app store with them describing about what an amazing experience and what a delightful experience it’s been.
The other insight that we had was just around the automation of screening and of matching, and that’s really what brings an enormous benefit to the employers in particular, as well as to the healthcare workers. For the employers, it’s usually a very small team internally that’s trying to hire a lot of roles. We started with nursing, we’ve now expanded to technicians and technologists, but at that time it was one recruiter would be trying to fill 100 roles in nursing in a highly competitive market. And so they very much value the fact that the talent was pre-screened and pre-vetted and custom matched to their needs.
Why Incredible Health geographically constrained themselves
BERMAN: Yeah, and one of the challenges of building a two-sided marketplace is, it’s like you can’t open a nightclub and not have patrons there. It feels really weird to show up and be one of six people there. So when you were building this and you were getting at least some positive feedback on the demand side, on the employer side, how did you go about filling up the candidate pool quickly enough so that the employers were able to screen through these candidates at volume and be able to say, “Oh no, these are the 10 we’re desperate to talk to?”
ABUZEID: Yeah, we honestly use a lot of the classic tactics that other two-sided marketplaces in Silicon Valley use. So first and foremost, we made sure we were geographically constrained. So for example, in the first two years of this business, we were only in California. Incredible Health was only available in the Bay Area and the LA area, that’s it, for two years. And it wasn’t until our third year that we started expanding to other states. The reason that mattered a lot is to build up the supply and demand at the same time in a constrained way, because we were limited on resources at the time as well. At the time, the team is less than 10 people. I think we’d raised a $2 million seed round, but that was it. We also wanted to make sure that our product and operations were good enough to drive success for both sides of our marketplace, and that was an enormous amount of product development and operational work that had to happen at the time.
It was wonderful working with those early adopter health systems then, because they were very engaged in understanding of what was happening. And I consider them some of our development partners. They were influencing our product and our operations at the time too.
The story of landing their first customer
BERMAN: Will you tell us how you landed your first employer side partner, and then how you engaged them to help evolve your product roadmap?
ABUZEID: Yeah. So, okay, we’ve now grown to over 1,500 hospitals.
BERMAN: It’s a lot of hospitals.
ABUZEID: It’s a lot of hospitals in the U.S., and the largest. We work with the largest health systems, including Ascension and Trinity and HCA, and we work with many community hospitals. We also work with many academic medical centers, like in New York Presbyterian, NYU, and Cedar Sinai and many others like that. So if I was to rewind back to the early days, I think we got the very first health system through cold calling.
BERMAN: Do you remember who it was?
ABUZEID: It was HCA. We didn’t have a sales team at the time so it was just me, and I would spend hours each day cold calling, cold emailing, and got ahold of someone. I still remember her name, her name was Gloria.
BERMAN: And what was Gloria’s role at HCA?
ABUZEID: Gloria is a recruiter.
BERMAN: God bless Gloria.
ABUZEID: Yeah, a very experienced recruiter. And so I sort of explained what we’re up to. At the time, we don’t have a fancy deck and presentation, there’s none of that, it’s just a conversation. I explained to her what we’re doing and what’s different about it, and she said, “We are actually having a lot of challenges,” and then she offered to introduce me to her boss. And so that’s how the first one happened.
Engaging with healthcare giants
BERMAN: And as you evolved the relationship with HCA and then Cedars and these other healthcare holding companies and hospitals, how did you engage them to understand what their needs were to inform the development of your product roadmap?
ABUZEID: So when it comes to enterprise, which are large, large customers, there’s actually multiple groups that you have to engage with. So, there’s the end users. So the actual recruiters themselves were amazing, in terms of just providing feedback in terms of their product experience, because they cared the most about the workflow within the product and as well as the experience that they’re having with the candidates. So they were extremely helpful in just improving our actual core product experience. When it came to the executives and leaders who were another important groups of users, with them it was mostly around, they helped us really improve our reporting, our analytics, how to explain and the return on investment in the business case. So we just stayed in really close touch with both groups of users. We were probably in touch with our customers every single week.
Honestly, look, seven years later, I’m still speaking with customers almost every day. Right? I still listen to recordings of our team’s call with the healthcare workers. And the number one value at Incredible Health, company value we have is customer obsession. Do whatever you can to delight your users, and that’s firmly embedded in our culture and the way we do our work. And so that’s a value that’s required of every single team, this isn’t just for the product team, this is for everyone, operations, finance, everybody.
BERMAN: More with Iman Abuzeid on how a slow and steady approach to nationwide expansion paid off big for Incredible Health, in just a minute.
[AD BREAK]
Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.
How slow expansion set Incredible Health up to scale
I imagine as a founder and CEO, and I’m also imagining your investors, your early investors saying, “Look, this is great. You’re establishing product market fit. You’re growing in these geographically constrained ways so that we’re making sure that we’re serving both sides of the marketplace well. But hey, we’re two years in and we’re in two markets in California, and it is a competitive marketplace, and presumably the ZipRecruiters and others of the world are seeing what you’re doing and would at least be contemplating whether they could compete with you in California and nationally.” Were you worried about others jumping ahead of you in the broader national market, or did you feel you had such a competitive advantage that you could take your time to really get it right in California before you expanded?
ABUZEID: Yeah, I mean, look, my perspective on competition is, it’s good to be aware of them, to study them and learn from them. I really don’t think founders and CEOs should be obsessing or focusing very much on them. I think the obsession needs to be on the customers, not on the competition.
BERMAN: So I want to drill into this for a second, because I imagine if you’d waited five years to go beyond California, that would’ve been too long, right? Because others would’ve caught up and what have you. And I’m curious if you had investors or advisors who were encouraging you to scale fast, like let’s scale this thing, let’s go, let’s get out there and beat the market. How did that play out for you, and how did you know when it was time to go outside of California and go more national?
ABUZEID: I’ll start by saying, this is the benefit of having really high quality investors. I work with James Joaquin at Obvious Ventures, who’s another OG, been doing the internet thing since the late ’90s.
BERMAN: He’s a great guy, he and his wife Zem are phenomenal people.
ABUZEID: They’re awesome, and then also I work with Jeff Jordan and Andreessen Horowitz. Jeff Jordan was the CEO of OpenTable, so honestly, I had very good investors who know a ton about not just software and the internet, but also about marketplaces. With the benefit of their advice, we wanted to make sure that the marketplace was working well in two geographies at least, before we scale it further. So I never really got a ton of pressure from investors to expand rapidly until we got to stronger metrics. Once we got to the stronger metrics, then actually, that actually triggered me to raise our series A, which was another $15 million. And with that, we expanded to more states.
It was actually our customers that were pushing us to expand beyond California more than our investors, especially with some of the bigger health systems we were working with. They were like, “This is working great in California. When are you coming to Texas and Nevada and etc?” So we had to actually tell our customers, “Hold your horses. We got to address a few things, and then we’ll support you.” But it was a great way to grow because we were able to grow and expand to other states with our customers.
Breaking down Incredible Health’s business model
BERMAN: You know the demand is there before you even show up there. The model for Incredible Health is interesting because only one side of this marketplace pays, if I understand it correctly. Is that right?
ABUZEID: That’s right.
BERMAN: How does the business model actually work?
ABUZEID: The business model is based on employers paying. We’ve achieved a days to hire of 20 days on average on the platform. We also drive really strong ROI for them, specifically around cost savings. So for every hospital we work with, we save them at least $5 million a year because by hiring permanent nurses faster from Incredible Health, they’re able to reduce their temporary labor and overtime costs. That is why they pay for Incredible Health. And so as a result, we’ve been able to effectively subsidize the healthcare worker side, so we can provide all kinds of free tools and services to the healthcare workers, and that piece has been really important to our strategy too.
For the healthcare workers, Incredible Health is more than just about finding a job, it’s about managing their career. So we provide a whole range of free tools and services to the healthcare workers, including continuing education and salary estimators and a community where they can ask each other for advice, and they get access to career coaches too, that help them with interview preparation. I mean, it’s a pretty full suite of services on the healthcare worker’s side. That helps give them a more delightful experience too.
BERMAN: You have 1,500 employers on the platform, is that right? And some of those are very big organizations. How many on the employee side, how many on the candidate team member side?
ABUZEID: We have over one million nurses on the platform.
BERMAN: That’s a lot of nurses, extraordinary. And this is just in about seven years that you’ve done this?
ABUZEID: Yeah, that’s right.
BERMAN: You said that you’re a big fan of five and 10 year plans, and we’re in a world where it’s hard to see what’s coming six months from now, much less five years down the road. When you look out five years for Incredible Health, what do you see?
ABUZEID: In five years we will be in more categories, more than just nurses and technicians, and more than just hospitals and surgery centers and home health. Our goal ultimately is to be in all aspects of healthcare on the employer side and on the healthcare worker side. And then we will also be embracing the latest and greatest technologies in order to deliver our service.
Hiring advice for any leader
BERMAN: So you are focused on the healthcare sector, understand that relentless focus on the category. If you were advising a company that’s trying to do something similar in a completely unrelated category, what would you say they have to do to make this a better experience, both for the employers trying to recruit and for the prospective team members they’re going after?
ABUZEID: Yeah, I mean, I think I’ll answer that question in a way that’s maybe advice for all hiring. There’s a whole range of best practices out there, speed is a key, one. Moving candidates through your process, not ghosting them, ensuring they’re clear on what the next step is, having a really clear process internally, all that really does matter and drives a very delightful candidate experience.
I think being very clear about what you’re actually looking for and defining your role accurately is important as well in terms of, what are the must haves versus the nice to haves? We ran into this issue a lot in healthcare, and we run into it in tech as well, where hiring managers and leaders could put all kinds of criteria and which can just kill a pipeline or a funnel. We need to really ask ourselves some tough questions like, do we really need all of this criteria to get the right person?
Another one is just, have very clear timelines as well. There should be the amount of time to complete a phone screen, to complete hiring management review, to get an offer out. There should be relatively short timelines, and so candidates can get through within days, not weeks or months. So those are all just tips that we’ve learned.
BERMAN: Your dad’s a doctor, how is it when you talk to him about the work that you’re doing as a healthcare professional who focused presumably on individual patients, seeing your impact on an entire nation’s healthcare system? What’s that like for him?
ABUZEID: Both my parents are proud of what we’ve done. I think that in the early days they were a little skeptical: “Is this a real thing? Is this? You’re not working a normal job.” There was definitely a little bit of skepticism in the first few years, but once we really got going, and certainly once the press started paying attention, that’s when they were like, “Oh, okay, this is real. This is actually happening.”
BERMAN: Right, you’re a doctor, what are you doing? And here we are.
ABUZEID: Yeah, my dad does not talk to me about doing an anesthesiology residency anymore, yeah. The next five years will be very exciting.
Solutions to the nursing shortage in the U.S
BERMAN: And even with the million nurses you have on the platform and this radically better way of going through a job search process on both sides, we have a real nursing shortage in this country. We have a real healthcare worker shortage in this country. What do you see as some of the solutions for that broadly, and what can Incredible Health do to help there, aside from creating a great experience in the job search process?
ABUZEID: For healthcare workers, let’s first just examine the bottlenecks. What is stopping us from increasing the number of healthcare workers in this country? One area is that it’s important to point out that there’s actually quite a lot of demand from Americans to get into nursing and some of these other professions. For example, for nursing schools, there’s wait lists of tens of thousands of Americans who want to get in but they can’t get in. So we have a really big bottleneck at the school level.
BERMAN: And they can’t get in because there just aren’t enough slots? We haven’t made the system efficient enough for the training for us to take the number of people who want the training?
ABUZEID: That’s a huge bottleneck. Another bottleneck that’s happening is right after school, you actually have to end up getting trained and getting specialized and so on. And there’s just not enough programs and employers that are willing to invest in training, and so there’s a whole range of solutions to addressing those problems. And it’s going to take all of us to do that. It’s going to take industry like us, like Incredible Health. Plus the role of local, state, and federal governments. I mean, it’s pretty important, even for a government to be providing healthcare and having a strong U.S. healthcare system. We all have to participate in driving these solutions.
BERMAN: One could imagine Incredible Health thinking about vertically integrating and helping solve the education and training problem.
ABUZEID: That’s right.
BERMAN: Is that on the roadmap for you all?
ABUZEID: Yeah, we’re on this journey already, so, well, we provide continuing education to nurses inside our apps. And to the extent that we can continue to provide more and more training in a remote way, in a digital way, even in an AI way, I think that will help a lot.
There’s a fascinating company I just want to mention called Stepful, which is providing AI training for healthcare workers, and we need more and more ideas like that. And at Incredible Health, we’re definitely going to be engaging in a lot of that activity.
Lightning Round questions
BERMAN: Quick lightning round questions. When you are stuck, when you are not sure what to do, and you’ve probably talked it through with your co-founder, Rome, because it sounds like that’s your first and last. Who do you call?
ABUZEID: So I have a whole leadership team, which is awesome. And it’s like a luxury to have an amazing CFO and chief revenue officer and HR leader and so on. And so, I have a very strong leadership team that I work with. Externally, I have advisors and board members. Jeff Jordan and James Joaquin are still two of my key advisors, and they’re both on our board as well. And then finally, just more personally, I have an executive coach, and that’s been really helpful too.
BERMAN: And what’s the thing that’s most valuable that you’ve taken from your coaching experience?
ABUZEID: The benefits of it remind me a little bit of the benefits of psychotherapy too. I think it’s important to be able to discuss, maybe even vent to people that are not our family members and not our friends and sometimes not even our coworkers, and so he’s been a great outlet. And the other thing is that they just provide additional perspective that you may not even be thinking of, that’s been really helpful. Increasingly, my role as CEO has moved more and more towards more people oriented opportunities and challenges, than just purely product, operations, customers. Right? So I’ve had to evolve my professional development very, very rapidly while growing this company too.
BERMAN: Yeah. What’s one book that’s helped you on your journey that you recommend to others?
ABUZEID: One, I love Ben Horowitz’s Hard Things About Hard Things. It really describes how insane the journey is to building a company. And as much as I say it all looks like sunshine and rainbows on the outside, but yeah, there were a lot of challenges while building Incredible Health, and that book really, really shows it.
Another one is by Bill Walsh, the former coach of the San Francisco 49ers, it’s called The Score Will Take Care of Itself. And it just really highlights the importance of having great process, great systems, and great culture. If you can set that up really well, then the outcomes are inevitable.
BERMAN: I love that. Okay, and last question for you. If you could wave a magic wand and change, fix one thing about American healthcare today, what are you doing?
ABUZEID: The two biggest problems in American healthcare today is access and cost. And if I could wave a magic wand, I would solve, if there’s a way to solve access issues where every American can get access to high quality healthcare no matter where they live, no matter where they work, that would be amazing. And then it’s been really, really challenging just looking at the trends over the last couple of decades to manage costs in healthcare. And so, I don’t know where we’re headed here, but it just seems like we might be on an unsustainable path on the cost side.
BERMAN: Let’s get you that magic wand. Thank you so much for being with us, appreciate you.
ABUZEID: Thank you so much for having me.
BERMAN: By listening to the pain points that nurses and hospitals faced around hiring, Iman Abuzeid has built an innovative job marketplace for some of the very most important people in our economy, our healthcare professionals. It’s a game changer, both for workers and for the employers, and it’s a testament to how every industry has outdated systems worth disrupting, if you know where to look. I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.