Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Iman Abzueid CEO and co-founder at Incredible Health, the fastest growing career marketplace for healthcare workers whose matching technology is the fastest, most effective way for hospitals to hire qualified permanent nurses.

Iman, I'm so excited to chat with you and, and not only talk about your founder journey and, and especially with Incredible Health and, and what you're doing in terms of connecting people with resources and, and that whole process and how. Also what I'm fascinated about is how the, the healthcare system's changing and, and people are, are finding new ways to not only utilize their skillset, but also other, institutions are finding new ways to, to attract, really strong and solid talent.

As we, we've seen there's, there's a huge need for healthcare services and, and there's needs to be a new way and a new efficient way to, connect those resources. But before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started Incredible Health?  

Iman: Oh, so I'm I'm an MD by background, but I can start even earlier. I'm originally from, I'm originally from Sudan. I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I've lived in the Emirates, I lived in, in the uk, and I moved to the US when I was 24 years old. I went to, I went to medical school. Although I don't practice as a physician at all. After medical school went into management consulting, worked at McKinsey and at Booz Allen.

Worked doing hospital operations and strategy work. Yeah. And then did my MBA at Wharton in Philadelphia. And then moved to the San Francisco Bay area. And that's really when I got into technology in startups like. Full, full blown. So, that's, that's a little bit about me beforehand.  

Julian: Yeah. What, obviously going from the MD route to the consulting route is not, not something necessarily I, I've been, familiar with, but what was exciting to you about hospital operations and I can think about probably a handful of things that I would be interested just with the mechanics of running a more efficient system and, and things like that.

But what in particular got you excited about that side of healthcare and, and, and the operations of.  

Iman: Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I, I trained as a clinician, right? Mm-hmm. , and I think one-on-one patient care is wonderful, right? Yeah. And it is a great career to pursue, whether you're a doctor or a nurse, or a pharmacist or a physical therapist.

Like those are really fantastic careers. But you know, for me, I, I really wanted to have an impact on a larger scale. Yeah. And I knew that there was gonna be two ways to have that kind of impact. One is just understanding how systems work mm-hmm. , at, at scale. And then also just learning how technology.

Influence such a massive group of people too.  

Julian: Yeah. And when thinking about back on that experience and, and learning the systems of hospitals and, and those institutions, I, I think about them and they're, they're huge enterprise companies. If you, if you really think about Yeah. The, the, the amount of resources and people that they employ, what was some challenges that, that you saw them having in terms of running things efficiently or I.

Taking a backtrack here, what were some ways that hospitals were running processes that needed improvement or were inefficient that you saw kind of needed, maybe some, some, insertion of new technology or health. Was there anything in particular that you saw was either inefficient or underutilized?

In, in, in that enterprise  

Iman: organization? Yeah, so you're absolutely, you're right, these are enterprise organizations. They're often the biggest employers in each of their cities in terms of the number of workers that they. and healthcare is the biggest in, is the biggest labor sector in the country by number of workers.

Yeah. I mean, I think what we discovered that led to the creation of Incredible Health is we knew that labor was the biggest, healthcare was the biggest labor sector in the country. We also knew there were massive shortages. Yeah. So, healthcare is, has the biggest labor shortages in the country.

Mm-hmm. , just to put it in context, we're on track. a million, 1 million nurses short by the end of this year. Wow. So that's a lot of missing. Nurses just, and that's just with nursing, let alone the other healthcare professions. And so when my co-founder, co-founder and I really started to dig into it, we discovered like the tools, the technology, the processes for what it takes to hire, in a supply constrained, market hasn't really changed.

20 years, wow. Post a job and hope it all works out. And, and we found that that just was very insufficient for both the hospitals and it was also just creating a very weak experience for the talent. Yeah. When you speak to nurses, you often hear them say, Hey, I applied to 10 places I didn't even hear back.

Right. Or if I heard back, it took, it took two, three months, to get my next job. And, that's just, Not how it should work. Yeah. And look, many things in healthcare are like this, right? Like right. Yeah. It's just an industry that's a little bit behind the ball when it comes to operational excellence and adopting the latest and greatest technology and, and really just driving that focus internally.

Julian: Yeah. And what, what is some of the causes behind that, I guess? , I guess inefficiency or, or lack of, lack of, new technology? Is it the compliance? I, I just think I, I, I worked at a pharmacy for like six years when I was younger and there was so much compliance that went into, whether it's HIPAA regulations and any technology was not the most sophisticated piece of equipment to, to learn in the new softwares because of all the considerations they had to make on a compliance level, let alone and, and how it actually works within its user interface And, What, what did you see were the shortcomings of, the technology?

Was it the compliance piece? Was it adopting on a mass scale? Was it the actual pieces of technology that were the incumbents? What, what did you see was, was really , where, where the process kind of halted or, or stopped or had barriers.  

Iman: Yeah, so I mean, in, in speaking in more general terms, like why is healthcare behind other industries?

Mm-hmm. , I think there's probably a couple factors. One is like, yeah, it, it is a regulated industry, so there is more compliance to consider and more regulation to consider. Not that different from, say, the finance industry, which also also has a lot of regulation and compliance and is also slower to adopt, adopt technology too.

But then the other factor in healthcare is that the way the payment payments flow in healthcare and the way incentives are set up in healthcare are quite convoluted and very different from, they're not as straightforward as like, buyer and seller in other markets take, e-commerce, it's, quite straightforward with the buyers who the seller is.

Whereas in healthcare, you can have an employer be. or an insurance company's paying and that's getting going to the provider. The provider has to bill an insurance company. The patient is not necessarily paying directly, but they're receiving the service. Yeah. Like it's very complicated.

It's very complicated how all the money flows. Yeah. And so that by having more convoluted incentives, it doesn't necessarily align everyone to operate with the most amount of operational effficiency.  

Julian: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense in terms of where the incentives are and, and yeah, the whole provider network system.

Then you interject that and things become more and more. . But you mentioned something a second ago about, the healthcare professionals who are applying for these jobs and, and not hearing responses and, there's a supply or there's seemingly a supply shortage. And I'm curious in, in, in your perspective, is it that we are constrained on this, the amount of people who are in the industry, or is it connecting those people and, and in, in a inefficient way, whereas.

One hospital is say, overstaffed and, and, and has resources and then individuals can go somewhere else to, gain shifts or be a part of another organization. Is that part of it? How much of it is an actual people shortage versus a connection problem? ?  

Iman: Yeah, that's a great question. The truth is it's both, right? So we have an underlying supply shortage. Mm-hmm. , where healthcare has the biggest labor shortages. Like we, we as a country continue to increase demand on our healthcare system because our population is age is growing and it's aging. Mm-hmm. , and so that's putting more and more in demand on the US healthcare system.

Mm-hmm. and us collectively as a society. Yeah. Have not done a great job over the last few decades to increase the number of healthcare workers to meet. To meet that demand. Yeah. And so we're, we're behind. Right. Right. And then in addition to that, there's an inefficiency problem that the right, the, the talent that is available and the employers that are available are not finding themselves as efficiently as they should.

Julian: Yeah. And, and running a two-sided marketplace myself, one thing I we struggle with is, is labeling and, and essentially labeling categories of experience. Thankfully, I, I, I work with engineers, so learning language competencies and there's quizzes and tests out there that we can implement to, to validate their experience.

How do you do that in healthcare? Not only, you have credentials, you have certificates, but then a lot of it seems like it's very experiential and what you've learned kind of on the job and, and, and gaining that knowledge and experience and expertise as you, you go along. And how do you kind of label that as, as a, as a marketplace to, to then help employers, filter or, or identify the right people for the jobs that they're looking.

Iman: Yeah. I mean, look, I think every marketplace company and Incredible Health is definitely a two-sided marketplace. Has to drive enormous value for both sides. Yeah. I would, I would sort of categorize our value in a few different ways. First, . We have a unique model where employers are applying to the talent instead of the other way around.

As you can imagine, the nurses absolutely love that . Yeah. Cuz they create a profile. They sit back and relax. They hear from different employers. They get to do, choose which interviews to accept or decline. The second thing is we've automated the screening of the talent. That means we're serving up quite high quality supply, quite high quality talent to the employer.

and we've done this through a combination of things, technology, data, humans, so on. And we, we're, we have to verify things like certifications and licenses and malpractice records and, and so on. Mm-hmm. . And then third, third is our matching. So, back to the efficiency topic we were talking about earlier, it's very important we put the right talent in front of the right employers and vice versa.

Right? And so therefore it's a very personalized experience for both sides as opposed to, a more spammy experience. Right? Yeah. Yeah. . And then finally it's, a, a whole set of, so next I'll say we have a whole set of data analytics. So the most amazing thing about a two-sided marketplace is it turns out an enormous amount of data.

Yeah. And we can share that with both sides of our platform to so, so individuals and company employers can benchmark themselves against others and see how they're doing from a speed standpoint and a conversion standpoint. Cuz, we're working with a lot of their competition usually. Yeah. And then finally we, the last piece I'll say is that we provide a whole, this is about more than just jobs for healthcare workers.

Yeah. Our vision as a company is to help healthcare professionals live better lives. And the mission is to help 'em find and do their best work. And so we offer things like free continuing education for every single nurse in the country, accredited in all 50 states. And we have free salary estimators, and we have a community for nurses built into our apps so they can ask each other for.

And all of these free tools and services, whether it's the hiring marketplace or continuing education, they're all a hundred percent free for the healthcare workers. Yeah. So from our standpoint, we wanna make sure we have a career long relationship with the healthcare workers. It's not just a one and done transactional relationship.

Julian: Yeah, I love, I love the, it, it's almost, I hear, I hear this time and time again, it's like this community piece where you orient people around not only just the service, but what comes with the value added that they don't necessarily need to have, an extensive level of commitment to, but they can passively learn and, and, adapt and, and get insights.

I'm curious, and this is very selfish question, but when you're conceptualizing the data and you're feeding it to both sides of the marketplace to really add value in, in, in. Different degrees. What do you lean on in terms of how you're educating both sides of the marketplace? Is it similar? Is it different?

What vehicles are you using to help, add extra value that goes beyond connecting, a healthcare worker with, with B employer?  

Iman: Yeah. The, the, there's a whole, there's a whole set of value We have to drive for the talent and a whole set of value we have to drive for the employers. Yeah, for, for the talent.

It's offering the free tools and services in an app form, right? Yeah. They can access a lot of this through their, their free apps through iOS and Android. And we keep adding to it, so, yeah, let's just take free continuing education as an example. They needed to renew and activate, nurses needed to renew and activate their licenses.

It's, part of compliance. They we've calculated that over $300 million is spent out of pocket by nurses on continuing education every single year. And we're just give, we're giving it to them for free. Right? Yeah. . So that's an example of value that we're providing to them that gets, message to them in multiple ways.

And then on the employer side, it's pretty classic enterprise stuff. We, we invest heavily in a customer success team. Mm-hmm. heavily in an analytics team mm-hmm. . And it's important that we ha we can share best practices, benchmark data and insights to, to the employers as well. Yeah. So they can continue improving their, their operational practices when it comes to hiring.

Yeah. and so that we're in like a very unique position to do that. And, all of that is sort of like the underlying aspect of that is product. And then as well scale, right? Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . So we now have one in four nurses in the US using our platform Wow. To manage their careers. Yeah. Which is a huge number, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And then we also have 700 hospital. Using our platform, US hospitals, using our platform, including 75% of the top ranked hospitals. We have over 12,000 nurses joining our platform every single week. Right? We have 10,000 interview requests being sent by employers to talent every single week.

So, so it's we're really operating in a, in a unique vantage point where we can see. quite, quite, quite a lot of insights yeah. Across, across the board for both sides.  

Julian: Yeah. It's incredible to see, hear the numbers and the amount of volume that is, is, being driven through your platform.

And I'm, I'm curious just because of obvious, with the pandemic and has really shifted a lot of industries and, and, and I think all industries have, have had some kind of impact for it. And I'm, I'm, when I was thinking about your product and, and the service that you provide are we gonna shift into a model?

This is how employees and employers kind of get found and connect and, and how does it kind of change as as resources get constrained? Will, will, certain nurses who lived in a certain location be moving? And will we have a more dispersed I guess, I guess I'm employer network.

Employee network, yeah. Marketplace. What do you see in terms of where healthcare. .  

Iman: Yeah. I mean, we, look, we, we only focus on permanent workers. Okay. So all the nurses being hired through Incredible Health are all employees of the hospitals and health systems. And we, we've really stayed away from temporary labor for a variety of reasons.

And so, what that means is that there's, there's a few things that are true that we've noticed in our data first. Mm-hmm. and foremost, there is quite a lot of geographic movement in the permanent labor market. Yeah. , about a third of the hires on our platform are relocating from a different state.

Yeah. Right. So, and, and we also know in our data that there's several reasons why nurses, I imagine it's the same for the other healthcare workers for why they're changing jobs. Mm-hmm. first is that they're pursuing career advancement. They're looking to grow their skills, specialize more, move into leadership.

It could be a range of things. a second. They're looking to reduce commute times. Yeah. Or they're looking to relocate. Third, they're also looking to, they're also looking for better schedules, mm-hmm. , yeah. More flexible schedules that work for their life. Yeah. And then fourth is, more pay.

We ha we find that a lot of leaders, hospital leaders, focus a lot on pay, but it's actually really critical for hospital leaders to invest heavily in career advancement for healthcare workers, as well as more flexible scheduling. And that's really what's gonna drive retention for this industry.

This is an industry that has high turnover, right? Yeah. Nur nursing turnover right now is at 23%. It's the highest, that's the highest it's ever been in the history of US healthcare. Wow. And this is also a workforce that's been overworked because of the shortage plus the pandemic. Yeah. So this is a tired workforce.

Yeah. It's also a workforce that is . Right. The average age of a nurse is, is in, in the US is in, is in the early fifties. Right. Wow. They also have five generations of nurses working in the, in the US nursing workforce from Gen Z all the way to baby boomers, right? Yeah. And so there's just a lot of different considerations that have to take, be taken into account when you're when you're hiring this kind of workforce and when you're trying to retain this workforce.

Julian: yeah. Thinking about just the way the paradigm is shifting and, and I love the way your model is essentially giving the power back for, for the workforce to essentially, start receiving, know inquiries about their skills and employment. And, and I, I love that because I, it sounds like it's really changing the institutions and how they view their employees and how they view hiring and this whole process and benefits, like you said, it's not just about the dollar amount, but it's about career advancement.

It's about improvement, it's about progress, about the work. Is that gonna, are, are you gonna see or are we gonna see in our lifetime where, where I guess there's changes in the overall structure of these companies to be, very much more people oriented. And what does that change as a consumer of, of healthcare services?

How will I be impacted, when I go receive care, will I see a different, ecosystem or dynamic or change in, in the way healthcare is going to be done? Have you seen any results in, in that? .  

Iman: Yeah. I mean, look, we started this company five years ago, right before the pandemic. Yeah. And when we started, we were primarily working with VPs of talent acquisition maybe director VPs and directors of nursing.

Now we work with CEOs and CEOs. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And is this like the attention around this workforce continues to increase because of market forces? Mm-hmm. , because we went through a pandemic because the workforce got negatively impact. because we're in severe short, we we're experiencing severe shortages which are projected to continue for decades to come.

Right? Yeah. And so this is really affecting the bottom line a as well financially. Yeah. And so, it's because of these market forces that are really driving change and driving how hospital leaders think about their workforces and, and we're seeing more and more change. . Yeah. Which I think, I think will be for the benefit of, of healthcare workers and for and for the benefit of patients too.

Julian: Yeah. I was, I was thinking about, in, in terms of, know fundraising and, and healthcare and health tech is such an interesting I feel like industry because it's, it's really matching two different things, which is you have traditional companies that, that invest into healthcare.

Maybe it's a new type of technology or, or instrument or service or, What have you and then your traditional VCs on, in terms of the tech side, investing in, in purely technology and software, not necessarily, marrying the two, but now that we're seeing a lot of, of, of meshing between these two types of industries, what was the fundraising process like?

And did you, did you end up going with the, the, the investors that you expected? Or was the landscape different from what you expected when you started the whole fundraising process?  

Iman: Yeah. I. There's, I mean, I, I've quite, quite a lot of experience in fundraising. We, we've raised three rounds of financing.

Yeah. I've raised close to 100 million for Incredible Health over a seed round, a series A and a series B. Mm-hmm. . Each time we fundraise, it was an oversubscribed round. There were always multiple term sheets, so, we were able to be very selective about which investors we go with. Mm-hmm. , there is a set of criteria that I specifically care about when it comes to fundraising.

One I have definitely have a bias for investors that are in the San Francisco Bay area. Mm-hmm. , sorry to anyone who's listening, who's not the Bay Area , but like, look, this, there's something. , the technology investor in the Bay Area tends to be more risk taking. Yeah. More ambitious. Mm-hmm. more aligned, which means more alignment with a founder or ceo like myself or my co-founder who are, who are really trying to build legendary companies.

Yeah. And then I also have a preference. In the early rounds, the scene in Series A definitely had a preference for technology investors and for marketplace investors. That is how I ended up with James Joaquin at Obvious Venture. Yeah. And with Jeff Jordan, Andreessen Horowitz, I mean, both of them are seasoned operators.

Both have been former CEOs, both have exited companies, whether it's acquisitions are going public. Jeff Jordan in particular is just, I call him the master of marketplaces, right? He was a CEO of OpenTable, the president at eBay, and the early investor and board member at at, at Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest is on, right?

Yeah. Yeah. . And so, and then in our most recent round, the series B was led by the team at Base 10, again, technology investors. And then for the first time we had hospitals investing Kaiser Permanente and Johns Hopkins both invested. So, so really like I, I find Fundra fundraising at the end of the day is highly strategic.

Mm-hmm. , it needs to be very selective about who you pursue and then who you allow onto your boards. Yeah. And and then also, I, I also think that it's critical to have, everything I just talked about is mostly the process of fundraising. Right. But it's also just quite important to have very strong content when you're fundraising.

Yeah. What I mean by that is having a, a very clear story, a clear vision and mission for what you're trying to pursue. Mm-hmm. , how you're gonna pursue it, what your go-to-market strategy is, what your unit economics are, and so on. You really have to have your ducks in a row when you are fundraising too.

So that's, just a little. Insight into, into the fundraising for Incredible Health.  

Julian: No, I, I love that. And you echo quite a few points, but I think added, added a little bit more kind of color and strategy to what a lot of founders kind of think about when they go into the, the fundraising process and who they wanna partner with and why it's important to do so, and to do so well because it's, it's you're hand in hand through this whole journey together.

And, and a lot of times when you're setting up expectations, it's, it's important to be aligned on the right vision so that, as things change the dynamics don't change within, your group of, of core people who are around the product. From, from a kind of a larger standpoint, what are some of the biggest challenges that Incredible Health faces?

Iman: Yeah. So, we, we, our most recent round, which was in 2022, our Series B valued the company at 1.65 billion. Right. So that makes us the highest valued, tech enabled career marketplace Yeah. For healthcare workers in the US today. And so looking ahead, what are we, what, what are we doing with that capital?

What next, right? Yeah, yeah. First and foremost, we're gonna continue investing in our technology. And continue making every aspect of the hiring process, every single step, more automated, more personalized, and with the addition of machine learning. Mm-hmm. , we have a machine learning engineering team now.

And they're making the screening aspects, the matching aspects, all of that more and more personalized and automated. Yeah. Second is we wanna continue adding more free services and tools for nurses. I mentioned earlier the free continuing education, the free salary estimators, the community for. and there's more and more that we want to do in the areas of education and skill development and uh, and the areas of scheduling and so on.

So yeah, there's more and more coming on. We have a very busy pro very packed product roadmap. Mm-hmm. for where we wanna continue giving away free tools and services to nurses. And then third is expansion. We're very focused on just nurses and hospitals in the US right now. We have tons of geographic expansion that we need to continue to do, but then, you we do wanna add more roles beyond nursing in healthcare.

And then there's also more types of employers beyond hospitals as well. Yeah. So, and then of course we wanna continue investing in our own team too. So we're a team of 200 people right now. We operate remote first. We're spread across 35 different states. Yeah. And wanna continue making this a great place to work for our employees.

Julian: Yeah. I think you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but if everything goes well what's the long term vision for Incredible Health?  

Iman: Um Our goal is to. So, our vision is to help healthcare professionals live better lives, and the mission is to help 'em find and do their best work. That means we're building this category defining company that is aiming to be the market leader in healthcare labor and to build a standalone independent public company.

And that's what we're, that's what we're all doing together. Our team as well as our, our, the employers and the nurses that we work with too. Yeah. So, that's, that's. That's the goal.  

Julian: Yeah. I love that. I'd like to add this next question or next section in, I call it my founder faq.

So I'm gonna ask you a bunch of RapidFire questions. Sure. And we'd love to hear what, what your thoughts are. So first question is what's particularly hard about your job?

Iman: The fact that it changes every two to three months.  

Julian: Yeah. . Yeah. Yeah.  

Iman: Was, that's something that's unique to a high growth setting, I think.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What's something that you didn't expect to be doing as a founder that you find yourself doing more often than, than not?  

Iman: Oh, good question. I mean, early days when we were in office, I did have to take out the garbage which is fine, yeah. Roll your sleeves up. Do whatever you need to do.

Yeah. Yeah. And nowadays I I'm surprised by or I understand it now, but I have to spend quite a lot of time on maintaining Incredible Health culture and ensuring that we remain, we all remain aligned.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you had a magic wand what's one thing you wish your company had today versus having to wait for it or not having it at all? What's one thing you'd wish for?  

Iman: Right. . Oh, I wish for amazing talent to join our team. We already have amazing talent. Yeah. But, we are a growing company, so if you're interested, please go to Incredible incrediblehealth.com/careers. .  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Next question was actually how, where do you go to find great talent and, and what's something that found hel helpful for screening really good talent when you're bringing them internally?

Iman: Yeah. So we have a very robust process when it comes to hiring. We have to put together hiring managers have to put together very detailed job descriptions that include outcomes. Yeah. We have a detailed interview guide. So if you're an interviewer, you can't just go ask whatever you want. You actually have to follow our interview guide.

There's set certain scoring that's required. There's a certain number of references required. Really what we're trying to do is just reduce the, the reduce the risk of hiring somebody incorrectly.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What's one thing that, I guess one piece of advice you would give for a founder kind of earlier in, in their founding process, say they, they have an mvp, they, they've kind of, they've got some user feedback, they're leading into a direction.

But what's some, what's something that they should consider that most founders maybe don't consider early on in, in the company's growth?  

Iman: The only thing that matters in the beginning is getting to product market fit. Yeah. . Yeah. So if you're doing, working on anything that does not enable you to get to product market fit, stop doing it. Yeah. for example, conferences, recording podcasts, um  

Julian: we're not, I'm gonna bleep that part out for sure. , yeah. Yeah. That part out.  

Iman: So, going to conferences, recording podcasts doing, doing pr, et cetera, like this. You as an early stage founder, you're one and only job is to get the product market fit and you gotta do whatever you can to get there.

Yeah, you need to get the right team. You need to get the right resources, and you need to build  

Julian: product. Yeah, this is this next question is a little bit selfish and, and for my business, but if I'm wanting to invest in a side of the marketplace, say my supply side, my, my, my workforce side, and I want to give them that educational piece cuz it's something I've thought about a lot.

How do, how did you go about getting them free resources? Because, with, with resources and institutions, there's obviously some relationship that you have to have or, there's always some buyback, right? But how were you able to give them the free resources so that they can upskill themselves and allow themselves to improve their, overall candidacy?

Iman: The, we were only able to give away free stuff to nurses after we figured, after we reached product market fit. And after we determined that we had a very strong business model. So, essentially it's, it's, it's our business model that ultimately funds free stuff Yeah. For healthcare workers. And so, that that's, that's the main piece of it.

And then the second piece of it is, think about it when it comes to these sort of like tangential ideas, like community and so on, figure out how it fits into the rest of your business. Is it part of engagement, engaging your users? Is it part of acquiring your users? . There, there is, there's some value there that you have to figure out.

Julian: Right, right. Yeah. I I love that. I love that. Last question is, is whether it's early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?  

Iman: As far as people goes, I mean, massively influenced by the leaders of each of industry.

Mm-hmm. that look like me, right? Yeah. So Beyonce, Serena Williams. Yeah. Oprah, like these are titans of industry. They are the leaders of their industries and, and that's just extremely inspiring. And so I do spend time watching their YouTube videos and listening to their interviews and how they think and what's their mindset.

And so, , then comes like the sort of the business visionaries, right? Big fan of Jeff Bezos. Just love how sus how he built such a sustainable company. Yeah. Sustainable, legendary company. And didn't do a lot of fundraising. Yeah. And also so those are just like, they. People I sort of follow and read about and so on.

Mm-hmm. . Then there's the actual, like, books themselves. I love the hard things, the hard things. My Ben Horowitz. Yeah. It really speaks to the psychology of, and how intense it can really get as a founder and ceo. Yeah. And I have gone through some, very tough moments. Like I can, I can empathize with a lot of stories in that book.

Yeah. And then and then, and then it comes my advi, my advisors. Right. I have two fantastic board members, Jeff Jordan, Andresen Horowitz, James Joaquina, obvious Ventures, but have fantastic early investors and advisors like James Courier, NFX. Yeah. Like Pete, fly to Nfx like Charles Hudson at Precursor.

I mean, these are not just our investors. These are, these are people who've given me phenomenal advice over the years. And then finally I gotta, I got a ceo friend group, . Oh right. WhatsApp group where we're able to really give each other advice and, those, those. Groups of individuals, we can really, em, we can really empathize with each other. So, other venture backed CEOs.  

Julian: Yeah, I love the community piece. And, and that's one thing that, that I think founders echo is defining those alike, building other companies cuz they're the only ones who know the true kind of trauma I guess of, of, of having to build and, and build over time and, and stay consistent.

And also, I guess another question for other founders out there is how do you decompress? How do you take yourself away from. , the, the intensity of building a company, running a team and keeping everybody on a cohesive mission to kind of recharge yourself. What do you do to recharge?

Iman: So I have, I just have set boundaries, right? So, for example, I won't work on Saturdays. Yeah. I'll try to have dinner with my husband two to three times a week. I can't do all five time. I have five nights a week, but at least two to three times a week. I. try to take, try to take one or two vacations a year, right?

Mm-hmm. , as much as, as, as best you can. I'm a big believer in psychotherapy, so I have a therapist, and I think every founder should have one, because the, the anxiety, the depression, the stress, et cetera that you go through is, is, it's quite an intense experience and it's, you try to have like professional support at all times.

And then and then you know, the CEO. , yeah. Find founders like yourselves, either at your current stage or at future stages. And these are the people that you should be friends with, that you should have dinner with, that you should call a friend, emergency text, like you gotta have a, a really strong support group.

Julian: I love that. I love that. And, and before I know we're coming to the close of the episode here, but and before we, we get your social accounts and your websites on where we can find and support you, is there anything I didn't ask you that you wish I did or that that you wanted to answer? .  

Iman: Yeah. I mean, I'll just mention our vision again, that visions to help healthcare professionals live better lives.

Right. Our mission is to help 'em find and do their best work. I personally think healthcare workers are some of the most overworked and underappreciated workers in this country. Yeah. And we want to do whatever we can to give them a delightful experience. And build a company that gives, that drives delight for them too.

Julian: Yeah, I love that. And last little bit is, is where can we find you, whether we're a, a part of the workforce or looking to hire from the workforce, or even just a fan of you as a founder, what's your, what are your LinkedIns, what are your websites? Where can we find and support you and, and the vision at Incredible Health?

Iman: Sure. So, incrediblehealth.com is our website al on Instagram. We're Incredible Health On Twitter, we are join. Incredible. on LinkedIn we're Incredible Health. And so, it'll be easy for you to find us. We'll, hopefully we'll be able to share some links in the show notes too.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, definitely will.

And it was such a pleasure chatting with you, not only learning about your journey as a founder and what inspired the idea, but how you think about scaling and building and, and what's important and impactful about how you're doing it, I think is extremely. You gave so many gems of knowledge for, and advice for other founders that I'm extremely excited to , to share this episode amongst the audience.

But thank you again for joining and I appreciate you being on the show. I hope you enjoyed yourself.  

Iman: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Julian: Of course.

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