Knew each other for 2 hours before We Co-Founded - Erica Jain - Healthie - Episode #94

Kevin and I met on campus at Penn, November 2015. We were paired together on a campus pitchathon event for a different project. We didn't win. I emailed him afterwards saying that I had an idea for a company and said, you know, are you interested in getting coffee? We started building Healthy over Christmas break, and then we launched with our first dollar in January 2016.

Today's guest is Erica Jane, co-founder and CEO of Healthy. Over the last 10 years, Healthy has become critical infrastructure for over 45,000 clinicians who are caring for over 17 million patients. You ran the company profitably for a while, for most of the life of the company. Did you not want to raise money? Was that the decision that you made?

No matter what path you go down, VC, debt, bootstrap, friends and family, all of those options are all great and well. You always want to be in the driver's seat and be in the position of control. I didn't start Healthy because I wanted to start a company. That was actually the last thing on my mind. And for me, it's all about just solving this big problem of access to healthcare in our country.

Today's guest is Erica Jane, co-founder and CEO of Healthee. Over the last 10 years, Healthee has become critical infrastructure for over 45,000 clinicians who are caring for over 17 million patients. HealthE's platform powers over 25 specialties in health and wellness by helping run, scale, and modernize their practices. Erica has been recognized as a top leader and innovator in the digital health space. The company has been recognized as one of the best places to work, and they've raised over $40 million from top investors. Even more impressively, they've been profitable for most of their life as a company. This conversation has been a long time in the making, and I'm very excited to have Erica on the show today. Hey, Erica.

Hi, thank you for having me today. Excited to be here.

I'm excited. First question right outta the gate, what is the one thing that you've done at Healthy, big or small, that's had the biggest impact and you would do again if you're CEO of another company in the future?

The one thing I would do is instill, and I think we do this incredibly well, instill across the company a true customer-first mindset. There is something incredibly, incredibly powerful about waking up every single minute of every single day and wholeheartedly focusing on making sure our customers are taken care of and that they are having an incredible experience on the platform with the product and also with each and every team member that they spend time with. So I think about it as being profitable has meant that customers keep our lights on. And every single minute of every single day, whether it is reviewing Help Scout tickets and our support tickets, whether it is taking copious notes and feedback from our customers on calls and on emails and driving forth a customer-driven roadmap, making our product roadmap public to our customers, it is the one thing that I think feeds into every other internal company decision and company building moment. For us. When we have a true customer-first mindset, and it's one of the things that I instill time and again in our company as we scale, we are then able to set up operating structures, rhythms, processes, and also hire for customer-minded individuals across the company as we scale.

I have a number of tactical questions. If someone's listening to this, first-time founder just getting off the ground, has that mindset themselves, How, if you go back, I'm saying in the early days, like how did you instill this into the company? Was it values that you wrote down? Was it some question you ask in the interviewing process? Was it something you do personally that everyone else sees? Like, can you give me some examples of things you did early or even today? So the tactical things.

The answer to that question. Varies based on company stage and number of team members. So for example, when you're just getting off the ground, for us, Kevin and I just sit side by side. I would talk to prospective and existing customers all day, every day, and Kevin would build what they needed. And that is really still the foundation of Healthy today. We just do that on a bigger and bigger and bigger level. And especially in our industry whereby our providers are on HealthE all day, every day, we know that we provide business-critical, healthcare-critical infrastructure for them. We are going to hear, and we do hear immediately when they love something and when they don't love something. And so that mentality then drives all of the decisions, prioritization, conversations that we're having, how we're organizing our internal meetings. How we're internalizing and organizing our roadmap. But it really starts with like talking to our customers, getting feedback, and then building what they need as quickly and as best as possible. And then when you build a team around that and you kind of go to that second stage where you have a team of, you know, 20 or 30 people, everyone's building out their own processes, everyone has their own experiences. I think it comes down to what we talk about, how we organize today. And in today's world, Slack channels, 5 to 7 years ago, it was like, all right, What do we care about? How are we going to make sure we get feedback from our customers and how do we aggregate and say, you know, 100 customers have been asking for this, we've got to tackle this. It's very different than, you know, and you constantly have that prioritization game. Today we have so many processes, onboarding seminars, and the list really goes on and on and on around really making sure that we've instilled a customer-first mindset. Every single feedback— my team knows this— every single piece of feedback that we get from a customer, whether it's from a support ticket or, um, a call or prospective, uh, sales conversation, we organize that internally. And that is how we are then able to prioritize and build upon our roadmaps. And tools have gotten better and better and better, but that is the fundamental promise. Hmm.

In the interview process, what is that thing that you look for when you're doing interviews that you're How do you identify that customer? I've been in your shoes before, and it is, I think it is hard to identify in an interview process. Are they really gonna be customer first? How do you do that?

Vino, you mentioned values earlier in our conversation, and to me, and especially in this day and age, hiring has everything to do with values and even less and less what's skills because the skills and the tools and the technology are changing so quickly themselves. So we have our values, we call 'em the 3 Rs: respect, resilience, and reliability here at Healthii. And we came up with these values as a company a few years back. We had a set of 8 values. Nobody couldn't remember them. I couldn't name all 8 of them, and they sounded really good on paper, but we were like, all right, we gotta simplify. We love rule of 3 here at Healthii. And we said, all right, we're gonna be encapsulated by respect, resilience, and reliability. And when you think about what that means, those are both applicable in human relationships, but also relevant in terms of product building and building a company. And so we really go back to the bottom layer, which is we've got to hire for values. And I think that we do a very, very, very good job of identifying what those 3 Rs mean to Healthy and mean to each of us. And from there, even in a hiring process, getting really crystal on, do we believe against our values that a candidate is going to make the right decisions? I think that it's easy. We say this at Healthy. Other things we say at Healthy, we have a whole set of Kavanisms or things that we say all the time. One of them is it's easy to be no ego, and it's easy to low fire value 99% of the time. It's that 1% where you've got competing priorities. It's easy to take a shortcut. It's easy to not do the right thing. And it's that 0.1% chance where it's like you've gotta make the right decision. And that's the hard part about hiring. But I think we've done a really, really good job of that over the years.

I actually wanna go into this values thing. I have seen this with a couple of companies, not that many. but a couple of companies that have looked at their values, like you just said, and said, this is ridiculous. I have 7 values, 8, like someone told me they had 10, you know, and then they redid the values with the company. They redid those values. Can you talk about that? It's actually really interesting because I think there are a lot of first-time founders that I meet that have literally like 6 values. And when I ask them, they're like 1, 2, 3, 4. And when after they get to 4, they actually sometimes forget. The fifth, the sixth, you know, cuz I don't even know how, it's hard to remember. So how did you do that? Why, let me say, why did you do that? And then how did you actually do that?

We did that because, I'll take a step back and talk about culture. Uh, one of the questions that I often get when I do interviews with prospective candidates and even with our current team as we scale is how would you define healthy culture? And my answer to that question is that I very much think that culture is an organism. I know that culture is going to change as we bring in new team members. So my job is not to protect culture in terms of keeping it the same. My job is to protect culture insofar as it means that we're living by our values. And I actually think that new team members coming on board is incredible because they bring their own rich experiences and best practices and know-how that are what expansively add to a growing company like ours. But the non-controversials are our values, and there should be no reason in any point in our culture where you're not being respectful, reliable, or resilient. And so when we go through the process, so we had, you know, this was a company retreat about 4 and a half years ago where at that time we were about a third of the size that we are at now. And even at that point, we would bring on new team members and we couldn't have coherent, good conversations about our values. Everyone agreed with the values. I don't think any of these words are controversial. Everyone wants to be, have integrity. But the question is, how do you really instill and embody a focused environment whereby people know that they have to and should want to live by our values? So we actually had an exercise during a team retreat. Everyone kind of put down into words what they thought values could be, why, et cetera, ran the exercise and This was pre-AI, popping it into ChatGPT to come up with the words to, to do this. We ran a manual RRI. If we could distill and organize and come up with it, this is exactly what we kept honing in on. And it's been really powerful for us as a company to really live by our values. And I think it speaks to a lot of who we are as people at the company, but then also the type of business that we're in because we are in healthcare. And so the ramifications of us doing our jobs well or not well are serious. And we take our job seriously.

That group of people that was there for that offsite, I would bet that those people become such a big part of the carrying the culture going forward because they were there kind of at the creation of at least this new set of values, right? Is that— is you felt that where like that group of people that was at the offsite, they then are like, wow, I was there. I was there kind of at the recreation of these values and they if you think about the organism, they're kind of that core.

The majority of those team members are also here. And I'll say one of the things that I'm most proud of at HealthE is that we have a core group of individuals that have been in the company for more than 7 years, 6 years, 5, many at 5 years. And that speaks to something that can never be measured, which is how do you create an environment for individuals to succeed? That's one of my favorite parts as a founder, which is watching team members grow in their careers. Run some of the biggest departments at our company and achieve personal milestones that they have long wanted to achieve. And it's really, really special to be able to do that.

When you think about operating this business kind of as, as it's continued to scale and you've had to be efficient, like we talked about, you were profitable operationally. Can you talk a little bit about operationally, how have you done that? Do you have some kind of strict operating rhythm that you run around? How do you do your goal setting? Can you talk about that?

Great question. What I've learned over the course of watching this at HealthE, our company, and then also talking with many other CEOs is that it does not matter what operating system you have. Pick, pick your path. The most important thing is that you have an operating system and you hold your team members accountable and instill that operating system across the company. So we at HealthE, uh, use the OKR system. I think there are pros and cons to the OKR system. There are parts about it I don't love, but that doesn't matter as much as having a shared language upon which everybody at the company knows how to report updates, identify blockers, flag items that need to be resolved, build relationships in a meaningful way such that we can be very direct and hold each other accountable quickly without spinning into a bunch of cycles on it. And that's the part that I think is the most important for any business. And so we use the OKR system. It's great. We run on an annual planning basis and then do quarterly OKRs. We do updates weekly. We use a shared tool to manage and aggregate that. And then we do department leads. We, we instituted this this year whereby we actually do additionally have department leads do proactive readouts of their KRs to the company to identify blockers.

By how? By email, Slack, or?

Oh, live. Live meeting.

Oh, wow. On a what basis is that?

To the whole company on a quarterly basis. And then across leads, we do that on a, each leader will do it once a quarter to leads. I find it to be, it's an experiment. We're instituting it for the first time. So we'll see in a few months how we feel about it. I mean, that's, this is a type 2 decision. You just cut the meetings if it's not effective, right? But it's a great way. There's so much happening at the company in any given moment. I think it's really important, important for leaders especially, but anyone at the company to know what's happening so that they can make the best informed decisions as possible.

When did you start this? When did you start doing OKRs? Day 1, or?

We started doing OKRs when we were at about 30 people.

Pretty early.

Yeah.

Where did you get that? Did you get that from a previous company? Did you get that from—

We've been working with an executive coach for the past 5 years, and it's been incredible. He has been very, very helpful in terms of helping us make sure You know, the thing about being a founder is the easy stuff is easy, the hard stuff is hard, and you want to make sure that you are— everyone has blind spots, right? And you wanna make sure that if you have a blind spot, you have people that are knowing how to help you get through your blind spots and also talk it out with you.

Wow, that's great. I'm gonna, I will say my own story, which is I had one of the biggest challenges I had was holding my team accountable. Kind of on a regular basis across the whole organization for the things that we said we were going to do. And I go back and forth myself of whether that was because I wasn't good at holding them accountable, we didn't have a good system to hold them accountable, or did we try to do too many things? Were we trying to do too many things at one time that was basically impossible? I recently published an episode with Amish Jani, who's from FirstMark, and he said companies don't die from indigestion. You know, from starvation, they die from indigestion because they're trying to do too many things. So have you seen that? Have you had to go through that journey of kind of, you know, eyes being too big for your stomach, kind of trying to do too many things and then cutting it back? How is that?

I would put a corollary to that. I don't think that companies die from doing too many things. I think it depends on the nature of the company. I would say that a company like ours would die not from trying to do too many things, but because we got so inefficient internally, which is probably a different form of indigestion. But I don't think it's a too many things. I think it's a didn't organize ourselves well and didn't set up a pace of execution that met the moment for our customers and for the market. And what I mean by that is the following. We have an ONC-certified EHR. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of features and subfeatures that go into our product. So the nature of our business is that it's probably one of the most complex pieces of software in healthcare. But I think that companies descend into mediocrity is a term that I use internally with our team, and that is my biggest fear, is we descend into mediocrity because we spend so much time internally doing process things and meeting things and going back and forth to make a simple decision that should take a tenth of the time. And so you can do a lot more if you have a strong pace of decision-making. And then you think about the components of what breeds and enables strong, concise decision-making. It comes down to operational excellence, having a team that trusts each other, knows each other, works well together. Has a shared language to say, hey guys, this is a blocker, this is just not gonna get done. And creating an environment where that's okay and/or you're like, all right, let's unblock it now. That is what excellence can mean and look like. And I think every company has its own flavor of that, but I think that we are all human, we are all people, we all have personalities, we all have strengths and weaknesses, and building teams that can power through and grow stronger through the course of the thousands of decisions that we all make every day, uh, collectively, not me, is what greatness over time.

You ran the company profitably for a while, for most of the life of the company. Was that deliberate? Did you not want to raise money? Was that decision that you made? Was it— I've had a couple of bootstrap founders on here who it's ranged from, I did not want to raise money to we couldn't raise money actually, which turned out to be better for us because we never did. What was that for you?

Yeah, a great, it's a great question. I talk to founders all day about this and we have so many amazing founders in our network and in our ecosystem. I think. There's no one right answer or path, so I can share a little bit about our journey and path in the hopes that maybe it helps others find their own path. This is actually something that I learned from Kevin, and Kevin was 18 when they started the company, so he is co-founded it when he was 18. I was a little bit older, so he was wise beyond his years on this point, but he was like, you always wanna be in the driver's seat and be in the position of control. And I would share that piece of advice to any founder. Which is that no matter what path you go down, VC, debt, bootstrap, friends and family, all of those options are all great and well, it doesn't matter to me insofar as you wanna be in the driver's seat of making whatever decision for yourself and not letting things happen because you've lost control of that. And so we've always approached it as, A, we want to build a generational business, and that is where we have our eyes set. And that is what we wanna do. We wanna be a company that's gonna be around in the future for a long, long, long, long, long time. And B, accordingly, we wanna think about long-term capital structures and capital financings that make sense knowing that Kevin and I want to be building this company for a long time. And so that is possible if A, you control your own destiny and have, are profitable, which has so many of the benefits, even if you're not profitable, if you're right under profitability for a while, But you get to really build for your customers and obsess over your customers. And B, think about capital partners. And we have some amazing investors who have been on our cap table for 9 years, and they know even today that we— they are signing up for a long-term outlook. And so I think a lot of that is going back to your question, is like, there's no one right path. What I have— what I would share in and of itself time and time again is founders should be in the driver's seat of what they want to do with their business. And if they want to take external capital and/or if they want to get— there's so many things They should be the ones that are making that decision.

That's how you ran the company for a long time, but you have raised significant amount of capital. What was that turning point? What was that tipping point?

A, the right partners, and B, having a very clear vision as to how capital helps you achieve certain milestones. I feel very lucky, genuinely, to have really good investors on our cap table. They are seasoned executives. They are other customers who have invested in us, and it is so valuable to have them around the table as we're building the company. We have— and then the second thing is, well, to have a clear vision of how capital helps you achieve things faster. We have been able to bring on amazing team members that we wouldn't have been able to bring on because we hadn't raised, right? And so when you raise, when you operate profitably, oftentimes you may be thinking about running lean. You know, it's all dependent on the specifics, but we have been able to bring on a top-tier team as part of raising.

That is a good— that definitely, use of capital, something very specific. Hey, we want to go out and build this team. We want to go out and get this level of person. That is, I think a lot of people, maybe it's changing now, but it does feel like it's just almost a de facto, like I'm building a technology company, I should raise money. So kind of just how people start. I, I do it does feel like it's changing a little bit. I hear a lot more people saying, I'm going to try to bootstrap as long as possible. I want the control. I want, you know, which is good, which is good. I actually think it's possible. It's much more possible now, you know, than it was. I mean, especially 20 years ago, 20 years ago, you need to buy servers, rack them in a colo facility just to build the software, to get the infrastructure to build the software was expensive. Now you can do all that obviously much faster in terms of you and Kevin, so he was 18. I didn't know that when you started the company. How did you even meet each other? How did that come about?

Yeah, that's a great question. So Kevin and I met on campus at Penn in November 2015. We're paired together on a campus pitchathon event for a different project. We didn't win. It was one of those awkward, I emailed him afterwards, uh, saying that I had an idea for a company and said, you know, are you interested in getting coffee? He thought it was going to be a funny story that he'd tell his friends around Wharton student seeks code monkey for a project to build the next Facebook. We got coffee and we said, okay, yeah, let's do it. We knew each other for 2 hours prior to starting the company. It is one of those stories that above all else, we both feel a tremendous amount of luck. In that we not only found each other and our, uh, paths, uh, stumbled into each other, but that it's been such an incredible partnership so far.

And I know that literally may be the fastest co-founding dating story I've ever heard. Yeah.

Wow. We just started building, then we met November, we started building Healthy over Christmas break, and then we launched with our first dollar in January 2016.

And did he drop out of, I guess he dropped outta school. Yeah.

Wow.

Amazing. How did you get your first 5 customers? First 10 customers?

Calling, calling and emailing, getting on the phone with providers, talking to them and showing them a product that Kavin would build right next to me. And very genuinely, I'm not a like salesperson. I've never done sales before. We got our first paying customer because Kavin went to me and said, well, what if we 'But what if you just ask them for credit card and see what they say?' And so, and I was like, 'Well, what if they say no?' And then they said yes. And that was a dietitian that's still using Healthbe today. And she's been an incredible advocate and supporter of us over the past 10 years. And that's how Healthbe really got started is solving a real problem and amazing, amazing, amazing providers and seeing that in us and seeing that in the product.

Did you do design partners like for free first or everything was paid right outta the gates?

No, I mean, we've definitely evolved our pricing. I'm pretty sure she's on a very high-end plan. Yeah, I hope so. I'm sure she, yeah, I know she is. So there's things like that where we really do take back to customer. We care so much about our providers. And I think that caring permeates when we very genuinely can show up and say, we wanna help you provide more care to more people. There is a genuine nature to who we are as people that I think clinicians see in us. Hmm.

When did you go from founder-led sales to hiring the first person to sell?

Oh, that's a good question. I don't super remember the answer to that.

But it was 10, 50, 100, 200? How far did you get?

We brought on someone pretty quickly to help. I mean, I, I still talk to prospective— I spend most of my time talking to existing customers actually today. Another saying we have at Healthy is we build for existing customers before we build for prospective customers. And I think that speaks to the ethos of how we prioritize and how we care for our existing customers. So I think we brought someone in pretty early, but I think again, it was us all doing it together in a very natural, seamless way.

Do you have a specific ideal customer profile? I can imagine with so many different types of kind of providers that you work with, is there a specific size or location, or is it purely horizontal? Any provider in those categories?

Overall, it's been really special to see how so many specialties of healthcare have been able to leverage our platform. And I think it speaks to what we've built, but also how we've built it. And also most importantly, the extensibility of Healthee because of the API. And there's no one right, and I think more and more healthcare is being delivered in a multi-specialty fashion. And I think that's really good for healthcare outcomes in this country. I think that Unfortunately, so many EHRs were designed as optimizers for medical billing and fee-for-service. And you can like think about the implications on a product perspective as to like what that means for the clinician involved. And we at Healthee, just given who we work with, like basically stood up a provider portal and a patient portal day one and have really enabled our providers to give a modern patient experience. Which is what I think healthcare deserves. Like we go, I go back to like we started the company because I had watched my parents go through the process of working with a corporate wellness program. They both lost 35 pounds over the course of a year and I was like, this is what healthcare needs to look like. And we started digging in and just realizing that most people weren't getting access to dietitians and coaches and therapists and chiropractors and PTs and nurses because they were so undervalued in the healthcare system. And also there had just never been technology to support and enable that. And so much of that has started to evolve and change, and it's so incredible to see that. But I also think it's because consumers are finally waking up and realizing that they can take a more proactive approach in their healthcare.

Hmm. Hmm. Over this course of a decade plus, what is the biggest challenge that you've faced and how did you overcome it if you were able to?

Oh gosh, that's a very good question. Biggest challenge I face, you know, I think it's like 10,000 challenges a day and 10,000 opportunities a day, right? We say this all the time in business. There's 10,000 things to solve, and if we're lucky enough to solve those as quickly as we can, there will be 10,000 more waiting for us. And we could be the size of Apple and still feel that way. And that's what we're getting towards. So in terms of things like big and small, I mean, look, candidly, I'll give a specific example and then I'll give you a theoretical example. A specific example is that back in our early days, we hit product-market fit so fast, all the SaaS fairy tale stuff we saw, and then behind the scenes, we had accumulated so much tech debt. Product was bursting at the seams. We were, you know, remember all those features that I mentioned? We have thousands and thousands of features. Those features were all breaking when working across each other. So, we had to go through a massive, massive rebuild, a massive, massive team restructure. And we were small at the time. We're still small, but we were really small at the time, and we had to go through the painful process of, over the course of about a year, rewrite our entire code base. And fortunately, that has set us up for having an API-first ONC-certified EHR. But that was really, really painful. And that was us as first-time founders being like, oh wow, we made some really bad decisions to get to this place. And we had to climb back out of that hole. My biggest challenge, going back to a theoretical answer, is pace of execution. I think that for a company like our— actually, for any company, really, we have a very, very, very strong pace of execution. I am always obsessed with how do you increase the velocity of decision-making and execution, because that is what breeds excellence over the course of time. How are diamonds made? Constant gentle pressure. And it is a constant question to each of us as leaders at the company to say, what is the right way to build excellence, um, across our company at any given time? And, and we do an amazing job at that here.

If there was one thing that you, you would tell someone else, you were talking, you're mentoring someone, and you said the thing that you can really do that's low-hanging fruit to increase the speed of execution, what would that be?

Build an operating system and a culture that allows you to have those conversations in a collaborative way. I am not— and that is a, a broad answer. It's important to have a culture whereby you hold each other accountable, but that it does not feel us and them. It, it's a part of the DNA and then as a part of the culture, it's, uh, not measurable at the end of the day.

The thing you mentioned before, I wanna go back for a second to the thing you mentioned about the rebuild or rewriting basically the entire code base. I went through something like that and we lost our entire go-to-market team during that period. We had a lot of upset customers. We had very pissed off investors in that year period. Was everyone happy and like excited and staying and, you know, like crushing it, or was that a painful year?

We let go of our, of 60% of our go-to-market team, and we definitely lost a couple of great team members that I otherwise would've hired and loved to have on. I think what I'll say is that many of the engineers who helped with that rewrite are still at the company today.

That was for them. They love that. I mean, that's, it's like an engineer's dream, you know?

Yeah. And so it was definitely hard. I think it was the right thing. So those things don't have to always be at odds with each other. As I tell my kids, we can do hard things. So you do it and you work through it and you wake up the next day and you keep going.

Hmm. Let's Fast forward now, it's 2029. We're looking at Healthy. What does Healthy look like? What does the business look like? What does the team look like? Fast forward 3 years from today.

I hope that it looks akin to what it looks like today. As we execute better and better and better and more and more and more, we earn the right to work with more customers and launch new products continue to have best-in-class technology and cover more and more surface area. But it is my biggest wish that a lot of the fundamentals that we have today are still in place because we have really, I think, you know, over the course of many mistakes and many good decisions and many bad decisions and many internal, we've built a really good and special motion and DNA and mindset and accountability system and pathways to execution and really, really good It's really, really good. And I think there's always 10,000 ways to build upon that. But as we say internally, I hope we, we continue to stay the course on a lot of our fundamentals while continuing to expand our surface area.

Let's transition to you and your background a little bit. Where, where are you from originally?

I grew up in Southern California, went to school in North Carolina, came to New York for the first time, um, and was like, this is where I'm moving. So I now live in New York and absolutely love it.

Um, What was your first job out of school?

I was a waitress in high school for a couple of years, and then after college worked in consulting and then worked at a nonprofit. My heart is in nonprofit. I absolutely love it, but I knew I couldn't build a career there.

Hmm. Is there a moment in consulting and the nonprofit somewhere in there that there was some break that you got, you know, for your career that someone some mentor, some role model, you know, is there something there that kind of triggered maybe the entrepreneurship? Is that from your parents? Is that, did you always know you were going to at some point build a business?

Great question. I had a couple of incredible mentors over the first few years in consulting at the nonprofit. And the benefit of having a mentor is that not only do you work harder because you want to be the best version of yourself, but you learn so much. So much. I remember I would, you know, stay up until 11 teaching myself Excel and thinking about, you know, second-order implications of the model that I was building. Not because I needed to, but because I was like, this is freaking cool. And I think that that's what good role models can really instill in you, especially when you're in your 20s right outta college. It is my belief though on, on the starting the company piece, and this has been my, like, I didn't start Healthy cuz I wanted to start a company. That was actually the last thing on my mind. And for me, it's all about just solving this big problem of access to healthcare in our country. And I think that is what motivates me, not the prospect of building a big company. So I think especially in healthcare, staying power, I have found, and I've observed other companies in the space over the last 10 years. For me, it's just, I love what I do. I love my customers. I love the fact that we, and I'm humbled by the fact that we get to work with so many amazing customers and organizations who are really pushing for what healthcare can and should look like. So, I actually hate the term entrepreneur. I think, you know, it's a fine term. It just— I don't resonate with it. To me, it's like, I want to solve this really, really big problem in healthcare and how can I use best-in-class technology to do that? Because I love the fact that technology can simplify workflows, give people access to care who otherwise wouldn't have access. And there are so many amazing applications of how HealthE has really helped people get better healthcare.

Hmm. With all of that, to start a company, a lot of people have that idea. Not a lot of people actually start a company, right? I mean, what gave you the confidence? Was that business school? Was that Wharton? Like, what gave you that feeling like, I can do this? Was there someone else that you had seen do it, like around you? Because again, I don't know how many millions of people every day think, I hate this problem. I want to solve this problem for the world, but don't actually go do it.

I don't have a very good answer for you. What I would say is twofold. One, I am the type of person, and ironically, Kavin is the type of person where when we go in and dive into something, we become obsessed with it and it's all we do. We dig in and dig in and dig in and dig in and then just do that. It's not a rational thing. And I, I'll say that the second thing here is that I feel very lucky and, and I know Kavin feels very lucky to have a support system of people around us that make this all possible and allow us to do what we do. And I think the thing about starting a company and scaling a company is that, yes, we can be single-minded, obsessed founders, and that is what, you know, to our conversation even before the podcast started, I think that that's what breeds excellence, but that comes and is predicated upon having an amazing a support system, um, of people around you. I don't want to discredit the fact that, yeah, like, how do you take something from an idea to real business? Not only is it being obsessed with something, but also having an incredible network of people around us.

That is a real— I mean, that point right there, I think the CEO founder support system, CEO support system, whatever you want to call it, I think is— someone said to me on one of these podcasts, they said, think about every professional athlete, they have surrounded themselves with the trainers and the therapists and the this and the manager and the agent and surrounded themselves with those people. And that's the only way actually that any of them are going to be really like the best athletes. But we don't really, and I will again speak for myself, you don't really think about that when you're founder, when you're CEO, you don't really until you're in it and you're like, wow, this is impossible without some, some support system around you. And I actually find that we probably don't invest enough. Frankly, into that support system personally and professionally to make sure that we're successful. To that point, you mentioned your kids before. You've got two little kids. You had those kids while building this business. Sounds like in the peak of building the business. How have you dealt with that? How have you— what kind of support system have you had? What kind of sacrifices have you had to make?

Great question. Candidly, I think having kids has been the best thing for me as a CEO. I became a better CEO after I became a mother. Um, I think the process of preparing for maternity leave is perhaps the greatest process because all of a sudden I am documenting everything I do. I am training up my team to do everything. And interesting. They feel empowered to go forth without me needing to get involved. What more do I want as a CEO? That is the most incredible thing in the world. That your team can run independently and hit their milestones without you. And so, I think that is something I'm incredibly proud of and grateful for, but also, again, that's predicated on having an amazing team that can really take that and run with that opportunity. So, in terms of that process of preparing for MATLAB and going on, you know, and becoming a parent, I think it's incredible. I also think that— So much of this job, like my job is not number of hours staring at a computer and typing as quickly as I can, right? That, that's not my job. Maybe that was my job 8 years ago, but that's not it today. And that's not what my company and my team needs from me. And it's not what our customers need from me. Having to prioritize, having to think strategically, having to think quarters and years down the line on what we're doing, what we want to be, who we want to be. All of that comes with experience. And I think that, you know, I don't know if this is parenthood or just getting older, but I think that that's what, that's what builds greatness over the course of time.

Um, okay, last question. Knowing everything you know today, all the experiences you've had in your life and in your career, what is the one piece of advice you'd go back and give yourself before your first job ever?

Have confidence in yourself. I think that I learned that over the course of time. I learned that watching Kevin and so many of my team members develop confidence. It's something that we talk about internally and how we can build a culture of anybody at the company having full confidence to make decisions, own their decisions, speak their mind, speak their truth. But I wish that I had had the confidence that I have today. In my early 20s.

What would you have done different? I, one of mine, when people, one person asked me, what's yours? And I said, trust your gut. And I think it's a similar thing where I was not, I remember being in meetings in the early, and I was like, I think we should do this. It makes a lot of sense, but I'm not going to speak up because I'm the youngest person. I'm the least experienced person. And that usually ended up being actually the right answer, but we came to it after many other steps. How would that have manifested itself? For you? Would, would it have been speaking up more, taking other kind of opportunities in the different jobs that you had? Or like, what would that look like?

I wouldn't have spent as much time second-guessing what I had said or done or obsessing over stupid things that don't matter. I think that there's a lot of value in making a decision, moving on, sending an email, moving on, um, having a conversation and then moving on. Um, and I'm a very empathetic person. I never wanna lose that empathy that I have towards others. I think it's actually one of my strengths. Strengths to be very empathetic and understanding. But I think with that comes a need to speak my mind, own it, and not waste a bunch of time rethinking.

I love that. Love it. Erica, thank you very much for doing this with me. Like I said in the beginning, I've been looking forward to this for a while. Um, thank you for Jess Lynn making the introduction. Um, and, uh, and really, really excited to get this out into the world. So thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

Awesome. For those listening, I hope you enjoyed. If you did, please share this out with your networks and we'll see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast.