S9E1: Iman Abuzeid and Incredible Health are Revolutionizing Healthcare via their Nurse Hiring Platform

The demand on the US healthcare system continues to increase, but we as a country, we haven't done a great job of increasing the number of talent or healthcare workers to meet that growing demand. And when I mean we haven't, all of us, government, healthcare systems, education, technology, everyone hasn't done a good enough job here.

Welcome back to season 9 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, happy Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday, Madison. Thrilled to be back behind the mic with you. Since last season, you've had a few updates on your end. You're now at Harvard Business School. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Claudia. It's been a dream of mine for some time to attend, and I'm thrilled to be back on the East Coast this fall. You'll have to keep me updated on what's going on in the Bay Area news and all things Priv, where you're still co-CEO and co-founder.

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On today's episode of The Room Podcast, we sit down with Dr. Iman Abuzaid. Iman is a former medical doctor turned CEO and co-founder of Incredible Health, a cutting-edge marketplace and platform in healthcare. After receiving her medical degree from University College London, Iman ventured into the world of business, working at McKinsey and then leading product management for health tech startups. This brought her ultimately to Wharton for her MBA, and after iterating through a learning period of her first company, she stepped into building her second business, Incredible Health. Now, as the CEO of Incredible Health, Iman champions a vital mission: improving the lives of healthcare professionals, specifically nurses. With 3 surgeons in her family and her own medical background, she knows how pivotal career decisions are in the medical field. Iman's personal journey fuels her belief in Incredible Health's potential. And this platform isn't just about job matches. It's a dependable guide for nurses. Helping them navigate their careers and making meaningful decisions about the placement, compensation, and career trajectory they're on. Incredible Health isn't just changing careers, it's reshaping healthcare recruitment and ultimately patient care. In today's episode, we explore insights and themes such as the 3-part framework Aman used to starting Incredible, when to bring on strategic investors to your cap table, and the future of the nursing industry. Let's open the door. Iman, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

We're delighted to have you joining us, and we like to start at the beginning with all of our guests on your own story. Could you kick us off with where you grew up and how that has shaped your view of the world?

I'm originally from Sudan. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. I lived in the Emirates. I've lived in the UK and I immigrated to the US when I was 24 years old to New York City. And so I'm not American. I immigrated here in my early 20s. That whole journey definitely shaped who I am today.

In that vein of where you grew up and how that shaped who you are, your orientation to yourself, did you always think you were going to become a founder? Or was that outta left field for you?

That was always an idea in the back of my mind. Both my grandfathers in Sudan were entrepreneurs, not technology entrepreneurs, you know, they did real estate and other things like that, but they worked for themselves. It's always been seeded in the back of my mind since then. But my dad's a doctor, right? So I had decided to go to medical school, as my older brothers did too. And that's how I ended up in the UK, in London, and that's where I went to medical school. And don't get me wrong, working as a doctor is wonderful and one-on-one patient care is great and it's very much needed, but I really wanted to have an impact on a larger scale, which is why I ended up deciding, first of all, moving to the US because this is where big things happen. Two is really wanting to go more into software and into technology and just, I just had a really strong desire to have an impact on a much larger scale as opposed to just one-on-one patient care as a clinician.

I love that framework for how a vision for change can be done in a small scale or a large scale, and there isn't really a relative judgment on whether one is better than the other. It's just what are you being called into? What can you do with your unique skillset? And I love that you've had this tangential vision for what being a doctor would become. And just to level set, you are a doctor. You did study at UCL, University College London, where you received your doctorate in medicine. Tell us a little bit more about that first step in the critical journey to what is now Incredible Health of understanding the medicine world from the inside.

Medical school was an amazing experience. Not only did I learn about patient care, but you start to get exposed to how a healthcare system operates. When I moved to New York City and decided not to pursue residency, I went into management consulting. I worked at McKinsey, at Booz Allen, and was doing a lot of hospital operations and hospital strategy work. That got me even more exposed to hospitals and health systems. And then after that, went to Wharton to do my MBA, uh, with a focus in healthcare and entrepreneurship. And I just got exposed to a ton of entrepreneurs while I was there who were my classmates too. And it's there where I really started to crystallize, okay, like, what do I need to do next? I knew I wanted to make an impact on a larger scale. I knew I wanted to stay in healthcare, and so made the decision during my time at Wharton to move to the San Francisco Bay Area, because that's where the capital of tech, whether people like it or not, it still is. And it's also where I just got exposed to a whole nother network. And I joined an early stage healthcare technology startup as a product manager. And that's where I learned to work with software engineers and designers and data scientists. You know, what it takes to create a software product that's actually used by people and can also grow. And so did that for 2 years. And honestly, that was another like training ground for me, right? Building software is not necessarily straightforward, and it's a whole skillset in and of itself. And so after doing that for a couple years, left with a software engineer who's a close friend of mine and my co-founder named Rome Portlock. Rome's a total whiz, went to MIT. He's a software engineer as well, and we started Incredible Health.

Well, that's an amazing journey to breaking out of the mold, what is not necessarily a career path that has one straight line. And I think that as someone who gets asked a lot, how did you break into venture from working at a large retailer? I love that image of just because you do one thing, it doesn't mean it, it precludes you from doing another. How do you stride that line? Bring us in on a moment, either working in McKinsey or Booz Allen in the consulting world, or in Alive Corp, one of the startups you alluded to working at, where having that interdisciplinary perspective, understanding what it means to be a doctor, or having your MBA, was valuable in a world in which you hadn't necessarily come from?

A couple areas where it's very valuable, it helps you connect the dots. One of the advantages I have today as a founder is the ability to synthesize information and data from lots of different places and make the best decision. And when I think about my perspective as a clinician, plus the, what I learned in management consulting, plus what I learned in the MBA, plus what I learned as a product manager, you can combine all of that and you can be a very powerful generalist. Essentially, that's the source of so many insights. Now, of course, I'm not going to dismiss market research and user research and all of that is very important, but it's being able to connect the dots between all of that and actually build something that's at least 10x more valuable, faster, cheaper, more compliant, whatever it is, than what's already out there. That's the superpower of a strong founder.

I love this sort of framing of being able to connect the dots or just having different experiences that make you this more well-rounded generalist so that you have ultimately better judgment calls in terms of making decisions. I think it's so interesting when folks give advice to aspiring founders of, oh, you know, you like understand a problem, you get feedback, and then you build a product and then it works. It's like really never that way. There's so many assumptions and decisions throughout that arc that ultimately could lead you in one direction or another. So after you graduated Wharton with your MBA, you initially led product management at AliveCore and then left in 2015 to start Lift League. As we understand it, Lift League was a mobile and web application that made it easy for wellness professionals to improve client results, build relationships, and increase retention amongst many other things. Tell us a little bit more about this founding journey and moment in your life.

You know, I worked on that with Rome, same co-founder. And we started working on this idea and probably one of my biggest lessons learned is try to go through a really robust ideation process before choosing what you work on. I think that was the big lesson learned or big mistake. We just started executing right away and it was later, like months later that we were like, okay, wow, we have a product that's live, but it's not growing. And when I think back in hindsight, like we didn't go through a really robust process to just evaluate the idea before we even built anything. And honestly, that's probably one of my number one tips to founders is like, go through a really robust ideation process, even if it takes a couple of months. It's worth your while because you want to make sure like, it's like a ship leaving the harbor and you want to make sure it's headed in the right direction or else you're going to end up somewhere super random. And so I learned from that experience that first of all, pay attention to market size. Even if you're not venture-backed, it's easier to operate in markets that are already very large, right? right? Because even if you capture just 1% of the market, you're fine. Second is the importance of looking at the competition, not even competition, but like, what are the alternatives out there for your customers? Now, there are certain industries, like, I don't know, business intelligence software that is extremely crowded, or CRM is very crowded. Now, I'm not saying founders shouldn't build companies in those areas, but just be aware that you're dealing with hundreds and hundreds of alternatives. And so then it's more challenging to stand out. And then the third piece is what's your unique insight? What have you come up with that's at least 10x better, better defined as faster, cheaper, whatever it is, right? Than what's already out there. And I don't think we went through that robust— we did not go through that robust exercise with the Lyft League idea. If we had, we would've discovered that the market size is not that big. There's not that many wellness professionals that own their own business. Second is that there's an enormous amount of other SaaS tools and other competition that they use. And then we didn't have a very particularly strong, unique insight. We thought that a tool that helps them retain clients was going to be super impactful and important. And that is what it does. But it turns out that the small business owner cares a lot more about customer acquisition than customer retention. If we'd just done our homework in the beginning, we would have saved months of time.

Those are some really apt insights that I've personally also felt having built a product for a few months. Thinking it was incredible, realizing that no one was using it, and ultimately pivoting into another area. So I think most founders will find that moment at some point in their building journey.

And I think the framework of questions you laid out is incredibly helpful.

I'd love to dig in a little bit more. You've mentioned a few pieces, but ultimately, how did Lyft League inform what ultimately became what Incredible Health is today?

Fast forward, this is now December 2016. Rome and I are like at our wit's end, not knowing what to do with Lyft Fleet. We start working with a team at NFX, James Currier, P. Flint, Gigi Weisliebe. They have an accelerator at the time. And, we start brainstorming in James Currier's garage in Palo Alto. And we decide we need to pivot. To your point earlier, Claudia, like sometimes you just gotta pivot. And, then at that point went through a very intense ideation exercise. To make sure that the second idea we pick is going to be a winner. And we picked Incredible Health ultimately, because at the end of the day, it fit the criteria of market size, unique insight, and competition. And then also both founders had sort of superpowers to make an idea like that work.

Tell us a little bit more about the early version of what the Incredible Health product was. Sure.

So it honestly hasn't changed. It hasn't changed that much. So our vision at Incredible Health is to help healthcare professionals live better lives. So what we're ultimately trying to do is we're trying to define a new category, become market leaders in healthcare labor. So when it comes to the initial product, hospitals and health systems use our software to hire nurses in permanent roles in 20 days or less. There's several unique things about the product. Number one, the employers apply to the talent instead of the other way around. So this is a very talent-centric platform. Which is what's needed in a supply, you know, we'll talk about the supply demand issues, but this is a labor market with a huge talent shortage. Secondly, we've automated the screening of the talent using technology. And so we're screening things like licenses and malpractice records and certifications and so on. And so we're able to serve up high quality talent. And then the third piece is the matching. So now with machine learning and so on, it's very fancy now, but in the early days it was a little bit simpler, but essentially we have to make sure we're putting the right talent in front of the right employers and vice versa. So it's a very personalized or a curated experience, automated for both sides of the platform. And honestly, that is still the core product today. Now, obviously added more, much more to it since then, but that's been the core value proposition from day one.

So much of what you just said is really ringing bells for me as I was a PM at Uber on the marketplace side of the business, navigating what Uber would look like if in some states drivers had to be employees instead of contractors. So, So I know there's just so much nuance in the marketplace construction. And so I'd love to dig in a little bit more there. So hospitals apply directly to nurses rather than the other way around. Unique and incredible. This is the first and only platform to focus on permanent employees rather than contractors, which is also a difficult nuance. Talk to us a little bit more about the unique supply and demand of a healthcare professional marketplace. And why you knew it was so important to have hospitals apply for nurses essentially, and have them be full-time instead of some other models and marketplaces that might exist.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's just talk about the demographic trends in the US. So our population is aging, and so that means the demand on the US healthcare system continues to increase. But we as a country, we haven't done a great job of increasing the number of talent or healthcare workers. To meet that growing demand. And when I mean we haven't, all of us, government, healthcare systems, education, technology, everyone hasn't done a good enough job here. And so the result is we have a massive labor shortage. We're on track to be 1 million nurses short by the end of this year. Like we're literally missing a million nurses. And so the shortages exist with all the healthcare professionals. We focus on nurses because they happen to be the biggest group of clinicians. As far as the focus on permanent labor instead of temporary labor, this has been our focus for us from day one. It has never changed, and honestly, we, we never will go into the temporary labor market. There's several reasons for that. One, we wanna be as aligned as we can with our users. Hospital leaders are trying to do whatever they can to reduce temporary labor and increase permanent labor because they run businesses that are low margin. And when you're spending 2, 3 times more on temporary labor than permanent labor, that eats into your already low margins. So it's like mission critical for them. And this has been the case even before the pandemic. Secondly, if you think about it from the perspective of a healthcare worker, and they spend 30, 40 years of their career as a permanent worker, nurses are like us. They got homes, they got kids. They can't just spend decades changing jobs every few months. Like that's not stable. And then the other reason was just market size. At the end of the day, even at the height of the pandemic, at most temporary labor was 8% of total clinicians. And when we're not in a pandemic, not in a huge emergency situation, it's more closer to 5 to 6%. Just back to the ideation topic, you wanna operate in the market size that's much bigger.

Focusing on more the supply constraints of the market, tell us a little bit more about what those dynamics are like and how you've innovated through a supply constraint dynamic.

Well, first is just recognizing that there's two problems in this market. There's an underlying supply shortage that we've discussed, but there's also a massive inefficiency problem, right? The talent that is there is not finding the right employers and vice versa. We hear these stories every single day where nurses say, I applied to 10 places, I didn't even hear back. Or if I heard back, it took months. We see that the days to hire a nurse outside of Incredible Health is 90 days, 3 months to fill a permanent nurse position. And I'm not talking about a nurse leader. I'm just talking about an ICU nurse, an ED, an emergency room nurse, an ICU OR nurse, right? And that's just simply too long. There's massive inefficiency in this market. So our unique insight with our product is to try to cut through that inefficiency as quickly as we can using automation and also changing the model around.

Well, you've definitely done that. And we're going to talk about some exciting milestones around the business and its growth. But because of that business growth, you have been able to raise incredible amounts of venture capital from top-tier firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Ambitious Ventures, and Base10. First of all, congratulations on your incredible raise, pun intended, at $1.65 billion mid to late last year. And we're really curious, you maybe have already answered this question, but could you tell us a little bit more about who was the first person to say yes to investing in Incredible?

Gosh, there were probably a couple different groups that said yes to Incredible Health. There was a very small friends and family round in the beginning, small round, like $200K we're talking. Those were actually the early believers. Secondly is the team at NFX, the team at Precursor Ventures, so Charles Hudson and James Joaquin, Obvious Ventures. They were the first teams to write checks. And when, when I say they were the first, I mean, we had nothing. We had two co-founders. And a vision. We didn't have a product, we didn't have traction, we didn't have revenue, we didn't have a customer, we had nothing. It was literally a thesis. And then after that, 2 years later, Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz invested in 2019, and he was incredibly helpful, right? Like, this is a former operator. I call him the master of marketplaces. He was the president at eBay, the CEO of OpenTable, early investor and board member at Airbnb and Instacart and Pinterest. Swan. So he, he knows marketplaces. So it's been super helpful having him on the board. And then there was a Series B, and that's when the team at Base10 came in, as well as the first health systems, Kaiser Permanente and Johns Hopkins became investors too. And so yeah, we've raised almost $100 million for this company. The valuation is at $1.65 billion. We are the highest valued and fastest growing career marketplace for healthcare workers in the US today. And we've done this over the— it's been just over 5 years.

It's truly wonderful to just see that progress because it's such a cause everyone can get behind, right? Unfortunately, everyone is impacted by our healthcare system for better or for worse at some point in their life with a family or friend. And just to see the challenges that inefficiency in the market can create for things that we all know we need, it's really awesome to have the venture ecosystem actually be putting our capital to I'm not gonna call other things bad, but this is definitely putting it towards the good. And we absolutely love to see that. And specifically, uniquely seeing how at different moments in your journey you've been able to bring different capital stakeholders to the table. At first it's people who have conviction in you, then it's people who have conviction in the business and the marketplace that you've already been able to build that can fuel the marketplace with their own understanding of how to build and scale them. And then you alluded to, but in your last round you had healthcare systems, just Kaiser Permanente and Johns Hopkins who are quite prominent providers here coming in. And we're curious just at that mark, that inflection point that says we're gonna bring on strategic investors as you're scaling. How did you think about the moment to say yes to someone like Kaiser? And then what have you been seeing in terms of value that it's brought to your go-to-market?

That's a great question. I think every financing round is highly strategic, and as a CEO, as a founder, you have to be very clear about what kind of partner you're looking for. I will say in the early round, like the seed to Series A, those two rounds, I definitely wanted technology investors. I didn't want any healthcare investors. I biased big time towards the San Francisco Bay Area. I still believe it's one of the places that has investors that are the most risk-taking and the most ambitious. It's important for founders and investors to have the same philosophy as far as like building a legendary company, the goals to IPO, et cetera. Now fast forward to the Series B, which was in 2022. At that point, we're now work with over 700 hospitals, but at that point we were over 500 hospitals. We were expanding aggressively in many different parts of the country. Where now 1 in 4 nurses in the US uses our platform, it was going to be pretty important to have like signaling, right? So honestly, the number 1 reason I added strategic investors who are also healthcare systems is to signal to the rest of the US healthcare system that Incredible Health is here to stay and it's not going anywhere. Kaiser and Johns Hopkins were already customers, but it's a whole other thing to say, and they also invested. I also just want to say like, I just painted the rosy picture. There was also like, enormous rejection. Like, I just wanna be clear to the audience, right? Like, 97% of investors said no at every round.

That's such an important point. That's teeing me up for my question.

Okay, great.

Which is, you've mentioned things have been successful and have grown, but tell us a little bit more, maybe give us some examples of some moments in this journey where things didn't go as planned and the picture wasn't so rosy.

And I'll talk about maybe our Series A. It was 2019. I remember pitching 35 investors. 32 of them said no. Now look, the 3 that said yes were like the top VCs in the world, right? Like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Benchmark. It was awesome. But there was still like 32 rejections before yeses. I tend to run a process where I leave the tier 1 investors honestly to the end of the process. Cause at that point I'm at like peak pitch performance, like, like worked out all the kinks. I've handled a bunch of feedback. I know what questions to anticipate and so on. And I do think founders should be super strategic like that. Like, it's almost like applying to university. You know, we have our safety schools and our reach schools, all that. Like, that's how you treat the investors too. I would get home, like the Homecoming documentary from Beyoncé had come out on Netflix when I was raising our Series A, and I just remembered coming home and I would watch that documentary like 2 or 3 times a week just to stay motivated because there was just so much rejection. She'd say things in that documentary about like, if I can do it, you can do it too, right? Like, I'm just a regular person from Houston, Texas. Look what I've accomplished. That's very motivating. So I watched this documentary on Netflix and I'd be like, okay, let's do it again the next day, you know?

So I love that you have to have those pump-up things that really get you going. Like, What's your activation song or activation motivation?

Oh yeah, I got Spotify playlists, whatever it takes.

Oh yeah. Love that you've revealed your activation. It's A, it's worked, but B, it's been able to help you have a material impact on the healthcare ecosystem and both the lives of employees, the nurses, and of course the patients. And you tease some of these statistics out around the growth that you've experienced over the last 5 years, but just to double-click on them, you're at over 700 hospitals today. 1 in 4 nurses in the US is on your platform, and hires are happening in less than 20 days, which is such a stark contrast to that 3-month number I believe you shared earlier here. And in turn, what does this mean for the business? As I understand it, it helps save hospitals $2 million per year. Given all that, though, I have never tried to sell to a hospital, so I'm outlifting this from what I understand, but they're kind of hard to sell into and often slow. How did you approach go-to-market?

Yeah, it's a great question. The nurse side of our business is very consumer. You have to get phenomenal consumer product managers, phenomenal consumer marketers, and just give them free rein to just get the nurses, right? The employer side of our business is very enterprise and we do have a full direct sales team. Enterprise sales team that sells to hospitals. It is difficult. Now, it's difficult for a few reasons, but it's no surprise, like, this industry is a little bit— it's a little old school, right? And then a little bit behind the ball in many areas. In fact, that was one of our original theses, right? Like, once we dug in, when Roman and I way back in 2017 started to dig into this problem, we realized, like, the processes, the tools, the technology that hospitals use And the health system overall uses, like, hasn't changed in like 20 years. So of course, naturally from that, selling to them is going to be challenging too. I would say the most important thing, and I would give this advice to any founder who's selling in healthcare, is that you have to have a really strong business case. At the end of the day, like, they are running businesses. Yes, they have amazing missions, you know, and we work with, we mentioned Kaiser and Johns Hopkins, we work with HCA, we work with academic centers, like, Stanford and Cedars-Sinai and NYU and, and so many regional systems like WellStar, Baylor Scott White, and so on. But at the end of the day, the, those leaders are running businesses and you have to have a very clear value proposition for what's going to drive numbers for them. In our case, it's a cost-saving product. When they use Incredible Health, each hospital location at a minimum is going to save $2 million per year. And they do that by Hiring permanent nurses faster. And so putting together a highly customized business case and ROI is actually what really accelerates the sales process.

That is really helpful and quite tactical. I think sometimes without having the other turn of the cards yet when you're in an early stage startup, how do you tell that story of ROI is something that is challenging. And then how do you get that early believer who is willing to buy in Could you tell us about a story for one of those maybe first 10, first 100 hospitals that said yes? What was the conversation like in the room?

Yeah, so all our early adopters were in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's where we started the marketplace. Now, Thaddee, I know you worked at Uber as well. Like, it's classic two-sided marketplace theory, right? That you should try to constrain the marketplace as you're growing, right? So you don't have an overly intense chicken and neck problem. And so that's exactly what we did. The entire Impronto Health marketplace in 2017 and '18 were only in the San Francisco Bay Area. That focus helped get the early adopters because we were very clear to them. We're like, listen, this is the concept. This is what we're thinking about doing. You're going to be the first on the platform. Would you like to give this a go? It's only available to the Bay Area. Now, the truth is, like, a lot of those early adopters were facing very real challenges. and we did tap into that and they were willing to give it a try. I will say in the same way I made that comment earlier that investors in the Bay Area tend to be very risk-taking and very ambitious. I would say it's the same even in our first employers. The truth is, yeah, the teams at Stanford and Stanford Children's, and even the HCA teams there and so on were willing to try something new.

I'm sure Claudia can speak to this, like the value and the distinction of where you start your marketplace business and how location is a dimension that maybe not every startup has to think about, but is incredibly critical to building a marketplace that has those network effects. A part of your marketplace though, underpinning it really, is a proprietary algorithm that helps to match the needs of your hospitals, so your customers, and then the right nurses who are your consumers. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sounds like you have an incredible co-founder whose background is more in that field and kind of how that's evolved.

And that's been a really critical piece of our value. At the end of the day, just, you think about it just from the user perspective. If you are a recruiter at Cedars-Sinai in LA and you log in, you don't really wanna see 276 nurses. You wanna see like 14 that are the right fit for you because nurse recruiters, just like nurses, are incredibly busy. Okay? They're trying to fill 100 jobs at any given time. They're probably some of the busiest people at the health system. And so you just cannot waste their time. You just can't. And then at the same time, if you're a nurse, let's say you're a highly sought-after ICU nurse or ward nurse, honestly, at this point, every nurse is highly sought after. You don't want to hear from 100 employers, but you want to hear from 5 or 6 that are the fit for you. And that's where the matching comes in. That's the value. That's truly the value that the matching drives. It makes the experience much more personalized, much more curated. So you're not wasting either party's time. It, it continues to be a big piece of our R&D investment. It's become much fancier now. There's machine learning, there's all this fancy stuff now. There's a much bigger team around it as well, but it is a key piece of the value proposition.

You touched about some of the fancy stuff there. I think we'd be remiss in not asking a little bit more. If we take a step back from just the Incredible Health worldview, how are you guys thinking about the future of healthcare? That is specifically now being augmented in perhaps for the first time new ways around artificial intelligence and machine learning playing a role in ultimately improving patient outcomes, which is what we're all here for with regards to healthcare.

My prediction here is healthcare, like always, will be one of the last industries to fully adopt artificial intelligence and all related technologies. Having said that, there's a lot of interesting experimentation going on across the country. In areas like virtual nursing and using AI in many different aspects of healthcare. I will say at Incredible Health, we're super bullish about that technology, including GPT. We've already started incorporating it into many aspects of our product, including helping nurses get resumes when they don't already have resumes. And of course, informing our matching algorithms a little bit further, really trying to predict which hires are going to happen and which ones are not going to happen. We've used them in predicting talent engagement, like how engaged talent is going to be throughout the hiring process. Then that's just like the user face amazing use cases, not to mention the internal use cases like our SEO team using GPT to create blog posts and the way we parse the data for the marketplace, which is an internal business process, can be done even faster with this kind of technology. So myself, my co-founder, Rome, who leads our engineering team, plus Yair, who leads our product team, are very bullish and pretty aggressive, honestly, with this technology and implementing it. Because there's just so many use cases for us, and it can be used extensively in the hiring use case.

I love that. I love the component you're bringing in here around how it can be even used for the end consumer through your platform, and the consumer of the nurse who maybe, you know, just like categorically would not be as exposed to technology innovation and not know how to leverage and benefit these tools. But through the trust that the Incredible Health Platform has built with the ecosystem, can empower them with these tools in net new ways. That's very cool. Speaking a little bit to the national shortage and nursing crisis that I think more of us are aware of as a result of COVID-19 pandemic, I am curious, as we look again at the more broad picture healthcare, what long-term impacts do you see the pandemic having on staffing and recruiting and how that maybe shifted the 2 years prior to the pandemic and now that almost 2 years after?

Yeah, it's a great question. So we, we did start this company before the pandemic, and at that point, a lot of our interactions were with directors and VPs at hospitals and health systems. During and after the pandemic, our interactions are with the CEO, the COO, the chief nursing officer, the chief HR officer. This problem that we're all trying to tackle has really moved up their priority list. Because ultimately it's impacting their bottom line. Labor, when you look at hospital financials, just this year in 2023, labor expenses are the highest that they've ever been, not just from temporary labor, but also the wages for permanent labor continues to increase. You also see their revenue starting to come down because of challenges with payers. They're in a very difficult spot. I would say that on a positive note, it means that there's now very senior leadership and C-suite attention on the problem. So, which means that often means in a health system that means there's gonna be more progress faster. Now, as far as the impact that's gonna have on nurses, which is ultimately like why we're here, like why we're here to help healthcare professionals live better lives, we're seeing more and more hospital leaders focus on career development programs for nurses because it helps retain them and help hire them. They're focusing more on flexible scheduling because it's one of the top demands from the nursing workforce. We are seeing more openness to relocation. So one-third of the hires on our platform are relocating from a different state. And when we started, maybe less than 10% of hospitals were even offering relocation assistance to nurses. And now like 75% of them offer it. And then of course they're looking at wages and compensation almost every 6 months now. We now can see in our data that more than 50% of the hospitals that we work with offer sign-on bonuses. And the average sign-on bonus is $11,000. So it's not like a tiny sign-on bonus. And we're seeing a lot of movement and change happening on that side, which I think will ultimately benefit the nursing workforce and the overall healthcare workforce.

I'm really excited about some of those changes and shifts, and I can— not being anywhere close to the medical field myself, having friends that can see how some of those impacts will be beneficial to more longevity in the space for even an individual nurse. And in that vein, I am curious If you have any advice being so close to this problem set, how we as a society can be better supporting our healthcare professionals with their mental health and wellness.

There's lots of suggestions. One is to just show appreciation in whatever way you can. At the end of the day, the healthcare workers have gone through a lot in the last couple years. 93% of nurses expect the nursing shortage to keep getting worse. Only 46% recommend a career in nursing. The good news is 80% of them plan to stay in nursing until retirement. A year ago, that was only 55%. So there's been some improvement there. It's definitely a workforce that's gone through a lot. So whatever you can do to show appreciation, if you have nurses in your family, if you have friends that are nurses, just whatever you can, you can thank them with a thank you card. You want to send them a meal, like whatever it is, right? Because their workforce stress is really high. The other thing is just to continue to push local leaders, whether it's hospital leaders, government leaders, to do more for this workforce. This is a workforce that requires more investment in terms of education. For example, one of the biggest bottlenecks we have in this country for growing the nursing workforce is we don't have enough nursing schools and the nursing schools don't have enough faculty. So there's tens of thousands of applicants to nursing school that are on waitlists trying to get in, but they can't because we don't have enough nursing school capacity. And so if you're in a position where you can influence that, like, by all means, like, please do. Um, another bottleneck where more people can help is what happens post-nursing school. There's not enough training programs. Nursing training programs can often be sponsored through donations and so on. And so there's an opportunity there as well. So honestly, there's lots of different ways we can all help.

Thank you so much for just sharing how small things like sending a thank you note actually can impact a lot of change, especially in a sector that is so important to just everyone in life. I'd love to switch gears a little bit. We've chatted a bit about your early career. The founding of Incredible Health, what's next in the space and what we can do for the space as well. But I'd love to chat a little bit more about your personal experiences as a founder. I'm a female founder, went through the fundraising experience, have had many enterprise sales deals that I felt like maybe did not go as effectively as they could have because of various dynamics. And as a part of this podcast, I think it's really important to be candid around what the female founding experience is like. Could you share a little bit more about that aspect of your journey?

We all know the statistics, they're pretty abysmal. I think it's something like only 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. Only 0.2% goes to minority female founders. And so yeah, the structural bias is very real. It's there. I would say the thing that got me through that reality is to Honestly suppress that, like not think about that. At the end of the day, if you're a founder and a CEO, you just got to do what you got to do to win, right? You're pursuing a huge vision and a mission and you have a destination in mind. In our case, we're trying to build this legendary company. We're aiming to be market leaders in healthcare labor. The goal is to IPO and, you know, just keep your eye on the ball and just do what you can to get there. I'm not at all trying to dismiss the bias and the issues that female CEOs have or minority CEOs have, because it's very much real, but it doesn't help to fixate on it or to overfocus.

Totally. I think that's incredibly wise and super helpful advice.

Having said that, I also would give the recommendation to like have your tribe. I mean, I have a tribe of CEOs, not necessarily, they're not all women, they're not all minorities, but you're probably, your most important support group is other CEOs.

Yeah, I can just like plus one to that. I think with Claudia and mine's own friendship and relationship, we can just be sounding boards, especially because we have distinct career paths, but they're interrelated and we understand the pain points on both sides. Having those people on your corner that you can trust when you're having a harder day than most is, is invaluable to helping to make it through to ultimately change the future.

Iman, we chatted a bit about your company, but what's next for you personally? What are you looking forward to this year?

I am looking forward to continuing to scale and grow Incredible Health. I would say there's two things that keep me motivated as it relates to the company. One is just the impact we have on users. We have over 3,000 now reviews across Google, Facebook, the App Store, and it's just really impactful. I mean, just every day we hear stories from nurses saying, this is the best job I've ever had. This is the best job search experience I've ever had. This is the most I've ever been paid. I dreamt of moving to California or to Texas or to New York, and I don't even know where to get started, and Incredible Health made it happen. Just so many stories. And then the other piece that keeps me really motivated at work is just working with really smart problem solvers. And I do get a lot of energy out of that. And so continuing to build the team with highly intelligent problem solvers is what I'm looking forward to as well. Outside of work, I am helping quite a few CEOs and founders in various ways. And then I recently relocated from San Francisco to Austin, getting to know a new city and built a new community here.

That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. We touched on this a little bit a few seconds ago, but we'd love to ask our hero question for the podcast, which is the question we ask all of our guests as we wrap up, and that is, who is a woman that has had a profound impact on your life and your career?

As far as business CEOs go, it's probably Katrina Lake. I still remember listening to her on How I Built This on, with Guy Raz before starting this company and thinking, wow, she's awesome. Like she's, and then I got to meet her and like we're in touch, which is awesome. And then I subsequently got to go on How I Built This, right? Which was just a great experience. But apart from Katrina, the, probably the female leaders that I really look up to are Beyoncé Knowles, Serena Williams, and Oprah Winfrey. Because those 3 leaders, they became the number 1 in their industries. They also just went through an enormous amount of rejection and had to exhibit tons of resilience to even get there. And it's just their mindset. When I listen to their interviews on YouTube and so on, like, they just— like, Serena is asked, like, what are you going to do about this competition that you have? She's like, I don't even think about my competition. I'm just trying to get better myself. I'm like, whoa, okay. Like, that's pretty awesome. So I think just from a mindset standpoint, there's a lot to learn.

Thank you so much for sharing that, Iman, and thank you so much for sharing your journey and what you're doing with Incredible Health on the podcast. It's been truly awesome to have you on today. So thank you.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

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