Transcript

Disrupting healthcare job hunting, with Incredible Health’s Dr. Iman Abuzeid

0:01 The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

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0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Founders are very good at just going straight to execution. It's almost like a boat leaving a harbor. Like you want to make sure you end up in the right place instead of ending up randomly in the middle of the ocean.

1:45 Doctor Iman Abu Zayad's first startup fizzled out and left her stuck in the middle of that ocean. But the lessons she learned led her to an undeniable North Star in moving forward. That North Star? Listening to the pain points of her customers. You spoke with nurses.

2:04 And really heard the urgency in their voice. It was almost like an emotional experience for them in terms of just the problems that they're tackling. Iman saw an opportunity to disrupt the way nurses get hired that would benefit everyone involved. That's why she co-founded Incredible Health. А marketплей for health care професіоналs. Incredible Health now boasts more than one million healthcare workers on the platform and has reached a valuation of nearly one point seven billion dollars.

2:36 Mm-hmm. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. It just seems absolutely nutball. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is masters of scale.

3:11 I'm Jeff Berman. Your host. This week on the show, we'll hear how Iman Abu Zayed's strategic approach to scale fueled the massive growth of incredible health. But first we wanted to hear how she ended up getting bitten by the entrepreneurship bug. after graduating from medical school.

3:33 Man, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you so much for having me. We're thrilled to have you. Like so many of the founders and leaders who have scaled companies in extraordinary ways, you're an immigrant that you didn't grow up here. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up. Sure, so I'm originally from Sudan. Uh, that's where my parents are from. I uh lived in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates in the UK. I immigrated to the US when I was twenty-four years old. And I you know, worked in management consulting in New York City and then moved to Philadelphia to do my MBA at Wharton.

4:08 And then move to the San Francisco Bay area to Work in tech. the path out of management consulting are are many. There are varied paths. Going down an entrepreneurial path is not what a lot of management consultants do. It's taking on the risk yourself. It's uh having to give yourself the advice that you might be giving to others as a consultant. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur? I went to medical school in London. So I'm I'm an MD by background. And if we just go back to even that time period.

4:35 I was always interested in having A big impact. Don't get me wrong, like working as a doctor is a wonderful career and I recommend it to everyone. However, I I really wanted to find a way to make an impact on a much larger scale. So after medical school, move to New York, work in management consulting. The benefit of that profession is that it just A, I gre grew a lot of skills and B just exposed me more to business. And then certainly the MBA award and helped me do that even further. But for entrepreneurship, I I genuinely believe I think entrepreneurship is one of the

5:04 It's like the epitome of what you can do with a cre your career and business. Like it's I think it's amazing. It's like imagine like a small group of people can ha transform an entire industry. Like it's it's magic. It's like the coolest thing. So I was always just trying to find ways to get there. What led you to move out to the bay and and how did you end up starting on a on an entrepreneurial journey? So I have a belief that the the San Francisco Bay area is still

5:30 the world capital of technology. If you want to start a c a company in s especially a software company, it It still is the best place. And that's for so many reasons, right? Um The capital, the talent, the the ideas, you know, the the network. Like it's it's just a a really amazing place to start a company. So I knew I was finishing business school in two thousand thirteen, like There was only one plan, move to the Bay Area and joined as a product manager at an early stage uh healthcare technology company. And that's really where I got exposed to software engineers and data scientists and designers and and got to learn what it takes to actually build products that users love and how to grow them as well. And so after doing that for a couple of years, uh left with a star software engineer that I was working with, Rome Portlock, who is a total whiz went to MIT, he's a fantastic engineer as well. And we left to to co found a company.

6:20 That's not the company you now have co founded and you're running. What was that company? Yeah, so we actually started working on another idea. And we worked on it for about a year, which didn't actually work. It was actually a app that helped small and medium healthcare businesses like chiropractors, physical therapists, you know, so on, uh r retain their clients. So it helped them, you know. engage with them between sessions and so on. And so it it was live, there was a revenue coming in, but we were really struggling with growing it. And so we made the decision after gosh, a year of working on it to pivot to a different idea.

6:50 And so just take us back if you would. You and Rome are at a fairly early stage company. How does it come to be that you leave and start a company together? What catalyzed that decision to do that with each other? I'm a big fan of thinking through well, what is your goal in five to ten years and then work backwards from there. So I knew at age, you know, in my twenties, like, hey, I know I want to start a company. So what's the path to get there? You know, one path is get to the Bay Area, another path is start, you know, you don't know you don't have enough skill. So like become a product manager first, you know. So All of that that was like the ultimate goal at the end of the day. And then Rome I encouraged him to join me on the journey. I don't think he has any regrets around joining joining me on this. Well, given given where you are today, I I have to imagine not so okay, so you you all are working at this other company, you come up with this idea

7:38 Do you start working on it while you're there, or do you all leave burn the boats behind you and say we're we're doing this and we're all in on this on this concept, we're gonna go build a company? We left. Um, so we were working on a company full time. Now one of the things that happened around that time is joining a team called NFX. And FX is today, it's a series seed and series A fund. At the time, it was a fund plus an accelerator. And so we joined their accelerator program. And that is actually where Rome and I just made the decision to pivot. And it was great to work with, you know, James Currier and Pete Flint and Gigi Weiss Levy in terms of figuring out what to do next. And so they were they were awesome thought partners as well.

8:17 Had you all raised money against the initial concept or were you bootstrapping it? What where where were you in your process? Yeah, we were bootstrapping. We didn't raise, you know, meaningful capital until we started incredible health. What was the point at which as you were in the N FX accelerator You and Rome looked at each other and just said, You know what, this really isn't working. There's there's a better idea. Take us through like was there an inflection point where that happened? What what what happened there? So essentially we've been working on this idea.

8:45 For a year. It was called Lif League, by the way. Fundamentally we You know, came to the conclusion that Small business owners. didn't necessarily

8:54 prioritize or care as much about retaining customers as they did acquiring customers. And our product only helped with retention, not acquisition. And so based on that, we were like, Hey, let's just Let's just cut bait and and change change the idea completely, which I came to understand is actually very common in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area. There's so many companies today like that were major pivots, like like Twitter, like Slack. Those founders were working on completely different ideas. Yeah. So the decision to pivot when something isn't working is one thing or What to pivot to is a whole other matter. What was the idea

9:30 for what is now incredible health and what was that moment where you go, Oh, yeah, that's the thing that we need to go do. So one thing that we did at the time was really put together a much stronger ideation framework. And honestly, this is like probably advice I give to a lot of founders. I think founders are very good at just going straight to execution, but sometimes we gotta think through our ideas to make sure we Uh we end up in the right place. It's almost like a boat leaving a harbor. Like you want to make sure you end up in the right place instead of ending up randomly in the middle of the ocean.

9:59 So what we did was you know, part of this framework is When when you have an idea, really think through the market size. Think through the competition and then think through your unique insights. Like what have you figured out that that is 10 X, at least 10 X you know, smarter, better, faster, cheaper, more compliant, whatever it is than what's already out there. And then after that, if if it's meeting you know the that those three criteria, market size competition and unique insight, then go deep on the really deep on the market research and the customer research.

10:27 So we we did that with a few ideas and ultimately decided to go with the incredible health idea to share a bit more about our thoughts process at the time. The healthcare industry is the biggest labor industry in the country by number of workers. So one one in eight Americans works in healthcare. It's also an industry where we have tremendous, uh, huge labor shortages, right? Like our demand for healthcare as a country keeps growing, our population is aging, it's putting more and more strain on the US healthcare system. And we as a country have not done a great job of increasing the number of healthcare workers to meet that demand. So we were very familiar with that huge, you know, supply-demand imbalance. As far as just like what else is out there, you know, it was primarily just

11:08 job boards, which is, you know, technology from twenty plus years ago, which are very tough when there's big shortages, you know, because from an employer perspective, you're you know you're posting a job and hoping all all works out, which is really tough when there's huge shortages. And then similarly on the talent side or on the candidate side, You know, the healthcare workers were saying I apply to ten places, I usually don't even hear back. Right. So there's a few unique things that we did with incredible health at We believed it was at least ten X better than what's already out there. One was having employers apply to the talent instead of the other way around. So we really flipped you know, flipped the script, flipped it around, instead of waiting for healthcare workers to apply to employers, having employers apply to the healthcare workers.

11:45 We also worked on automating the matching and automating the screening because of where software was at that time. And still today, I mean, there's just we had the ability to do that. At scale. And so those are those are some of the initial insights. And so ultimately decided to pursue the idea based on that. Of course, we did a little bit of customer research too. We spoke with health system executives, we spoke with nurses. And really, you know, heard the urgency in their voice. It was almost like an emotional experience for them in terms of just the problems that they're tackling. With You know, hiring in general. I imagine that part of the advantage of the pivot also was you went from pitching software to

12:22 thousands upon thousands of prospective customers who were not All that practiced in evaluating new software systems and what have you, and all of a sudden you're pitching like Kaiser. You're you're pitching huge healthcare companies that have this massive need for talent and we have a talent shortage. So was part of it also that you saw that your sales channels and sales cycles would be cleaner and shorter? That was definitely one of our learnings. And selling in the enterprise world you are working with a more sophisticated set of buyers. And that meant for us we really had to have the amazing business case and ROI and you know all of that had to had to be put in place too.

13:01 Yeah. So I'm curious as you were looking at the marketplace, and well, obviously there's LinkedIn and obviously there's ZipRecruiter and other platforms. What did you see that you could do 10x better than the existing platforms for job applicants for recruiting, et cetera, in healthcare specifically? First was the vertical focus on just healthcare. One of the complaints our customers have, like the health systems have, is that these horizontal marketplaces like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter and so on are not necessarily customized for healthcare. The reason that matters is there's healthcare is a regulated industry. the healthcare workers have licenses and certifications and and and so on. So that was one piece. The second piece was just the the employers applying to the talent instead of the other way around. So it's a completely different experience. Healthcare workers, they absolutely love it, right? They create a profile, they sit back and relax, they get interview requests, they get to decide which interviews they accept or decline.

13:57 And it, you know, we're often described by healthcare workers as the this was the best job search experience of my entire career. We have thousands of five star reviews across Google and Facebook and the app store with them describing about what an amazing experience and what a delightful experience it's been. The other insight that we had was just around the automation of screening and of and of matching. And that's really what brings a enormous benefit to the employers in particular as well as so the to the healthcare workers. For the employers, it's usually a very small team internally that's trying to hire like a lot of roles. We started with nursing, we've now expanded to technicians and technologists, but at that time it was

14:32 You know, one recruiter would be trying to fill a hundred roles. in nursing in a highly competitive market. And so they very much value the fact that the talent was pre-screened and pre-bedding and cost to match to their to their needs. Yeah. And one of the challenges of building a two sided marketplace is it's like you can't open a nightclub and not have patrons there. It feels really weird to show me one of six people there. So when you were building this And you were getting at least some positive feedback on the the demand side, right? On the on the employer side.

15:05 How did you go about filling up the candidate pool quickly enough so that the employers were able to screen through these candidates at volume and be able to say, Oh no, these are the 10 we're desperate to talk to. Yeah. So we honestly use a lot of the classic tactics that other two sided marketplaces in Silicon Valley use. So first and foremost, we made sure we were geographically constrained. So for example, in the first two years of this business, we were only in California. Like Incredible Puzzle was only available in the Bay Area and the LA area. That's it. For two years. And it wasn't until our third year that we started expanding to other states. The reason that mattered that mattered a lot is to build up the supply and demand uh at the same time in a constrained way, because we were limited on resources at the time as well. At the time the team is like, you know, less than 10 people. I think we'd raise a two million dollar seed round, but like that was it.

15:53 We also wanted to make sure that our product and operations were were good enough to drive success for both sides of our marketplace. And that was that was an enormous amount of product development and operational work that had to happen at the time. It was wonderful working with the those early adopter health systems then, because they were very engage and understanding of what was happening. And they were I I consider them some of our development partners. Like they were they were influenced our product uh and our operations at the time too. Will you tell us how you landed your first employer side partner and then how you engage them to help evolve your product roadmap? Yeah. So okay, we've now grown to over one thousand five hundred hospitals. That's a lot of hospitals. It's a lot of hospitals in the US. And and the largest, you know, we work with the largest health systems, including Ascension and Trinity and HCA and and we work with many community hospitals. We also work with many academic medical centers like like in New York Presbyterian and NYU and C or Sinai and and many many others like that. So If I sort of wind back to the early days, I think we got the very first health system through cold calling.

16:57 Do you remember who it was? It was H C A. We didn't have a sales team at the time, so it was just me. Um, and I would spend hours each day cold calling, cold emailing, and got a hold of someone. Uh, I still remember her name. Her name was Gloria. And what was Gloria's role at H C A? Gloria's a recruiter. God bless Gloria. Uh yeah, a very experienced recruiter.

17:19 And so I sort of explained what we're up we're up to. At the you know, at the time there's not like we don't have a fancy deck and you know, presentation. There's none of that. It's just a conversation. Um I explained to her what we're doing and what's different about it. And and she said, you know, we are actually having a lot of challenges. And then she offered to introduce me to her boss. And so that's how the first one happened. And as you evolve the relationship with H C A and then Cedars and and these other healthcare holding companies and hospitals, how did you engage them to to understand what their needs were to inform the development of your product roadmap? So when it comes to this enterprise, which are you know large, large customers, there's actually multiple groups that you have to engage with. So there's the end users. So so the actual recruiters themselves were

18:03 Amazing. Yeah. In terms of just providing feedback in terms of their product experience and the w because they they care the most about the w about the workflow within the product and as well as the experience that they're having with the candidates. So so they were extremely helpful in just improving our actual core product experience. When it came to the executives and leaders, we were another group of important group of users, you know, with them, it was mostly around they helped us really improve our reporting, our analytics, how to explain and and the return on investment in the business case. So You know, we just played we just stayed in really close touch with both groups of users. We were probably in touch with our customers. You know, every single week. Honestly, look, seven years later, I'm still speaking with customers. Almost every day. Right. I still listen to recordings of of our team's call with with the healthcare workers. And the number one value at incredible health company value we have is customer obsession. Like do whatever you can to delight your users. And that's like firmly embedded in our culture and the way we do our work. And so that's a value that's required of

19:01 Every single team. This isn't just for the product team. This is for everyone, operations, finance, everybody. More with Iman Abu Zayed on how a slow and steady approach to nationwide expansion paid off big for Incredible Health. In just a minute. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about

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20:13 Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. On my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

20:46 Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more. On our YouTube channel. I imagine as a founder and CEO, and I'm also imagining your your investors, your early investors,

21:04 Saying, look, this is great. You're establishing product market fit. You're growing these geographically constrained ways so that we're making sure that we're serving both sides of the marketplace well. But hey, we're two years in and we're in two markets in California. And it is a competitive marketplace and presumably the zip recruiters and others of the world are seeing what you're doing and would at least be contemplating whether they could compete with you in California and nationally. Were you worried about others jumping ahead of you? in the broader national market? Or did you feel you had such a competitive advantage that you could take your time to really get it right in California before you expand it? Yeah. I mean look my my perspective on competition is it's it's good to be aware of them, to study them and learn that and learn from them. I really don't think founders and CEOs should be obsessing or focusing very much on them.

21:55 I think the obsession needs to be on the customers, not on the competition. So I want to jump to this for a second because I imagine if you'd waited five years. to go beyond California. That would have been too long. Yeah right? Because others would have caught up and what have you. And I'm curious if if you had investors or advisors who were encouraging you to scale fat like blitz scale this thing. Let's go, let's get out there and beat the market. How did that play out for you and how did you know when it was time to go outside of California and and go more national? I'll start by saying like this is the benefit of having really high quality investors. I work with James Joaquin at Obvious Ventures, who's another OG, been doing the internet thing since the late nineties. He's a great guy. He and he and his wife Zemmer are phenomenal people. They're awesome. And then also I work with Jeff Jordan and Andreessen Horowitz. So Jeff Jordan was

22:45 The C of open table. So honestly, I had very good investors who know a ton about not just software and the internet, but also about marketplaces. With the benefit of their advice, right? We wanted to make sure that The marketplace was working well in two geographies, at least before we scale it further. So I never really got it a ton of pressure from investors to expand rapidly until we got to stronger metrics. Once we got to the stronger metrics, then actually that actually triggered me to raise our series A.

23:15 Which was another fifteen million dollars, and with that we expanded to more states. It was actually our customers that were pushing us to expand beyond California more than our investors. Especially with the some of the bigger health systems we were working with. They were like, This is working great in California. Like when are you coming to Texas and Nevada? And you know, et cetera. So we had to actually tell our customers like Hold your horses, like we got to address a few things and then we'll support you. But it was a great way to grow because we were able to grow and expand to other states with our customers. you know the demand is there before you even show up there. The model for incredible health is interesting because only one side of this marketplace pays, if I understand it correctly. Is that right? That's right. How does the business model actually work?

23:53 The business model is based on employers paying. We've achieved a a days to hire of twenty days on average on the platform. We also drive really strong ROI for them specifically around cost savings. So for every hospital we work with, we save them at least five million dollars a year. Because by per hiring permanent nurses faster from Incredible Health, they're able to reduce their temporary labor and overtime costs. That is why they pay for incredible health. Um, and so as a result, we've been able to effectively subsidize the healthcare worker side, you know? So we we can provide all kinds of free tools and services.

24:24 To the healthcare workers. And that piece has been really important to our strategy too. For the healthcare workers Incredible health is more than just about finding a job. It's about managing their career.

24:35 So we provide a whole range of free tools and services to the healthcare workers, including continuing education, salary estimators and a community where they can ask each other for advice and they get access to career coaches too, that help them with interview preparation. I mean, it's a pretty full suite of services on the healthcare worker side that helps give them a more delightful experience too. You have fifteen hundred employers on the platform, is that right? And some of those are very big. organizations. How many on the employee side? How many on the candidate team member side?

25:04 We have over one million nurses on the platform. That's a lot of nurses. Extraordinary. And this is just in in about seven years that you've done this. Yeah. That's right. You said that you're a big fan of five and ten year plans, and we're in a world where it's hard to see what's coming six months from now, much less five years down the road. When you look out five years for incredible health, what do you see? In five years, we will be in more categories more than just, you know, nurses and technology technicians and more than just hospitals and surgery centers and home health. Our goal ultimately is to be in all aspects of healthcare on the employer side and on the healthcare worker side. And then we will also be embracing the latest and greatest technologies in order to deliver our service. So you're focused on the healthcare sector, uh understand that, you know, relentless focus uh on the category. Um, if you were advising uh a a company that's

25:58 That's trying to do something similar in a in a completely unrelated category. W what would you say they have to do to make this a better experience both for the employers trying to recruit and for the the prospective team members they're going after? Yeah, I mean I I think I'll I'll answer that question in a way that's maybe advice for all hiring. There's a whole range of best practices out there. Speed is a key one. Moving candidates through your process, not ghosting them, ensuring they're clear on what the next step is, having a really clear process internally, like all that really does matter and drives a really very delightful candidate experience.

26:33 I think being very clear about what you're actually looking for and defining your role accurately. is important as well in terms of what's the what are the must haves versus the nice to haves. We ran into this issue a lot in healthcare and we ran into it in tech as well, where you know hiring managers and leaders could put all kinds of criteria and which can just Kill a pipeline or a funnel. We need to really ask ourselves the tough questions, like, do we really need all of this criteria to get the right person? Another one is just

27:01 Have very clear timelines as well. You know, there should be the amount of time to complete a phone screen to complete a hiring manager interview to get an offer out. They should be relatively short timelines and so candidates sho can get through Within days.

27:13 Not weeks or months. So those are all just, you know, tips that we've learned. Your dad's a doctor. How is it when you talk to him about the work that you're doing as a healthcare professional who focused, presumably, on individual patients, seeing your impact? on an entire nation's healthcare system. What's that like for him? Both my parents are are proud of of what we've done. I think that in the early days they were

27:35 A little skeptical, like, is this a real thing? Like, is this you're not working a normal job? You know, like there was a little s definitely a little bit of skepticism in the first few years. But once we really got going and certainly once the press started. you know, paying attention. That's when they were like, oh, okay, this is this is real. This is actually happening. Right. You're a doctor. What are you doing? You're and here we are. Yeah, my dad does not talk to me about doing an anesthesiological residency anymore. Yeah. The next five years will be very exciting. And even with the the million nurses you have on the platform, um and

28:10 This you know, radically better way of going through a job search process on both sides. We have a real nursing shortage in this country. Um, we have a real healthcare worker shortage in this country. What do you see as some of the solutions for that broadly? And what can Incredible Health do to help there aside from creating a great experience in the job search process? For healthcare workers, let's let's first just examine the the ball next. Like what is stopping us from increasing the number of healthcare workers in this country?

28:38 One area is that It's important to point out that there there's actually quite a lot of demand from Americans to get into nursing and some of these other professions. For example, for nursing schools, there's wait lists of tens of thousands of Americans who want to get in, but they can't get in. So we have a really big ball neck at the school. level. And they can't get in because there just aren't enough slots. We haven't made the system efficient enough for the training for us to take the number of people who want the training.

29:03 That's a huge bottleneck. Another bottleneck that's happening is right after school. You know, you actually have to end up getting trained and getting specialized and so on. And there's just not enough programs and employers that are willing to invest in training. And so There's a whole range of solutions to addressing those problems. And it it's gonna take all of us to do that. It's gonna take industry like us, uh like incredible health, plus you know, the role of uh local, state and federal governments. I mean, it's it's pretty important even from a for a government to be providing healthcare and having a strong US healthcare system. We all have to participate in driving these solutions.

29:35 One could imagine Incredible health thinking about vertically integrating and helping solve the education and training problem. That's right. Is that on the roadmap for you all? Yeah, we're on this journey already. So but we provide continuing education to nurses ins inside our apps. And To the extent that we can continue to provide more and more training in a in a remote way, in a digital way, even in an AI way, I think that that will help a lot.

30:01 There's a fascinating company I just want to mention called Stupful. Which is providing AI training for healthcare workers. And we need more and more ideas like that. And we're definitely at Incredible Health, we're definitely gonna be engaging in in in a lot of that activity. Quick lightning round questions. When you are stuck.

30:16 when you are not sure what to do and you've probably talked it through with your co founder Rome because sounds like that's your your first and last. Who do you call? So I have a whole leadership team, which is awesome. And I it's all it's like a a luxury uh to have an amazing, you know, CFO and and C and Chief Revenue Officer and HR leader and so on. So and so I have I have a very strong leadership team that I work with. Externally, I have um advisors and board members. No. Jeff Jordan and James Joaquin are still two of my key advisors. Uh, and they're both on our board as well. And then finally, just more personally, I have I have an executive coach, you know, and that's that's been really helpful too. And what's the thing that's most valuable that you've taken from your coaching experience? The benefits of it remind me a little bit of

31:01 The benefits of psychotherapy too. I think it's important to be able to Discuss, maybe even venture. to people that are not our family members and not our friends and sometimes not even our co workers. And so he's been a a great outlet. And

31:18 The other thing is that they just provide additional perspective that you may not even be thinking of. That's been really helpful. Increasingly, my role as CEO has Moved. More and more towards more people oriented. opportunities and challenges than just purely, you know, product operations customers, right? So I've had to evolve my professional development very, very rapidly while growing this company too.

31:42 Yeah. What's one book that's helped you on your journey that you recommend to others? One, I love Ben Horowitz's hard things about hard things. It really describes like how insane the journey is to building a company. And As much as I say like it all looks like sunshine and rainbows on the outside, but Yeah, there were a lot of challenges while building incredible health. Um, and that book really, really shows it. Another one is uh by Bill Walsh, the former coach of the San Francisco 49ers. It's called The Score Will Take Care of Itself. And it just really highlights the importance of having great process, great systems, and great culture. If you can set that up really well, then the outcomes are inevitable.

32:20 I love that. Okay. And last question for you. If you could wave a magic wand. And change, fix one thing about American healthcare today. What are you doing?

32:33 The two m biggest problems in American healthcare today is access and cost. And if I could wave a magic wand, I would solve you know, if if there's a way to solve access issues where every American can get access to high quality health care, no matter where they live, no matter where they work. That would be amazing. And then it's been really, really challenging just sort of looking at the trends over the last couple of decades to manage costs in healthcare and And so I I don't know where we're headed here.

33:01 It it just seems like we might be on an unsustainable path on the cost side. Let's get you that magic wand. Thank you so much for being with us. Appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me. By listening to the pain points that nurses and hospitals face around hiring, Iman Aba Zayed has built an innovative job marketplace for some of the very most important people. in our economy.

33:25 our health care professionals It's a game changer, both for workers and for the employers, and it's a testament to how every industry has outdated systems worth disrupting. If You know where to look. I'm Jeff Berman.

33:41 Thank you for listening. Masters of Scales await what original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Masha Makutunina and Brandon Klein. Our senior town executive is Stephanie Stern.

34:09 Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holliday. Our head of podcasts is Letal Malad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter.