Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz How I Built Resilience: Dr. Iman Abuzeid of Incredible Health About this episode Dr. Iman Abuzeid is the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, a digital platform that helps streamline the hiring process for nurses and recruiting hospitals. After seeing an increased demand for nurses in April, and a shift to hiring digitally, the platform has now been able to expedite the hiring process to 15 days or less, compared to an industry standard of 90 days. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.
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0:00 Guy Raz? We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.
0:45 Guy Raz? But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes
1:30 Guy Raz? based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?
2:14 Guy Raz? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt.
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4:21 Guy Raz? NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.
5:06 Guy Raz? If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, really quick before we start the show, The How I Built This book is now a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. So, thank you to all of you who ordered it and for your support of this show. If you haven't picked it up, and you want to learn the secrets of how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, How I Built This, the book, is for you. It's now available wherever books are sold
5:49 Guy Raz? and in most countries around the world, or by visiting howibuiltthis.com or guyrazz.com. And thanks.
6:02 Guy Raz? Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This: Resilience Edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're building resilience into their businesses at this very challenging moment. And today, we're going to hear from Dr. Iman Abuzeid, the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health. It's a digital career platform where nurses create profiles and are matched with hospitals, making the hiring and onboarding process much quicker and much more efficient. It's currently being used by hundreds of leading hospitals across the country.
6:35 Speaker 01 So hospitals and health systems, they use our platform and our custom matching technology to hire permanent nurses in what is 15 days or less right now. Usually, the industry average is 90 days. Now, the reason the average is so high at 90 days is because we are experiencing a massive nursing shortage. Even before the pandemic, the shortage was pretty bad, and it's now become even worse. So the few unique things about our platform and the way it works is that the hospitals apply to the nurses instead of the other way around. And so by flipping it around like that, it's a magical experience for the nurses. They create a profile, they sit back and relax, and they hear from different employers, and they get to choose which interviews to accept or decline.
7:18 Speaker 01 And we also use our software and automation to screen the nurses, as well as to custom match nurses to the right employers, too.
7:24 Guy Raz? So it's sort of like a job site, but of course, the nurses are not applying for jobs, just to pick up a profile. It's sort of like LinkedIn meets Match.com in a way, I guess, right?
7:34 Speaker 01 Yeah. You're right. I mean, chief nursing officers refer to us as the Match.com of hospitals and nurses all the time. So, yeah.
7:41 Guy Raz? So how does hospitals applying for nurses instead of the other way around help the shortage issue for both sides?
7:50 Speaker 01 Our demand for healthcare as a country keeps going up. You know, our population is aging. Of course, pandemics don't help, and we just simply don't have enough workers in the system. Like, by 2024, we're going to be 1 million nurses short, and that shortage just keeps getting worse and worse. Now, what's happening inside a hospital or a health system is the way they hire Really hasn't changed since the early 90s, right? Like it's post a job and hope something happens. Unfortunately, like that process and that kind of outdated technology is not sufficient to operate in such a competitive talent market like this. That's why by adding the, you know, changing the model so they're applying to the nurses, adding the screening, adding the custom matching has really accelerated the hiring and why we're used at over 250 hospitals and health systems across the country today.
8:35 Guy Raz? My, um, uh, stepsister is a nurse and this shortage crisis that you mentioned is obviously an acute crisis. Before we talk more about, you know, how incredible health is kind of streamlining this process, let's just talk for a moment about this crisis in nursing. I mean, I know maybe people watching don't know you are a doctor by training. You're an M D and also an M B A. How do we even begin to change this? Presumably you have to attract more people to the nursing profession. How do you do that?
9:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, we have to, as a country, have to solve the underlying supply. And we need to not only attract more people to the nursing profession, but even for the nurses that are graduating, we need to expand the amount of training that we have for them as well. Cause there's bottlenecks in both places. There's a few ways to do that. So one is really, I guess, promoting the profession as a fantastic profession. Look, at the end of the day, yes, nurses are, they do work a lot. You know, sometimes they do feel underappreciated, but this is a relatively high paying profession after you complete your education.
9:44 Guy Raz? It seems to me that we should pay or subsidize their education, that, that becoming a nurse should essentially be free.
9:51 Speaker 01 I a hundred percent agree. So for incredible health specifically, you know, we provide free continuing education to every single nurse in the country. Continuing education is needed to renew and activate their licenses and they usually have to pay out of pocket for it, you know, just on continuing education, which is, you know, those are courses that you do after you become a nurse. You know, we figured this is crazy. Let's just give it, give it away for free. It's accredited and all 50 states and they can just simply get it done inside the incredible health application. So there needs to be more programs like this across the board that essentially make the education and the training of nurses cheaper and cheaper and ideally free.
10:27 Guy Raz? I just cannot believe that you've packed so much into your life already. You, you have a, a medical degree and an M B A. Did you, by the way, did you ever practice?
10:35 Speaker 01 I actually did not. So I finished medical school and I always wanted to make an impact kind of on a more system level. And don't get me wrong, look, one-on-one patient care is amazing, but it's not very scalable. Things like software and technology are highly scalable. You can literally transform an entire industry. The genesis of incredible health came from my background, right? So I am an MD. I have a lot of friends and family members that are doctors as well, who are often complaining about understaffing. At the same time, my co-founder, who's a software engineer from MIT, Rome Portlock, his sisters are nurses. And they were saying, hey, I'm experienced and I'm qualified, and it still takes me two, three months to get my next job. I applied to 10, 15 places. I often
11:18 Speaker 01 don't hear back. This is a very common experience for nurses, by the way, even today. And so we just figured there just has to be an easier way to solve this problem.
11:27 Guy Raz? So essentially, the problem you identified was this kind of, the process, right, of hiring nurses was broken, which doesn't make sense, right? Because you would think, you know, with the shortage and hospitals needing nurses, they would bring them on. But hospitals are also big bureaucracies with lots of different challenges. So I guess it does make sense. You identified this problem, which was the hiring, the onboarding process and all the bureaucracy involved. You decided to figure out how to streamline it, and that was the genesis of Incredible Health.
11:59 Speaker 01 That's right. And it's now expanded beyond just the place where a nurse finds a job. It's a place where he or she manages their career. I mentioned continuing education earlier. We also have free salary estimators. We have a couple more services that are launching at the end of this year as well. That's exclusively for nurses. You know, so it's really become the place where, you know, you can manage your entire career on Incredible Health.
12:22 Guy Raz? Wow. I'm wondering, Iman, how does the business model work? Do hospitals subscribe, pay a subscription fee to the site, or do they pay, you know, every time they hire somebody, you get a fee, sort of like Zocdoc's model?
12:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's designed as a subscription. And within that, you know, the hospitals are picking, are selecting different tiers that are based on volume. But it's, of course, 100% free for the nurses.
12:46 Guy Raz? When nurses go and work at hospitals, do they tend to stay at the same hospital for a long time? Or is there high turnover? Are they moving around to different hospitals?
12:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, so for our platform specifically, we only do permanent workers, right? We don't do any contract workers. Now, look, nursing in general is known for high turnover, right? So usually it's 17% is the national annual turnover right now. And so retention is also a hot topic and a very important topic for these employers as well. And we'll try to do whatever they can to keep their nurses.
13:20 Guy Raz? So let's go back to the beginning of this year. At what point did you realize that this pandemic was going to be a major problem and that the service you offer was potentially going to be in high demand?
13:34 Speaker 01 I figured this out, put this all together probably in January, early February. And that was because I was on Twitter. And honestly, the most amount of information was coming from epidemiologists and MDs and public health experts around the world because we weren't getting real time data here in the US. So Twitter was actually my source for figuring this out.
13:56 Guy Raz? I know you've got a team of about 30 people. You're based in San Francisco, right?
14:00 Speaker 01 We are headquartered in San Francisco, but our team is in different parts of the country.
14:04 Guy Raz? So when you realized that this was potentially going to be a huge issue, did you see an immediate spike in demand for your services?
14:15 Speaker 01 We did. And certainly by April, there was a spike in demand for specific types of nurses. If you were an ICU nurse or an ED nurse, like the hiring for that like increased like by 3X on our platform like right away. And we saw it drop for some of the other specialties because surgeries were getting canceled. But since then, since July, August, the demand for every single role has dramatically increased because not only are hospitals operating at full capacity, they're also dealing with this pandemic.
14:44 Guy Raz? So how did you start to position your company and your business to meet that demand?
14:50 Speaker 01 So there were a few things that we did. A few months ago, we launched what we call the pandemic hiring suite. And what that is, is a range of features and tools that even more dramatically accelerates the hiring and really helps the hospitals reduce costs because they had gone through some very severe financial hardship. So a couple of the things that we did was we added in automated interview scheduling, remote interviewing, because that's just what you have to do during a pandemic. In-app chat, enhanced our matching algorithms. All of these were the goal of accelerating the hiring even further. So we got it down to 12 days now. And on average, we save every hospital that we work with at least $2 million because
15:33 Speaker 01 they dramatically try to reduce their travel nurse costs as well as their overtime and HR costs.
15:39 Guy Raz? So essentially, last year or the year before, if you were a nurse using your platform, you would have done an in-person interview, at least one. You would have traveled to the hospital. And that, of course, has gone away.
15:51 Speaker 01 That's gone.
15:52 Guy Raz? So that's not even a feature anymore. Now, everything is happening virtually.
15:56 Speaker 01 Correct. And that has accelerated the process.
15:59 Guy Raz? So now, it's meant that the average hiring period is just 12 days from the time that somebody identifies a nurse they want to the time that nurse has offered a job.
16:08 Speaker 01 From the time the nurse accepts the offer. Yep.
16:11 Guy Raz? How are the interviews happening? Do they go through an interface on your site or is it just like a Zoom call?
16:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, the first set of interviews are all facilitated through our software and our site. And we have automated interview scheduling built in that requires like zero integration with hospital IT teams. So that it was very rapidly adopted by both the recruiters and the nurses.
16:32 Guy Raz? Did you build that this year?
16:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, at the beginning of this year. I mean, it was in our roadmap. We just had to accelerate it because of the pandemic.
16:39 Guy Raz? How did you ramp that up so quickly?
16:42 Speaker 01 It's just a case of prioritization when it comes to product roadmaps, right? Like, you just kind of shift things around and you prioritize what your customers most urgently need right away. Half our team is software engineers. And so we are able to ship product. Honestly, we ship code every single day and do product launches every single quarter.
17:02 Guy Raz? So when you released that, that's a pretty sophisticated feature, right, on your site where you can now interface and do an interview through the site. When it was initially released, was it perfect? Has it been improved upon? Was it a little glitchy at first?
17:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course. It was not perfect. The priority was to release it fast, even if it was imperfect. And then we dramatically rapidly improved it over time.
17:26 Guy Raz? Do you think that that you could have done something like that so quickly without the urgency of the pandemic?
17:34 Speaker 01 Honestly, yes, because one of the values of our companies is speed. I just believe one of the only competitive advantages you have as a startup is you can operate and you can execute far faster than any of your incumbents and anyone else. So we generally move as quickly as humanly possible. And so the improvements to our platform are rapid, even before the pandemic.
17:55 Guy Raz? Tell me about your workforce. I mean, you're based in San Francisco, but you've got a distributed workforce? Or pre pandemic, were most people coming into an office in San Francisco?
18:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, so half our team is in San Francisco and we do have an office here in San Francisco, but half the team are in other parts of the US. That's been really helpful because we do serve clients all over the country. And of course, at the moment, we're fall fully remote. We are going to keep our office, so we're likely going to do this hybrid model.
18:21 Guy Raz? So people will kind of work from home or come in a couple of days a week, depending on how it works for them. You know, you said half of your workforce are engineers, so presumably they are kind of self sufficient. But what about the rest of the team? I mean, you are the CEO of the company and even the best of employees are, it's a challenge this year, right? There are lots of challenges that people are dealing with, whether it's family issues or just loneliness and isolation morale. How are you? How have you been handling those challenges with your team?
18:54 Speaker 01 You're right. I mean, it's been a very challenging year mentally, right? We had done a quick survey of our team and it was like 50% were experiencing some kind of symptoms of anxiety or depression. And I think that's pretty common across the board, across the country. So there were a few things that we did. So the first thing is just in the acknowledgement and communication of the problem. Everything from just like, hey, like, we understand everyone's going through a tough time right now and just saying that explicitly and saying. That we understand. And then also for certain groups of employees, like, you know, the parents with the young kids, right? Or the person in an apartment with three other roommates. I mean, they were under even additional strain. Um, and, and saying that, hey, it's okay if we're on a Zoom call that your, you know, your kid shows up, right? That's perfectly acceptable.
19:39 Speaker 01 The second thing we did is just really invest more time on just improving the setup. Right? So, uh, everyone got to work from home like stipend to set up their office space at home. Um, for some employees, they did have to like scale back a little bit in terms of their hours and switch from full time to part time, which is completely understandable. And then the third major thing that we did is just kind of dramatically improve our communication and our interaction as a team in a remote setting.
20:03 Guy Raz? Yeah.
20:04 Speaker 01 So whether it be like our weekly hangouts, our coffees that we do every Friday, um, our game, you know, game afternoons, you know, just adding more of these, uh, intentional, uh, communication, uh, touchpoints was, was really helpful as well.
20:18 Guy Raz? When we come back in just a moment, Iman describes the biggest changes she's seen in the healthcare industry during this unprecedented year. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This, Resilience Edition from NPR.
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23:40 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This: Resilience Edition. And I'm talking with Dr. Iman Abuze, the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health. And she says the healthcare industry has had to adapt very quickly to meet the increased demand for services during the pandemic.
23:55 Speaker 01 The biggest change I've seen is the rapid decision-making and rapid adoption of whatever solution there is, right? So, you know, historically, the healthcare industry has just been known for lots of red tape bureaucracy, like, can't get anything done fast. And this year, just like, really dramatically changed all of that. Whether it's the adoption of telemedicine, adoption of, you know, operational infrastructure like Incredible Health and others, like, it was, the speed in which they started to move and operate and make decisions has been, we've never seen anything like this before.
24:31 Guy Raz? I've had two consultations with my doctor this year for minor things, you know, like a skin issue, and I got a COVID test just out of safety a couple of months ago. You know, the doctor that I used to go see, she was just a remote call. And as you know, CMS is now reimbursing doctors for consultations with Medicare patients, which is a new feature this year. Do you think telemedicine now is here to stay and will actually be the predominant form of medical care in the future?
25:03 Speaker 01 I think it is here to stay. At the end of the day, the healthcare industry as a whole needs to really focus on customer service, which is like, basically the patient experience, or, you know, many phrases for that. And if patients are adopting telemedicine, and you're going to get reimbursed for it, like, as you just described, then there is no reason why it would not be fully adopted. Now, there's a few, you know, areas that need to get figured out. You know, there are entire communities in the US that don't have access to these devices and don't have internet access and so on, so it's not a solution for everyone and every single location and every person, but the adoption of it, the dramatic adoption of it is here to stay.
25:43 Guy Raz? Anyone who's been to a hospital for any reason knows that you interface mostly with nurses, and nurses are the people who make your experience better.
25:54 Guy Raz? There's a bunch of questions coming in. I'm going to ask, this is more of a comment from Patty McLaughlin. She says that she is a registered nurse. She went through a refresher course at the age of 63, but nobody would hire her. And she believes it's blatant age discrimination. You know, she says she had great references and did really well in her refresher course. She got certified in BLS and ACLS. I don't know what those mean, but you do.
26:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're certifications.
26:20 Guy Raz? Pass with fine colors. And apparently, we're getting a lot of nurses responding to that comment on Facebook, who are saying, yeah, same experience. First of all, do you think that is a common experience? And then the second question I would have is, if there's a shortage in nurses now, wouldn't hospitals want to hire somebody like Patty at age 63?
26:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. So unfortunately, it is a common experience. Not only do older nurses get hired less, even if you took a gap from the workforce, right? Like you had to raise your kids, or you just had to take a few years off, that also reduces your hiring, you know, chances and opportunities. And you're right, that is really unfortunate, because like there is a dramatic shortage.
26:59 Guy Raz? Yeah.
26:59 Speaker 01 And we need, we need every able-bodied we can get. You know, a lot of that has to do with just the existing, I don't know, bias, right? That just exists among employers today. And that's across all industries, not just healthcare. And so this is one of the, a really important topic, because it's something that we track really carefully. Because we're a software platform, we have so much data on this. Like, I'll give you another example of a human bias that's been introduced, or that we noticed. We noticed that nurses that lived further away from a facility were less likely to get interview requests on the platform, even though they wanted to, you know, live in wherever it was, LA, or Dallas, or whatever it was. And what we did is, we just removed the current
27:40 Speaker 01 location of the nurse, right? And we just saw that human bias just removed. It was gone. You know, hiring in general, you know, there's a lot of preconceived notions and biases and so on, that just have to constantly be addressed in order for it to get better. And the great thing about a software platform is it can really highlight this data at scale. And so we can have more informed discussions about it.
28:02 Guy Raz? Could you also remove age from the site?
28:05 Speaker 01 The tough thing with age is that work experience, of course, is required.
28:09 Guy Raz? Yeah.
28:09 Speaker 01 And so absolutely, age is not part of the nurse profile, but work experience is. And so sometimes employers can tell from that.
28:17 Guy Raz? I mean, I would rather have a 63-year-old nurse than a nurse just out of nursing. Not to say that a nurse out of nursing school isn't great, but I mean, a 63-year-old nurse or 65-year-old nurse is coming with decades of experience. I mean, to me, it would seem like a no-brainer that you would want somebody with that experience at a hospital.
28:33 Speaker 01 And you do, look, and that's not to say that older nurses don't get hired. Look, there is a huge cohort of nurses that is approaching retirement, which is going to be at another strain when they do retire. So regardless of what age you're at, nurses are needed. Whether you're a new graduate, 10 years' experience, 30 years' experience, you're needed.
28:51 Guy Raz? Yeah. Here's a question from Mark Monroe. It's more asking you to put on your entrepreneur's hat for a moment. He writes, "As someone who's built a hiring platform, I'm wondering what your, Iman, what your best interview practices are."
29:04 Speaker 01 Oh, that's, because that's a great question. So, well, there's interview practices for nurses specifically, and there's interview practices for technology workers. And so I'll just answer it in two different ways. So in terms of interview practices, when we're hiring for our team, the most critical thing is to get phrases like "cultural fit" and like "my gut feeling." These kinds of phrases need to just be removed from any hiring process.
29:28 Guy Raz? Totally. Totally. They're nonsense.
29:30 Speaker 01 They're complete nonsense, right? So what we've done is really have improved on this and got really diligent with our hiring process. So every single interviewer has specific questions that they must ask. Like literally, there's a guide and they have to follow the guide, right? The way, the rubrics that the interviewers fill out afterwards are very regimented. We do training for the interviewers as well. And then we think through a hiring process, it's not just like asking behavioral questions, but you have to ask case studies or you have to do a presentation to kind of test like a range of different skills. Now, for nurses specifically, I don't think nurses should assume because they're very experienced that they know how to interview. And we've just seen it time and time again that very experienced nurses can sometimes bomb interviews. And so we have put together-
30:15 Speaker 01 Pretty detailed interview preparation and guides that are available on our site and free to everyone. And that have like the do's and don'ts for nurse interviewing. Everything from like, you know, don't bash your former employer. Don't say you were looking for the job because of money. You should be saying it's because it's about patient care. And you know, just things like that. You just need to present yourself in an extremely professional way.
30:35 Guy Raz? Iman, how do you, and I'm sorry, I keep calling you Iman. I should be calling you Dr. Abuzeid.
30:40 Speaker 01 Oh, no, please. That's totally fine.
30:42 Guy Raz? How do you prevent, or as best you can, systemic bias in hiring? Nurses come from diverse backgrounds and there's incredible need. For example, nurses who are bilingual, who speak Spanish, et cetera. But how do you build in barriers to prevent the kinds of bias that that happen in the hiring process?
31:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great, great question. I mean, look, there's, there's several tactics for addressing bias. But a huge one is just acknowledging it and measuring it, right? So there's a whole set of best practices around just measuring your entire funnel, how you're sourcing. And like, almost like tagging every candidate that's coming through based on some kind of demographic data, right? And then that way you can quickly, based on the data, acknowledge and realize where the bias is happening. After getting that information, you know, then it's time to implement some best practices to reduce the bias. That could just simply be training that's needed for the interviewers. That could be, you know, completely adjusting your sourcing methodology and like attracting candidates from different, from different sources.
31:53 Speaker 01 You know, for Incredible Health specifically, there's a few things that we do. For example, nurses can pick avatars instead of their profile pictures if they don't want to kind of reveal how they look. We absolutely do a random sort inside the application on the employer's side. The nurses are randomly listed, so everyone has equal opportunity to interview requests. You know, there's a few other things that we do to kind of constantly reduce the bias that can be introduced.
32:19 Guy Raz? I mean, you can imagine working with like social scientists, for example, to experiment with, you know, not using names, for example. Because as you know, names are often a source of bias, right? It's often where the bias begins.
32:32 Speaker 01 We've tried, you know, removing names, even removing pictures. The number of interview requests you receive drops.
32:39 Guy Raz? Yeah.
32:39 Speaker 01 There's something about software where like it's. There's almost like a human connection that you're trying to enable inside a software platform. Things like names and pictures enable.
32:50 Guy Raz? I mean, how do you think that this year has changed your company's overall strategy?
32:56 Speaker 01 It's changed our strategy in a few ways. So one, in terms of just, we talked about the product changes, has to dramatically reprioritize and reconfigure things and really double down on what's it going to take to help hospitals and nurses find each other faster and interview remotely and just, and dramatically reduce the cost for the hospitals, too. The other thing that's changed is just like where we expand geographically. You know, when the pandemic first hit in, you know, April, you know, we just had to delay all our New York expansion plans, basically, right? And as a pandemic has spread throughout the country, we had to adjust where our different expansion plans. At this point, hospital and health systems have honestly become quite accustomed to the pandemic and they're very prepared and they have the, you know, the personal protective
33:41 Speaker 01 equipment and they've, they're making adjustments needed and they're not, they're just a lot better prepared now. So we haven't, we've been able to kind of really roll out our geographic expansion plans as normal.
33:51 Guy Raz? Last question for you, Aman. I'm going to ask you again to put on your entrepreneur's hat.
33:55 Speaker 01 Yep.
33:55 Guy Raz? For, for someone watching this, who's, who's looking at you now, an MD, an MBA from Wharton, I believe you are the child of immigrants. Am I right about that?
34:03 Speaker 01 I am, yeah, yes.
34:04 Guy Raz? I think your parents came from Sudan, is that right?
34:07 Speaker 01 That's correct, yeah.
34:08 Guy Raz? So if somebody, somebody looking at you now and, you know, looking at you as somebody who's inspiring them, do you think it's a good time right now to start a business or maybe to go to business school or to, you know, to dive into this uncertain world of entrepreneurship?
34:24 Speaker 01 Okay, so obviously I'm heavily biased here, but an opinion I have is the epitome of what you can do with your business career is to start a company. And that's just, and that's not a fact, that's an opinion. The, the excitement, the learning, the skill development that comes from entrepreneurship is, is dramatic. Now, of course, with that comes an intense amount of resilience that's needed and, you know, you got to manage your mental health pretty carefully as well, but. It's the quickest way to learn as much as possible. And sometimes we need to evaluate the risk and the perceived risk a little more carefully. It's not, you know, there have been a lot of layoffs this year. So like this working a normal job is not necessarily like foolproof either.
35:08 Speaker 01 So, yeah, I highly recommend it.
35:11 Guy Raz? That's an excerpt from my conversation with Dr. Iman Abuzaid, the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health. To see our full interview, you can go to facebook.com/HowIBuiltThis. And if you want to see all of our other past live interviews, you can find them there or at youtube.com/NPR. And if you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with help from J.C. Howard, Will Mitchell, Bruce Grant, Matt Adams, Elle Mannion, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Farah Safari. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and happy Thanksgiving.
35:54 Guy Raz? I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.
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