Incredible Health

Iman Abuzade had an unconventional path to entrepreneurship. With an MD from medical school, he chose not to practice medicine, instead pursuing management consulting at a top firm. After finding consulting too corporate, he earned an MBA from Wharton, where he was exposed to entrepreneurship and built a network that would later prove invaluable. He moved to San Francisco—believing it was where technology companies had to be built—and joined an early-stage healthcare tech startup as an employee to learn how to actually build and scale a product.

At that startup, he met Roman Portlock, an engineer with 15 years of software experience who became his co-founder. When they decided to start their own company, they had the co-founder chemistry and the determination, but not yet the idea.

Their first idea was a complete failure. After a year of work, it wasn't growing and they were running out of cash. This became "the highest stress point I've had in my entire entrepreneurial journey," Abuzade recalls. The turning point came when he reached out to his former Wharton professor Adam Grant for introductions to mentors and investors. Grant's warm intro to Hunter Walk at Homebrew led to a connection with James Currier at NFX Accelerator, who invited them to join the program.

Two days into the accelerator, they decided to pivot. Currier, a five-time entrepreneur with deep expertise in pivots, helped them explore what they actually knew and cared about. Abuzade came from a family of doctors and surgeons; Portlock's sister was a nurse. Both had heard the same complaint repeatedly: healthcare workers took 2-3 months to find their next job. They started digging into market research and realized the problem was massive.

Hospitals were using hiring tools unchanged since the 1980s—either generic job boards that produced quantity over quality, or expensive recruiting agencies charging $20,000-$30,000+ per hire. With 6,000 hospitals in the U.S., thin margins (3% average), and 50% of operating costs going to labor, understaffing was a "hair on fire" problem for every hospital CEO. Patient safety, staff burnout, high turnover, and expensive contract workers all hinged on solving hiring.

They named the company Incredible Health with help from James Currier and moved forward with contracting healthcare systems. By the time they raised their seed round, they had some hospitals starting to use the platform and nurses signing up—proof of concept enough to grind through 75-100 investor meetings over two years to raise $2 million.

The pivot worked. After building out California, they had 150+ hospitals using the platform, including Cedar Sinai, Stanford, HCA, and Providence. They had made their core metric work: reducing hiring timelines from 90+ days to under 30 days, a 25x improvement in hiring efficiency. The business was profitable in California by the time they raised their Series A.

What didn't work was the first idea—and that's okay. Abuzade emphasizes that pivots are not failures; Slack, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord all pivoted from different original ideas. The key was being willing to kill the idea quickly and move to something that met their criteria: a "hair on fire" problem, a huge market, a 10x better solution, and founder-market fit.

In summer 2019, just two years after founding, Incredible Health closed a $50 million Series A led by Jeff Jordan from Andreessen Horowitz. This came after the top three venture capital firms in the world wanted to invest, giving them the luxury of being selective. They didn't need the capital to survive—the California business was profitable—but they needed it to "take over the entire market to become a category defining market leading company as quickly as humanly possible."

Abuzade's mission is clear: help healthcare professionals find and do their best work, while helping hospitals deliver quality care. The metric driving the entire company is monthly growth in number of hires, with a target of 20% monthly growth—the rate required to take over the entire market in eight years.