Rise with Resilience: Becoming a Rare Unicorn Iman Abuzeid, Incredible Health

(INTRO) Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Hey there, so many of you know how obsessed I am about solving for the gender venture investment gap, and really is part of the reason why I started Billion Dollar Moves, to showcase a different pattern of success in the shape of what I call the unexpected leader. Now this week's Billion Dollar Bite is from my work archives last year where I was in Austin with my firm Beyond the Billion and our sponsor, Brown Advisory, among a crowd of family offices and other investors.

This snippet features Iman Abuzeid who, upon raising her 80 million Series B funding round, valued her healthcare career marketplace startup at $1.65 billion, making her one of only nine Black and Latina female founders whose startups have ever reached a billion-dollar valuation. How crazy is that? Now, Iman's startup, Incredible Health, connects healthcare networks with their nurses.

They need to fill open, permanent positions. And unlike on typical job listing sites where workers apply for roles, employers apply for the talent. Backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Incredible Health is on a mission to help healthcare professionals live better lives and find and do their best work.

One in four nurses in the United States use Incredible Health for planning and managing their careers and the company is partnered with 75 percent of the nation's top ranked health systems. We cover a few topics from fundraising, shifting mindsets to focusing on the fundamentals in a challenging environment.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Which part of your business was self-funded? And what did it look like?

Iman Abuzeid:

We were self-funded for the first year and a half, which I know is a very short period of time, it was just my co-founder and I who had put capital into the company. And then, raised our seed round in our first two and a half million dollars relatively quickly. Now, keep in mind, like, there's just an enormous amount of rejection that happens, even now, right? That seed round probably spoke to 80 investors, 71 said no. So, even at the series A, we were very established in California at that point, probably had 35 conversations, 32 said no. Even the series B, when I did the series B last year, Fantastic metrics and so on. Even then, it was, I think, spoke with 15 investors because it was pretty large check sizes we were looking for. So it was a small group. But yeah, 11 of the 15 said no.

So there's just like an enormous amount of resiliency you need to get through the fundraising process. Even if you have an amazing deck and an amazing business and great metrics and so on.

So, there were probably a couple of things that led to successful fundraising rounds. And I've raised almost 100 million over three rounds. The biggest being last year in 2022 for 80 million. First and foremost, be very selective about who you pursue. At the end of the day, fundraising is sales. And so I, as far as just the context of this overall discussion, I tend to only pursue investors that have already backed female CEOs. Like, wow, I'm not going to be the guinea pig. You know, it's 2022. Like, I don't, we don't need to be. I don't need to be and so there's definitely some selection that goes on there. Not to mention also, I'm looking for technology investors, marketplace investors, et cetera, right?

The second piece is just like, look, I know the statistics are bad. I think you mentioned less than 2 percent of venture capital is going to female. Yeah, the data's bad, it's clear, like there's a very clear structural bias in the system. But if you are a CEO who's pursuing your huge vision and ambition and your mission, you actually kind of have to compartmentalize and suppress that psychologically, right? Like you can't really focus on the 2 percent thing.

You just have to go for it, right? You just have to walk into that room and share your vision, share your mission, share what it is that you're trying to do. Be very, quite assertive, honestly. And just go for it. Because, like, at the end of the day, it's, we're the ones that are going to drive the change.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

And an interesting question, while most of our founders featured on Billion Dollar Moves are venture backed, Iman presents an alternative view on financing.

Iman Abuzeid:

Yeah, honestly, that question is, it's a very personal decision. It really just comes down to what you want to do as CEO. At the end of the day, different businesses need different financing strategies too. Everything is supposed to be venture backed, so it's a very, very personal decision. I want to make sure, if you are going to get external investors, make sure it's the terms that you want. Where you still retain the majority of your company and the majority of the control of the company. And also, make sure you're working with partners that you want to work with. Because you can't get rid of them. They're not like employees.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

So from fundraising, we shift to her strategy on staying focused on the fundamentals. A question that Iman was asked, how do you know when to get out there or when to hang back, when to build with a team and have your head down?

And focusing on fundamentals, is exactly what Iman is doing with her business. Which challenge should I talk about today, right? The multiple challenges that a CEO is faced with. Especially at a time where I don't know if you all know this, but the nursing shortage is going to be, what, a million by the end of this year?

There's a huge burnout rate due to the pandemic. I was spending time with a friend that was on the board of the Medical Association of America and he was saying, the surgeons are resigning. No one wants to do this work anymore, especially the nurses, because they're bearing the brunt of how hard it is.

And you're right smack in the center. Talk about an easy problem to choose to solve. How are you thinking about building a business, for the investors in the room here, that's focused on fundamentals in what is such a challenging environment?

Iman Abuzeid:

That's a big question. So the way we think about the market is that there's two fundamental problems in our market.

One is the shortage, right? We simply don't have enough healthcare workers. And then the second is, there's a huge inefficiency problem, like the right talent isn't finding the right employers and vice versa.

And I would say that, you know, using our product, we really tackled the second issue, right? The inefficiency issue, you know, we've automated the matching, we've automated the screening, we have the employers apply to the talents, set it the other way around, and I've now started to introduce AI into the platform. But all of that doesn't actually solve the first problem, which is we just simply don't have enough services.

We are on track to be a million nurses short in this country. So we've started to do more work in that area. So we offer free continuing education to every single nurse in the country in our apps. And there's a community of nurses built into our apps where you can ask each other for advice. We are really expanding to make sure that Incredible Health is not just a place where you find a job, but it's a place where you manage your career.

And we, from a product standpoint, want to have a 30 to 40 year long relationship. With a nurse and other healthcare workers in the future, instead of just a one and done transactional relationship. It is similar to what Kendra was speaking about earlier, like at the end of the day, our most important constituent is the nurse, is the healthcare worker, and we need to continue to add more and more value to them.

That's free, by the way, it's always free for the healthcare workers in our case. In order to retain them for a long period of time, so they just keep using our platform over and over again. That's sort of how we're thinking about a strategic plan.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

But what about some of her mistakes? Another recurring theme we've heard among so many of our leaders we spoke to. You guessed it, it's the people.

Iman Abuzeid:

Was actually going to mention a similar mistake related to people. At the end of the day, I mean, for many of our companies, certainly for our company, we're a database of people, and that's it, right?

And so the people are just such an important asset of the company. And getting the right people matters a ton. We've all had hiring mistakes, but just the importance of recognizing that early and correcting it quickly is very important. The other thing is when you're in a high growth company that's growing 200 300 percent per year, you have to actually be very aware that some of your leaders are going to hit a ceiling, right?

Like, half of them will be fine, they'll keep growing with the company, but then half of them will be like, okay, this is strategically, all of it has just become a lot more complicated now and I can't handle it. So you have to recognize a CEO, who needs a new boss, or who needs to move to a different role? You're constantly assessing your talent.

I have like an enormous amount of empathy for female investors, female CEOs are like two sides of the same coin. It's very, very similar challenges that we're all facing. I would say something I had mentioned earlier. The statistics are bad. The bias is very real. But don't focus on that.

Like, just go, go raise your funds, go make your investments, go pursue your visions and pursue your missions and just, like, really go for it. Because that's the only thing that's gonna really make a difference.