Operating Principles, Culture, and the Nexer Experience

Learn about how our unique operating principles and culture enable our organization to accelerate innovation in healthcare.

NexHealth employee in Utah office

Company Mission

Our mission at NexHealth is to accelerate innovation in healthcare. We do this by connecting patients, doctors, and developers.

In the long run, the way to look at our product is that we’re a protocol moving data from point A to point B. Today, we help The Smilist, a dental service organization, send data from their servers to TrueLark’s servers (a software company). In the future, we want to be able to send data from a Roche lab in Germany to a hospital in the US. We simplify the movement of data from point A to point B.

However, we know the entities that hold the data, EHR vendors, insurance carriers, pharmacy chains etc. do not want this data to be so easily interoperable. On the other hand, people that actually need to use the data for treatment or other operations, like doctors and patients, want to use our technology to move their data from point A to B.

This, by default, means we’re taking on the whole “system” at a global scale. Sometimes it will be adversarial, but our hope is that most of the time it will be friendly through established and formal partnerships. Executing on this roadmap means lots of high quality decisions will need to be made, challenges overcome, all while growing revenue and the customer base.

Making the right decisions, solving challenges, and growth are only possible through the right culture. A culture that’s built specifically for NexHealth, our market, and context. Everything defined in this document is designed to help us build that specific culture for NexHealth.

Starting with our Operating Principles. Our Principles are designed to help us make decisions that solve both our long term and short term challenges.

Our long term challenges are: 
  • Doctors are focused on providing care, and are less tech savvy as a result.
  • Historically, healthtech has not been an attractive place to work for ambitious talent. 
  • “The system,” - Nearly all EHR vendors, insurance carriers, pharmacy chains, and any entity that holds consumer data - is resistant to change.
Our short term challenges:
  • Keeping customers insanely happy.
  • Growing our customer and revenue base quickly, month by month.
  • Expanding our TAM.
  • Building and developing a great team.

Executing with urgency is how we are going to accelerate innovation in healthcare. From 2020 to the end of 2022, we went from 5 people to nearly 300 people, $4M in funding to $176M in funding, and $18M valuation to $1B valuation. We are keeping a similar pace of doubling year over year and are delivering value to customers across the healthcare ecosystem. 

Our Journey

Read about the key milestones, including product launches and fundraising, that have shaped NexHealth into the thriving organization that it is today.

2016

Alamin Uddin is inspired to start NexHealth after working at a practice in New York City. Al pairs with his co-founder Waleed Asif and they start writing the first lines of code.

2017

NexHealth launches first ever integrated Online Booking solution that syncs with an office's health record system.

2018

NexHealth signs a new customer, The Smilist, whose vision for digitizing the patient journey aligns perfectly with NexHealth's product goals. The Smilist uses NexHealth in 50+ locations today.

2020

NexHealth raises $15 million in Series A funding, and acquires Enlive, the leading paperless patient forms platform for healthcare practices.

2022

NexHealth raises $125M Series C at $1B valuation and opens its Utah office.

2023

NexHealth now supports more than reaching many thousands of practices across the country along with some of the largest enterprise organizations in dental and medical. 

Operating Principles

To achieve our lofty goals and propel our growth forward, each of our actions and decisions stem from seven core operating principles:

  • Solve the customer’s problems, not yours
    When making decisions, think from the perspective of the customer. It’s easy to make decisions that make our lives simpler, but not the customer's.
  • Do the things others are not willing to do for our customers
    As a Nexer, always go after the hardest problems for our customers. Pursue things at the highest quality. Move at the fastest pace.
  • Take ownership
    Act like a founder. Own your roles, destinies, mistakes, behavior, and our mission. The buck stops with each of us - no blaming or excuses.
  • Say what’s on your mind, with positive intent
    Be direct, proactive, transparent, and frequent in your communication. 
  • Default trust
    As a Nexer, you do not have to earn trust, trust is given to you by default. If we by default trust each other, our speed of communication, feedback, information sharing, and overall improvements will be a lot faster.
  • Think in first principles
    We first identify the problem and then break it down to its fundamentals before diving into solutions. We constantly ask “why” to validate our assumptions. 
  • Live in the details
    As a Nexer, you should know all the details about all the things you do. If you’re in the details, you will make high quality decisions.

Building a Lasting Culture

Why do some cultures last thousands of years? Why do some die off while others persist generations after generations?

It’s because of the daily rituals, beliefs, and lore that the culture lives and passes on from one person to another. For example, meditate every single day, attend church every Sun, wear your team’s sports jersey on game day, believe in a specific creation process, respect cultural artifacts, etc. 

A group of people sharing common daily rituals, beliefs, and lore means those groups of people feel strong kinship, trust, and passion. And they enthusiastically pass it on to the next group of people. Similarly, in order for NexHealth to build a lasting culture, we need to have our own set of common rituals, beliefs, and lore: our own way of operating.


In addition to our operating principles , here’s our way of working:
  • Non-hierarchical
    We’re not a traditional hierarchical company with titles and all the politics that come with it. We’re a culture where people’s impacts are measured in scope and outcomes, not their titles. As a result, we’ve replaced titles with job scopes, and have internal levels and ladders so we can properly reward Nexers as they progress in their careers.
  • Talking to customers
    Every Nexer uses our product and visits a real customer in their first 90 days. 
  • Metrics visibility
    Every Nexer, regardless of their role, has visibility into all of our core metrics in real time. You can’t take ownership if you don’t have the right information.
  • Supporting Nexers through their career
    As we continue to grow the company, we want to ensure employees have a long career at NexHealth. We will continue to evolve our employee offerings and support system to stay current with the needs of the team.
  • Celebrations
    We recognize value in company-wide celebrations but each team should have its own culture and celebrations to recognize the impact of the team’s performance (like rewarding new shoes to top performers).
  • Rituals
    It’s important for Nexers to participate in all of our company-wide rituals like the monthly all-hands, visiting customers, offsites, planning sessions, shoe awards, etc.
  • Document culture
    Most decisions are made over written, narrative documents, and not meetings. All relevant documents, recordings, meeting notes, emails, Slack messages etc., should be easily searchable by everyone across the company.
  • Communication etiquette

    Email
    Email should be used for most communication, especially when the recipient needs to either take an action or give a thoughtful response. Each team has an email distribution group where all emails get CC’d to. For example, if a marketing team member is sending an email to the head of marketing with information relevant to the entire team, [email protected] should get cc’d. This way the whole team has access to all emails that they can search for and read on their own time.

    Slack
    Slack should only be used for quick, urgent, and non-thoughtful communication.

    Meetings
    Outside of effective team operating mechanisms (e.g. weekly team meeting), having a meeting should be the exception, not the default. We try to avoid holding meetings. Instead, we write documents and circulate to as many people as possible for alignment, comments, and visibility. Only hold meetings if there is no alignment after circulating your written document. If we do need to hold a meeting, ensure that each meeting calendar invite is populated with a well written document articulating your thoughts, questions, and action items in advance of sending to your peers. Include as few people as possible in meeting invites.

Beliefs

Our company was built upon certain beliefs about the market, the world, and how we want to shape it. These are a few important ones we share:

  1. Incumbents are entrenched in a business model that does not want data interoperability, but healthcare data should be freely interoperable.
  2. Free exchange of data will enable more innovation. Through faster innovation, most problems in healthcare can be solved.
  3. The government can’t build the solution.
  4. We are a tech company and not a healthcare company.
  5. In the next decade, there will be an Amazon or Microsoft of healthcare. NexHealth will be it.
  6. NexHealth is supposed to be hard. We’re not riding a market trend to success, we’re creating our own success by manually rewiring healthcare data flow. Similar to Amazon rewiring the physical world with warehouses and shipping logistics to succeed vs Google riding the internet wave.
  7. Our timeline is in decades, but our customers decide whether or not to stay with us monthly. As a result, we need to have short term operational excellence while maintaining long term vision.
  8. We believe that most of the talent that will change healthcare will come from outside the industry.
  9. The greatest good we can be doing for society is to succeed in our mission. This means we will dedicate 100% of our resources to our mission.
  10. We recognize having different communities within NexHealth makes the company stronger and gives us the best chance at fulfilling our mission.   
  11. We’re short term pessimistic, but long term optimistic. 

Lore

Creating something from nothing is hard. In the process of creating NexHealth out of nothing, we’ve had many challenges and opportunities, from several near deaths to taking advantage of surprising events that have informed our beliefs, operating principles, and way of working.

Here are a few of the challenges and opportunities that are company defining lores.
  1. Alamin and Waleed started the company with credit card debt and selling things on eBay. No connections to tech, VC, or talent. They took on so much personal credit card debt that Al received a court order from Amex and has a ~600 credit score to this day. 
    Lesson:
    take ownership. There is no such thing as “disadvantaged” or playing victim. Everything is up to people and their will.
  2. We ran out of money in Q1 of 2018 and survived by convincing a big customer to pay upfront. We reduced headcount from 12 to 4, turned cash flow positive, and grew bootstrapped for the next 18 months. Our product got a lot better, and we grew faster with 4 people than we did with 12 people.
    Lesson: most hard things need to be willed into existence. More money and more headcount is not always the solution.
  3. When the pandemic hit, all of our customers shut down. We stopped charging them to do what’s right for our customers. Our revenue went to 0 overnight. So did our competitors’. Competitors did layoffs, turned off marketing spend, and most sold to PE. While our competitors went into defense, we went on offense. We raised $15M series A in April 2020 while the whole world was shut down, increased headcount, and also acquired Enlive in 2020. It set us up for amazing long term success. 
    Lesson: solve the customer’s problems, not yours. There is no such thing as a crisis, it’s all about the decisions you make and how you react.
  4. In 2018 we signed on The Smilist with only 4 people. Our largest customer at 18 offices at that time. We had to write a new integration for Dentrix Enterprise in less than 3 weeks, onboard and train their offices, and support them with only 4 people. But it ended up being one of our pillar logos in the dental and medical spaces that gave us credibility to grow in the space. 
    Lesson: do the things others are not willing to do for our customers, like pulling multiple all nighters to sign a pillar customer.
  5. Many experts told us NexHealth would never work. Especially in times when we ran out of money.
    Lesson: think in first principles. In a changing world, experts are almost always wrong, especially when you’re creating something new that experts have not seen before. Experts being negative on your new creation is often a sign whatever you’re creating has value.
  6. Every year there’s a new EHR system that tries to shut us down. And always fails because the customers are on our side.
    Lesson: in order to drive change you have to be able to align incentives. The EHR companies are generally incentivized to keep their customers happy. As long as the customers are on our side, they can’t stop us.
  7. When Bobby closed his first deal in 2018 as an account executive, Al bought Bobby Allbirds shoes. To Bobby this was such a symbolically important moment that he bought our next sales rep shoes on their first deal closed. And this tradition has generally continued. 
    Lesson: celebrations are important for culture.
  8. We hosted the Chainsmokers – NexHealth investors – at our first ever company offsite. 
    Lesson: it was symbolic and recognition that NexHealth is just not another vertical SaaS company like our competitors are. We’re here to change the world, and our standards are a lot higher.
  9. We tried to integrate with an EHR  as one of our early integrations by getting API access. They told our customer that NexHealth will not get API access and that the EHR can offer similar features that NexHealth did. This happened often enough that we decided to find technological ways to exchange data that didn’t rely on an EHR’s API.
    Lesson: do the things others are not willing to do to solve problems.
  10. We acquired Enlive as a series A stage company, about 50 people, no finance team or in-house lawyers, while the world was still reeling from Covid Q3 2020. And most of our investors were questioning it. Acquisitions are not something companies at this stage should be doing. It ended up being company defining for us. 
    Lesson: think in first principles. Do whatever it takes to solve problems regardless of optics or what you’re “supposed to do.”
  11. We raised our Series C a few months after our B. Most investors were questioning it and didn’t see the need for it. However, we’re in an amazing position now because we timed the raise so well. 
    Lesson: think in first principles, don’t just listen to experts.
  12. We bet on Packy McCormick, an up and coming blogger, to do a long form post on us as part of our series B PR. This long form piece has become one of our greatest recruiting tools.
    Lesson: bet on trajectory and potential, not experience alone. 
  13. Our journey back to the office started in Salt Lake City, and was followed by reopening of our San Francisco headquarters. The outcomes have surpassed our expectations for our teams and the business, which have both thrived in.
    Lesson: In-person contributions are invaluable in nurturing culture and fostering collaboration.

Nexer Experience

In order for us to succeed in our mission, we need to become a go-to destination for smart and ambitious people. We want and expect that Nexers are proud of the work they are doing along with the culture that exists within the company. However, not everyone will be a fit for our space, product, and culture. So we need to cultivate an experience that seeks out those who are motivated by our culture and high expectations for success, and ensure we are supporting and retaining those that choose to join.

Who is a Nexer?

A Nexer is mission driven and intelligent with a growth mindset. They build for the long-term, desire greatness, can problem solve and learn quickly, and are not so arrogant that they are not willing to change.

They are happy when they get to work on challenging problems, build lasting things, learn a ton, and grow as individuals. They’re not entitled. They care about quality of performance and maintaining high performance amongst Nexers from individual contributors to leadership.

Defining high performance 

High performance is made up of 3 things: speed, quality, and quantity. In other words, your ability to get a lot done in a very short period of time in high quality is the definition of high performance. At NexHealth, you should be able to get things done 2-3X faster and 2-3X higher quality than what you’d consider normal for yourself.

Tenure

Our goal for tenure at NexHealth are high performers stay >6 years, and low performers stay <6 months. Whenever a Nexer does resign, we want them to be a champion for our brand. We want to give them the best experience possible on the way out.

Our Offices

Nexers can be found in San Francisco, Draper, and remotely across the country.

Where do Nexers Work?

The NexHealth team can be found at either of our locations, 12936 Frontrunner Blvd Suite 525, Draper, UT 84020, Bay Area headquarters, 445 Bush St San Francisco, CA 94108 and remotely across the United States in cities like, New York, Los AngelesChicago, and Seattle.

Join & Follow Us

Amazon has “your margin is my opportunity.” At NexHealth, we have “your talent is my opportunity.” 

Most of our competitors in the space suffer because their teams do not maintain high quality or hold a high bar for performance. They have good products with clear market needs, but an inability to execute and scale into leading market share because they don’t retain high performers or maintain a compelling culture. 

We have a great vision, differentiated product, we’re well capitalized, and have high growth. However, all of this is eventually copy-able by competitors. The only way we achieve our mission is through our talent and culture. And when we do achieve our mission of accelerating innovation in healthcare, the world will be a far better place than it is today.

Recruiting: how does a Nexer hear about us?

We need to build our employer brand so that ideally a future Nexer hears about us from another Nexer. The secondary way a potential Nexer should hear about us is internal recruiters or social media channels like, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, X, TikTok and Youtube. Once a potential Nexer does hear about us, they should have ample public content and information available to learn what it’s like to work at NexHealth.

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