Why I Invested: Incredible Health
Why I invested: A writing series on early stage angel investing chronicling the rationales behind various early stage tech bets by Pete Kazanjy.
After TalentBin was acquired by Monster, one of the things we were tasked with doing was bringing composite profile talent search to other talent categories beyond software engineering.
One of these was healthcare, specifically nursing. We crawled every state’s database of registered nurses and did clever things to append email addresses and other communication vectors. But when we went to sell it to recruiters at health systems and hospitals, they looked at us like we were crazy pants that a recruiter would proactively reach out to a candidate uninvited. Our offering was not viewed, um, favorably. I quickly realized that healthcare recruiting was 10-20 years behind tech recruiting.
And it made sense they were behind the times. Before the rollup period of health systems buying up lots of hospitals in the last decade, a given hospital had a single HR department, whose recruiting subsection was responsible for all the hiring for the hospital - nurses, doctors, technicians, janitors, etc. Not a lot of specialization. Not much opportunity for efficiency and leverage. The opposite of, say, Facebook or Amazon’s recruiting organization. As a result most hiring was done through staffing agencies - which themselves are generally mom and pop shops, or at best, regional winners. Again, not much technology leverage.
So when I met Iman, and she told me about how with Incredible Health they were building a talent marketplace that would abstract away sourcing from hospital HR staff and recruiters, I knew it was a prime opportunity.
In fact, because of the timing, they might be able to be the “cloud recruiter” for these massive hospitals and health systems who themselves might as a result never develop an internal recruiting muscle, and thereby be heavily reliant on Incredible Health. (This is in contrast to technology companies who used hiring marketplaces like Hired…but also have their own technology-levered internal staffs, as well).
Moreover, as a marketplace, albeit one with regional pools, a first mover would potentially have the advantage to tip a market and dominate. So potential large upside. Not to mention that marketplaces can be extremely capital efficient once they hit initial liquidity. Little known fact: Indeed only raised $5m from Union Square Ventures in 2005 before their eventual $1b acquisition by Recruit Holdings in 2012. Damn, right?
Lastly, when I first talked to her in 2017, Iman was a badass (we were connected by a VC I was acting a diligence partner for). A doctor who became a product manager who became a founder? That’s like a purple unicorn with a glow in the dark horn.
I told the VC I was doing diligence for that they should definitely invest. They didn’t. I did - $25k (which was a lot for me at the time) because I was very bullish. Incredible has done on to raise a seed from marketplace gurus NFX and Obvious, an A from marketplace legend Jeff Jordan at Andreessen, and then a massive B from Base10 Ventures. And from the looks of it, are running away with the market. Not surprising having had the pleasure of watching the team exeucte