Choosing the right people
Jan 30, 2026
The most important thing you have to get right when building a company is talent.
It’s okay to be 80% good at most other things. Strategy will change. The product will evolve. But you have to be close to 100% right about the people you’re building with. Everything is downstream of the people: culture, standards, quality.
We’re building a generational company. Not one that we’re eager to sell, but one that would feel wrong to sell at all. And this starts with the people.
The Anti-Sell
If you’re reading this because you’re interested in working here, I’ll start with the typical anti-sell:
Hospitals rely on our software for mission-critical operations. This can mean going into the hospital at 3am during a night shift, or taking last-minute flights to customer sites.
During onboarding, you won’t get a checklist. You’re expected to jump in and start solving problems immediately. Trust is given. Faith is earned.
We’re naturally contrarian. We dissent thoughtfully and in public. Best idea wins.
No one is going to handhold you. You’re expected to dive into the deep end and pull the context you need.
We iterate constantly. It’s impossible to ever be “done” ramping up on the product. You have to keep up.
If that excites you, you’ll probably love it here. Keep reading.
So how do we identify the people who will thrive here?
Experience is overrated
Well, for most roles.
For many roles, we don’t optimize for years of experience or deep subject-matter expertise. Those things might matter as we scale, but on their own they’re meaningless without the right operating fit.
We look for highly intelligent people who can reason clearly, ask sharp questions, and constantly challenge assumptions. These folks tend to outpace “perfect background” candidates very quickly.
In practice, this often shows up as people who:
Optimize for learning and talent-density rather than titles and promotions
Are excited to stay IC-first rather than rushing into management
Care more about raising the bar for quality than about “being right”
Get energy from execution, not strategy
We’ve also learned that not all startup experience is good startup experience. Our bar for ambiguity and learning speed is often meaningfully higher than people expect. It’s impossible to evaluate this through conversation alone. Hence point #2…
The best candidates break the process
One thing that consistently surprises me is how the strongest candidates reveal themselves in unscripted ways.
When the right candidate comes along, a 30-minute conversation turns into 90. They have an almost insatiable curiosity. The questions they ask keep me on my feet. It’s usually an instant signal that they’ll raise the bar anywhere they go.
Examples of what folks on the team have done to get hired at Vitalize:
One candidate asked for our deployment documentation mid-process, improved it, and sent it back. We still use some of this material today.
I asked a candidate if she’d be willing to move to Tennessee with me for four months to get our first health system live. No clear end date. She didn’t hesitate. She became our founding ops hire and went on to navigate our first ten deployments and shape the product into what it is today.
One candidate submitted three versions of our take-home, iterating repeatedly on feedback they weren’t required to act on. They also created videos, a website, and a memo deep-dive outlining their thesis on Vitalize and why they’d be a great fit.
We’ve had candidates join us at customer on-sites before receiving an offer, just to see how our team works and hear directly from customers.
Our most recent engineering hire showed up to a follow-up interview with a working demo built on sandbox data, unprompted, based on a single earlier conversation.
The underlying signal here is bias to action. We don’t reward people for following instructions well or for waiting for permission or follow rules. We like people that are obsessed with execution. That don’t simply talk about the work, but always find ways to get closer to it.
We look for people with unorthodox convictions
One thing that consistently shows up in our strongest hires is they hold slightly contrarian beliefs or opinions on how teams should build or operate. These perspectives are crafted from either extensive research, lived experience, or previous experimentation. They don’t hold these beliefs strongly, but have takes that challenge conventional ways of thinking.
These are folks who were willing to push back on even the founders in past roles. People who have left companies they respected because they disagreed with the direction, not because it was hard or inconvenient. They don’t always conform to consensus.
One concrete example: one of our hires wrote a 20-page memo to leadership at their previous company (one of our competitors) arguing the founders needed to pivot the business. The effort failed. He joined us instead.
This is the signal we’re looking for - people who are vetting us just as much as we’re vetting them. They' care more about alignment for how the work is being done, are selective with where they spend their time, and never afraid to challenge the status quo.
Final Note
I am grateful for the team I get to work with every day here at Vitalize. Quite candidly, they are smarter than me and always pushing me to be better. And there is nothing that excites me more than finding the next person that we get to work with here at Vitalize.
- Sanketh, Co-Founder