Lessons from Wei Deng, CEO and Founder of Clipboard Health, on relentless growth mindset from zero to Healthcare Unicorn
Wei Deng, CEO and Founder of Clipboard Health, an online marketplace that matches healthcare workers with open shifts at the best facilities
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Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and dive into building a digital health business from 0 to 1.
This week, we’re super excited to chat with Wei Deng is the CEO and Founder of Clipboard Health.
Wei came to speak to our early-stage pre-seed bootcamp, PearX and we repurposed the talk into a PHP episode because there were so many amazing nuggets. We were lucky enough to hear her insights on building a unicorn as a first-time founder. Wei Deng is also a Pear Healthcare Advisor and deeply committed to supporting the next generation of founders.
Wei got her career start as a lawyer and after a stint in investment banking, worked in a variety of startup roles from Head of Product to COO. Before Clipboard, Wei was one of the first 10 employees at Sendwave. Founded in 2016, Clipboard Health matches healthcare facilities with nurses nearby. Clipboard Health has raised $94M in funding and is now a credible unicorn backed by investors like Sequoia and IVP.
In this episode, we talk about persisting through the idea maze, creating accountability systems within your team, and how to set up frameworks for yourself for success.
Wei’s journey through law, banking, and tech to become a founder:
Wei shares that Clipboard technically started while she and her husband were on their honeymoon. Both wanted to build something, and they talked about their shared mission of lifting people up the socioeconomic ladder. Both are children of immigrants. Their first idea was around refinancing student loans— the idea for Clipboard didn’t come around until pivot #7 or #8.
Navigating through the idea maze:
Wei knew they had to pivot from their first idea after talking to potential users who weren’t interested at all.
“If users aren’t that frustrated, it’s actually a bad sign. You want users to feel passionately about your product one way or another… You’d rather someone be angry than they don’t care at all.”
With each idea, within 3-6 months, Wei noticed too much drag to get engagement. With Clipboard, the main difference Wei saw was engagement in their customers: even with their most basic product, people felt passionately about it. They were upset when it didn’t work; for example, if a nurse assistant failed to show up and it wasn’t marked on the app, users were upset.
While exploring the first idea around student loans, Wei talked to all types of potential customers: lawyers, medical students, boot camp engineering grads, etc. Some of the healthcare workers she spoke with, nurses in particular, didn’t want help with financing nursing school— but they did want help finding a job afterwards. Here was a group of real humans with real problems.
They tried a job board, a job board specific to hourly workers, and the penultimate idea before Clipboard: a job board specific to nurses where job posters were traditional staffing agencies. The staffing agency would hire full-time nurses for themselves and send them to partnering healthcare facilities. The number one problem was that the students would want to work for the staffing agency, but they couldn’t commit to the schedule that the agency would force upon them.
Based on this problem, the first idea was to create software to help the staffing agencies synthesize a full-time nurse out of part-time nurses. Agencies didn’t want to pay for software, so after many months of frustration, Wei realized they could try to compete with them. But, negotiating with individual nurses was difficult. The final pivot before Clipboard was to try signing a contract with a healthcare facility to create shift-based nurses.
Wei shares that it took two and a half years from incorporation to find the idea that finally worked.
Even today, Wei shares that she got her nursing certificate and is still searching for product market fit at 1,000+ employees! Her growth mindset and motivational drive is contagious.
“The limiting reagent to your company’s success is going to be your own psychology, so I did whatever I could to keep myself going… So many great companies and founders have all gone through near death moments or moments where nobody believed in them.”
Clipboard Health is an app-based marketplace that connects healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals, allowing healthcare professionals to book on-demand shifts and healthcare facilities to access on-demand talent.
Clipboard helps healthcare facilities, like hospitals or nursing homes, with staffing needs that range from nurses to janitors, dietary aides, cooks, and more.
Clipboard is expanding rapidly with 20x growth since January 2021. Wei shares that Clipboard’s newer products are geared towards general workforce management, software that helps healthcare facilities figure out budgeting, compliance, and staffing— full-time staff included.
Go-to-market strategy
Getting the first customer: learn from your conversations in order to speak the language of your customers.
Getting the first customer depends on what you’re trying to sell. Wei shares that for her first contract, she made hundreds of cold calls— something people might be even less inclined to answer with the rise of spam bots. Wei went to all the nursing homes in the Bay Area.
Once you’re in front of a decision maker, even if they don’t sign a contract with you, they’ll give you a lot of information. Wei shares that these early conversations can help you understand the key jargon that’ll help you seem like you’re an expert on what you’re trying to sell.
Do whatever it takes to get in front of the customer. Wei tried everything: warm intros, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, email lists, YouTubers, Instagram, wherever she could find her customers.
To take “understanding the customer” to the next level— Wei is getting her nursing assistant certification.
Clipboard staffs a lot of nursing assistants and nurses, so Wei shares that she’s always wanted to receive her license.
“It's always important to understand what your users are going through. But even if you have the utmost empathy, it's just different talking to a user all day long and being one.
Tony from DoorDash famously has everyone in the company do a dash once a month. Wei wanted to experience the discomfort and pain that nurses often shared about their jobs, understanding all the pain points. A second reason was also to see whether there were things that they were really missing or potential unlocks for the product team.
Successful sales looks like having a conversation with a friend.
“An actual conversation with a friend— that’s where you’re probably going to get your first sale. If you’re doing a salesy thing, you’re probably not.”
Wei encourages thinking about sales as trying to understand people’s lives. You’re their friend, you’re their therapist, whatever it is that helps you with that conversation.
Be persistent. Be intentional about making time, and keep following up.
Hiring
When it comes to your first employees, look for doers and versatile workers.
Wei shares that when hiring your first employees, you shouldn’t look for people who want to manage big teams. It doesn’t matter how old or how young they are. You want versatile, ambitious people— product people who can also talk to customers and are willing to get on the phone and sell.
How to hire.
Wei’s advice is to find people who care about the customers, care about the mission, or even just care about working with you. They really want to be a part of your company for some reason or another, and they’re willing to go and do.
“It's oftentimes the overlooked people. They have a chip on their shoulder, there's something that they want to prove. There's some reason that they're really hungry to work hard.”
Cultivate a winning culture: “the most fun thing for people is to be on a winning team”.
Wei believes that her team wants to work at a company that’s doing well, and her team recognizes how much she cares about the company. Her job is to create a winning team, and that does mean being a lot more hardcore than she used to be comfortable with.
“This is a championship sports team kind of environment. It’s not cut out for everyone. The high performers have stayed and they are thriving, and I’ve provided a lot internally.”
Wei doesn’t prefer to hire outside execs. She believes there’s an advantage to people who have grown up in the culture you’ve cultivated and who understands the way you work. Around 90% of Clipboard’s executives are internal promotions.
Clipboard has a big writing culture, what Wei describes as a “forcing function for herself.”
“I used to be less into the writing culture and now I’m more into it, regarding how decisions are made. When you look back on things you’ve done in the past, it’s great to have documentation on how you thought about something.”
It’s a lot of writing to keep up with. But for the core team doing more scale stuff, Wei believes writing really helps you think. It helps you realize this thought pattern or this process doesn’t actually work that well.
Wei started a writing framework even when the team was just herself. She wrote board meeting notes once a week for herself, sometimes sharing them with a friend. She started this habit early on to highlight questions that needed to be answered and milestones that needed to be reached, both quantitative and qualitative.
A writing framework for early stage:
In the earliest days, a note to yourself once a week will suffice. Before Clipboard’s Series A, Wei made a document working backwards: “what do I need to get to raise my Series A, and what’s the narrative going to be about?” She wrote the Series A memo with all sorts of blanks and created a loose plan from there.
“Recognize that progress is never going to be linear. It’s the discipline of being honest with yourself.”
Advice on Series A and beyond
Further into the fundraising rounds, it gets harder and easier. Get money from your customers: that’s how you’re going to raise money from the VCs.
“It gets harder for those who don't have the numbers but who have to rely on narrative, but gets easier actually, once you have numbers and you can tell the story with numbers.”
Customers won’t automatically come to your company after raising a big round. Wei’s best advice for fundraising: the best money you’re going to get is from your customers, because that’s how you know you’re providing value to people. When that happens, the money from investors will also follow.
Investors will have questions, so anticipate them.
Especially at a later stage, make it clear to your investors that you’re thoughtful and thorough about your business. Wei shares that she made a list of 150 questions that an investor could ask and she had all the numbers. She knew there was no question they could ask where she wouldn’t know that answer.
Wei shares that she did a few hundred hours of prep work.
Be proactive about seeking mentorship.
Be shameless about asking for help. Wei shares that DoorDash founder Tony Xu was first a reference call for another investor. She liked him and asked him to have a follow-up call— ”you have to be okay just putting yourself out there and asking them for help”. When Clipboard was raising their Series C, she called Tony for advice about Sequoia’s investing process and what they were looking for.
Be a good listener. Don’t make it about you all of the time, and think about building a relationship over time.
Interested in learning more about Clipboard Health? Learn more on their website, X, and LinkedIn.