Thanksgiving Thankfulness
Clipboard Health is a global company, and our team members come from all corners of the world. We know that not everybody here celebrates thanksgiving, but we still want to take the opportunity to talk a bit about what we are thankful for; there’s a lot, and in the absence of a truly world-wide thankfulness event we think this is as good of an opportunity as any.
Clipboard Health is a young company, and we are growing very, very quickly. This means things change for us all the time; some of our thankfulness-points are the same as last year, while some of the things we’d like to talk about aren’t even announced yet. But we’d like to focus on some of the things that are both consistent over time and have only become better and better as the company has matured.
We work with the very best people
You can’t have a conversation in this company without the person you are talking with mentioning that someone else is brilliant; everyone is surrounded by talent, and it comes up in every conversation you have. Which means sometimes you are talking to a person you think of as operating on a really elite level, and then they rattle off the names of three or four people who are better at a particular thing than they are.
Clipboard spends a lot of time thinking about hiring and how to find the best people, but we are also blessed to work at a time where remote work has really taken off. The company has been remote-first since founding, and it’s a bet that paid off for us; we are able to hire the best people no matter where they are and give them the flexibility they need to do their best work.
Many companies experience a “dilution” effect as they get bigger; size makes it harder and harder to make sure every hire really brings something new to the table and maintains the level of quality. Our leadership has done an enormous amount of work to prevent that effect here; they push for constant refinement of hiring processes and how we look for our next team member. They recognize that people are above all else what makes a company what it is and what determines the ceiling of what they can do.
If you’ve never worked in a company like this, it’s hard to explain how profound this is. There’s never a point where you need help and can’t find it. There’s never an instance where you find yourself having to drag others along; on the contrary, the quality of the people around us tends to create a synergy where everyone is working to meet everyone else’s standards.
Clipboard is the kind of place everyone wants to work, and it’s the people that do it. We are incredibly thankful.
We work for the very best people
Having a mission matters. Doing good work is its own reward in many ways, but knowing that your good work is immediately being utilized to help people in meaningful ways is a multiplier. Being able to see your effort make the world better in real-time is a huge motivator; it helps you get out of bed, and it feeds into all the work you do in the future.
We have the privilege to work for one of the most deserving groups on earth. On one side of our marketplace we have health facilities trying to provide the best care they can for the ailing. On the other side we have the people who actually give the care, nurses working long hard hours to improve lives and outcomes. They do this at great cost to themselves; nothing about medical care is easy.
Everything we do matters in a real way in someone’s life. Whether it’s making check-in calls with our nurses, small or large improvements to the app, making sure people get paid as quickly as possible for work they’ve completed or any of the dozens of other tasks we work on from a day-to-day basis, everything we do creates a direct, observable improvement in someone’s life.
We get to help people be healthier. We get to help people move their careers along. We get to help people spend more time with their families. We give people control over their own lives in a way they just didn’t happen before. And the people we help deserve it; everything we do feels like it’s pushing the balance of the universe one step closer to where it should be.
We are growing faster than you think
If you are reading this from outside the company, you are probably aware Clipboard Health is growing; we are now a Y Combinator top 100 company and we are increasingly visible in more and more places. But from outside the company that might be all you see; Clipboard Health doing well. But from inside the company you would know that growing isn’t quite the right word. With a view from the inside, you’d use a word more like exploding.
Pretty much every day we are adding new team members who almost immediately go on to do incredible things. Every day new projects are started or completed that all have the potential to change the company on interesting, fundamental levels, not only making us bigger but making us better at an atomic, granular level.
We are constantly adding new nurses and new facilities to the app and doing more and more work for more and more people. The work we do is changing as well; we are constantly moving into new areas and new ways people can work. Right now we are a great fit for a lot of people; every day we move closer to being able to offer incredible improvements to almost anybody.
From the outside, you see some of this. From the inside, it’s exciting every day. There’s so much going on that it would be a full-time job just to know about all of it. It’s an incredibly dynamic and invigorating place to be.
There’s a lot more we are thankful for. We could go on and on about all the things that make our work worthwhile and our workplace special, but in the interests of keeping things short we can condense it all down to this: It has been another wonderful year at a great place to work. We have every reason to expect the next year will be even better as we work to amplify the good we’ve built even further.
To everyone who works with us and everyone who is reading along: We wish you very happy holidays and we are so glad to have you with us. Keep your eyes wide open - we are heading in a cool direction and you won’t want to miss a thing.
If this article is the kind of thinking you find cool or exciting, we’d love to talk to you. Apply here, and we will be in touch soon!