SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
How Extreme Openness Fuels SaaS Success with Oron Afek, CEO of Vim
Dan Balcauski interviews Oron Afek, CEO and co-founder of Vim. Oron discusses Vim's approach to extreme transparency, fostering a high-performance culture, and their mission to accelerate innovation in healthcare. They dive into the importance of a meritocratic environment and the distinction between competent leaders and individual contributors. Oron explains Vim's strategic decision to involve multiple stakeholders, like major payers, to foster collaboration and reduce barriers in healthcare. He also shares his views on leadership, transparency, and the necessity of selling outcomes in the modern SaaS landscape.
01:16 Introducing Oron Afek and Vim
01:48 Vim's Mission and Triple Aim
02:34 Healthcare Ecosystem and Innovation
05:26 Culture and High Performance at Vim
07:31 Meritocracy and Decision Making
08:35 Writing Culture and Communication
12:42 Barrels vs. Ammunition
16:31 Hiring for Competence and Humility
20:10 Evolving Hiring Strategies
21:44 Navigating Cultural Transparency in Leadership
23:05 The Role of Mentorship and Team Dynamics
25:13 Strategic Investors and Multi-Payer Systems
28:50 Managing Competitive Tensions in the Boardroom
37:43 Final Thoughts and Rapid Fire Questions
Guest Links
One is extreme transparency. So Vim is a place where everyone has access to. All the data they needed all the time. They need board decks, financial information customer lists, status, churn, whatever they need to know. The idea is to really put everything out there, obviously outside of personal information and just allow people to allow that to assimilate and allow people to make decisions based on full data information, what matters is do you have a data backed, solution for a problem that, that you can articulate basically get through the noise with good data and good arguments. you wanna have a person with competence over confidence. Like you want to have someone who, is likely a little bit more, a little bit more humble in the way they're approaching problems and the way they're talking about problems.
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories to the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to welcome Oron Afek, CEO, and co-founder of Vim, the B2B middleware platform that's revolutionizing healthcare workflow integration. Oron has scaled Vim to serve 40,000 providers covering over 120 million American. An Israeli special forces veteran turned four time founder Oron brings nearly a decade of hard won insights about scaling B2B platforms in complex regulated markets. Oron, welcome to the show.
Oron Afek:Hello, Dan. Thanks for having me. Thanks for this intro.
Dan Balcauski:It's good to have you. I'm excited for our conversation today. Before we dive into your scaling journey, give us the elevator pitch. What does Vim do? Who do you serve? I.
Oron Afek:Our goal, our sole purpose in the world is to and accelerate innovation healthcare. So the idea is to reduce the barriers of entry, whether you're large company, trying to do business in healthcare, whether you're a small company. If you go one level below this we have a triple aim. One is to. Really, Simplify workflow and how do you put, basically, how do you put stuff in front of physicians within their clinical workflows in a way that is contextually relevant that is clinically relevant for those providers in an experience that is be directionally connected to their clinical workflow. Doesn't need to be any swivel chair. Separate screen, split screen, those type of things. So really deep knowledge to integrating into EMRs or EHRs, PMS choose your poison there. The second part is. to make sure that the right data flows into those applications at a point of care, which is are the data coming from payers, from other providers, from other third party companies or employers if it's eligibility. And the last constituents is taking that ecosystem again. Providers on one end data source on the other hand, and making it accessible for developers through a dev platform and app store to build on top. So, just like iOS or the iPhone, think about the immense amount of innovation you brought to the world. Creating macro effects and a ton of downstream benefits for the entire humanity. We believe that if you really reduce barriers, the democratizing access, reducing barriers to allow innovators to operate in healthcare, whether they want to build new insurance company, or they want to build a clinical decision support tool, or a new way to reimburse for certain treatment. If we reduce those barriers, I believe that there's gonna be a much more flourishing ecosystem. Companies that can get to market a lot faster with less resources and prove their value because, the number one killer of healthcare companies is runway. It's just really tough to get to an escape velocity. So that's what we try to do. That's a pretty
Dan Balcauski:And correct.
Oron Afek:that.
Dan Balcauski:It was, we were going up to the nine ninth floor. It's okay. Let me just ask a question and you could, based upon what I think I heard, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, so, so you guys are providing a platform at the point of care for the provider. Uh, but then also I heard you're providing like a almost a middleware layer for like developers to build healthcare applications on top of as well. Did I get that correctly?
Oron Afek:Absolutely. So initially we were the only developer on a platform, and we were. Obstructing clinical workflows and creating different ways of consistently writing and building on top of those clinical workflows consistently for our own internal purposes. And we saw that, providers asked us and others s us, hey could we use the same framework to deploy other applications, things that we built internally or third party vendors we work with. We like the way you guys operate. Could I use it for other things? And that kind of yielded, that, that vision that. We chose almost four years ago to then pivot towards saying everything we've done for ourself, let's open it up for the world a little bit. What a, Amazon has done with AWS and other services. Like how do we use what we've done internally to then create more scale for, by opening up for third parties to leverage? So, yes.
Dan Balcauski:As a consumer of US healthcare, I wish you, your company and your ecosystem all the success in the world.'cause God knows we need it. This is SaaS Scaling Secrets. I want to pivot from, I wanna get back to the healthcare industry and some of those stakeholder considerations that you outlined in a bit. But put a pin in that for a second. And, you know, this is secret, so I want focus on. The growing of Vim itself. And one thing that's come up a lot on this show is the importance of culture. Now, culture is one of these things that is in many regards, fluffy. It sounds really nice to be like, oh you should have a good culture. But in practical terms, I think a lot of founders, leaders are often grasping a bit to figure out like, well, okay what do I do? So how do you think about. Building and maintaining a high performance culture at Vim.
Oron Afek:Yeah, I mean obviously over the years we. And, but I think one, one thing remained given both my co-founder and I came, like, like many others from Israel, came from military background. High integrity is critical for us and we take it I would say if few steps maybe beyond beyond the average company from our standpoint, in order to create, maintain a high integrity environment, you need to. Nourish two different principles. One is extreme transparency. So Vim is a place where everyone has access to. All the data they needed all the time. They need board decks, financial information customer lists, status, churn, whatever they need to know. The idea is to really put everything out there, obviously outside of personal information and just allow people to allow that to assimilate and allow people to make decisions based on full data information, both personal decisions and professional decisions. So, extreme transparency. Is is a key tenant in kind of what we do here. This also goes both ways. We share information. We also like to provide very, like, sharp to the point feedback and not not wait for feedback cycles or different type of ceremonies around feedback. We just say things as they sound. we believe they need to be said. And we also expect to get this reciprocated back to US managers receiving that feedback from people. So transparency goes both ways. We want to hear everyone opinions at all point and being very transparent. That dovetails to the second principle, which is nourishing an environment. That is idea meritocratic. And this is is, we're not the first company that tried to foster a idea meritocracy. But for us it's really about, it doesn't matter how long you've been here, what's your tenure, what's your experience? Did you grow up in healthcare or did you grow up in advertising? Doesn't matter. What matters is do you have a data backed, solution for a problem that, that you can articulate basically get through the noise with good data and good arguments. I ideally in writing, by the way not on a verbal presentation. And then, if that's the, if that's the best idea that wins whether someone else more senior or myself included, came with more conviction to the table, something I've been thinking about for six months if someone came up with a better idea that's the idea we're gonna move forward with, without any ego, without any like, kind of legacy. Around that. So those two things contribute to I think building a high integrity culture where people can trust each other with a good say to do ratio. Ev everything else I think is downstream for the, for those principles.
Dan Balcauski:So, integrity, transparency meritocratic environment. You mentioned something there about writing versus verbal. I'm curious, like, what does that look like in terms of rituals or processes during your company? Like how does that tie into the meritocratic element that you mentioned?
Oron Afek:Yeah, I think those things have been discussed in di different Amazon related books, right? Where they're. Really nourished or more of a memo type of solution versus allowing people to create presentations. I, I think when you having too many, meetings and presentations you, you're likely allowing certain folks to, certain personality trait that may not necessarily, that might be masking the true, transparent fact. So I think if you're putting things in writing and you're able to advocate for yourself in writing. The charisma or the other elements that might be a fluff within a really important argument, they're going away and you need to explain yourself in writing. Now when people put their soul and passion toward writing something like a nice memo or a short document. And they're not just using a hundred percent AI for it, but they're truly putting an effort to make an argument. You feel you feel it's in their bones. It's a compelling and convincing argument. You can put the data there, you can, would like to be comprehensive with the way we make a decision. So, yeah.
Dan Balcauski:There's a old motto that, uh, someone said that says, uh, more fiction has been written in Excel than all the world's books combined. I think the same could probably be said about PowerPoint or Google Slides if you happen to be in a workspace world. So I appreciate that approach. I, the Amazon writing approach is super interesting. It wasn't planning on going here, but you know, it's one of these things that I think a lot of people, you're familiar they have a sort of a writing culture and that they've instituted we, we don't have presentations and we spend, 15 minutes at the beginning of a meeting, reading a document. I'm curious how you've actually implemented that. Like what does that look like? I don't know about you, but I've been I've worked with plenty of companies where. Everyone shows up in the meeting and they're like, why am I here? And if you send a pre-read, nobody's actually pre-read it. I'm curious as a leader, like how have you instilled that as a, as an actual practice versus like, yeah, we wrote, write stuff down and then actually nobody actually, you get to the meetings and nobody's actually read the thing. Uh, do you actually allocate like the first 10, 15 minutes for everyone to sit there and read the documents? How does that actually work in practice for you at.
Oron Afek:I would say it's far from being perfect. But the intention, yes, is to allocate needed time for people to read the document. I have the meeting start. Sometimes we being internally. Blamed for being too much kind of in writing versus just having a meeting and getting it over with. Sometimes we can try to beat up a topic synchronously to death and then, might as well just get in a meeting and solve those things. But I think it's a good for sync function. I think try to resolve things as synchronously, especially when you operate between. different, like two different, very distinct time zones like Israel and New York or the rest of the United States. I mean, those things are pretty critical. So back to your question, Dan, we, I. We are far from being perfect. And we constantly trying to improve the way we are approaching those things. And for us it's just not just the meeting or the meeting memo, it's also about the synchronous communication and connectivity or communication between meetings and how we make decisions. And again I think it's still work in progress.
Dan Balcauski:Well, going back to something else you were saying about the meritocratic environment obviously, there's huge risks in running a scaling business in being part of a scaling business. Nothing is for certain. And I'm sure, you try to hire very smart, ambitious people and then they understand that, hey, we, this meritocratic environment is well known, uh, so I need to perform excellently, but that can also have downside. Effects where maybe folks don't take enough risk, uh, maybe they stay within their, comfort zone. How do you think about managing that from a cultural level of where does it maybe more succinctly, like how do you think about the role of failure in building this high performance culture?
Oron Afek:So I think it's a good question. I think there are different maturity levels in terms of how do you work with, with with a person, we like to separate barrels and ammunition. If someone is a true barrel, you make them a barrel they become a barrel because they don't how to take risks. You also trying to build teams where you need to have incredible ammunition, but you need to have incredible barrels and you're trying to align. People ne next to people can take risks and, lead the charge. So anyone who is a functional owner at Vim is a person who, has demonstrated the ability to take risks confront the things that are, that may be less comfortable and, don't need to be micromanaged. That's something, you know, having said that, people are detail oriented. Uh, if you're a manager at the company, you're likely able to do pretty well the job of every one of the functions you're managing. and again, like that obviously dilutes as you go higher. I'm, I can't write code but I do have a co-founder that can do it pretty well. And he when something, uh, uh, happens and a monumental challenge in the RD team he's going and helping out and is helping to build a team. So I think at the very top, you need to have people that can understand the different components, and then you'll be able to micromanage them at times if that's needed. Or even push people to take more risks if needed because they understand the. We understand the matter in hand but we wanna make sure we nourish and put together in right place as managers who can take risks and have taken risks in the past. And you know, that's why we got conviction that we need to be a manager of the company. So.
Dan Balcauski:Before you use the analogy of barrels versus ammunition. I think I've, I'm familiar with that phrase, but could you just delineate what the distinction between those two is for listeners?
Oron Afek:Yeah, absolutely. I think, we philosophically we are trying to create as little as possible in terms of middle management, right? Part of being at the meritocratic as you would appreciate you wanna have direct access between. Whatever decision makers and individual contributors and as much as
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Oron Afek:Player coaches that are, nobody is a sole people manager at the company. I staff my co-founder write code and I meet customers. That's what we do, 60 plus percent of our time period. I want that to be the norm at Vim in a sense that like anyone is likely an ic. Some of us are also able to manage some other ics, and that's what maybe is the separation of what I'm just saying about ammunition and barrels. Basically saying if someone is a quote unquote barrel they're able to command to guide, to coach, to grow. Other folks who may not be ready to be such a payroll may maybe don't even want to. Maybe they're just incredible engineers, maybe just incredible ics, maybe just individual salespeople that. You just have their own network they wanna sell into maybe doing business development. They're phenomenal folks who can really continue to grow as an ic and they are phenomenal folks who can continue to grow in a different axis where there are managers and then become managers of managers. Again the
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:merit meritocracy is some, is a place where anyone can discuss any topic with anyone else at the company, including with board members, any employee have access to the board. Definitely every manager. We don't have a lot of managers at Vim, so we do encourage those direct conversation. Direct engagement. It's also part of transparency.
Dan Balcauski:Uh, would it be fair if I reflect back what I think I heard, the barrel is the person who not only can excel in their IC role, but can also uplevel and create other ics performing at a high level. Would that be maybe the distinction?
Oron Afek:Exactly. And basically implement KPIs for these folks to then pursue a target. Yes.
Dan Balcauski:Well, I'm curious, so if we look at it through that lens, when you know you're interviewing, and maybe this is bringing on executive leader or maybe this is even for an IC role and you're trying to understand if this person could grow in, like what are you looking for when you sit across from, a candidate beyond sort of their resume technical skills where you're really trying to figure out like. Does this person have, barrel capabilities? Because obviously this seems like a core component, right? Like you've got a limited number of hires that you could make, and it sounds like this is really a high point of leverage. So walk me through a little bit, like what's going on in your mind during those conversations? What are you trying to suss out?
Oron Afek:I think that well, I personally believe that, I mean, at least I haven't found just incredible people that are all the, all they're good at is managing people. And that's a hundred percent of what they do. And maybe that's because I only work for small companies and I never worked for Google, I
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:for large hyperscalers. And that's, at least, that's what we're looking for in the, in, in that type of scale of companies. The one thing I would be looking for is or, two things that are critical, again, outside of the technical skills of doing the job and what do you know what you
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Oron Afek:One is. Basically making sure you have a good do ratio basically, as much as we can assess it ahead of time without seeing you actually doing this in on, in reality. We at the point, I think I've seen d different roles, different skill, different companies. And I feel I have a good sense of, okay, if you're a selling, if you're a product manager again, almost anything outside of being a true, a software architect, I could personally feel like I, I'll be, I'm able to assess, did you really do what you say you do. Did you really take part in, in doing that? And in what way? In what shape? And just doing a few double clicks. I think after the third abbreviated of a question, you're likely able to uncover the truth. And if someone continues to be like knowing what they're talking about and are coherent and you're not just hand wavy and they have the details, I think that checks the box. That
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:15 to 20 minutes. You go deeper and. it, it's a relatively straightforward to assess. The second thing that I think, and particularly you want, you wanna diagnose for a barrel versus ammunition, you wanna have a person with competence over confidence. Like you want to have someone who, is likely a little bit more, a little bit more humble in the way they're approaching problems and the way they're talking about problems. And it is it, I think it's something that you just develop with intuition over the years. Is this person talking a big game or did this person just talks, pretty big, what they've done is actually bigger. Or maybe they talk small, but they've done bigger stuff. And I think that those two questions, stuff tells to each other at the point where, you know that they check both those boxes. I think they qualify to, okay, now let's see. What have they done before? Do they manage people? Are they ready to manage people? Is this part of a passion? How do they, just do some role playing and see how they deal with certain situations? But those two things really help to assess someone to be, potential manager and a, senior person.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Pressing them on what they did on clicking on that two, three times to see if the story falls apart. And it really wasn't them driving the change, but also them being humble in their claims. That's a very, interesting tightrope to walk as an interviewee because there's definitely pressure to make yourself as large as possible to stand out. So if you could find the person who really knows what they're talking about and is humble, uh, that definitely a gym. Um, but I could see how that would be important. I'm curious, like as you've scaled, VIM has the type of person you've focused on bringing into the company changed.
Oron Afek:I think it constantly changing. I think at the beginning we thought. We don't know anything about healthcare. That's like 10 years ago. We need to bring people with strong healthcare expertise. Then we pendulum swing to the other side and said, people with that've been growing in healthcare, they're gonna be, it's tough to unlearn what they've learned. And it's tough to innovate in an environment where so, there's so much legacy. And then we swing to the fences when to bring juniors. And then after we became. Quote unquote more, more experienced ourselves. Then it was time for us to bring, again, more senior people from different areas of the business. I think today we have a healthy mix on one end It relates to. Just engineering and innovation. You need to have a healthy mix of, senior people. We deal with a lot of the, computer vision and reverse engineering and a lot of different disciplines that are not just regular software engineering. So you need to have a good combination of very experienced people alongside, early ai, first young juniors who don't have any, any problem to, to unlearn how writing software should look like in the AI era? I think when you're thinking about more customer facing roles, we tend to think about more, more senior folks who've done that in the past and done that successfully. And then everything else being in between. We try to have a good mix of juniors and seniors, nothing's at
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:sense.
Dan Balcauski:I wanna ask kinda one more question about culture.'cause you mentioned before this idea of transparency and being very upfront with dashboards and metrics. Everyone is so everyone can kinda see the state of affairs and make a judgment with the best information possible given, their position in the company and what they're directly seeing. There's often a tension though, as the leader, uh, where I haven't talked to a a CEO on the show yet who hasn't expressed some version of, oh my God, I don't know what the heck I'm doing. Uh, because they hit some situations. The, it's the, and the downside of growth is you're always being asked to do a bigger job than you were doing, uh, the day before. I'm curious how you think about as a, as it reflects that. The notion of cultural transparency. How important to you is it to be transparent with your team about these doubts? Because I mean, I can imagine there's a, there's often a tightrope you may need to be walking of like, well, I'm sure you always have some raging fire, probably multiple fires at any given day. And so, there you could be like totally transparent about like, oh my God, all these things are broken. But that may have not great impacts on the business. Or the morale of the company. How, like, how do you think about that? Incorporating that notion of transparency as it projects to what you're dealing with day to day with the broader team?
Oron Afek:I think that, when it relates to my the team I work with directly, like my co-founder, our CFO or champions officer, I'm trying to be as real as it gets in terms of like. And I do want'em to do the same, right? So it's like we, we always just confront brutal facts together. And even if something personally happened, like, people I think, feel comfortable sharing and not holding it back. Whatever bothers them. We don't need to wait for a one-on-one. If there is something that bothers you, just text or slack.
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:So I think with the immediate team, those things are much easier to do. I think, I've been. Sharing a lot of personal growth, personal growth challenges with our chairman Il Levy from Seia Capital with End Perlman is our largest investor at Great Point Ventures. Those folks have been, incredible mentors for me. And, we just talking about everything. I think what, when it gets to the broader team, we. We do have certain interfaces where you know, like all hands or an email or a Slack channel where we can exchange ideas. I think usually just the nature of this communication not happening on a high frequency basis like I do have with my team. I personally, I usually don't get into a lot of the, the personal hurdles. I do
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:I think, and Asaf my co-founder is trying to the same thing. We do try to appear again, being transparent, being vulnerable sharing those, some of those personal challenges with the rest of the team, whether it's in informal conversations or even during an all hands, try to be open on what's going well, what's not going well at a company level. I, I think we have less. Of like sharing personal hurdles and in kind of public forums and, you know, what's going on with us. It's kind of a,
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:agree with you. It's kind of, kind of
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Oron Afek:with, it's like almost like a little armor you have when you swing in the broad team. You know how to, how it's gonna affect different people. But what I do know for a fact is that sharing data, forget about sentiments or emotions. Sharing data with everyone is always helpful, it's good or
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:It's always helpful.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, it's a, it's definitely a tight rope and I think we're all always trying to figure that out. Unless you're on LinkedIn, which in case everything is always amazing and wonderful. And, uh, but, uh, but no one likes that. So, I you mentioned, you, you do leverage some of your board. That's interesting segue. I did wanna. Talk a bit about board because you have quite an interesting cap table. Like you have, Sequoia well-known venture capital fund, but then you also have some well-known folks in the healthcare space, Optum, Walgreens blue Cross. I'm curious how that developed, I guess what led you to seek funding from, I guess what you might. Folks might term strategic investors rather than traditional venture capitalists. I'm wondering, like, can you walk us through what that decision process was from your end?
Oron Afek:Absolutely. Initially when we started the in initial app that, that, specifically called Care Insights, something that we used to leverage connectivity to put data from payers in front of physicians so they can make better decisions in value-based care environment. For those who who are from that. Space risk adjustment, quality improvement, things that are the building blocks of value-based care. Physicians would really struggle to adopt a solution from a vendor that is single payer in nature. If you think about the average provider in the United States, the average primary care physician, they likely have an average 10 different insurance companies or payers, quote unquote, that they
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:a contract with. And so between, between that plus they have a busy day and they're taking care of patients, they would really be hesitant adopting a solution that is not multi-payer. Now when you try to make an argument to one payer that you're gonna get another payer the same platform, at least early on, I think you know, today the notion of doing things in a multi-payer fashion is much more. is, I think it's much more common. And I think Vim did play a certain role in that in the last, 10 years becoming more of a multi-payer data connectivity system. But initially at least one pair would be hesitant to, to share the data with a vendor that also gets data from another payer. Because basically it's kind of an argument of kind of, basically, everyone gets better. And then where's my competitive advantage? So you're gonna be On my back just to then go and turn around and resell it to my competitor, lift their ship in that tide as well. And so what's where's my competitive advantage? I put all those dollars. So we had to neutralize those arguments by initially a saying to multiple different payers, Hey, come participate in the cap table. Sit. They're on the same board board. Table, four or five times a year have good relationship, talk about what really matters that, we all appreciate it. Without multi-payer nature for the platform, we're not gonna have any adoption. So you may put the dollars and never get the ROI. At the same time, if we are making it multi-payer, we can drive, we can drive adoption, which then benefits everyone else, and I think people appreciated that. I think putting them on the same cap table, having a conversation, building relationship, understanding that I'm not helping competitor A, B, or C collaborating with a friend. We're working together to, to solve a problem. I think that was pretty helpful. Uh, and so
Dan Balcauski:hmm.
Oron Afek:how it's all started. think over the years it, it made sense to. Make sure that our largest customers have a voice in the room. We do, healthcare does have certain concentration with some major payers and healthcare players that, it's good to have in the room because. They really are just big buyers of what we do. And they're also very successful. And you wanna learn from them and you want them to share whatever they can share, not confidential with others. And I think that make it more attractive for others to join the board, just to have those conversations. So I, I think it really benefited us from that standpoint.
Dan Balcauski:So it's interesting'cause so you mentioned right, that, uh, very, uh, I mean, astutely, right? There's this competitive tension. So bring them on board as collaborators so that you're not viewed as a competitor, but they, but then they're still sort of competitors with each other. I'm curious, like, does that imply. Difference for how you need to manage conversations, in the boardroom, uh, with those strategic investors because there is potentially sensitive information, right? That I don't know. I'm curious, like, does that is that imply any. Either practices at running the board meeting or governance structures in place when you bring those type of investors on board to, to mitigate that.'cause you've you've brought everyone closer, but then I don't, like, there's obviously it doesn't absolve the market tension entirely, so I'm curious how that it gets managed as you now you're running that relationship directly.
Oron Afek:use one example which I think can really address your question. The answer is we have to be careful. But we also don't want to be too careful because then there, there's no value outta the board meeting. Why would people show up for the board meeting? You need to get value out of this. The one example I'll give you is this. Vim is really focused on being the last mile, delivering data providers engage. in, in our case, payers or the third party developers would benefit from that type of engagement to either drive. A care gap closure for stars or different risk measures to improve RAF scores or, get referrals to the right specialists to reduce cost of care and so on and so forth. There's multiple different levers that, that make a difference in healthcare. we try not to have a horse in the game of, data analytics. We are relying completely on our customers to say, here's what I think. true. For example, here's the best specialist or here is what Dan had last year, and that's what I think he has this year. Now, different data analytics outputs lead to different levels of engagement between different payers. If certain payers more invested in clinical data to improve their insights versus just claims data, they're gonna have better engagement. The second thing that contributes to different engagement on the provider side is. The way you contract, they will incentivize they will build your incentive mechanisms to basically compensate providers for the work they're doing for you. How much you're paying upfront, how much you're paying as an upside and those things doesn't really matter. And how do you pay the differences between engagement and uptake and performance. Between different payers would never be discussed in a board meeting. That data, obviously we
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Oron Afek:can show averages and how they're trending. can show what moves the needle on average. Like, Hey, better contracting that users A, B, and C leads to better engagement. We're not gonna tell you who is doing that, but we know that as a fact, it leads to better engagement data that is taken into account. If you're just throwing an LM on a bunch of clinical data, it can get you, certain way, but you need to actually physicians reviewing data and preparing it. I mean, that, that can get you a much nicer uplift. We can share those insights. So making it interesting and engaging for people to learn and benefit, but at the same time, not to expose who is doing what and what it leads to directly. It's almost like a you almost like wanna de-identify. The names behind the performance, and that, that's just one example for how we're thinking about that.
Dan Balcauski:So being able to kinda comment about. What you're seeing generally in terms of how provider behavior is maybe modifying patient outcome, but not attributing that to any particular group or, I mean, you mentioned incentives as well, right? Or, or contracting terms, right. So that, that, those may all fall in under that, uh, umbrella but then keeping that anonymous and aggregated so that you don't trip any of those with that group. I, I'm curious given that, like do you with these folks on, well, I mean, lemme take a step back. There's a bunch of different stakeholders in the healthcare space. You've got the doctors, you've got, the hospital systems or the, or the clinic level practice, right. And the doctor in the clinic are not always aligned. The patient is another stakeholder. You've got the payers, uh, you've got you running your business, right. There's probably three other folks, uh, that I, stakeholder groups that I'm not even aware of. Um, how do you think about like navigating that? Set of different criteria, both from a, I guess like, I mean, you can take it any way you want, either from a like development point of view, or maybe even it's like marketing or messaging to the broader market. Right. I mean, just to make it concrete I don't think patients pay you directly. Hopefully we're making this healthcare system so that patients' outcomes are improved across the board. How do you navigate when those are in tension,'cause I could imagine your payer folks on the board maybe want you to go a certain direction, but, that may be in conflict with you I, hopefully there's always a happy path where everyone is better off. But I imagine sometimes you find yourself in situations where, uh, those are intention. I'm curious how you thought about navigating that from. Such a complicated space, uh, as you've scaled the company.
Oron Afek:Let me start with as a developer, and I think that the other question you asked. Like, almost like be downstream of that, including board conflicts or customer conflicts or even marketing questions of how we message stuff.
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Oron Afek:to be a dev platform which means we try to enable the infrastructure to allow different constituents such as physicians, risk-bearing entities, third-party developers, AI vendors, all to connect and try to get out of the way to the much. As much as we can. Right. And the architecture this infrastructure that we're building, the architecture is not, it's not just the, the SDK that is publicly available and anyone can access it. And then, if you are an EHR vendor or if you're, if you are a small practice, you anyone installing, or if you're a developer, you want to use Vim. Or if you're a payer, you wanna connect into Vim, everything is publicly documented. You can just go online and do it. It's also the legal foundation. For how we engage with practices, how do we exchange data? How do we do that with EHR vendors? How do we do this with payers, with risk-bearing provider groups, with developers? It's that layer that allows every different piece to be decoupled and in subsequently work well. So for example, if I wanna enable a one click install process of an app by a physician top of their EMR, developer doesn't need to go and sign a new BAA in healthcare sense for business associate agreement with that practice.
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Oron Afek:the BA we already have in place. They don't need to sign net new terms of service because they can leverage. And update the existing types of service that, that we already have in place. So the legal foundation on top of the architecture foundation and try to decouple those things is really critical. And, we also add additional things like we run the security reviews for different developers and data sources to make sure we give people their confidence. And, the SOC to in High Trusts responsibility we taking for everything we do is also. Go, goes down to everyone we, we work with, from an architectural standpoint. I think one thing, once you do that, then there is really like, and by the way, that, that cuts both ways. It's a great, it's a great benefit and it's also a great threat. You can do almost anything you don't you wanna do on the platform. it's a great benefit because then if people saying, go do this, do that. It's like, oh, you guys can do it. Here's the SDK. You guys can build it. We don't need to build it. We already enabled that. The problem is that what happens if you're getting sucked into something yourself? Enabling something yourself that is not yet supported in the system and then you have multiple different constituents pulling you in different directions. And, but I think that's something that any company would deal with. When you serve large enterprises on the communication side, yeah. I would say we're still learning how to navigate that very complex. of different stakeholders. We're not there yet. We're gonna launch a new website soon. I think it's gonna make much better job articulating kind of the different stakeholders, what FIM does and how it works.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, you have a, uh, a significant challenge. And, uh, I look forward to seeing the refreshed website because I mean, folks much. In much more simple markets, I'll say than you struggle with this. So, your marketing team has a hercule task in front of them. I wish them all success. Look or I could talk to you all day but we're up on time. There's a whole bunch of stuff I didn't get to ask. One close out with a couple of rapid fire closeout questions. You up for it.
Oron Afek:Go for it.
Dan Balcauski:Well, look I believe you're successful. I don't think anyone of any success gets there on their own. When you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to, work with, learn from is there anyone that just pops to mind who's had a disproportionate effect on the way that you think about building companies?
Oron Afek:Yeah. It's my co-founder of David. 100%.
Dan Balcauski:What has been most valuable in, in that relationship for you?
Oron Afek:Just being brutally honest. Working together for almost 10 years now and going through the hurdles together, success together caring for each other on a personal level well as a professional level. He's a way better manager than I'm, so I'm learning a ton from him about how to manage and, I think, they're just an incredible synergy.
Dan Balcauski:If I gave you a billboard. You could put any advice on there for other B2B SaaS CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?
Oron Afek:Sell outcomes.
Dan Balcauski:Sell outcomes?
Oron Afek:sell. Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:I love it. Well, is it is a rapid fire, but could you just unpack that a little bit? Because I like it a lot.
Oron Afek:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:do you say that, what do you mean?
Oron Afek:I think
Dan Balcauski:Okay.
Oron Afek:the AI era, we can getting to a point where okay to say I'm providing services or I'm replacing what used to be called services with data, AI and technology, and I think we're gonna see more and more SaaS companies evolving into. Okay, I'm gonna be selling outcomes. I'm gonna be selling an end-to-end product that fulfills an outcome versus a system that you can use to get your own outcomes. Especially in healthcare payers. They don't wanna buy pipes, they wanna buy reduction in cost of care, or increase stars or improved raf. They wanna be in that game. Providers, they want, they wanna get buts in seats in terms of patients coming to their practice. People wanna buy outcomes and SaaS companies with AI and data can leverage and sell outcomes.
Dan Balcauski:Sell outcomes. Love it. Or this has been great. If listeners want to connect with you, learn more about Vim, how can they do that?
Oron Afek:Just shoot me a LinkedIn message. Look forward to speaking with you.
Dan Balcauski:Awesome. I will put a link to ORs LinkedIn in the show notes for listeners as well as to Vim. Thank you so much. That wraps up this episode of Sask Galy Secrets. Thank you to or for sharing his journey and insights. For our listeners who found ORs insights valuable, please leave a review and share This episode with your network really helps the podcast grow.
