Lessons from a summer at Datavant
This summer, between my first and second year at Stanford GSB, I interned at Datavant, a technology startup working to organize the world’s health data. Many players in the health data ecosystem are looking for ways to combine data from siloed datasets in order to develop a more complete (and longitudinal) view of patient health. Datavant’s technology enables the safe and secure linking of patient data from different sources to support analytics. The company is a year old, has raised $40m and hired about 25 employees, and has a few dozen paying customers.
I had three sets of goals for this summer:
- New environment: Experience the excitement and challenges of working in a small, scrappy start-up environment
- New skills: Work in unfamiliar roles (in particular, in sales)
- New content: Learn how data moves through the healthcare system
Thanks to Travis May and the team at Datavant, I had the chance to test myself on each of these fronts.
Environment: Maintaining order during rapid (sometimes chaotic) growth
Datavant is growing rapidly, but it’s still small enough that I could see all of the different pieces of the company and how they work together. The company’s linking product is in market and requires a tuned sales, implementation, and customer success engine tailored to the expertise-driven market of healthcare IT. Datavant has ambitious product goals that will require disciplined product management and top-notch engineering. And the company navigates complex data privacy and security problems on a daily basis.
One of the biggest challenges at Datavant (and the one I was most excited to see up close) is how to manage this complexity without introducing structures and processes that sacrifice agility. Over the course of the summer, I saw the team at Datavant pull a few cultural levers to address these challenges:
- Urgency: Like most startups, Datavant wants to grow quickly. Everyone in the company understands and internalizes this drive. Urgency is baked into executive communication, target-setting, and general hustle on day-to-day tasks.
- Ownership: Given its size and the complexity of the business, the company requires high-velocity decision making from every member of the team. Everyone (including summer interns!) has to think like a leader — developing a vision for his or her domain, making decisions quickly, introducing (light-weight) structures that help streamline work, sharing success and owning failure. Whenever I’d ask Sam, the head of the go-to-market team, a question, he’d first put me in his shoes and ask what I thought we should do. Datavant can operate this way because the company screens for ownership early on in its recruiting process.
- Accountability: Every team member sets OKRs to define and measure their goals. This can be challenging given the often unpredictable trajectory of a high-growth start-up, but OKRs put structure around the company’s aggressive growth and are frequently tested and revisited. Given that the company has aggressive goals and OKRs are calibrated to match, what happens when people fall short? This is still an unsolved question at Datavant, but the company understands that OKRs are about accountability, not blame. Team members are encouraged to aim high and create space for reflection and improvement if and when some targets aren’t hit.
- Communication: At this size, everyone is accessible, including the CEO. Even at this early stage, though, communication is a challenge. The right people aren’t always informed on new sales or blockages in the implementation pipeline; there are simple misunderstandings about product decisions. This is the flip-side of a culture that promotes high-velocity decision making and ownership. It has been interesting to see the team work to solve for the right balance and develop a more open, “always-on” communication culture across teams as the company scales.
Skills: Hustle as a strategy
I spent most of my summer with the go-to-market team, selling Datavant’s patient-level data-linking capabilities and building partnerships. It was fun to see the team grow and mature while I was there: we were making sales and forming strong partnerships, with everyone owning their deals from prospecting to close, but the playbook was (very much!) a living document. I learned to treat the sales process like a closed-loop learning model: on every deal, pay attention to what’s working and what’s not and tweak your approach accordingly. The team’s philosophy is “hustle as a strategy” — constant momentum, including a set of hacks to keep things moving. My favorite of these was “More Link Mondays.” Each Monday evening, the go-to-market team would order dinner in, put on music (often starting with Jonas Blue’s remix of “Fast Car”), and grind through hours of lead prospecting and pre-sales research. We would power through this pre-sales work together, building camaraderie while we did so.
Content: The fragmentation of the health data ecosystem
I spent another fraction of my summer documenting (and crystallizing) Datavant’s view of how data flows between entities in the healthcare system. I was lucky to be able to work with Shahir Kassam-Adams and Eric Perakslis on this project, who were generous with their time and criticism and sharpened my thinking. We compiled an industry landscape that lays out how healthcare data is generated and used, and we mapped the intermediaries who touch it along the way (the results of this project can be found in this medium post). Researching and writing the piece allowed me to learn about the many health data sources, intermediaries and companies pursuing analytical solutions in this exciting and complicated space. I came away from it with conviction that Datavant is working on one of the core challenges facing the healthcare data ecosystem today: getting the right data into the right hands at the right time.
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I am grateful for my experience at Datavant. This summer I had a chance to learn about an important industry, develop good habits while taking ownership of substantive projects, communicate my ideas openly, hustle, and get to know some great people. With an important mission, strong leadership, a sharp and committed team, and lots of momentum, I believe Datavant is poised for an upward trajectory in the years to come.
