I Want That Job: Co-Founder at Roster Health
Welcome back to I Want That Job, the Sunday email from onejob where interesting people with interesting jobs explain what they do and how they got there.
Stay tuned for some exciting new changes to onejob in the weeks ahead - I think you’ll like them.
As always, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming (sending you one great job opening 3x per week) on Monday.
I Want That Job: James Jiang, Co-Founder at Roster Health
His Path
James worked as an Analyst at Night Owl Capital, a generalist public equities hedge fund, then in Strategy at Hillflint, a sports apparel company. Now, he’s a Co-Founder at Roster Health.
What does Roster Health do?
We're a healthcare services business that employs community health workers who build home-based relationships with vulnerable patients and help address their non-medical barriers to health such as lack of access to healthy foods or transportation. We partner with health insurance plans and providers and allow them to focus on their members' clinical needs while we address the non-clinical aspects of health.
What makes you most bullish on your company?
We have an opportunity to serve the most vulnerable patients at scale using an evidence-based approach centered on whole-person care. The community health worker model is not new: they have been working globally for hundreds of years and in the US for decades, and their positive impact on patient outcomes and reducing costs is well-documented.
We believe we can advance this really important profession and component of the care delivery system in a way that is collaborative and aligned with the broader healthcare industry.
How did you find your way into the co-founder role?
Luck and this newsletter. My co-founder and CEO was looking for someone to help work on Roster, and I reached out. We shared the same vision and immediately hit it off.
What do you do in a typical day?
We're still in the earliest phases of finding and testing product market fit, so my primary focus has been on learning. Most of my days are spent talking to community health workers, potential customers, consultants, advisers, and other innovators in this space.
What one personality trait of yours makes you effective in your role?
Too early to tell if I've been effective yet! But probably curiosity. Especially in this early phase of hyper-learning, it's very important to be constantly asking questions and be extremely rigorous in answering them. At the same time, you can't get too wedded to any idea and need to be able to change your mind when the facts change. I can go deep testing an idea over dozens of customer interviews and be super excited when the last one breaks my thesis.
What’s a piece of advice that you’ve been given that you keep returning to?
Listen more than you talk. It's tempting to talk to demonstrate what you know when that time could be better spent listening and learning another perspective. st one breaks my thesis.
Which fictional character would be your ideal teammate?
Silvio from the Sopranos. I need a level-headed consigliere who can hype me up with things are going wrong and keep me grounded when things are going right.
The ask:
We're always interested in talking to people interested in making health care delivery better and more equitable. If you're interested in learning more about Roster and opportunities with us, send me a line at james@rosterhealth.com
If you like this, share it!