"To me, it has entirely been around the people. The DNA of the people that you hire and that you work with and you spend time with is the DNA of your company. One of my investors told me that, and I think it is so true."
Speaking at HLTH 2025, Amanda—whose company now serves 10 million older adults through Medicare partnerships—has learned what separates companies that scale from companies that stall. It's not the strategy or the funding or the product roadmap. It's who stays when things get hard.
"I feel so lucky and grateful that I get to pick the team I work with and have choice in building this company," she told Laurie. "It's just been really incredible to see the relationships of who joins you along the way, because starting a company, building a company, scaling it is hard."
This is the skill nobody teaches in business school: how to distinguish between people who look impressive on LinkedIn and people who'll actually walk the hard road with you. Fair-weather teams are easy to build. Finding people who lean in when everyone else is leaning out—that's the challenge.
Building a company gives you something rare: you get to choose who you spend your days with. You get to embed resilience and grit into the foundation from day one. Those choices become your culture, which becomes your company's ability to survive the inevitable rough patches.
Choose people who make you better. Choose people who won't leave when the challenges ahead look big and scary. Because they will, and your company will only be as strong as the people who stay.
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