Discussing social good with Hinge Health CTO, Julian Diaz

Discussing social good with Hinge Health CTO, Julian Diaz!

Here at Source Coders, we differ from other recruiters in that our mission is to connect the best talent who work with a purpose with companies who share their drive and ambition. From using technology to improve the lives of others, engaging in corporate social responsibility practices to helping charities and non-profit associations, we’re proud to have placed candidates with companies that do exactly that.

We sat down with one of our clients championing social good, Julian Diaz, CTO at Hinge Health to talk about what ‘social good’ means to him and the business.

How do you feel that Hinge Health is coding a brighter future?

“Literally through our code; the software application that we put out is helping people become more aware of the right way to feed musculoskeletal health. We are pushing the message along that movement makes for a brighter future and helps with joint care.

We’re taking best practice clinical advice and distilling it into a method that’s actually much more approachable than traditional physical therapy, and that right there is influencing people’s lives. We actually have a special flight handle that goes straight to this where our health coaches will, every now and then, drop in and feedback, unsolicited feedback, from our patients where they’ll say things how they’re quality of life has improved. How they’re able to play with their kids again, how they’re able to go running, how they’re able to go hiking again. We have former rock climbers who can do their sport again.

All these amazing things are enabled by the software that we make, I can’t think of a better example of a bright future than that.”

How do you feel every morning on your way to work knowing that you’re working for a company that’s doing social good?

“It puts everything into context for me. No matter what tries to drag me down, whether it’s waking up too early or going to sleep so late, dealing with a very tough one-on-one talk with someone who made this disciplinary action; it all kind of melts away when I put it into the bigger context. Ultimately, all my actions, as long as I do them correctly, will lead the company forward in a way that allows it to help more people, and every action I take in that direction is absolutely worth it. That’s kind of the thing that keeps me going forward and keeps me aligned and keeps me willing to deal with both the highs and the lows, and able to kind of do what it takes to make sure that this is a success.”

How big is your engineering team and what is the culture like at Hinge Health?

“We’re currently twelve and I would say, to categorize our culture, we try to keep things very flat and organized in the engineering team. The way I actually like to describe to prospective candidates is we’re really at capacity now. We’re very collaborative and we recognize each other as peers. Even though we’re in an academic environment, we’re constantly learning, sharing information, and always looking to level each other up.

I see the team in terms of the skill sets and not so much in terms of front-end guy and back-end. When I see that we have gaps in skills, that’s where I go reach out to the right recruiting tools and think about what’s needed. That’s how we’ll just continue to scale the future – there’ll be copies of me going down until the last structure, where they’ll be doing essentially the same thing and I obviously won’t be managing minutiae. We’re already naturally recognizing the leaders in our team, and giving them the agency to be able to move in that same direction. Recognizing people for who they are and keep offering them the opportunity to grow and collaborate is really the most important thing here.”

What has been the biggest technical challenge that you’ve faced at Hinge Health so far?

“The biggest challenge I would characterize as a, let’s say, cowboy-driven code base; it kind of speaks to the history of the company. Our CEO is very practical and very thrifty, which lends itself very well to being a seed-stage start up. So back in the seed-stage, we needed a lot to get going, particularly a backend, and so he made sure things got built. We hired someone that could get it done on a shoestring budget and in around three years, got it out the door.

It started selling like hotcakes, and then I was hired and transitioned to the CTO role. I looked at what was built and it was fine, but that’s just literally what it was. Early stage products don’t have a lot of consideration or forward thinking, which is absolutely the right call when you’re just trying to a get it out there with a minimal budget. The challenge is evolving that, not shutting down the business for a couple months and just be building from scratch, but instead, evolving it to the point where we made this a platform on which we could build everything else. And then really modernizing it and making it stable.

That’s been the biggest challenge for us. We had many tough moments where we kind of look at the, sometimes unflatteringly we’ll call it a mess, and we’ll just look at the mess and go “should we just throw the whole thing out?” And, fortunately, we’ve had the instincts in the right place where we don’t make emotional judgments. We charted up the course, we followed it, and we’re actually here in a place where, lo and behold, where we actually didn’t rewrite everything. We’re iterating our features. We’re actually using this thing. We’re doing exactly what we thought would happen. We’re evolving our systems to meet business needs. One day I may have to actually write about it, what a success story that was.”

Which key industries do you feel are making a big difference through technology?

“I would say healthcare is the shining example, especially as our government is kind of dragging its feet at the moment on a solution to the real problems that it has – we’ve seen technology fill in that gap. Healthcare and bio-tech startups are doing a lot to patch the holes in our methods.

I have to say, finance actually plays a massive role too, especially concerning under-banked communities. I was working at a startup previously where we were doing projects specifically for the under-banked and un-banked. There’s massive opportunity to really make a brighter future for people by improving the financial products available and just improving the scope of access to financial progress. Software makes that cheaper – it naturally increases the reach and accessibility of things that may have been traditionally harder to access because of transportation networks; other factors like having to run a physical store is an expensive thing. We now see banking products that don’t require the costly retail routes that traditional banks do, so I see huge, huge room for growth in finance, and some of the bigger players trying to finally pick up on that.

Tech security is another area. There’s a movement starting to automate and improve government information systems, where outsider startups are coming in to revolutionize things that are traditionally very slow, like legal processes. For example, optimizing the process of starting a business, by being able to generate all documents and information in a single click. That’s a massive thing that opens up a new opportunity for people; lowering the barrier of entry to business is a big deal.”

What does the future hold for Hinge Health?

“What I’m looking to see in the future is a place where we’re celebrated and coveted, where people start considering Hinge Health as a factor in where they choose to work. I want this company to hit a level where, well maybe we’re already there, people start to go, “You know, I’m going to take that Google job because they’ve got Hinge Health, right?”

This article was brought to you by Stephen South, CEO, at Source Coders.