Keep a hype sheet.

A note from Helen

Welcome to the second issue of The Early Hires.

Last month was about hiring, from the side of the person doing it. This month is about you: how you keep track of the work you do that nobody else is writing down, and how to talk about it once you have it. Your HYPE sheet!

After that, a look back at my conversation with Caitlyn Tivy, PT, DPT, on what clinicians actually do in product. At the end, how to follow the podcast, get the free Clinician's Startup Guide, and partner with The Early Hires.

This month: your hype sheet

The Moment

You had a big quarter. You closed a months-long partnership with a regional health system. You launched your first market outside your home state and hired the clinician who will lead it. The CEO called out your work at the all-hands.

Six months later, it is time to make the case for a bigger title. You remember the deal. The details are gone: the numbers, the objection you worked through, the people who helped you get it done.

Clinicians are trained to document. Every visit, every decision, every plan gets charted and signed. Then we move into leadership, and nobody charts the difficult conversation, the partnership that almost fell apart, or the hire who became a leader.

The work happened but there is no record of it.

Where this started

A few years ago, a fellow woman leader in big tech at told me how she tracks her accomplishments, skills, and growth. She keeps a running "hype" sheet. In tech the practice goes by a few names (some people call it a brag document), and it often becomes the backbone of a promotion packet. When it is time to make your case, you are not relying on memory.

I loved the idea. One of my goals for 2024 was to record my daily hype: compliments received, deals closed, positive contributions, impactful hires and partnerships, shout-outs. I kept it focused on my administrative and leadership work, not my clinical care.

Some days it took ten seconds. The CEO praised me for "batting 1000% for recruiting and building teams." Easy entry.

Other days it was hard. Nothing went right, and the last thing I wanted was to find a win. Those days forced me to look for what I was doing to move things forward. One entry from a rough stretch just says: "Ability to have difficult conversations and advocate for team needs."

It was also the hardest to write. My unedited version had a few expletives in it. Those did not make the final cut.

What a year of it showed me

Over the holidays that year, I gave the whole year to Claude and asked for the most succinct version of wins, trends and highlights.

It came back with three core strengths: team building and leadership, strategic communication, and program development. Then two trends: growing executive influence and measurable impact. One line pointed to a direct hire promoted to VP in six months. I had written that down when it happened. I had never connected it to a pattern.

That was the surprise. Each entry on its own was small. Read together, they showed me where I was growing and where the company trusted me more than it had a year earlier. I could not have seen that from inside any single week.

The hard part: saying it out loud

Keeping the record is step one. Using it is harder, especially for clinicians.

We are trained to deflect. Outcomes belong to the patient and the team. Our best work is often invisible when it goes right: the complication that never happened, the readmission that never came. We do good work many times a day in ways that feel impossible to brag about, and most of us learned early that talking about our own wins was a little unseemly.

Then we move into business, where that habit costs us.

On a gorgeous sunset night at the soccer fields, I finished Likeable Badass by Alison Fragale, a UNC Kenan-Flagler professor who studies status and influence. Her research is clear that self-promotion is a skill. The people who earn respect show two things at once: assertiveness (I know what I am doing and I deliver) and warmth (I care about you and this team). Respect builds from that combination, and in her words, "resources follow respect." Title. Scope. Budget. A seat in the room where decisions get made.

She also says, "We teach people how to perceive us." Your hype sheet is the raw material. A story is how you put it to use: the situation, what you did, what changed, and who helped. Thirty seconds, told plainly.

Two of her ideas I am putting to work:

–     Dual promotion. Share the win and name who helped you get there. Clinicians are already good at the second half. The practice is not skipping the first.

–     Positive first, gap second. In your next standup, email update, or leadership meeting, lead with what went right before what is still open. We are trained to present patients problem first. Leadership updates work better the other way around.

I am still working on this myself. It gets easier with repetition, the same way presenting a case did in training.

Why this matters more in a startup

In a health system, some of this tracking happens for you: annual reviews, competency checklists, a manager who has watched you work for years.

At an early-stage company, your manager may be a CEO who is also fundraising, hiring, and putting out three fires. There may be no review cycle yet. Your role shifts. The person who hired you may leave. Decisions about your title, scope, and equity get made by people who see only a slice of your work. If you do not tell the story, someone else will tell a shorter one, or none at all.

Your hype sheet is the record that goes with you. It helps when you are:

–     Asking. A raise, a title change, an equity refresh.

–     Updating. Your resume or LinkedIn, after a year of moving too fast to notice what changed.

–     Presenting. A board meeting or investor conversation where you need proof points, not adjectives.

–     Doubting. A hard stretch when you need evidence that you are moving things forward.

How to start

Keep one running document. A note on your phone works. Date each entry and write a sentence or two.

What to capture:

–     Milestones. Closed a partnership with a major health system. Launched your first out-of-state market. Hired your first clinician outside your home state, the start of going national. Signed a first payer contract. Earned a spot in a CMS model or a pilot with a large employer.

–     Things you built. The first clinical protocols. Credentialing, quality, or a training program stood up from nothing. The care model the company now sells.

–     People. Hires who grew into leaders. A team member promoted. Retention that beat industry benchmarks. A struggling clinician you turned around.

–     Visibility. Your first board presentation. Leading the clinical piece of investor diligence. A conference talk, a panel, a press quote.

–     Numbers. Patients reached, turnaround time, revenue enabled, dollars saved. Whatever you are able to share.

–     Words. Compliments, shout-outs, a thank-you email. Copy the exact phrase.

–     Hard things done well. The conversation you did not want to have. The advocacy that cost you something. The time you pushed back on a timeline and held your ground.

–     Who helped. Names of the people who made the win possible, so dual promotion is easy later.

Write the big ones down the day they happen. They feel impossible to forget in the moment, and they blur faster than you expect once the next launch starts.

One caution before you start: be careful with confidential company details, especially if you plan to run it through an AI tool later. Write "closed a regional health system partnership," not the name and the terms.

Let AI find the pattern

This is the fun part! After collecting for the stretch of time you set (one month, three months, six months, a year), copy and paste your entries into your fav AI tool and use a prompt like this one:

If you are aiming for a full year, try a check-in at three months too. It is enough to show a trend and still early enough to act on it.

Where it led me

The hype sheets (over a few years) did something I did not expect. Read back over time, it showed me where my energy was going. The entries I was proudest of kept pointing in the same direction: hiring clinicians, helping them find their footing inside a startup, and watching them grow into leaders.

My interests were changing, and so was the way I wanted to build and support healthcare.

That record helped drive my move to build The Early Hires. It still drives what I do here, to support you, my clinician colleagues inside startups.

From the podcast: What clinicians actually do in product

Product is where a lot of clinicians land once they are inside a startup, and, yet, it is not always clear what that really means. So I asked Caitlyn Tivy.

Caitlyn is a pelvic and women's health physical therapist. She took a telehealth role at a large musculoskeletal startup during the pandemic, got pulled onto the team building a new women's health product line (she was one of a handful of pelvic-trained clinicians in the company), and three years ago started her own consultancy. Today she works as a successful fractional clinical leader across several health tech companies at once.

Caitlyn breaks it down into five jobs behind one title:

–     1. Review every claim. Much of health tech launches as a wellness product, not a regulated one. Someone has to read every line and ask: could this be taken as medical advice? In the episode, Caitlyn explains how she walks that line, and what separates biotech, medtech, and health tech.

–     2. Check it against the evidence. Is it accurate? Is it current? What would a clinician add from real practice? She walks through what a first content review with a new company looks like.

–     3. Run the advisory team. Assign reviews, keep them on track, and carry findings back to the product team. Done well, advisors work every week, not just appear as headshots on a website. (And yes, we got into why clinical advisors need to be paid.)

–     4. Translate between medicine and the build. Take an advisor's concern to engineers and designers in a form they can build against, then carry the deadline back the other way. Caitlyn calls it speaking both medicalese and startup-ese. We talked about how to hold the safety line without becoming the person who slows everything down.

–     5. Find what is missing. One advisor's offhand comment, made during a review of something unrelated, became a prototype, then a review by specialty, then a shipped feature.

One more point from Caitlyn connects straight back to this month's theme. Advisors often never find out which of their recommendations made it into the product. She makes a point of showing them. If you advise, ask. If you manage advisors, close the loop. Either way, write it down. That goes on your hype sheet.

Listen to the episode

Before you go

Listen, follow and rate! The Early Hires podcast features clinicians who joined healthcare startups early, in candid conversations about leading, building, and finding their way through startup life. New episodes every other week. Follow the show so you do not miss the next one, and if an episode was useful, a great rating helps more clinicians find it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts  |  All episodes at theearlyhires.com

Download The Clinician's Startup Field Guide. If you joined this newsletter by downloading the field guide, welcome. The guide came out of my two-part solo series on the podcast. Part 1 covers what to know before you sign: stage, board and ownership, equity, your credential and the language around it, and the split between clinical and administrative work. Part 2 covers what to watch for once you are inside: title versus authority, the operating environment, clinical infrastructure, protecting your license, and your external identity. Each item comes with a clear next step. It is free at theearlyhires.com. If you know a clinician weighing a startup offer, send it their way.

Reply to this email and tell me how you keep track of your own growth. I’d love to hear from you!

Thank you for all you do! 

Helen