Gregg Armitage

Studying incentive-structure failures in human-centric industries. Building the correction. FoundHuman, Vestra, Trovero.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Everyone with a GLP-1 angle is hiring heavy before the next regulatory shoe drops. That's how you end up overbuilt the quarter the rules change. The weight-management wave goes to the few operators who hold clinical and commercial in one head, not the specialists you over-hired.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Healthcare M&A is running hot again, and every deal creates the same job nobody budgets for: the operator who actually fuses two companies into one after the press release. Rarest hire in the transaction. A merger is made or lost by whoever's left holding both halves.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

My father built houses that made magazines. He said the part that gets photographed is never the part that matters. Nobody shoots the framing. Every company has a load-bearing hire nobody's heard of. Unphotographed and underpaid, till it walks and the house sags.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Land your first commercial leader a year before you can hire one. Court them now, dinners and honesty, lock them up emotionally. Just don't put equity and severance on the books before you know you have a business. Foresight is cheap. Early commitment is reckless.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

A company lost a hire they wanted and blamed the money. It wasn't the money. It was the silence: days between stages, a one-line reply to her take-home, nobody ever making her feel wanted. Feeling wanted is a currency, and the best people spend it on whoever paid it first.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

"We use AI" was a pitch six months ago. Now everyone has the same models. The scarce hire is the engineer who can walk into a customer's messy workflow and make the model land, not the lab researcher with the famous logo. The operator with the muscle beats the résumé.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Where I grew up in Maine, the lobster pound ran on handshakes. What kept it honest was not the market. It was that a reputation traveled faster than a truck. Fifteen-month guarantee is the same bet. My name works in this harbor longer than any single deal.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

90-day recruiting guarantee covers month one (learning names), month two (finding real problems), month three (first real decisions). Then it expires. The hard part starts at month four. We guarantee fifteen months because anything shorter is hoping nobody notices.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

A VP sent me a job description asking for 10 years cloud infra, 5 years managing 20+ people, HIPAA expertise, 3 EHR integrations, and an MBA. I asked how many people check every box. Probably fewer than 50, and none are looking. The job req is a wishlist. Not a person.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Ben Scharfe at Altera: health systems need "internal expertise to test and verify AI performance" because regulations won't protect you. Most systems don't have anyone whose job that is. This hiring category barely exists yet. The ones who start looking before it has a title win.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

$4B in Q1 digital health funding. 12 companies took 59% of it. When capital concentrates like that, talent follows. The companies that need great people the most are now competing against companies that can pay whatever they want. Not a sourcing problem. A persuasion problem.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Cigna cut 2,000. PeaceHealth trimming. Baptist, Hennepin, Alameda all reducing. The common thread: billers and coders are the first jobs AI can actually do. The clinical people stay. The job description stayed the same. The job didn't.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Series B CEO told me she's exhausted. For two years every deal closed because she was in the room.

The VP of Sales doesn't replace the founder. They amplify what the founder proved works. If you never proved it, they're building on sand.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Rock Health stopped tracking "AI deals" separately. AI is now table stakes.

Three years ago, "AI-powered" got you a term sheet. Now it gets you a shrug.

The AI is the how. The outcome is the what.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

General Catalyst bought Summa Health two years ago. Now they're using it as a proving ground for their portfolio.

The technology is the easy part. The talent to deploy it is the whole game.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

Health system CEO told me they've been trying to hire a CDO for 14 months. Three failed searches. Every finalist took a better offer.

Talent follows power. When the CDO reports to the CFO and owns nothing, the best candidates walk.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

When companies freeze hiring, the first team they cut is recruiting.

The work doesn't disappear. It lands on founders and hiring managers who are already drowning.

Now the board is asking the CEO to "do more with less" on hiring. The math doesn't work.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

12 companies took 59% of all digital health funding this quarter. 12 out of 110.

If you're not commanding a $100M+ round, you're fighting over 41% with 98 other companies.

The middle is disappearing. Nobody's funding potential anymore. They're funding proof.

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

@Berry_cooool Auto

[Gregg Armitage @GreggArmitage]

The AI wage premium doubled in 12 months. Every CEO heard the same number from the same recruiters.

Now every Series B has the same comp band. Calibrated to a round they haven't closed.

Hire with discipline. The same talent goes for 65 cents on the dollar.