I build healthcare companies from first principles. Hospice taught me what actually matters, so I build backward from that.
Scroll. The sun comes up as the story goes on.
Every field note I write is an episode too. The newest is on top, and the rest are a tap away on cultureai.com.
Read in Steven's own voice, made with AI
New episode ·
Nº 23 · Field note
In 1961 nine in ten doctors surveyed said they kept a cancer diagnosis from the patient. In 1977, 97 percent said they told. Hospice began the same way, outside the consensus, which is the one place a model trained on medicine can’t look.
Nº 22 · ForbesCulture Works When Nobody Has to Step Away From Their Work7 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 21 · Field noteThe Invoice18 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 20 · Field noteThe Fourth Lesson From Surfing20 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 19 · Field noteThe Permission Machine17 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 18 · Field noteThe Rocket17 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 17 · Field noteWorking Backwards22 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 16 · Field noteWhy I Open-Sourced the Way I Run My Companies15 min listen on cultureai.com
Nº 15 · Field noteThe Yield13 min listen on cultureai.comThe hit is not what defines a team. The recovery is.
Start with these fiveCandy in the fourth grade, stolen business books, a lifetime of no, and the plan.
Listen · 11:14Read along
Inc. Leadership Forum · ColumnistThe Culture Lab series: practical frameworks from two decades of operating, tested in companies that live or die on their people.
Forbes Business Council · ColumnistEssays on culture as infrastructure, leadership from the bedside to the boardroom, and building organizations people don’t want to leave.
Panels with operators in the room, and a day on Capitol Hill.
Panel photographs by Merz Photography.
Stage photos for press, in the kitCare delivery, investment, and technology, and the operating system that ties them together.
Skilled care at home across Southern California since 1967. Fortune Best Workplaces in Health Care. Inc. 5000.
Comfort, dignity, and clinical excellence for patients and families in life’s most important chapters.
hvhh.ai Founder
The operating intelligence layer: cultural architecture, people engineering, and disciplined AI integration across the portfolio.
cultureai.com Founder
A permanent owner of post-acute care, starting in Southern California. We buy clean, small agencies we know how to fix, keep their people and never sell.
The Culture Group WriterThe column: essays and frameworks on culture as infrastructure, published through the Forbes Business Council and the Inc. Leadership Forum.
The Culture LabBios, a photo, the facts and the receipts. Use anything in it. If you need something that isn’t there, write to me.
Bios in three lengths, a photo, three stage shots, the facts, my lines and how to reach me.
On the record
Four words that started as something I would say to get myself through difficult stuff. Then they went on the record.
Be cool.
Be positive.
Four words I would say to get myself through difficult stuff, before there was any record of them.
Joined July 2009. The old profile still signs off with the creed, and it never came down. It’s the oldest receipt I can point to.
becoolbepositive.comTHE ORIGINAL LOGO, THE SAME ADDRESSThen a social good blog, at becoolbepositive.com. The same address you’re on right now.
Shirts and hats, an actual company in Irvine, a community made to cure negativity, because I knew from the inside what negativity does to a kid.
The original mission: to create a positive living experience for the planet and those that inhabit it.
My site moved onto becoolbepositive.com, and stevegonzalez.me points here now.
Be cool. Be positive.
THE LAST LINE OF MY WHYIt’s the last line of my letter, and the line that runs under every page of this site.
My career has run on two rails since 2006. Building post-acute care organizations from the inside, home health, hospice, palliative, assisted living. And building healthcare technology companies in between.
The full origin story, chess table and all, is in the letter.
Today I lead HealthView, a Southern California post-acute organization. Number 16 on Fortune's Best Small Workplaces. Number 97 on the Inc. 5000, the fastest growing home health and hospice company in the country. I did not inherit that culture. We manufactured it, measured it, and then built software around it.
Every requirement carries a person's name. If nobody will own it, we delete it. Delete first, simplify second, speed third, automate last.
Our raw material is a clinician hour. Our finished part is a clean, paid month of care. When the gap between them is wide, that is a process problem, never a people problem.
So at HealthView the clinical team is the executive team, inside the finance and technology decisions, and our products ship from the people who deliver care.
Fast on decisions we can reverse. Slow on the ones we cannot. Being wrong is fine. Being confident and wrong is the thing we fire ourselves for.
I walk an hour or more every day, usually with a founder's story in my ears, and the companies get run in my head before they get run in a meeting. The two-word thesis behind CultureAI came from months of those walks. So did the decision to buy the domain.
The ocean is the other half of it. The standard in our companies is simple: you enter someone's home, someone's hardest season, the way you would want your own family entered. Newport is where we work. Hawaiʻi is where I go to remember why.
Ask anything in your own words. Every answer comes from what Steven has written, here and in his field notes, with the passage it came from. A short follow-up works too.
