Be cool
Be positive
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.
The creed has receipts.
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.
A mental exercise.
Four words I would say to get myself through difficult stuff, before there was any record of them.
Then it became a tweet.
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 ADDRESSA social good blog.
Then a social good blog, at becoolbepositive.com. The same address you’re on right now.
Built a company on it, and wore it.
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.
The creed came home.
My site moved onto becoolbepositive.com, and stevegonzalez.me points here now.
Be cool. Be positive.
THE LAST LINE OF MY WHYHow I close what I write.
It’s the last line of my letter, and the line that runs under every page of this site.
Operator and technologist.
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.
- Maxim
- Silverado
- Compassus
- Bridge
- HealthView, President and CEO, today
- SpartX, the first company, founded at 22, acquired in 2010
- PokitDok, founding team, acquired by Change Healthcare in 2018
- CultureAI, founder, today
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.
The operating system, in plain words.
Delete first.
Every requirement carries a person's name. If nobody will own it, we delete it. Delete first, simplify second, speed third, automate last.
The clinician hour.
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.
The nurse is the engineer.
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.
Confident and wrong.
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.
Every idea on this site was worked out on foot.
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.
The hit is not what defines a team. The recovery is.
Essays on culture as infrastructure, leadership from the bedside to the boardroom, and building organizations people don’t want to leave.
The Culture Lab series: practical frameworks from two decades of operating, tested in companies that live or die on their people.
