Vivek Swaminathan, founder and CEO of Cardamom Health
Vivek Swaminathan created Cardamom Health with a desire to build a community along with a business.
“When I started this company, I said, ‘Why can’t everybody win?” Swaminathan said in his Wisconsin Economic Summit presentation, “Building What’s Next: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Courage to Start.”
“Nobody has gotten somewhere in life without being given an opportunity to try that next thing and push themselves,” Swaminathan said. “So, we built a culture with that being core to what we do and how we do things.”
The courage to take chances
Swaminathan was born and raised in Madison by parents who came from India to pursue their education, leaving behind everything and everyone they knew to create a new life. Their story led Swaminathan to have “a sense of fearlessness,” he said: “There’s nothing that I could possibly do that’s even remotely as difficult” as what they had done.
Taking his parents’ assurances at face value that he could accomplish whatever he set his sights on with hard work and perseverance, Swaminathan set a goal of becoming a CEO based on his love of problem-solving and leadership. Yet, he “grew up feeling like an outsider in a lot of ways,” he said—“I was the little brown kid that looked different. People couldn’t pronounce my first name. People didn’t even want to try to pronounce my last name.”
Feeling neither Indian enough nor American enough to fully fit in in either place, Swaminathan chose to emphasize forming authentic relationships rather than following the crowd. “Finding these folks, these people that support you, that know you, that you can be vulnerable with, that you will always be there for each other … there is no greater power, I think, than having that that feeling, because then you can build off that and do anything,” he said.
That was key in creating Cardamom, a technology-forward company that works with healthcare providers, payers, and health information technology organizations to get the best outcomes. “If you want to start a company, you need a lot of grit,” Swaminathan said. “It’s so much easier when you’re doing it with people you trust, you care about, and you have common goals … It changes everything. And when you have that, you start building this base-level resilience.”
Swaminathan encouraged aiming high rather than setting attainable goals. “I would rather have a goal so high that we’re not going to hit it but we’re going to keep trying to get close,” he said. “You’ll get further along if you keep trying for the higher goal.
Hiring a person, not a skill set
In his talk, Swaminathan also shared lessons about his approach to hiring and developing talent. At Cardamom, “We talk a lot about giving people a chance they would not otherwise have gotten,” he said. “Nobody has gotten somewhere in life without being given an opportunity.”
Some decisions for the company have been made on principle—for example, the decision to allow team members to have equity in what they were building, rather than retaining complete ownership control.
This ties back to a sense that the team is working together to create something as a community, he said. He urged listeners to think, at work and at home, about “how can we improve our communities incrementally” by taking steps each day.
“I believe that we will always be better and the greater good happens when we’re all trying to find ways to win,” he said. “If you do it right, you make the pie bigger for all—and then everybody wins.”
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