Why You Can't Hire Passion Into Your Business (and What to Look For Instead)
You can design almost every part of a business. The thesis, the operating model, the go-to-market, the people. After enough years, most of it starts to feel like something you can draw, measure, and improve. Then a company with a good plan and good capital stalls, and a company with a messy plan moves, because somebody at the center of it cannot imagine walking away from the problem.
Mike Batista is the Managing Partner of Healthworx Studio. He trained as an engineer at MIT and Johns Hopkins, founded and led Quantified Care, and now builds healthcare companies from zero. His napkin says you can't engineer PASSION. The practical answer he gives is not softer hiring. It is looking for the person who would have built this company anyway, from day one of the idea rather than month eight, and testing for curiosity under pressure instead of a resume match.
Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 409 with Mike Batista.
The leading indicator an engineer couldn't design
Healthworx Studio builds companies. Mike's team thinks hard about the component parts: the thesis of why they build it, the go-to-market strategy, the operating model. Seven years of doing that produced one truism that stood out above the rest.
As much as the team thinks it can construct all of those puzzle pieces well, the most important leading indicator of success turns out to be "the passion, conviction, lived experience that the leaders or founders bring to the table."
That changed the sequence. The studio used to go looking for a founder six to eight months into building the company. Now the search starts on day one of pursuing an idea.
And it changed the standard. The phrase the team uses: they are looking for people who "would have built the company we're working on, even if we weren't the one doing it with them."
Notice what that is not. It is not a question about whether someone can execute a strategy. It is a question about whether the problem matters enough to them that they will keep searching after the strategy fails.
Subject matter expert was the wrong filter
Early on, the studio used the frameworks most of us use. Do they know the space? Are they a subject matter expert? Mike says the learning was that there is a difference between someone with the academic experience and someone with lived experience and a personal connection to the problem.
Michelle Turner and Here Now Health
Michelle came in and applied for a leadership role at a different portfolio company. At the end of the interview, the team asked what other ideas she had, out of curiosity. She described a gap she saw in the market. It was a close approximation of something the studio had just started working on.
Michelle and her family have taken more than 40 children into their home through the child welfare system. She had been involved in that system for many years outside her professional responsibilities. Her vision and understanding of the space shaped the business case rather than the other way around.
Here Now Health provides trauma-informed behavioral healthcare for children and families affected by the child welfare system. A year and a half on, Mike reported she had raised her first round of outside funding and the services were deployed in three states. As he put it, a majority of that is because of Michelle's momentum and energy.
Aaron Malloy and Paralign Health
Different lived experience, similar connection. Healthworx had been testing clinics inside fire stations, staffed by EMS-trained firefighters, in communities short on primary care. Two test clinics in Idaho. Positive feedback. The team was getting excited.
Aaron looked at it and said there is a kernel of truth here, but you can go about it a different way. His EMS background and his understanding of stakeholder incentives told him brick and mortar would break on scalability. Underneath the idea was something better: underutilized paramedics who can already deliver care in those communities, and insurance companies with members who need access and no clinical network to reach them. Marry those two together as a clinically integrated network.
The problem did not change. The solution did. That is the distinction that makes conviction useful rather than stubborn. The passion has to attach to the problem, not to the particular answer somebody drew first.
The first thing that works is the most expensive assumption you own
Mike's own company taught him this one. Quantified Care was a digital health platform for chronic care management. The first positive signals came from provider organizations, so for a decent amount of time the assumption was that providers were the customer. Because they were the first ones to respond positively.
It took a moment to give that up. Home care agencies were a subset of providers who actually had a problem: outfitting mobile staff with technology to make their work in the home more effective. Interest and a problem are two different things. Customers were saying yes, we're interested, and the real problem sat somewhere else.
The business also moved toward pulmonary conditions, including pediatric asthma, which Mike had as a child. That shifted the work from what and how to why. He thinks the team solved the problem better as a result.
I brought up the law of diffusion of innovation here. The innovators at the front of the curve buy new because it is new, or because it is you. Either way they are not a great indicator of what the mass market will do. A yes is information. Why they said yes is worth far more.
Mike added the piece underneath that: be precise about the financial incentives. Who can actually make a buying decision, and why are they making it? In healthcare especially, the person who says yes may be under internal pressure to look innovative. That is a different yes from the one where you can connect the dots between what you solve, their incentives, and a better outcome for a patient.
What pressure does to passion
Pressure runs both ways, and the direction tells you something about the team.
Mike has watched down weeks turn into down days, and for a startup it can be 24 hours in either direction. In those moments, some leaders constrain themselves. The pressure pushes them to double down on the very strategy that created the pressure. Others react with curiosity. That, Mike says, is where you see the spark of the potential to be very successful. Pressure can make diamonds. It can also exacerbate an unfortunate situation, and the most persistent pressure in an early company is runway.
I asked whether passion and curiosity can be grown in someone who has the subject matter expertise. Mike's answer was yes, but not on the timelines an early-stage company runs on. People join companies all the time and become passionate about the mission. A young company pivots on a timeline too short to wait for that.
Movement creates data
Roger Federer told a graduate class he won around 54 percent of the points he played and roughly 86 or 87 percent of his matches. The margin on any single point is thin. What he could do was stay present, and refuse to let the point just played decide the next one.
You cannot be curious if you are not present. And you usually do not know which direction is right. The important thing is to move, because moving is data. Mike agreed, and corrected the phrasing in a way worth keeping: it's not the right direction, it's a direction. His team would rather someone make a call and come back saying they were wrong, with a measurable way to decide true or false, than get stymied building a perfect answer.
So the ingredient list grew to three. Passion, curiosity, and urgency. Call the third one momentum if you like.
Don't be the single point of passion
I asked Mike what a leader can do to find passion, protect it, or get out of its way. Two answers.
Bring in team members who carry passion for the parts outside the CEO's own lived experience. Healthworx has clinical organizations where the founder is not a doctor or a nurse. A head of nursing, a medical director, someone who is actually in the frontline weeds of care delivery. That keeps the leader from becoming the single point of passion while everybody else is there to operate and execute.
Then look outward. Teams get so focused on what they are working on that they forget to pick their head up. A good board and a good advisory group mitigate the heads-down risk and keep the bigger picture in view. The code ships this week because a patient is waiting on it.
Running this in your own business this week
For an owner twenty years in, this is not really a startup hiring problem. You have professional management, reliable systems, a strategy that has proven itself. Those are the things that let the company keep growing even when it no longer runs through you. And the conviction that made it possible in the first place can get hard to find underneath years of accumulated process.
Five things from the conversation, each small enough to start now.
1. Run a reverse pitch in your next leadership interview. Describe a real problem your business faces. Expose some of your own thinking. Then hand over the reins and ask what they see as the opportunity and how they would build it themselves. Listen for personal conviction and for thoughtful disagreement. A laundry list of questions tells you about compliance. This tells you about what they would do on their own.
2. Put one untouched assumption on the table. Find the strategic assumption your organization stopped questioning years ago. Invite someone with direct experience of the problem, closer to it than you are, to challenge it before your next planning meeting. Michelle and Aaron both reshaped a thesis that looked reasonable on paper.
3. Re-examine your best customer opportunities. For each one: what is the specific problem, who actually pays, who can make the buying decision, and what makes acting now necessary. Interest is not urgency.
4. Change the weekly leadership meeting. What assumption do we challenge, what can we change now, and how do we know next week that we moved at all? What can we expect to see in a week, and can it be measured? Most teams never start there.
5. Find where execution is strong and connection is weak. Somewhere in your business, the work gets done well by people who have no real contact with the person it serves. Bring in someone closer to those people and give them a real voice in shaping the solution.
And the question worth carrying out of this one: where have you become more committed to the solution than to the problem you originally wanted to solve?
The Napkin Moment
If Mike Batista had to reduce his years of company-building experience to a single paper napkin, the message would read exactly as he wrote it: "You can't engineer PASSION!"
The statement is not an argument against planning, engineering, or disciplined execution. Mike's work demonstrates the value of all three. It is a reminder that the human commitment behind a business cannot be reproduced simply by constructing the right organizational chart or following the right methodology.
Leaders can create conditions that encourage passion. They can recognize it in others, give it room to influence decisions, and protect it by surrounding committed people with capable teams.
They cannot manufacture the personal conviction that makes someone care deeply about a problem.
That commitment has to come from somewhere real.
What Happens When Success Outgrows the Original Passion?
For an entrepreneur who has spent ten or twenty years building a company, Mike's insight extends well beyond the challenge of finding a startup founder.
The business may now have professional management, reliable systems, and a strategy that has proven itself repeatedly. Those achievements matter. They are often what allows an organization to continue growing without depending entirely on the person who founded it.
Yet the qualities that made the company possible in the first place can become difficult to recognize beneath years of accumulated processes and expectations.
Mike's conversation invites experienced leaders to reconsider what they are optimizing for. Perhaps the next chapter requires more than improving the business they already know how to run. Perhaps it requires rediscovering a problem they care enough about to approach with fresh curiosity.
And perhaps the person best positioned to lead that next chapter is someone whose conviction challenges the assumptions that made the previous one successful.
The question is worth carrying forward:
What problem would you still feel compelled to solve, even if nobody gave you the company, the capital, or the title to solve it?
Related Insights
If the systems are running well and the connection to the original problem has gone quiet, the Growth Pattern Diagnostic is a structured way to see what your business is actually optimizing for. The Growth Pattern Diagnostic
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