I didn't set out to be a founder.

I started as a registered nurse, drawn into the profession by caring for my grandmother and witnessing — up close — how broken the transition from hospital to home really is. Patients discharged with binders of instructions, no one to call, families left to guess. That experience never left me.

In 2020, while at Arizona State University's Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, I co-founded Navi Nurses — a concierge nursing platform that puts a real, expert RN at a patient's side wherever they are. It started with a single client. It grew into a company the press has called the “Uber for Nurses.”

Today, Navi Nurses has delivered 120,000+ hours of care to 900+ clients across 25+ specialties, with a network of 130+ registered nurses. We crossed $7M in revenue, built an Inc. 5000 company, and I was named personally to the Inc. 500 Female Founder list. I was also named Phoenix Business Journal's Female Founder of the Year at the 2024 AZ Inno Fire Awards.

And here's the part most founder stories skip: I did not build this alone. I had a co-founder, a board, mentors, advisors, a brilliant operating team, lawyers, fractional finance help, and a community of other founders who'd already walked the road. Every milestone has someone else's fingerprints on it. The single most important decision I made as a clinician founder was learning when to stop DIY-ing and start investing in the help I needed to grow.

I've told this story on the mainstage of the Flinn Foundation's Bioscience Storytellers, on Business Insider, FOX 10, AZ PBS, Johnson & Johnson's platforms, and on podcasts like Creating a New Healthcare. None of it was the plan. All of it started with one nurse noticing one problem — and slowly building the team to solve it.

Today I split my time between leading Navi Nurses and teaching the next generation of clinician founders — nurses, physicians, PTs, allied health — the exact playbook I had to build from scratch. Validate. Build. Scale. Land the press. Raise the round. Hire the team. Own the room.

The future of healthcare will be built by the people who work in it. My job is to make sure they have the framework, the team, and the courage to lead that change.