The HealthSparks Lesson That Shaped Uptiv Health: Why Torben Nielsen Obsesses Over Culture Math

The HealthSparks Lesson That Shaped Uptiv Health: Why Torben Nielsen Obsesses Over Culture Math

Culture doesn’t erode because you hire bad people. It erodes because of math. After losing it once at HealthSparks, here’s how Torben Nielsen prevents culture dilution at Uptiv Health.

Every founder in hypergrowth faces the same realization: the company that felt like a tight-knit team at 20 people suddenly feels like a corporation at 100. The values feel hollow. New hires don’t seem to “get it.” The early magic is gone. Most founders blame this on hiring mistakes or growing too fast. Torben Nielsen learned the real culprit is mathematics.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Torben Nielsen, CEO and Co-Founder of Uptiv Health, shared the most painful lesson from scaling HealthSparks from 11 people to over 100 as the second fastest growing digital healthcare company in 2016. The company landed at number 196 on the Inc. 5000 list. Growth was intoxicating. But culture became a casualty, and not for the reasons most founders expect.

The Math That Nobody Talks About

When you have 20 people and hire 30 more, you haven’t just grown 150%. You’ve diluted your cultural carriers by 60%. More than half your company now consists of people who weren’t there when the core values, ways of working, and philosophical foundations were established through lived experience.

“When you start with 11 or even 20, right? As we started hiring early on, you still had a really good sense of what is the culture, what is true north, you know, where do we want to go?” Torben explained. “But as you start quickly getting from 20 to 50 to 70 to 100, all of a sudden that base of core people that know the culture of why you do certain things is getting smaller.”

This isn’t about bad hires. It’s about the mathematical reality that culture gets transmitted through osmosis, observation, and repeated exposure to how decisions get made. When the ratio of people who absorbed the culture through immersion to people who arrived after that culture was established tips past a certain point, osmosis stops working.

At HealthSparks, this happened fast. The company was on fire, scaling a price transparency platform that had been spun out from Cambia Health Solutions in 2012. Health plans across the nation wanted the software. Revenue was growing. Hiring was urgent. And with each wave of new employees, the percentage of people who understood the “why” behind decisions got smaller.

Why Values Statements Don’t Save You

Most companies try to solve culture dilution with values statements, handbooks, and onboarding programs. These help, but they’re not sufficient. Values statements tell you what to think, not how to think. They give you the conclusions without the reasoning.

When someone who lived through the early days makes a decision, they’re drawing on dozens of conversations, debates, and experiences that shaped the company’s philosophy. They know not just that “customer obsession” is a value, but specifically how that manifests in product prioritization, pricing discussions, and support escalations.

New hires get the value statement. They don’t get the hundreds of hours of context that make the value actionable. And when 60% of your company consists of people without that context, decisions start drifting. People follow processes without understanding why the processes exist. The soul of the company becomes harder to locate.

“Managing that growth, I think was one of the key learnings I had,” Torben reflected. The key learning wasn’t about processes or structure. It was about communication.

Over-Communication as Survival Strategy

The solution Torben discovered wasn’t slowing down hiring or creating better values statements. It was fundamentally changing how leadership communicates—shifting from assuming culture will transmit itself to actively, almost obsessively, articulating it.

“Over communicating and making sure that everybody is with you as you hire new people and they understand, you know, what true north is and why you do certain things. What your philosophy is, I think was a major learning for me,” he noted.

Over-communication doesn’t mean more all-hands meetings or longer Slack messages. It means constantly reinforcing the philosophical foundation behind every decision. When you eliminate the reception counter at Uptiv Health, you don’t just announce the operational change. You explain the philosophy: “We feel there are enough barriers in healthcare, we don’t need to create yet another one between us and the patient.”

When you put consent forms in the patient app instead of on clipboards, you don’t just train people on the new process. You explain why barriers matter and how this decision connects to the core belief that healthcare creates too much friction.

When you centralize phone operations so no phones ring in the centers, you don’t just implement the system. You articulate how this protects the patient experience and connects to the broader philosophy about where administrative work should and shouldn’t happen.

The Uptiv Health Application

At Uptiv Health, Torben is applying this lesson from day one. The company is building retail-based infusion centers that move treatments out of hospitals into strip mall locations next to Starbucks. But the operational model is designed around a clear philosophy that everyone needs to understand viscerally, not just intellectually.

The no-reception-counter decision is the most visible manifestation. “We feel there are enough barriers in healthcare, we don’t need to create yet another one between us and the patient,” Torben explained. “So we’ve instructed all our nurses. They have a very choreographed playbook where they greet you at the front door.”

This isn’t aesthetics. It’s philosophy made operational. And every nurse needs to understand not just what to do (greet at the door) but why it matters (eliminating barriers is our core principle). When new nurses join, they need that context, not just the choreography.

The same applies to how the patient app works, why preferences get collected before arrival, why suites are personalized, why phones don’t ring in centers. Each decision flows from philosophical clarity about eliminating barriers. But that clarity only scales if leadership over-communicates it relentlessly.

The Compounding Effect

What makes over-communication powerful is how it compounds. When everyone understands the philosophy behind decisions, they can make new decisions that align with that philosophy without needing constant guidance. They become cultural carriers themselves.

At Uptiv, this shows up in the results. Patient NPS of 99. Referring provider NPS of 87. Over 150 unique providers referring patients in 12 months. The first center cash flow positive in just over a year. These outcomes don’t happen unless the entire team understands and executes on a coherent philosophy.

“At full scale, when we are at steady state for any one of our centers, those centers will return about, you know, anywhere from a mil to a mil and a half in positive cash flow,” Torben shared. That unit economics story requires operational excellence. Operational excellence requires everyone making aligned decisions. Aligned decisions require shared philosophical understanding.

The Framework for Other Founders

The HealthSparks lesson gives founders a framework for thinking about culture in hypergrowth:

First, recognize that culture dilution is mathematical, not personal. When you double headcount, you’ve diluted your cultural carriers by 50%. This happens whether you hire great people or not.

Second, understand that osmosis stops working past a certain dilution ratio. You can’t rely on new hires absorbing culture through proximity once the percentage of people who lived through the formative experiences drops below a threshold.

Third, shift from implicit to explicit culture transmission. The founders and early team absorbed culture through shared experiences. Later hires need it actively communicated—repeatedly and from multiple angles.

Fourth, focus on philosophy, not values. Values statements tell people what to think. Philosophy explains how to think. “Eliminate barriers” as a philosophy is more actionable than “patient-centric” as a value because it gives people a lens for evaluating decisions.

Fifth, make over-communication a leadership discipline. This isn’t something you do once during onboarding. It’s something you do in every meeting, every decision explanation, every piece of internal communication. The goal is making the why behind decisions as clear as the what.

The Three-to-Five Year Test

Looking ahead, Uptiv aims to reach 50 to 60 clinics in three to five years. “I would love to have optiv with, you know, 50 or 60 clinics across the nation and really prove out that hybrid model of in person care and virtual care creates better outcomes for the patient and will decrease costs in the system,” Torben shared.

Scaling to that size will require hiring potentially hundreds of people. The culture math gets brutal at that scale. But with the HealthSparks lesson internalized, Torben has a playbook: over-communicate the philosophy relentlessly, make every decision an opportunity to reinforce the why, and never assume culture will transmit itself.

The lesson from HealthSparks isn’t that hypergrowth kills culture. It’s that hypergrowth reveals whether you’re actively building culture or passively hoping it sustains itself. Mathematics determines the dilution rate. Leadership communication determines whether the culture survives it.

For founders entering or already in hypergrowth, the question isn’t whether you’ll face culture dilution. The math guarantees you will. The question is whether you’ll recognize it as a mathematical problem requiring a communication solution, or whether you’ll treat it as a hiring problem that can’t actually be solved through better hiring.

Torben learned this the hard way once. At Uptiv Health, he’s making sure it doesn’t happen again.