At 6:30 in the evening, Anas Nader put his phone away. For the next two hours, his daughter had his attention. Messages could wait. If work still needed doing after bedtime, he could return to it then. This was the routine he described in January 2024, after becoming a father, and more than seven years after co-founding Patchwork Health.
It is an unusually domestic detail for a founder’s account of running a software company. There is no funding announcement in it, no new office, no triumphant chart. Just a phone temporarily relieved of its duties. Yet it gets close to the question that has occupied much of Nader’s working life: how much say should a person have over the hours they give to a job?
His company makes workforce software. His own career has crossed visual communication, medicine, consulting and entrepreneurship. Along the way, he has had to learn when to insist, when to listen, and when to let someone else take charge. The phone is a small example of a larger habit: examining a working arrangement that seems inevitable, then asking whether it needs to be.
Before the rota, there was the drawing board
Nader’s route into business began well before Patchwork. At the University of Toronto, he studied physiology, then completed a master’s in biomedical communications. His early professional profile lists illustration and animation as his concentration. Among his interests were web development and data visualisation. He was already moving between subjects that do not always share a classroom.
A communicator has a particular problem to solve: knowing something is only the beginning. Someone else has to understand it. A drawing, an animation or an interface succeeds through the person using it. That makes this earlier chapter a useful way to read Nader’s later career, though it would be too tidy to pretend every degree was a rehearsal for the company.
He subsequently worked as an independent consultant on digital transformation, and studied medicine at Imperial College London, graduating in 2014. The sequence matters. The founder described simply as a doctor had already spent years learning another craft. His professional life had room for both specialist knowledge and the work of making complicated things intelligible.
A friendship looking for a project
At Imperial, Nader met Jing Ouyang. Their courses overlapped for a year. They tried projects together, including Project Pal, which connected people with ideas to clinicians. After graduation, their jobs took them to different parts of England, but the friendship continued. The partnership preceded the business plan.
Patchwork was founded in 2016. Its early opportunity became concrete at Chelsea and Westminster, where Nader worked on improving temporary staffing. In his account of that period, recruiting more people into the organisation’s own staff bank reduced its reliance on outside agencies and saved £30,000 a month. That result suggested a question with a much larger address: could technology help other organisations do the same?
He and Ouyang were also members of the first intake of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs programme. They had a shared problem to investigate and an environment in which to investigate it. The company grew out of practical work already under way, with the untidy advantage that real users were close enough to object.
The people between the buttons
The first proposition was straightforward to describe. Managers could advertise available shifts. Workers could choose suitable hours and locations through an app. Credentials could move between participating organisations, reducing repeated administration. The machinery behind that apparent simplicity was rather less simple.
Nader has repeatedly emphasised the value of working closely with customers during implementation. Organisations have different workflows, requirements and existing systems. Software has to fit those arrangements sufficiently well for people to use it in the middle of a working day. A demonstration can end with applause; an implementation has to survive Monday morning.
There was also a practical question of what workers could see for themselves. Patchwork let them keep track of wages as well as choose shifts. For someone arranging work across locations, the administrative details belong to the experience just as much as the calendar does. Being able to select an hour is useful; understanding the paperwork that follows makes the choice more usable. Nader’s description of the product gave those apparently small details a place in the proposition.
His ambition for flexible working therefore depended on relationships as much as interfaces. In his early interviews, he stressed staying involved in rollout, customisation and troubleshooting. Selling the product created an obligation to help it settle in. This explains something about Patchwork’s character: the business needed people who could help an organisation change its habits alongside people who could write its code.
A cheque comes with a person attached
By August 2022, Patchwork had secured a £20 million Series B led by Perwyn, with backing from Praetura Ventures and KHP Ventures. Tom Blomfield and Dominic McGregor were among the angel investors named in the announcement. The money widened the circle around a business that had begun with two friends.
For Nader, learning to raise money also meant learning to assess the people offering it. In his writing about investor selection, he recalls being grateful for any early interest. Experience made him more inquisitive. A prospective board member would be present at consequential decisions, including uncomfortable ones. Getting along deserved examination before signatures.
He described meeting Praetura’s David Foreman for several coffees, with conversations extending beyond startups. His advice to founders includes speaking to other founders about investors and asking for concrete examples of support. The chemistry meeting belongs beside the financial checks. Capital may arrive as a number; the working relationship arrives as a human being.
Three people become a hundred
Growth brought a different organisational puzzle. In April 2024, Nader wrote about Patchwork’s expansion from three people to a hundred. Extra layers had begun to slow engineering. The company moved towards smaller squads that brought engineering, product and design colleagues together, while simplifying processes.
The irony is available without much assistance. A company working on other people’s working arrangements had to reconsider its own. Nader’s account is useful because it admits the structure had needed adjustment. Growth had produced new friction inside the business. Changing the chart was part of the job.
He continued joining sales calls and partnership reviews, while arguing that a founder should delegate without losing touch. There is a delicate distance to maintain: close enough to understand a problem, far enough away to let a colleague solve it. Being present in every decision can look conscientious right up to the point when everybody is waiting for you.
In another interview, he described weekly all-hands meetings, monthly town halls and an annual gathering called Patchweek, including a hackathon. He also spoke about time with his wife, daughter and friends, and bike rides. Ouyang remained someone he could spend time with without talking about work. A co-founder who can also change the subject is a valuable colleague.
The original customer is still in the picture
Patchwork’s acquisition of L2P, announced in November 2024, added job planning and appraisal software to the group. The combination extended the company’s reach across more parts of workforce administration. The announcement described a combined offering intended to serve over 100,000 professionals across more than 200 organisations.
That figure belongs to the combined offering at the time of the deal. It measures something different from the number of customers using any one product. Such distinctions matter in a growing software business, where a large number can be perfectly accurate and still answer the wrong question.
There is a more intimate measure of continuity. Chelsea and Westminster, where Nader’s early work took place, remained a customer. In a case study covering 2016 to spring 2025, Patchwork reported £15.05 million in avoided agency expenditure there. It also reported 98 per cent of shifts filled at base rate. These are the company’s reported operating results, tied to a particular organisation and period.
A decade of entrepreneurship is often told through departures: leaving a profession, leaving a small office, leaving an old product behind. Here, one of the revealing details is a relationship that continued. The place where the idea became practical was still helping to test its value.
Room for someone else to lead
Nader’s public advice returns to the limits of doing everything yourself. He urges entrepreneurs to recognise the point at which another person’s skills should take over. That advice has demanding consequences. A founder has to act on it while still feeling responsible for the result.
“Recognising where your talents end and another’s begin is an essential lesson for any entrepreneur.” - Anas Nader
His own example includes handing over a product function he had initially led. Parenthood also gave him a reason to protect particular hours and rely on other people’s expertise. The ambition remained; his arrangements for pursuing it changed. An evening boundary made room for a family. Delegation made room for colleagues.
In May 2026, he was still writing publicly about workforce systems, this time arguing that software should reflect the way different professional groups work together. It is a recognisable continuation of the same concern: tools and structures should accommodate the people using them.
There is something pleasingly unglamorous about the recurring objects in this story. A staff bank. A coffee with an investor. A team meeting. A phone put aside before bedtime. None requires a grand theory to understand. Each asks who gets heard, who makes a decision, and whose time is being used. Nader’s career has given those ordinary questions a company to work on them.