Raphael Nadel and the company that outgrew a one-person job

When Raphael Nadel described the company he was leaving, he began with its smallest possible headcount: himself. There was a smiling emoji beside that recollection. By the time of his farewell, HHAeXchange had more than 300 staff, he wrote, and offices in India, Ireland, Miami, and New York. Somewhere between those two versions of the business, the founder’s job had changed several times.

There is an appealing neatness to a founder story told backward from an exit. The beginning becomes inevitable; every appointment appears to have been a step toward the ending. Nadel’s career is more interesting when the stages keep their separate identities. He built software around a customer’s problem. He added executives. He stopped being CEO while remaining inside the company. Later, he left. Then he appeared in another company’s story.

Those are different decisions, with different consequences. They also make a better account of entrepreneurship than a photograph of one person beside a very large number. A growing business eventually needs enough people to make the founder’s original one-person arrangement look rather impractical. Success can be hard on a job description.

A request with work attached

The origin has four useful words: “make us work better.” Greg Strobel used that phrase when recalling the request behind Nadel’s start in 2007. The customer was Revival, a New York agency that needed better coordination with its contracted agencies. The company’s current history dates HHAeXchange’s founding to 2008. The initial request and the corporate founding belong to adjacent chapters.

It is an unusually serviceable beginning for a software business. Somebody already had work, partners, and a coordination problem. Nadel’s opportunity was to build a system around those relationships. The payer management product came first in Strobel’s account, followed by the agency management product. One operational problem opened onto work on both sides of a business relationship.

The appeal of that kind of software is easy to underestimate. A product can earn its place by making an existing organization less cumbersome to run. Scheduling, billing, payroll, and communication are ordinary words. Put them in separate systems and they can keep quite a few people occupied. Put them into a connected workflow and the value becomes easier to explain to the person responsible for getting the work done.

Adding names to the org chart

By April 2014, the story included outside capital. McCarthy Capital Fund V led a recapitalization intended to accelerate expansion. Nadel spoke about time spent getting to know the investment firm and called out an “excellent cultural fit.” He was discussing a partnership that would sit inside the business, with consequences beyond the transfer of money.

That November, HHAeXchange appointed Strobel president and Kim Mills chief operating officer. Both reported to Nadel, then CEO. Strobel brought experience in sales and operations, including leadership at MedAssets. Mills brought experience managing technology organizations, developing strategy, and working across different ownership structures. Their appointments gave the growing company more than an extra pair of impressive biographies.

Consider what changes when a president and a COO enter an organization. Decisions acquire new owners. Product development, market expansion, and day-to-day operations no longer have to be discussed as though they were one indivisible task. The org chart starts to describe a division of labor. For a founder, that can change the substance of the job even before the title changes.

Nadel’s comments at the time concentrated on the experience the two executives would bring. There is a practical lesson in that emphasis, though it need not become a universal rule. A business that is expanding has work it has never had to do at that scale before. Hiring someone who has already encountered some of it is a fairly sensible use of a growing payroll.

Growth, measured carefully

Recognition followed. HHAeXchange ranked No. 1678 on the 2015 Inc. 5000. In 2016, it appeared again, at No. 2467, with reported three-year sales growth of 145 percent. The two appearances landed during Nadel’s tenure as CEO. They put a public marker beside a business whose appeal lay largely in the daily operations of other organizations.

The 2016 account also described more than $3 billion in services billed annually through the company’s system. That measures a different thing from the software company’s own sales. Keeping those categories separate matters. A platform’s transaction volume tells you something about the activity it supports; sales growth tells you something about the business selling the platform. Neither number belongs on a founder’s personal bank statement.

There is a temptation to make every number in a founder profile point in the same upward direction. These figures work better as a snapshot. The company was attracting recognition for expansion while supporting a substantial flow of business activity. They help explain why an organization would need more experienced leaders and a clearer allocation of responsibilities. Growth brings arithmetic. It also brings meetings.

The founder takes a different job

On July 20, 2017, HHAeXchange announced that Strobel had become president and CEO. Nadel moved to Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer. The business was making an explicit distinction between leading its operations and concentrating on enterprise software and strategic direction. The founder remained part of the company, with a different remit.

This is a useful moment to pause over. Founding a company describes an event that remains true. Being its CEO describes a job that somebody has to do now. The two titles can travel together for years and then separate. In Nadel’s case, Strobel had already spent three years as president before taking the chief executive role. The successor knew the organization from inside it.

The next ownership chapter arrived in January 2019, when Cressey & Company completed an investment in HHAeXchange. Strobel remained CEO. Andy Hurd, an operating partner at Cressey, became chairman. The investment announcement emphasized continued expansion and the platform’s connection between organizations. For the business, the announcement described continuity alongside a new financial partner.

Nadel’s own announcement described a departure. He said he would exit alongside some other investors, take a break, and move on to another venture. The company and the founder could now have different next chapters. An organization capable of continuing after its founder leaves is a consequential thing to have built.

“Many of them became friends.”

Raphael Nadel, reflecting on his HHAeXchange colleagues

His farewell made room for colleagues who had worked alongside him for more than a decade. Friendship entered the account beside the offices and staff numbers. That small detail gives the departure a human scale. The person leaving a company has also spent years working with particular people. A transaction can put a date on the end of that arrangement; the relationships do not fit so tidily into a closing announcement.

Another venture, another set of colleagues

Nadel’s professional background also has an international dimension. He lists Bar-Ilan University attendance from 1995 to 1998 and French, Hebrew, and English at native or bilingual proficiency. The Bronx is his listed base on LinkedIn. Those details place a little more of the person around the executive titles, without turning a university entry or a language list into an explanation for every decision he later made.

EmmaCare appears in Nadel’s subsequent career. CareDev describes itself as EmmaCare’s software development arm and lists Nadel as CEO and founder, alongside COO Andrii Kamchatnyi. Its recruiting language stresses in-house development, a fast feedback cycle, and the ability to influence a product. These are familiar concerns for people joining a young software organization: what will I build, who will decide, and how quickly will I learn whether it works?

Other public roles broaden the picture. RemoteFocus lists him as founder and CEO. TIGA VP lists him as a venture partner and mentor, identifying him with EmmaCare. The latter adds the work of helping other builders to the work of running a business. Experience accumulated inside one organization can become something to discuss with a person starting another.

There is a useful conversation to be had between those roles. An operating executive has immediate decisions to make. A mentor can help another founder examine a decision before it hardens into habit. Neither role makes experience automatically transferable: a new company has its own customers, timing, and constraints. But a career that includes bringing in leaders and eventually handing over responsibility supplies concrete episodes to discuss. The value is in the questions those episodes make possible.

The connecting thread is a sequence of working relationships: the customer with a request, the investment partner, the executives who joined, the colleagues who stayed, the teams that followed. Nadel began his HHAeXchange farewell with a company of one. The career that emerged from it contains many more people. The headcount changed; so did the work available to its founder.