Hi! I'm Danielle, and I was the first hire and founding engineer at Baba. I'm coming up on a year here at Baba, so I'm taking some time to look back on why I made the jump, and what I've learned since.

I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and studied computer science, economics, and data science at MIT, though some of the most important things I took from there happened on the swim and dive team and the fifth floor of Baker House, where I lived a few doors down from my teammate Connor, now Baba's CEO. I interned at Stripe a couple of times in college, spent a gap year doing machine learning at Butterfly Network, and after graduating went back to Stripe as a product engineer in New York for three years before leaving for Baba.

The internship that set the bar

It was my gap year with Butterfly where I entered the health-tech startup world for the first time, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'd turned down an offer from Meta to go there, so it was also my first real experience with "risk-taking".

Butterfly had built the world's first handheld, whole-body point-of-care ultrasound. While I was there, we shipped a number of FDA-cleared AI imaging tools that helped providers assess anatomical conditions faster and with more confidence. There were three things that made it one of the most exciting experiences of my career up to that point, and they became the lens I've used to evaluate every job since:

1. Impact. Simply put, the work mattered and I could see it. The whole point was getting imaging to people who'd never have access to it, and it applied to providers and patients alike.

2. Speed and responsibility. I was an intern, but I was leading the expansion of Butterfly's annotation cloud, the platform we used to annotate millions of de-identified ultrasound cines for model training and validation. I owned everything from platform security to inference tooling. I didn't absolutely love every single thing that I worked on, but I didn't have to. What I loved was that I got to try all of it, and that I was trusted to drive it.

3. Talent concentration. The team was stacked, but what resonated with me wasn't the credentials so much as the drive. Yes, there were PhDs from Columbia, Stanford, and MIT; one guy even went to Juilliard for piano before picking up a physics PhD at Harvard and moving into deep learning! What stuck with me was where people went. I watched my own intern manager go from research scientist to team lead in my year there. He now leads ML infrastructure for Tesla's Robotaxi and Optimus. Many of my teammates went on to become CTOs and founders. Being around that kind of ambition raised my own bar.

Although the team was extraordinary, the business itself was a little shakier. It seemed like the talent and the technology were never the problem; the direction and leadership were. Watching a building full of exceptional people get held back by that taught me something I hadn't really clocked before: how much a startup rides on the people steering it, not just the idea or the market. When the path forward with Butterfly got uncertain, I went back to Stripe, a stable home base while I figured out what I actually wanted.

Stripe was great. It just wasn't those three things.

I had an amazing time at Stripe. A lot of the smartest people I know and some of my closest friends came from there. But on those same three things, it just couldn't compete. The impact felt abstract; it's hard to compare building out fintech SaaS features to making sure someone's grandpa has heat on at home. The pace was slower, the way big companies inevitably are. There were a few too many projects that were more about documenting than building, when I just wanted to ship. And the talent, while famously world-class, felt less concentrated the more I took on; larger companies will always have people who are just there to coast. There's some line about being the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I don't know how true it is, but it seems pretty sensible to me and I'd rather not risk it!

Why I considered Baba

First, what Baba actually is: a health tech platform for seniors, building toward an all-in-one home for caring for an aging population. We're starting with advocacy — real people who help seniors navigate a healthcare system that clearly wasn't built for them — and pulling more under one roof from there, much of it covered by insurance. The product itself is overtly human-to-human. We're not wrapping a model in a nice UI and calling it a product; the tech backs real people doing real care.

When I thought about joining Baba, I knew impact and speed were guaranteed. That's the nature of the area we work in, and the consequence of joining a team of one. Talent was the one I'd get to shape myself, by being early enough to influence who we hire.

The deeper reason was leadership, which was the exact thing I'd watched go wrong before. Baba felt like the opposite, starting with Connor, who's low-ego in a way that actually shows up: he listens to the team instead of just steering it. Our team is small and picks every hire with diligence. A deliberate, high-bar team isn't a nice-to-have at this stage; from what I've seen, it's one of the biggest things separating the startups that make it from the ones that don't.

None of that made it an easy decision. I was still anxious, but the reasons to go were clear.

Almost a year in

This time, all three are here.

1. Impact. It doesn't get more direct than B2C healthcare. Our users frequently direct message us to say thank you, and one even told us the tale of how their Baba advocate saved their family’s Christmas!

2. Speed and responsibility. You touch way more than you'd expect, and it turns out pretty much anything is learnable when you have the motivation. At this stage, being fast basically is the strategy, so there's never a dull day.

3. Talent. It's a rare mix: healthcare experts who actually know this industry, ex-founders compounding the team’s resilience and resourcefulness, and engineers who’ve weathered through scaling software before. And we build a lot: products that free our providers to focus on patients instead of typing through every visit, internal tools that equip a small team to operate like a much bigger one, and a deliberately simple experience for seniors so all they need to do is tell us what they need. We take engineering as seriously as the care.

I won't pretend I made some calm, calculated decision when I joined Baba. I was anxious and I felt like I was betting everything, but I kind of just closed my eyes and went for it.

A year of hindsight has made me a lot less precious about it. Leaving a big job feels risky, but staying put isn't actually as safe as you think either, especially right now with AI reshaping everything around us. Layoffs don't care about how comfortable you'd gotten! And the startup risks you're scared of are usually smaller than they feel. If you've built real skills and a track record, the odds are a lot better than the anxiety suggests. The upside — being early, owning real work, building something that matters — is the rare part. I'm glad I made the call instead of letting one get made for me.

It's still early and we've got a long way to go, but the foundation feels right.

It's tempting right now to mistake speed for progress: to ship fast, pile up shortcuts, and watch the whole thing buckle under its own weight a year later. That's not us. The speed rests on deep expertise. On the clinical side, people like our head of clinical operations, who was executive director of care transitions at Mount Sinai and spent years making sure patients didn't slip through the cracks between hospital and home. On the engineering side, one of the most sophisticated AI-native stacks I've worked on, built by a team that cares just as much about doing it right: the compliance, the safeguards, the careful work that's tedious to get right and costly to skip. In healthcare, trust is everything, and we'd rather build it properly than cut corners for speed.

The demand is real. Our seniors refer their own friends and family, and when people trust you with their loved ones, that says a lot. There's an actual business underneath it, with plenty more who want in, too, waiting on us as more of what we offer gets covered.

I'm excited for what's next, and for whoever decides to take the leap and build it with us.