“How I Screwed Up Hiring” - Tara Viswanathan, Rupa Health
Tara Viswanathan is the co-founder and former CEO of Rupa Health. Find out what she learned about hiring the right people at the right time as her company scaled.
Calibrating for greatness: The hiring framework that transformed Rupa Health
Tara Viswanathan was the co-founder and former CEO of Rupa Health, a lab services platform that brought together specialty and advanced labs in one place, allowing doctors to order tests for their patients and consolidate all of the data in a single dashboard. Over the course of 4.5 years, she grew Rupa to $80M+ in annual sales before selling the company in a nine-figure deal in 2024. Prior to the exit, Rupa and its broader educational platform supported half a million patients and practitioners every month.
But the road to getting there wasn't completely smooth. Soon after launching Rupa, Tara hit a snag — one that first-time founders will understand all too well. She realized that she never built a team from zero to one before. How was she supposed to know what a great Head of Operations looks like when she had never hired one before, let alone worked as one?
In this episode, Tara reveals how she screwed up hiring by ignoring her gut intuition in favor of “nice resumes” and traditional hiring advice.
What began as confidence in her ability to spot talent transformed into a painful lesson when several impressive on-paper hires proved wrong for Rupa’s stage.
“I actually believe that we left growth on the table because of hires we made and the mistakes we had to clean up after they left, and it was entirely a result of my not calibrating to what great looks like.”
Tara Viswanathan (Rupa Health)
Co-Founder at Rupa Health
This wake-up call inspired Tara to develop a rigorous hiring framework that she calls "calibrating for greatness" — a system that would ultimately accelerate Rupa's hiring while dramatically improving candidate quality.
In this episode, Tara unpacks...
How to train your hiring intuition. Instead of abandoning gut feelings, Tara explains how she systematically calibrated them through 30+ conversations with experts until she could finish their sentences. “You know when to stop talking to people when you’re not learning anything new from the next conversation,” she says.
Why evaluating "hard-to-change" vs. "easy-to-change" competencies is crucial. Not all skills are created equal. Tara shares her color-coded framework for quickly disqualifying candidates who lack critical traits that can't be easily developed. "If detail orientation is rated five out of five in importance, and it's hard to change, a candidate who's a three gets disqualified — regardless of other strengths," she says.
The power of detailed role one-pagers. Documenting exactly what success and failure look like serves two purposes — aligning your team and selling candidates on the role. "When candidates can see what they're responsible for in a very crisp and clean way, they feel more bought in to the process," she says.
Tara also explains her controversial approach to interviewing that starts with childhood questions, why she believes "decisions made on data alone are not great for founders," and how speed is the core advantage that comes from properly trained intuition.
Whether you're a first-time founder making your first hire or an experienced operator scaling a team, this episode will fundamentally change how you think about recruiting. You'll leave with a clearer sense of why understanding a candidate's life trajectory tells you far more than their pedigree ever could.
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