At Thatch, Brilliant Jerks Don’t Make the Cut
"We interview candidates who are clearly very good at what they do, but maybe less pleasant to work with," Adam Stevenson says, leaning into one of the hardest trade-offs his company makes. "Some companies just say, 'We want the very best people and yeah, sometimes they're going to be prickly or difficult to work with.' We're not."
Adam Stevenson is the co-founder of Thatch, a platform that's flipping healthcare benefits on its head. Instead of employers picking one-size-fits-all insurance plans, Thatch lets companies give employees tax-free money to choose their own coverage. In just over a year, they've signed up around 1,000 companies and attracted talent from Stripe, Shopify, and Ramp.
But Stevenson's hiring philosophy breaks startup orthodoxy. Most founders obsess over technical excellence above all else. Stevenson has built his company around a controversial premise: the very best people are also nice people.
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The Cancer Patients Who Changed Everything
Stevenson didn't set out to fix healthcare benefits. He and his co-founder originally wanted to help cancer patients find clinical trials—a deeply personal mission after both had lost parents to the disease.
Then they talked to actual patients.
One hundred percent of the patients that we talked to told us the biggest problem for them was actually paying for healthcare. It was the experience of dealing with insurance companies, claims that were denied, bills that came up.
The feedback stung. They'd poured emotional energy into solving what they thought was the problem. But customers kept pointing them toward something else entirely: the nightmare of paying for care.
So they pivoted. Hard.
They discovered a 2019 law that introduced Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements—a mechanism that lets employers give employees tax-free money to buy their own insurance instead of forcing everyone into the same group plan.
When we learned instead, you could just give your team money and they can pick the insurance plan that their doctor takes, it just seemed like a no-brainer.
The regulatory work was brutal. They needed to become licensed health insurance brokers in all 50 states, build banking partnerships, get certified as third-party administrators. Months of infrastructure before they could ship a single feature.
But Stevenson had conviction. He built a working prototype and took it to companies. "Universally people said, 'I'll switch today. I'll do that.'"
Why Nice Matters More Than Smart
Here's where Stevenson's approach gets interesting. Most startups at this stage would hire anyone who could execute. Thatch turned down technically excellent candidates who failed the culture screen.
"We've had great candidates that we've decided they're probably not a fit for the culture that we're building."
It's a trade-off Stevenson acknowledges openly. Some companies will hire brilliant jerks and build systems to manage the interpersonal damage. Thatch won't.
"I'm a big believer that the very, very best people are also pretty much universally nice people," he argues.
The philosophy extends beyond individual hires. Stevenson and his co-founder were writing down operating principles before they had employees. Their values: resourcefulness and bias for action, velocity, and care.
Care isn't typically a startup value. Most companies talk about excellence, innovation, disruption. Stevenson talks about people who "really care very deeply about each other and care about the mission that they're solving."
Early employees came from his network—people who knew his reputation and trusted his vision. But as Thatch scaled, they faced the classic dilemma: maintain quality or move fast.
They chose both, with conditions.
The Agency Experiment
This morning, Stevenson asked his team what they appreciated most about working at Thatch. The most common answer: autonomy and agency.
For employees coming from big companies, the contrast is stark. Instead of owning "a little box on the homepage," they own entire product lines. Instead of navigating committee decisions, they get problems, resources and creative latitude.
If you're great at what you do, you like the idea of being given this huge juicy problem and then given the resources and the creative latitude to go execute on it.
The approach requires trust. High trust:
"We have an idea, we bring one of our really smart employees into the fold, say, 'Hey, this is the thing that we think could be really exciting. Go figure it out.'"
Healthcare complicates the typical startup MVP approach. You can't ship broken insurance enrollment systems. So they build light prototypes for internal validation, then robust products for real users.
Ideas come from customers. All of them. Employers, HR teams, employees using the platform, insurance carriers, payroll partners. The feedback loop is constant.
We pretty quickly try and think about what's the most interesting version of this that we could build. We go about building something as quickly as we can to try and show value and prove out that idea.
They're currently hiring a dedicated team around infrastructure for insurance carriers—a direct result of customer conversations that revealed new opportunities.
The Best Job You've Ever Had
Stevenson has an explicit goal that might seem distracting: "We want every employee at Thatch to be able to say, this is the best job I've ever had. This is the best place that I've ever worked."
It's ambitious beyond competitive salaries or interesting problems. It's about creating conditions where talent compounds.
"When you do that, you become a talent magnet...The single most important thing that we do is hire really exceptional people. And you do that by building a really great place for them to work."
The logic is recursive. Exceptional people want to work with other exceptional people. Create an environment where both technical excellence and interpersonal skills matter, and you get what Stevenson calls "talent density" that's unusual for their stage.
But there's a deeper mission underneath the workplace optimization.
Healthcare in the U.S. is deeply broken. I see my life mission as trying to drag all the smart people I can into healthcare to try and fix it.
For employees, this represents something more than career advancement. It's a chance to apply skills learned at technology companies to a domain that's "seen very little innovation and badly needs help."
The combination—mission-driven work, exceptional colleagues, genuine autonomy—creates what Stevenson believes is a compelling proposition. Not just for candidates looking for their next role, but for anyone wanting to build something that matters while working with people they actually like.
"It's an opportunity to come work on a mission that really matters," Stevenson concludes. "Work with great people and take what you learned at Stripe or Shopify or whatever and apply it to a domain that badly needs help."
Final Tips for Founders, Recruiters, and Job Seekers
Founders — Write down your operating principles before making your first hire, then actually use them as filters in interviews—even if it means turning down technically brilliant candidates who don't fit your culture.
Recruiters — Screen for "relentless resourcefulness" by asking candidates about times they solved problems with limited resources or unclear direction, as this trait predicts success in fast-moving environments.
Job Seekers — Ask specifically about autonomy and ownership in the role—companies that give employees genuine agency over meaningful problems typically provide the most career growth and job satisfaction.