Scale Like a CEO

From Founder to CEO: Leading with Soul & Scaling a Health Tech Agency w/ Ricardo Velasquez

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 60

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What if a software company could scale and still feel deeply human? We sit down with Ricardo Velazquez, founder of Alternova, to unpack how a 90-person team navigated a pandemic pivot, built patient-first products in digital health, and held onto its principles when the market turned. Ricardo explains the journey from services-only growth to a smarter model: partnering with distribution-first operators to co-create products, combining deep compliance expertise with real go-to-market power.

We dig into the CEO shift from chief-everything to focused leadership. Ricardo shares how he delegates finance without losing rigor, invests time where it matters most—product and clients—and sets a high bar for leadership: transparent communication, respectful delivery, and a commitment to elevate the entire team. You’ll hear how Alternova hires and promotes quickly, why escalation is a non-negotiable habit, and how knowledge-sharing across backend, frontend, and product turns individual stars into durable teams.

The most powerful moments trace culture under pressure. Funding freezes and post-COVID corrections forced painful layoffs, and Ricardo walks through the playbook: radical transparency, tailored support, and severance that respects people’s lives. He also reveals a simple but profound way they rebuilt trust—a series of hand-written letters from leaders and peers that reconnected the company to its mission and set sights on a stronger year ahead. For founders, product leaders, and anyone building in digital health, this conversation offers a practical blueprint for scaling with soul: HIPAA-savvy software, patient-centered design, principled decision-making, and partnerships that compound impact.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s leading a team, and leave a quick review so more builders can find it.

Justin Reinert:

Welcome to the Scale Like a CEO podcast. In this episode, Justin speaks with Ricardo Velazquez about his software company, Alternova. Stay tuned as they discuss navigating business pivots and Ricardo's inspiring leadership philosophy regarding building a company with a soul. Ricardo, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a quick intro to you and your business.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, thank you, Justin, for having me. I am Ricardo Velasquez. I am a founder from Colombia. I live currently between the US and Colombia. I have a company that does software development specifically for the wellness and the health industry. And most of our business is here in the US, while most of our team is in Latin America. And one of the reasons why I moved here is because I'm trying to transition from being a mostly based in Latin America to also having a bigger team here in the US.

Justin Reinert:

Great. That's great. And tell me a little bit more about the company. What problem are you solving and why does that matter right now?

SPEAKER_00:

So we well, our company is one of those bats in which you start building your company by offering services, then you grow those services, and then you start producing your own products. So we started around 2019, and we were doing something completely different in a completely different industry. But then when COVID hit, the industry we were in was hit hard, and we decided to pivot to offering development services for digital health, which at the time was an amazing opportunity. And we've been doing that since then, but more recently we have started to create our own products. And so what we solve is we have a team of around 90 people, and we are a company that develops compliance software for health. And since most of our projects are in health, we have basically built all types of tools for patients. So we don't build that much technology for a hospital to run its operations, but we deal with patient experiences so they can kind of enjoy the use of actual stuff that helps them feel better.

Justin Reinert:

Great. That's so great. So tell me a little bit about as you've grown the company, what was one of the biggest shifts that you've had to make personally as you've navigated from being the founder to now a CEO of a company of 90 people well at the beginning, we were, of course, a very small company and stayed like that for uh one year.

SPEAKER_00:

Then we found the need to like since we were offering services, the only way in which you can basically grow is by hiring more people. So for several years, our headcount would grow non-stop. And since last year, I would say we decided to uh change to focus or shift the focus a little bit into hey, let's grow this thing to be massive in the service business. And instead, we're shifting towards, hey, we have an amazing team already that has been working with us for years. We know very well the intricacies of building software for health and wellness and how to make it compliant and how to host it compliant. And we're trying to partner with people that we call distribution partners. So people that have great ideas of products and they have amazing connections to distribute them and sell them. And we're bringing it's our experience on the technology side so that we can create those products together. So that shift between okay, small services company, then services company with more than 130 people, and then no, this is not so much the way we want to do things anymore. So let's reduce the software services and just keep our best clients and then move towards let's partner with people that we can build amazing businesses with and raise capital and so on and so forth. Um, that has been our character arc or my own character arc in the past few years.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah. And how has that impacted the way that you lead as a CEO then?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, in several ways. So as you grow, delegation becomes really important. I'm not entirely sure whether I am great at delegating or not. For a very long time, I was the chief everything officer, as many people in small companies. But nowadays, uh what I have been trying to do is being a CEO that can allocate a lot of time to product, and I am trying to delegate all the financial stuff, which I still oversee very, very closely in an incredibly strict financial way. And so I do oversee that very closely, but nowadays I have someone that can prepare everything for me and then I can check it out. And I have also brought a team of amazing product owners that can help me manage a lot of the clients so that I can deep dive with each one of our clients and and their team to try to apply all the uh learnings that we have had in the past couple of years in the industry and and try to make them or try to set them up to be as successful as I can from the point of view of what I can do, which is the technology, and that's just a small piece of an actual distribution system. So yeah.

Justin Reinert:

And so as you've grown the company, how have you gone about identifying and then developing the leaders that you put in place of some of these different teams?

SPEAKER_00:

Hiring leaders is very tough, especially as a small company. Like if you're a company that you're raising millions of dollars and you're you're basically being given that money to hire outstanding talent. Uh, but for smaller companies it's way more difficult as that talent. If it's magnificent, then it's probably already being pouched by this multi-million rounds. But so what we do is we try to bring in people and incentivize them with a lot of valuable salary. And also what we do is we also try to move people as fast as possible through like the chain of command as we can. So if you show very quickly that you're a person that can lead and have a great potential, we will try to create with you a path of okay, let's start small working with leading X or Y teams or X or Y projects. And from there, we're going to help you with some educational stuff and things like that so that you can continue preparing yourself to become a great leader. And then you will also start having a viable salary and things like that. So you can move forward your career with us.

Justin Reinert:

What are some of the things that you're assessing to know that someone's an effective leader?

SPEAKER_00:

So I like people that can communicate very transparently, as that is kind of like the way I am myself, like a no-filter person. But also, it's not only about being able to say things, but I do care a lot about how you say them. Because in every industry, you find these people that they're brilliant and they are really straightforward with how they say things, but many times being very straightforward can also come by as being rude or being disrespectful. And I try to balance those two things. So I need straightforward communication that is very respectful, and the other thing that I try to find is people that augment other people's skills. So, for example, since we're a software company, I really like when one of my um tech leaders, so let's say one of our Python backend leaders, is a person where if I assign this guy in uh one or two projects, I know that the entire team, even part of a team that is not doing back-end, is going to grow because of the way they manage knowledge on the project and how they share their own knowledge with everyone else. So, really good communicators in general is what I'm looking for. Not so much someone. I don't need someone to rally people to move behind them and stuff like that, or rally people into staying in the office 24-7. That's not how we work. I do need someone uh that people feel confident that if they talk to them, they can help them either by finding a solution to whatever their problem is, whether it is technical or salary or personal or whatever. And and these people need to also be quite smart at escalating things. So a leader that doesn't know when to escalate something to me or to my CEO is someone that I cannot put trust on because I need like the early alerts of whatever can go wrong, either with a person, with a client, or with a project. And I do want these leaders to let me know about that in time.

Justin Reinert:

And so as you've grown the business, what's been the toughest part about maintaining alignment and culture as your headcount's grown?

SPEAKER_00:

So we have a company that uh is based on very strong principles. So the reason the whole reason why we started the company uh at the beginning is because we were working with as part of a company with other people and we didn't align in the way they manage talent or manage humans, the human part of having an employee or or of having a resource that is producing for you. And I remember my business partner and I talking about how do we build the company that we would love to have, and we got embarked in this journey of trying to create a company where the company itself can have a soul, and because we have in Colombia a very interesting saying which is companies don't have a soul, and the for example, the ink here in the US in Colombia is SA, which is the uh acronym for without a soul, so it plays very well in Spanish. So we started trying to do that, and we have been very fortunate to find people that very well with that, but the problem of having a very highly principled company is that when something doesn't go right or when um things get tough. So, for example, with the correction that was in the market after COVID, we had to take very tough measures, and we lost a bunch of contracts that were not able to raise more capital, and we had to lay off some people, so or a chunk of people. And at this point, you are confronted with your own principles, right? So um, with time in order to maintain culture, the way we do it is we are incredibly transparent about it. So whenever that happens, I immediately get all the team connected. We are a remote company, so I get everyone connected either on a call or I also love to write. So I would prepare something that I would send for the entire team, and I explain the situation. This is what's happening, these are our numbers, this is what's wrong, this is what we need to fix, and this is the measures that we're going to take. We have had several types of these situations before. So, in some of them, we have really tried to keep people working. So uh there was one time where we closed a business that we had in the past, and we were able for the 10 people that we had to lay off, we found jobs for, I believe, eight or nine, only one person we were not able to find a job for. And additional to that, we paid them their severance packages that are mandatory in Colombia, but we always go above with the severance packages, and we also try to be very aware of the situation of every person. So I personally make all those decisions and define the extra package that anyone can get. So, if for example, you're a person who uh I know has a kid with some kind of condition, then I will probably extend your family's coverage for six months after you're laid off and things like that. So when you try to really base your company in strong principles, the biggest difficulty to maintain culture is to be consistent and to not be hypocrite when things get tough. So it's very easy to maintain, don't be an evil company motto when things are going great, but then when they get difficult, you have to put the extra mile with people and communicate it and be transparent. And what we try to do is every time I lay off someone, I only know that I did it right if they thank me after the call. If they don't, or if during the call there's discussion and stuff like that, which has only happened a couple times in my experience in the last six years. Um I know that I did something wrong. I didn't communicate well how things were how actions were taken, and maybe I didn't prepare the package that this person needed. Either me or my HR person didn't go in depth into what this person needs were and so on. So yeah, that's how we try to do it.

Justin Reinert:

I really love hearing how um, you know, how you're bringing soul to the company and just making really great human-based decisions. I'm curious, what are you doing today to prepare your next layer of leaders for the future?

SPEAKER_00:

So I don't do anything very special or very sophisticated. I just try to um bring the humanity that does not characterize in general business life to it. So, for example, we work a lot with NIH-funded projects. And at the beginning of the year, when the current administration started, there was a freeze, and that affected us a lot because a lot of our projects that we were working on with clients got their funding frozen. Sometimes you try to use as much cash as you can to allocate people to other projects and stuff like that. But when something like this massive happens, you're put in a position where the only thing that you can do is just lay off these people. We had to move very fast, we didn't have the time to find other jobs for them, so we had to lay off a ton of people. So um, and I'm going to answer your question, but I want to make the point here, and it is we had to uh do that, and I felt a dent in the culture of the company after I did that, even though we did it the best we could, it was very significant, it was in projects that had a lot of people excited to be part of because they were going to be helping a ton of individuals with different conditions or research for children and adults and stuff like that. So I felt this stemmed, and and I've been managing the rest of the year, the company, in a how do I because financially it's been a tough year, so you're basically just spending the year trying to do the best that you can with the resources that you have, and so I was thinking like, how do I get because I have a circle of people around me that are my most loyal employees, but the company's 90 people. So, how do I get to the hearts of these people that need to understand that what we do, we don't do it because we want to screw them up, but because it was necessary in order for the vision or the grand vision of doing something with a soul to continue. So for December in Colombia, we have something similar to the Advent calendar, and which is a tradition, it's not a religious tradition anymore, it's just a cultural tradition, and we will be sending an idea. I will not be able to send this to any of my employees before they get it, but we will be sending uh nine letters because it lasts for nine days in Colombia. Uh, and two are written by me, one of my co-founders, one by the CEO, one by the head of HR, um, and some others written by leaders of the company and project management and back end and front end, or even some of our newer employees. And I asked them, because I trust them that they would do a great job, to send a positive message through a letter to their teammates and to address this on how we can um prepare ourselves for an amazing 2026. So, this is the kind of stuff that we do. I'm not interested in putting my people in a university course about leadership if we are not going to be showing the kind of leaders with real actions within the company in a day-to-day. So all the letters have been written already. And uh I had some envelopes made for branded with the company, with the colors of our company. Also, every page is also going to be with a really nice paper and a really nice design. And these are all going through to the people that we have everywhere in Colombia, and also we have a couple people in Panama, and so every day, every envelope is going to have a date, and they will be able to open that letter on that date and read a positive message from their peers, from their leaders, preparing ourselves for having a way better 2026 than what we had in 2025. So um the short answer to the question is leading by example. And people that lead our company admire that as a team, we come up with this idea, and they want to replicate that too with their teams.

Justin Reinert:

That's great. I love the positive example that you're leading with there, Ricardo. Thank you so much for your time on the podcast today. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do so?

SPEAKER_00:

They can reach out from our website, alternova.com. There's a contact there that will immediately get into my inbox. I also am very much available on my LinkedIn, which is on LinkedIn and X and TikTok. Uh, people can find me at theri.net. I post a bunch of stuff about business philosophy and stuff like that because I I do believe that um the people that have a privilege of creating companies and either getting funding for them or being able to self-fund them and make them successful or make them survive at least, we have the responsibility of showing that more sustainable business and sustainable in a social meaning is possible. So we can create companies that are amazing for people, amazing for the users, and also amazing for shareholders. So great.

Justin Reinert:

Well, thank you so much for your time today, Ricardo.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin.