Welcome to HackerNoon’s Writing Prompts! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.1. What is your company in 2–5 words?Healthcare operations intelligence2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?Insurance complexity kept growing while the tools used to navigate it barely changed. Practices are still relying on phone calls, portals, and institutional knowledge to manage work that has become far too complex for manual workflows. Today, AI can finally understand and shoulder that complexity, if it is built around how healthcare actually works.3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?I think we work well because neither of us is trying to be the same kind of founder. I can spend an uncomfortable amount of time pulling a problem apart, talking to people, and figuring out what is really underneath it. Serge is the one who says, “we know enough, let’s build it,” and then makes it happen. He gives us velocity, I give us a little healthy resistance. We trust each other enough to disagree, stay in our strengths, and still move fast. What we do have in common is that neither of us is very good at accepting “that’s just how healthcare works” as an answer.4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?Probably building a different healthtech startup and making a different set of people nervous about changing their workflow. I’ve always loved science and technology, but I need to see what an idea does in the real world. Healthcare gives you plenty to work with: brilliant people, enormous stakes, and systems that sometimes seem designed to test everyone’s patience.5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?I keep two sets of numbers close. One tells us whether we’re building a business: paying practices, usage, and retention. The other tells us whether life inside those practices is actually getting easier: fewer calls, fewer preventable claim problems, and less time spent hunting for an answer. I want both sets moving together. If revenue grows while the work stays just as painful, we haven’t built the company I want to build.6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?Sphere gives independent medical practices an AI layer for the work they usually solve through phone calls, portals, spreadsheets, and experience. We start with insurance and payment, where the operational burden is highest, and automate more of that work over time. The idea is to give a small practice more leverage without asking it to hire more people just to manage complexity.7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?For an AI company, a surprising amount of our growth has been old-fashioned. We spend time in practices, build around the problems we see there, and providers tell other providers about Sphere. Most of our customers have come through those introductions. I love that kind of growth because it means the product earned enough trust in one office for someone to bring us into the next.8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?Independent practices are expected to navigate extraordinary complexity with small teams and a collection of tools that barely talk to one another. I think that’s a huge opportunity. Next year, I see Sphere spreading through provider referrals while taking on more of the work inside each office. My ambition is for a small practice to have the kind of operational capacity that once required a much larger organization, without losing what makes it independent.9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.Our first revenue came from practices that had helped shape Sphere from the beginning. They knew exactly where the product was rough, and they still chose to pay because it had become part of how they worked. That was the signal I cared about most. Over the next year, we want to turn that early pull into scale: more practices, more workflows, and a much larger share of the operational work moving through Sphere. The opportunity is not to sell another tool to a practice. It is to become the system the practice increasingly relies on to run.10. What’s your biggest threat?The hardest thing for us will be scaling without losing the understanding that made Sphere useful in the first place. Payer rules vary, specialties work differently, and every practice has habits that never made it into a manual. We’ve learned a lot by being close to our first customers. Our job now is to turn that depth into a product that works in the hundredth practice as well as it does in the first.Visit us https://sphereint.net/Follow Stefaniya at https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefaniyab/This startup founder interview template is based onHackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.*Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.