The Zingage Way: Keep Grandma Out of the Hospital

Our Story

Victor and I never set out to build software for other software people. From the beginning, our goal was a generational company in the real economy - systems that move the world outside a browser tab. Victor had just exited Astorian, a marketplace that helped property managers find contractors. I had just watched my family scramble to find caregivers for my grandfather with dementia during COVID. We didn’t know yet that home care would be our industry, but we knew our ambition belonged where failure has consequences.

We reconnected in 2023 at South Park Commons and started exploring. Our first step was Zingage Perform, a layer on top of the EMR (electronic medical record) to automate communication, engagement, and rewards. At the time we assumed two things: full automation wasn’t yet feasible, and most agencies had foundations we could build on.

We were wrong. The work itself sets humans up to fail. Agencies live in a 24/7 cycle - 2 a.m. hospitalizations, daytime call queues, texts and emails piling up - while trying to coordinate care in systems built for records, billing, and compliance, not minute-to-minute staffing. These are good people doing heroic work inside constraints that make reliability overly dependent on brute force.

So, we stopped hedging and built what we always meant to build: Zingage Operator - coordination infrastructure that frees agencies from the back-office grind and makes care delivery dependable at scale. For a few months we even became schedulers ourselves to feel the weight of it and learn fast. That changed how we work. Every line of code now has a patient on the other end. A race condition isn’t an edge case - it’s a missed visit. A clumsy workflow isn’t an inconvenience - it’s a family crisis.

And now the curve has bent. Since launching post-pilot in August, four weeks of selling took us past seven figures in annual contracts, and we expect to 10x by year-end. Agencies aren’t just adopting; they’re telling us it’s changing their days. Laura Curry, who runs a veterans-focused CareBuilders agency in Kentucky, once bought cruise tickets with her husband and never used them - she was on call around the clock. When she saw Operator in action, she told us it was the first time in years she could put her phone down and know that her veterans would still get the care they needed.

That’s why we’re writing this now. We’ve shared these values internally, but with the team growing, the company at an inflection point, and the stakes higher than ever, it felt right to share them publicly too.

The Zingage Way

Right now, at this moment, there's a caregiver call out that will end in a hospitalization or worse. Families are drowning in chaos: spreadsheets, late-night panics, missed visits, caregivers churning at 80% per year. Zingage exists to end this. We're building the infrastructure so healthcare can happen in the home, so our parents can age with dignity, and so their children can live without sacrificing everything.

We are the coordination layer that makes home care automatic. That's the mission behind every line of code, every sprint, and every late night. We know that behind every bug fix is a family counting on us. Behind every feature is someone's parent waiting for care.

We move fast, bend convention, and take risks others won't. Our customers need us to be this way because their livelihoods and lives depend on it. We courageously build what others avoid, commit to deliver excellence, and uphold the integrity of our commitments.

Zingage may not be an easy mission to achieve but it is an easy mission to champion. Ultimately, our values will determine whether we win.

Customers First

We are building so that every provider, caregiver, and family can live the life they always dreamed.

We build for the providers whose dream is to deliver excellent care to thousands of people without having to give up their own lives staring at screens and staying up late.

We ship so that caregivers who show up for their patients never have to do this alone.

We deliver so that the families who need care can trust they will always get care.

Serving our customers is not only a privilege, it is a duty that we pledge ourselves to fully.

When Zingage succeeds it means that a daughter sleeps easy knowing her bed-bound mother hundreds of miles away will get the care she needs.

It means a caregiver is supported when her patient suffers a stroke in the middle of a visit, instead of being so overwhelmed that they quit.

It means a provider can continue serving thousands of patients without unforeseen compliance hits shutting them down.

Tradeoff: we will prioritize customer impact over internal preferences or engineering elegance, even if it means cutting scope, scrapping work, or redoing something we personally liked.

Velocity

We move fast and we ship responsibly because we care. Our customers’ lives will not wait for us to reach perfect certainty nor will they tolerate careless mistakes. At Zingage we create velocity as a marathon of sprints, punctuated by bursts of intensity and recovery.

We focus on the inputs: work long, work hard, or work smart; pick what works for you, but pick something. Velocity isn't negotiable, but how you achieve it is.

We're pirates. We hired an actress off Craigslist to crash our first conference. We snuck into WellSky's event posing as customers. We hand-deliver donuts at 6am. We take the shots others won't because playing by the rules means families suffer.

We're pirates because this industry needs pirates. The treasure we're after isn't gold, it's every family sleeping soundly knowing care is handled. We burn the ships behind us because there's no retreat when lives are on the line.

In the end, all that matters is what we have done for the customers.

Tradeoff: we accept fatigue and messiness in bursts in order to move fast, but we also commit to cleanup cycles so we can keep sprinting again. If you want a steady, predictable pace, this isn’t the place.

Extreme Ownership

We take extreme ownership at Zingage. We don’t make excuses. We don’t blame anyone or anything. We take ownership of the problems and the solutions. We take ownership because it is the bedrock of trust, which is the lifeblood of success.

Ownership shows up when no one is looking. It appears when you choose to sweat the details to fix a bug no one else caught. It’s there when you go out of your way to teach a customer how to use our product. It’s present when you show up in person to listen and to build beside the customer.

Most importantly, extreme ownership is taking care of each other. There is no blame at Zingage and making excuses without providing solutions is intolerable. When something breaks, we don't point fingers, we make solutions. We not only accept but praise support, encouragement, and respect.

Extreme ownership is the manifestation of high agency. If you want to start a podcast then do it; if you want to understand a customer then call them; if you want to build a feature then ship it.

Tradeoff: we stomach the discomfort of eating shit when we make mistakes and we accept everyone's fallibility. Zingage is not a place you can hide nor is it a place to begrudge teammates who try and fail.

Our mission is worth every difficulty. With these values, we won't just succeed, we'll build a world where no call goes unanswered, no family drowns in chaos, and everyone can age with dignity at home.