The secure Cuidas platform empowers companies to offer consultations with primary care practitioners to their employee base via a subscription model. Companies pay a monthly fee per employee, which entitles them to unlimited telehealth or in-person consultations with Cuidas doctors. While Cuidas curates the network of doctors on the platform, they are not their employees; however, Cuidas does provide its own in-house medical record and manages all system and patient data generating insights for client companies’ HR records. Deborah and her team started out handling most of these processes by hand in their small São Paulo office—but their manual processes couldn’t keep up with growing demand for the platform. Cuidas needed resources to properly scale their bandwidth and their company. Already familiar with the Google for Startups Campus São Paulo space, they decided to join the Campus Residency program with the hopes of gaining leadership skills to grow their team sustainably.

The Google for Startups Residency 2020 class turned out to be the first completely remote Campus São Paulo program, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced teams to work from home. Despite the virtual nature of the program, the selected founders were still able to forge meaningful relationships and be vulnerable with their mentors and fellow participants. Mentor and founder of Founder Bay, Punit Aggarwal’s guidance on how to deal with interpersonal challenges in the midst of turbulence or change was particularly helpful during the world’s sudden transition to remote work. Other sessions helped the team better understand OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), outbound sales, and even how workflows could increase productivity levels. The six-session “Outbound Sales” course led by Horácio Poblete, founder of TrustVox, helped Cuidas completely restructure and redesign Cuidas’ communications, from their mission statement all the way to their external emails to prospective and existing users. “We implemented OKRs in a sustainable way for the first time,” said Deborah. “The marketing mentoring session helped us to restructure our website and optimize SEO strategies, which directly impact our sales project.”

In addition to people and leadership skills, the Cuidas team received one-on-one product support on how to best leverage Google Ads, Analytics, and Tag Manager from Google product experts. They also use Firebase to send phone number verifications to their users through SMS to ensure privacy and security for their users. Deborah says that one of their key products that they’ve recently adopted is Looker. “We already used Data Studio for some internal dashboards, and have now migrated to Looker. We are in a movement to make Cuidas increasingly more data driven and this was an important step.”

Since Cuidas completed Google for Startups Campus Residency, the company has grown to 38 employees, 25+ corporate clients, and raised a successful Series A. In 2020, Cuidas received an additional round of investment of 17 million Brazilian Real (roughly $3 million USD) and those resources will support the company's growth in the coming years, team expansion, and promotion of digital campaigns. Deborah’s focus now is ensuring not just that the tech works for customers, but for tech workers—including her own employees—as well. While she still loves tech, Deborah’s experience in the Residency program inspired her to lead her team on a more interpersonal level. She’s repositioned herself as the Chief Operating Officer in order to work across operations and people. Deborah humbly brags that the culture at Cuidas is “pretty good” as employees are encouraged to actually take time off and discouraged from late night or weekend work. “Founders tend to be laser focused on execution and neglect their health—but ironically, health is the backbone of productivity,” advises Deborah. “It can seem that everything depends on you, but stepping out for a few days on vacation can be positive for you and for your team.”