Mariza Hardin launched her startup, Zócalo Health, after helping her own family navigate the health care system.
Hardin met her fellow Zócalo Health co-founder Erik Cardenas while the two were working at Amazon. They realized the impact they could make designing a virtual health care experience for Latino patients.
“We had opportunity and resources to really drive innovation and think outside the box, but we really weren’t focused on our community, the Latino population,” said Hardin, also the head of strategy and operations at the startup. “It was time for us to leave the comfort of a company like Amazon and start a company like Zócalo Health. If it wasn’t us doing it, it would probably be somebody else. We wanted it to be by Latinos, for Latinos.”
Zócalo Health, founded last year, offers virtual health care appointments in both English and Spanish, and Hardin says it takes patients only four or five clicks to sign up. The startup matches patients with a community health worker to help them navigate the health care system.
Zócalo Health can help patients with prescription renewals, Covid-19 care and family planning, among other options. Its services are live in California and Texas, and the startup is targeting early 2023 to announce its Washington launch.
The Business Journal sat down with Hardin to talk about her background, launching her startup and her love of cooking.
About Mariza Hardin
Co-founder and head of strategy and operations at Zócalo Health
Age: 39
Hometown: Roswell, New Mexico
Residence: Bothell. Hardin lives with her husband, 3-year-old son, and two dogs and two chickens.
Education: Bachelor’s in sociology and political science at the University of New Mexico; master’s in health policy at George Washington University
Interests outside of work, besides cooking: “We do a ton of hiking. That’s why we love it here so much.”
A day in the life
We asked Mariza to break down her typical workday.
5 a.m.: Meets husband in garage gym for a workout.
6 a.m.: Gets ready for the day and responds to messages.
7 a.m.: Son wakes up.
8 a.m.: Breakfast with family; takes son to school.
8:30 a.m.: Makes "long commute" to home office, checks in with remote team.
9 a.m. to noon: Meetings, planning: "No day is ever the same as a startup founder."
Noon: Takes a walk: "It's truly how and where I do my best thinking."
5 p.m.: Quickly gets dinner together so the family can eat together.
6:30 p.m.: Bath and bedtime for son, who takes every opportunity to postpone bedtime.
7 p.m.: Wraps up work and tries to squeeze in some Netflix time with husband.
9 p.m.: Bedtime
How did your career lead you to starting your own company? I was one of the few that got selected to work on Amazon Care, which was a confidential program when I was hired. I was, I think, employee number three of that team. I took the job and moved my family without knowing what I was going to be working on, but I knew that Amazon had resources and brain power to really disrupt health care, so I wanted to be part of that.
With such a nice job, why launch your own startup? I started at the Amazon Care team, and then started the AWS health and human services team, where we really redesigned the experience for accessing Medicaid and unemployment services on the consumer side. … Both areas for disruption, both moving really fast and using the brain power of Amazon, but I was so focused on my family and my community that would never touch any of these services directly. Amazon Care was really designed for a corporate employee or B2B sales cycle that our community would never likely see in the near term that type of innovation or that type of customer obsession.
Did you always want to be in tech? No. I grew up wanting to be a doctor. I failed miserably in my first year at undergrad and thankfully discovered public health. Public health was this amazing field of using policy and population-level health to improve the experience and outcomes. So I got my degree in health policy and worked for the Obama administration and really fell in love with the impact of policy at the state and federal level.
How did you end up in tech, then? I really focused my career on the Medicaid and Medicare programs. As those aged and different issues have come up with them, technology has always been the beacon for correction in those programs. I naturally made my way to different tech companies.
What are your long-term goals for the company? People use health care when they’re in their most vulnerable states, and if you throw a chatbot at them or you throw an app at them to download, you miss the opportunity to drive connection. We’re going to prove that innovation and technology can exist with tradition and culture.
Zócalo Health is geared toward the Latino population, but pretty much everyone would appreciate a service that helps them easily navigate the health care world. Do you see your idea having a broader appeal? When we started the company, we spent the first six months just talking to patients. Latino patients, families and allies. It was incredibly clear that navigation and understanding the ecosystem was the biggest pain point. We designed for the experience around that. I think what we’ll learn as we scale is that we’re building a playbook to be very hyper-focused on a specific ethnic group or geography that can be replicated across other communities.
What is one thing most people don’t know about you? My love for hosting and cooking for people is something that I love to do, and I have really struggled to not be able to do that for my team and for my family in the pandemic.
What is your favorite thing to cook? My co-founder and I have a very friendly competition around flour tortillas. Mine are the best, obviously. … I love to cook traditional New Mexican food, which includes green chile and lots of flour and corn tortillas.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
