The Gratitude Loop

In a startup, "good job" is a vanity metric. Genuine gratitude is about reinforcing high agency, rigor, and the courage to fail.

In the world of startups, there is a natural tension between the holidays and "Founder Mode."

Thanksgiving is a time to pause, reflect, and soften. Yet, the reality of building a startup, especially one tackling problems as complex as healthcare, is that the clock never stops.

We operate with an intensity that demands constant motion.

There is a misconception that "accountability" and "gratitude" are opposites.

The thinking goes: Accountability is the cold, hard logic of OKRs and ship rigor, while gratitude is the soft, fuzzy layer we add to make people feel better.

I disagree.

At Nedl Labs, and during my years leading engineering and product at Microsoft, I've found that gratitude, when treated as a rigorous discipline rather than a polite gesture, is actually a performance multiplier. It is a system.

We often talk about "Learning Loops" when things fail. We analyze the outage, we debug the code, and we institutionalize the lesson so it never happens again. But we rarely apply that same rigorous analysis to our appreciation.

This Thanksgiving, I am proposing we replace generic praise with a "Gratitude Loop."

The Problem with "Good Job"

In a high-performance culture, generic praise like "Great job, team!" is a vanity metric.

It feels good for a moment, but it lacks actionable data. It doesn't tell the engineer why their solution was elegant, or the product manager why their decision to cut a feature saved the timeline.

If we believe that "empathy without standards is enablement," then we must also emphasize that "gratitude without specificity is noise."

Designing the Loop

A Gratitude Loop is different. It's a mechanism that reinforces the specific behaviors that drive the company forward: high agency, tech intensity, and intellectual honesty.

Here is how I am thinking about gratitude this season, and how we apply it at Nedl Labs:

Thank the dissenter. Innovation dies in an echo chamber.

When a team member challenges my assumptions or points out a flaw in our architectural logic, my first instinct might be defensiveness. The Gratitude Loop forces me to override that and say, "Thank you for the rigor you brought to that argument. You saved us two weeks of wasted dev time." By rewarding candor, you ensure getting the truth next time, not just the happy path.

Thank the "Intelligent Failure." We claim to want risk-takers, but we usually only praise the risks that pay off immediately.

If someone takes a high-agency swing at a new Deepseek model and misses, but brings back crucial data on why it failed, that deserves gratitude. I am thankful for the failures that increased our "Tech Intensity," and for the proprietary knowledge our competitors don't have because they played it safe.

Thank the Invisible Work. In every startup, there is "glamour work" (shipping features) and "glue work" (documentation, refactoring, mentoring).

The glue work prevents technical debt and culture rot. Acknowledging this work publicly signals to the team that we value the health of the system, not just the speed of the output.

The ROI of Thanks

We are building Nedl Labs to eliminate $100B+ of Payment Leakage to give $1300/yr back to American families for medical affordability.

We are asking our team to do hard things, navigate ambiguity, execute with velocity, and care deeply about the outcome.

You cannot sustain that level of output on pressure alone. You sustain it by creating an environment where people feel seen, not just for their wins, but for their struggles.

This Thanksgiving, look at your team. Don't just thank them for the hours they put in.

Thank them for the agency they showed.

Thank them for the standards they refused to lower.

Thank them for the curiosity that turned a roadblock into a breakthrough.

Gratitude is not soft. When done right, it codifies the culture for the long haul.