Building With Heart: A Journey Through Impact and Innovation

Join Molly Baker, founder of Indie Consulting, and our guest, as they explore the human side of healthcare innovation. From early caregiving experiences that shaped her mission, to building a psychosocial support platform for families navigating serious illness, our guest shares candid insights on purpose-driven entrepreneurship, redefining success, and the importance of balance along the way. Whether you’re in healthcare, tech, or simply curious about creating impact in complex spaces, this conversation offers a thoughtful look at resilience, resourcefulness, and building with heart.

MB (Molly Baker): We are going to start with a quick round of “trendy or tragic.” I will give you a topic and you tell me if it is trendy or tragic. Reality TV?

CK (Christy Knutson): Both. Some of it is absolutely tragic, but I do enjoy good reality TV. Sister Wives is my surprising vice.

MB: High protein snacks and dessert pasta, this whole high protein trend?

CK: Also both. There is some truth to it, but I do not think most of us need 200 grams of protein a day.

MB: Birkenstocks?

CK: I love Birkenstocks.

MB: Me too. But have you seen the newer ones that almost look like Hey Dudes, kind of like a loafer Birkenstock slide?

CK: No, I have not.

MB: They are unfortunate. I think they are tragic.

CK: Yeah, that does not sound great.

MB: Cold pizza?

CK: Love it.

MB: Same. Cold pizza fan here. LaBubus, those little monster looking stuffed charms people hang on their bags?

CK: I did not know the name, but yes, I know what they are. The ones with the weird mouths. That is tragic. They actually scare me a little, even though they are very popular right now.

MB: I do not get it either. Blazers?

CK: Love a blazer. Come on. Amazing.

MB: Without telling us who you are, what is top of mind for you professionally right now? What are you thinking about these days?

CK: I spend most of my time thinking about how we can improve the end of life experience, both for people who are dying and for the people who love them. It is a big topic with a lot of layers, but that is really where my focus is.

MB: How long have you been working in that world?

CK: I have been working in healthcare and serious illness for about 20 years, but I have been really laser focused on end of life challenges for about seven years.

MB: Who is the primary client for what you are building. Is it the person who is near end of life, or is it the family?

CK: The primary client is the family. The person who is ill can absolutely use our platform, but it is really geared toward family and friends who are trying to organize care and support.

MB: Interesting. Without getting into the specific business quite yet, brag about yourself for a minute. What are you really good at?

CK: Starting in the nonprofit sector was a huge gift. I worked in healthcare nonprofits right after college, and it taught me to be very resourceful and scrappy. In nonprofit and startup worlds, you usually have to make a lot happen with very little. That has shaped how I think and work. It pushes you to get creative and to look for a third option when the first two will not work. That ability to be scrappy and inventive is something I value in myself, and it is something I intentionally look for when I hire as well.

MB: When you look back over the different phases of your career, what would you say has been the most pivotal moment?

CK: Strangely, it was a tweet in 2018. Nothing big or viral. I was in bed late at night, scrolling and watching videos, and I saw a talk from an organization called End Well Foundation. They do TED style talks about end of life. This particular talk was about bringing palliative care into the home before hospice, and I found it really compelling. I retweeted it and went to bed.

The next day, the founder, Dr. Shoshana Unglider, reached out. That started an incredible relationship. She is now one of our advisors, and End Well has become this yearly gathering in Los Angeles as well as a nonprofit doing work all year to improve the end of life experience. Being welcomed into that community opened my eyes to what was possible.

I grew up in a small town, had a traditional college path, and I thought your choices were basically corporate or nonprofit. Building your own thing felt very outside the box. Being exposed to the West Coast tech world shifted that. I began to see solutions as a series of projects instead of just one job or one organization. That shift in mindset, which started with a random retweet, changed everything.

MB: That is kind of wild. And before we started recording, you mentioned that you met your business partner in a Facebook group. Social media has really underpinned some big career moments for you.

CK: It has. It feels a little complicated to say that now, but at the time it was not as fraught as it is today. This was years ago. Social did exactly what it was supposed to do. It helped create real connection.

MB: That was the whole goal of social platforms in the first place, to create those connections.

CK: Exactly.

MB: So you started in nonprofit and then moved into the startup world. In those two spaces, how has your idea of success changed?

CK: Early on, with that more traditional background, I saw success as a series of benchmarks. I was always drawn to work centered around impact, especially in serious illness. I thought success would look like clear lines in the sand. You build something, it works, you can measure it, and you call that success.

Over time, I stopped measuring success that way, partly to protect my sanity. The bar is very high when you are working in a complex human space like end of life. Now I think of success more as progress. On my best days, I picture it as planting seeds. Some seeds we will see grow. Others will sit there and need other people to come along to water them. Success is not one finish line anymore. As long as we are genuinely moving the ball forward, that is a better and healthier way for me to measure it.

MB: I relate to that. It is a big mental shift to go from, “If I do not hit this exact goal, it is not success” to “If we are making progress, we are still moving forward.” If you could give advice to your younger self, early in your career, what would you tell her?

CK: I would tell her to listen to her intuition. When I look back, every really good decision I made was driven by a gut feeling and intuition, supported by data but not dictated by it. I see myself as a calculated risk taker, and the best risks I have taken came from trusting that inner sense.

The decisions I would do differently now are the ones where I knew, even as I was making them, that something did not feel right. I let external data, best practices, recommendations, or common wisdom override my intuition, and I regret ignoring that inner voice more than I regret the actual outcomes.

MB: That is such a hard lesson. It is the worst feeling when you make a decision and later think, I knew this probably was not right.

CK: Exactly.

MB: What has been the most impactful relationship on your professional life?

CK: I am going to cheat and name two. First, my husband. I have taken a very nontraditional path, and he has a very traditional job and career. That has been good for our family. But my path has also required sacrifice. Sometimes it pulls me away, emotionally and physically. He has been incredibly supportive, even though my work is not something he feels drawn to or fully understands from the inside. I deeply appreciate that and do not take it for granted.

Second, my business partner, Jane Butler. She lives in New York and I am in Raleigh. Back in 2011, she started a small design shop in New York and I started a small marketing consultancy here. We worked independently for a few years and then partnered on a project. Immediately we knew we should do this together. We merged and ran a marketing agency for over 10 years, then eventually scaled that down to focus on the project that became Near. We have been working together for a long time.

MB: So you two have really grown up in business together. That is awesome. Alright, without further ado, tell us who you are and what you are up to.

CK: I am Christy Knutson, and I am the cofounder of Near.

MB: Tell us about Near. What is it?

CK: Near is a psychosocial support platform for individuals and families from the point of serious illness all the way through grief and loss. It brings together a number of tools that people might recognize individually, but that have not really existed in one place before.

If you are diagnosed with a terminal illness, if someone you love is actively dying, if they have been admitted to hospice, or if you are grieving a loss, you can come to one place and be guided through the emotional and logistical parts of that experience.

When I say psychosocial, I mean primarily emotional and practical challenges. Our healthcare system is incredibly fragmented, especially in end of life. It has always been fragmented, and with an aging population it is even more strained. We are not trying to get everything from the healthcare system. We want it to serve in the ways it is best positioned to serve, and then we come alongside to support the psychosocial side that is often overlooked.

MB: What originally drew your interest to this space, even before that tweet and the End Well connection. What is the personal story behind this?

CK: For me, it started when I was very young. I became a caregiver when I was 10. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s and lived with us. We had a very close knit family out in the country, and we all supported one another. I helped care for her until she died when I was 16, alongside the adults in my family.

For me, that experience was a privilege. I know that is not every young caregiver’s story, but I felt very supported. As soon as my grandmother passed, my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. We walked through that with her for a few years.

Within that same year, my aunt’s daughter, my cousin Theresa, was also diagnosed with breast cancer. I was just starting my freshman year of college. She passed away right after I graduated. We were extremely close, almost like sisters despite the age gap. She was my person, my best friend.

Those years of illness and then walking through her end of life shaped everything. I was always interested in healthcare, but that solidified it. Her end of life was really difficult in ways that I now know did not have to be inevitable. That is a huge part of what drives my work today.

MB: Thank you for sharing that. Moving from running a marketing agency to starting Near is a big transition. What made you decide to make that shift, and how did you know it was time?

CK: When we started the agency, I was coming out of healthcare nonprofits. We wanted to work with startups, small businesses, and some nonprofits. We worked across several industries, but healthcare and technology were always where my passion was.

Through that work, I started to see how technology could be used to build real solutions in health. Health tech was still relatively young at the time, so we were learning alongside everyone else.

Once we began working with End Well and met the broader psychosocial community, social workers, end of life doulas, and others, we realized we had a skill set that could be applied directly to this space. So Jane and I started slowly building. Near has gone through multiple iterations. When you are embedded in healthcare, there is a lot of trial and error. It is not a classic consumer product. You launch, you learn, you rework, and you keep adapting.

MB: What does an average day look like for you right now?

CK: Honestly, it is pretty choppy. I have three kids, none of them drive yet, and they go to three different schools. So my day is structured around their schedules. I also still do client work, because Near is not funded yet and that work helps pay the bills and support what we are building. So every day is a puzzle of family needs, client responsibilities, and Near. There is constant juggling.

MB: What part of your work brings you the most energy, and what is the hardest part?

CK: The most energizing part is when we are actively building pieces of the platform that can be implemented in real time. I love research and I love relationship building, but actually seeing features come to life and knowing they will be used by real people in very vulnerable moments is a big high for me.

The hardest part is funding. Every startup founder will tell you fundraising is challenging. It is a critical part of the work, but it can feel like a distraction from the mission and the product. It is necessary, but it is not my favorite part of the job.

MB: I have found building a company to be an intensely introspective experience. You built a marketing agency and now a tech platform in a very purpose driven space. What have you learned about yourself through all of this?

CK: A lot, some of it flattering and some of it not. Entrepreneurship exposes you. You are leading a team on one side and building something new on the other, and those roles draw on very different skill sets.

One big lesson is realizing how much white space I actually need. I am high energy and I genuinely love my work, but to stay at a healthy level I have to deliberately build in time that is not filled. Part of that is the nature of the work itself. Even in something like an investor meeting, within ten minutes people are often sharing deeply personal stories about loss or illness. I am not a counselor, but I sit in a very vulnerable space with people. It is an honor, but I carry those stories with me. I need more time to process and reset than I once realized.

MB: How do you balance building a company, holding all of those emotional stories, and having three kids and a family life?

CK: I do not think anyone has the balance perfectly right. Having good organizational systems helps, both at home and in the business. But the bigger thing has been accepting that the work is never fully done.

Early in your career, there might be days when you leave work with everything checked off your list. That does not last. Now it is about deciding where to stop for the day, not finishing everything. If you refuse to stop, your body will eventually do it for you. I have hit that wall before and I try hard not to repeat it.

MB: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a business in healthcare or social impact?

CK: Commit to being a lifelong learner. In healthcare and tech, the landscape moves quickly. If you are not constantly learning, you will fall behind.

A learning mindset keeps you curious and humble. It keeps you listening to the people you are trying to serve and to the people you think you are teaching. That is where the best solutions and the most respectful work come from.

MB: You mentioned you are always iterating on Near. How often are you making big updates to the product?

CK: We are in the middle of a big update right now. We are constantly fixing bugs and making small tweaks, but the major releases are less frequent. This is our fourth large iteration, which works out to roughly once a year for a major overhaul. Because our solution can be used in B2B, B2C, or hybrid ways, those big updates often mean reconfiguring a lot of things depending on what we are testing and learning.

MB: How do people find Near?

CK: Our website is staynear.co. We are on Instagram at @staynearco, and I share on my personal Instagram @christyleeknutson. I am also active on LinkedIn.

MB: In terms of how people actually get to you, is it referrals, word of mouth, marketing, partnerships?

CK: We have done a mix. For a while, we were focused on working with social work teams in healthcare, which meant more of a B2B partnership model. Now we are leaning more direct to consumer, while still valuing partnerships with healthcare institutions. Word of mouth, traditional channels, and trusted institutional partners are all important in a space as sensitive as end of life.

MB: So right now, you are prioritizing direct to consumer?

CK: Yes, that is our priority at the moment.

MB: At 21, did you think this is what your career would look like?

CK: No. I did not even know this kind of path was possible. I assumed I would stay in healthcare nonprofits for my entire career. Building a psychosocial support platform in end of life care was not something I could have imagined at that age.

Find Christy on Linkedin and Instagram! And visit Near on Instagram and Linkedin!

As for us, follow @namedrop.pod on Instagram & LinkedIn and@molbakes on Instagram for all future episodes and insights.