Shiftkey’s $2 Billion Journey: How a Personal Crisis and Round of Golf Revolutionized Healthcare Staffing

Matthew Creason, co-founder and former COO at Shiftkey, has always preferred to be a one man team.

“If I fail, it's my fault. If I succeed it's my fault,” Matt states. “I don't want to blame anybody else. I want to make sure that it's under my control.”

From his childhood mowing lawns to teen years dedicated to solo sports to launching a startup that would become a double unicorn, he has enjoyed the rush of accomplishing things on his own.

“If you're gonna bet on anybody, who do you bet on? You,” he asserts. “I know what I'm good at, and if I'm gonna put the bet on somebody, let me carry the weight.”

Today, he lives in Dallas, Texas, where he co-founded his startup in 2016, Shiftkey, the $2 billion staffing platform for health care facilities to find licensed and certified professionals to fill available shifts. He has gone from a college dropout to delivering lectures to people with Ph.D.s and even at the U.S.-India-America Chamber of Commerce.

“That community is some of the most educated people I think I've ever been in the same room with,” he recounts. “And I'm sitting up there telling them I have 42 college hours, and they are listening to every word that I have to say about how I built my business.”

But he never stopped to examine the people around him on the way to the top. This may have been a major advantage considering he also never took the time to look down at the potential fall.

A Childhood of Side Hustles

Matt grew up in the middle-class suburbs of south Irving, Texas. His mom was a local school teacher while his dad held the title of purchasing manager. But that didn’t mean money came easy.

“Where I grew up, if you wanted the things you couldn't have, you tried to figure out the ways to get the things that you wanted,” he explains.

“It was always: you've got to get this job, but what are you going to do on the side?” Matt continues. “If I wanted something, I would go get a job, or two jobs, and I'd buy it.”

He started working around 12 years old and never looked back, always in search of the next job that would bump up his pay. “It stayed with me.”

But this mindset didn't come from nowhere. Growing up, Matt remembers his parents' fights over finances and the strict budgeting between paychecks.

This was one reason his mother pushed for him to aspire for a stable life: go to college, get a job, and then climb the ladder for the next 20 years. But he didn't see the value in that.

“I always remember going, ‘you sound like you're not really happy, so why would I want to do that?’” Matt recounts. “ I think that played a role in doing something on my own – going out and just seeing what there was and what I could do.”

It wouldn’t be long before one sport completely changed his life – twice.

Golf to Diapers

Matt was a very active kid, playing baseball, soccer, and golf – the latter of which he was a natural at. When he started thinking about his future in high school, he decided golf was his best bet.

“My interests weren't in being great at golf, I was just kind of good at it,” he admits. “And golf was an individual sport – there weren't 10, 12 other guys behind you helping you out. So I just said, let's do that.”

By the time he graduated from Irving High School in 2002, he enrolled in the Northlake College junior college, where he earned his infamous 42 college credits before dropping out.

“My actual goal then was in pursuit of playing golf competitively,” Matt explains. By this point, he was playing at a semi-pro level. But those plans were upended when he found out his partner was pregnant.

“Now there's formula and diapers when before it was just paying for a cell phone and car,” he says. With all this at stake, failure truly wasn't an option.

“I was like I had to feed them. I had to put a roof over their heads. I had to take care of them,” he recounts. “At 21 years old, I had an obligation. They kept pushing me to do better.”

Matt knew his golf aspirations were no longer an option. He needed “a real job” with a steady income.

That’s when a couple of his buddies pointed him to a company called Merritt Hawkins, a physician recruiting and consulting company. This is where he met Tom Ellis, his future co-founder and Mike Vitek, the current CEO of Shiftkey.

But he was still a long way from automating the industry.

An Ugly Glimpse, A Simple Solution

Before Shiftkey, Matthew moved from Merritt Hawkins to the aptly named staffing firm, Nurse Staffing. This is where he “cut his teeth” in the industry.

Eventually, he began to hear the same complaints about cost and quality of care from clients, so he took it upon himself to bring new ideas to his higher ups, focusing on how to make their services cheaper to lure and keep clients. But they were not impressed.

“Honestly, I would have probably never left that job,” he states. But there was one comment they made that he couldn’t shake. “We've been doing this since the 80s, and this is the way it gets done, and this is the way it's always going to be.”

He decided not to stick around. “I'm going to go do this myself because I think these ideas will work,” he says. “I'm going to take the risk, and I'm going to jump – and that's what started the ‘let's go.’”

But he was about to be confronted with a new, more horrifying challenge.

During this time, his grandmother was in a nursing home in Oklahoma while he was working in healthcare staffing, " he recalls. When he arrived for a visit one day, “she was basically sitting in like a pile of her own urine.”

Understandably, Matt wanted to know why she was left in such a state. The nurses were just as unhappy with conditions. They were too understaffed to keep up.

At this point, Matt was already staffing orthopedic surgeons with spine and neck experience, so finding nurses to fill vacant shifts seemed like second nature.

“I remember going, what do you need?” he says, suddenly finding his bigger mission. “I know what I'm doing, I'm going to go do this on my own, and I'm going to figure out how to really impact the world.”

The last piece of the puzzle for Shiftkey would be found on the green. “The whole origin story of Shiftkey was us playing golf.”

Around 2012, back when Shiftkey operated as a traditional staffing agency, he and Tom were playing a round of golf that kept getting interrupted by Matt playing middle-man between hospitals and nurses.

Tom complained that they’d never be able to finish a game at this rate, saying they should just build a system that did this process for them.

Matt's response? “You build it, I'll sell it.” And just like that, the future of healthcare staffing was cemented.

Putting a Period on It

By 2013, the two were working on how to automate the entire staffing process for nurses, and the system went live in 2016. While they experienced steady market growth, the COVID-19 pandemic was a massive accelerating force for the startup.

“We were positioned at the perfect time, the perfect place for COVID to hit because we were already going to market,” he reveals.

After the fever dream that was COVID and sharp growth, the two men felt priorities shifting. By this point, the rest of the industry had started to catch up with copycats popping up everywhere, including the main stage.

“When Silicon Valley starts replicating the things you're doing in Dallas, Texas, you put the period at the end,” Matt smirks. “It solidifies that what you did wasn't some fluke.”

He also felt like there was no motivation to sell, as they had accomplished that dream.

“We got to the point where we were running a company, we weren't building a company. That's honestly when I lost interest,” he admits. “We wanted to be lifestyle business owners, we just wanted to be guys that can make enough money, take care of our family, go have lunch, maybe have a drink, enjoy life, you know?”

So, in 2023, they sold Shiftkey for the first time at a $160 million valuation. Then, 12 months later, they closed their Series A round with a new cash infusion of $300 million, bringing them to a $2.2 billion valuation and double unicorn status.

“You never think a billion, you certainly don't ever think two billion,” he divulges. “I did not realize how hard it was to do until after Shiftkey.”

Of all his entrepreneurial ventures and accomplishments, earning his two unicorn badges are some of his proudest moments.

Legacy & Letting Go

When he imagines the legacy he will leave behind, Matt cherishes the butterfly effect his system created. After hearing so many stories of nurse burnout, he is proud to know how many people were positively affected by his tech – finding time for family, self-care, and, most importantly, rest.

“I think that's ultimately what I want people to remember, and I do believe that we changed the way that people staff their buildings,” he says.

When Matt stepped down as COO, he had to learn to accept that Shiftkey was no longer his.

“I want to be included and I wanted to give my opinion,” he explains. “Then you realize that your opinion kind of doesn't matter as much anymore because they've invested a lot of money. They have new obligations.”

But he will never truly be done with Shiftkey.

“It's always there,” he says. “It'll be a big defining thing of who I am. You just try to hold on to the good foundation you built. That's all I can do.”

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