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- [00:01]
Tai Wang
What keeps me up at night is making sure that we're focusing on the right things. Making sure that we're focusing on things that are going to be most impactful, that are going to have the biggest impact on our customers.
- [00:14]
Frontlines IO Host
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
- [00:47]
Brad
Our guest today is Tai Wang, CEO and co founder of Angel Health. Tai, welcome to the show.
- [00:52]
Tai Wang
Thanks, Brad. It's great to be here.
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Brad
Looking forward to the conversation. So you spent some time at Palantir. I have to ask, what was that experience like? And as you went and founded this new company, was there a big lesson, a big takeaway that you brought with you?
- [01:03]
Tai Wang
It was an incredible experience. I love my time at Palantir. I think it's one of the few places, at least back when we were there, and I would hope so today is one of the few places where you can work with some of the smartest people in the world and where truly everyone around you, you feel like is smarter than you. Probably the biggest takeaway is that you really don't need to have a lot of deep expertise in kind of any given area if you have the ability to learn and I would say just the kind of the general aptitude to think from first principles. And I think it's actually a, that's a benefit is, is not having kind of the baggage of decades of bad behaviors or habits in a given industry or operational workflow or anything like that, and being able to think about if you were to rebuild this from kind of scratch, how would you do it? Kind of right or better.
- [01:56]
Brad
And is that a mindset that you brought to the current company today? First principles approach, how do I rebuild from scratch?
- [02:02]
Tai Wang
Yeah, I think that is very much how we've built Engle Health today. And it's something that we really like to emphasize and really focus on here with our employees and how we build. And I think it's important that fundamentally what we are trying to do is rebuild the healthcare system. And change the way that people fundamentally access healthcare here in the U.S. easy vision.
- [02:26]
Brad
Tell us about the company. What does the company do?
- [02:28]
Tai Wang
I would say today we are really the first AI, native health plan and vertically integrated healthcare benefits platform where our core products themselves are fully custom health plan and healthcare benefits products. So health insurance and the services around that for small and medium sized businesses. And that's something that doesn't exist in the market today where we're able to offer very tailored, very personalized healthcare benefits and healthcare experiences for the employees of these small businesses and also offer them some of the most transparent, predictable and stable rates costs for healthcare year over year.
- [03:12]
Brad
And in terms of distribution, are you going direct these SMBs, are you doing channel partners? What does that look like?
- [03:18]
Tai Wang
Yeah, it's all channel distribution. And I would say this is a big learning. Over the course. Course of building Angle Health is the value that distribution partners, that insurance brokers, benefits consultants, general agencies bring to this world, especially for these small and medium sized businesses, where these are local businesses, these are family businesses, these are companies where the leaders of the company, whether it's the CFO or the owner or the head of people or hr, they're not necessarily experts in benefits, nor do they have huge teams around them to be able to build these kind of sophisticated packages for their employees. And the broker provides an extremely valuable service to them, operating on their behalf and out of their best interest. And what we've been able to do is really enable brokers and benefits consultants and those consultants to deliver the kinds of products that really meet the needs for these employers and their employees and do it in a way that's seamless, that's transparent and that keeps it affordable.
- [04:19]
Brad
Did you know day one that was going to be the path for distribution?
- [04:23]
Tai Wang
No. It was a learning. So when we first launched Angle health back in 2021, we were going direct to employers, direct to these small businesses. And I think we very quickly learned that that was not only a highly inefficient distribution motion, but we really weren't serving the market in the way that we would have wanted to or been able to scale in the way that we have. And again, yeah, it's where we realized, okay, this is why brokers and agencies are such a valuable part of the ecosystem today.
- [04:56]
Brad
How did you dig in and start learning about that ecosystem to understand it so you could start to sell in there?
- [05:02]
Tai Wang
It was on the job training, it was on the ground talking to these business owners, running into kind of roadblocks in the sense that at the end of the day, a lot of these business owners, they need support, they need guidance. And it's much better coming from an unbiased party that's working on of their best interest. And we weren't in the business of building an insurance broker and even building a health insurance company. That's not the ultimate goal. That's how we kind of started. But that was really a means to our ultimate goal, which is again, fundamentally changing the way that people actually access healthcare benefits. And the health plan just happens to be the kind of entry point. It's for better or for worse. It's the way that the vast majority of Americans access healthcare and pay for healthcare. And the reality is, if it's not covered or offered to you by your health plan, you're unlikely to ever access it because you either don't know about it or it's just cost prohibitive.
- [05:54]
Brad
So this show is brought to you by Frontlines Media Podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. If you were to just close your eyes and wave a magic wand and everything you believe becomes true, like what does this all look like? What does healthcare look like? And go as far out you want to go, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, what does that look like when this big vision becomes true?
- [06:33]
Tai Wang
Yeah, it looks like a seamless experience for the consumer, the patient, the member. It looks like one that is fully transparent that you understand exactly the cost of the procedure or whatever you're going to get. And that's just not the case today. I think one thing, if you really zoom out and take a macro view of things you have, our health care system in the US is extremely fragmented in any given interaction or experience that you have as a consumer. As simple as going to your primary care provider and getting a prescription filled. There are countless stakeholders in between and each of those stakeholders has hyper optimized for their kind of individual piece of it, whether it's the provider or the doctor or the hospital or health system or the pharmacy or the PBM or the the health plan or insurance company. And they've optimized to essentially extract as much value as possible out of their kind of thin slice of the puzzle and without regard to how that impacts anyone else in that ecosystem. And our goal with Engle Health is really again taking that kind of first principles approach and rebuilding what we call care pathways and really ultimately the end to end experience for any given service or course of care or what have you, whether it's getting infusion treatments for Ms. Or whether it's getting an MRI or an X ray or a CT scan, rebuilding one, understanding what every one of those stakeholders looks like and what the experience today is, both the experience for the individual, for the consumer and the patient, as well as the kind of underlying workflows behind that from all the data that's exchanged and all of the processes when it comes to things like eligibility and claims administration, prior authorizations, all of that, and rebuilding that kind of end to end workflow there to make it seamless, partnering with the best in class solutions providers, what have you, to create this very seamless experience that allows a member, a patient, a consumer, an American, to get access to the healthcare again in a way that is highly transparent. They know exactly how much it's going to cost. Ideally in a lot of cases it can cost them close to zero if they have the right coverage. And also making that experience seamless for them where they're no longer. Today, another big issue is it's entirely incumbent on the consumer to understand when they're navigating the healthcare system, to understand, okay, these are available to me. I don't have to just follow whatever kind of path that I'm told, but I have multiple options in it. There's differing costs associated with those options, even going from, I think very well known today. But an MRI is a great example. Getting an MRI in one hospital versus another hospital versus an outpatient facility or an imaging center is for the exact same procedure and the exact same kind of outcome. The costs are vastly different and it's not even correlated with the quality of the service that's being delivered. So being able to have kind of full transparency and optionality and being able to make the choices, there is something that's important to us as well. So to kind of get back to your original question, it's essentially rebuilding that entire experience for an American when it comes to accessing healthcare, to be seamless,
- [09:59]
Brad
to be transparent, when you break that down of what you want to rebuild and maybe do you know, building blocks like what's the order, what do you focus on first? What do you do next? What's the steps to making that vision happen?
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Tai Wang
I think what we've built today is one of the biggest and one of the most important steps and that's just ensuring that we can get as many people access to affordable coverage as possible. So being able to access healthcare and pay for healthcare, and that's something that we've done through EngleHealth and through our health plan products for these small, medium sized businesses. The reality is that almost half of Americans, of working Americans and their families are covered under a health plan that's provided by a small, medium sized business. And they're the ones that are working for these small and medium sized businesses. That is also the part of the market that has the least optionality when it comes to the kinds of coverage that they have. If you're a small business owner and you're in any part of the country, you very likely only have access to 1, 2, maybe 3, if you're lucky, different health insurance options. And for the most part, these are off the shelf products. They may or may not actually meet the needs of your employees and they're very rigid. There's no ability to actually customize the kind of coverage. And what we've been able to do is deliver that to the market so that they can design the kinds of benefits that they want optimized for what matters to them, whether it's certain coverages for their employees, whether it's optimizing for budget, and then being able to see immediate pricing on that and having confidence in the fact that they're going to see very stable rates cost for those benefits year over year. So our median renewal rate increase for EngleHealth customers for our employers is about 5.5%. I mean, that's a fraction of what the vast majority of small businesses are seeing. 11 to 15, 20% plus rate increases year over year. And that's what they've been seeing for the last several years. And that is just unsustainable. So the first goal is, okay, let's try to get as many people covered as possible. And now the kind of next goal where we've really unlocked that motion of being able to deliver transparent cost, stable plans is now, okay, let's actually help these employers and their employees actually lower the cost of care. And that's really the next step. Now that we have well over 100,000Americans that are EngleHealth members, we can really start to engage them, especially the ones that really need an elevated level of care and an elevated level of kind of the guidance and navigation. And let's try to do the things that really tangibly reduce their overall cost of care without compromising the quality. And a lot of the focus today are partnering with these kind of best in class healthcare companies that are tangibly reducing the actual costs through things like site of care. So moving an infusion out of a hospital to an in home setting with the exact same kinds of professionals, nurses and physicians, and the exact same drugs that are used for those procedures and doing it in a manner that provides a much better experience for the member and the patient and that provides it at a fraction of the cost. And the reality is when you look across the healthcare system and all the different experiences that people have, all the different kinds of procedures, the kinds of diseases that people are facing, you can find countless examples of these kinds of care pathways that can very much be optimized to provide a much better, better consumer patient experience and significantly lower costs. And that's really how we're approaching the problem today.
- [13:48]
Global Talent Company Announcer
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- [14:09]
Brad
when you think about that big picture vision, what keeps you up at night? What are the big problems that you're gonna need to solve to make that vision become a reality?
- [14:17]
Tai Wang
It's just the scale of the problem. The reality is that there's so many different directions that we can go and there's so many. I think that this is a lifetime endeavor for us and for myself, my co founder, for our employees, this is something that you can go so deep in any direction. And the challenge is, and I think what keeps me up at night is making sure that we're focusing on the right things, making sure that we're focusing on things that are going to be most impactful, that are going to have the biggest impact on our customers and ensure that we can continue delivering them, these extremely affordable and stable healthcare plans.
- [14:53]
Brad
Do you recall any debates that you've had either with the co founder or others on the team where it was exactly that? If you had to make a hard decision about what to prioritize, what to put on the back back burn or no longer focus on?
- [15:05]
Tai Wang
I would say that we have those conversations all the time. And I think that's actually one thing that we really pride ourselves on is we operate a very lean team, especially for the scale of the business today. And we like to do A very small amount of things at any given time and do them really well and really focus in on those. And a big piece is prioritizing. Okay, what is going to be most impactful? What do we focus our limited resources on addressing? And then when we make those decisions, we go all in on that and we pride ourselves on a high degree of operational excellence when it comes to those initiatives.
- [15:42]
Brad
And we've been through 17 minutes, 18 minutes. We haven't really talked about AI. I think you only said AI once. So I want to talk a little bit about AI here just to wrap what does AI look like in the product and in the business?
- [15:53]
Tai Wang
It's a great question and we've talked a lot about the product and kind of the macro level problems. The reason we're able to address a lot of these today and deliver the kinds of products that we are delivering is because of AI and because of the kinds of infrastructure that we've built. So my co founder and I, we're engineers. At the core of what we're building is a technology platform and we've essentially rebuilt and what we are continuing to build is the underlying rails that power what I think we imagine to be the next iteration of the US healthcare system. And what that looks like is highly integrated infrastructure. All of our data sits in one place. That is what enables us to leverage tools like AI and machine learning with full context across any one situation that you have, whether it's about a particular member in their journey, whether it's about a particular claim, whether it's about a provider or a certain interaction that's going on. And that's how we power really everything from our quoting and underwriting to implementation, to our engagements with our members and patients, to all the administrative and clinical procedures that we have with providers and as well as our employers and brokers. And that is really, I would say, a very core piece of how we're unlocking what we've unlocked. I guess to put it more tangibly, to give you a very real example of what that means, there's a reason no one offers fully custom health plan products to small medium sized businesses. And the reason for that is because for any legacy incumbent, they have tens of different systems across their their quoting and underwriting platforms and their policy administration systems and their care management systems and their where they store information about their members and patients and where they store information about their employer groups and their provider directories and all of that stuff. And it's all like very siloed. These are just classic Palantir Problems, but they have countless systems that are supposed to have the same information across the board, but is inconsistent. And none of these systems talk to each other. In order to deliver a custom health plan product, it means manually configuring each and every one of these systems, whether it's for eligibility or whether it's for actual claims processing or their policy administration or billing and invoicing. And it just, it's not economically feasible for them to do that for tens of thousands of businesses that have two or 10 or 50 employees. For us, we've been able to automate really the vast majority of that where there is a high degree of complexity. When you look at your healthcare benefits, you're probably used to seeing this two page blue sheet of paper called your summary of benefits. And there's 15 major buckets of services in there. It's like preventative care services, hospital visits, imaging, things like that. Very high level. Behind that you have hundreds of benefit codes that map to hundreds of thousands of CPT codes and HCPC codes, the things that healthcare providers, doctors and health systems use to bill insurance companies. And there's, there's just no one to one mapping to any possible benefit plan design with differing cost shares to how you actually process a claim for a given service behind the scenes. If there was, it would be a solved problem. But it's not. And for us, and you can imagine how offering fully custom products just creates an infinite amount of complexity when it comes to administering these health plans. And we've been able to unlock that because of the AI and the machine learning models that we have on the backend that can take these custom plan designs that are built self serve by the brokers and the employers and translate that into all the downstream roles and workflows needed to actually administer that.
- [19:40]
Brad
Amazing. Love it. All right, Ty, we're going to wrap here. Before we do, where should we send people who want to follow along with this vision?
- [19:46]
Tai Wang
They should follow along on our LinkedIn. I think we are pretty active there. We're regularly doing things like webinars and fireside chats. They should feel free to reach out to us anytime if they think that they might be a good fit for a role at EngleHealth. They can reach out to us via careersglehealth.com or reach out to us directly as well. I would say LinkedIn and reaching out via our website or the the best ways.
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Brad
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time.
- [20:15]
Tai Wang
Awesome. This was fun. Thanks, Brett.
- [20:19]
Frontlines IO Host
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders Brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers, and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcast as a service.
- [20:43]
Brad
Mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.