You can just do things

I went from knowing nothing about healthcare to launching a health insurance. Despite all the rejection along the way. Here's a story to the crazy ones to keep on going.

At the start of the year I was lost, but committed. I knew I had spent a lot of time working on things that I did not truly care about and was more focused on making it than staying true to myself. Even before making the next step from my last startup I knew I wanted to focus on something that was truly me. Something that would make me happy no matter when it worked or not.

When I started my sabbatical in February this year I knew I wanted to do something that was truly me. Something where it feels hard to others, but trivial to me. It was easiest to follow ideas that have stayed with me for years and health optimization was the most obvious choice for me. I have gone through a journey of always being very aware of the inputs to my health and trying my best trying to optimize the outputs. Over the years I have developed habits that have helped me achieve peak performance energy, motivation and fulfillment without much effort. I knew I wanted to help others achieve the same. It was easy for me, but I knew many others where struggling with it. I knew I had a secret that I needed to share with others to help them reach greatness. It was the impact I want to have on the world. To help more people reach their greatest potential.

My journey quickly led me to explore the space of wellness apps and employee benefits that encourage people to reach peak productivity. The trickiest part for me was always how to provide people the tools to make the journey easier and natural. Wearables and wellness classes are all things people have to pay out of pocket meaning only a small part of the population will ever have access to them. Employee benefits such as mental health apps etc reach more scale, but it’s always harder to justify the spend as the employers when the performance improvements and better retention is questionable. Thus, my journey led me to an inevitable employer spend that I had been so frustrated about at my last company, which is health insurance.

I had to pick a health insurance plan for my team at my last company. Trying to provide the best benefits, I asked AI, searched Reddit and asked fellow founders - there was no one option for health insurance that caters for startup needs. Not any smarter, I picked the most expensive health insurance plan for my team. Everything broke. Insurance cards arrived months late. Medical procedures got denied. Our assigned PCPs didn’t exist. Preventive care wasn’t covered. The provider search didn’t work. I’d paid premium prices for a non-existent product.

It became clear that if I wanted to provide the largest amount of people access to preventive health and help them live the most fulfilling lives, the solution was starting a new health insurance company. The people get the awesome benefits, employers don’t have to pay more than they currently do. Next, how to start a health insurance company?

In March, I started talking to people in the industry and learning as much as I could. Why do the existing insurance companies suck so much. Why don’t companies vote with their wallets? Why are there so few options in California and New York? Why is preventive care not covered? And obviously, why are the plans so expensive for generally healthy, young teams?

I learned every book I found about the health insurance market. I read books and articles about regulation and why the market worked the way it did. I read a book how you can reduce healthcare costs by not paying your hospital bills. I read a book that described how Obamacare was passed and which parties lobbied for which provisions. I read a book about how it came to be that health insurance ended up becoming an employer-sponsored benefit. I talked to health insurance experts and slowly started to catch up to them. I sounded knowledgeable. At some point someone said “you’re one of the few person that understands why American healthcare system is so broken”. I felt like I had become an insider.

In May, I started talking to investors about my vision to provide every American access to unlimited preventive health. I was so excited. They were not. Investors hate insurance businesses. They did not care that I am not taking underwriting risk. They did not understand the why now. They did not believe in the team, which was me. They said I don’t have any healthcare background. They asked why would you succeed where Oscar and Pearl failed. They did not believe in the distribution model. They did not believe in the market size. Despite the market being the largest part of the US economy.

Rejection was plentiful. I wavered and lost belief myself in what I was doing, but I could not give up. I knew how much I had hated my health insurance. How I was willing to pay for a premium product and how that premium product did not exist. I feel like the world was against me. However, even in the darkest hour, I had support from a few that never wavered. There were friends. There was my family. And there were my potential customers.

Customers. Whenever I told founders like me what I am working on, they got visibly excited. They loved the mission and they felt the pain. They wanted the product. Now. Without asking how much it costs. That gave me the confidence that I have seen the future. I have a secret that the rest of the world does not yet know. I knew I was right, despite most people around me not believing me.

The first conversation where it clicked for me was in San Fransisco. I was at a Nordic founders event and told another founder that I am building a new type of health insurance plan for startups. He immediately became curious. He told me a story how his emergency department visit bill was denied, despite having a great employer-sponsored plan. He told me his employees have no clue how to find providers in the network and avoid care due to that. He was beyond excited about there being a better way how to do insurance. His passion for something that was still an idea in my head showed me that I am truly onto something that people care about.

Then I had more conversations with other founders. People told me how they did not care which plan they had. They did not know which carrier they have, what their premium is or even where their insurance card is. They knew the product they had purchased was useless for them unless they get into an accident. Anything that they actually cared about was not covered by insurance. More and more conversations would end with “When can I sign up for this?” without asking me how much it would even cost.

So, I kept going. I kept going because I knew this had to exist. I knew this is the largest problem for me to work on right now. This is my life mission.

I also realized this was the point where I had quit or pivoted in my previous startup adventures. When the going got tough, I had looked for a way out. I had looked for a way out since the world did not agree with me. This time was different though. I knew I was onto a secret. My perspective customers were pulling the product out of me.

Fast forward to June. I decide to put the fundraising behind me and learn everything there is to learn about health insurance. I enrolled in health insurance broker courses and learned every regulation and rule there is out there. I completed 40 hours of studying separately for California and New York. I passed the insurance exams in both states with flying colors and finally became a legally licensed health insurance broker. I could finally start helping startups find the best suitable health insurance plan. I learned about their pain and helped them the best I could. My secret sauce was being a licensed broker in an old-school industry AND understanding the needs of startups. A unique combination very few others have.

I found an engineer to help me build the brand and consumer app. I found a partner for managing prescription drugs. I found a partner for managing claims processes. I found a partner for pricing the stop-loss policies. I found a partner for giving our members unlimited access to primary and urgent care. It’s all possible. You just need to keep on going. I talked to ten reinsurance partners before the first one was willing to take a chance on me. Most companies in the insurance industry hate innovation. They want tried and tested. It took me persistence to convince a single carrier to do business with me. They have doing business for 40 years the same way, but they found my idea compelling enough to take a chance on me!

“A year ago, I would have quit by now. When investors said no, I always found a way out. I’d tell myself ‘the market isn’t ready’ or ‘the timing is wrong.’ I’d pivot to something easier.

Not this time. Because this time I had something I never had before: customers begging me to build it.

When a founder tells you ‘I want this now, I don’t care what it costs’ - that’s not feedback, that’s a command. When three teams start using your product before it’s finished - that’s not luck, that’s validation.

I became a licensed broker because customers needed it. I built partnerships because customers demanded it. I’m launching in January 2026 because customers are waiting.

You can just do things. Not because you believe in yourself - I’ve believed in wrong things before. You can just do things when customers are pulling the product out of you. That’s the only permission that matters.

Don’t wait for investors. Don’t wait for advisors. Don’t wait for the industry to accept you. Find the people with the problem. If they say ‘yes, now,’ everything else is just logistics.” First, it’s impossible. Then, it’s inevitable.