Will Young

I want to change the world.

Lambda School, Oklo, Boom, SchoolHouse, SpaceX

Healthcare in the US is so broken. It is this big hairy problem that most people are too afraid to touch. My co-founder Nathan & I got excited by the scale of the problem and we figured out a unique approach by building a product for small businesses we think can really change the system for the better in the long run. It's an exciting thing to work on every day.

The frustrating thing at the start of a health insurance venture is getting past a series of very difficult chicken and egg problems. For example, customers want to see a track record before signing up but you can't get a track record without customers. Same with reinsurers - they want to know that we are good at managing costs, but how can we prove that without a history of doing it? Lots of things like that. You basically end up crawling through the desert for a long time before you find an oasis.

Two things are tied for most rewarding. 1) being surrounded by creative, passionate people at work every day and 2) seeing customers embrace your product. Basically, I want to feel like I've created a net positive impact on the world around me and those are two very concrete daily reminders that we are doing good work at Sana.

They aren't hungry enough for negative feedback. There are a million ways to fail and only a handful of ways to succeed. Avoiding all the failure modes is hard work. You need to be paranoid and relentless at uncovering weaknesses in your model and fixing them.

1) Focus on the customer always. They will tell you what you need to build, even if you have to read between the lines.

2) Keep your bar for talent very high. The ROI on talented people almost always exceeds my expectations. It's worth the investment to find and keep people.

3) Never stop learning. You need to reinvent yourself over and over again as a founder as your startup moves between stages. You can't get stuck.