How Angle Health built a unified data layer to make fully custom SMB health plans economically feasible at scale | Ty Wang

**Ty Wang** (0:00)
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.

**Brad** (0:13)
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.
Our guest today is Ty Wang, CEO and co-founder of Angle Health. Ty, welcome to the show.

**Ty Wang** (0:52)
Thanks Brad, it's great to be here.

**Brad** (0:53)
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?

**Ty Wang** (1:02)
It was an incredible experience. I loved 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 any given area, if you have the ability to learn, and I would say just the general aptitude to think from first principles. And I think it's actually a, that's a benefit 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 scratch, how would you do it right or better?

**Brad** (1:55)
And is that a mindset that you brought to the current company today? First principles approach, how do I rebuild from scratch?

**Ty Wang** (2:02)
Yeah, I think that is very much how we've built Angle 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 fundamentally what we're trying to do is rebuild the health care system and change the way that people fundamentally access health care here in the US.

**Brad** (2:23)
Easy vision. Tell us about the company. What's the company do?

**Ty Wang** (2:27)
I would say today we are really the first AI native, health plan and vertically integrated health care benefits platform where our core products themselves are fully custom health plan and health care 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 health care benefits and health care experiences for the employees of these small businesses. And also offer them some of the most transparent, predictable and stable rates costs for health care year over year.

**Brad** (3:11)
And in terms of distribution, are you going to direct these SMBs? Are you doing channel partners? What does that look like?

**Ty Wang** (3:17)
Yeah, it's all channel distribution. And I would say this is a big learning over the 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.