How to fix a 'broken industry' (w/ Brandon Weber – Nava Benefits, VTS, Hightower)

**Brandon Weber** (0:00)
There's a reason there's not 20 YC startups that have successfully penetrated X market. We just had to say no to a lot of things. We're like, no, how do we get smaller, basically? Which is kind of an ironic thing to say when you're trying to build a multi-billion dollar business. We were searching for sort of the soft underbelly of this marketplace. They were sort of holding the keys to the kingdom. We are on the cusp of just a thousand flowers blooming, re-imagining services with that sort of mindset. We are in a moment where the opportunity is not to incrementally approve what's being done there, but it is to deliver a multi-X, 5, 10X better product much more scalably and efficiently.
You're listening to The Startup Podcast. This is an educational episode.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:45)
Hi, I'm Yaniv Bernstein.

**Brandon Weber** (0:47)
Hi, I'm Brandon Weber.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:48)
Every founder gets the version of the same advice. Don't pick a fight with an entrenched industry. The incumbents have the relationships that regularly cover the deep accounts. You'll bleed out trying. It's one of the most interesting companies of the last decade got built ignoring that advice. They kicked it back at everyone said with unwinnable and they won it anyway. Brandon Weber is co-founder and CEO of Nava Benefits, a series C funded AI powered health benefits brokerage. Before Nava, Brandon co-founded Hightower in 2013, a commercial real estate startup and after merging with VTS in 2016, through to run over half of all the office buildings in the United States today.
Brandon seems to have perfected a repeatable founder playbook for breaking into entrenched industries and how AI is changing what's possible. All of which of course make them the ideal person to take us through today's topic. Brandon, welcome to The Startup Podcast.

**Brandon Weber** (1:41)
Thanks for having me. I'm pumped to be here.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (1:43)
What are the characteristics of a broken market that an startup founder can consider exploiting?

**Brandon Weber** (1:49)
For us, commercial real estate and now health care, I think there's a couple of big things that I think about. Number one is the status quo is bad and getting worse year over year. It's not marginally improving year over year, but slowly, it's actually getting worse. Where the constituents would say, this is a problem that feels to me, I'm looking for the burning platform opportunity because I know how hard the work is going to be ahead. We're focused on huge markets too.
My starting point is like, if it's going to take a long time to go make an impact, we have to just deeply believe that there is so much running room inside of that market that it's going to be worth shopping wood for as long as it's going to take. For me, in moving into healthcare specifically, I wanted those two things and a problem that I could look at, my daughter and my grandkids and say, I'm working on a problem that matters. There's a common thread through many of those industries that are broken and worthy of attacking. Many of them are relationship driven or owned industries where distribution is the value proposition in some ways. It's no coincidence that I've been effectively working in brokered industries for the last 18 years of my career. That creates a different dynamic when it comes to how do we actually go and attack that industry and attack that space. The status quo is actually the end customer is not the one being served.
There are the middlemen inside of that marketplace that are actually the ones that are serving each other. And we'll get into maybe how you go and attack that marketplace. But where there's a very big gap between the constituents that are making the money or taking the toll inside of that market and the actual end consumer or end customer is where I get really excited.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (3:39)
It feels like the key issue here is distribution. In a sense, the market's being captured by those middlemen who primarily serve their own interests. But it's not so easy to just say, oh, okay, healthcare is broken, so I'm going to launch a better healthcare organization and all the customers will come to me. Because what seems to be missing, I suppose, is distribution.

**Brandon Weber** (3:58)
Yeah, 100%. Healthcare is the most obviously broken marketplace that I think any one of us could think of. Like when you just point to a marketplace, which one feels obviously broken or rife with problems to solve its healthcare, when you double click on the healthcare marketplace, you realize it's like a five-layer cake of constituents sitting between the healthcare consumer and the medical professional that's providing healthcare. There's a real complexity there in unwinding what each of those constituents or stakeholders are doing and attacking the right one. The broker in these marketplaces where they're distribution driven, they really control the flow of goods and distribution of solutions, and the opportunity to change the way in our world, where the way that the broker actually works, was the big opportunity, the big unlock.