52 – The Future of Health Benefits – Noah Lang’s Quest for Equitable Healthcare

Marcus: [00:00:00] All right. Welcome to the show. My very good friend, Noah Lang, who is the founder and CEO of stride health. Noah, welcome to hell further.

Noah Lang: Thanks for having me, Marcus. It’s fun.

Marcus: No, we, uh, have had a lot of fun over several seminars. Um, just getting to know each other. And I, I so respect, first of all, you’re an entrepreneur in the healthcare industry, one of the hardest things you can do as an entrepreneur in America.

Marcus: This industry is so upside down. And so, you know, you’re, you’re not just, um, You know, you’re, you’re not just working to make things better. You, you certainly have to have a little bit of a revolutionary streak to, to try to be an entrepreneur in this system, because it’s a, it’s a gauntlet. It’s super Byzantine.

Marcus: And, uh, the reason why you’re on the show today, besides being just, um, cool as hell [00:01:00] is you, you, you’ve hit a real milestone and we’re, we’re not going to get to that right away. We’re going to talk about, you know, this company that you’ve built, why you’ve built it, and then we’ll talk about this milestone that is not just a milestone for your company, but also.

Marcus: Um, a milestone for the future of employer benefits in America. Um, but can we just start by, by talking about Stride Health, the origin story, like how did you decide you wanted to create this company? And then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll kind of go from there.

Noah Lang: Sure. Well, the good news, you said you have to have a little revolutionary streak.

Noah Lang: Maybe it’s a little crazy streak too. I had no idea what I was getting into because this is my first job in healthcare. And I think that played a big role in my willingness to dive headfirst into it. Um, you know, at Stride, what it’s become is we’re trying to build a benefit system in this country for individuals in a country where the benefit system is built for companies.

Noah Lang: But it started with, uh, the Affordable Care Act. And I got curious, uh, post Affordable Care Act about how these people were actually going to go get their coverage. And I just happened to [00:02:00] be picking my head up and sticking it into healthcare around the time where healthcare. gov was imploding. And, uh, uh, you know, shout out to the US digital service for helping them get over that hurdle and creating a very stable platform, but at the time, not only was the government website not working, but I don’t really think people want to go to the government for recommendations and to make decisions about their financial life and their health life.

Noah Lang: And so the butt of stride, the initial kind of version of stride was we built the recommendation engine, an algorithm and a really elegant user experience to help people. Who didn’t get job based benefits, make a smart investment decision. In their health. For me, it was me coming to a personal realization.

Noah Lang: Like I just cared about healthcare. I decided I want to spend my career in healthcare, but I I’m not clinical. And as I started looking at the spectrum of healthcare consumption and all the broken transactions at a consumer level, which are not news to anyone, it struck me as really odd that no one is really helping to handle people, especially those who are on their own through decision of how am I going to pay [00:03:00] for all this?

Noah Lang: Right. Insurance is it’s a payment mechanism. Bye. And secondly, we have this totally new marketplace where anyone can get covered, thank God, regardless of their gender, their illness or their health. Um, and yet you, you don’t have any revolution to use your word of like how people are going to make these decisions.

Noah Lang: Um, it has existed in other areas of financial decision making, robo advisors to plan your retirement for our net worth individuals, right? But not for the everyday American who is going to have to pick their own health coverage. And lucky for them, could get government assistance in paying for that coverage.

Noah Lang: So that was the first bud of Strada. Like, can we just make this an easy decision and not have it be, you know, uh, Marcus is going to pick this one because the premium looks like it’s 30 bucks less than that one. Right. But instead, Marcus has got a fair understanding of how much healthcare he’s going to consume this year based on his conditions, his prescriptions.

Noah Lang: A little bit of forecasting based on Marcus’s demographic and where he lives and his age, [00:04:00] um, healthier than the average, uh, but, you know, figuring out what your personal healthcare forecast is, helping you figure out what you might qualify for in terms of tax credits, total premiums, and then baking that all into a really elegant UX.

Noah Lang: And that was it. We just want to see if we can make that happen, right? Can we help you make a basic. Or what should be a basic financial decision more easily. And our, our really rich goal was like, can we make it delightful? Which sounds silly to anybody in healthcare. Uh, but that was the, but that was the first starting point of stride.

Marcus: So, uh, I think the thing that I love about that is, um, well, there are two things, one as a general investment thesis, I have realized that better matching in every way you can think about it in healthcare is a win. There’s so many opportunities to better match individuals with. The services, the people, the information that they need [00:05:00] and so much, you know, people talk about care navigation.

Marcus: It’s so much deeper than that, right? And so you focusing on something that is so fundamental to our health care experience as patients, um, citizens of the United States as a result of the Affordable Care Act, but not really clinical is, is wonderful. And, and I love that you are creating, you know, effectively like a.

Marcus: You know, a graph picture of me and saying, Hey, you know, there’s no way you would be able to take all these data points as an individual and then do this search on your own. So how do we then make a much, much better search engine, a much better matching system to kind of connect you based on who you are with the best options for you?

Marcus: Um, I do think that that’s, you know, and not just boil it down to premium, which is, it doesn’t tell you anything. I mean, you know, it doesn’t tell you anything

Noah Lang: and, and, you know, I try to do it myself. I’m a relatively healthy person. It’s been a decade now too, but I, I tend to hurt myself a little bit and I tried to [00:06:00] figure it out.

Noah Lang: You know, I want to plan for an MRI each year and I want to plan for some emergencies. Like I tried to build my own spreadsheet and I couldn’t even get my hands on the data as an individual. And so I just felt like an unfair decision that we’re asking people to make entirely on their own or even with the help of a human who doesn’t have a great computer, frankly, doing the math and backing it up.

Noah Lang: Um, and that probably existed throughout healthcare, right? I talk to people every single day who are making an employer benefits decision and can’t pick between the three options they have, let alone the hundred options you might have on, uh, in the ACA marketplaces, but we stay pretty committed to that.

Noah Lang: Individual. So the people who don’t have an employer providing a second or tertiary safety net, um, even though we’ve had a lot of knocks on our door to use that same recommendation system for large employers or for large payers. Um, but the kind of the next great realization for us, I thought it was, honestly, I thought it was building a healthcare company.

Noah Lang: And the next place we’re marching to was great. You have health insurance. Let’s help you use it. We do some of that today, right? Let me pick a doctor. [00:07:00] Let me help you figure out what happens if you’re in the ER. Um, and we’re really. Found us building a company around a system, right? The healthcare system.

Noah Lang: And I had this realization or I got whacked over the head by, I remember one specific time was sitting in Long Island city, New York. And I, I met, I’ve spoken to speaking to a thousand Uber drivers and I probably spoke personally to 40 of them that day. And they very quickly started opening their worlds up to us and said, this is great, you’ve made that we make this healthcare decision.

Noah Lang: How can you help me with these 15 other problems I have? And I kept hearing that every single day from the people who are showing up and knocking on our door was I’ve got a gap here in my life in my financial livelihood because of the way I work Right and when you parsed apart all these issues, it was really about We have a benefit system that’s stapled to traditional full time W 2 work.

Noah Lang: And you’ve got, you know, today over 60 million Americans who are freelancing in some way, shape, or form. You’ve got self employed Americans. I’m the son of [00:08:00] a solo practitioner attorney and an independent realtor. Like my parents! You might not think of them as gig workers, but they had to figure out the stuff on their own when they should just be focusing on their trade.

Noah Lang: Um, and you have, you know, small businesses who can’t kind of, uh, take time or effort or have the capital to go and bargain or buy for group benefits for their workers. And so it seemed like there was this moment in time I’ll never forget where like we have a choice to make. We’re either going to be a company built around healthcare or we’re going to be a company built around healthcare.

Noah Lang: a type of person and it was, it turns out it was a very easy decision, but it was pretty fraught. One of the time was like, we need to build a company that is focused on solving people who don’t get job based benefits, regardless of how they work, the level, the playing field, because the benefit system we built in this country is about 75 years old.

Noah Lang: And when, when we started delivering benefits in this way, the average American had one job for the rest of their life. So it made sense that their pension was stapled to their job and that their healthcare was stapled to their job. And you know, sometimes their [00:09:00] housing was stapled to their job, but we’re still living in that world.

Noah Lang: And that’s what like, that’s what gets me up out of bed already. That’s what kind of grinds with me. And like the Affordable Care Act was a great first step in making health benefits no longer dependent on your job. But we still have just about every single benefit. Either dependent on your job or unfairly kind of set up.

Noah Lang: If you don’t have a employer doing the bargaining for you. And that’s like, that’s kind of become our mission. Now it’s a level of playing field and give people who work in whatever way they so choose. Access to the same or better benefits starting with healthcare as a foundation that you might get in a traditional kind of traditional in quotation marks, um, a full time job.

Noah Lang: And I could have chuckled at, cause it’s like, we talk about the future of work, but it’s the, it’s the now of work. I wanted to

Marcus: actually. Go there for a minute because I’m sure you have some more stats. You know, you talked about the 60 million. Um, we, we all live in a world where quite [00:10:00] frankly, we depend on these gig workers.

Marcus: The easiest place to point to is, you know, your Uber or your Lyft drivers. Um, but I, I think if we really thought about it, there would be many, many more instances where. We just sort of take for granted that the infrastructure of our day to day lives are there. And what’s underpinning it is, is gig workers, you know, and I think that when you look at how layoffs are happening, the, the continued proliferation of, you know, technology, that’s going to continue to, and not just AI, I mean, a variety of different ways, you know, just, just automation, just the ability to do things with less labor.

Marcus: We’re only going to trend more and more and more in this direction for a variety of reasons. Um, you know, we’re going to continue to sort of grow, uh, the, the, the rise of the independent entrepreneur effectively, right? I mean, the independent entrepreneur, right? Who is a one or two person, you know, kind of business, uh, maybe one person and a partner, maybe they’re doing consulting on designing, maybe they’re, you know, Uh, you know, [00:11:00] doing fashion work.

Marcus: Maybe they’re they run a food truck. Um, you know, so food trucks is a great example. I mean, uh, you know, every thursday, there’s a whole lineup of food trucks right in the back of our, of our building here. And everyone loves it. Everyone in the neighborhood, uh, you know, downtown Nashville goes to this street to get their lunch every single thursday.

Marcus: It’s part of the fabric. But like all those people, they run everything on, you know, striper square and they’re, they’re, you know, They’re small businesses. I mean, you know, there’s there’s small businesses. So what like what kind of numbers just to kind of give some shape to to where we are today. It’s not the future of work.

Marcus: It’s the now of work. What kind of what kind of numbers just kind of help us ground in that reality.

Noah Lang: Yeah, I mean, I’ll share a couple that kind of come to the front of my mind right now. And most every day is you’ve got 64 million Americans who are working independently in some way, shape, or form. That is a spectrum, right?

Noah Lang: There are some people who are very much like high net worth earners who are running themselves as a solopreneur, um, instead of their business. Yeah. You’ve [00:12:00] got folks like my sister, who is a freelance designer, always has been, always will be right. Um, and you’ve got a mass of folks. Who are now working as independent contractors on a growing set of marketplaces or platforms like technology has made this easier than ever to work.

Noah Lang: However you see fit right on our platform. We’ve helped over 4 million Americans now in some form of. Making benefits decisions, saving on their taxes, and now we’ve got a new product for them soon. Um, and 70 percent of them do two or more jobs. So it isn’t even just that like, more people are working as an entrepreneur or soloist or as an independent contractor.

Noah Lang: They’re usually doing one or more things. And a lot of folks we meet are like, they’re trying to break away from traditional work. They’re doing something as an interstitial layer of work. And then their goal is like, I want to launch a business one day. Right. And I’m sure you’ve been in a hundred different Ubers who’ve had drivers who have told you the same story all the time.

Noah Lang: There’s no gradation of like benefits though. Right. There’s [00:13:00] like, right on or you’re off. So it’s real. Um, I’ll get to some more stats about an announcement we’re going to make in a moment. But I think everyone kind of knows it, uh, and yet we fail to recognize that it’s just the way people work today. Um, the Department of Labor came out with a new rule, uh, around employment classification, uh, uh, just a few weeks ago.

Noah Lang: And the number one year they reference in benchmarking all of their recommendations, decisions, and rules is 1947. It’s like how many gig workers were there in 1947? Like how many people were working independently? Nobody, right? You couldn’t. Um, and so like we just, it’s just such like a chasm between the reality of millions, tens of millions of Americans working this way and it’s truly going to be more.

Noah Lang: The forecast are 90 million by 2027 which is not that far away. Wow.

Marcus: So, so, so effectively 50 percent growth in the next three years.

Noah Lang: Yeah. And, and the, the other, I’ll understand, I’ll share with you, I mean, small businesses continue to grow and thrive. I see negative headlines. I [00:14:00] see positive headlines every day, but small businesses are shape shifting too.

Noah Lang: Kaiser Family Foundation recently published some data around benefits for small businesses. Mm hmm. Over the last two decades, we’ve gone from almost two thirds of small businesses offering benefits, which is still not a hundred percent down to 50%.

Marcus: Yeah,

Noah Lang: sure. And it’s like, this isn’t just like an independent work gig work thing.

Noah Lang: It’s like independent work, small businesses. Like if you’re not working for a mega corp, how are you supposed to get your benefits? Yeah. And maybe you shouldn’t feel so locked into mega corp, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus: And look, I mean, I, I run a small business, um, and I, I can tell you two things about that. One, um, when, when you run a small business and you have a large ownership percentage, you’re really not an employee.

Marcus: Um, and so you don’t really, you’re not really supposed to do a W 2, um, you know, and so you’re kind of out there on your own. And then the second thing [00:15:00] is, uh, It has gotten harder and harder and harder to provide respectable benefits to your employees as a small business owner. Um, you know, I, I think they said that the average, uh, cost of, of health insurance for an employer was going up somewhere between seven to 8%.

Marcus: Um, but I can tell you for our firm, when we went out and shopped, it was all double digit increases year over year. Um, and, and then, you know, you’re shopping that and you’re presenting that to your employees and they’re like, uh, seriously, like, you know, and, and, you know, and it’s a big name plan, right? You know, it’s a big name plan.

Marcus: It’s not that impressive of a plan, quite frankly, it’s, it’s just gotten to be so expensive and so difficult for small businesses to effectively, um, provide a benefit that is viewed as a benefit, right? You know, as opposed to, uh, okay, well, this is what I have to take.

Noah Lang: It’s either that or employees have no idea.[00:16:00]

Noah Lang: We’re, we’re fairly generous on benefits. So our, our premiums went up 12 percent this year. We’re fairly, fairly young and healthy start, you know, tech startup. Um, we, we, you know, we can run some of the costs for our employees, so they’re not really aware, which is also a healthcare cost issue, but, um, you know, it’s.

Noah Lang: It’s growing for small businesses, premiums are growing at over twice the rate as the average ACA plan. Which, you know, a few years ago, the ACA was having some massive spikes in premium growth. It’s very stable now. And so it kind of begs this, you know, existential question of like, are we really better off with a group employer benefits construct?

Noah Lang: Or Can we continue to grow the, the individual marketplaces with a greater risk pool, contain more of those costs and save people money, um, at the end of the day, while also giving them continuity over their, their lifetime or their professional lifetime.

Marcus: And by the way, like here’s the other thing, um, save people money.

Marcus: But like, how about save the [00:17:00] business money, which makes the business more stable to be able to pay the people more and to grow the business more effectively. Right. I mean, it’s anyway. Um, but let’s, I think what we’re going to talk about in terms of the announcement that you made last week and the one you’re doing this week as well.

Marcus: Um, what stuck out to me when, when you shared it in the group chat, the When I was reading the press release was where the words portable benefits, right? Because that is always the super sticky part. And quite frankly, like if you’ve ever, for any reason, had to let let an employee go, right. I mean, you actually care more about their ability to have continuity of their benefits than them finding the next position.

Marcus: Right. I mean, that, that, that is like the more, the bigger concern. And so, um, okay. Portable benefits is just, sounds amazing. And also sounds like a unicorn in America, but somehow you’re starting to crack the code on that. And that’s, that’s, that’s really why I wanted to talk to you [00:18:00] and have you like explain what is this thing that you’ve kind of figured out and, and how does it work and, and.

Marcus: Why is it working in the States where you, where you, where you’ve sort of found partnerships and just break this all down to us.

Noah Lang: Absolutely. Yeah. So portal benefits as a concept is kind of simple, right? Just benefits you can take with you and you’re right. Whether someone was leaving by, you know, choice or, or involuntarily.

Noah Lang: It’s a really dramatic impact on their lives that they have to change their health plans, pick new doctors, maybe switch even prescription drugs because they’re switching formulas, or pay up too much money, in my opinion, to stay on COBRA. Yeah, right, right. They’ve got paying COBRA administration costs on top of that.

Noah Lang: Seems true of retirement, right? Why should you have to roll over your 401k to an IRA and deal with all these machinations of shifting your financial foundation? When you just had a massive change in your life was changing a job, whether you chose to do it or not. Um, it’s broken, right? It just doesn’t work well for anyone.

Noah Lang: There’s another layer that, [00:19:00] that I’m personally very passionate about, even as we become kind of more like a financial services company and less than a health care company, which is like. Um, I think this has bred a sick care system, um, where people are, if the average American has 12 jobs in their life, not staying on any one health plan for very long.

Noah Lang: And so health plans are taking the role of, let me treat Marcus, just the minimus amount and control costs while he’s on my plan. But in two and a half years, he’s going to be on someone else’s plan. Seems a little short sighted. It is. Um, and I think that’s one of the fundamental. Underpinnings of why we have a sick care system is there’s no continuity of coverage.

Noah Lang: So I have a personal dream tied to overall portability benefits, which is like if we keep continuity. Of care and responsibility, right? Where practitioners and carriers are actually managing your risk over your lifetime. Boy, like I think of a much better shot at a wellcare system. Uh, and this is my, my pie in the sky idea for you right now is like, what if I [00:20:00] could buy my Medicare insurance?

Noah Lang: 20 years in advance that my insurer would treat me differently. Yes. And so like, I just think the fact that we don’t have any portability and that these things are stapled to our jobs, it has ripple effects probably has similar ripple effects on the retirement sector and others as well. There’s big ripple effects on our healthcare system.

Noah Lang: So for me, it’s not just a, Oh, the gig economy lacks benefits. No gig economy is a clean slate. So we can kind of do more and be more experimental and make faster progress there. But this applies to all types of benefits and work. So nine years ago. I wrote a little manifesto, I was very dramatic, I was feeling angsty as a founder, you know, and uh, dramatic foggy picture up, and basically advocated for a new system where regardless of employee classification, W2, 1099, I don’t care, self employed, that we should have a system where anyone can contribute to your benefits.

Noah Lang: So Marcus can work for one or more or no [00:21:00] companies and anyone can contribute to his benefits and he can then allocate what those benefits are and take him with him wherever he goes. The ACA was kind of the first half step towards a portable benefit because I can go have the same ACA health plan across many different part time jobs or even small businesses, right?

Noah Lang: I can keep some continuity there. What’s been missing is what I’d call employer contributions and we, I kind of like to talk a lot about. I want to shift this through a system from employer control to employer contributions, right? Put money in, but don’t tell me which health plans I can have and which retirement option I can choose from.

Noah Lang: Right? Let me keep the ones I like. Yeah. Um, and, um, and in the 1099 economy, there’s a big, even bigger issue, which is it’s not even employer control. There’s a bunch of regulatory gray zones. It’s the key 1099 marketplaces, platforms, even just traditional organizations, right? Fortune 100 organizations from offering some form of benefits or [00:22:00] benefits payments to their own workers, um, because there’s risks that it triggers a reclassification, right?

Noah Lang: And so this has been one of the big friction points in this has taken me a decade to kind of chip away at what we need in this country is just. More innovative policymaking. We need clarity on what, why someone’s classified in the way that they are. And this is what the Department of Labor came out a few weeks ago and said like, let’s look at 1947.

Noah Lang: Let’s see how Let’s see how we should define this. And the result is like at a federal level, we live in a world where there’s like 20 different tests to figure out how markets should be classified. Okay. And a lot of them is like, are you offering benefits? I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be clear. I think there should be a test for classification, right?

Noah Lang: If I’m controlling your work and when you show up and how you do your work, that’s right. Great. Right. Like that’s right. I should be on the hook

Marcus: for a lot

Noah Lang: of stuff. Totally. Let’s do the house and the wise and the employer risk as a dictator, but offering benefits. Why should that shift someone’s employment?

Noah Lang: And the reality is [00:23:00] like, we’re not sure that it does, but maybe it will. And that’s created a lot of friction in the space. So one of the things I’ve been advocating. For and waiting for and writing dramatic manifestos and hope of was that we create a system where it’s simply not a determinant. You can offer benefits to anyone 1099 W2 or, you know, or 10 W2 and not have it trigger anything.

Noah Lang: Let’s just, let’s remove that bear and let’s let companies innovate. Let’s let companies contribute and help their workers. Hasn’t happened. Um, in some states there’s been some, uh, either ballot initiatives, uh, Proposition 22 in California passed, which created a little bit of a requirement for gig companies, just taxi network and delivery network companies, uh, to provide health coverage stipends, some audit reimbursement and some occupational action and coverage, kind of like a half step in the right direction.

Noah Lang: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s legislation and a half dozen other states get a little nerdy on the policy stuff, but to set the stage of like This is a moment it’s finally happened. [00:24:00] Um, and it’s probably gonna happen in great ways in some States and in mediocre ways in other

Marcus: States.

Noah Lang: But we’re lacking that clarity.

Noah Lang: And so the big announcement that we made last week was that in the state of Pennsylvania, we had governor, uh, Shapiro stand up and say, I think in our state, it should be okay for gig economy companies to give the work, give money to their workers. to allow their workers to pick their own benefits. Like, let’s make that okay.

Noah Lang: Uh, and DoorDash came in and said, we want, we want to be the first to do this. And so we’re gonna give a pro rated kind of portion of earnings, additional earnings to workers and let them put it in stride save account, which is our third product, our kind of third pillar, healthcare, taxes was next, I kind of skipped over that, and now save, um, which allows workers to set up basically goals and withholding to allocate.

Noah Lang: Their money into the right set of benefits. So we have for the first time ever, a governor coming out in [00:25:00] support of portable benefits and saying, this is okay. It’s a, it’s a good new innovative model. Let’s see how it works. Right. Let’s not try and perfect it, but let’s see how this works. We have a major gig company saying we’re going to step up to the plate and put money in the pot for our workers to get their own benefits.

Noah Lang: Um, and then we got to deliver on a long decade long dream of mine, which is. To build really kind of all the pieces of a paycheck that have been unbundled health care, taxes, your savings into a single system where workers are getting their own money contributions from the companies that they do work for and from the government, by the way, in the form of tax credits, so they can set aside money for health coverage and make sure they’ve got it and it’s paid for, um, they can, uh, they can set aside some money to save for PTO or rainy day savings, which by the way, okay.

Noah Lang: 63 percent of Americans can’t cover a 500 emergency. Um, and even set aside money for things like retirement, saving for the long term. So we’ve rebuilt a little bini benefit system, [00:26:00] but you needed a big company to step up and say, we’re going to do this. And we’re going to leave from the front. You needed a governor to provide regulatory clarity.

Noah Lang: Um, And to me, it’s just a massive moment and I hope more people follow. Um, this is not, doesn’t have to be just an app based gig economy thing. They have to be the first movers, a little more bold. Um, but I think it’s super promising step and we need the federal

Marcus: government to follow their lead too. It’s a massive deal.

Marcus: So just talking a little bit more about how it works. Um, and this, this, I think gets into the stride product. So, um, if I am a gig worker or maybe we even take that off of it. Um, I’m I’m a, I’m a stride customer. I have an account with, with stride health is, is stride. The thing that enables my portability is, is that the thing that I take with me wherever I go and, um, it’s handling my taxes, it’s, it’s helped.

Marcus: It’s helping me on a year over year basis, make sure I’ve got the right health insurance plan. And now it’s got this savings account that is cleared in certain [00:27:00] States with certain companies who have agreed to do it, to contribute to. You know, my ability to take care of my health, but really to, to do what I think is necessary in, in, uh, within certain bounds is, is that basically like how, how it works?

Marcus: Yeah.

Noah Lang: Yeah. So we’ve put all those pieces together in one place. You know, when it comes to healthcare, we’ve, you know, this is, this is our core kind of product. And what we launched with is we help you make a personalized decision on picking our health plan. Sure. I also skipped over this a little, but we have a really interesting integration with healthcare.

Noah Lang: gov. We partner closely with HHS and we, you can actually, Marcus can show up at stride. I can quickly ping the federal data hub and verify his identity. Yeah. Yeah. I can go claim eligibility for and drawing tax credits to pay for coverage in real time and net amount. And so like, you know, almost two thirds of the gig workers we got covered last year paid less than 50 bucks a month for a fully qualified health plan.

Noah Lang: That’s on stride, right? Their workforce introduced them to us. So [00:28:00] we work with Amazon, Uber, Instacart, DoorDash. We also work with like, you know, traditional gig economy, as I like to say, Red Lobster, the gap, Olive Garden, you know, no matter how you work, your workforce can introduce you to stride, but it’s stride is yours.

Noah Lang: Take it with you. They can sprinkle more benefits on top and some do so you can pick your health coverage, bring on dental vision, life accident, disability, both the full set of benefits there. Those are yours. Yeah. We, we then layer in, uh, our app, uh, and taxes where if you’re an independent worker, it matters a lot that you know how much you earn.

Noah Lang: Um, and what you’re spending to make that money. I mentioned my, my, uh, moment, my spark in Long Island city. Um, a lot of the workers I talked to, a lot of the Uber drivers I met that day, actually they didn’t know how much they were making except for what they made last week and the week before.

Marcus: Wow. They had

Noah Lang: no idea how much they were spending.

Noah Lang: Yeah. And so we built a basic tool. I mean, but of

Marcus: course, but of course,

Noah Lang: right. Yeah. It’s week to week, month to month and massive fluctuations. [00:29:00] And so, uh, we built an app that helped them track their income, helped them identify their expenses. We track your miles even. So if you’re an Uber driver or door dasher, or you’re a realtor driving house to house, track your miles, we’ll help you to adopt them, but it’s giving you a home base to make these financial decisions.

Noah Lang: And then next that we launched safe, which allows you to set money aside for those health insurance premiums, or set aside money that cover your taxes. Right. Kind of build in withholdings for the worker, um, but then also make these kind of savings based decisions. So set aside money for the long term or for short term.

Noah Lang: Uh, and so it’s kind of, that is our product suite. You can all get it in one place, which is really critical for this workforce. Uh, and on top of that, The company you work for and in this case, yes, as you described it, um, you know, launching with gig economy companies in select states, but any organization 1099 or w two can put money into this account.

Noah Lang: Uh, and then we’ve, we have basically have a preset set of. Quote, unquote benefits that you can [00:30:00] pick from and allocate that money into. So Mark’s, it can say, great. So cool. That that’s 50 bucks a month over here. Yeah. 50 bucks. I want to hear from my health insurance premiums. We link that account back to your health insurance and your premiums are paid for every single month, right?

Noah Lang: Like automating it for workers who have plenty of other stuff to worry about.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. I, well, I mean, not just a, I mean, you’re, you’re automating it, but you’re also keeping them compliant. Sure. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because the money is not there for you to go, you know, um, I don’t know, like go to a theme park with.

Marcus: Right. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s there for, for specific things. Right. That’s right. And, and there’s,

Noah Lang: you know, we’ve created, uh, there, there is one benefit goal that you can set up, which is PTO. Right. Uh, I can’t remember if I talked to you about this, but you know, I’m a, I’m a son of a lawyer, sole practitioner, attorney, small town bar, yeah, small town in Orlando, it’s become a big town.

Noah Lang: But whenever we went on family vacation, I could always tell my dad was like sort of enjoying himself, sort of a little stressed [00:31:00] out, right? Because he wasn’t building any hours. Yeah. And the same is true for this, these workers, so they need. What I call synthetic PTO, they need some other option to save up money to replace income, or in some cases they can use that to cover some costs, right?

Noah Lang: And so you have to think about benefits differently, like taxes as a benefit. This isn’t something we think about in traditional W2 world. Right. Um, and so we’ve, we’ve kind of re imagined these different types of benefits into a system that makes sense for, uh, individuals. And we have, I will say a lot more to learn.

Noah Lang: Um, a lot of benefits we want to add. But the key is simplicity and automation for the individual.

Marcus: So I want to go back to Pennsylvania because, um, things like that don’t just happen. And you talked about more innovative policy work and, uh, you know, I, I know that you, you’re very knowledgeable about the policy, but I mean, most healthcare entrepreneurs, you know, they complain about the policy, but they’re not actually necessarily [00:32:00] rolling up their sleeves and getting engaged in.

Marcus: affecting change at the policy level. Um, I mean, can you talk a little bit about, you know, maybe high level, not necessarily blow by blow, but what did it take to get to the moment where last week actually occurred? Like as an entrepreneur, you know, I mean, you know, you said it was a decade long dream, but you didn’t just dream it.

Marcus: You did some work. Uh, you know, you made some calls, you send some emails, you got on some planes, like, Like frame that up a little bit for me.

Noah Lang: We’re supposed to talk about how the sausage is made. I thought no one wanted to hear about that. Um, I’ll, I’ll speak. So some of this, you know, was work that we did.

Noah Lang: And some of this was great work that our partners did and the workforces have done. Um, I’ll just share a personal story. Like I was not historically interested in policy necessarily, but when I started stride, a couple things happened. One, I started going to DC and realizing that like, First of all, healthcare is a mystery and people don’t [00:33:00] really deeply understand it.

Noah Lang: But I started this mission of like, can we find ways to partner with the federal government? There’s this new website. It doesn’t seem to be working very well. Like, how could we help? Some people did not want to help. Um, but I realized that some did and it started kind of chipping away at my first policy mission, which was like, can we just get an integration here, which I’m looking back and it sounds a little crazy, but we didn’t know what we were doing and so we just asked and we got senators to write letters.

Noah Lang: Oh, you can actually like, you can rather quickly. If you have a do gooder story and you’re actually trying to move the needle in the right way, you could, you can get people to follow you. And it took a few years, but we got, you know, now we’ve worked across three presidential administrations with very political positions around healthcare, um, to build and nurture and grow a public private sector integration.

Noah Lang: I think that gave me a little spark of like, Oh, so you, you can like collaborate here. You can find ways to work with policymakers. And, um, and so then the next big mission for me was like, we’ve got to shake this [00:34:00] tree of the benefit system. And to be totally honest, I’m still figuring it out. I’m still figuring out.

Noah Lang: We’re like, Um, labor has certain pushes on certain, you know, policymakers and whether state versus federal issues. I still consider myself a newbie, even though I’ve been chipping away at this for 10 years. There’s a lot of undercurrents here. Um, but we started at the federal level and, uh, Senator Mark Warner has been a great advocate for portable benefits.

Noah Lang: He’s a big believer. Um, he puts a new bill up every year. That’s not passed yet, but he’s been kind of ringing a federal, uh, I don’t know, alarm bell that we need benefits innovation. But it seemed to me that wasn’t really going to happen very quickly at the federal level. There’s not a lot of movement going on.

Noah Lang: There is a hearing this week, hopefully that will shake up, shake the tree a little bit more in the house. Um, but I think once we realize like this is going to happen at state’s level, it just has to start there. Um, we started spending time with legislators, regulators of various sizes and shapes. And the, the really interesting thing that I observed there was that nobody [00:35:00] really had like tangibility on the problem.

Noah Lang: So, uh, everyone’s talking about the polar ends of the, of the issues of, you know, Here’s what’s in the headlines about worker issues. And here’s what’s in the headlines about how companies are behaving. But no one’s talking to workers. You know, we’re like, Oh, well, this seems like an interesting role for us to play.

Noah Lang: We’ve got quite a few of them using our app every day. And so we started bringing the workers who are our members. We meet them usually through their workforces to the story. And when you listen to their words, they, they want flexibility around the way they work. And they also want flexibility around their benefits.

Noah Lang: I’m giving you like the broad strokes. But it was a journey of kind of like. Figure out what’s going to move the needle because I was hearing from these workers. They want change. I was hearing from these workforces. We’re willing to do more. We simply really can’t. Can’t. And so, um, we, one kind of big moment.

Noah Lang: I’ll never forget. As Senator Mark Warner came out, we had a closed door round table, uh, in San Francisco and leaders from every single one of these big companies, not just driving and delivery, but [00:36:00] Caretaking and home repair and real leaders kind of across the Virgin get kind of got together and spoke openly.

Noah Lang: Everyone agreed. Everyone was advocating for the same thing. It was not a conversation was happening publicly. And so we kind of took that as our mantle. Like, how do we kind of bring this to light? So kind of fast forward to today, there’s bills in half a dozen states. Some are moving in the right direction.

Noah Lang: Some are moving slowly and some are moving in the wrong direction. Um, and I think it’s, it’s, uh, I like there for you, right? Like there probably aren’t many CEOs or spend their time on this, but I realized like this is what it’s going to take, um, to move the needle here to kind of shake. Policymakers and regulators, but they need to hear an authentic story from the workers and from like a company that’s sitting at the nexus of these issues.

Noah Lang: So, um, I give massive kudos to our, our partners DoorDash and kind of bringing along a governor level. Um, we hadn’t really done that yet. I will also say I’ve got a, another announcement making this [00:37:00] week, which is the first. Legislation, signed into law, passed by legislature and signed into law, which is the state of Utah, passed legislation last year.

Noah Lang: And this year they’re announcing that stride. We are now expanding the same program we launched in Pennsylvania last week in the state of Utah, Utah did something very innovative here. Uh, at least to me, who’s a nerd on this stuff, they created like, oh, it’s like a one liner, like if it’s on a single page of bill, which is pretty rare.

Noah Lang: And it just said, benefits should not be used as a determinant of employment classification in the state of Utah. You want to deliver benefits? Have at it. And no one’s done it yet. This was just passed last year. Um, We’re doing it. We have our first partner client in the state of Utah. They’re launching this month.

Noah Lang: Uh, and you’ll see some great, I think, news coming out of the legislature and Governor Cox’s office. And so I’m, yeah, I’m quite hopeful that these are the first two dominoes, if you will, to fall. We need more policymaker innovation. We [00:38:00] need people to listen to the end workers, um, and to kind of just create the space for more innovation.

Noah Lang: I think policymakers are scared of that word, but that’s really what we need in this space.

Marcus: That’s a powerful story. And one thing that stuck out to me was, you know, when you said it took a few years and it’s like, you know, you know, a lot of people wouldn’t, wouldn’t put a month in to something like that.

Marcus: Right. So, um, and it also sounds like. There, there was, um, aligned wills really across your industry and, and with certain, um, with certain executives. I mean, you know, you talked about Senator Warner and obviously everyone knows it’s, it’s not a. It’s not a mystery. Everyone knows that D. C. is pretty broken right now.

Marcus: Um, but a lot is happening at the state’s level as a result of that, right? Um, because, because D. C. is so broken, um, states are really, you know, making a lot of innovative moves in a lot of different directions, uh, you know, to your point. And Utah is a very innovative state. [00:39:00] innovative state, um, in, in, uh, in a lot of ways that people just don’t necessarily notice.

Marcus: So it doesn’t really surprise me that, that Utah, uh, you know, did that. And it’s such a common sense, one liner that you said. I mean, I had never really thought about it. The fact that there are, you know, a series of tests, just like there are in the sec, you know, the, the, how we test, right, you know, there’s a series of tests to kind of determine should this person be an employee or are they actually an independent contractor?

Marcus: And it is kind of crazy in 2024 that benefits should be one of the tests that determines that someone’s an employee. Um, because why, right? I mean, and you can see why in the forties in the post World War II era, why, you know, Why you kind of came up with that? It was a

Noah Lang: test and a requirement, right? We needed, uh, we needed to attract workers.

Noah Lang: We need to protect workers. Like there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world.

Marcus: Totally. I get it. [00:40:00] But like today. It just does not make sense anymore. So, um, and I don’t know, to me, this is, this is really, really, really exciting because I don’t think people, um, fully appreciate how much the, the tethering of health insurance to employment, um, locks up.

Marcus: Our economy. I mean, I, I think it prevents so much innovation. There are so many people who would be so much more bold in their life choices, um, if it were not for, uh, how they rank the importance of having strong benefits. And, and, and that entirely drives them to stay employed as opposed to going You know, try to do something bold and great and important that would, you know, make the world a better place.

Marcus: So,

Noah Lang: uh, It’s right. And, uh, just [00:41:00] about a year ago, there was a study done found a third of American workers would try to consider switching jobs or going out on their own if it wasn’t for that need to stay attached to that benefit system. And so, Hopefully this can be a pipe, a bipartisan issue if there are any of those these days, right?

Noah Lang: So like unlock the American economy, give people some more freedom when it comes to labor. Yes. Let’s protect workers. I don’t envy the folks who have to write all the rules about how you actually should classify things, but let’s stop it with all the, you know, all the exceptions, but just create, create some space for innovation.

Noah Lang: Um, and there’s a, If you look at some other forms of financial protection in this country, like 529 accounts, anybody can actually put money into that. Your, your family members can, grandparents can, right? It’s all tax advantage. Like why don’t we do that for benefits and just make it a kind of a much more flexible system that everyone can, can use.

Noah Lang: So, and there’s one more stat I’ll share with you because you asked my stats and I said, [00:42:00] yes, yes, I love stats. Utah, over a third of Utahans have actually done some gig work. Over a third of the workforce in Utah. And so, I mean, it’s just like, there’s so much gravity there, right? Um, and it doesn’t mean everyone’s doing it all the time, but it just really kind of shines a bright light, like, we’re kidding ourselves if we think it’s just like everyone’s going to be tethered to a desk and do normal, kind of traditional, quote unquote, work these days.

Marcus: No, and it’s, look, I mean, as a, as a parent, it’s, it’s very, very confusing for me because I would like to encourage my children in the reality. Of, of, of what the market is, but there are still some conventions in our economy that make it still kind of appropriate and wise to recommend that they, you know, look into the job force.

Marcus: Right. And, and, and benefits is a big one. Benefits, [00:43:00] benefits is a big one. You know, partially because like, I’d like them to be off of my benefits.

Noah Lang: Well, they’re coming up. They’re coming up there. Yeah. So, so my youngest has decided she wants to be a rock star, so she’s going to have to figure out her own benefits.

Marcus: Well, may, uh, may she, may the force be with her and may she have all the great fortune of Taylor Swift and Beyonce. Um, no, anything we did not yet cover.

Noah Lang: I don’t think so. I think, I think we covered it. Uh, I appreciate the time. I think this like story needs to be told. There isn’t enough innovation in this space.

Noah Lang: I want more people to come and push on this.

Marcus: I’m super excited about this for a lot of reasons, but I’ll just leave you with this, you know, I’m, I’m a venture capitalist. And one of the spaces. I am most excited about personally, passionate about, and also really always scared to write a check into is innovation in the employer space.

Marcus: Because it’s so locked up and [00:44:00] because there’s so many gatekeepers and because the Aons and the Mercer’s and the, you know, Gallagher’s have just such an iron fist over how all things innovation go in this industry. Fortunately, the. The, the, the founders I’ve invested in, in the space, um, you know, do a really good job politicking and networking in those worlds.

Marcus: Um, you have to, you, you do. But they have to, they have to. It’s not an open market, right? It’s a very, very, very closed market and warm intros are required. And, um, the more that this sort of gets. Gets opened up and the more that portable benefits become a thing, even on a state by state basis, that’s fine.

Marcus: It creates opportunity for us to invest in great innovative products. Like I think about this stack that you’re building at stride and I’m like, it’s brilliant and there’s so much more that also can be done, right? Going deep across all of those stacks, right? Going [00:45:00] deep into the health stack, deep into the taxes stack, deep into the savings stack.

Marcus: There’s so much that could happen. Across all of those. Right. And so, yeah, I, I hope that, that this little fire you started like turns into, you know, four alarm blaze and, and, uh, we get more and more. Adam deal. Sorry. Sorry about that. Uh, uh, and, and I hope that we, you know, we really do get to the place where this is, this is just not an issue, right?

Marcus: That people can take their benefits with them. I mean, it should, it should be that way. And employers would be happy with that too. I think so. Plenty

Noah Lang: of employers, massive organizations. who don’t want to be responsible for which doctor their employees get or don’t get. They love to help where they can and obviously some companies are doing a wonderful job of it.

Marcus: Like, is this my job? Right, right. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Um, okay, man, look, uh, congratulations on a great two weeks. That is really the culmination of 10 plus [00:46:00] years of, of work. Um, and I hope that the rest of your 2024 is a really, really fruitful.

Noah Lang: Thank you so much, Marcus. It’s been fun.