Diaspora.nz S2 | E12 — Zak Holdsworth (Founder & CEO at Hint Health) on minimising waste in US healthcare payments, considering private equity vs. VC as a founder, Stanford GSB as a gateway to Silicon
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Hint Health co-founder and CEO Zak Holdsworth retains a strong Kiwi accent - after all, he grew up on a farm near Gisborne. It was no ordinary farm, however, as Zak tells us.
Considering his mother was a diplomat and his father an inventor and pioneer of pultrusion, Zak developed a taste for innovation in the wider world, and eventually headed off to Stanford Graduate School of Business to achieve his MBA. Zak worked briefly as a VC prior to joining the founding team ofWellnessFX in 2011, a California company which diagnosed health conditions through blood analysis.
He then went on to co-found Hint Health in 2014 – a platform which has raised $64 in investment and today handles over a billion dollars worth of payments per year.
Based in San Francisco, Hint is a vertical SaaS platform powering Direct Primary Care practitioners allowing them to to focus on patients in an industry which has until recently been far too dependent on the insurance system to cover patient costs and which - as Zak tells us - wastes more money annually than NASA’s 60-year budget. Disrupting the $4 trillion US healthcare industry is a topic also shared by our previous guest Dr Zachary Tan.
Zak joins us to share his ideas about finding and investing in disruptive startups, the future of cryptocurrency, and how New Zealand might be a great place to run the next Xero from.
In today's episode, we discuss:
* Hint Health’s mission to step away from insurance, give everyone a transparent rate of costs and connect patients with unlimited access to primary care, telemedicine, urgent care and other services - the way Zak remembers it when he was a child in NZ
* Getting into Stanford business school, realising which paths weren’t ideal, before taking on US healthtech with Hint Health
* How Zak’s passion for startups included forays into venture capitalism as well as patenting a phone charger
* The staggering percentage of each dollar Zak feels is wasted when handled through health insurance.
* Reasons for lack of change in US healthcare
* Becoming respected in the healthtech community with the Hint Summit annual conference
* Whether the startup community's expectations of how quickly a startup should triple or 100x its revenue are fair expectations or not.
* DeFi Summer, and lessons learned while investing in crypto currency
* Faith in Bitcoin
* Zak's balance between being plugged into Silicon Valley but having peace and tranquility to focus on his family.
* …and whether New Zealand’s tech startup ecosystem is ready to host another Xero.
Referenced:
* Hint Health
https://www.hint.com/
* Stanford Graduate School of Business
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/
* The Hint Summit
https://summit.hint.com/
Where to find Zak Holdsworth:
* LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakholdsworth/
X/Twitter https://x.com/zakholdsworth?lang=en
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