Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Arel, thanks so much for joining us.
Arel Lidow, Cedar
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk to you because we're going to talk about a company called Cedar, which when I look at the healthcare industry, there's so much going on, there's so much disruption. And there's a lot of consumerization of different solutions out there in Cedar is like a bull's eye fit for what we expect as consumers now. So talk about the company what you guys do?
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, so at Cedar, we work with really large healthcare providers. So think, you know, hospitals, large physician groups, lab companies, and so forth. And we help them fix their patient financial experience. So if you're like, you know, most people dealing with the sort of financial administrative side of US health care, there's probably a lot that you've experienced, that's really wrong with the system, it's no fun paying medical bills, or not knowing how much something is going to cost, we're having to navigate the complexities of your insurance, and you know, how that interacts with any given kind of visit to a doctor. So those are exactly the problems that we solve, we build technology and products to kind of build a layer in between, you know, the sort of administrative financial side of US healthcare system, and, and consumers and people to help fix these problems.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's the background story of the company that led you and your co-founder Florian to start the company?
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, so So both my co-founder, and I had had our own sort of personal issues, dealing with the financial side of US healthcare. So we both had, you know, really messed up medical billing experiences. At the time that we were starting cedar. I was, you know, personally in collections. So I was getting calls from debt collectors for a visit to a doctor, and I never actually received the bill. And it turned out, they'd sent it to the wrong address. And my co-founder, and I started kind of digging into the space and saying, Well, why is this so broken? You know, we were shocked to discover just the sheer magnitude of the problem. So it turns out that I wasn't alone, in my experience, about one out of every six Americans, it turns out, will receive a call from a medical debt collector each year. So it's really, really clear that there's something that's just fundamentally broken in this experience. And when we kind of zoomed out and looked at the space, you know, what we observed that this, this massive macro trend, where costs for healthcare had very subtly shifted away from basically employers and governments to actually consumers paying for a huge chunk of the cost of their of their health care. So I'm talking about hundreds of billions of dollars and new sort of financial responsibility that didn't exist before. And whole system just wasn't built to accommodate this. It wasn't built, you know, with a good sort of consumer mindset. So, you know, we looked long and hard, we actually tried to talk ourselves out of starting cedar, and we looked for any other company or person organization that was doing a really good job actually, solving the root cause problems of poor health care, financial experience, we couldn't find any other company doing this. So we decided to take a leap and do it on our own.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
And it just makes sense. I mean, well, building a company to solve this problem is very complex, it's not easy. So it takes brave entrepreneurs to take the leap of faith to go solve this problem. But for consumers, you just want the bill to be able to look at it. And it should be simple to read. And then you should be able to pay it with your mobile device like you pay your friend for pizza or something. It should be that simple.
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, well, I think it even goes beyond that. So it's kind of messed up in the first place that you even kind of get a bill after you've had a doctor's visit. So if you think about it, when you go to a restaurant, you know, you see a menu, you know exactly what the prices are, you order off the menu, and you got to build immediately identify your bill. In healthcare, you know, you visit the doctor, and it sort of equivalent to someone else ordering off the menu but no prices on it. And then 30 to 60 days later, you may or may not get a bill, you also get something that looks like a bill from your insurance company that says this is not a belt that often doesn't quite match your bill. And you may get multiple bills for the for the you know, for a single visit. So, you know, we believe that see her that the whole experience needs to be fundamentally reinvented. And we're really on a mission to do that. We're thinking much, much bigger than just sort of incrementally making medical bills better. We actually want to reinvent the system itself.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, there's a lot going on at Cedar. Last year, you announced a new round of funding, there was an acquisition. So what's the current stage of the company in terms of where things are at employee size, whatever you can share?
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, absolutely. So it's a really exciting time at Cedar. So you know, as you mentioned, we just did a large fundraising last year last year we acquired a company, Buddha health that brings a whole new set of capabilities. To our platform, and we're a little bit over 500 people on the team right now, we expect to probably double the team size over the course of the year. And, you know, we have a fantastic team, I mean, some of the best, most brilliant people I've, personally I've worked with, but really, really strong. What I would call kind of maker mentality on the team as well, just brilliant people who love to create new things that have real impact on the world.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, you mentioned the growth plans in terms of hiring, which are pretty aggressive, is that across all different functional areas that the company?
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, so we're hiring both on our commercial teams and operations teams. And we're also very aggressively hiring what we call our makers team. So you know, Product Engineering, data science design, you know, all across the board, we're, we're, we're pretty much grown like crazy.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, once someone does join the team, what's it like working at Cedar? What's the culture like?
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, so um, you know, our culture, I think, first off, starts with the people. So I, you know, we believe very, very strongly that most culture is actually invented organically with if you get any group of people together for a long enough period of time, they're going to develop their own value. So number one thing that we care about is actually getting really, truly exceptional people onto the team. But then on top of that, we have a core set of, you know, three or four things that we really, really tried to instill within the culture, and I think you actually would see us sort of live up to day to day. And that's it, you know, we're exceptionally focused on achieving our vision, we are a mission and vision focused company, we want to build products that are going to have a positive impact, and be a win win for consumers and for our healthcare system. You know, we also believe in having a highly autonomous culture. So we don't want a lot of top down decision making, we believe in and bring on people to team who have excellent judgment, and can, you know, really invent the playbook on their own versus just being given a set of tasks to run down. We also have a culture of really what we call applying growth mindset. But we want to solve problems in exceptional ways, we don't want to settle for kind of the average way of doing things, we want to be exceptional, and everything that we do. And the last thing is that, you know, we really, you know, apply very kind of constructive thinking and what we do, so we look for people, and really instill, you know, kind of creative, positive decision making processes, we want people who can kind of see what can exist versus looking at, you know, the barriers that exist today and saying that something can't be done. We're always focused on sort of looking for net new solutions to problems.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
The job market is very active out there, which is a good thing. It's good that people have options. So why is now the ideal time to join Cedar?
Arel Lidow, Cedar
We're at an incredibly exciting stage on our journey at Cedar. So you know, it's no, it's no secret that the US healthcare system needs to be reinvented, it needs to be fixed from the inside out. And we've spent the first six years of our existence, really getting to massive scale, where now we are engaging with 10s of millions of patients every single year. And we're in a position to start fundamentally reinventing the actual plumbing of the way that the US healthcare system works. So it's incredibly exciting time. If you care about fixing something that is really a major problem for us, for the US, you know, society as a whole, then Cedar is a great place to be. It's also incredibly exciting time, just given the projects that we're working on across the board. You know, whether you're on a commercial team actually marketing or selling our products, or on one of our makers team actually building our products, we're in the process of building whole new products are kind of zero to one, we're in the process of scaling up already massive products and building new things on to them that I think are going to be revolutionary. And, yeah, it's just a really, really fun time to to join the team. A lot of good, exciting creative energy there
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well as Arel mentioned, this is an exciting opportunity to join a company that is disrupting the healthcare industry that we know, there's lots of room for improvement, and it's something that touches all of us. So it's an opportunity to work on something that has massive, massive scale. So you need to go check out their job openings on VentureFizz, go to venturefizz.com/cedar. And that's Cedar, and you'll see all their listings there. Arel, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Arel Lidow, Cedar
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
