In this episode, your host Carol Schultz talks with Brandon Weber, Co-founder & CEO of Nava, a benefits brokerage on a mission to disrupt and transform how healthcare is found and purchased by businesses. A great number of Americans receive healthcare insurance through their employers (about 168M people) and Nava is navigating how to bring the benefits that a F500 employer can provide its employees into the SMB market.

Though it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that our healthcare system is broken, Brandon and his Co-founder, Donald DeSantis, realized the inefficiencies of how this is currently accomplished. There is a lack of transparency for employers putting together benefits plans and a lack of support for employees trying to navigate the system, so Nava is using tech to help employers and employees be smarter shoppers and users of healthcare.

Listen as Brandon describes his shift from commercial real estate to healthcare and the mistakes he made hiring employees in his first startup and the lessons he learned and has implemented at Nava. A couple of these lessons learned are the value of outside advisors, the impact of hiring the wrong people, and the impact of hiring the right people and putting them in the wrong place in the organization. He also discusses "chasing shiny objects" and the damage this can do to a startup, a mistake many first-time founders make.

You can find them at: https://www.nava.io/

You can find more information and all episodes at Vertical Elevation and you can find Carol on Twitter @carolbschultz.