Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:22:36 · Alexa von Tobel, Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:22:36] S1: Jeremy, if you think about how Solace is changing outcomes, how do you think about that? What are the metrics that you care about? And and, again, I think it's already an incredible lift to know that if, god forbid, you get any medical diagnosis that feels worrisome where you're making a big decision, go to... Go to Solace and get an advocate who just works on your behalf to help you answer any question. But if you want to change the category, what do you measure? How do you think about that? [00:23:06] S0: Yeah. So it's a very fair and great question. We've been asked it in a bunch of different ways. So we started this from a consumer perspective. And so the first place we have to go is, like, our consumers actually, our patients finding value in the product. And we have... And we've been accused of this. Like, how is this real? We have something like an NPS of, like, 90, which I think is, like, insane. [00:23:27] S1: Wow. Wow.
00:23:28 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:23:28] S0: Yeah. Like patients really, really find... And we ask just kind of the standard question, like, would you recommend this to others? Did you have a good experience? We ask them to rate solace. We ask them to rate advocates. And just the responses are off the charts positive. So I think that's the first place you have to start. It's necessary. I wouldn't say totally. I'll go into some of the other things here. But you have to start there. Because I think oftentimes there are folks that try and approach solving health care without taking what the patient wants into consideration. So a great way to reduce health care costs is just not provide care to patients. And there are countless examples of this in the past where, and this is where some of the challenges arise where, if you have very intensive prior authorization protocols, if you have very intensive processes to even get access to physicians, you can lower health care costs by just not providing patients care. I don't think that's really what people want. So you have to start. The foundation is, are patients having a good experience? Which I think we clearly have. The next step from my perspective is like, is there a way to measure improved outcomes, lower costs? And so we have some preliminary data right now. So we're still not fully... You know, we haven't fully published all of it yet, where we look at longitudinal claims. So in other words, like, you just look at health care claims data. There's a standardized process where folks submit codes representing the health care work that people do. And you can look at the cost for patients before working with Solace and then afterwards. And what we find is that when patients work with Solace, there's lower costs, which is really, really exciting. We don't have kind of like full numbers to announce yet, but it's something that when we publish it, I think is going to represent a pretty significant game changer for the industry. And we didn't even really talk about the history behind coverage. In 2024, Medicare changed their regulations to cover health care advocacy there. And part of the thesis, and I've been lucky enough to engage with CMS and speak to the former head of Medicare who actually instituted these codes. And they had preliminary data from... And there's studies that show this actually. And I actually didn't even mention this.
00:25:36 · Jeremy Gurewitz
When we're first starting Solace, I was looking up studies. And the study would go basically we did some version of health care advocacy. We had a nurse engage with patients when they were transferred or discharged from the hospital and followed up and made sure they knew what to do and helped them with any questions and worked on their behalf. And the study would go it made sure that patients weren't readmitted to the hospital. It massively improved outcomes and costs. And then we ran out of funding and then the program never continued again. And so when you speak to some of these folks at CMS, they have seen these studies. And so that was part of the idea behind them creating these codes is can we create a way to actually because they've known that this problem has permeated throughout health care. And so the work that we've been doing, I think, has been confirming that. And so then the last piece is improving health care outcomes. And so there, there's a whole bunch of data. It can be challenging because it's like, do you want to use mortality as an endpoint? You could. That that can help for, I think, severe illnesses. But then there's also kind of other questions around quality of life, for example, and even just early, are you connecting folks to the health care system? So we're seeing increased engagement, which I think is something that's really, really powerful and is one of the key things that people look at. Are patients more engaged with the health care system? Are they engaging with primary care? There's been countless studies that show that when patients are engaged with primary care, that's preventative. It prevents the worst and escalatory diseases and costs that tend to occur. And then right now, ask them this question. Think, again, we're still working. We've hired just recently a whole bunch of PhD researchers to go and attack the outcomes problem very directly. But we just ask patients, do you believe that you got a better outcome with solace than you would have otherwise? And the answer is just undisputably yes. And so I think we have very, very clear data information to show that solace it's kind of like this magical trifecta that doesn't really happen where it's good for patients, it's good for costs, and it's good for The US health care system. And I think it's something that's just super exciting.
00:27:45 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:27:45] S1: Jeremy, I know you recently just raised a round and you had sort of a wild amount of interest in queuing money to Solace. And you've always been very, very thoughtful and measured about when to take capital and how to take capital because you care so much about your mission. Tell us a little bit about this latest round and this exciting new announcement.
00:28:08 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:28:08] S0: Yeah. So we recently announced the round, raised a $130,130,000,000, I get to say that fully from... Led by IVP participation from all our investors. I think we were really lucky that just even from our existing investor base, the round was deeply oversubscribed. We ended up actually raising more than we expected just from interest from existing investors. And and, obviously, IVP, incredible investor. Really excited to have them on board and lead this round. And, yeah, I think we had we had reached a point where we've made, I think, really substantial progress. The company is growing at an astronomical rate, and the additional capital will allow us to invest in the platform. So I'll give the plug now, hiring basically for every conceivable position, especially software engineering product design. So if you have any anyone listening to this that's interested should definitely go to our careers page and and check it out. So it'll allow us to invest in the platform and allow us to start investing in awareness. You know, we've been super targeted with the way that we've done our go to market. We've tried very hard to lean into word-of-mouth, referrals, SEO, and some very limited targeted advertising because we've been solely focused on Medicare population. As we expand our go to market, as we release commercial, we're... We want people to be aware that Solace exists. I think you you mentioned this previously where, you know, I I mentioned Solace to people and I hear the same thing where it's, I wish I had known about Solace when blah blah blah was... What had happened to myself, to my friends, to my family. And so now with this round, the goal is to begin sharing that Solace exists to people. More broadly, we're considering the best way to do that. And so when people have challenges, they know that Solace is the first place that they should go to connect with their health care advocate, and it's going to lead to better outcomes for themselves and for everybody involved. And so that's one of the main purposes in the round.
00:30:03 · Alexa von Tobel, Jeremy Gurewitz, Charlotte Ross
[00:30:03] S1: By the way, I'll give a plug right now if you're out there and you wanna work for a company where every day you can go to work and feel really, really extremely good about the work you're doing, go work for Solace, where every day you show up and you're helping somebody in their worst and scariest moment feel safer and more stable, which is pretty good reason go to work. So... [00:30:23] S0: Yeah. We feel inspired every day going to work. [00:30:27] S2: As you think about growing the team, and I think you have around 300 now, you may get to 1,000 employees by the end of the year. You obviously operate with an extreme sense of urgency towards this mission. How do you think about building that into the culture as you guys scale?