Where Do You Go When You Need Help, and Who Connects You to It? | Erine Gray, Findhelp

The Ripple Map: There's a lot of unnecessary suffering because of that stigma. When you grow up poor, there's a stigma that you carry for the rest of your life. People are afraid to ask for help. ⁓ there's not enough humans to solve poverty and to fix the safety net. It will never be fixed. I wanted our customers to be able to fire us if they were unhappy with us. Your gut's trying to tell you something. If I knew how hard it was gonna be, I never would have done it. ⁓ but I it but it's the best thing that ever happened. That's Aaron Gray. Founder and CEO of Find Help. I'm Yasam Manui, the host of the Ripple Map podcast. For Aaron, it started when he was 17 years old, when his mom got sick almost overnight and lost her memory. He spent years navigating the system for her, then tried to fix it from inside the government. When that wasn't enough, he started something new. He brought together a team and built it. So join me for the full conversation. Stop, stop, stop, stop. Erin Gray, welcome and thank you for being here. I'm very excited. Thanks. ⁓ I'm excited to talk to you and ha and happy to be here. Thank you. So before we get into Find Help, before any of it, I wanna start with you as a person, where you were as a as a child, what kind of personality you had, how did you move through the world and maybe a little bit about your family? That's a good question. ⁓ so I I'm ⁓ so I was I'm I'm from a small town in upstate New York called Olean, New York. ⁓ it is about an hour due south of Buffalo and it's on the border of Pennsylvania. It's you know, blue collar town and I was born in nineteen seventy five and ⁓ my ⁓ First home was in the Martha Avenue housing projects in town and became ⁓ w familiar with the safety net at a young age. Then my parents bought a house and their mortgage was something around a hundred and five dollars a month. And we grew up in a very safe place, never locked our doors. Our family was what we called them my mom called a a mine, his and ours family. So my dad had four children. ⁓ and he was divorced, but he had custody of those four kids. My mom had one kid. She was also divorced. So when they got married on day one, they had five kids in the house. And then they had myself and my younger sister. So I grew up in a family of seven kids in a four bedroom house with one bathroom. And ⁓ still very close with with siblings today. you know, fast forward I I ⁓ you know always was able to do sports and ⁓ I'm lucky my dad's where he worked, he worked at a print shop, but it was three blocks away from where we grew up. So he was always able to come to our track meets and, you know, making sure that we were able to participate in sport. So we're l very lucky in that way. ⁓ my parents were were incredibly loving human beings. and my mom ⁓ my mom struggled with mental illness. She was an only child herself and she was came from an abusive household when she was a kid, when she was a kid. And but she tried really, really hard and just she just struggled containing her emotions. And I remember she had recently started a job as a janitor at the community college in Ole Ann, New York, called Jamestown Community College. And it's a job she loved. ⁓ the re one of the reasons why she loved it is she was able to take classes for free as an employee. So she would take math classes and ⁓ and she enjoyed doing that and she was proud of her job and ⁓ It had really good health insurance. It was close to where we lived. and ⁓ the summer of nineteen ninety two, she was ⁓ presumably bit by a mosquito and attracted a disease called encephalitis. Well, it's hard to say. but back in nineteen ninety two the doctors believed that it was either from a mosquito or from a severe case of the flu. ⁓ but ⁓ because there are about six other people in the town that ended up getting encephalitis. ⁓ I'm I'm going with mosquito. ⁓ but so she ⁓ the ended up the du the d you know it was a small town. The doctors didn't know what it was. And when she first went to the emergency room they sent her back home. ⁓ and she just wasn't getting better. And and my sister and I r remember that those days. It was it was the summer of nineteen ninety two. ⁓ she ended up going back to the emergency room and they realized that she needed to go to a a brain trauma center. And in my hometown, there was a helicopter that could have taken her there, but it was ⁓ it was under repair. So she actually needed to be driven in an ambulance to Sayre, Pennsylvania. ⁓ so they it was normally a five, six hour drive. They did it in half the time. And so she did end up flatlining twice on that ⁓ ambulance ride, but but she did survive it. ⁓ And, you know, they had specialists. They were able to get ⁓ you know, her stabilized. And she probably spent the next couple of months in the hospital. And when she kick got back from the hospital into my hometown or in into our house, she she didn't know who we were. So it was as if she ⁓ had those files in her memory erased. In fact, what was interesting is she remembered much of her life to the first 30 years, but nothing after that. Which meant she didn't remember who I was because I was 17 at the time. She didn't remember who my sister she didn't know who my sister was. and ⁓ but there were several odd events. I say odd, but things most normal most people don't have to deal with. One was ⁓ I remember one night ⁓ I got a call while I was working at Wendy's And my sister said, You need to get home. And so I I drove home and my mom was upset at my dad and she wanted to go to a bar to get a drink. And my mom didn't drink a lot. They I mean they they really didn't drink, but she was upset and she wanted to go to a bar. And my dad basically said, Look, on that medication, you can't have alcohol. And he's a real stickler for the rules. Well, it turns out what was upsetting to her was the fact that earlier in the night. She wanted to go walk over to her parents' house. ⁓ and what they didn't what she didn't remember is her parents had died ⁓ 15 years earlier. ⁓ so in her mind, she thought she could just walk a few blocks over to her parents' house. ⁓ and then there was another night when ⁓ you know, she was she she goes, Where's Becky? And Becky is my older sister. And my dad said, Well, she's she's in college in Texas. And my mom was like, Texas, she thought my sister was a toddler. ⁓ wow. So ⁓ so how w what do you do with that, right? I mean, she's no longer able to work. ⁓ she was also sleeping. How how do you comprehend and how do you what's happening inside of you while all this is happening? ⁓ I don't know. I mean, we you know, we weren't a touchy feely family. We we didn't talk about our feelings. ⁓ You know, mental health and what you do with it's different, you know. ⁓ you know, my ⁓ there really wasn't any dealing with the f feelings of it. It it was just what do you do? I mean, I certainly didn't talk about it at school or with friends or even with family. So as somebody who's learned a lot about mental health and counseling and why it matters and all of the things that we do as adults, my sister and I we just gutted through it really. and so so she was able to well she didn't have to work anymore. She was disabled officially disabled because she couldn't drive a car. She couldn't ⁓ she couldn't work because she was subject to seizures and she would have seizures often. But she looked normal. She looked like she could have a normal conversation. She could walk, you know, she looked healthy. But then what you notice is you'd have the same conversation over and over again because her memory was pretty much gone. But she also still had a very strong personality and the inability to control her emotions. So you take somebody Who and she was very smart, although she never graduated from college, but she had taken some classes. She was very street smart and very logical. And and then and then you take your memory away. So facts that you think are right are not right, and then somebody corrects you, that adds to the mental illness and and the anger and and things like that. So honestly, I wanted to get out of there. My dad, again, he lived three blocks away. Or sorry, he he He worked three blocks away from our house. And so we had an aunt. Her name was Elaine. It was actually my mom's aunt. And Aunt Elaine would come and sit with my mom. My dad changed his work schedule to start work at six AM and he got out at two PM. And Elaine would come over and spend some time with my mom. And then my dad would take care of her. So in reality, she probably needed twenty four hour care in some sort of facility, but my dad didn't have the heart to do it. No, we we always kinda thought she would get back to normal. And ⁓ so that was before my senior year and where I grew up was also a r a pretty depressing place to grow up. It's overcast cloud. I mean, ⁓ You're are you from Toronto? Did you say Toronto? I'm from Vancouver. So if you say depressing you mean clouds and rain, then I'm kinda familiar with that I grew up here. Add, you know, snow five months out of the year and you know, it it's it it it's kinda like that. And where we lived was in a valley, so it it would get dark and it was always cloudy and over overhead. ⁓ for me, I just I just wanted to leave. and ⁓ you know, so I ended up getting into college and and leaving that next summer. But I experienced a lot of guilt about that. and ⁓ but ⁓ you know, the idea of wanting and longing for something bigger than the town that I grew up in and to get away from that heavy stress, you know, of my mom because she I mean she was difficult before she got sick and and even after she got di sick, it w it was really hard. And in fact, those years were really hard on my younger sister Shannon and she had to deal with And how much younger is she from yourself? ⁓ she was ⁓ four years behind me in school. So she spent her you know, so if you were seventeen, she was thirteen ⁓ dealing with similar things. With the birthdays, she was a cu you know, a couple years younger, but but yeah, sh there she was also dealing with that and not being in a family where you talked about your feelings and she's a more social person, so she had a bigger friend network than I had and but she definitely had the brunt of it. ⁓ of of that. And and it and it was it was very difficult for her and for my dad. So that's basically from birth through high school. And then ⁓ I ended up going off to Purdue University. I tried to study computer science. And so ⁓ but I really shouldn't have gone in the grand scheme of things at the time because ⁓ you know we I was paying out of state tuition. We didn't have any savings, but I got student ⁓ I got some Pell Grants and you know some financial aid and student loan. and but I also had to work. So I I w had a couple different jobs while I was while I was a freshman at Purdue. Wasn't a strong student. ⁓ and that was really nobody's fault but my own. I I just didn't have the discipline to have the rigor. In high school I I did okay in high school, but it was mainly because high school was easy and I was good at math and and things like that. But with the work schedule, I also delivered pizza. I had a lot of different odd jobs, but I would deliver pizza at night. my second. I is that discipline? Is that just that you had a lot? I mean, to to go to school, to work, to have whether you're beside family or not, like it's still on your mind and on your heart everything that's happening. Yeah. I I ⁓ I was just so relieved to be to be out of that house, you know, so that I I wouldn't say the family was as much of it as it was I I did have to work, but I also have always liked working. I think a lot of it was discipline, meaning there's no reason why I couldn't set up my alarm and get to class on dive. You know, and I was also I was also younger than everybody else because my birthday's in August. So when I went off to college, I was still seventeen. A few days later I ended up turning eighteen. But and so to make a long story short, I failed out of college. I failed out of Purdue two times and ended up, you know, I I had a crazy summer job that I did after my freshman year. It ended up being one of the best things that I'd ever done. But I got a job selling books door to door, educational books. ⁓ with a company that was that has been around for over a hundred and fifty years and what's the company? They may have come to our house 'cause I feel like every educational everything came to our house. It was called the the Southwestern Company at the time. ⁓ I think they call it Southwestern Advantage now. And it was in the nineties and it was a sales job and basically there are about three thousand students that did it every summer. And the first summer our territory was in Independence, Missouri. ⁓ ⁓ out in the Kansas City area. And there I was, you know, an eighteen year old with a summer job of knocking on doors and selling educational reference books. And, you know, you learn a lot about people and communication and rejection and persistence and discipline and hard work. So I did well at that job. And after that job, ⁓ I had, you know, I was able to save something like five or six thousand dollars. ⁓ Which helped with tuition and ⁓ it didn't end up mattering because I ended up failing out of college the next year. But after doing that job for a couple of years and delivering pizza, I ⁓ ended up being in a better place to go back to college. So I went back to Indiana University in Indianapolis. At the time it was called IUPUI. It was a satellite campus of Indiana University. I got good grades that semester and ended up transferring to Indiana University's main campus in in Bloomington, where I got a degree in economics. and ⁓ graduated in 2000. ⁓ because I had studied computer science, I learned how to be a programmer. And my my job while I was at IU was as a programmer in the business school. So because I had programming experience, it was during the dot-com boom and they were hiring anybody who could program. And so I ended up getting a job for a consulting firm that ⁓ was partially owned by by Dell Ventures, which is ⁓ Dell Computers had a venture capital arm. And ⁓ so that's what brought me to Texas. So I got my very first job. I moved to Austin. My older sister, if you remember, I talked about Becky earlier. She was now an engineer at Applied Materials, which is a big chip company here in Austin. And ⁓ and there I was, that's what landed me in Austin, and then became Became a a programmer and did that for a few years. And I would say I wasn't particularly good at it, but I I liked it. I liked figuring things out and tinkering and making things work. And then I get a call from my dad. So this is now seven years after seven or eight years after my mom got sick. And he told me that, you know, he he couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't take care of her anymore. And he was getting sick himself. And so there I was faced with a decision, you you know Do I go get her? and in very naively I decided to fly up to n to to Buffalo, ⁓ pack up her things and then move her to Texas w with the hope that I could, you know, be closer and get her the care that she needed. And, you know, because she physically looked okay, and again, this was incredibly naive, I thought, well, I can get her an apartment with some supports. And one, I couldn't really afford it. But two, she absolutely needed twenty-four hour care and nobody really knew it. And so I tried to get her an apartment and she would wander around and she would go knock on other people's doors and it was really disruptive. she ended up, you know, being taken to a hospital and put into a psych ward, you know, ⁓ of that hospital. And ⁓ it became very clear she needed twenty four hour care. So so there I was know, I didn't have any money. she didn't have any money. There's like we're not a wealthy family. And ⁓ there I was as a child a twenty seven year old, ⁓ navigating on behalf of somebody with disabilities. And that's where I realized, ⁓ it's it's a messed up world. The safety net is a messed up world. And ⁓ so, you know, I was her legal guardian for ⁓ twenty four years ⁓ before she passed. And ⁓ she most of the time she lived in ⁓ facilities. So she ended up ⁓ living in a a skilled nursing facility and ⁓ and you know ⁓ you just see a lot. You see some of the best people in the world, like the nurses and the nurses' aides and nurse practition pr practitioners who would take care of her, and you would see families the system. These were not private pay facilities and it w it wakes you up. To what the world really looks like. And you r you come to realize that those folks that are disabled with a severe divisibility or severe mental ill illness, they're fortunate to to have places to go. And and and our government is degenerous about these things. So we ⁓ we were never in a position to to take her in, you know, or to ⁓ go to a fancier place. So in those early days, almost immediately I decided I didn't want to be a programmer anymore and applied to grad school. To go to the LBJ school, which is a public policy program. It's a master's program in public affairs, and got in and decided I want to spend the rest of my life working in the safety net. ⁓ was it a frustration that got you? Like what was because you obviously navigated the system on behalf of your mom, because she wasn't able to do it, to find out what she needs, where she needs to go. What what were you feeling that you were like, this is the path I need to go to tackle this? I don't know that I had a lot of well formed thoughts. I I just knew that ⁓ I wanted to make a difference in the world. Okay. and and I, you know, my my time as a programmer, you know, in an industry I you know, e commerce selling computers, I just didn't care that much about. and what I liked about the LBJ school is that it's a generalist it w at the time it was a generalist program, meaning there are a lot of people that were changing careers and decided they wanted to go into public policy. ⁓ I'd always been interested in public policy. I enjoyed watching Meet the Press every week. and this program was in my backyard and they let me in. And I even got a scholarship for three semesters where they covered the tuition. And ⁓ and it was a chance to just explore and figure out what what do I want to do? And ⁓ we had a great class. Some of my best friends in the world are from that class. And ⁓ and you know, the cla you can choose your classes and so the classes that I enjoyed were things related to the US safety net. So one of the classes that you have to take is a year long policy program where you analyze a public policy and you write up a report on the effectiveness of that policy. And the report that we wrote up was related to a behavioral health ⁓ program, carve out program from Mem Medicaid. Which basically allowed people who were uninsured in Dallas to get a mental health care by getting one of these behavioral health cards and it allowed them to go see counselors or psychiatrists to get the medication they need. And prior to that, if if you were indigent or you were uninsured, you didn't have mental health coverage, or you could go to the local MHMR centers, which were government buildings and you know a lot of different places across the state. But there was a s in Dallas at the time. And so I think it's not a very back then that's what it was called, but I'm sure they've changed the name by now. And ⁓ That's where you would go to see a counselor if you couldn't afford it and you didn't have health insurance. And so but at the time in Dallas, the wait list for seeing a counselor was six months. So you can imagine you're going through a mental health crisis, you take the brave step of going to a ask for help, and then you're told you have to wait six months. And depending on severity, you may or may not be able to wait that long. That's exactly right. And so interestingly, by bringing in the private sector, they brought in a a company. ⁓ basically a an HMO for ⁓ behavioral health. And ⁓ it was one of the first times they've done it. And what they that group had to do is go recruit a bunch of counselors and a bunch of psychiatrists and ask them if they are willing to accept this new form of payment. And what that did is that increased the supply of behavioral health specialists in Dallas. Who would be willing to take these clients? What ended up happening is that those wait lists at the MHMR centers went from six months to zero because you now had competition. And you had cer situations where these folks in Dallas were able to fire their old counselors and then go to another counselor that was because they were now insured for mental health. And we studied that program. We wrote up a report. And for me, I liked it because it showed that a private sector solution could help a public sector problem. And I believe that to this day. I think, you know, capitalism has its flaws, but it's the best thing we have. And that seeded a really important thesis in my mind about, you know, could the private sector influence a broken safety net? So fast forward, ⁓ graduated, ⁓ I had a first job was at the city of Austin where I had a chance to ⁓ work as a project manager ⁓ f first job out of college and out of grad school. And I I enjoyed it. I I managed a couple of different projects. One was called the City of Austin Physical Education Department, like like gym class basically for ⁓ city employees. And back then I was a marathon runner and So it was a p cool program where city employees could sign up to run a five K and they would get some time off every week to go pr to go to practice. They would get an hour of flex time so they can go practice. And the city would pay for, you know, their enrollment in a five K and we made a fun event and the mayor would come and and so I managed that for a couple of years. ⁓ but then I had an opportunity and this this ⁓ experience really changed the direction of my life. ⁓ Through the LBJ job serve, listserv, ⁓ there's a company called Maximus, who is a consulting firm that does work for health and human services agencies ⁓ across the United States. And they were looking for people to join the team because they had a very large contract in Texas trying to simplify the way people get enrolled in Martha Avenue housing projects, Medicaid, SNAP. ⁓ TANF, which stands stands for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and the CHIP program, the Children's Health Insurance Program. In in essence, they were basically trying to figure out how can I make it easier for people to apply for complicated government programs, either online. So this is a Texas Health Human Services Commission or Yes. Yes. Yep. Texas Health and Human Services Commission, H H S C. And so I did that for four years and it it was it was it was incredible. ⁓ and I I could share stories about that. And what did you learn being close and being in the obviously that's a different perspective than having to navigate it with your mom. But can you give me what you got to see being on the inside? Empathy, really. And and empathy towards the people who are responsible for administering these very complicated programs. A lot of people like to blame government for problems and they like to criticize government and why can't they figure it out? You know, they how how hard can it be? Not just in my country and yours and many other countries. Yeah. I think what I learned is once you go inside And you see They're trying to save the world. They're trying to help people. And especially the ones that make it make their way up ⁓ to deputy commissioner or directors, they've made a conscious decision in their life that they're gonna go try to make the world a better place and make government better. And I saw the late nights and the difficult decisions in the private sector, you know, a business can just serve a certain population. ⁓ In the public sector, you have to serve everybody. You can't discriminate. You can't, you know, only serve customers that are convenient, you know, or wealthy. and it is really a beautiful system that our s our our founders and ⁓ and others really set up. ⁓ and so there we were trying to basically think, okay, how do we Th this is another thing that I learned. The simplest way is often the cheapest way as what as well. So simplicity has a way of simplifying and decreasing the cost of managing complicated programs. So if you only accept applications for benefits through, you know, a paper application that somebody fills out, and then if they have to then go turn it in at a local office, that's very expensive to administer. Because you need a human being to receive that, open it up, look at it, and determine whether or not, you know, you qualify for those benefits. And that's the way applications happened for many, many years in the safety net. When you think about it, the s the US Safety Net is not that old. The ⁓ Social Security Act or the the Great Soci Great ⁓ not Great Society, but the ⁓ the New Deal programs, including Social Security, is in the early thirties and that's less than a hundred years ago. I'm fifty. So a hundred years is not a long time. I I used to think differently when I was seventeen. Yeah, I hear you. and and so, you know, you you begin to see firsthand that by simplifying things, actually submitting an application on your phone and having a state government ⁓ system to process that application, that's actually very inexpensive in the grand scheme of things to to get people A yes or a no for their government benefits. ⁓ and so again, the simplest ⁓ way of doing things is often the cheapest way of administering programs, and it's a better product for the people who are applying. So this project was a very bold project. And the state of Texas also believed that the simpler way was the least expensive way to administer. And they hired a bunch of consultants to do it. And there we were basically trying to figure out. How do we design the application for benefits so that it is easy for people to fill out? Once that application is received, how does that information get pulled out from a document processing center in Midland, Texas? So then you have OCR techni and technology, which I think it stands for optical character recognition. And then you take that information then and submit it to an eligibility system to determine whether or not, you know, you qualify for those benefits. There's thousands of steps along the way in the workflow that help people get enrolled in these services. And so you have to be a stickler for the details. You have to be willing to draw all of those workflow diagrams. And I was lucky in that when I went to Maximus, ⁓ being somebody who was a programmer in a past life and got his master's, I was able to work with some really smart people. Well, ⁓ through a bunch of crazy circumstances, the company that I worked for, Maximus, became the prime contractor because Accenture, which was ⁓ a larger company, ended up parting ways with HHSC. And so there therefore my company, Maximus, that I worked for, had to look around and take over the entire contract. And I just happened to be one of the people in the room at the time. And so there we were, several hundred Accenture employees literally left the building over the next month. And we were just looking around at each other thinking, How in the world are we gonna do this? And so that was fast forward three and a half years. There were a lot of late nights. You know, my car was the last n car in the parking lot. And which year is this? Just This was two thousand seven until two thousand and ten. Okay. And the financial crisis happened in the middle of this. Exactly. Yeah. So there we were trying to transform the infrastructure of the state government. of Texas and all of the functions weren't done yet. You know, all the processes weren't done yet. And part of my team's job was to forecast how many calls we were going to get so that our company could staff the call center that have the right people there to answer the phone. So, you know, there's a lot lot of data science there where you need to know how many people should be there on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Wednesday based on the hold time or the time it takes to handle the call. But you have to start with a baseline forecast of demand. We also had to forecast How many applications for benefits we would receive on a month over month basis so that we can process the document processing ⁓ center staff. We'd have to be able to hire the staff on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. What we noticed this summer, spring and summer of 2008 was that our forecasts were wrong significantly. In part because we didn't anticipate the financial crisis. ⁓ so They were not the only ones. We exactly yeah. and we saw that firsthand for the second biggest state. And that was a lot of pain for a lot of people, including and mostly people that were struggling. And I had a chance to listen to phone calls from people with a headset. I didn't you know, I was sitting with the call center agent and so I would just listen people telling their stories about how they would respond to their renewals and wouldn't be able to get enrolled because there wasn't enough staff. to sit with them to do their interview in order to renew their SNAP benefits. And that I mean, that's very real. ⁓ and you know, a large agency it can't move on a dime and two hundred employees don't just fall from the air and get trained and, you know, and do that. So after working through that crisis with hand in hand with the state, ⁓ We were able to deliver lots of different projects ⁓ that simplified the workflow for those employees that were trying to process people's benefits. The call center staff only required a high school diploma. And once you were hired, you got three weeks worth of training. And so we would develop software for those call center staff to be more efficient on the call. And some of these ideas were very successful where we were able to shorten the call by 20%. because the call center staff had access to information through better design screens and they would be able to help the client faster. We're also able to allow some phone calls to be answered through electronic voice system. Now of course this is before AI, but you tell people you know your traditional AI, even your prediction of your what's the load that's gonna come in, what's your log going to come in? This is Before AI was cool, you were doing it ⁓ just the traditional. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't I mean what we were doing wasn't as complicated, but like, you know, ⁓ most problems don't require AI and and so we were able to ⁓ to do that. And we were also able to drive down the number of calls needed to be answered by a human being because people could get it through the voice response system. And so ⁓ I I think the big light bulb moment with the state was look, there's not enough humans To solve poverty and to fix the safety net. It will never be fixed. And because as I looked at the crisis and you know, I I felt the pain of the people we were serving, it was just quite clear that if I w if I was gonna make a difference in my life, it wasn't gonna be here. And that's when I had the crazy- Did you realize that at that point? Because you got more staff, you got better prediction. What made you realize what did you see that you were like with more staff or more people and Better prediction, this is not gonna solve it internally. I need to go outside. What is it that you saw or you I think what I realized is ⁓ I worked for a company who had a a boss and that was HHSC and ⁓ the company they they didn't have control over what they could build. You know, th they would o only be able to build what their boss, the you know, their customer ⁓ would tell them to build. ⁓ and I think I I think I just realized that, you know, they're an operations outsourcing ⁓ entity and they're they're a great company, very innovative company. But ⁓ I could have a great impact by staying where I was, but it wasn't going to happen fast enough. Like the like I just wanted a bigger impact than that. And and I'll give you one example. While I was there, the call center staff were bilingual in a couple of the contact centers, the good the call centers. And when you're a brand new employee and you're bilingual or any employee, you have work instructions that you look at on a screen when somebody calls, and it tells you what to say when somebody calls. And so if you have a question about a very complicated subject like a SNAP benefits, you have to read those work instructions on the fly. Well, those work instructions were only written in English. And the Spanish-speaking staff asked a very simple question, do you mind translating these work instructions to Spanish? Because it's it's very stressful being on a call, hearing somebody speaking Spanish, you know, speaking Spanish in your mind, and then going to a screen that's in English, you're having to translate, and then you have to translate that back to the client. And of course, this was before Google Translate and all the great things that are out now. Well, the state agreed that this was a problem and they wanted to fix it, but it took them one year to fix it. That Tiny little problem. It took them a year. And so that's that was part of the straw that broke the camel's back in that look, you get one life. And so I started writing a business plan that summer, the summer of 2010, you know, ⁓ downloaded the business plan from the small business administration and nights and weekends would just draw out what I wanted to do. And at the time there was a great Austin company called Indeed, which is a big search job search engine. So Indeed was one of the first vertical search engines. And so I thought, why isn't there an Indeed for social services? ⁓ and and there wasn't. And so ⁓ I had a chance in September of that year. And so I incorporated the company ⁓ full time. And ⁓ So I wanna I definitely wanna go into this and I wanna like obviously hear all that story, but I wanna just take one pause and maybe one step back. So The government was working on this. Obviously you guys helped them with a consulting company that you guys had. Were there any other non profits or organizations that were trying to tackle this that maybe failed or there were some learning lessons that we can take from that? ⁓ so yeah, there there were. ⁓ the so in the US and I think in Canada too, they have what's called two two one one call centers. And these are call centers that were stood up in the nine ⁓ and so if you call 911, that's an emergency number and that goes to the police and fire. If you call 311, that's basically information at at a city level. If you call 211, those were typically contracts that were given to nonprofits like United Ways, and they would run call centers and they would give people options for the social services. and ⁓ that those existed. And I I researched those. But then I looked at and I and I realized that those were contracts that were given to United Ways. ⁓ they were primarily call centers. And at the time they did have software, but it was pretty obvious that software was not their first priority. ⁓ so they had vendors, ⁓ that some of them still exist today that would allow people to go find services themselves, but it was clear from how You know, from what ⁓ from my research that it was primarily a call center. So I I don't I j I guess I was just thinking a little bit bigger and thinking, well, if indeed can create, you know, a worldwide search for jobs in a beautiful interface just for the United States, why can't we do the same thing? Meaning it shouldn't matter where you live, you should be able to find social services in any zip code in the United States. And so if I put it on on the person that's trying to access these services and I'm trying to find a gap, what's missing from these call call services? Do they potentially give you something that's not applicable to you or may it may be outdated? Or what is what were some of the issues that those have that the person looking for the right service may may struggle with? From my research, and I didn't call the call center as a test or anything like that. I was working on the assumption that ⁓ there there's a s I mean, when you grow up poor, there's a stigma that you carry for the rest of your life. And it's a stigma that I have today, regardless of your financial circumstances. It's just rooted in you. And and people are afraid to say out loud what's really happening because they and they shouldn't be, but they get embarrassed. ⁓ they you know, i it imagine if imagine if you're a breadwinner for your family and you lose your job. ⁓ There's a lot of stigma about a breadwinner and being able to provide for your family. And when you call a call center, people are afraid to ask for help. ⁓ although they shouldn't be. ⁓ they are. And I guess my belief was remember, we are living through a time of e-commerce where you can buy anything off of Amazon and ⁓ it'll ride at your door the next couple of days. and the thinking was, well, if I can apply apply for a mortgage online and I can apply for a car loan online. And these are all very complicated workflows. There's not that many nonprofits in the United States. Why can't we solve this problem and have a a unique experience? So for me, being a programmer by training or or by early profession, I was like, we can build this. I can build this. So let's try. And and maybe someday those call centers could be customers of ours using our software. But the goal is the human being Their time is so precious that Why not if people can get information themselves or solve problems themselves, that frees up capacity for human beings to solve other more complicated problems. So in the social workspace, I could tell Yassi that, hey, here's three food options for you to go to that's currently open today. Well, if Yassi can find that out herself, you can then use that time with the agent to solve deeper questions. So what's going on? Well, the the truth is I I didn't get my child support. Okay. Well, how long have you not gotten it? Well, over a year. Well, did you know that the Attorney General's office has a program where they'll help track down and recoup some of that child support? My belief was is that if we can solve the information problem of the safety net, that frees up capacity to solve deeper problems that require the human mind ⁓ to solve and more importantly, the empathy of the human mind to solve. So you sort of find health to solve the information problem. Yes, exactly. Okay. So what did you consciously start to solve and maybe walk us through I understand there's organizations that use your products and then there's individuals. Can you kind of walk me through both of those and sure and maybe give an example for each so it's a bit easier to understand? So in the early days, we didn't know what our business model was going to be. Even though I wrote a business plan, ⁓ it was not it didn't exactly play out the way I originally wrote it. But the belief was if we d could do a good job with the search engine and get a lot of users, then the business model would present itself. It was a it was a leap of faith, really. So the the problem that I wanted to solve is for anybody who's navigating on behalf of somebody, we use the term seeker, which is anybody seeking services. So a seeker should be able to at least understand their options. They should be able to have a very simple interface. And for many years, it was just the zip code. And they should be able to see everything categorized and taxonomized. And you you can then choose. Do I need help with child support? Do I need help with food? Do I need help with affordable housing? And if I think the belief was if we just solved that problem, new problems would present themselves. And so today it's it's similar in that most of far majority of our users are people in need that are out going to findhelp.org and doing searches and and finding services. Over time, the business model began to present itself. And that was our customers, basically any group that hires large groups of social workers. So this could be a safety net hospital. It could be a federally qualified health center, which typically serves the Medicaid or uninsured population. It could be a health plan, ⁓ Medicare Advantage plan, a commercial health plan. A lot of these organizations hire lots of social workers, but they don't have a lot of workflow software for social work. They have workflow software for doctors through electronic medical records. They have workflow software for sales organizations through Salesforce, but the social services sector didn't have a lot of options for making their workflow more efficient. And so over time, we've become the leading platform for the workflow ⁓ that social workers and care coordinators use. And that's the side where we have customers. And so we sell a premium version of our platform to organizations that hire large groups of social workers. And we put our pricing on our website and they pay us a monthly fee and they have unlimited licenses. And you get enough customers, you know, hopefully the business survives. We don't monetize. So just so I understand, I'm a social worker. I work for organization X, and now I'm helping Jane here. I, on behalf of Jane look at what are the services that she would qualify for. Am I understanding this correctly? Exactly. Yeah. So you said your name is Jane in this example? No, I'm still Yassi. Jane is the person I'm helping. I'm the social worker. Yeah. So Yassi, you know, he works for works for a big company. So our customers tend to be bigger companies. So the small nonprofits that are providing services, they can use our software for free. They've always used it for free. So we don't monetize that part of it. But if Yassi works for ⁓ let's say a hospital, ⁓ and you're a social worker at a hospital, ⁓ you need some advanced features. And one of those advanced features are integration with the electronic medical record software. So ⁓ you know, you might need some some demographic information about Jane, and that's already stored in the health record. So we we build the integrations with the health records and many other systems of record so that your workflow, you don't have to remember another password. You can basically Search for programs and make referrals for programs through either your health record in this example or through an integration with Find Help. And your company needs a longitudinal history of all of this work because Yassi might quit a month down the road and Jane is going to be assigned to another social worker. That new social worker is going to want to know the history of those interactions. You know, it has some similarities to CRM, if you think about it. But that ended up being a good enough product. To subsidize all the work that we do on the free search side of the house. Okay. And you decide to put all of this in a for profit legal structure, my understanding of it. And does this loof back to your university project that you realize private business can actually help public, or or was it a different reason why you decided to do it this way? That was part of it. That was part of it. You know, remember I I had worked in government. I'd also worked in I'd also seen that model in graduate school. ⁓ and I I wasn't sure at first. At first I thought I would start a nonprofit to do this work. And ⁓ my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, was getting her master's degree at University of Texas. She was getting her MBA, and there was an entrepreneur in residence there, a guy named Gary Hoover. And for my birthday ⁓ in 2010, while I was writing this business model. ⁓ she invited me, she took me out to dinner with Gary, invited Gary to listen to my business model. and we went to Fonda San Miguel in Austin, which is a nice interior Mexican restaurant. ⁓ we spent three hours. Gary is an eccentric guy, he's a former entrepreneur, ⁓ teacher, and he listened to the model and me explaining it. And it just so happens he was a big libertarian, you know. He believed that for profit companies have and always will solve social problems. And when I told them that I was thinking about incorporating as a nonprofit, he very gently sort of shared, he goes, you know, I've been on many nonprofit boards. If you think it's going to be easier to make this successful as a nonprofit, you're wrong. Raising money isn't is very difficult to do. But if you're a for profit company, you can raise investment. You can raise equity investment. And then he goes, You may be familiar with this, but there's something called the Martha Avenue Housing Projects, B Corporation. And he told me about B Corporations. And so I ended up looking into it a little bit further. And I thought, you know, he's right. In part, one of his last arguments was, Look, you have a business model here, and I think you should pay taxes. Again, this is coming from a libertarian. And his point was the sector is huge in the area you're trying to work on. You have a business model there somewhere, therefore. go all in and make it a for profit company. And so I I incorporated as a ⁓ a Delaware Sea Corporation two weeks later on a website called incorporate dot com where the fee was only ninety nine dollars. ⁓ and I incorporated a lot different now? Yeah, a lot different. I I incorporated as Aunt Bertha Incorporated because I couldn't think of a name. and I didn't have an Aunt Bertha but in part ⁓ it reminded me of ⁓ Aunt Elaine, my mom's Aunt Elaine, who who helped my mom during her hard time. And at that point, I was ⁓ off to the races, building Aunt Bertha. And ⁓ if I could just pull on one thread, you mentioned before that private businesses can say, This is not my problem, this is not my target customer. Now you're building a private organization who's making the problem of anyone and everyone who could be needing social services. I mean, I don't even know how big that scope is. How do you make sure that you're still not saying this is not my problem while being a for profit? Well, resources make that a lot easier because even though you're a for profit company, you don't have unlimited money to lose, you know, on a daily basis. So you have to figure out what your scope is. And ⁓ I I wish I could say that there was some masterful design along the way, but ⁓ resource constraints as a way of forcing you to specialize in one way or another. Along the way, when you're when you're starting a company, you h you have to raise money. I like I said, I at the time I didn't have any any serious money. I had about twenty thousand dollars in the bank and ⁓ I had a home that had some equity in it and I had a 401k which had forty thousand dollars in it. And and I I didn't know how I would fund the business. I just knew there wasn't a gun to my head right away. So I lived off of my savings for a little bit and then joined a coworking space that was also very entrepreneurial and they would teach you how to raise money and it became very clear that I wasn't going to be successful raising money because I hadn't built a product yet, you know? And but then I got into this incubator program called the Unreasonable Institute. And they were based in Boulder, Colorado. And ⁓ Did you go on the ship that they had folks go on to review? Or were you on a ship? This was before the ship. Yeah. I always wanted to go on that ship. That's funny you've heard of them. Actually the castle. Well he did a presentation. This is like just a sidetrack. I'll come back, I promise. I was going to Malawi to do my fellowship and I came back and I was trying to figure out what the next thing is and he told me, I'm taking a bunch of people on the ship who are going to solve the world's biggest problems and I was like, This sounds exciting. I told my mom and she's like, This is ridiculous. Like you need to find something, like at least an established organization. But So I ended up going to Malawi and Tujikasa and coming back with like establish your USA. ⁓ But I always I was like, if I ever went on that ship instead of this, what would life have been? So that's why I asked you if you were on that ship. They had famous people on that ship actually. No, I wasn't on it. So the so so two of the co founders of Unreasonable Institute was a guy named Tyler Hartung and one of the other ones was a guy named Daniel Epstein. It's very likely you spoke to Daniel. Yes, I spoke to Daniel. I hired Tyler away in twenty sixteen and he's been with our company ever since. Crazy. So I went through that program and we ended up raising our first investment in twenty twelve, where we raised a hundred thousand dollars. ⁓ so for me, over time I had gotten advice from different incubators that I had gone through. And as you know, there's a lot of social good companies and and things like that. And so some of the advice that I got was, you know what you should do? You should you should just stay local in Austin and and really figure it out in Austin and figure out your business model and then and then grow that way. And for me, I hated that I absolutely hated that idea because the idea of, you know, life is not that organized. People ⁓ programs cross state lines, you know, kids move away from their parents and then they have to help their parents, you know, kids, you know, parents have to help their kids and that cross state lines. So I thought about it is, you know, we want to solve the problem of making sure everybody gets at least the information they need in a few seconds. That doesn't mean we have to establish the entire workflow for enrolling in a program, but well let let's at least solve the what are my options question. And I always just have had a strong conviction that that had to be nationwide. ⁓ and s which what what that meant is that I wanted to get the nationwide search done. Which means, you know, we'd import programs. ⁓ and and and the way to do that was to raise some some money, some investment to fund, you know, the staff that we needed. And so I was able to hire ⁓ Stu Scruggs, who's still with the company. And I had worked with him on the previous project at Maximus. And, you know, ⁓ over time you you you sort of have to do it. And so we're tempted to wanna build a bunch of other functionality. Customers would ask us, Can you build this functionality or that functionality? And we would just have to say no. But who we serve was all ⁓ I'll give you one quick example of when we first launched. I mentioned I worked at this coworking space on my on my business, and you would get a lot of advice from other startups that would basically say, look, you really want to get registered users, not anonymous users. And so when I first launched, I envisioned, you know, Aunt Bertha as a turbotext for social services. And so what I the very first iteration was getting a bunch of demographic information from the user and then being able to spit out all of the government programs that they qualified for. And what it ended up being was six pages of questions. And then on the seventh page, rather than How many questions on each of these pages, just to get a sense? A few questions, like three to five questions on each page. And then on the seventh page, rather than show them the results, I asked them to create an account, which was a really dumb idea. I actually sent this out to everybody I knew that was everybody that knew that I was working on it. And only one person actually filled out all seven pages. It was my friend Lulia. And my sister didn't. My girlfriend at the time didn't. Now wife Nien didn't. So the big lesson was I'm not going to ask for a login. And to this day, we don't force a login. Anybody can search for services without a login. And when they're ready and they need to apply for a service, then you know they can put in their email or their names or the things that are necessary. to get enrolled in that program. That's a big and it loops back to your phone call. If I could you said there was a there was a call that people call c to to talk to someone and not many were going. And it sounds like similar in your case, give me all this information. Well no, I just want to test the waters. And now I get to see it afterwards I put it. So it's a that anonymity that me being able to save face maybe if if that's what their concern is. It is absolutely it's the biggest thing facing there's a lot of unnecessary suffering because of that stigma. Yeah. And that's a big aha moment and a learning moment. Is there another learning it's been fifteen years that you guys are or how many years has it been since you said? In August it'll be sixteen. ⁓ okay. Sixteen. Any other big learning lessons that you can share? There's hundreds. So the the next you know, so we are trying to figure out what is our business model. Remember, up until twenty twelve we didn't have any revenue. So ⁓ so ⁓ Originally I thought the business model after a couple of years would be ⁓ to provide a case management solution to nonprofits and with and charge them fifty dollars a month. ⁓ and so we built a very lightweight case management solution and we started selling it ⁓ for fifty dollars a month. For folks who don't know what case management is, can you give me a really simple definition of it? Think of it as ⁓ a software application for nonprofits. to manage the interactions that they have with the people they're serving. So a social worker might say, you know, I spoke to Yassi, she's at risk of being unhoused. Here's the answers to the assessment. It's basically just storing all the information they know about Yassi in into one of the software applications. Well we got up to about $250 a month in revenue after about a year. And that just wasn't adding up fast enough. And along the way, there was an organization called Serve Denton, which is a nonprofit in Denton, Texas That asked a question, they said, basically, can we white label your search? Can we put the serve Denton logo and the colors? Because they were opening up ⁓ basically a co-working space for nonprofits where you can have wraparound services for people in Denton. and ⁓ and I thought, well, that's interesting. And I said, technically there's no reason. Why not? How much would you pay for it? And he said I'd pay two hundred dollars a month if if you could white label the platform. And so I built it in a Starbucks in ⁓ Colorado. ⁓ and I I still have the email that I sent ⁓ to the r the team on that day, and he paid us two hundred dollars a month. And which year is this? This was twenty thirteen in the summer. And so we then realized okay, we're on to something. And so we ⁓ met some more organizations and we tested the pricing a little bit. and that white label product made us realize that we're really an enterprise software company building the workflow and the tools. So when people wanted to put out their brand on it. They already had relationships, they already had trust with the people that they served. And so there were some child welfare organizations in Florida that became customers and there was a cancer fighting organization. And then they started paying more for the solution. And and then that led to health plans, ⁓ Medicaid managed care health plans. And then they started asking for referral functionality. And so the light bulb moment was that we're an enterprise product, which meant we could charge more. For the solution. And that really is when things took off. Because a network effect started occurring, our customers ended up promoting their platform. And again, we were the underlying technology. And this was a business model that existed for many years. So for example, if you ever go buy a used car, it's not likely that that used car company is building their own custom software. They basically license software that has all the bells and whistles for buying a used car. So that was huge. And then You know, there there's lots of others along the way. ⁓ you kinda never would believe. Life has a way of basically putting the right problem in front of you, you know, at the right time and also moving things out of the way. If you're in the lab working on it. If you you that's exactly. If you're all in. Yeah, my my my I don't remember some sometimes ⁓ I don't remember who it was that told my dad, well, you know, even Einstein found things out by luck and my dad said yes, but he was in the lab. And he was working on it. Didn't just like he wasn't chilling on the side of a park and it just like fell on his head. You were you went from experiencing your mom to inside to outside to f that flexibility and that perseverance y also is a big portion of it, but it's beautiful the way you tell the story. It it is. You know, I everything happens for a reason, I believe. You ha you have to believe that. Life's too hard otherwise. ⁓ So a and the other thing that happens along the way is ⁓ in our world trust is ⁓ crucial because the the the our d our users ⁓ and our customers ⁓ talk to people for a living. The decision makers are typically ⁓ chief nursing officers, chief medical officers, ⁓ doc doctors, ⁓ social workers, they they're very, very good at reading people. You know, they have advanced degrees, you know, in in reading people and human nature. ⁓ and by, you know, going to our customers and saying, look, this is what we do, this is what we're trying to do very earnestly, really simplifies the sales process. They don't want fancy. They don't want know it all. They don't want smart. They just want people who care and and people they trust. They also don't mind if you screw up every now and then, so long as you own it. And then, you know, you you're very responsive to them. And the other incredibly important moment was how we approached pricing. I remember we were raising money in 2019, and a lot of healthcare, a lot of companies are call are what was called healthcare IT companies. And as you know, for 20 years, interest rates were very low, which meant there was a lot of money that went into venture capital that you know and venture capital made a lot of Good investments, but also a lot of bad investments. And a lot of healthcare IT companies popped up and they would overcharge, which made their revenue look good in the short run. But guess what? You have to renew in one year or three years, however long your contract is. We always believed that there were tens of thousands of customers out there in the United States. So therefore, our pricing needed to be consistent and it needed to be transparent. And it also needed to be unlimited in terms of seat licenses. Because people don't like to be constrained. And in our world, we want our customers to expand their usage across their whole enterprise. And we didn't want to put barriers in place because the more people that use our software within a community, there's a network effect. So if the city government and the county government and all the Medicaid managed care health plans and the safety net hospitals and the FQHCs are all using our software. The quality of the data gets better, the workflow gets better, and they work together to serve more people. And so you get there by keeping price as less of a barrier. And it's a leap of faith to believe that there's enough customers out there. And it's incumbent in the very early days, our contracts were only a year long. And I did that on purpose because I wanted to teach our team that building that trust is constant over time. And so I wanted our customers to be able to fire us if they were unhappy with us. And we end up having a really good renewal rate as a result. And we've received good scores from feedback as well. So You still need to grow, you still need to grow revenue, you still need to make money, ⁓ as a for profit company. But if you're going after a gigantic problem, there's always plenty of money if you take pain away from a particular industry. Yeah, and but ⁓ with millions of searches and referrals and going across from you mentioned cancer, you mentioned hospital, I'm really curious on you have a beautiful perspective from thirty thousand or hundred thousand, I don't know how many thousand foot we should we should say. What does that big picture look like? What are you seeing that maybe policy people and funders don't get to see? Can you share a little bit of that? You know what? We haven't we haven't studied our data in an exhaustive way yet. Our focus has always been on, you know, a good user experience, a good workflow, keeping our customers happy. And that's led to pretty significant usage across the board. Millions of people a month use our software and vi visit our site. But what we haven't done yet in a in a very deep way is looked at that data to really understand what's going on. And with the advanced tooling that is now available of big tools for analyzing big data, there's unlimited potential to to really influence public policy. That's what have you tested or piloted any of this just to We're beginning to now. And so imagine being able to testify, go to a your your your city council meeting or your your state legislator or to Congress and say, look, this is what we're seeing on the ground, some simple examples. One, you clearly see trends of people searching for air conditioner repair and help paying light bill in the summertimes in the South. You clearly see searches for heating bill support in ⁓ in the north. ⁓ few years ago during COVID What we noticed is that some of the top searches in certain states was dental care. And I was surprised by that. And it turns out that for adults in most states, Medicaid does not cover dental care. So we were able to determine which states had policies to cover dental care for adults without even knowing the policy because we were able to see it in our data. We believe that there's thousands of insights in our data set. And we're excited to sort of dig in and to start sharing that. Where you saw the gap, just to pull on that thread, because it's interesting. Where you saw that there was a gap, did you start new partnerships? Did you take that did anywhere to say, here's a business opportunity? It doesn't matter what your legal entity is, but there's a gap in supply here. No, we did some partnerships with ⁓ some universities that are are studying, not not in a super deep way, but we would be approached either by customers or people who had heard of us that ⁓ were looking at certain problems related to either immigration and and services related to that or food deserts and and things like that. And so but it's a we're we're in the we're in the very, very early innings of that. I would even say the preseason spring training, if you will, you know, of of that. But our focus has always been on look, we know for a fact there's enormous insights in there. We we We already know that. Let's make sure that we have enough momentum to really understand it. And so the more users you have and the more referrals that take place on your platform, the more you're gonna be able to find things that are going to enlighten policymakers and funders. Here's another example. I I was in West Virginia recently and I looked at the data And we have report that shows in any given state the zip code that has the most searches in our entire history. And in the state of West Virginia, the zip code that had the most searches was Parkersburg, West Virginia, which is a small town. It's not the biggest town in West Virginia. And it turns out I actually ended up meeting the mayor of Parkersburg at one point. And it turns out there are clinics in Parkersburg that will help people recover from their opioid addiction. And it's about a month-long clinic. And They accept people from somewhere between 18 and 22 states. What happens is that people are able to get into those clinics, but when they get out, either they're still addicted or they don't have any money to get back. So in that small town, due to those small clinics, you got a real problem. And they're doing these searches from the center of the town. And they're trying to figure out how do I get bus tickets to go back? How do I eat? So imagine, you know, what you could do with that. Maybe you Have an offboarding program. Maybe the legislature puts away a million dollars for bus tickets. You know, maybe they put the facilities in different towns. I I don't know what those solutions are. But the going back to the original, you know, thing that I was talking about is we're trying to solve the information problem. So it's not just the information problem about finding programs, it's the information problem about it evaluating the effectiveness of programs. That's that's where you change the world. Yeah, because I think the first part you're trying to make traffic run better. You know, the the same number of cars, the same number of nodes. And then you're looking at, okay, how do I how to make the efficiency better now? How do I where are the gaps? Where do I go? And so it's various parts of the information problem that I think you guys can solve. So it's you said you're in spring season. I'd I Spring training Spring training. Thank you. Well ⁓ stay tuned. Love to see where that takes us. We're working on a project to start to share some of those insights. And I'm excited. Again, very early stages. One one of the c I still admire Indeed very much and they have ⁓ I think they have this blog called Hiring Lab. And Indeed has hundreds of millions of users all around the world. They've collected so much data that they're advising governments on the economies that they're seeing. I've definitely fed information into them from every job I've ever had. Exactly. Exactly. And and then they have ⁓ many employers use Indeed to determine whether or not you get the job. So you also have denial reasons and a bunch of stuff. The Fed, the Fed the Federal Reserve actually uses Indeed data in their data sets. And it's just a wonderful company and and th you know, that hiring lab writes in depth articles about the data that they're seeing. We would love, you know, someday to be able to share that type of information. To help policymakers make these decisions and and to also help funders. One of the things that I'll share is I think the safety net 10 years from now looks a lot different. Right now, there's people who decide. There's there's there's sort of people in the middle who decide who gets the benefits. In a state government situation, it's it's ⁓ eligibility workers. In a n in a nonprofit system, it it might be a a local United Way who maybe they receive a large grant from a funder, a million dollars, and then they decide which nonprofits are going to get that money. Or the nonprofits themselves that make a decision on what the eligibility rules are about, you know, who gets to go to the subsidized camp for kids that are struggling. It's really, really interesting is that if you can have a going back to economics, you know, you talk about perfect information, you know, between supply and demand. I can imagine a world where computers are gonna find out about n demand in a city, supply in a city, but also Yassi's individual demand. And based on your demographics, based on your medical history, ⁓ based on ⁓ ⁓ what your immediate need is, within a couple of seconds, they're gonna be able to get your need fulfilled. You might be 70 years old, fast forward, and you might fall and break your hip. And the only thing preventing you after you get out of the hospital from recovering at home might be whether or not you can get into the home in a wheelchair or not. You may not be able to afford to build a wheelchair ramp or put grab bars in the bathroom or have nurses come check on you, but it'll be a lot cheaper if you If you recover in the home, then you recover in a nursing home that is quite depressing, I can assure you. So what I believe is going to happen is these systems are going to get so good that while you're in the hospital, the wheelchair ramps are already going to be built, your apartment your house or your apartment's going to be modified. The nurses are going to be scheduled to come come check on you because the economics require it. And I think that's a beautiful future. But it's going to it's going to be rough on a lot of people because an industry that's used to somebody in the middle deciding. who gets the services and who isn't, to a future where an algorithm decides that, it could help millions of people and it could eliminate the time to receive services. It's also dangerous if not done correctly, but I think disruption is absolutely inevitable. It's been a beautiful journey you guys have gone so far. Obviously you have millions, I think around four million people that rely on on find help every month. When you sit down with yourself, not the numbers, not what you report as this is my impact, how do you know you're making a difference? Is it a particular story that comes to you? Is it a Is it a something subjective that you look at? How do you know that you're still making a difference? You're still aligned to the right things? That's a hard qu that's a good question. That's a hard question. Sorry. It you know, I ⁓ I I would say you don't know. I i i it it I you don't know. ⁓ but it's that feeling you get on a Friday night when you close your laptop and you drive home. And you get one life to do all this. to do as much as you can. And And you can do anything with your career, but that feeling of knowing that you did everything you can to make the world better, you know, on on that moment when you close your laptop and drive home. ⁓ I that is ingrained in our culture because in any given day, I probably have eight to twelve meetings every day. We're sitting in rooms talking about things like Well, this person had, you know, this medical code and, you know, we're talking about getting these things reimbursed and this claim file broke and and we repaired it and it is you know that every line in a database is a human being that's depending on it. ⁓ so it's so ingrained that you it it it's It's present in every single conversation. and and as my job gets more complicated and I'm I'm working with investors and others, ⁓ sometimes you forget. But ⁓ we're a pretty flat organization and ⁓ I like to go to the product ⁓ planning meeting every week and sit and listen to what They want to build and prioritize and you know, I I share my two cents. And then you're just constantly reminded that look, we're doing the work. and I I think at our company we have that in spades. ⁓ at the end of the day, could other people do it? Yeah, I think they could. ⁓ but you just have to be thankful that you get to work on this stuff. and it's in that humility. to where you know, life has a way of reminding you, ⁓ and getting you back to the humility phase. So I I'm not sure if that answered the question, but ⁓ It does. It's a lot of food for thought and Yeah. You hope you are. And sometimes that's enough. But I think that feeling, that instinct, that when you're going to sleep and when you wake up and how you feel about it. I think we underestimate what that means. And I don't think that lies. My dad's a serial entrepreneur. He's done some similar work as you and he always tells me, make big decisions with your heart, make small decisions with your brain. so when I because studying math, computer science, math and finance, I sometimes get way too analytical and excel shitty with my decisions and it's a wise person. Yes. I do I do need him in my life more than more times than not. before I go to into our standard ripple questions, is there any question you wish I'd asked you or any story you wished you had shared that we didn't brush up on it? No, but I do have to leave it about twenty after, so in the next thirteen minutes just to give you a Yeah, I just have three quick questions, so it should be great. I happy to dive in. No, no, this has been fun. I you know, I it's rare that I get to have an extended conversation about our history. So I I appreciate your curiosity for one. ⁓ but ⁓ no. Feel free to go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. ⁓ so what's the next Ripple Find Help is working on right now? The thing that hasn't been solved yet, maybe it's that thirty thousand foot. But what is it that you guys are are working that you know is the the next frontier of your work? So I'm glad you asked because you heard you heard the story in the early days. We're now rolling out a behavioral health module this fall, partnering with some some companies that are expert in this area. So I mentioned how hard it is to find a counselor, especially how hard it is to find a counselor that takes your insurance. Because we work with hundreds of insurance, health insurance organizations and and because our partners work with counselors and psychiatrists around the United States, those partners understand the insurance that they ⁓ That they take the time slots that are currently open. They know how to process the claims. And our end, our users are looking for a counselor or a psychiatrist. So if you recall, we did that project in graduate school about behavioral health. It's a subject given my mom's history that I'm very passionate about. On Find Help, you're going to be able to find a counselor. That already takes your insurance and you're gonna be able to click a button and go ahead and schedule yourself for that appointment slot. And it's all gonna be seamless. So should I look for that on find help or where where can I find out about it and do you know which month? Or do I I stay tuned for fall? So we have a blog. So if you go to company dot findhelp dot com, you can see a blog and in in the blog we talked about this. And then if you find our LinkedIn page, you can look. We've also recorded we'll put it in the ⁓ we we've also done a webinar on the project. You can see a little bit more details. But I don't wanna commit to an exact date and and have my product team yell at me ⁓ in case. As a product person I understand. You understand. Yeah. So but ⁓ we we expect this to be live ⁓ before the end of the year and ⁓ but we already have customers that are super excited about it. and it's just it's gonna be an awesome problem to solve. And that's where, you know, with the right partnerships. you you can get back to a seamless, seamless process. And again, the simple process is always a less expensive process to society. So ⁓ that's that's one area that we're super excited about. Awesome. Two more questions. So if there's another operator somewhere, maybe in a different country, maybe it's a different problem, but the same kind of messy information gap. What do you wish someone had told you at the start? And what's your advice or the mistake you're hoping that this person will not make? Well, that's a hard one. I I always say that if I knew how hard it was gonna be, I never would have done it. ⁓ like it's I really I really understood how hard it was gonna be and what it would take out of me. I wouldn't have had the the courage to do it. ⁓ but I it but it's the best thing that ever happened and it has given me a wonderful, ⁓ a wonderful journey. ⁓ I think it really is to Truly trust your instincts, ⁓ especially in periods of time when you're getting advice from everybody. Eventually you're going to get advice from investors, from customers, from employees that you hire that have a nicer background than you do, and better education and better experience. ⁓ You can digest that information, but for major decisions, spend time with it. Don't let that imposter syndrome push you to a decision that makes you feel uncomfortable in your gut. So slow down a little bit. Just because a customer is a Fortune 500 customer and you need to keep the account, or just because an investor invested in XYZ companies, that doesn't mean they know your business better. And just because an employee talks about what they did in their previous company, which was a very good successful company, that should not discount that that level of uncomfort you have your gut. So I would just say lean into it a little bit more, listen, because they all three of those entities have really, really good ideas. But if it doesn't square inside, it's it's your heart's trying to st your gut's trying to tell you something. That's a good one. And I think it goes even beyond work. One last one. And this one is just for you on an individual level. Fifteen years of building for other people's access to a better life. What are you personally doing outside of work to improve your own social, environmental, economic impact in the world? So for me, I really struggled. I used to be a runner in high school. I was Did tracking cross country and then after grad school I started running with a running group. ⁓ and started running marathons and loved it, did nine different marathons, and then I started a company and then I gained forty pounds. ⁓ no. over the last couple of years I started running again and ⁓ it it's really, really good for my mind. ⁓ and you know, to take companies or any if you're leading any organization, you know what they say, put your mask on first ⁓ before you help others. ⁓ so I've really enjoyed forcing myself to go exercise when I don't feel like it. And and that has it takes the edge off. And I forgot how much I enjoy it. It it's not the weight you lose or how you look or whether your clothes fit better. It's it's ⁓ it's how you feel at the end of the day. ⁓ and you and you sleep better and you don't crave the sugar and all of those other things. ⁓ and and the other thing is ⁓ you know I I love spending time with with My family, ⁓ my nieces in particular and and my wife and I have two dogs. ⁓ but I'm close with my ⁓ my two sisters that are here in Austin and I have five nieces and a nephew and my brother's there, so Your brother's here. ⁓ great. Well when you come visit you'll have to come by the Austin. My son is in love with my brother, so we we we will be in your city at some point, ⁓ because I get told every day, why can't we go on a plane and go see Uncle Ella? Well, there's no excuse. ⁓ there's a good reason to come. There's great barbecue. And he runs, so I should connect him to you. And he's a good could he's a drill master, so he he used to kick my butt. I I should connect him to you if you need someone to push you. I'm hype. But yeah, hopefully you'll come down and ⁓ check out the city. We'd love to have you by the office. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your passion and resilience and for Taking the time to share your stories and thank you for everything you've done in this world. And sharing some of those stories and and really thinking about the important questions you're asking. I'm really excited for the ripple map. I think you're on to something big and I look forward to your first season when it comes out. Thank you. That's very sweet. Thank you. Erin said something really simple near the end. Every line in the database. Is a human being depending on it. Somewhere in your world, there are lines like that too. Are you looking for them? One of our guests started with something huge. Some have been shaping the ripples for decades. Some are just noticing theirs for the first time. What's one ripple from this conversation that stayed with you? What's one ripple of your own from your own life and your own community that you're ready to reflect on or even act on? Join me and the other ripplers as we keep working on our ripples. Thank you.