How Alan is Redefining Benefits and Digital Health in Canada with Mark Goad, GM at Alan

In this insightful interview, Mark Goad, GM of Allen Canada, shares his journey through the tech and health sectors, discusses the future of healthcare and benefits in Canada, and explores the transformative role of AI in medicine and insurance.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
01:51 Music Preferences and Personal Interests
03:54 Early Career and First Job as Skate Instructor
05:02 Career Journey: From Strategy Consulting to Venture Capital
06:31 Experience in Silicon Valley and Tech Ecosystem
07:19 Canada's Tech Ecosystem vs Silicon Valley
09:09 Returning to Canada and Bringing Back Experience
10:54 Canadian Innovation and Ecosystem Strengths
12:02 Joining Alan and Healthcare Innovation
16:17 Motivation for Focusing on Healthcare
18:55 Impact of CAMH and Mental Health Initiatives
20:39 Trends in Employee Benefits and Healthcare Needs
27:17 Disconnect Between Employer Perceptions and Employee Needs
31:09 Evolving Employee Expectations in Benefits
33:55 Future of Benefits: Flexibility and Personalization
35:48 Long-term Vision for Healthcare and Benefits
38:14 Role of AI in Healthcare and Insurance
41:28 AI Adoption Timeline and Future Outlook
43:24 Personal Reflections on AI and Healthcare Innovation
47:06 Future of AI-Driven Health Insurance and Benefits
49:18 The Purple Marmot and Branding Strategy

Creators and Guests

Host

Martin Hauck

Co-Founder of The People People Group & Host of From A People Perspective

What is From A People Perspective?

A podcast about fascinating professionals, how they got to where they are and where they’re going from the lens HR, Recruitment and People Operations hosted by Martin Hauck.

Martin Hauck (01:34)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of From a People Perspective. I'm your host, Martin Hawk. And today we've got Mark Goad, the GM of Allen Canada. Thanks for thanks for joining the podcast today.

Mark Goad (01:49)
Thanks for having me on, Martin. Looking forward to it.

Martin Hauck (01:51)
⁓ so yeah, this is, this has been a long time coming, lots of emails back and forth and we've yet to shake hands in person. This is the first time we're seeing each other. I love these kinds of episodes because we get to learn so much about each other. ⁓ and I kind of start things off with, ⁓ with some icebreakers. let's, let's, let's see where things are at. let's just say you've only got one album that you can listen to or artists.

that you can listen to for the rest of time. What are we dealing with here?

Mark Goad (02:26)
That's tough, that's a tough one. I definitely like to spread it around a little bit, but I think my first thought was kind going back to the Strokes in high school. is it, like that is just like a very specific, know, everybody loves music from their high school period. It's shocking how that was always when the best music was released. So I think I gotta be true to myself and go back to the Strokes. Yeah.

Martin Hauck (02:35)
Okay.

That's interesting. I want to, kind

of want to double click on like just general music preferences. Like strokes is, a nice, strokes is a nice, there's something unique about their sound. I don't, I don't know what to say beyond that. Like, any other bands that come to mind for you? I'm just curious.

Mark Goad (03:10)
Yeah,

I really do like to pass the buck around, like whether it's like country music, rap, EDM. Like if you look at my, like I'm a big live music fan, like probably five or six concerts a summer. And there's just no thematic, like overlaying theme to anything. No, we got a little Noah Khan coming up. We got Mumford and Sons. ⁓

Martin Hauck (03:14)
Yeah, yeah.

Amazing.

There's no theme to it.

Mark Goad (03:35)
There's a EDM show coming up. So really, really broad interest range there. And that's what I think makes life great.

Martin Hauck (03:40)
Nice, nice.

I've always listened to EDM. I've enjoyed it. ⁓ I've never gone to a festival or that music and ⁓ seen that music live per se, like maybe like Oceania and was someone else. no, that's on the bucket list for sure. Okay, next one.

What was like your first gig before you got into ⁓ the world that you got into and we'll go into your career history real quick but

Mark Goad (04:14)
Sure, yeah. First job was 13, learned to skate instructor. grew up in Scarborough, a lot of new Canadians learning how to skate and that was the first gig. It was like a very interesting lesson of like specialization, because like I remember vividly earning like minimum wage I think was $7, $7.50 an hour and I was making $10 an hour. was like, wow, this is the real deal. So that was my first job.

Martin Hauck (04:39)
Cool. Cool. Skate instructor. Nice. Nice. It's nice when you get your first like chunk of change as a kid and then you can buy all the things you've been eyeing or like make up for any birthdays that didn't go as exactly as planned. ⁓ from skate instructor to strategy consulting, you were a co-founder at one point, moved into the

Mark Goad (04:53)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Hauck (05:02)
corporate world of SAP, then got into the VC world. This has been an interesting journey. And now most recently you're with Allen leading the charge in Canada, kind of transforming how benefits are being done. I'd love to just kind of get your sense of your journey. And then I definitely want to spend some time on the benefit side of things.

Mark Goad (05:23)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. mean, for me, like everything changed at ⁓ university when I got accepted into the IB business program. That really opened my mind to like the types of things you could do. you know, the classes focused on, you know, all day long, eight hours a day strategy, finance, operations. And that changed, like not only how I saw the world, but also how I saw myself and where I could fit within it. So all I knew graduating from school was that I wanted to work.

in technology and I don't think I could have told you like anything more specific than that at that point. And you know, sometimes you've got to be lucky, right? SAP at the time was starting up their very first consulting analyst program. So it was like, hey, come work at it. At the time, the world's largest software company.

Martin Hauck (06:02)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (06:08)
and learn from people. So all of my managers were either at Booz Allen, McKinsey, BCG, come learn the strategy consulting tool set within the environment of learning how to structure and sell large software deals. And a good chunk of those deals, SAP bought SuccessFactors, and now it's been a couple of decades ago, but a good chunk were on HR. So my first projects I remember doing for Fortune 500 companies were

Martin Hauck (06:19)
you

Mark Goad (06:31)
basically helping them assess their workflows. Like what are they spending time on in HR workflows? Were they spending too much money? Where could they go faster? Benchmarking business processes and headcount and resource planning. So it was a really cool introduction to the world. ⁓ From there, kind of parlayed that into venture and San Francisco had an opportunity to move down to SF, Silicon Valley and be in the heart of the technology world, which was really a dream come true and a huge accelerant for me.

It was an incredible experience, but I was fortunate to kind of bring that back to Canada as well.

Martin Hauck (07:03)
Nice. Any, any experiences that stick out in the, like that's, that's you were at the Mecca of technologies for somebody like, want to work in tech to like going to San Francisco. Like a lot of people don't even get there. So that's, that's really cool. Anything stand out about your journey or your lessons there?

Mark Goad (07:19)
Yeah, it's, it's, you know, there's a recurrent debate and kind of like, want to be the next Silicon Valley. We want to be the next thing. And it's like, I don't think until you get there, you realize what it is. And the selection bias that happens, like the people that are there every time you go out to a dinner, to an event, to like, I played soccer, I ran with a group. Like every single person there is building something in technology. They're an engineer, they're a product manager, they're a salesperson, they're recruiting and helping place, like the ecosystem.

Every single person you run into is obsessed in the way that a lot of us are in Canada, but it's much more distributed. It doesn't have that same, Alex Danko calls it like the scene. It doesn't have that scene element and the density that we have, that was down in the valley. So think it's important to note that because then it changes your strategy. How you see yourself, how you position yourself as a tech community changes how you allocate resources, how you define, how do you retain.

Martin Hauck (08:02)
Hmm

Mark Goad (08:18)
retain and attract new talent within that ecosystem.

Martin Hauck (08:22)
No, it's it's and we're were there any companies that stood out? Like in terms of like your time with them or ⁓ like, while investing and while like, like what stood out apart from the scene but

Mark Goad (08:40)
Yeah, yeah. Came across like a number of like really interesting companies that are now very big today. And then, you know, as part of the scene there, a lot that like didn't make it, fast failure, I think is more of a norm down there than, you know, there are companies that aren't going to make it here and you can last a very long time on kind of government grants and fumes here than otherwise you would. And I think recycling a capital, whether it's human or financial, is an important part of an ecosystem that we don't have here.

Martin Hauck (09:01)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Mark Goad (09:08)
Really.

Martin Hauck (09:08)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (09:09)
So ⁓ that was a big difference. Yeah, there's a couple of companies. I mean, like I remember my first Waymo experience back in 2017. You see a car like without a human being or a human being sitting behind the wheel. Yeah. So they were behind the wheel, but not touching it like around their campus. Cause SAP has a campus in the Valley. And then I lived up with most of the folks in the city of San Francisco. So I remember seeing that and just being like completely blown away. That was like, yeah, that's something that sticks out to me for sure.

Martin Hauck (09:18)
2017.

Okay.

I like that you you there was an element of like bringing it back to to Canada as well. ⁓ And in terms of bringing, what would you say you brought back to Canada when you did come back and where did you end up?

Mark Goad (09:57)
I think, but I also learned this at my fund in Toronto of like, what is exceptional look like? One, from a pure empirical perspective, you can look at it and be like, yeah, look, venture funds are built around finding that 0.001 % outcome, which in my opinion means 0.01 % founder. And it's like, what does that bar mean to you until you truly see great and exceptional?

I think it's tough to kind of put your finger on it, but I don't think that's unique. Like we have that in Canada for sure. I there's incredible companies being built here. ⁓ So I'm careful to like completely attribute that to my time in the Valley.

I think what I remember is the shared collective conscious obsession around technology and building and scaling and venture is like a, it's a cultural language we don't have here. It's not the same density. ⁓ So that's what I remember about that experience.

Martin Hauck (10:54)
Gotcha. But in terms of what you wanted to bring back to Canada, what, when you came back to Canada, it kind of got, it came a sense of like, okay, I've got all this experience now I'm back, back in Toronto, back in Canada. And there's obviously an element of, of, of pride with that. what do you see Canada like fostering really well in, terms of that ecosystem in general?

Mark Goad (11:23)
I think we...

Yeah, I don't know if I have like a super strong opinion on like what Canada does incredibly well, because I think I see like entrepreneurship across here and I see great founders in specific domains. Like I don't see it necessarily by stage. if you like, I don't know if I have like an overarching unifying theory on like what Canada is uniquely well positioned to do.

Martin Hauck (11:47)
Okay. Yeah, no, it's fair. ⁓ So out of VC moved into a COO role at Curve Health. ⁓ And, and then into Alan, maybe just kind of like help us get to where you are now.

Mark Goad (12:02)
Yeah, so I left my ⁓ venture role and was trying to figure out what to do next. And then that was in May of 2020. So the world was about to go into a two week lockdown at that point in time. connected with a bunch of people in the ecosystem and met with the original founder of Curve. And we felt a really good fit around our vision of

using technology to deliver asynchronous care and this idea that we can scale care providers of any kind using AI. And now this is pre-ChatUBT kind of 2.0, which is, or 3.0, depending on how early you want to go and say the change in movement, like this is before all of that. So we, I joined a team that had like a really interesting computer vision model and we built and they were, they were targeting mostly like high-end athletes and we built and pivoted the whole business around healthcare.

Martin Hauck (12:39)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (12:58)
The idea was like using technology to scale providers to deliver higher quality care that has higher adherence, better outcomes for less capital. And we raised $5 million around that. had contracts with a number of the biggest carriers in Canada. We had contracts with a number of the biggest brokers and distributors and TPAs. So I got

without really intentionally designing this way very deep into the Canadian group health landscape, like very deep. then even all the way to the workers compensation board is a long-term disability. And we just weren't able to find the fit. There's a few other telemedicine providers, which is a big category I think we fall into, that were able to find it. So Curve is still alive today, operating, selling to back to kind of its roots as athletes, which I think is a great fit for that team. I still get updates and chat with them all the time.

Martin Hauck (13:38)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (13:49)
But from my experience really pushing and leading our healthcare business and our group health business specifically, I got connected with the team at Allen. And it was kind of one of these moments where you just spent the last four years smashing against the wall that is kind of the...

Martin Hauck (14:06)
Thank

Mark Goad (14:07)
incumbent structure of the Canadian health system and really learning about where the economics lie. As a digital health provider, what rank are you relative to a insurance carrier? So just simple math, most telemedicine providers are $3, $5 per employee per month. Insurance carrier is 200. Who do you think's a little bit louder voice in that room? Who do you think comes first? And I was like, wow, I didn't necessarily consider. In that channel, who has the most sway and power?

Martin Hauck (14:29)
Yep.

Mark Goad (14:35)
And then you start looking at it, it's like, oh, wait, this looks like so many other markets in Canada. We only have three telcos, five banks. There's only really three health insurance carriers in Canada. They dominate 80 % of the market. And they matter power that they have. So when someone came together and was like, hey, this company is doing what you were trying to do occur on a way, way bigger scale.

Right? Trying to flip the model and say like, hey, instead of starting with like reimbursement, what if we started with prevention? What if we started with access, doing the things we were trying to use AI probably before it was ready, to be honest, to do around patient engagement, but they have the economic engine of an insurer. So what I say all the time is like, we only sell insurance so that we can deliver at scale, zero marginal cost healthcare. And like insurance is the only wedge to do that in Canada.

And then you start looking at it like, wow, this market's actually huge. We spend about $60 billion a year on the categories of care that a private insurer like Alan or the other ones can address. Out of the $400 billion we spend every year on healthcare. It's like, whoa, that's interesting. So that's where I got connected. That was a kind of connection between our worker curve and kind of what led me to Alan.

Martin Hauck (15:52)
Nice, nice. And there was a, mentioned at the beginning, sort of this, like, I always knew I wanted to be in tech. ⁓ and there's this trend and theme in your career so far in terms of like dabbling in the, not even dabbling, like fully immersed in, in the health space. What, what was there at anything that sparked that, or did you just end up in it and then you loved it or?

Mark Goad (16:17)
It's a really great question, Martin. Like I started to become more interesting in health and to be honest, I haven't really shared this, but like the reason I moved back from San Francisco to Toronto was there were some health issues in my family and it was like important for me to be at home and help out.

And it was the first time, know, 25 years old, I like every 25 year old living in, so like, I wasn't really thinking about these things. Like I would run and jog a little bit, but like, it wasn't really like a huge like priority for me. And through that experience and then being part of the team at Omer's, like there's a fantastic investment team there. Like I are connected to the board ⁓ of League and they were really building some super innovative stuff in this space. And then I started writing about healthcare and the intersection of using technology to deliver.

better care experiences. And then I got connected to CAMH through another venture capitalist in Toronto.

you know, as soon as I saw that team and that mission was like, have to be a part of that. I actually just wrapped up my six and a half years volunteering there as the board chair for their young professionals community. it's, it really was not intentional by design, but it seemed to me like a category of all of our lives that was made very important to me at a relatively young age of like, wow, like these two things are obviously fit together. There's room for folks like me to come in, you know, working with healthcare providers and policy experts to like bring a

Martin Hauck (17:15)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (17:38)
point of view that can add a lot of leverage and you know I joke with the team all the time like I'll never go back to selling accounting software like doesn't matter how much money you offer me I don't care like I still have emails from curb of patients who email me and say hey you connected me with a therapist who changed my life hey you connected me with a dietitian who helped me get a hold of this problem like there is no amount of like quote of money in the world to go back to selling something that I don't think has a positive impact so yeah

Martin Hauck (17:45)
the

Yeah.

It's, it's well, when you, if, if you're lucky enough to get an opportunity to work on something where you truly feel like you're making an impact and like what, greater area than health. And it's, it's funny, you don't think about it until you do. And then you almost think about it all the time. ⁓ and you know, at some point people are going to have to, at some point in your life, you're going to experience, somebody's going to experience something in terms of their health, whether, ⁓

And it's, how you deal with it. That kind of like makes a difference. I, you, mentioned CAMH, which was interesting. I'm curious, like, you know, your time, like on the board, ⁓ and I'd like also I'd like a pretty transformational time in like the, mental health space. Did any of that shape your thinking about health benefits at all?

Mark Goad (18:55)
Yeah, 100%. So like at Allen, to be very specific, we have... ⁓

50 to 100 % higher mental health coverage than our competitive peers on the same benchmark plans. And we do that standard across all our plans. And that comes from my experience at ChemH. It's something that when you're joining a company, you're jointly interviewing their values and trying to figure out what do you care about. this is something that was kind of a hard line for me. Like, hey, this is something I think we need to make a stance around. Again, part of the reason why Alan's unique role is they're coming in with certain things that are incredibly

Martin Hauck (19:18)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (19:31)
incredibly high-end in terms of efficiency, but they're looking for local, like our team is all Canadians, to share what are the unique challenges in Canada and what can we do to make it better. So it was really like an incredible match of our philosophical approach to these. I'm like, hey, this is something that we need to make a difference on. So yeah, to answer your question, definitely.

Martin Hauck (19:51)
And you've got like, you've got a firsthand view. What's always interesting is like, you've got this vantage point of like, obviously you're in touch with so many different organizations across Canada and trying to disrupt this space that is pretty stale for lack of a better term. And you have to differentiate yourselves in, such a way. What are you hearing from customers that, that seems to be like,

Okay, this is the trend and we really need to do like, like you're obviously going to match your products and services to what you're, you're hearing in the market as best as you can. And you have this advantage of being tech forward and in a way that none of the organizations are. I'm curious what, are you looking at all of this?

Mark Goad (20:39)
Yeah, yeah. Maybe I could take you inside to kind of our boardroom, what we talk about. Really, I joined coming up on two and a half years ago, year one was about getting the license. So when you talk to the regulators today, they're like, hey, it's going to take you probably three to four years to get through. That's a significant, because the next best question is like, well, why has no one done it yet? Right? That is the very obvious investor lens question to ask us. And it's like...

Martin Hauck (21:00)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (21:04)
It takes three to four years to get through the process of getting the federal license, and then you have to go to each and every province. When you explain this to a colleague in Europe or something, they're like, what? What do you mean? I'm like, yeah, it's a federalized system. We distribute a lot of it. Health care is actually run by the provinces. 80 % province-funded, 20 % federal. It becomes very complicated very quickly. So year one was getting through the regulatory process, making sure that

Martin Hauck (21:14)
You

Mark Goad (21:31)
We fully understand the requirements to operate and be a good partner to the regulators. I think the relationship's been fantastic. Year two was how do we build the best health insurer in Canada? And like I say that a bit, like I do that in a year and it's like, yeah, so what really matters for health insurance? Is it simple? Can you sign up in three clicks online? Is it easy to understand your coverage? Right? Who hasn't had the, like, wait, what? I thought this was covered. That's the worst thing in the world. Can we pay you really, really quickly?

Can we get the money in your bank account before you get home from traffic? And that's not a joke. So you probably might have noticed I'm still missing a front tooth. I was in a really bad cycling accident in September. I broke my neck, my face, my nose, my teeth. It was really bad. And look, I'm in a position where I could pay for stuff out of pocket and get reimbursed. But 50 % of Canadians can't absorb a $1,000 unexpected expense. And let me tell you.

It was more than a thousand dollars as anyone in this space knows. And by the time I got home from my first dental appointment, the money was already in my TD bank account. that, I don't think we realized. It seems like, it's just insurance. It's like, yeah, until you're sick, kind of where we started this conversation, until your family member, your daughter, your partner. And then it's one other thing of a thousand things. Like I'm at a point where I'm recording every doctor conversation and...

Martin Hauck (22:39)
That's wild.

Mark Goad (22:58)
physio and rehab because it's too many, I can't keep track of them all. Having one less thing, I don't think we really truly understand the value. So that's what we're doing in year two. It's like, can we be the best in class by observable metrics, not like a, hey, powder subs on the backs. Based on what our customers expect, can we get there? The final piece of support kind of ties back in. Like anytime you have a question, can we get back to you in five minutes? That's our internal SL. It's absurd. That's absurd to do. But that's where we're hitting.

Martin Hauck (23:06)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Mark Goad (23:26)
we are still have yet to have a quarter without a hundred percent perfect C-set. So I would argue we've really checked the box of the best in class. I would put us up against any carrier in Canada on that. It's a ridiculous stat. So perfect for us is four out of five or five out of five. So that's not, that's a different bar. It's like perfect to like a reasonable, cause a lot of the time we have to say, Hey, we're not reimbursing you, but we hope you give us a good mark anyway. So that's a really high bar when you think about it from an insurance perspective. And again, if you look at the studies,

Martin Hauck (23:34)
That's wild.

Hmm.

No.

Mark Goad (23:56)
We operate at a plus 70 net promoter score, plus 69, plus 70. It's almost Apple Netflix level. The traditional carriers, the studies are a bit old, but they're in the negative two to negative eight range. So it's like, okay, it's a bit old, but I think.

Martin Hauck (24:00)
Okay.

That's world-class. That

is, that's a world-class NPS. And for folks that don't get NPS scores, I just happened to know it because we run NPS scores for the, uh, for the community. it's like 30, 40 is kind of like average and like bad experiences is, um, like negatives. You'd like the numbers can like 70 isn't out of a hundred. It's a weird scale, but 70 is insane. Like that's wide. That's wild.

Mark Goad (24:42)
for an insurer who does not accept every claim. My favorite messages are where we say, hey, sorry, that's not in policy. We get back to you quickly, like, that doesn't work. We're not going to reimburse you. And we still get a high mark. Because we get back to you quickly, we're transparent, we link exactly in the book. We do everything we can. Those are the ones I'm most proud of. Not the, hey, we ended up paying you back, and you're happy about it. So that's kind of level year two. And now what we're doing right now is

Martin Hauck (24:48)
Right.

Yeah.

Mark Goad (25:11)
launching the standard, flipping the entire system from I got sick, I went to my doctor, I got a prescription, I sent it through insurance to starting with prevention. So launching gamified apps that are right up there with the stickiness of a Netflix or an Uber Eats. How can we do that? We just reviewed our customer satisfaction. have a third of users using our gamified health apps every single week. There isn't a wellness program.

like on planet Earth that has 33 % weekly active users. that's like getting up to top tier of consumer fitness apps you would pay hundreds of dollars a month. That's like the future of health care, though. Getting ahead, flipping the model, how can we do prevention? And then the second piece is access. How do we instantly connect you with local, verified, registered providers, either virtually, which is what we've done already today with our free mental health sessions in the app, to then how can we build a map and

show you, hey, there's a walk-in clinic down the street. Here's the fastest way to get to care using technology to drop all friction and barriers to care. And that's where we're investing. And that is where the future of conversation is with all our customers. hey, like, one of my viewers is like, I don't want to pick on any of the existing groups, but like, hey, does your current care, like, what was the last new feature that you saw in your insurance app? And then we show our roadmap and it's like, we're shipping like absolute maniacs over here. Like, when's the last time they asked you like what you want to see?

Martin Hauck (26:28)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (26:35)
in terms of your health app. Because then I pull up mine, like, hey, here's a feature that this customer told us. They wanted to see more faster geolocation for reasonable and customer limits. Like, I want to know, you're not going to get reimbursed anything above $150 or whatever it is. Or like, hey, I forget how many times my kid went to the dentist. Can I have a live balance of what's remaining integrated into my booklet with search and a chat bot coming soon? That's the stuff where it was like,

wait, we're not really even having the same conversation. Like we spend very little time talking about like, do you have 80 % coverage for paramedical? It's like, yeah, we do that stuff. But it's like the future is like, how do we help you instantly unlock prevention and access for your team?

Martin Hauck (27:17)
You've, you've got this in like, I already talked a bit about the vantage point that you have in terms of like all the companies that you, that you talk to, but you've also got this additional layer of users slash employees and whatnot in terms of that. Like, what would you say the biggest disconnect is between what companies think their employees want versus what they actually need?

Mark Goad (27:41)
So it's a great, like you're kind of talking about principal agent problem of like buyer and member, but there's even one deeper that I see, which is like stated preference versus observed preference. And that is particularly like pronounced in healthcare. So to answer your specific questions, sometimes we'll talk to, we'll talk to admins, like people that run programs that sometime in a small company as a CEO could be a head HR. It kind of depends on the size and scale of the company.

Every single time, man, they care so deeply about their team. This notion of a cold, don't care HR is not one I'm very familiar with, to be really honest. They really want to help. I think most of the teams we talked to was like, hey, there's one person in HR, or they're one of many, but this is all, they don't have capacity to do what they want to do to help their employees' health. So one of the things we're running right now is Canada Workplace Health Leaders Award.

The idea of like, can we go out and find these gems, these diamonds who are doing an insane amount with a limited budget. Ideally, it's free for programs around fitness and wellness. Can we take those stories, package them up and share them with all of our members? Like, can we help give you exactly right? And I mean, this is what you're doing, by the way, at scale in your community group.

Martin Hauck (28:51)
Mm-hmm. Open source it. Yeah.

Mark Goad (28:58)
I'll say we have a lot of awards coming to your members, which probably makes sense. I often always start from like that. They want to do more than they have the resources for. So that's where we want to come in and say, hey, instantly we can just do a wellness program, a fitness program, a care program. Most of the time we talk to folks, they're really concerned about gaps in primary care. To answer you specifically, sorry, it took a while to get here. But it's like, we mostly sell to 50 to 100 person tech companies.

Martin Hauck (29:03)
Nice.

Yeah, no, no, no, it's fine.

Mark Goad (29:28)
There's demographics associated with that. Typically, he's a little bit younger and a little bit more male. That's just an insurer answer. And those folks are typically less likely to have a primary care physician. So a lot of the time when we're doing testing, so as I mentioned, we launched with mental health. Probably not a surprise, given the CAMH part of the conversation and the care gaps we have in Canada. Shocker, we picked mental health. The next one up that we're launching this year is primary care. That is like, and when we started CURVE six years ago,

Martin Hauck (29:45)
Yeah

Mark Goad (29:57)
It was mental health, was the pandemic, it was the height of that, and what's happened is like wait times have exploded for access to primary care. So your family doctor is probably the first logical step there. Then you have to tie on what's happening right now in longevity, right? And a lot of these services run directly through a primary care physician, right? Whether it's, you know, blood testing, biomarkers, that's the fun.

Martin Hauck (30:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Goad (30:20)
probably a guest very excited about. Like that also runs through a primary care physician. So I think it really solves too. And when we talk to the individual users, I think there's less acknowledgement around primary care as the big gap in their lives. We just did a study on this and women's health is actually the number one issue, which is really interesting to me. so we're talking about, like what are our members saying? You know, we're doing the classic product management thing.

What do they describe as their pain points? What can we feasibly solve as a company given, you know, we'll start virtual first, but we'll kind of extend into that value chain. And what are the top use cases that we're like, wow, if we went to our members and hey, like here are the things that we can help you solve. Like, does that create enough value? Do we think that's the right place to start? So that's our process. And it's been a really interesting kind of discovery for us.

Martin Hauck (31:09)
Would you so in my mind, right? Benefits lives is very much like prescription and dental, right? That's the like standard. That's what you've always seen. And like even everybody is almost programmed to think about their benefits program and like anything else is sort of like cherry on top. But every cherry on top has been underwhelming to the point. So you just, you don't really think about it ⁓ other than like, what's your dental and what's your and what's your HSA or like what's like what coverage do you have outside of that?

And I guess, so what you're saying now is like the trend that you're seeing in terms of like what employers think that their employees want and what, you're hearing and seeing from the actual employees and the users is that all these other things that you've just talked about, like it's, is it safe to say that the, narrative or the like most important things are shifting for the employee base. And if people don't catch up, it's kind of, is that what you're saying?

Mark Goad (32:06)
Yeah, I'm saying they have shifted. Like if you look at surveys from employees, they think their employer is responsible and accountable for their health and wellbeing. Full dead stop. The reason why we continue to have conversations about what percentage coverage we have is because that's all that's been available in Canada. There is no comprehensive integrated provider. I mean, you can look outside the top three, they're like...

Small examples here and there, nothing at 33 % weekly active usage, which I think like usage is the next key. It's like, you know, talk to HR about buying another thing that sits on the shelf that no one uses, like completely uninterested in that. So we spend most of the time when we talk, like in our first kind of meeting is talking about, this is the unique moment to differentiate your employee experience and make a huge difference.

quantifiable difference in the health and therefore well-being of your employees. We get to a point where one third of our customers in Gurp put Alan Health Benefits, not health benefits. They name us in the job postings because that is a level of understanding of this is the future. And we're already starting to see that in conversations. Our referral rate is through the roof because once you see those dots connect, I think it's hard to, as you were talking about in other parts of the discussion, it's hard to go back to that old.

Martin Hauck (33:24)
Yeah. I mean, the best, mean, that's just a Testament, right? To everything you've already said, like the best scenario is the, your users are doing your marketing for you basically. word of mouth and that, like, if you're not getting word of mouth in that, like, what are you doing kind of ⁓ what's, what's something that sort of like keeps you up at night in terms of the benefits space, ⁓ that, that probably most people aren't talking about or thinking about.

that maybe they should be.

Mark Goad (33:55)
Hmm. mean, the things that keep me up at night are not typically around like the benefit space, right? It's like, Hey, am I doing the right things for my team? Am I showing up every day being the right leader? Like those are the things that keep me up at night. I think on the benefit side, like, you know, it's, very clear to me where we want to go. The theme that we hear throughout is like increasing flexibility.

Martin Hauck (34:08)
Yeah, that's

Mark Goad (34:17)
Like how can we make things that are simple to manage? Because it can't feed this like web of plans. If you're a 50 person team, you can't the same complexity as a 5,000 person team. But how do we add flexibility and inject that so you can, because health is best when it's personalized. Like how can we add that without it adding any additional complexity? And we don't have the answer to that today.

So what we're spending a lot of time on is planning this out of like, okay, we feel like we've really nailed kind of that second bucket of like operating a great insurance carrier. Now, how could we go rebuild products that you're used to buying in a way that makes sense from a budget perspective, a management perspective? ⁓ So those are the problems we're trying to solve right now.

Martin Hauck (35:02)
It's interesting because when you're doing this work and you're effectively like innovating in a space that's just not seen much innovation at all for a myriad of reasons, ⁓ you probably spend a lot of time not only thinking about like, what does the market and what do what do customers in the market and employers and employees need right now?

that is elevated that helps us stand out. But you're also thinking about like the future state. And I'd be curious to get a sense of like, okay, well, there's like in the next year, here's all the things we'd like to get done. But like, what are you thinking five years out 10 years out? Are you thinking that far ahead?

Mark Goad (35:48)
Yeah, we definitely are. like, this is where it's cool to be operating like a business unit within a larger machine.

So Alan has been around for 10 years in France, in Spain and Belgium for five years. And then we're actively looking at, maybe I'll say, new markets beyond Canada. And it's great because I don't have to guess too much of what adds value. The first question asked is, are those relevant markets to hear? If you ask our team in Europe, what are the big healthcare system problems we're trying to solve? It's like, rise of chronic disease.

lack of access to primary care and medical deserts. Do those sound relevant to you? Like, yeah, we're all trying to sell, like every developed economy is trying to sell the same things within the context of healthcare rising as a percentage of GDP. Like in the last 10 years, healthcare is up 10 % as a percentage of GDP in Canada. That's completely disconnected from demographics. So average age is up 1.3%.

So like we keep spending more money and getting worse results from this thing. And within that context, it's like very clear to me, it's like, great, how do we build out the rest of a virtual care clinic? So as I mentioned today, we have mental health, primary care. How do we get 40 different care providers all through one seamless front door and digital experience? You know, for me long-term, if you have to ask five to 10 years, like how are we piping data back into the public system? I deplore the idea of health silos.

As I mentioned, when it was in a beta accident and my chiro had a different EMR than my doctor, than my surgeon, and it was a nightmare to manage. That's a unique thing. In Europe, they mandate EMRs. When I'm explaining this, my colleagues are like, this isn't a problem we have. We're not used to. But there are solutions where we could be piping data back to create an entire...

like basically an omni-channel EMR experience, which I think is really, really important. And some other very much smarter people than me have talked about this idea. ⁓ And then it's very clearly like longevity, right? Like how do we take this emerging science, productize it, and give it to our users in a way that makes sense? Because our goal is not, again, is not to build the best health insurer. I think that's frankly too low of a bar.

Like that's not our expectation of a win. It's like, how do we build a health system that, you know, is focused completely on prevention, drives access costs to zero, and helps you live happier, healthier, live to 100? And that's kind of the three goals that I think along the timescale you mentioned are not scary to me in terms of ambition.

Martin Hauck (38:14)
No.

No.

I hate to bring it up because it just gets talked about so much and you know exactly where I'm going, but you can't avoid it. And, I'm just very curious, like how does AI factor into all of this? How do you feel about it personally from a medical perspective? How do you feel about it from Alan's perspective or whatever? Cause that is a portion of the future. A big portion of the future is, is, is surrounding in, ⁓

basically orbiting around that right

Mark Goad (38:49)
Yeah, I appreciate you bringing it up. I have very strong views on it. We will not achieve our goals without automation and artificial intelligence. This goes back to a curve in my experience like six years ago. But this conviction is even stronger today. So I'd like to start with some facts. There are one billion questions per day into Google about our health. This is happening.

The idea that we can pretend that we're not all Googling immediately as soon as we get sick, what's happening? Nor should we block that information. Is that a personalized, customized, safeguarded, physician-reviewed model? No. We're entering into Google. Have they gotten better? For sure. But let's not pretend this isn't happening today. And if you look at the stats, like,

ChatGBD posted theirs of like what percentage are on health and fitness. It's a big chunk. You know, it's not a big, it's like help me cheat on my exam, but it's pretty big chunk that people are already using AI today. And those are flat foundational generalist models, which are really good, but they're not anything custom. So Alan, you would probably see where I'm going with this, has a custom verticalized, safeguarded, physician reviewed model. So right now you can talk. This is coming to Canada. It's coming.

Hear me out. There's a doctor in the loop. See, it says, hey, Martin, you're logging in. Do you want to wait seven minutes or do you want to talk to our AI? If you talk to the AI, a human doctor will review and verify the messages. But you can chat with them. Opt-in rate is pretty good. Last I saw, it was sitting around 50%, which is kind of my, yeah, OK, that makes sense. Now, what we find is that one,

Martin Hauck (40:11)
⁓ nice.

Mark Goad (40:35)
if you want to get really uncomfortable for a second, it's like the empathy score. So, know, human doctors happen to be human. You have you ever been at the end of a 12 hour shift and like maybe been a little bit shorter, maybe not added a bunch of emojis? Turns out as long as we keep AI plugged in, super happy. So we actually get like higher patient empathy scores. We have about a 91 % very good or excellent rating from both patients and doctors on messages.

Martin Hauck (40:48)
Yep. Yep. Yep.

Mark Goad (41:03)
So we're moving in the right direction. That study was done almost a year ago. I don't know if you've been following Claude and Opus and all the new models. They've gotten so much better. This is a problem on route to being solved. You have to keep the scope of care in your mind. Because sometimes I'll talk to people and be like, oh my God, like what? And I'm like, we run a private health clinic in your phone accessible by chat. If you get hit by a car,

Martin Hauck (41:15)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (41:28)
you're going to the hospital. If you type in, hmm, my left arm is feeling kind of funny, what do think, we're sending you to the hospital, right? You have to keep the scope of care in mind. But the idea is like 50 % of the people that talk to us in our clinic, either through Mo or other places, don't end up going to their family doctor, don't end up having to go to the emergency room. That means you and your family who need to get through, get through faster. And where wait times are heading on both the family, know, GP and emergency side,

This seems like a good thing. So it is coming. It's very responsible. I didn't talk about how it's a rag model with safeguards and how we built it to ask you questions, that it goes on an iterative kind of Socratic process. It's incredibly well designed and we will launch it safely. The question that I like to ask, I'd be interested in your opinion. After how many successful chats approved by a doctor,

Would you be willing to trust this thing completely? You know, is it a hundred billion? Maybe you're like, I don't trust it at all. Like, is it a billion? Is it a hundred million? Is it 10 million? Right? Like there is a point at which you are going to in your lifetime, trust completely an AI doctor for a specific set of scope. My question is like, how far are we from that is like a more interesting discussion.

Martin Hauck (42:37)
Yep, yep.

I don't feel like it's more than five years.

Mark Goad (42:47)
I would say you're, based on the progress and the charts, if you are, part of your question is like AI, I'm obsessed. I spend like every weekend, by coding apps and having fun and learning, it makes me way better at my job. Like I can't stop. I'm addicted to Replet because it's just like, you're peeking into the future. It's not here yet, but I tried every year for the past three years over the winter break. This was the first year that it was like.

Martin Hauck (43:06)
No, no.

Mark Goad (43:14)
the agent is reviewing the agent, which is reviewing the security agent was reviewing the CTO agent. It's like this swarm of agent, it's just like, wait, this is the future. So that was a long answer, but you several parts in there.

Martin Hauck (43:24)
Yeah. No,

no, no. I appreciate it. And, like similarly have gotten like for, I think it's been, it's weird to say that it's been two or three years that I've been messing around with like AI and using cursor and, ⁓ like exploring lovable and just kind of seeing all like, never, never got into replet. ⁓ but now I'm using Claude code and like what was

Amazing two years ago was also infuriating just because of hallucinations and the back and forth. And now you can just like one shot a prompt and it does everything for you. And like, don't get me wrong, there's still stuff to be reviewed and improvements and it's usually coming back to like, I, I said a single sentence and didn't give it clear enough. So it's more of a user prompting issue then.

than the model not working. It's just, I'm not working well with the model for how the model thinks kind of deal. for that to like, I mean, I'll get a bit more personal about this. Like I've been struggling with high blood pressure for like two years, unknown reasons. I've gone to like a million doctors appointments. And so I've got a folder in chat GPT and everybody's kind of like talking about the switch to like,

Mark Goad (44:32)
Hmm.

Martin Hauck (44:43)
⁓ you know, going from GPT to anthropic, whatever, like any, for forgetting that kind of like back and forth. there's other models as well on top of that, but I have gotten so much clarity and better results. And that's just with my duct taped version to know that like it, it's actually

a really nice thought to be like, okay, this is actually doctor reviewed. And this is like a specifically like, I'd love something like that. That would be fantastic. so it's, it's really cool to see and know that it's being built and it's being built by, people with the right vision in mind in the first place. I, I, there's more of a statement than anything, but like to your point, right? Most people are, a lot of people are doing this. I don't know if most people are, ⁓

Mark Goad (45:34)
No.

Martin Hauck (45:40)
And it's been, it's been incredibly helpful for me and it's in my version is very janky. So I can only imagine the results I'd get if I was using a better tool, to be honest with you.

Mark Goad (45:51)
Yeah, I'm I'm sympathetic to people that are worried about this stuff. I really am. Like think sometimes as a couple of tech bros on a podcast, it's like easy to come across and be like, like, you know, AI forever. And it's like, I'm very sympathetic to the concern around it, but I think it's always easy to be done with the perspective of like,

what's happening today? Is that something we're okay with, right? So the two things we talked about, like people are asking AI, you're asking AI, I was asking AI anyway, like I don't need permission to like learn about my own health and it makes me a better patient. We've all like, we've all learned about patient advocacy and asking the right questions and then every doctor I know in my life will tell me, this patient came in and chat to you to Google their, you know, they they had some conditions that they don't have. But the flip side of that is like.

Martin Hauck (46:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Goad (46:36)
you learning more about your own body and your experience and being able to ask questions on your timetable. Like I think that's really, really valuable. And we'll all just have to agree to disagree on like our own personal timelines because that's the true answer. So everyone have their own timeline for subjective. Like no way my folks are jumping on chat to be to ask your questions right now. Like they love their family doctor. She's a lovely person, but like I definitely will continue to do so. And like, I think we need to accept that like it's going to happen and.

Martin Hauck (47:02)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (47:06)
Yeah, think it's a net positive, but it's not a full pro.

Martin Hauck (47:08)
Yeah, everybody's using Google

now, like everybody's using Google now. And so the same, same thing's going to happen in some way, or form. And who knows what, if it's going to be open AI or anthropic or whatever, but it's, it's going to be part of our day to day and, and not using it's going to be, I mean, that, that doesn't even feel, feel like a question, guess, wrapping, wrapping things up here, this has been super interesting conversation. Grateful that, that you're, you're

Mark Goad (47:24)
Yeah.

Martin Hauck (47:36)
advocating and building what you're building for for Allen, but also for Canada. ⁓ I guess what any sort of like final thoughts or or where you're what you're thinking of in terms of the future for for benefits and healthcare in Canada.

Mark Goad (47:53)
Yeah, to me, it's like an extension of what we just talked about is like, it's very clearly an agentic future for health insurance. If you look at all the components that make like an agent, which I differentiate from a chat bot is like, hey, I gotta ask it something, agents coming in and like automatically, maybe then for your users, like automatically triggering, triaging, pulling on other agents, spinning up new instances to look into complex case. Like it's so clear to me.

Martin Hauck (48:05)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Goad (48:18)
that we need to be as an insurer pushing the absolute boundaries of AI within our core part of our operations and doing so in the same way we think about it on the medical side, like in a responsible, supervised fashion. But you can't convince me that if we did this podcast next year, I won't be telling you about the 10 agents, because I can tell you there's quite a few being built right now.

that are running our business and that we are just completely pushing the boundaries of what you can expect from a carrier around innovation and R &D around an agentic future for health insurance. Because it's just so obvious to me.

Like this is where the people that play around with AI tools on the weekend, like you're living, you're glimpsing the future today. And I'm looking forward to being able to ask our customers, like, hey, what agents did your old carrier ship for you this month? And showing them what we're doing. Because I think that's obviously the future. And that means we can spend more money on building out our health care networks, longevity programs. Like I think it just means we can focus on the stuff that really matters.

Martin Hauck (49:18)
Final question, it's a little bit silly. Talk to me about the bear.

Mark Goad (49:23)
Yes. Do you have questions about it or do want me to share the lore?

Martin Hauck (49:27)
I would love the lore. I'm a bit of a marketing geek at heart and ⁓ I love the branding, I love the content, but yeah, what's the story there?

Mark Goad (49:38)
So first off, incredibly important point, it's actually a marmot, not a bear. Really, really vitally important. A purple marmot, ⁓ I think a big part of it is what you're kind of highlighting on, which I would say is observed in our buyer group of like, that's different. I was not expecting a big fuzzy purple marmot to be part of a health insurer. That's not really the type of branding they go for. Usually it's a little more castle doom sort of stuff.

Martin Hauck (49:48)
purple marmot.

Mark Goad (50:07)
I think a bit of it is like, you know, positioning by contrast, but it's incredible. I've learned so much around the science of branding and mascots as a sub component within branding.

And it's so extensible, like how we do it from, whether it's a physical asset we drop off with every customer, we do an onboarding, know, we drop off some bears, some marmots, we have two plans underneath. We picked bears so we could drop off teddy bears. That's like not a secret. Who doesn't want some teddy bears hanging out in their house? And it just like, it's easy, it's fun. And the number, like probably once a month we get someone come in and be like, I wasn't even interested about health insurance, but I saw the bear and I thought it was super cute.

Martin Hauck (50:46)
Yeah.

Mark Goad (50:46)
⁓

So I think you kind of, yeah, from a branding perspective though, it's a, history of mascots is something really fascinating that I've learned a lot about.

Martin Hauck (50:55)
Was there was there sort of like a lineup of like a flamingo a marmot a bear a squirrel Do you know any behind-the-scenes stuff on that or how did you arrive at arm? It is there a reason why marmot is the one?

Mark Goad (51:04)
for the, ⁓

So I don't have the history of the original one, but I can share like we named all our products locally here and we kind of went through that animal list. We were looking at things that like sounded good in French and English.

Martin Hauck (51:21)
Okay, that's cool.

Mark Goad (51:21)
that were somewhat easy to say for English

people and French and vice versa. And then things that would make a cute stuffed thing that we like. We didn't want it to be size ranked, although it kinda happened that way with Chipmunk coming out in the next little bit, which is our smaller plan. Because we want everyone to feel great. Well, it doesn't matter what plan you're on, you wanna feel awesome about it. We don't like gold, silver, bronze, because that means the bronze people might feel a way about it, which is not how we think about healthcare. ⁓

Yeah, so we did name the plan types after that specifically. That was a lot of fun.

Martin Hauck (51:53)
Cool.

Cool. Well, no, this has been great conversation. Mark really appreciate the time and yeah, just excited to see more from you guys in the future. Thank you.

Mark Goad (52:05)
Thanks, Martin, really appreciate it.