On swinging big, contrarian bets, and building a full stack fintech.

Hello Everyone! Keeping today’s edition of Fintech Founders short and sweet. Today we have the pleasure of chatting with Derek Flanzraich, the founder of Ness. Ness is a health and wellness company looking to fundamentally realign the relationship between an individual’s financial and personal health. Put simply, Derek wants all of us as consumers to be rewarded for making smart health and wellness decisions. Eat at Sweetgreen? You get a reward! Spend money on a wellness retreat? You get a reward! Go get a critical health check up? You get a reward! Put simply, Ness wants people to put their money where there health is, and to provide the appropriate nudges and incentives along the way.

As a second time founder, Derek has a ton of amazing lessons learned for both founders, operators, and VCs. I hope you all enjoy today’s interview. Let’s dive right in.

Derek! Great to have you on for the interview. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you came to found Ness.

You got it. Thanks for having me Dez. Yeah, so Ness is my second company. My first company was called Greatist. Both companies have come from the same deep and profound passion I have, but also my biggest struggle, which is health and wellness. I started Greatist 6 months out of college to build a brand that talked about health in a healthier way. I felt, growing up, like everything out there was for people who already had six pack abs, and for Gwyneth Paltrow, and that didn't feel fair to me. It felt like health and wellness should be for everyone, and so I started Greatist. We ended up building the largest site on the internet for millennials who care about their health and wellness. We reached 15 to 20 million people every single month through fact-checked, expert-approved content, all written, though, in the voice of a friend. We ended up raising a bunch of money, and we ultimately sold that business to Healthline in 2019. From there, I took a year and a half off from starting companies to help other companies start theirs, but then I couldn't shake this feeling, like, no matter how friendly and accessible you make health and wellness, there's no denying that it's so expensive for so many people.

So that's what brought me to Ness. I had this idea of, “What if you could actually align incentives long-term with people, both in terms of their finances and their health?” Today, health and wellness are expensive for most people, and that's primarily because health insurance doesn't pay for it. At a very basic level, even though experts agree that eating well, and working out, and taking vitamin D, and getting therapy are good for you, no one's actually incentivized to care, because the health insurance plan and the employer that you work for only think you’re going to be in your seat for 3-4 years, and because of that paying for your long-term health doesn't make any sense if you're going to switch jobs and switch plans.

And so with that in mind, we landed on this idea of a credit card company as a way to actually build that long-term relationship with people, and the idea of having the relationship and trust with the wallet would allow us to actually drive better decision-making and eventually use that data to actually build health insurance plans that, you know, just might reimburse for the things that people want and need, because long-term they'd still be around on this platform, and it would make financial sense.