Outside Work

I live in New York City with my wife and our three young boys.

My wife is a clinician who runs a successful, solo dermatology practice that she started in 2014, the same year Healthcare.com was founded. Watching her build that practice has been fascinating and inspiring — especially seeing the soup-to-nuts reality of patient care, charting late into the evening, running the practice, and operating the business. Her operational motor and attention to detail in both her craft and her business are truly world-class. While most people can’t do what she does, there are parallels to my world. Building a medical practice is very different from building a startup, but the underlying challenges are surprisingly similar — trust, reputation, systems, and long-term relationships.

Over the past few years, I’ve also had to navigate parts of the healthcare system for my dad, particularly Medicare and Medicare Advantage. Experiencing the system from the family side is very different from seeing it as an operator. It reinforces how complicated healthcare decisions can be for people — and how much incentives shape the experience.

Life in New York City

We love living in New York. The energy of the city, the density of ambitious people, and the randomness of who you might run into on a given day are hard to replicate anywhere else.

One thing I’ve come to appreciate about New York is that most people eventually pass through it — for work, meetings, or just life. That creates a surprising number of opportunities to reconnect with people over time.

Like many people, COVID made life smaller for a while. I also work from home most of the time — Healthcare.com is largely a remote company — which means it’s easy to spend too much time in the digital world.

Lately I’ve been trying to rebalance that by living more in three dimensions: meeting people in person, going to more events, reconnecting with founders and operators, and spending less time interacting only through screens.

Lastly and most importantly, I’m trying to make time for family. Time together on weekends. Time preparing large weekend meals that my wife dreams up and cooks like a master chef.

For Fun

For fun, I’ve played volleyball most of my life. I used to play competitively — my high school team at Cherry Hill East in New Jersey won the program’s first state championship in 1996 my senior year, on a team I co-captained. We had only started the program a few years earlier as underclassmen and ended up beating schools that had established programs for decades. Nearly 30 years later, it’s still one of the proudest moments of my life.

These days I still play most weekends through GoodRec. I’m usually the oldest person on the court by about twenty years, but I still enjoy it.

I spend a lot of time thinking about systems and incentives.

Outside work, I try to spend more time around people.