Not for Tourists: Building for the long haul

What do you do when the prevailing business model doesn’t align your incentives with those of your customers? Ali Diab co-founded Collective Health after a medical emergency left him fighting his insurer over denied coverage. He set out to build a better way for self-insured employers to administer health benefits, entering an industry he knew almost nothing about at the time. In this conversation, Ali talks about the early years of “breaking glass” when benefits consultants wouldn’t return his calls, and how Collective Health found its first believers found its earliest customers among other iconoclastic companies trying to challenge entrenched, highly regulated industries, including Uber, SpaceX and Palantir. Ali also gets into the economics of competing against insurers that can subsidize administration with other parts of their businesses, and why Collective Health has deliberately stuck with a model that aligns how it makes money with the employers it serves. He talks about maintaining conviction through periods when the economics looked challenging, resisting attractive adjacent markets. Finally, Ali reflects on how his role has changed as Collective Health has grown to roughly 1,200 people: learning to delegate, building a low-ego culture, staying grounded in facts even when the data challenges your beliefs, and why being CEO means making even the smallest problems your responsibility. About Ali Diab Ali Diab is the Co-Founder and CEO of Collective Health, a leading independent health benefits platform serving self-funded employers. Inspired by his own experience navigating insurance denials following a life-threatening medical emergency, Ali founded Collective Health to simplify the healthcare experience for employers and their employees. Prior to Collective Health, he held leadership roles at Google, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, and studied economics at Stanford and Oxford. He currently serves on the Board of Advisers for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Presented by Aytza