[00:00]
Alex “Fro” Frommeyer: I think there's no better use of my working day, and no better use of some of the incredibly talented people I'm working with at Stack, than to try to attack healthcare cost and complexity as fast and as aggressively as possible — using the free market forces, using AI to its fullest, using these capabilities, but also understanding that the business's success will be society's success as well.
Ansel Parikh: Welcome to another episode of The Current, a bi-monthly podcast exploring the intersection of people, finance, and data. I'm Ansel Parikh, co-founder of Finch, the connectivity platform for the employment ecosystem. And today I'm joined by Alex Frommeyer, who goes by Fro. Fro is the founder and CEO of Stack Health, a startup reimagining how Americans access health coverage by shifting the shopping of coverage from employers to individuals. Before Stack, he spent 13 years building Beam Benefits from a college dorm-room idea into one of the leading digital benefits platforms in the country, serving over 25,000 employers across 45 different states. He was recently recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of the most exceptional entrepreneurs, and I'd have to agree. And Fro is also a two-time engineering grad from the University of Louisville and a proud Midwest builder based in Columbus. Fro, welcome to the show.
Fro: Thanks for having me, good to see you.
Ansel: Yeah, really excited to have you here. Obviously you've been building for quite a bit of time. So I want to start at the beginning, since your arc has been a really interesting one. You started Beam Benefits as an undergrad with — I remember you telling me — a Bluetooth toothbrush, and it turned into a company servicing tens of thousands of employers. And now you've launched Stack Health, which is going after a completely different part of this healthcare ecosystem. So for anyone who isn't familiar, can you walk us through that journey at Beam? What was it about? And then how did that shift into, or inspire you to build, Stack and what you're trying to accomplish there?
Fro: Yeah, you know, we started Beam with two college friends — one was my roommate, and then a dorm mate nearby. In engineering school, we met in Louisville and started a hardware company together. And I guess I thought I was starting a hardware company, but it turned out it was an insurance company. And so we began this business called Beam Benefits — at the time it was called Beam Dental.
And what we were noticing at the time was this huge movement called quantified self, which is really what we now know as digital health or consumer-directed healthcare. But the idea was that you should control all of your own health data, across all of the different measurements and metrics that matter to your total body health. And we wanted to be the dental component of that, because we had a lot of family members in dentistry, including my sister, and one of my other co-founders — his mom was a dental hygienist. So we ended up building the first internet-connected toothbrush. And the idea was that it would function just like every other toothbrush you've ever used, but the data stream from it would allow us to gamify the experience for families and kids. And then ultimately we would use it for underwriting dental insurance policies based on the behavioral trends that came from it.
And so this worked great until we realized that we couldn't even integrate the data into the leading insurance platforms of the time. And so we realized that we needed to raise venture capital, something we knew nothing about at the time. We ended up moving the business to Columbus, where I'm now based. And we brought in the capital we needed to ultimately expand our platform from being a hardware company to one of the early insuretech businesses. And still today, Beam operates as an insuretech company that provides a full suite of benefits — dental, vision, life, disability, sub-health products — to tens of thousands of employers all over the country.
Ansel: Yeah, that's pretty wild. You went from a toothbrush into, “I guess now I'm an insurance company.” And so obviously you've learned a lot from that experience, especially on the insurance side. So can you tell me a little bit more about Stack? What's different? What are you taking from Beam, and what are the things that you're going to build from scratch or approach differently?
[04:16]
Fro: Yeah, lots of learnings from Beam have now been translated into my new company, Stack. And it really was sourced, frankly, from a level of frustration that I had while building Beam, where almost all of our customers at Beam are small businesses. And to a degree, some 100-, 200-, 500-life companies, but for the most part it's under 50 — it's five people, or 15, or 50. And we really, really love that SMB customer, and we really understand what they care about. And one of those things is the rising cost and complexity of health insurance. They feel like they're out of options. They feel like everything is really generic — it's not tailored for their needs. The costs are going up much, much faster than they can afford to keep up with.
And so after staring at the problem and being so close to it for years, I realized I needed to do something about it. So I hired a new CEO to take over for me at Beam, which has gone incredibly well. And over the course of the past year or so, I've been researching and ultimately planning this new business that we just recently launched, Stack Health. And the idea behind Stack is really simple: that we should be building personalized health plans that are customized and tailored, for that same small business customer, but now we really want to help the individuals who are working for a small business be able to build their own stack. And that ultimately means that insurance is at the base layer of someone's stack and covers all of the big, unforeseen costs, but ultimately on top of that, you should be stacking things that are important to you. For some people that's an HSA; it might be a direct primary care relationship; it might be a specialty medication platform, a chronic disease management platform; it might be a wearable or peptides. It could be anything related to your health over time.
Ansel: I love that you're going back to — like you said — this is a problem that you felt yourself, that you've seen for quite a bit of time. I remember listening to one of your recent interviews and I wanted to dig into this. You said you believe the window truly opened up for Stack in just the past six months. What changed in the last six months that makes this the perfect time to launch Stack?
Fro: There's probably three catalysts that I think emerged for the first time in 2025. There were cultural catalysts, technological catalysts, and regulatory catalysts.
And so I actually decided I was fully committed to building Stack on July 5th of last year, because it was right after the Big Beautiful Bill got passed. And in it was a number of things that I think are really good for the future of consumer-directed healthcare, and for small employers in particular, having the confidence to begin switching from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans, which is something that we're taking advantage of. And so we got, I think, a lot of regulatory clarity in 2025. That means the window has opened for new alternative health plan approaches of various flavors. HSA eligibility expansion would be another thing you could point to here.
Just before that was, I think, a big cultural catalyst that certainly had a big impact on me, which was the murder of Brian Thompson in New York City, which is maybe late 2024, if I remember right. And I think that was a big wake-up call for a lot of folks in the insurance industry — like, man, this used to be a very sleepy industry. And of course we understand that it matters, but there's clearly a ton of cultural frustration that is shared by the public broadly, and by very sick people, and by business owners, and everybody's bearing costs in figurative and literal ways. And I think we have to address that as a society. And I want to play a role in the solution, and not in just staring at it and pointing at it.
And I feel like we have this very unique idea at Stack that can help contribute to innovation in the space and build a very, very important company over time. And then the technological catalyst is AI, because it is here, and healthcare is one of the places where I think some of the most durable advantages will be built. And this is because of all of the ultimate interactions that healthcare has in a very intimate and hands-on way, in very local market contexts. So imagine being able to take the platform power of the foundational models being built in SF and in other places and apply those platform capabilities to the very localized realities of healthcare.
I think the mix of those technological factors, the regulatory factor, and the cultural factor have all created the perfect storm for what I think is going to be rapid change in healthcare in the coming few years.
[09:01]
Ansel: Yeah, it's kind of wild — they've all come to a head at the same time. Like you said, it's very real systemic problems, right? And when you have all of that coinciding with potential solutions in the technological space that can really address that — match it — you're taking this macro change in all this technology and trying to apply it, again like you said, to an individual, so that somehow they're getting some real benefit out of it, because I think it's still early days.
So I did want to double-click a little bit on AI, because you can't have anyone building in this ecosystem without talking about it a little. You've spoken a lot about ways that AI is making building things fun again and bringing a lot of experienced folks back in the game. People always talk about how AI is impacting some people earlier in their careers, but I'd love to dig into what you're seeing for the people who are getting re-engaged, reinvigorated to build again, who are maybe five, 10 years into their career. Who are these people, and what's drawing them back into this ecosystem?
Fro: I've seen this at a macro and micro level over the course of the past year. I think it's really fascinating.
So you can take macro examples as big as the literal co-founders of Google, Sergey and Larry, who have come literally off their yachts to come back into the business to begin building. But I'm almost also seeing this locally, with all of the founders in my friend group and network. I can name five or six serial founders, many of whom do not need to be working anymore, who just launched new businesses in the past year because they're just so excited to build again — and build with new tools and new capabilities and new ways of working, new styles of working as well. And they're like kids in candy stores. They're so excited — and I'm one of them — to be building with all these new capabilities. And there's no better way for an entrepreneur to learn these tools than to start a company and start professionally winging it to see what can be done and what can be built. And so I think it's a really exciting time.
I think the most underappreciated part of the labor discussion happening around the AI topic area is that, in my experience, it's creating thriving mid-careers. And what I mean by this is there are multiple people on my team at Stack — there's about 10 of us total, but a few of us are 15 up to 25 years into our careers and have developed some really amazing subject-matter expertise. For example, insurance, regulatory affairs, these sorts of things. But now you can actually express your ideas, your taste, and deploy that expertise yourself. You don't need to depend on building a team or waiting for the IT group to get to your part of the roadmap. You don't have to get approval through some bureaucratic committee structure. These are all the things that frustrate people in the middle of their careers, because they end up as a manager who's not allowed to put their hands on the keyboard anymore. They just have to orchestrate a team of junior people — and now they can just do it themselves. And those are the sorts of people that we're working with at Stack. And I see a lot of these middle-career people being reinvigorated by their ability to actually impact the work.
Ansel: Yeah. And I love that you looked into the subject-matter expertise, right? Because I think that is something you can't skip. You kind of need that wisdom of doing things wrong for a long time, or making the mistakes and then understanding how all these pieces fit together, especially in a highly regulated industry like healthcare and insurance — you really need to have some guardrails.
And so I wanted to take a step back and look at that ecosystem. Because I think the problem — again, in a world where there's a lot of solutions looking for problems — you've got a pretty strong one. One of healthcare's biggest problems is that employer-sponsored insurance is a 25%-plus drag on new business formation and job mobility. So how does AI factor into that? How does Stack help address some of those pieces?
[13:13]
Fro: Yeah, I think one thing we're just going to see happen — and we're already seeing happen because of AI — is the proliferation of new companies starting, companies changing their labor model both up and down, companies growing faster than ever and then growing slower than ever, slash negative growth. More people are going to work more dynamically. So they're going to be 1099s, consultants — new types and new definitions of gig work. And all that dynamism is going to shift labor around faster than ever.
And so it's important, in my view, to ready ourselves for this transition by helping small businesses — and big businesses too, but especially small businesses — and then all of these newer types of emergent labor and the dynamism of people moving from company to company, contract to contract. They need to be able to organize the fundamental unit of their health benefits at the individual level instead of at the group level, because the group construct is not evolving nearly as quickly, but it is going up in price very quickly. So it's the worst of all worlds, where you can't really rip and replace it except as a group construct. So if you change it for one person, you're changing it for everybody. And it only renews once a year, and it renews once a year at a 15, 18, 28% higher cost.
And so everybody's losing in this construct, which is why I believe — and concluded last year when I was researching this to build Stack — as fast as possible, we need to shift the entire model to organizing the fundamental unit of risk at the individual level, so people can keep their plans and keep their entire stack of products that's personalized for them, as dynamically as they are, and as they change where they're working, how they're working, et cetera. The plan moves with them. This is the idea of portable benefits. And I think people like Noah Lang at Stride Health have been doing this and talking about this for years and years.
And so I think we're finally now starting to see the dynamism requirement of the economy because of the changing nature of labor. And I think if we don't do something about this, we will see small business formation fall off a cliff, we will see small business growth fall off the cliff, because the cost of healthcare is too high for them to hire the incremental person and to continue to run a profitable company. So you never want to see a country famous for our small business and entrepreneurship culture not be able to execute on our entrepreneurship culture simply because we can't afford health insurance, of all things. For many small businesses, this is now the second-largest cost in their business other than wages themselves. And so this is a pretty urgent problem, and one that I would say is a founding inspiration behind what we're doing at Stack.
Ansel: Yeah. I mean, I definitely feel the pain as an employer and as an employee. It doesn't seem like anything gets proper coverage. So are ICHRAs one of the tools that are transitioning to enable that? Are there other things that you think need to happen in the market, whether it's insurance companies better understanding how to underwrite not groups but rather individuals? I'm curious what structural changes have to happen alongside what you're building.
[16:41]
Fro: Yeah, I have a long, wonky list that I send to policymakers all the time, so I'm happy to share the Google Doc of that list later.
A couple things I would point to: ICHRAs are really, really smart. And the reason it's a necessity — it's an imperative, it's the platform that we're initially building with at Stack — is that it's a great half step for the market. And what I mean by that is you're separating who's paying the money for health benefits from who gets to pick what the plan is. And so classically, the employer does both of those things. They fund the benefit, and they tell you, “Hey guys, we're on an Anthem plan this year, and it's a deductible of $2,000,” et cetera, et cetera. And now with ICHRA, the employer can say, “Here's the budget for this year.” So the money's still coming from me, the employer, but now the employees can take their budget and apply it to the plan that's the best fit for them. Maybe that's still that Anthem $2,000 plan. Maybe it's something entirely different, but each person gets to make that decision.
So this is a very good half step toward our vision for Stack Health, which is that all people eventually own their health, and they own it in the context of being the decision maker of what they have, and the one who feels accountable and responsible for what happens. Today, the employer is still very much in that equation. And I think the employer wants to be out of that equation as much as possible. But they, I think, are going to be the long-term funders of benefits, at least for the foreseeable future.
It goes beyond ICHRA, though. I'm very excited about HSA eligibility expansion. I think all Americans should be able to get an HSA. You shouldn't need an HSA-eligible insurance plan — you should just be able to get one. And if we could just pull off something similar to what the Trump Accounts are, where new Americans being born will get an automatic Trump Account set up for them so they're a participant in the stock market and in equities in the capitalist system — why can't we do the same thing for HSAs? It should be the new birth health account, and all people should have an HSA, not just people being born today. We should make sure all Americans have an HSA.
I think methods like that don't require huge out-of-the-box thinking; it just requires an expansion to something that already exists. And I do think we're going to see more latitude, regulatorily, in what we can do with health insurance, because frankly the economy is going to demand that more alternative solutions get moved up the chain.
Ansel: Yeah. What's nice is you start to see this in other parts of the ecosystem, right? I think the Trump Accounts — retirement is number one, because, hey, we need people to be able to retire after they're done working. And then the next immediate piece is, well, once they're retired, what do they need? They need healthcare, because that's really where the costs start to pile up.
And so, last thing I want to touch upon, because I think this is really cool and kind of blends everything together and really focuses on what you're building: you've coined this phrase, a “societal dividend company” — a business that only works if it creates both enterprise value and public benefit. And I think you put SpaceX and Tesla in that category. I'm curious, how does that change the way you're approaching Stack? How do you loop that public benefit into the fabric of how you're running your company, how you're building with your team?
[20:04]
Fro: So I'm fascinated by the Gilded Age and the Industrial Revolution, and the people and the companies and the technologies that all coalesced starting just after the Civil War till the 1930s or so. And when you study that era, what really stands out to me, among other things, is that you've got these amazing entrepreneurs — the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, et cetera — who built these amazing industrial businesses over here, and then they did philanthropic things with their money over there. And those two things were not intertwined at all, meaning that the railroads themselves were not used for the charitable, philanthropic purposes.
A more fascinating way to think about building businesses is: what if the business itself could also generate a public benefit, instead of making money and then using the profits to fund something charitable and philanthropic? And I think what Elon's done and demonstrated is that a properly mission-driven company that can make money and have great margins and attract investor capital and the best talent in the world is also useful to achieving these huge civilizational goals.
And when I was thinking about what to do next for me, I just couldn't shake this idea that the most important thing to be doing is creating a societal dividend company that has a public benefit baked into the business itself. The business does not exist to make money to then be used later on something philanthropic. And when you start force-ranking the list of our biggest problems as a society today, you don't have to go too far before you run into the healthcare cost and complexity one. I personally rank that number two. Other people might put it all the way at number three, four, five, but it's one of our top problems as a country.
And I'm afraid that it's going to get worse before it gets better. And so I think there's no better use of my working day, and no better use of some of the incredibly talented people I'm working with at Stack, than to try to attack healthcare cost and complexity as fast and as aggressively as possible — using the free market forces, using AI to its fullest, using these capabilities, but also understanding that the business's success will be society's success as well. And those two things will create a positive flywheel and feedback loop.
Ansel: Yeah. I think more founders should — if they're looking for problems — this is a better way to do it than, you know, “Do we need another SaaS product in XYZ category that may or may not actually help people?” But I do think it's something you don't get to without having built a lot of stuff and done the hard stuff ahead of time, right? Building an insurance company is no joke. And because you've now done that — that approach of “I'm not afraid of hard, big, meaty problems” — it makes it a lot more clear why you're doing it, and also that, hey, you will figure it out.
And I think that's something that, as a maybe first-time entrepreneur, you're kind of scared, because you're like, “Well, this is something that hasn't been solved yet.” And I think all the changes happening recently — regulatorily, technology-wise — actually changed that whole paradigm, where “yet” is the key term now. And now there's an opportunity to solve a lot of these things. It'll take time, but I think what you all are doing is really special, and I'm excited to see how you build it.
So, one final question for you: given all these changes happening in this ecosystem — obviously the changes of AI, and you building things yourself, getting back into that seat — how do you think all these shifts will impact what your job looks like in five years?
[23:49]
Fro: So, tough to predict. Here's what I know is still going to be a very durable and relevant part of my job: setting a vision, connecting with customers, and representing the credibility and trust that is critical to our business and our business model. That's still a very human function. In the same way that I know who Jamie Dimon is, but I don't know anyone else at JPMorgan — when Jamie Dimon speaks, I feel good that my money, if it's sitting in their bank, is safe.
That level of trust and credibility is what's required to build a big business in general. I think that's definitely true in a regulated, multi-threaded industry like healthcare. And so when I think about the jobs to be done, I think you need to think of yourself as both a builder and a trust agent. And you are translating trust and credibility to the customer, and through to the people that you're selling to or partnering with.
And remember, selling happens at multiple levels. It's to your employees, it's to your investors, it's to your board, it's to your other shareholders, it's to all your partners that are depending on you, and it's the actual customer that's paying for the product or service. And so I think those things will not go away, even though how we build the product and execute the operations could change a lot in the upcoming years.
Ansel: Yeah, that resonates really strongly with me too. I tell a lot of the team, hey, we're building infrastructure, things like that, but at the end of the day, what you're selling is trust — trust that it'll work, trust in the most mission-critical parts of your business. And for you all, the most critical parts of an employee's life cycle are taken care of and optimized in the best way you possibly can. And I think it's a lot of pressure, especially as a CEO, I'm sure. But I think taking that trust-first approach is going to take you pretty far. And I'm excited to see what you all build.
So, Fro, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your journey, as well as some of the learnings, as well as your peering around the corner on where this future of the healthcare ecosystem will be going.
Fro: Thanks for having me.
