PJC interview: Lively
PJC Interview with Alex Cyriac, CEO & Co-Founder of Lively
“The HSA is actually the best savings account you can have in the country because it carries three tax advantages. But people were not seeing it as a benefit, they were seeing it as a burden….That was really the catalyst for starting Lively.”
- Alex Cyriac, CEO & Co-Founder of Lively
About Lively: Lively makes it easier to manage the rising costs of personal health through Health Savings Accounts (HSA) that allow people to not only save on the costs of healthcare today, but plan for the costs of tomorrow. Learn more at https://livelyme.com/
About Alex: A software engineer by trade, Alex started his career off working on the technical side of online payments. Staying within the online payments space, he eventually transitioned into global sales and business development roles, and, later, flexed his Operations muscles as one of the first couple employees at Justworks in NYC. Starting part-time in 2015 (and then full time in 2016), he and his co-founder, Shobin Uralil, started Lively, which he sees as that perfect “crossroads of payments and healthcare that I think my career has led me to.”
What motivated him to start Lively: For Alex, starting Lively was deeply personal. Having experienced his mom struggle with medical issues for a long time, there was one experience in particular he was never able to shake: when his mom had to stop taking one of her medications after her copay increased. Helping people plan for and better afford the rising costs of healthcare -- so that he can prevent as many situations like this as possible -- is what motivated him to start Lively. Now the team has over 75 people and has raised over $42 million in funding.
On his experience with PJC: “I don’t think of Matt as an investor. To me he’s a friend….With PJC as a whole, that’s how our interactions are.”
Top 5 takeaways from our interview:
Lively was founded on the notions of simplicity and transparency. Alex saw a future where managing healthcare costs didn’t have to be so hard. “With Lively, it’s free. Everything is online. It’s really simple to use.” His goal: “We are trying to make it easier for people to navigate a complex world.”
Your childhood friends just may end up becoming the best business partners. On his business partner, Shobin: “We’ve been friends our entire lives and our families go back generations….Our families met in India long before we were born and we have a lot of mutual friends and cousins.” Alex even grew up with Shobin’s future wife!
Pessimists should tread carefully. When asked if startup life was for everyone, Alex warned that a pessimistic outlook may lead to trouble. Starting a business is hard and in general you have to anticipate that going into it will have a lot more lows than highs. His ultimate advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, however: “the highs make it worth it….It will be really hard and stressful, but in the end it will, hopefully, be very rewarding.”
The impact you can have is really rewarding. “We’ve saved our users over $1.5 million in fees that would have normally been paid elsewhere. To me, that’s $1.5 million that is being spent on medication, x-rays, doctor visits, all the things that it’s meant to be spent on….That’s a remarkable thing to be able to say: In under two years of being in market, we’ve put a million and a half dollars back in people’s HSAs that can be used on the things they’re meant to be used for.”
Lively is just getting started. After 3.5 years, $42 million in funding, and building the team out to more than 75 people, it’s clear that Lively is only just getting started. To Alex, the real northstar is helping people. “How do we enable people to live a better life? When you are thinking about healthcare and costs around healthcare, I want you to only think of Lively. I want Lively to be the first thing our consumers log into when they are thinking about anything associated with healthcare…..That to me is the end state: Providing so much capability and value for our user base so that we’re the trusted source of where they go to for information, so that they [consumers] can make more informed decisions about their own care.”