What's up, everybody? This is Cortland Allen from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the

NDHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders behind profitable internet businesses.

I tried to get a sense of how they got to where they are today, how they make decisions,

both in their personal lives and at their companies, and how the rest of us can learn from their examples to go on to build our own successful internet businesses.

Now, this show is just one part of NDHackers. There's also a website that you can find at NDHackers.com, where there's an entire community of founders and aspiring entrepreneurs, helping each other get started

and helping each other resolve the sort of day-to-day practical challenges that you run into

as a founder. In addition, there are full transcripts of every podcast episode, including this

one, at www.n.w.ndhackers.com slash podcast. Today I'm talking to Caitlin Gleason, the founder and CEO of a company called Eligible.

I think Caitlin's proof that passion and grit and tenacity are really the key ingredients to being a successful entrepreneur.

Paul Graham, the creator of Ycombinator, is called Caitlin his role model and for good reason, I think.

Caitlin has been successful at a great many things things from acting to sales and now as the founder

of her company, which develops APIs for medical eligibility, claims, and payments.

So I'm super excited to have you here, Caitlin.

Welcome to the show and thanks for joining.

Thank you.

I just spoke with Stelly FD, who was part of the same YC batch where I first

met you a couple years ago, or I guess that was six years, excuse me, seven years ago now.

A long time ago now. Yeah, tell me about it. But you know what? I never stopped hearing about you.

I've continued to hear good things about you and about eligible since you started the company right after YC. I thought I'm quiet. You know what it is? It's because we're Facebook friends and so I see your post. Oh, okay. I'm not quite on Facebook. Yeah. No, you definitely talk about what's going on there. We use that for marketing and for recruitment. So, yeah. I think everything that I've seen and everything that you've been doing is awesome. Thank you. But I have to admit, I know very little. Like we were going well out of my area of expertise. I know nothing about the healthcare space. I know nothing about insurance. I barely even go to the doctor. And so in this interview, you're going to have to do a lot of

explaining. Yeah. So why don't we start with you explaining to the audience what eligible is and how it works? Yeah, I always like to give a quick anecdote that a lot of people can relate to. So, you know, when you go and get some lab work done, or you say you never go to the doctor, so maybe you can't relate to. But essentially, most people, if they go and get a lab, they'll kind of stop at the front desk

after they're done with the lab and the front desk will collect something like $20, right?

And then two months later, that same person winds up with this mystery bill for another $100.

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