Inside the $2 Trillion Employee Benefits Market | Ryan Sachtjen, Threeflow
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 114 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ryan Sachtjen is the Co-founder and CEO of Threeflow, building software for employee benefits brokers and insurance carriers.
We start with a deep dive into the nearly $2 trillion dollar employee benefits market, including the structural issues that actually give the smallest companies the most leverage.
We also talk about insurance more broadly, AI opportunities in insurance, lessons from kickstarting a marketplace doing nearly $3B in volume, when his wife got cancer two months after closing Threeflow's seed round, and how his co-founders adjusted to support him.
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Timestamps:
(3:57) Threeflow: B2B benefits marketplace
(5:50) How the benefits industry works
(9:20) The importance of brokers in insurance
(12:32) Benefits broker software stack
(15:36) How to make money in employee benefits
(21:11) Ways to compete in insurance
(26:34) How AI is changing insurance
(31:01) What its like to be an insurance broker
(35:37) Starting ThreeFlow in 2016 pre-LLMs
(40:13) The 128 day walk through Europe before Threeflow
(44:47) When his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer
(50:23) Advice for founders on surviving large personal events
(52:46) Threeflow’s unorthodox Seed round
(59:46) How to vet your investors
(1:04:14) Why insurance brokers exist
(1:05:08) How to build a marketplace on top of Vertical SaaS
(1:10:53) Choosing a marketplace entry point
(1:15:05) $2.5B in premium volume on Threeflow workflows
(1:26:39) Importance of supply side volume in a marketplace
(1:31:21) Fundraising without a formal process
(1:33:03) Hiring for “just get stuff done”
(1:36:22) AI opportunities in insurance
(1:41:05) Building software in insurance
(1:44:56) Tactics for running a distributed team
(1:49:04) Creating your own playbooks
Referenced
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Careers at Threeflow
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansachtjen/
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | we had to figure out ways to process documents at scale, |
| 0:04.0 | leveraging not only the underlying foundational models that we're using, |
| 0:08.0 | but also how we're building the vertical structures above it, |
| 0:12.0 | that allow for us to have very intentional cascading strategies |
| 0:16.0 | around how we breaking down the document sets |
| 0:20.0 | so that we can actually focus the LLMs to have |
| 0:24.0 | really high performance. |
| 0:25.7 | A general foundational model is not going to have that information. |
| 0:28.7 | And so leveraging both allows for us to just make it helpful and easy for the user because |
| 0:35.3 | they just want that. |
| 0:36.9 | They just want it to work like magic. |
| 0:38.7 | Welcome to the P.L. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is |
| 0:43.4 | Ryan Sochgen, founder of Three Flow, building software for employee benefits brokers and insurance carriers. |
| 0:49.1 | It's an area that most people don't know much about. Our conversation starts with a deep dive into the nearly $2 trillion employee benefits market. |
| 0:56.7 | Freeflow sits in between those two key stakeholders of employee benefit broker and employee |
| 1:02.4 | benefit carrier. |
| 1:03.7 | For a lot of these employers, the benefit package is about 25 cents per dollar spent. |
| 1:09.7 | We talk about insurance more broadly. |
| 1:11.6 | This market is unique in that the smaller entity actually has more leverage and power. |
| 1:16.6 | Insurance companies are sales companies that just happen to also do insurance. |
| 1:20.6 | There are some insurance companies where all of their tech stack, they custom built themselves. |
| 1:24.6 | AI opportunities in insurance. |
... |
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