Data Clinic

Matthew Robben (Co-Founder & CTO of Serif Health) on Healthcare Pricing Transparency: From Petabytes of Garbage to Market-Changing Insights

• Hunter Muse

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Ever wondered why you can't get a straight answer about healthcare costs? Our guest Matt Robben has been deep in the trenches of this problem for years. As Co-founder and CTO of Serif Health, he's building the infrastructure to make healthcare pricing truly transparent.

What You'll Learn:

The Healthcare Pricing Maze

  • Why that phone call asking "how much will this cost?" never gets answered
  • How the Transparency and Coverage Act is changing the game (slowly)
  • The shocking reality: knee surgery costs range from $1,400 to $113,000 for the same procedure

Building Data Products That Matter (And Why It's Not Just "Software with More Data")

  • The fundamental mindset shift: your "inventory" is data assets, not features
  • When a single backfill costs $20k and takes 4 days, every change becomes a P&L decision
  • Why managing schema changes feels more like supply chain management than SaaS
  • Processing petabytes of messy government-mandated pricing data (90% is unusable)
  • The difference between managing data teams vs software teams - and why sprint cycles don't work

Startup Strategy in Action

  • Pivoting from B2C to B2B when the market spoke clearly
  • The power of extreme focus: selling CSV files for 2 years before building a UI
  • How to find product-market fit by following the money, not your assumptions

AI in the Real World

  • Smart applications of traditional ML for entity resolution
  • Why they avoid GenAI for critical analysis (20% hallucination rate stories included)
  • The difference between AI that adds value vs AI that adds buzzwords

Founding with Purpose (and Five Kids)

  • How to build a sustainable company culture as a parent
  • The communities that actually help vs content that just markets
  • Setting boundaries as a founder while staying committed

Matt's journey from software engineering at One Medical and TruePic to founding Serif Health offers practical insights for anyone working with data products, navigating healthcare tech, or building companies that actually solve market problems.

Key Takeaway: Sometimes the best way to help consumers is to fix the market mechanics first. By making pricing data accessible to the entire healthcare ecosystem, companies like Serif Health are creating the transparency that could finally bring costs down.

Connect with Matt:

Resources Mentioned:

  • YCombinator
  • On Deck Founders
  • Health Tech Nerds community
  • Cincinnati Health Professionals Network

Perfect for data engineers, healthcare professionals, startup founders, and anyone curious about how transparent markets can actually work.