Scale Like a CEO
Join host Justin Reinert as he sits down with founders who’ve navigated the jump from do-it-all entrepreneur to strategic CEO. Each episode uncovers the key milestones, hard-won insights, and practical tactics you need to build a high-performing leadership team, overcome decision fatigue, and scale your business with confidence. Tune in weekly for quick, actionable conversations designed to accelerate your path to CEO mastery.
Scale Like a CEO
From Layoff to Leadership: Amanda Lannert's Journey of Resilience and Innovation
When Amanda Lannert had to write her own severance letter and lay off 90% of her company during the dot-com crash, she never imagined it would lead to building one of the most trusted names in healthcare decision support. Today, as CEO of Jellyvision, she's transformed that early failure into wisdom that helps millions navigate healthcare choices with confidence.
Trust lies at the heart of Jellyvision's approach. While healthcare giants possess mountains of data, consumers hesitate to call them for guidance. Amanda recognized this fundamental disconnect and built Alex, a platform that doesn't try to be the smartest entity in the room but instead empowers users to become the experts in their own healthcare decisions. "No one should need a PhD in insurance to see a doctor or afford their meds," she explains with characteristic clarity.
The journey wasn't straightforward. After years of pivoting and repositioning, Jellyvision discovered the power of "vested customers" – organizations willing to invest significantly in being first to solve pressing problems. This approach proved more valuable than traditional venture capital, allowing the company to build sustainable growth while maintaining its human-centered values. As Amanda puts it, "Companies don't innovate. People innovate."
As Jellyvision scaled beyond the point where leaders could maintain direct connections with everyone, Amanda discovered the transformative power of storytelling to maintain cultural alignment. Rather than imposing rigid rules, she continuously reinforces the "why" behind company practices through meaningful narratives. This approach enables Jellyvision to hire talented people with good judgment, inform them about underlying principles, and then trust them to make appropriate decisions as circumstances evolve.
The company's core mission – "be helpful" – might sound simple, but Amanda reveals its profound implications: "To be truly helpful, you have to care about someone besides yourself, you need wisdom to solve problems, and you must have a bias toward action." This philosophy drives everything from product development to customer interactions to internal collaboration.
Looking toward the future, Jellyvision is expanding its impact through AI-powered benefits administration and Medicare decision support – continuing its mission of bringing clarity to complex, consequential choices. For anyone navigating their own business challenges or healthcare decisions, Amanda's story offers a powerful reminder that technology works best when it amplifies our humanity rather than replacing it.
So the beginning of my story of entrepreneurship was I had to write a severance letter from myself to myself and actually laid myself off along with 90% of the rest of the company, and during that time I tucked my tail.
Amanda Lannert:I ran to Europe, 9-11 happened, thought I'm never going to work again, came back and was just hanging out, went to San Francisco where I hung out with my sister, where she was the only person working post dot com implosion, post 9-11. She'd go to work and I would go to coffee shops and kind of lick my wounds and feel so ashamed for the face planting and the failure. And everyone else who was also laid off would be like get over yourself. We tried to do something really big, but the internet is here to stay. We will all ride again and I got a little bit of that West Coast grit and resilience that was really important. Meanwhile, harry the founder pulled off a miracle and raised $1.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2001, where I think nobody else on the planet raised money and he called me back to help reboot the company.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Scale Like a CEO the show where we dive deep into the strategies and stories behind scaling successful companies. Today, we're in for an incredible conversation with Amanda Lanner, the CEO of Jellyvision, a company that's revolutionizing how people navigate complex healthcare decisions. Get ready for powerful insights on leadership, scaling companies and how Amanda's unique journey has shaped her approach to building trust in an industry where it matters most. Let's jump right in.
Justin Reinert:And thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO, and it's great to have you on after having met several years ago and having some mutual friends in common. But to get us started, if you would just give us a 90 second intro to you and your business, Sure, I'm Amanda Lanner.
Amanda Lannert:I'm a CEO of Jellyvision, a company that makes a platform called Alex that is designed to make really complicated, really high stakes decisions, like choosing and using your employee benefits or signing up for Medicare, feel human and clear and actually doable. And why do we do those? Because no one should need a PhD in insurance to see a doctor or afford their meds. Our mission is to be helpful. We go to where there's furrowed brow, where people are trying to do something complicated and boring but important, and we talk them through it. And there is not much as complicated, boring and important as healthcare in the United States. But it is great to be here, justin, great to see you again.
Justin Reinert:Yeah, so I love that. I've actually I've seen I think I don't know that I've used your platform in practice, but I've seen demos and stuff and so it's really great and I love the production value that you all have. You started talking about it a little bit, but I'm curious what are some of the biggest challenges you see in the industry and how you're helping solve those?
Amanda Lannert:Yeah, it's a weird one, right, and I think Jellyvision exists not because of what we do, but the way in which we do it. So there's a lot of soft with the hard and soft of business at Jellyvision, because the biggest problem we see is trust. Everyone says, oh, it's data, data, data. If you got sick or someone in your family got sick and you wanted the very best data to make decisions around providers and cost and efficacy, you would pick up the phone and call UnitedHealthcare. Nobody has more data, but they're in the headlines for very, very different reasons, about people not wanting to call them and wanting to call anyone else. And with employers in the business of sponsoring so many benefits, there really is a question about who can you trust to have your best interests at heart. You can trust your doctor, but they may not know what things cost, right. They may not know what else is going on in your life and what counterindications could be. So we really see the problem. There are many problems of middle pair models and misaligned incentives and all those kinds of things, but we are trying to solve the problems around health care the cost of confusion as it relates to you don't know who to trust.
Amanda Lannert:We are an educational film company turned educational software company that became a gaming company that made games like you Don't Know Jack and who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the late 90s.
Amanda Lannert:That became an agency, a sort of a boutique agency that learned how to build things and that persuaded, listened, built trust.
Amanda Lannert:And then we put all of these things together the teaching and the entertaining, just enough so that you could pay attention, and the trust and persuasion to basically sell math so that employees can make better decisions around their health and financial well-being. Our algorithm is utterly employee-directed. We will not work with a customer or partner who asks us to make something look better than it is, and we have approached healthcare by not trying to be the smartest person in the room. We try to make you, the user, the smartest person in the room by empowering you with just enough education so that you can feel confident, know the answers about the hard stuff, but really can speak to your preferences and your family and your situation and your attitudes towards risk and make the best decisions for you, because no one knows you better than yourself. We will know enough insurance and translate it to you so you can make good decisions on things that can be a second or third largest line item for a household.
Justin Reinert:Yeah, it can be really challenging, especially for those who are new to needing to select insurance. I mean, years ago, when I was heading HR for a small company, I actually ran. I did benefit selection with our provider. I had to determine, all right, what's the package we're going to offer to our employees, and I still, to this day, have to really struggle and work through. You know, I'm on my partner's insurance and so we were going through this hybrid plan that I'd never heard of before and I'm like, wait, well, what is this going to cover? And honestly, at the end of the day, we kind of crossed our fingers. We're like, okay, I hope we're making the right decision for this, and the good news is we did. It's actually been a really great plan for us.
Amanda Lannert:But it's nice to have someone having a good time, because I'll tell you. First of all, there's no other industry where you can take a product, name it based on its most terrifying feature and expect it to be successful in market. But we literally have this thing called the high deductible plan instead of the low premium plan. The vehicle that you use to pay for things in retirement is literally called a 401k, and one of the biggest new plan designs is by name. An ICRA Like you can't make up a grosser sounding name. So anything is horribly named, horribly branded, incredibly complicated.
Amanda Lannert:But then you get in, and it's not just these horribly named products. You have to think about perceptions of your own fragility, even mortality, your attitude towards risk, the affordability of when things go bump in the night Like it's a lot of yuck kind of you know around health insurance, and rarely do we hear people like I love our plan, I love it. Most people wake up and go oh gosh, today I have to pick my insurance. No one's like today I have to pick my insurance. No one's like today I have to pick my insurance.
Amanda Lannert:So we really have tried to be incredibly empathetic to the user about both the importance, the gravity of the decision and the dread around it. It's just like we know we're stuck in the yuck. We know we're dealing with ick that nobody wants to think about what we think. Stuck in the yuck, we know we're dealing with ick that nobody wants to think about what we think about all the live long day, and so we try to arm you with just enough information to help you make a good decision, to make you feel and confident and empowered, and then let you get on to anything but insurance, which is really what you'd rather be doing. So not a love for plans, justin, it's rare to hear people be like it's awesome.
Justin Reinert:No, that's for sure. Well, so you were in your intro. You were talking about the multiple iterations of Jellyvision and kind of the different focuses that you've had, and you've been leading the company for over 15 years. I'd love to go back in time a little bit to kind of the early days of scaling and building the team and tell me a little bit about what that was like and how you approached growth.
Amanda Lannert:Yeah. So just to be clear, I'm a joiner, not the founder. I was the first employee hired at Jellyvision who didn't meet the founder. I joined as marketer because Jellyvision didn't want to give me even a director level title and I was VP track in a much larger company. So I said, let's not fight, I won't take a step down, but I won't fight over a specific title. So I'll just come in as marketer. And I became president of the company less than a year later and inherited my first P&L of a company, more or less going off of a cliff.
Amanda Lannert:We made money back at the time on these things called CD-ROMs that you would put data on and feed them into a computer, and data was going from being on CD-ROMs into the cloud. So the way we made our money CD-ROM games. The price point went from $30 to $20 to $10 to $5 in about 18 months, and so our ability to monetize dropped by one sixth similarly, or dropped by five sixths in a similar time frame, and so we had to try to figure out how to keep the company alive and more or less I was very candid with the founder identified hey, we're in a really big time of everything's moving to the cloud and everything's moving to the internet. But then the bubble burst, the dot-com bubble burst and we said, all right, figure out how to finance this business. I said, hey, listen, we have got to do things differently if we're going to survive this transition to the internet, where things are online but nobody's making money yet. So we put together three deals that were on consoles the first Xbox, the first Dreamcast, the first PlayStation even though the majority of investment in the time was going to core games that showed off the technology, were like well be, the family game that you play during the holidays and put together three deals and the first one died and the second one died, and then the third deal died. I put the phone down and knew we'd have to basically shut down the company. So the beginning of my story of entrepreneurship was I had to write a severance letter from myself to myself and actually laid myself off along with 90% of the rest of the company, and during that time I tucked my tail.
Amanda Lannert:I ran to Europe, 9-11 happened, thought I'm never going to work again, came back and was just hanging out, went to San Francisco where I hung out with my sister, where she was the only person working post dot com implosion, post 9-11. She'd go to work and I would go to coffee shops and kind of lick my wounds and feel so ashamed for the face planting and the failure. And everyone else who was also laid off would be like get over yourself. We tried to do something really big, but the internet is here to stay. We will all ride again and I got a little bit of that West Coast grit and resilience that was really important. Meanwhile, harry the founder pulled off a miracle and raised $1.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2001, where I think nobody else on the planet raised money and he called me back to help reboot the company. So I was one of, I think, nine original employees that were a reboot or an offshoot of the gaming company. We had a new lease on life. We're going to go to where there's furrowed brow, where people are trying to do something complicated and boring but important, and we'll talk them through it. We had new financing, we had new West Coast resilience and then we proceeded to spend the better part of a decade almost seven years going sideways, never quite getting traction but managing to not run out of money despite a few more near-death experiences. So in short.
Amanda Lannert:My journey into entrepreneurialism was accidental. It's all accidental. I wasn't a founder who sat down and said there is a problem that bothers me so much. I'm going to do the very hard thing of starting a company to solve it, reinventing and pivoting to stay alive. And everyone's oh, you're so great at pivoting. I'm like that's not a positive, that's because it took us a long time to get to traction. But I have all the lessons of multiple reboots, multiple pivots. And then you know, very luckily, we've found scale. And I've seen now the pains of growing. And I've seen the pains of standing still. They're painful too, versus just the pains of starting and sputtering. And I've seen the pains of standing still. They're painful too, versus just the pains of starting and sputtering. So I've seen a lot. Let's dive into it. What would be helpful to talk about more?
Justin Reinert:Well, so the first thing I'm hearing is a bit of product market fit. That comes up a lot and it sounds like you've gone through multiple iterations of that. What is? Because I'm sure you've got a lot of war stories in there. What's like kind of the top one that you'd pull out and say like here's how we finally got it right.
Amanda Lannert:So there's so many things go into it, but perhaps the definition is what is scale or product market fit? How do I define it? And I define it simply as when you can sell the same thing repeatedly to satisfy customers for a profit and we were very good at the zero to one the first sale and a lot of times what we would do was very special and unique and novel and when you're doing something that is special and unique and novel, that creates competitive in-market differentiation, the second your partner, who starts to get success with you, they do is ask you to not compete against them and do it again for anybody else. So as an agency we realized there's a big difference between doing go-to-market things, customer acquisition things and employee benefits or customers that could be diehard arch nemeses wouldn't mind if we helped both of their employees. So, understanding where you can get repeatability, understanding where there are common enough problems deeply enough felt that you could build something unique and bespoke to really drive up the price point per customer but do it repeatedly is how we sort of cracked the nut on our business. We figured out the difference between customization and configuration and we built that into a business. So it felt very bespoke but was rather knob changing, turning knobs and dials than it was building something repeatedly from the ground up.
Amanda Lannert:So obsessed with being in market, obsessed with listening to customers, you know setting them up to comfortably tell you the truth. One of our core values is you can tell the truth with kindness and respect. One of the best things you can get is a quick and hard no and then you say, awesome, I've heard a quick and hard no. And then you say awesome, I've heard the quick and hard no, it's over, tell me why. And then you get the real truth, the lessons, and then you can go and get better. Just a lot of times, a lot of scraped knees before we ever got to traction. And I think one of the key lessons that's different about Jellyvision, which is kind of a unique company to begin with, is we know that there are two types of VCs. There are venture capitalists who can finance your business, but there are also vested customers. Very often I see the desperation on companies to get any traction and so they give away free pilots. But the reality is skin in the game is a powerful weapon and a powerful motivator for both parties, and if you don't have skin in the game as a you may not be the partner someone wants to deal with at all.
Amanda Lannert:We charged the most for our early customers because they felt the pains we were solving so profoundly. They were willing to work with a scary startup, they were willing to be at risk with a company that couldn't get through their normal procurement processes, and also they were innovators who valued being first, and both the magnitude of their pain and the fun of being first was something we could monetize. So we really funded the business more often with vested customers, large customers in a B2B space that were willing to write big checks, to be first to solve scary problems, and that was a lot of the seeding of our business. And it's non-dilutive. And that was a lot of the seeding of our business and it's non-dilutive. Right, it's better than that because it's non-dilutive and it actually is making you better in market, instead of what venture capital is, which is, to be a little bit cynical about it, an awful lot of obligation, right, you got to go pay back that investment. You got to go create returns on that investment. It's not validation, it's obligation.
Justin Reinert:I really like the two VCs. I hadn't heard of this idea of the vested customer, but that's so valuable when you've got people who want you to succeed from that angle, because that is a real, true partnership where they're investing in making it happen. I love that and I also love the understanding, the difference between customization and configuration. That really resonated with me because one of my favorite moments in my career was working with when I was with Big Machines, another startup here in Chicago, and we had grown a lot through a lot of customization. There was still a core product but we would still go land a big customer customize for them, and when we really made the pivot to scalability was shifting to we're going to make a configurable product with minimal amounts of customization, and then it was just up and to the right until we were acquired by Oracle. And so that really resonates with me is scalability comes in configuration, not in customization.
Amanda Lannert:Hi, dear friends, One of my favorite CEOs told me one of the problems with his business that he realized was self-inflicted was they had a charter for salespeople which was do what needs to be done to get the sale. And that means their salespeople were fundamentally tasked, incented, rewarded, encouraged to say yes to everything and that, in fact, can really mire a company and technical debt before it's even out of the gates, really mire a company and technical debt before it's even out of the gates. And we were very, very good, I think, at being honest and earnest about no, we don't do that or no, we don't do that. Yet Can you tell me why that's important to you? How do we get there?
Amanda Lannert:And trying to have honest conversations about separating what is really truly critical to solve the problem versus what is truly worthwhile and that, to me, is one of the greatest questions at scale, there's so much. When you have affordability, when you have profitability and you can afford to make these investments, you start to do all these things that are, they make sense, they're worthwhile, and being able to really separate and prioritize that which is differentiating, that which creates unique and distinct value, versus that which is just worthwhile and prioritizing accordingly is never not critical. It's most critical when you're fighting for your life and you're trying to get the deal without having to build something bespoke with every new deal. If you're, you know, a sas software company, but boy does it create a lot of waste doing things worthwhile, a lot of bloat, a lot of slowness later, later in the game too yeah, so let's talk about now.
Justin Reinert:All right, so we've got. We've got product market face time to scale because we're growing, so we're adding people to the team. How do you then decide all right, it's time to start putting more people behind this growth, and how do you do it in a way that's sustainable?
Amanda Lannert:I mean there's always like there's a personal answer and then a business answer. The business answer is easier for me, which is I sort of advise to invest according to the customer journey, what they touch first, and sort of like just in time. So you work on top of funnel and then you work on closing and then you work on servicing and then you work on supporting and then you work on renewing and you kind of invest according to where the customer is as close to just in time as possible. Otherwise you get bloated. You have the best sort of QA engine and not any customers to put on the platform. So that's sort of like it sounds so simple and obvious and yet companies don't do it. So I'm like invest where the customer is just in time.
Amanda Lannert:And from a personal perspective, you know ego when you're small. You're wearing all the hats, you're doing all the things and the I'll just do it myself reflex dies hard. Right, it's not arrogance, it's just I'm a grinder and you don't get into these situations unless you really like the work, you like what you do, you get satisfaction out of the work product and the way I got over that was simply hiring people to do one or two jobs instead of five or six jobs and seeing them be so much better at their one or two jobs than I was ever at them that I very quickly got the idea that businessing is a team sport right and I started to see like the power of having a functional expert in any given role. To me, the bigger shift around scale was I became kind of very good at okay, you do it or I do it, and when you're small and tight knit and a fearless, mighty crew, that really works. When you can just lead with total trust and you can know everybody, you know their whole families that works.
Amanda Lannert:But the do or delegate falls apart when you start to get scale and I really had to learn, I had to become a chief accountability officer, which was less interesting than doing it or you do it, having to say let's talk about what it is and let's talk about what great is, and then let's talk, let's agree to some milestones along the way where I'm not doing it and I'm not just letting you run off on your own, but I'm creating accountability in between. That was the hardest transition for me as a leader, because I really like getting my hands dirty and I really like trusting other people to get their hands dirty, but it was a whole new knowledge gap. It sounds so simple, justin. I probably sound like a crappy CEO, but that is a skill set I'm still developing of how to be a chief accountability officer.
Amanda Lannert:When the way I do things is I do them. I know every nook and cranny. I like to. I spend a lot of time. I get very Six Sigma. It's hard for me to have accountability without doing it, and that's learning to know enough to be a good coach and a good leader without doing it myself.
Justin Reinert:What I think I'm hearing in that is that it's, you know, it's creating alignment in the organization, and which becomes more challenging the bigger you get, and you know.
Amanda Lannert:Say it again. That's so true. What point for you? Do you think it starts to become really hard? Do you have a sense of when companies start to wobble?
Justin Reinert:Well, so I think if we look at kind of even just in the research, it's 100 to 120 people. Once you get beyond that it's really hard to keep alignment with that group of folks. But I do think, you know, it depends on how fast you're growing. But I think even at 50 and 100, there are probably some bumps. And then once you get over 120, that's where you really have to be intentional about how you're creating the vision and the alignment to that vision, Because you start getting people going left and right off that vision and now people are just colliding all over the place.
Amanda Lannert:I think that there's an anecdotal way to look at it. It's when you ask somebody why you're doing this or why you're doing it this way. Just hey, what's going on with this? Why are you doing it this way? Well, they said hey, what's going on with this? Why are you doing it this way? Well, they said. They said I'm like they, as in me, I'm Amanda, I'm unemployable elsewhere. I bleed for this company, they is Amanda, and now they can be my boss, my boss's boss.
Amanda Lannert:Leadership, executive leadership when you shift from knowing faces and having intimacy and I'm talking about people, but I'm talking about organizational structure I think that's when it starts to get really hard. Because I really want to lead with benefit of the doubt. I really want to lead with trust. I really want to lead with transparency. But it's easier to trust people than it is to trust companies right.
Amanda Lannert:The most forgotten fact in business is that we're all human. Companies don't buy from companies. People buy from people. Companies don't innovate. People innovate right. They're tinkerers who are just better at zero to one than others. You know, employees quit companies, people quit their bosses, again and again and again. There's this dynamic of we forget that we're systems of humans and we think we're systems of organizational life and entity. And then we stop leading with trust and we stop forgiving mistakes as easily and we start to worry more about risk instead of you know what good judgment and a motivated person can do to create something new and different. That's maybe when the magic starts to fade and the conglomerate starts to rise. Yeah, my guess is, I'd say smaller, smaller than 100 to 200 in my experience, closer to 50 to 60. I think it's the first time a company structure really breaks and you need managers, and then you need managers of managers and leaders of managers of managers, and then it's just. You know, communication is never crystal clear when there's some level of telephone.
Justin Reinert:Yes, I love your this. They said A CEO that I worked with many, many years ago. He would always call that out and he'd say who's they? Who?
Amanda Lannert:Yeah, it used to be me, it used to be well. They said I was like wait, wait, wait, hi, I'm a. I mean well, but make mistakes. Call me on it Like let's, let's have a conversation. And now it's like which? They? Because there are lots of different potential days. It's, you know, it's people. Peopling is hard work. It can be really really hard work. It's also the best work, it's the most rewarding work. It's my highest highs, the of your people. And then you've got managers of managers. Tell me about scaling leadership at Jellyvision.
Justin Reinert:And as you grew, how did you build?
Amanda Lannert:the layers of leadership that you needed to grow the company. Yeah, I think early on it was really easy because one you have such a visibility to the work and to the person and we were kind of hiring birds of a feather, people that we thought would be good cultural fits. But, as we realized, we're serving not tens of thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people, but millions of people. We realized we needed a lot of different perspectives and we fundamentally started hiring people different, that would be culturally additive, not culturally meld. We wanted to change the culture, evolve the culture, and we started asking not are you a bar raiser? That's Amazon's thing, but are you going to evolve the culture in a way that is better representative of the 8 million or so users we represent, of the 8 million or so users we represent? And I think that's when it starts, when you, when you lose visibility of people and you understand you have mind meld, you have really shared values, maybe even similar ways of working, as you start to lose the direct connection and you stop knowing how people are motivated and why they do the things that they do, I would start to see work where I would kind of be like talk to me about how we got here, talk to me about why this decision was made. Do you know why we used to do it a different way? And I realized a full, huge part of my job is to tell the same stories over and over and over. And because Jellyvision's been around for a long time yeah, I might be like the you know the sentimental parent who's whipping out days of yore. I understand that. You know people who have been in C for two years don't tell the same stories of history, but telling the stories of why over and over again is a huge part of the job, because I don't want to be watching everybody's individual work. I want to hire truly great, talented people with integrity and good judgment, inform them as to the whys and then let them make the choices and the decisions that are best.
Amanda Lannert:Knowing today is different than yesterday in all kinds of different ways. So as you start to scale, I mean there's nothing, nothing more important than hiring humble, hardworking, self-adaptive learners who have integrity and I harp a lot on integrity. Jolly vision is not a growth at any cost. Business never has been, never will be, because that's how you die. Overnight, you can make all kinds of earnest mistakes. If you apologize, sit down and say here's what happened, here's what I learned, here's how we're going to make sure it never happens again, here's how we're going to make you whole, except for breaches of integrity. And so you get those kinds of people and then just go on loop telling stories about why. That's the best I can advise about how to scale is be a storyteller about why we do things the way we do, why we care about customers the way we do.
Speaker 2:I'll give an example.
Amanda Lannert:We ripped off Maya Angelou. She has a quote. I'm going to paraphrase it People won't remember what you said. They won't remember what you did. They'll only remember how you made them feel.
Amanda Lannert:And so we say we need you to be responsive to customers. We need you to never ghost a customer for a couple of days. If they respond, you need to get back to them. It doesn't mean you have to answer their question, but you just need to say I've heard you. Why do we ask you to be responsive? Because it makes them feel important. And if you have the power to make somebody paying your bills feel important and valued, why would you not? It's very different than micromanaging someone about accountability and response time. It's saying you wield the power to make someone feel a very positive way. That's why we ask you to be responsive, and it becomes much more about how we're making our customers feel than the rules of engagement. Companies default to rules of engagement.
Amanda Lannert:We try to talk about the why. Why do we try to be funny in meetings? Because we live in a cynical world and if you show up eager to please, you can make someone's day. You can literally be the bright spot of a week if you are eager to please and you try to not be boring and you try to be delightful, never mind. It also helps with learning and all these wonderful things. So the example of it just I quote that quote from Queen Maya over and over and I talk about it. We do these things. Why? How do they make people feel? And we have a bunch of really kind, caring people here.
Amanda Lannert:Our mission statement is be helpful. Right, there are companies that are like we're going to cut everybody's throat and be the first to the top of the Holy Pyramid. That's great for you. Ours is to be helpful. And you might say, well, that's kind of bland or milquetoast, justin, and I would say, no, no, justin, give it a minute.
Amanda Lannert:To be helpful, to be truly, really helpful, you have to care about someone besides yourself. You have to be empathetic. That takes a lot of energy to. You have to have wisdom. You have to be able to solve problems. You have to have a base of knowledge that can see a problem and undo it. And three, there's a bias towards action. Right, helpful is a to do, not to, not a to think or feel. Right, it's action-oriented and so you really attract people who are inspired by the idea of fundamentally being helpful to our users, to our customers to each other, to our tech community, et cetera and that's why I think if you really try to hire for quality and caliber a person, then you can story, tell about why and allow them as much autonomy as possible about how and when and where they do their work. That's the goal.
Justin Reinert:Amanda, I'm inspired.
Amanda Lannert:Okay, I was like you definitely try it. And I was like oh no.
Justin Reinert:Just listening.
Amanda Lannert:None of that reminded me at all. Speaking from the heart, totally, totally no one.
Justin Reinert:So there's something in to summarize a lot of that and it's something that I talk to organizations about, when, when they're talking about culture and values and whatnot.
Justin Reinert:You know, I had a conversation with someone, oh just a few weeks ago who was saying you know, I used to think this whole idea of of, you know, company values was BS and just stuff on the wall. And now, as the CEO has grown a company, I actually get it if you do it right. And what I'm hearing you say is that you are very explicit about what the culture is and, beyond just some posters of words, you are telling stories all the time about what it means to be an employee at Jellyvision and how we all align together, because every company has a culture, whether it's implicit or explicit, and if it's implicit, oftentimes it's not necessarily a desirable culture. There's stuff that's going on that isn't necessarily what the most senior leaders of the business would want to see going on, but when they're explicit about what they want to see, that all follows. So I just I love the story of how you're talking about the values and what it means to be an employee at Jellyvision and how you grow.
Amanda Lannert:And our values. We have five core you know core values. They're long and wordy, right, because writing is so important to what we do, communication is so important to what we do and I suck at editing when I'm speaking from the heart, obviously. But when I was originally trying to write a mission statement or a purpose statement, we had gotten a scale we were hiring we're doubling the size of the company every year. Things are really nuts. And I said all right, that which goes without saying must now not only be said, it must be written down. Right? I just had this epiphany of like we can never, it no longer goes without saying. It has to be both said repeatedly and written down. Statement. And I kept coming up with these. You know various statements the owner's mindset we all need to operate with an owner's mindset or various things about how we're going to reach through the screen and engage learners one-on-one, and our chief creative officer.
Amanda Lannert:Then, at the time, ali Blaban, who was a man with a beard, happened to stroke his beard and say that's, that's not it. And then I do another shot, he goes. He finally said culture. Really, everyone thinks it's about this ethos or these bulletproof values, but it's really about behavior. It's about action. It's about what happens in rooms where leadership isn't even there. When do you talk? How do you talk? What do you work? Do you listen to everybody? Does the loudest person get to make all the decisions? What's going on? He said it's think about it as what's the beat of how we do what we do, what's our mantra.
Amanda Lannert:And I right away said oh, be helpful, that's, that's obvious, it's, that's that's how we need to, in every moment, in every meeting, say all right, we understand what next steps are. When I would look around the room and see two or three people doing the same next step and everyone could kind of be like wait a second, we're all trying to be helpful, who's on first? Like that is the jelly vision that made me the most proud. And when I said be helpful, allard said that's it and it is stuck. It is one of those things that it actually is a heartbeat for our people and the way we work. In a way that if I, if I pulled our people, I don't know that. If everybody could name all of our five values, one is essentially don't be boring. Don't be boring, it's very, it's very jelly vision if you get to know us in our jazz hands. But if I said what is our purpose, a hundred percent would say be helpful, and I think that's a pretty good thing to be crystal clear about.
Justin Reinert:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and I like this, the focus on behaviors that we're describing, the behaviors that we want to see. You know, the other angle is that those behaviors or actions are driven by our beliefs, and so another way that I've seen it successful in an organization is, rather than values, we had our cultural beliefs. What are the beliefs that are going to drive our actions and our behaviors? And then we went in and did a lot of storytelling around. What does this look like? If you are living these beliefs.
Amanda Lannert:So I love that. I remember an exercise when I was actually really writing our first core values and they evolve as they should. We look at them, we challenge them, we make sure that they're inclusive, we make sure they're galvanizing. But when I first wrote them, I was Googling back in the day before ChatGPT how to write good core values and I read a blog where someone had said the exercises don't write about values, write about people.
Amanda Lannert:Think about your best and brightest, an example of a person being who you want the company to be. When you're at your best, describe that person. And so I wrote about our then head writer, tom Haley. He knows I was writing about him. I just thought why do I think Tom is magic? And it was his humility, his hard work, that he'll tell you the truth, because he means well and wants you to learn and get better. He is never boring, but it really is core values.
Amanda Lannert:The best thing you can do is think about a superstar in a superstar moment. Why was it a superstar? And that will help you in the most specific way possible, because for some companies it will be their winners. For some companies it will be they zigged while everyone else was zagging For someone else, it would be like they really listened and were empathetic. But I think in those moments as a leader, if you can really try to identify the human characteristics and behaviors of like the 10 out of 10 performance that you really wish everyone would replicate, if you're writing about humans, it's easier to be pointy with your point of view than it is if you're trying to write about a company. For some reason it's just like companies genericize what is in fact just human behavior, yes, yes, and companies are collectives of people.
Justin Reinert:So, amanda, what does the future look like at Jellyvision?
Amanda Lannert:So Jellyvision's been around for many a year and Alex now is the market leader that helps hundreds over 1,000, 1,600 companies help their employees choose and use their benefits. In many respects, I feel like we're just getting started. We are building an end-to-end employee platform that includes benefits administration. And why would we do benefits administration when everybody hates benefits administration? Because AI is finally here and we can build a truly intuitive, natural language-based binadmin. And I think if there's any area that's going to be disrupted by large language models, it's going to be Ben Admin, because nobody wakes up today and says today I want to hang out on my Ben Admin site. It does not happen. You only go there because you have a need that is personal to your life that you want resolved ASAP, and large language models are chef's kiss for it.
Amanda Lannert:I think UX is going to die in the world of employee benefits and we are going to be the ones to kill it with this platform. And the second thing is we understand our North Star is the employee. We wanted to follow them through their life's journey. We realized one of the biggest life's journeys is when you stop being an employee and start being a Medicare beneficiary. So we are launching late this year, an end-to-end decision support and enrollment platform so that Alex can help you choose and use and get value out of Medicare when you start to get insurance from the government, no longer from employees.
Amanda Lannert:So we have our two biggest irons in the fire in terms of new bets, new innovation and it's weird, you can almost feel it. Innovation is scary, I have grossly said you cannot get birth without blood and screaming, and it's true. Innovation is messy, invention is hard, involves some level of blood and screaming. But it's also like I really think the time is right. I think the technology is here now and I feel like our people have the unique skill set of deep caring and respect for the individual user, where they will be religious about making sure they're well taken care of and they're treated with integrity and, at the same time, not being boring and being helpful. For people who are going to have a lot of furrowed brow moments just in navigating insurance, we're going to be able to be really helpful. So my Alex Health, the Medicare solution and the Alex platform January 2026. It's been busy. We're building a lot right now at Jellyvision.
Justin Reinert:That's incredible, Amanda. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?
Amanda Lannert:Amanda Lannert L-A-N-N-E-R-T at LinkedIn is great, but also, like I'm not hiding, amanda, at Jellyvisioncom, I'd love to talk shop. Tell me a joke, I'm here.
Justin Reinert:Great Well, thank you so much, Amanda.
Amanda Lannert:Thanks for having me, justin. It's great to see you and I really appreciate you creating a platform for you know, walking down memory lane and trying to share war stories. If someone can not make all the mistakes I made, I'm good with that.
Justin Reinert:Love it and I love having your stories on the podcast. Thank you, thank you.