This episode of Pour Over spotlights Shannon Goggin, the Co-founder and CEO of Noyo, a benefits data platform powering next-generation benefits experiences. Shannon's journey to founding Noyo spans diverse roles, from management consulting to product management at the HR tech startup, Zenefits. Shannon shares key insights from her early career experiences, describing how she has learned to challenge the status quo in environments that are often rigidly stuck in old systems and processes. While working at Zenefits, she gained insights that highlighted the need for a supportive framework. This is how Noyo was first designed. Shannon shares some of the early challenges of finding collaborative partners, describing what makes Noyo’s mission attractive for those who come from a tech background and others who know the benefits ecosystem. We discuss the common traits of high performers in her scaling team, and why she considers it an advantage, rather than a liability, that her identity is tied to that of the company. Hear why Shannon doesn’t have one role model in particular but rather embodies different styles. Sharing the future vision and challenges, Shannon highlights the efficacy of Noyo’s software and the small team behind it. She also shares the important principle of thinking of yourself as the end user of your product and the double-edged sword of taking everything personally.
Early Lessons & Shannon’s Motivations: How far you can get if you have a high level of ambition and are willing to challenge what is commonly accepted as impossible. Working at Zenefits, Shannon was able to see the blockers behind accessibility before landing on the need for new infrastructure.
Early Challenges & Building a Trusted Brand: Noyo Aims to demystify the world of benefits to empower everyday people through a data-based approach. Earning trust and building relationships in an environment with a high volume of sensitive and private information isn’t as easy as it looks in retrospect.
Scaling a Team: Growing from three employees to 80, the highest performers take ownership of what they are hired to solve for. They are hyper-collaborative, hyper-creative, and work to form a point of view.
Finding Identity & Character of Leadership: A personal identity rooted in the company’s evolution propels Shannon to commit fully to her team, partners, and the mission of the country. Her passion for understanding the details to shape the path forward where the data is so clear and reliable that users can easily benefit.
Sources of Inspiration: Identifies that no one person can be your model for success, but rather believes that different styles are necessary in different moments.
Changes in Data: A surge in investment for those building in the tech startup space, with a broader set of companies playing in the space. Insurance companies investing in APIs and considering the future to a new extent.
Long-Term Vision: Now supporting the biggest insurance companies in the world, a future focus is on helping to transform their own systems. Using technology to scale, not people, and working to support the customer base.
Bridging the Gap to the End User: Everyone who works at Noyo is an end customer with their own insurance, which enables them to fully understand the experience.
QUOTES
“That heightened level of ambition and just being a little stubborn, you get a lot farther than most people think is possible.”
“We’re not trying to burn down the industry; we’re not trying to blow it up and start it over. We’re trying to really work with people who are already in the industry to make it dramatically better.”
“For me, understanding the details is what helps me shape how we get the path forward.”
“The challenge for us is, how much good data can we get from the insurance companies to help them improve? So we are investing a ton to add new software tools to improve the quality of data and visibility.”
“[It] always surprises the partners we work with for the level of scale and service we provide them, which is a testament to the software that we have built.”
“When you’re building something; when you’re shipping something, think about yourself as the end user because you are.”
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