College dropout turned self-taught coder and business owner named to Forbes 30 under 30 2023

Gr o w i n g u p , m a n y p e o p l e expect to follow the same basic steps: graduate high school, go to a good college, and ultimately land a job that pays well with bonus points if you actually enjoy it

However, the universe oftentimes makes it a point to teach us that life is not always meant to be predictable. Sometimes even the best-laid plans have to fall apart in order for something even better to come together.

This happened to be the case for Cavan Klinsky, a self-taught coder; cofounder of the API-first solution for modern health care delivery, Healthie; and a recipient of a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 2023 for health care

Klinsky found his life path altered after being diagnosed with a chronic heart condition in his first year of high school at the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx

“I first became interested in engineering after I had to have open heart surgery as a freshman in high school,” Klinsky explained “Basically, for weeks over the course of the following summer, I couldn’t really exercise or run around or do most of the things I would spend a summer doing I was really stuck in my bedroom, which led me to become a lot more serious about engineering and that is when I built out my first web application ”

He expanded on this, saying that, at the beginning, his coding education came largely from his own Google searches along with a surplus of free time.

After that initial spark of interest,

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“So, we built an MVP and launched that and started making sales very quickly with a very young product and then that summer we got into an accelerator program called Techstars, which pretty much required us to go full-time the company just kept growing and growing and it has now been seven years. ”

He went on to say that while the company was founded in November 2015, it did not reach profitability until around four years later.

Klinsky said that he mainly learned through repetition and the hands-on experience he gained from experimenting with sample code in order to determine what did and didn’t work

He continued to foster his engineering skills throughout high school and after graduation went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for business

Focus on the business

However, after meeting Erica Jane, his future Healthie co-founder, during his winter break of freshman year, Klinsky decided to take what he thought would just be one semester off from school to invest all his time into starting their business

“She had come from a health care background and I came from a background of building out MVPs and small projects for other businesses, so she knew a lot about the space and I knew a lot about building stuff,” Klinsky said.

“We really wanted to build a stamina business, so one of the things we can tell our customers is that we are going to be around in 10 years, ” Klinsky said. “So, I would say that we have been cash efficient since day one, but we didn’t end up breaking profitability until 2019 or 2020 ”

He explained that building this business took a massive amount of patience, as it did not see the rate of growth it currently has overnight

Rather, Klinsky said that Healthie has experienced the most growth in the last few years, leading it to where it is today, working with thousands of health care organizations and covering millions of patient lives

“I think we have really caught on to something and found a great place to be in the market and a great piece of software delivery and we have seen great growth with that,” he said

Expanding the scope

He explained that the original vision for Healthie was to be a platform for individual dietitians, but after feedback from users Klinsky and Jane decided to expand its functions and transform it into a core, underlying infrastructure for large digital health care companies

Today, the company ’ s software API helps health care companies of varying sizes deliver the best care possible by providing them with a scheduling, engagement, and electronic medical records platform that enables the building of lasting relationships with patients

Klinsky knows firsthand that people often find themselves at their most vulnerable when they are seeking out health care That being said, navigating the industry while also trying to advocate for their own care can feel like a daunting task

This is why, according to Klinsky, Healthie’s ultimate goal is to lessen stress and foster a more positive relationship between patients and their health care providers

“Anybody who has experienced health care in this country has seen how broken it is, and there are all of these people out there with great ideas, great plans, great experience, and a great knowledge base about how to solve this problem,” He said. “But what they’re really worried about is delivering health care so they’re not necessarily focusing on the technology, the infrastructure, or the back end and those other very important but very time-consuming pieces.”

Klinsky also said that when it comes to running a business and growing a startup, the most important thing is to normalize and embrace the journey, no matter what it looks like He emphasized that running a business is a continuous learning process and even when it feels like you ’ ve made it, there is still more to learn and improve upon

He explained that he has always approached managing his engineering team in the same way he looks at growing the business as a whole: listening and responding to feedback in order to provide the best end result possible

Now, at just 26 years old, Klinsky has been recognized for his success and named to Forbes 30 Under 30 2023 in the health care category

According to Forbes, this came after Healthie raised $18 million in venture funding and helped millions of organizations and patients in areas such as chronic pain, cardiac rehab, addiction treatment, weight loss and others

“We have seen great growth in the last couple of years but we are still really just getting started,” Klinsky said. “So, the vision and the goal is to become this really widespread platform that makes it really really easy to launch and scale new types of digital care. ” z