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I drove down from Dallas to sit in an actual studio with Will Johnson of Gyde, 17 months post-incorporation and a decade at Oscar behind him. Will had a thesis I hadn't heard anyone articulate this cleanly: healthcare's real front door isn't the carrier or the PCP. It's the broker, and there are fewer of them every year while the job gets harder every year.

Hear why Will thinks commission rates stay flat while ACA premiums rip 14%, why an AI founder calls himself "a huge software bear," why roll-up is a banned word inside his own M&A shop, and the Capstone deal he thought was dead until a February coffee in Austin. Plus a shared parenting bond over kids with brutal food allergies, which is its own kind of prior auth.

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• Healthcare has an advisory shortage nobody is pricing. Will Johnson's read on broker distribution: the advisory hours required per consumer keep climbing (more plans, more switching, mid-double-digit rate increases) while the number of licensed humans doing the advising keeps shrinking. He calls it an inversion, and he's building against it.
• Premiums are up double digits. Commissions are flat. Somebody is eating that. ACA rates heading into 2027 are running around 14%, and Johnson will bet the house that ACA, small group, and override comp doesn't move a basis point. On a labor-adjusted basis, brokers have taken a multi-year pay cut while the press writes about steak dinners.
• Consumers leave carriers every single year. They don't leave their broker. As individual and MA markets get more liquid, carrier LTV compresses — but the broker relationship stays longitudinal, closer to a PCP than a vendor. Johnson says broker text-message engagement runs 80-100%. Carriers spend millions chasing a fraction of that.
• "I am like a huge software bear." Said by a founder building an AI platform. His argument: most SaaS is data organization plus alerts plus a little workflow, priced way past its utility, and it frequently required hiring a person to manage the SaaS. Gyde's pitch is capacity, not another seat license.
• "Roll-up" is a banned word at Gyde, and the deal structure backs it up. Every partner holds equity at the parent, most retain a slice of their own OpCo, and zero deals have come through a bank to date. Johnson on what a sell-side advisor told him was market: "We are not here to be market."