Members Leave Carriers, Not Brokers (with Will Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of Gyde)

Blake Madden
Blake Madden
October 6, 2026

Claims Denied is back for a new season, and Blake kicks it off by driving down from Dallas to Austin, and sits in-studio with Will Johnson, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Gyde (http://gydehealth.ai/).

Will is 17 months post-incorporation with a decade at Oscar behind him, and he brought a thesis Blake 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.

They get into 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.

Healthcare keeps trying to go around the broker. This episode makes the case for going through them.

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Blake Madden
Blake Madden