Inside Kaizen: Co-founders Kenneth Acquah and Michael Silver on AI agents in ops work
One day on the Muni to work, Anika saw someone that looked familiar. She realized she knew him from his Slack profile picture, classic SF. Ken’s company, Kaizen, had been automating healthcare workflows at the health tech startup she worked at, saving hundreds of ops hours a week. She knew she had to get Kaizen on the pod, and this is that pod!
Kaizen is an AI agent automating the most repetitive, time consuming work in healthcare like credentialing therapists across 50 states and every insurance company. They entered YC pitching a dev tool, pivoted mid-batch, and then were doubling MRR week over week by Demo Day. Partners still use them as an example for new batches.
The pod gets into:
Why dropping out to do YC or a startup is overrated.
The four jobs that will survive AGI according to Michael. One of them is hot person, tune in to hear the other three.
Why healthcare admin is a trillion-dollar market.
Why they only hire platform engineers. They have zero ops and zero FDE.
How referrals now drive most of their pipeline because healthcare is all about “whisper networks”.
00:00 Their first podcast was TBPN
00:15 John Coogan’s stage presence
02:03 Meeting at MIT
08:35 Starting Kaizen 13:01 Why you shouldn’t drop out
14:02 Why pivoting in YC led to 2x MRR growth MoM
15:32 How Kaizen changes healthcare ops
19:46 Customers choosing Kaizen over Claude
23:46 What “whisper networks” really mean for GTM
24:24 Hot take you don’t need FDE
27:40 Pain tolerance is the most important founder trait
32:43 Do founders get to have hobbies?