In our latest videocast, we talk to Steve Kraus, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Steve grew up in Connecticut in the 80s, and is the son of an early female leader who broke glass ceilings and his dad, a talented entrepreneur who took a backseat to support his wife’s inspiring career. Steve originally wanted to be a journalist, and attended Yale to follow this career path. However, somewhere along the way, he lost his love for writing to deadlines. He took a different trajectory after his degree and obtained an internship in consulting at Bain & Co. where he discovered his passion for both, consulting and healthcare. After this, he became involved in politics and a series of serendipitous events led to him being offered a position at Bessemer, where he has been an investment partner for 16 years.

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Listen to this videocast on Spotify.

Steve talks to us about payer adoption of digital health in the US having recently read our report on the same, and the interesting experiments being carried out by some of the bigger players. Whether it is Aetna-CVS and the expansion into broader consumer offerings, or United Healthcare and Optum’s initiatives to progress value-based care, he definitely feels positive about the ongoing experiments by incumbents. Steve, like many of us, is excited by companies like Bright Health who seem to be ‘’getting it right’’ - aligning a payer and provider to take care of patients and empowering consumers by giving them the choice to pick how they want to manage their health and wellbeing. Steve believes a full-stack approach with free flowing (interoperability) data is where we should be headed, and this can only be accomplished successfully with legislative support. In another life, Steve would love to be in public service and really give back to society. 

Watch the videocast here: