Woo welcoming guests to a dinner for influential media figures cohosted with the U.S. Embassy Seoul in the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, with the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea in attendance.
Tae Young Woo ’12 never set out to become an entrepreneur, but whenever he encounters a problem, he can’t help but devise a solution. Little more than a decade after graduating from Taft, he has already followed this drive to produce a series of seminars and conferences around the globe, write a bestselling memoir, and launch multiple businesses. The newest is Finestra, a search engine that allows users to more accurately track health care costs in their area.
Finestra was born when Woo found himself unemployed and without insurance at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “My two biggest questions were, where can I get a new job, and how much does a COVID test cost?” he says. “To find a job, I went on Glassdoor, the site that not only tells you about job opportunities but also shares how much people earn at certain companies. Companies aren’t sharing this information—it’s the employees. That’s when I thought maybe I could create a website where patients can share their experiences, so other people will have an idea of what they should expect to be charged.”
Woo meeting backstage with former Speaker of the House Sen. Kevin McCarthy at the Asian Leadership Conference inSeoul, South Korea, discussing ways for Finestra to engage with federal agencies.
The seeds of Woo’s business acumen were planted early when, as a student at Taft, he founded a local chapter of the Future Business Leaders of America. Soon, he invited Apple executive Phil Schiller—whose son Mark was in the Class of 2013—to lead a presentation during the upcoming Parents’ Weekend. When more than 100 students, faculty, and parents attended the talk, Woo was eager to organize more events. At New York University, he established his first company, CNH Studio, to host conferences with prominent guest speakers—including one featuring journalist Anderson Cooper that drew 1,500 people—and founded Blue Books Media to translate and publish books in his native South Korea.
With this string of early successes, Woo was excited for the opportunity to embark on his latest endeavor. “If I was going to start a website to track health care pricing, I knew that I really had to understand the industry. I had to do my research,” he explains. “I went to the library and borrowed a ton of books. I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of videos. I even signed up for an online class to qualify for my New York State health insurance agent license, which I earned after cramming five to six hours a day for a month.” At the same time, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued new guidelines requiring hospitals to publish pricing information for all their procedures, and Woo realized that between these figures and the data submitted by users, he could provide a fairly reliable estimate of real-life costs.
By February 2021, he was ready to officially incorporate Finestra and enlisted a pair of friends to help oversee the company’s operations and computer engineering. Together, they explored a number of possible technologies—from a text-messaging service to answer billing questions to an online bill-negotiation tool—but ultimately settled on the current model, which allows users to input their ZIP code and required medical procedure and then see a range of out-of-pocket costs charged by nearby providers. The results are broken down by different insurance plans, and users can obtain even more personalized information by connecting Finestra to their existing health care accounts, like MyChart.
Tae Young Woo ’12 giving a talk in Busan, South Korea, after his book Studying the World became a national bestseller there.
“When we originally introduced Finestra in New York City, we kind of went viral,” Woo recalls. “We got hundreds of requests a day asking us to share information for more cities, so we spent the next six months frantically expanding to different cities—Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. And every time we added another city, we would go viral again!” Ninety days after the release of the initial beta version, the site had already received more than 500,000 visits and processed more than 150,000 searches. Woo and his team have continued to add data for additional cities.
For him, price transparency is the key to helping people take control of their health, explaining that the company’s name (“Finestra” is Italian for “window”) represents his mission to introduce greater clarity into the often-murky health care industry. “Hospitals have never been interested in clearly disclosing their pricing structures, and many Americans simply don’t seek care because they’re scared of the price,” he says. “I’m so encouraged every time I hear from someone that used the data from our site to negotiate down bills or find places that they didn’t know had more reasonable prices. By democratizing that source of information, I think our tool can really help people.”