About

We started as one person with relentless curiosity.

Thunderbolt^™ is a collective voice, anchored to a real person and a real experience of the system we work to improve.

Andrew Gordon, LSW Founder

One bill opened a much larger question about why healthcare costs what it does, and why almost no one can tell you the price in advance.

Before founding Thunderbolt^™, while working at a major health system in New Jersey, Andrew Gordon, LSW needed an MRI. A routine scan, billed at $3,611, surfaced a whole lot of questions and conversations that never stopped.

He set out to understand why, and built a team to do it. The road ran through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps programs, shaped by faculty from Princeton University and Cornell University, among many other prominent organizations. The milestones live in the timeline below.

Over months of structured research we spoke with people from every corner of the system: patient advocates, policymakers and government officials, consultants, executives from health systems, health plans, and insurers, journalists, and patients and their families. That research still anchors how we work. It showed us where incentives fall out of alignment, and it opened doors to work with organizations across the healthcare space. That work now spans independent client engagements across the healthcare space.

Today the “we” is a collective; Andrew and the many people who have shaped this journey with their time, insight, and honesty. The company stays small on purpose, and rigorous by habit.

Our north star

The reason is people.

We have heard from patients, from families, and from people worn down by an affordability crisis they did not create. Our why, in the end, is people. It is the reason the work exists.

A lot of the real insight does not come from a stage at a conference. It comes from the quieter conversations, off the record, across a restaurant table or beside a coffee cup, where someone tells you what the system did to them. That is where the heart of this work lives, and it is where we keep going back.

The people we meet along the way are the reason we do it.

Why “Thunderbolt”

The greatest chess move of all time.

Looking for a company name, we looked through the best chess moves ever played. Chess fit, because business is competitive and strategic in the same way. Both have winners and losers, and both punish anyone who stops thinking a few moves ahead.

One of the moves on that list was Vladimirov’s Thunderbolt, played by Grandmaster Evgeny Vladimirov against Vladimir Epishin in 1987. With his queen already captured, one move won the game on the spot. It took more than calculation and nerve; it took creativity and vision beyond anything you could measure. They say moves like this are why people play the game.

Thunderbolt^™ carries the qualities the work is meant to have: power, speed, and strength. It is easy to say, spell, and remember, and it leaves room to shake up an industry that rarely gets shaken.

The chess metaphor keeps going. Most patients navigating healthcare are new players seated across from a grandmaster. The insurance company processes tens of thousands of claims a day, while you see your provider a few times a year. You can teach someone the rules, but that is not enough when so much of the board stays hidden and so much sits out of their hands. We want to change what people can see, and when they can see it.

Our Values

The principles we work by.

We operate with an innate curiosity and ask as many questions as necessary until a solution is reached and fully understood. It is important to sweat the details. We promote psychological safety, an environment that encourages risk taking, where people feel encouraged to speak up with questions, fixes, or new ideas. Gold is often found by diving into the nooks and crannies people do not usually explore.

Have you ever heard the saying “measure twice, cut once”? We analyze several options and look at opportunities through many approaches before making a key decision, so we can execute on the best possible path. Execution is crucial, but only valuable when it follows proper planning.

It is the combination of the two that creates winning outcomes. Half the battle is showing up and surviving. Being persistent and putting in the hours needed to meet our ambitious deadlines can make or break our success. In the words of Mark Cuban, “Work like someone else is out there working 24/7 to take it all away from you.”

Every day we compete to keep our clients and to keep our competition trying to catch up. Business is competitive, and our desire to stay valuable and relevant motivates us to perform at our best. As the football player J.J. Watt said, “Success isn’t owned. It’s leased, and rent is due every day.”

We choose the tougher problems because we welcome challenges. We enjoy the critical thinking and investigation around pain points for the people we serve, because that is where ideas for new solutions come from. The insurance and medical billing industry is complex, with limited innovation. We believe it does not have to stay this way.

Inside the company, we care about each other just as much as we want to excel over the competition. We see one another as friends and colleagues alike, and we recognize how much friendship, inside and outside the workplace, drives our motivation and work ethic. Outside the company, the clients and individuals we serve are people too. We recognize our work is built from their wants, needs, and pain points, and we value their feedback.

We believe the “why” behind something is the key driver of the motivation to complete any task at hand. Rigorous thought and industry feedback shape our goals and vision. Those goals are ambitious, and our north star is clear. How we landed on the name of the company is one example of the purposeful energy we put into important decisions. Our north star was built with careful consideration of the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The ball starts and stops with us. We individually take responsibility for meeting deadlines or falling short. We are open to constructive criticism and know the importance of dependability in a team environment. When every team member reliably completes their work, greater trust is built. We win or lose together, as one company, and the result is the sum of all our efforts.

The road so far

How we got here.

Early 2023

Where it started: curiosity

Digging into why healthcare works the way it does. No company yet, just the drive to understand it.

March 2023

Thunderbolt is founded

The curiosity became formal. Andrew founded the company to join the NSF’s Regional I-Corps program.

Spring 2023

Completes NSF Regional I-Corps

A structured program to test our assumptions against the market.

Fall 2023

Selected for National I-Corps

Chosen to advance from the regional program to the national one.

February 2024

National I-Corps, winter cohort

Led the cohort in total interviews and won the People’s Choice Award.

2025

First major consulting contract

Our first large engagement: helping an international company explore new product lines.

2026

New engagements

Began working with several new clients across the healthcare space.