No 2 EREN BALI
CARBON HEALTH
THREE-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH: 39,734%
FRIENDS OF EREN BALI talk about a certain kind of glow that lights up his face when he gets into conversations about solving problems. The soft-spoken co-founder and CEO of Carbon Health, this year’s second-fastest-growing company on the Inc. 5000, has what longtime investor and friend Paul Lee describes as “a weird, quiet confidence about him. He has a calm demeanor, but also this deep curiosity.”
Lee, who, like Bali, has a degree in mathematics, recognizes a mathematician’s way of thinking. “Math is not about throwing a bunch of formulas at something. It’s about solving problems in a very thoughtful, logical way,” he says. “And I think that’s the fundamental thing that Eren brings to being a founder: He falls in love with problems and breaks down those problems, and then attacks them with solutions.”
Bali’s college classmate Erbil Karaman saw those tendencies early on, while the two attended the elite Middle East Technical University, in Ankara, Turkey. “In everything he did, he wanted to learn the very deepest levels of it, like what it is and how it’s done, and how to do it the best way,” recalls Karaman. “We would get into these very deep discussions about minute details.” Karaman and Bali are still close, and these days the conversations revolve around not just math or computer concepts, but also chess, parenting, or the various social areas, like health care, that Bali feels passionately are unfair or inadequate. “He can go on forever if you hit on one of his topics,” Karaman says.
Carbon Health, which grew 39,734 percent over the past three years and brought in more than $45 million in revenue in 2020, aims to solve one of the knottiest problems in America today: to fix not some specific aspect of health care, but rather the whole broken system. The spiraling costs that force workers and employers to swallow double-digit annual percentage increases
