Speaker unverified: uncertainty

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…ements that is the actual advisory that sometimes doesn't get as much attention as everyone would like to have and they do their best and they a lot of them do a really nice job. But if you can unlock that, you think about how much of a better outcome that you could drive as a firm if you're not spending and burning all your time, you know, doing these manufacturing elements which are super important. They're like mission critical to the deliverable. But if it just if that just was done for you in a way that didn't limit your ability to go consult on it, it didn't limit your ability to work with your supply side partners, it would be meaningful. And you and you started the company not recently like this is not something where the LLMs were out they were good and like it kind of it all started working out. What was the original product kind of back when you started when we when we first started cuz was it 2016 am I remembering right? Yeah. And we, you know, we really got things going into market, you know, in, you know, 2017, 2018. The the first, you know, when we started the business, I started it with co-founder Rich Parrot and then we got connected to our CTO and and co-founder Shahib Roshan. And we had no product and we were we were two guys that didn't have a tech background. We knew the business deeply. Yeah. And so we went and just met with everybody for a while and just made them write things out on whiteboards of like how do you do it? No, no, like really tell me this part and this and the first version of what we built was a very much a point solution and it was very much a broker side solution only. So it didn't have any collaboration with carrier partners. You just can't build everything to start and so we were like let's just get something out and just get it started. We had to call friends in the business and just say, "Hey, I just need you to do me a favor and try this thing and let us know it's going to be probably pretty terrible to start, but you you understand the premise and like you know that this this can be better and we're like on that on that hunt." And that helped to inform the first versions. And then, you know, this was before we had the ability to leverage things like LLMs to process documents. And so, you had to like really drive it forward through a lot of brute force in the first couple years of getting a a collection of brokers to start using it. And then one of the elements that was a big unlock for us was understanding how we can then start to use that that volume of transaction in a way that we can engage with the supply side and the carrier side. And so for us that was a big part that we did actually right when we pursued our seed round of financing in 2019 that was okay we can now turn on the carrier side we can get them to enable we can drive enough value and then we can actually have them participate in the economics as well. So is there some sort of like the broker sends a link or like the threeflow input form that the carrier then sort of fills out in some way instead of just dumping their data like their raw policy PDF that they might send. Yeah. Kind of it was you know the the first version was nput form that the carrier then sort of fills out in some way instead of just dumping their data like their raw policy PDF that they might send. Yeah. Kind of it was you know the the first version was they were like pulling we were like helping them build out the composition of like what they're delivering and they were actually still emailing it. Okay. Okay. And then they were introducing the document back into our system in the very first version before the carrier. Okay. And so then we realized well if we give if we allow for the delivery of the information to carriers to be organized in the right kind of way. Carriers use thing phrases like in good order like did you get it in good order like inbound? So the data has all been like processed in the right format and stuff. You like have the basic components to underwrite that risk right? You have the census file, you have the claims file, you have the policy documentation. And so that was part of like how do we pull the carrier in and then how do we build a workflow where they can have control over what is being delivered to the broker. So a big part of it was visibility and control initially for the carrier to say hey today you send over a document and you have no idea what the broker is going to then pull and put onto their deliverable to the employer. you now have actually you now can control what they're seeing on screen as part of your offer to that employer. Why is that a big deal? Maybe I'm just maybe I don't know anything about the industry like is that there there's a big deal of this element of nuance between carrier whether it's a service offering or it's a contractual offering is a big part of how do you differentiate if you're one of 15 insurance companies trying to sell into a broker. Okay, you've got things that you believe really matter a lot. And so what you by giving that individual control, you have the opportunity to position that differently in the way that you want it to be positioned for the broker. And then you use that as an opportunity to then go and inform and educate that broker of why that matters and why your employer matters. So, it's a big part of the sales cycle of why that control has an impact for you wanting to do that versus it doesn't really matter. Like, it's going to be the same either way. Oh, okay. That that makes sense. And and one thing I know before you actually started, you took a pretty big vacation sort of with your co-founder and and your wives. Like, what did you kind of do before you officially started the company? And was this like in between all the like the research? You took a break and then you and then you officially started. We did the research after. So Rich and I both worked for insurance company and you know we had been I had been in that role for I think 13 years and Rich I think 11 10 or 11. And so we this was independent decisions. We both independently made decisions to get married. So we got married the same year and then we wanted to take a break and have a beat and like take a breath because this was the first job like out of school. And so we we ended up doing 128 days sort of walkabout style through started in then we wanted to take a break and have a beat and like take a breath because this was the first job like out of school. And so we we ended up doing 128 days sort of walkabout style through started in Scotland, ended in Turkey. And we were able to have fun moments of like connecting up with Rich and his wife Julie to, you know, meet up for a week in Italy and hang out in Italy and then like separate out again and then meet back up in Istanbul and do all sorts of fun stuff like that. It was, you know, one of those moments where there's a lot of reasons that you don't do that trip because you want to jump right into the thing. Uh, but I got to say it's one of those where you reflect back on it in the value that it has for you just as a a person and a human and certainly something to to share and celebrate with your, you know, your wife is is pretty great. And uh we reflect quite fondly about and we wrote a terrible blog while we were and uh oh like a travel blog you wrote and we had I think four readers mostly aunts were the readers. Nice. And there was one my family is German and the heritage goes back to a small little farming town in northwest Germany. Yep. and wrote a blog of us finding finding the family because we had had we had an address and that was it. And we just showed up to the farm and met my basically like sixth cousins, you know, once removed. Yep. And spoke no English whatsoever. I speak no German. How did you tell them like, hey, I'm your sixth cousin once removed. So we had gone to Bremerhavin and Bremerhavin has this amazing immigration museum and so we're actually able to find and track back when our family left. And so there were there was a family where two of the brothers left and the rest of the family stayed. And so like that's where the family tree. So we print we basically printed that off. And so I'm st I'm standing there and I assumed that they I assumed that they would speak English. Okay. And so I was just like hello. And um who's just right looking at me, right? They're looking at me and I'm just I'm just standing there doing nothing helpful. And my wife Jamie, she she like takes a moment. So she puts her hands on my shoulders and she's like suction. And everyone starts everyone nods and then she puts her hands on my shoulders and she's like suction. And then everyone's like ah. And I had like my driver's license. And I like took my driver's license out. And then she smartly ran back to the car and grabbed the family tree that we had printed out and we had shared. So we had sort of figured it we tripped our way into figuring it out. Interesting. But we I we wrote about that day and it was it was pretty it was pretty amazing. That's a pretty that's a pretty cool story. Yeah. I feel like that's what what I hear a lot with those like we went to Europe to find our original family and we just showed up to the farm or the village and like unannounced and it was just a great time because they were like so excited to see us. They are it was so great. We were just cool sharing cake and just sort of looking at pictures of our dog and kind of nodding. And then when we got back to the hotel, we were…

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