YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Schreiber

lines on the record: 59
first: 2020-06-01
most recent: 2020-06-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Being one of the most demanding regulators in the world. So we have to pass master with them. We are reinsured, which means we have extra financial backing by some of the largest financial institutions in the world. So I think that the faith placed in us from a financial perspective is well placed and there's plenty of checks and balances in place to ensure that that's the case. And we go the extra mile in terms of trying to build a business model, a technology stack, a user experience that projects to you the confidence that you'll get paid, you'll get paid fast, you'll get paid hassle free, and so far so good.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have Look at the skyline of Chicago, of New York, of London. It's all insurance companies. But that kind of projects financial prowess. And that is indeed try to attempt to signal to you, hey, we've got the money. But I think most insurance customers aren't worried that their insurance company won't have the wherewithal to pay. They're worried that they won't have the will to pay. That's really what we try to tackle is to say, how do we signal that we're a different kind of insurance company and that we don't make money when denying your claims and that our incentives are aligned with yours? And it's worked. What can I tell you? Insurance sold by lemonade has now become, as I say, the number one voted by consumers. Insurance companies in both renters and homeowners throughout the United States. And I think the trust is well placed. We are regulated. The New York Department of Financial Services prides itself on”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So trust is an interesting thing. It is true that when you see the skyscrapers that our competitors have dotted around whatever city you happen to be in.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, lastly, when you think about how people think of insurance and what they're doing, because right now it is on people's minds is what they're protected against, I think the nervousness of some, I'm thinking of myself if I would use your product or not, but I would be nervous that you would when the going got tough or something happened, then I would be protected, especially in a disastrous event. I guess millennia is banking differently. Millennials are doing things, and that is, I assume, the area, the group of people you're trying to target.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand the challenges that we face. And one or two of them said to me, I fancy your chances more than my own. And indeed, we wouldn't want to change places with them. It's so tough to take over that kind of legacy, that kind of enormous operation and adjust it to a world that has changed so very thoroughly. So if we thought that we had what it takes to do that, we would have established an entirely different company. We actually think it's easier to start from scratch, which is why at Lemonade we built the whole thing from the ground up.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we certainly respect all of them. These are formidable companies that have survived over so many years and grown into massive, massive businesses. They're well-funded. They've got very smart people at the helm. But they do face the classic challenges of an incumbent. They've got systems that were designed in the 80s and have been built up hickledy, pickledy, hodgepodge ever since then, and systems don't talk to one another. They've got executive teams that were groomed for legacy preservation rather than for change. And this is a time for change. They've got tens of thousands of brokers. And how do you manage through that if you want to switch to a digital infrastructure? They've got existing businesses that were architected for an entirely different kind of world. For the 19th century rather than the 21st. So I don't envy any of them. I've had a few CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world say to me, hey, we”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extremely grateful and really lucky to have been able to progress as we have. We went from zero to over $100 million in just three years. We've got three quarters of a million customers who rate us above anybody else in the nation after just three years in market. So momentum is on our side. We're feeling up to this day.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get asked that and I always feel a little bit awkward. There were times when the risks facing lemonade were black and white. They were binary. Would we get a license or would we not? Would consumers want to buy our product or would it not? Would we be able to secure the reinsurance that we needed? Would we be able to raise the money that we needed? Today we don't face one of those black and white binary clear things that keep you up at night. The risks are much more amorphous. They're much less well-defined. And that is more disturbing because it doesn't mean that the risks aren't out there. It just means that it's harder to point a finger at them and saying this is the one thing that keeps me up at night. So I think we faced all of the classic challenges that everybody faces. We've got hugely well-funded, massive behemoth competitors. We are the flea. They are the elephant. There are regulatory risks. There are weather risks. There are financial risks. There are skill risks. But so far, the wind has been in our back and we feel...”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're led by really smart people who see the writing on the wall, want to make change, but are genuinely hamstrung by the organization. It's the classic innovator's dilemma. When you have 80,000 employees and 80 million customers, as some of the large players have, how do you turn that around? And 40,000 brokers. You've got a management team that was groomed for legacy preservation, not for change management. You've got shareholders who just want a 5% coupon every year, their dividend, and don't want you to take risks. You have an existing business that you can't just cannibalize. And I think they face the exact kind of challenges that the innovator's dilemma mapped out and that therefore they will be very few traditional large insurance companies that will really be able to manage this transition.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and the good news is that insurance is not a winner takes all market. Insurance produces companies that do over $100 billion a year and do it year in, year out for decades at a time, and yet they only have 3% market share. So there's room for many winners. I don't think any of the big players are about to go kaput because we've turned up on the scene. That said, you know, it's a bit like Walmart and Amazon 25 years ago Walmart sitting around saying, oh, this new thing Amazon and totally failing to understand that this wasn't just a website in front of a store building on a digital substrate changes everything and the differences as pronounced as they appear in the early days become more and more and more pronounced over time rather than the gap closing. And I think insurance is in for a similar thing. 20 years from now, the big names that you're familiar with will still be around, but I think the shift will be pretty stark.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next few years, we hope to flesh that out and bring the same immediacy, simplicity and social impact dimensions to other areas of insurance. Absolutely.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we are pretty expansive kind of horizons, if you like, both in terms of geography. The US is huge, but we're beginning to launch in Europe. We've launched in Germany. We're launching in another country this week. We'll be launching in another one before the year is out at least. So definitely see ourselves expanding geographically. And at the same time, product lines. We have these amazing customers today who enjoy lemonade and keep asking us for new products, but we're a small, young company, and we'll expand as quickly as we can. So we have announced pet insurance. And rather than going into commercial kind of B2B insurance, I think we will stay in the consumer facing arena, but we want to cater to all the insurance needs of our customers. And today we don't. We offer them homeowners, renters, condos, pet. We'll launch another major category later this year, but there are still other categories where they turn to us, we have to disappoint them. And over the course,”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, an insurance brokers actually, when you look at them as a cohort, they're aging. Very few young people are going into this sector. So it's a business that's dying a natural death. And there will always be some need for brokers and certainly people who want a human interaction to buy renters insurance can do that. But it's about consumer choice and giving them options that they will have and if they want to be self-served and pocket the change or give it to charity so much the better We're not seeing though any kind of cutback in terms of our people we're hiring even in this downturn we've been growing at several hundred percent year on year so even if there's a ding to those numbers we still see an upward and to the right kind of trajectory so”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that brokers in so many places are finding that technology can do a job better, quicker, cheaper for many things. If it's a relatively simple product, whether you're a travel agent or other kinds of brokers, we've seen the same. And in insurance is kind of happening fairly naturally because”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are Texas and California? We have zero employees in Texas. We have zero employees in California. So the idea that you can run an insurance company in that way is really pretty novel. We just launched in Europe last year in Germany, first country that we launched in Europe. We have zero employees in Germany as well. So it really is a new day in that regard.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“right and even amongst the top five who are the most efficient some of them have 140 to 1 ratio whereas we have 2500 to one ratio so you're talking about something like 10 or 20 times the efficiency without disappointing customers just by using technology so that each one of our employees kind of has an exoskeleton if you like an iron man suit almost that allows them to do so much more than could otherwise be done So we do pride ourselves on responding to customers super fast, doing it empathically, having humans when humans are needed, but at the same time human interactions are so often characterized by faxes and by hold on. And let me get back to you and all that kind of stuff. And if you can take that out of the system, you slash costs, you delight consumers, and you generate efficiency that's never been seen before. In the United States, unsurprisingly, two largest markets”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, so 2500 users, you're exactly right. So we did a bit of a mapping just to give you kind of a benchmark here. We looked at the largest insurance companies in the nation, and they are several orders of magnitude bigger than us.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the other event you have, I assume, especially in this coronavirus crisis, and there's been a lot of reports about the huge people cannot underwrite right now. It's really hard. Obviously, they're doing payouts. But there's a lot of humans involved in it. And you have, I think, the figure was, and I'm looking at this, may I not be correct, is that you sort of don't have that problem in terms of having to underwrite because you do everything online. You have this lean operation powered by self-service and artificial intelligence. And do you have a 2,500 policy employee ratio? Is that correct? That's enormous. So each person is responsible for 2,500 policies.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is just mind-blowing and the level of differentiation that you can bring from what traditional carriers can do to what you can do when you build a whole thing from scratch is really, really exciting.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For insurance companies, where we thought that that's all great and all of that needs to be done, but I think there's a real glass ceiling in how innovative, how much you can change if you're just touching one element here. And to us, it was tempting to say, let's start from scratch. Let's go and build an insurance company. Not a single line of code of lemonade's code comes from traditional vendors, not a single license does. We went to New York and we spoke to the regulators and we stood up an insurance company, which has never almost never been done in the sector before. And what we're finding is that when you do that, the opportunities for innovation within an insurance company, in a multi-departmental way, in a way that is borrows from customer interaction to underwriting, to claims management to data management, the symbiosis of all of these systems coming together in a unified AI-driven system.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some cases, 200 years ago, in some cases 300 years ago, why are these still the brands that everybody knows? And then you say, well, it's huge, it's unchanged, but hey, if it's working, don't fix it. But it's actually broken because you start looking at customer satisfaction levels, you look at the level of trust and distrust, it ranks lower than secondhand car salespeople. That was hugely tempting. It was tempting tasks. It was tempting to investors. And I think it's been tempting to many other innovation companies as well. So there has been an influx. What we have done, and Metromile you mentioned, are similar in this regard, but there's really just a very few, less than a handful of companies doing this, is to try and innovate the whole stack. So a lot of companies are saying, okay, I'm going to create a shopping comparison site, or I'm going to create tools for brokers, or I'm going to create databases or fraud detection.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is. It's such a huge area of the economy that was kind of left untouched for the longest time. It was striking to us when we started this back in 2015. It wasn't, as you described. Nobody had ever heard of insurance and technology. The term now coined in Shortech didn't exist. And when we stumbled upon this industry, our kind of eyes lit up because we found a sector that is so huge, whether you look at it in terms of household penetration, it's 100%, or in terms of dollars, it's trillions, or in terms of its impact, which is even greater than that. No doctor will operate without insurance. No plane will take off without insurance. It's really the fabric of society depends on it. So you find a sector as big as that, but perceived as gray. And then you say, wow, why is nobody touched this? Why are the companies that dominated 100 years ago?”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chamed the game in the outset so that our hands are tied and therefore the goodness flows from the very business architecture rather than because we're better people than anybody else. We're not.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“certainly disincentivizes it you know we think about it as something called the Ulysses contract there's it's a term in game theory but the legend of Ulysses is that he lived in a time where there was this island in the Mediterranean with sirens this womanoid monsters who would devour anybody who came close and sailors all knew that the danger lurked but when they heard the song of the sirens they were tented and they believed in their future self they thought I will have the discipline to stop just before I get to the point of no return and one by one they paid with that hubris for that hubris with their life and Ulysses was the only person to hear the song of the sirens because he tied his hands to the mast of the ship and therefore he couldn't change course and we're trying to take a page out of that to say look we know that we're our moral fiber is no superior to anybody else's if our hands aren't tied to the mast of the ship we'll want to reach into the cookie jar just like the other people do had we”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we did was we created a business model where my temptation is besides the point. Our give back is algorithmic. It's built into our business model. It's communicated widely. It's an expectation our customers have. And therefore, I've put the temptation beyond my reach by building it into the very business model. And I'm hoping that as we scale, that will survive.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thoughtful early on about incentives and a lot of the examples that you say yeah you get big and then you've got temptation we think that the problem is the game it's not the players There's nothing wrong with other insurance people. They're all wonderful people. But if you put money on their position whereby I could make more money by denying your claim, I'd be tempted. And now after 10, 15 years of serious social sciences in this area, we have a pretty good grasp of the damage that conflicted conflicts of interest generate and how long we can really withstand them and what lies we tell ourselves in order to work around them.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are you to give away your shareholder value? At Lemonade, we've been trying to innovate around this in a different way. We don't begrudge the charities the money that we give them because we think that ultimately it doesn't come at the cost of shareholder value, it maximizes shareholder value. So we've really tried to create a model whereby, yes, charities are part of it, we take policies on gun control and climate and COVID and everything else. But we don't for a second apologize for it. We think that we're doing that to the betterment of shareholder value. We are profit maximizing entity. At the same time, we were founded as what's called a public benefit corporation, which is new kind of legal entity entitled to take into account the greater good without having to account for its shareholders. So we created a legal infrastructure that allows us to do it. Then we created a business model that rewards our shareholders for doing it. And I'll add one more thing. We were very...”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're fumbling our way towards that, yes. I think that consumers care about these things. Anybody who listens to your show knows how much you take Facebook to task for the ills that they do. And that's damaging to their brand. And at some point, that damage becomes expensive enough that people start changing their ways. I think that consumers today care about these things. I think the arc of history is against the kinds of ills that you're talking about. And I think this is profoundly good. I think we had a really interesting time in the following sense. Up until now, anybody who tried to do good or give charity or what have you framed that as sacrificing shareholder value in order to do good. And they felt this immense tension between the two. And if you feel that that's the case, then properly there should be a real glass ceiling on how much you give back because you're being generous with other people's mind.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Organization trying to do the right thing, but it's not a sacrifice in order to do the right thing. We believe that ultimately you create shareholder value by creating sustainable long-term brands that are servicing their customers in all the multidimensional needs that they might have.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we don't think of what we're doing as being do gooders. We think of it as enlightened self-interest. We think that having changing a relationship that today is bilateral. It's the two of us and it's conflicted if we can introduce nonprofits into the room as part of our give back program, for example, then it becomes a trilateral relationship. It changes the nature of the game. It keeps us from being tempted because we're just humans and we'd be tempted if we could. It keeps you from being tempted for the same reason and it changes the whole dynamic. And we see that. You know, if you look at the popular review sites in the United States today, clear assurances perhaps the most popular, but there are many where consumers rate insurance companies. At the end of 2019, lemonade was separately for homeowners and renters insurance was the most upvoted insurance company in America after three years in market. So I think that, yes, it is our...”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we all like this. I think everybody wants to associate with a brand with whom they have aligned values given the choice. And yes, younger consumers seem to have put more of a premium on this. There's more distrust amongst young. How do you signal to your consumers that you're aligned with them and that you won't do anything to screw them over”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in terms of getting this idea so, you know, this is, I don't mean to call you a do-gooder, but it's sort of a do-good mentality of insurance that we're not going to, you're trying to appeal to millennials because they like this. Who are you trying to appeal to in this regard?”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“policy all criminal activity is excluded so drugs and things like that anything that's criminally obtained but beyond that legitimate property will ensure everything absolutely”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, we've put a cap. We said we will not. If you have more than $2,500 worth of firearms, go to one of our competitors. We're not going to offer insurance for that. If you have any assault rifles, we will not protect them at all. And if you want to be protected against the liability, if you've misused your gun and you're being sued and you want the insurance company to pay for your defense, we will do that on condition that the gun was securely stored and responsibly used”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massacone 2017, we instituted a policy that won't ensure automatic weapons, assault rifles. We put a limit on how many guns we'd ensure at all and we conditioned that insurance on them being securely stored and responsibly used. And again, I'm not aware of any other insurance company in the nation that does that. Homeowners insurance includes both damage done to your gun and because it includes liability insurance, damage done by your gun. And when insurance companies just stand by and don't take proactive steps there, I think it's a fairly near-term short-term kind of perspective rather than building the long-term trust and goodwill. You pay it forward and it comes.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think those go hand in hand. This distrust of insurance that we spoke about earlier is pervasive. And I think insurance companies who invest in the very ills that they're trying to protect don't signal the kind of thing that engenders the kind of trust that we're seeking to get. To my mind, it goes deeper. I think that businesses at large who focus very narrowly on profit maximization won't achieve even that. And ultimately they tarnish their brands in a world of increasing abundance. People are climbing up the Maslow scale. All of our customers already have a house, they have a roof over their head. And to the extent that we can alter to other needs of theirs further up, the Maslow scale, if you like, so much the better and we get rewarded for that. So I think our customers do care. We've taken positions on climate change after the Las Vegas.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are being invested in coal and polluting industries. And we found that just striking that I would take your dollars to protect you from those climate change events, from those health disasters that come from pollution, and use it to invest in the very things that are causing the wrongs that we're trying to protect you from. So lemonade was the first and to my knowledge is still the only US insurer that foreswore investment in any of the polluting industries. So we're trying both at a policy level to do our bit to try and mitigate those risks and then use technology at a much more proximate way to help address them as well.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Machine vision to analyze those imaging and to detect early on when fires are beginning to spread. So we our systems get notified throughout the US of all fires, big and small, oftentimes before they make it to the news cycle. And it will take immediate response. And we do this for other natural disasters as well. It can send warnings to our customers, a bunch of solutions and policies that it can implement instantaneously without human intervention, again, using what technology is available in order to try and mitigate the risk of those kind of disasters. But we went one step further than that. One of the striking things about insurance in the US, and Europe is different in this regard, is that, believe it or not, US insurance companies are one of the biggest investors in polluting industries. There's about half a trillion dollars of premiums money that you give to your life insurance company, your health insurance company, your home insurance companies.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“our business and that is going to run a bunch of projects to try and see how we can use our technologists and our product design people to try and create solutions that would help people in this hour of need so even though our business isn't in the first circle here we're trying to see what we can do then there are places that we are in the first circle so you're absolutely right fires affect our business we had customers last year who died in in the fires in california so this is something that's near and dear to our heart and pretty close to us And our response here is, again, kind of twofold. One is technological. So early on, we implemented, we have an internal bot called Cooper, who manages a lot of our business on the inside. We kind of think of Cooper as our Javis, if you like. And Cooper actually gets a direct feed from NASA satellites with spectrometer imaging overflying the USA twice a day. And it analyzes that imaging to users.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spoke about our charitable give back, and for us, coronavirus doesn't affect our business directly in the way it would impact insurance companies who are in the health business or life business or business interruption or event cancellation. Whoever's insuring the Olympics is having a bad week. So we're spared from that vantage point. But we really do want to do our bit to help and to try and resolve. And in fact, because we have this social give back dimension to our business, one of the things that we did this week is reached out to our customers and offered them to designate as part of their charitable give back for this year to generate COVID responses as a charitable donation. And about 40,000 of our customers did that. So a lot of the money this year from premiums will be going to COVID response. We also created a few weeks ago something called the Lemonade Foundation, which is a nonprofit arm of”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So we've been at a first kind of level of proximity. We've been somewhat insulated. Obviously, as people, as teams, we're very much at the heart of this. New York City is our headquarters, but we have four locations around the world, and everybody's been working from home for some time now. And let's talk a little bit about Corona, and then I'll talk about, as you say, wildfires and others, which are closer to home for us.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because they were built during the Industrial Revolution and you wouldn't build a company like that today. You wouldn't use a company built on human substrate to do a job that requires really machine learning. And where had the advantage of being founded this century and being built from scratch on a digital substrate and it just produces profound advantages that will be manifest, I think, ever more powerfully with every passing cycle.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's part of what Lemonade's thesis is. You're absolutely right about the money bowl scenario, that data is displacing expertise, that at some point people think that they can tell wines or batters or other things. But frankly, with enough data, we're seeing that the world writ large, and this is true in insurance as well, that the big data is really displacing that kind of expertise. And I think one of the big challenges for insurance has been that for 300 years since the scientific revolution, insurance companies were the bastions of the world's data. They were home to the best statisticians. But 20 years ago, they ceded that to Silicon Valley, and they've lost supremacy in the most important component of an insurance company, which is data and the ability to extrapolate from it.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're right, and we do that as needed, but frankly, oftentimes it isn't. So we've been training again AI models. We use machine vision to get satellite imagery and get a lot of data that way. We use data sets in order to not trouble you and not come to your house as much as possible. And overwhelmingly, we really can do that. So we don't even need to ask you questions. Satellite imagery and machine learning will tell us if you've got a swimming pool, what kind of tars you have on your roof, all that kind of good stuff. And we collect stunning amounts of data for the pure purpose of assessing the risk and giving you the best coverage that you want. And a lot of the ways that things were done traditionally, frankly, are much more labor intensive, but generate about a tenth or sometimes a hundredth of the data that digital interactions can generate. So it produces less risk.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so lemonade is not for everybody, but it is for almost everybody. So there are some insurance companies that specialize in high net worth individuals. And if you've got a special If you've got a special collection”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But frankly, making a claim is the same. So 97% of the time our customers opt for the bot to make a claim. And the bot will ask them all the same questions that a human would, it's instantaneous, it's responsive. It will ask them for receipts, ask them for police reports, ask them for whatever is necessary. They'll take photos with their smartphone. And in about a third of cases, the bot will make the full, manage the full process right through to paying the claim. We actually hold the world record for paying a claim because we pay claims every day of the week in three seconds from when somebody presses submit. So it's just transformative. It slashes costs and it delights consumers. And if you look on Twitter or elsewhere, you'll see that the level of customer satisfaction that this engenders is really outstanding.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So insurance remarkably has had very little innovation. It's 11% of GDP. It's absolutely huge. And 12 of the Fortune 100 companies are insurance companies by their average age is 125. So this is really an industry that is dominated by legacy players and by broker-based distribution. If you buy homeowners insurance in America, 95 times out of 100 you're dealing with a broker. But it's really not necessary for the overwhelming majority of our needs. We can do this in our pajamas from home. We can do it while we're waiting for the latter to be made after we place an order at Starbucks or during a commercial break on TV. And in fact, the median time to get a policy on lemonade is 90 seconds. So it really is that simple, that playful. And getting the policy is just the beginning. And you do that only through chatting to a bot. There's no other way to buy insurance and lemonade.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last year was about 20 times higher than the Fortune 500s. And it went to a bunch of worthy causes. We saw whether it's meals and wheels or UNICEF, charity water. We did five water projects in Africa over the course of the last year, vaccines with the Red Cross. We financed a thousand girls and women being taught to code in Afghanistan through Code to Inspire. So loads of different charities that our community care about get funded through this goodwill and good luck of our members.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there's a mix. If you pay $1,000 in premiums, your charity, it's not you, but your charity will get up to $400 back. So what we do is every person who buys lemonade gets to choose a charitable organization they care about. And that kind of behind the scenes creates a community of sorts, a cohort who are unified by a common cause. And once a year mid-year, on the 1st of July, we look at what's called the loss ratio, how many losses as a percentage of the premiums did that cohort have? And if it was 40% or lower, all the dollars that would make it up to 40% are given to that communal cause. So some of the money is needed in order to pay other claims to pay for reinsurance, et cetera. But think about it, up to 40%. And actually last year we've been doing this now for three years. We've had sizable givebacks. In fact, our charitable giving as a percentage of revenue.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're one of the top rated insurance companies, and that's well deserved. But your experience and your perspective is not shared by most Americans or in fact by most of humanity for hundreds of years. But think about if you're coming to make an insurance claim and you don't trust your insurance company But you know that embellishing your claim isn't going to hurt this insurance company that you don't trust and don't care about. It's going to hurt a charitable organization you do. Your kids PTA, your local church, the soup kitchen you volunteered on Sundays, that flips a switch in our mind and suddenly we say, one second, I'm not going to be so quick to swindle them and it brings honest people back to the honest behavior that characterizes the rest of their life.”
2020-06-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Daniel Schreiber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT