YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Fitzgerald

lines on the record: 90
first: 2021-05-24
most recent: 2021-05-24
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

“When I was a senior in high school, my parents offered me $300, and the terms of that deal were for me to do something nice for myself instead of going to my senior prom, because they just assumed I wasn't going to go, their reasoning being, well, honey, we just thought you wouldn't be able to get a date. Mom and dad, if you ever end up listening to this, I love you. But what the f?”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is always the tough question. I think Balance is always more toward luck, to be honest with you, because I've seen a lot of people who just work so, so, so hard. And, you know, it's the wrong idea or right idea, wrong time, or you make a couple bad decisions early on. A few things don't break your way. So for me, it's all around luck and timing. Hard work is table stakes, right? And often if you get really, really lucky, you probably don't need to be as diligent and hardworking, but it's catching breaks and being in the right place, right time, right idea.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be surprised that I would see myself where I am right now, which is an entrepreneur, a founder, and CEO of a company that I built from scratch with my co-founder and our early employees that's now almost 600 employees is a leader in a massive industry and is thinking about going public, I would be very surprised, even as ambitious and hardworking as I was, you know, in my late 20s, the outcome of this journey so far would have been a total surprise to me.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are heading towards profitability and we are thinking about what's next for us on the capital markets horizon and maybe going public sooner rather than later.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a whole different ballgame. We're also subject to 50 state regulations on the distribution and agency side, but everything that we've built, if you think about the capabilities, right, how to acquire customers, how to underwrite customers, how to think about the risk of the customers across the suppliers on our marketplace, how to manage those customers over their lifetime, because those customers are our customers, right? The end policy right now might be with progressive or met life or prudential, but that customer is with us and is our customer. So we've built the technology to track them, manage their policies over their lifetime. So we've actually built out every single layer that we would need to also be an insurance company, except for the balance sheet to take on the risk.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually not that complicated compared to what we've already built. We basically have built everything that we would need but for the balance sheet to actually take on the risk and reserve cash for claims.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, yep. We look at our journey similar to Amazon or Netflix, which started in the third-party world, consumer goods in the case of Amazon, content in the case of Netflix, and they eventually moved from third-party to first party, where they were actually manufacturing the thing that they were providing alongside the third-party products that they were offering. That is very much a road that we think about for the future for us”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why, you know, we moved away from the analogy to kayaker expedia because this is such a high consideration, high stakes decision that is not like buying flights.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flavors of life insurance, right? How do you choose between prudential and Lincoln financial and MetLife, right? Are there differences among those versus Delta United American, like airlines? You know that they're basically offering the same product, right? So in every single dimension you can think of, insurance is different than buying a flight. And it's also high stakes, right? If you get life insurance wrong, that's a pretty high stakes decision, right? Your family is now faced with the worst case scenario of you, the breadwinner in your household dies prematurely, and it turns out you didn't buy the right life insurance or you didn't buy enough life insurance and you got it wrong. And boy, did you get the worst possible decision wrong, right? Same thing homeowner's insurance, right? House floods, whoops, you didn't know that home insurance didn't cover floods, right?”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not really, because we believe that it oversimplifies what it is that we actually do. And buying a flight is really apples and oranges with buying insurance in that buying a flight is a high frequency purchase, meaning that you'll do it probably, at least in normal times, not pandemic times, several times a year. It's low stakes in terms of if you get it wrong, no big deal, right? If you end up paying a little bit more than you should have, no big deal, right? And it's something that you know how to do because you do it so often. Buying insurance, it's the exact opposite on every dimension. You don't do it that often. Life insurance, you may be buy at most two to three times over your life. It's not straightforward on how to buy and make that person decision. Are you optimizing for price? How does price work? How does price work across the different”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is absolutely that segment. It is older millennials. So our average customer is thirty six years old. And in that home buying, having children married for a few years stage of their life. I think if you look at all the demographic trends in the US market, millennials would be 75% of the workforce, I think by 2030. So that's where most of the growth in terms of consumer purchasing power and just overall households are going to be millennial. And we say millennial. You know, the oldest millennials are now basically turning 40. So that's who our customer is.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of your new job offer compared to your job that you're leaving. So what we have done is figured out what those life events and those triggers are, right, and build kind of an ecosystem of content and advice around that to link that life event with the insurance purchase and get them comfortable with what insurance they need, how much they need, and then to work with us to get it.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a big part of what we do is educate and link the insurance decision to life events, which is really what it's about, right? So again, life insurance or disability insurance or homeowner's insurance isn't an impulse purchase. It's usually triggered by something happening in your life, right? The biggest trigger for life insurance is having a child. Specifically, what we have found in our consumer research, it's having child number two, because when people have their first child, they're so overwhelmed with now they're a parent, right? And getting through that initial period with child number one, they actually don't get around the life insurance. If and when they have child number two or if and when child number one is old enough that they start to think about life insurance. For homeowners insurance, it's typically the act of buying a new home. And for disability insurance, it's typically switching jobs. And now you're looking at your benefit.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And what I would say is that there's not been any material bankruptcy of any top-rated life insurance company in, I don't know, a generation. And there are state guarantee firms that even if a life insurance company were to go out of business, they are required to pay into these state guarantee funds to make sure that any claims would be covered.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have much healthier profit margins on life insurance than they do for property casualty insurance, where the claims are far more frequent.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Life insurance. So the insurance industry is split between property and cashy, right? So think home auto commercial and then life accident and health. About $1.2 trillion of premium is written every year in the US on insurance. And it's roughly 50-50. So half is on life accident and health. So call it 600, 500 to 600 billion on life accident and health.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took several years before we decided to expand into new products. So when we launched, we had disability insurance, we had life insurance, we had pet insurance, and we had one kind of offering for renters insurance, right? When we launched Life insurance is where we started to see signals of product market fit. We started to see more consumer traffic to life insurance. We started to see more revenues generated through the product experience for life insurance. So we said, you know what? This is where we're seeing product market fit. Let's focus basically everything we've got on life insurance.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want it to be the go to marketplace and advisor on a digital basis for all financial protection. So it was building trust. It was building the marketplace experience. It was building the brand awareness out there to get consumers to come to us instead of trying to find a brick and mortar ag”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were still so small that, and it's such a big market that we weren't overly focused on that on the competitive side. I think I heard from another founder, maybe some TechCrunch article, that most startups don't die by homicide. They die from natural causes. So we were focused on making sure that we were executing against our own vision, our own strategy, and building the proof points to eventually raise even more capital, right? Because this is an industry where a trillion dollars is spent every year. So we knew that $5 million wasn't going to get us to where we wanted to go to in terms of the vision.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We found an investor. He operated a small early stage fund out of LA and he got the thesis, he understood the space, he saw the opportunity. He's an investor who really likes big, messy, old-fashioned industries and insurance checks all those boxes. So he got the vision, he got us, and we got lucky. That was the only term sheet that we got, the only yes that we got from the VCs that we pitched that round. And he's still on our board to this day.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The market. I don't know if this insurance is a big enough opportunity. This is great. It's still not enough traction that we'd like to see.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a little over a year. I remember going into this next round of fundraising, right? Far more confident than our initial seed round when we just had a very bare bones prototype and an idea in a pitch deck because we now had a team. We now have a functioning online website. We had New York Times coverage. We have revenues. I can point to customers. We didn't have a lot of revenues. We didn't have a lot of customers, but we had some, right? And I went into it thinking, great, we have proven everything that people questioned about us over a year ago, right? And so this should be a more straightforward exercise. That was my mindset going into it. It was not enough for most investors. I think they still said, I don't understand.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we closed that $735,000 round in November of twenty thirteen. And we started raising a series A rent of capital in January 2015. So we were able to stretch it a little over a year.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We generated a decent amount of revenue. Honestly, I think it was a lot of people who were just in browsing mode. So we also weren't necessarily focused on converting those shoppers. We were just so overwhelmed by the deluge of shoppers and we just wanted to get quotes out so we didn't disappoint the readers who found us in the New York Times. So we just were emailing out these PowerPoint quote presentations as fast as we could get them out. It was basically an Get to everybody who requested quotes from us.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into the system to get to generate quotes, then we put those quotes into a custom PowerPoint presentation for the quote requester.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To buy insurance to get disability insurance quotes, yes. We had a rudimentary CRM and we saw the request just start to fill up.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. Francois, I think, tweeted at the reporter who was writing a column, I think he was talking on Twitter about writing a column about disability insurance. And I think the story as Francois tweeted at him, he replied, was interested to learn more because who'd ever heard of a tech company focused on disability insurance for consumers? And it all snowballed from there. He tested the product out, got quotes, and we got featured and that was our big break. The article went live and we had at the time a tracker that showed how many visits were on the website. So I think we literally went from zero to thousands within an hour of the article hitting the New York Times website. And normally that looked like 10 people.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't. We operated on the first. Principles and the belief that this was long term going to pay off, but that short term there was no valid way to measure it, that this was a long-term bet.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, nobody's reading the content. I think it was just also new for all of us, and we were just operating this fog of war under a belief that at some point people would be visiting this site and would be reading it.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's one of the most expensive ad words that you can. Purchase on Google, the word insurance and insurance related terms can go upwards of $40,000, $50, $60 a click. For a click, a click. And on the organic side, right, you've got all the big insurance companies, and we all know them because they spend billions of dollars on advertising a year. And you have a lot of other sites that are vying for organic real estate. So it took us our content SEO strategy probably took a good two to three years to really start to see results in terms of our traffic and in terms of business results.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go to one of the flight aggregators, you look at prices to go from A to B, and you pick the cheapest one, right? People don't know how to buy insurance. People don't know how to shop for insurance. People have no idea what are the different types of life insurance, for example, and what's right for them. So we knew that great content and content that doesn't read like it's written by underwriters was going to be a big part of our success.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, because insurance, as you probably know, it's a very considered purchase, right? It's not an impulse by you don't wake up one morning saying, great, today I'm going to get life insurance and I know exactly what I want, how much I want, and where to go. It's a pretty long decision journey, lots of research involved because nobody's an expert on insurance, right? Even very financially savvy consumers don't know a lot about insurance. So we knew that a key part of our value proposition and a key part to our success was making sure that we had the right content and the right tools along every step of that journey, right? So for most consumer purchases, it's not a multi-touch journey, right? You want to buy a pair of shoes, like you go, you go to the place where you buy shoes and you pick a pair that you like. If you want to buy flights, you know how to do that because you do it all the time, right? You go to expedia.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's called FinCon F-I-N-C-O-N, right? So financial blogging conference, I think, is what it stands for. We wanted to be clever and eye-catching. So we did a play on fin and shark fin. So dressed up in shark costumes. We had cupcakes at the booth with like shark fins in them. It was kind of dumb. But, you know, you need a gimmick to stand out. We went to FinCon and that was a big unlock for us. And where we got a lot of our initial blogging relationships and initial, you know, earned traffic and earned media coverage for the company.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few different ways. So we did not have enough money to do any sort of paid marketing or advertising because you can quickly spend upwards of $735,000 on digital marketing if you don't know what you're doing and you're not careful. What we did in those early days was build relationships with personal finance bloggers to try to get them involved, where the product to get them to write about us on their site and to get them to refer their audience and their readers to us as the recommended place to get insurance. There is a big conference that happens every year called FinCon where all the personal finance bloggers get together. And so we went to FinCon, put up a booth, had a few gimmicks.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are tough. They don't work, right? Or very common words like you can't name your company tree because if you Google tree, you know, odds are your little startups not going to come up. So after getting pretty smart about that, we're like, oh, Noah Al is absolutely not going to work because nine times out of 10, people aren't going to get it. They're not going to be able to spell it. So we went back to the drawing board and ultimately landed on policy genius”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why? After pitching Noah et al. and getting a bunch of quizzical looks and then people saying, what does that mean? How do you spell it? Know it all. We realized, oh boy, this is not going to work. And I quickly did some research on how to name your company and what are the tests that you should subject your potential business name to. And there are some pretty straightforward heuristics like if you see it, can you say it? If you hear it, can you spell it right? Because when you hear it, like on a radio ad or TV, you need to be able to go directly to Google and type it in, right? So puns plays on words, completely random made up words.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the life and disability insurers were mostly like fine, you know, I don't care how you guys get your customers. Just get some customers and write some business. On the pet insurance side, that was more establishing direct partnerships with the pet insurance companies. We then had to get access to their rate filings for their products. And then I think, yeah, Francois in Microsoft Excel and a spreadsheet built the first comparative rater and pricing engine for pet insurance, working through all the data and the pet filings that we got from the pet insurance companies.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we decided to launch with disability insurance life insurance and pet insurance. And at the last minute, we were also able to put a renter's insurance offering on there. So we launched with Life Disability Renters and PET.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thankfully, they were pretty well behaved, and we manage expectations about updates. But yeah, we raised, so we fell short of our million dollar target. We raised $735,000. And we said, you know what? That's enough. Let's see how far we can stretch this.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, we said, you know what? If these early stage venture capital firms don't believe in us, let's talk to people who do believe in us. And so we ended up raising a purely angel investor round from friends, family, and some McKinsey partners.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was round the clock, so we would man the website, man the phones, and then try to pitch in the late afternoons, evenings. We had a few people working with us as independent contractors that we were paying for while we were trying to figure out the funding situation.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. If we split up, the business could split if one of us is problematic, if we're still together, but the investors want to fire one of us, that's harder because we're in a personal relationship. So I get it. It's a very complicated dynamics, especially in the first few years of a company, which are so basically one or zero, right? In terms of life or death of the business.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly thought they're all wrong. They don't get it. But, you know, in your darker moments, we would think God, are we missing something? Is this a sign from the world that this is not the right thing to work on? Because the other piece of feedback that we got, so again, people didn't understand the market or the opportunity insurance. And two, they looked at two McKinsey people and said, well, what do McKinsey people know how to do? Neither of you is technical, neither of you is a software engineer. You're proposing that you're going to build a tech company. You've got zero experience doing that. And early stage investors bet on the team and they really didn't have a lot of confidence in us as the founding team of the team.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, totally. Yeah. And, you know, you're talking to two insecure overachievers and to get door after door shut in your face. It was discouraging, especially when you have been reading TechCrunch, right, which is the highlight reels. So you don't see the failure stories. You see the success stories in TechCrunch. And so we were looking at each other going, God, what are we doing wrong that everybody else seems to be doing right?”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outfit as an investor, you've got to remove yourself from what you use day to day as a 25 year old in New York City to think about the broader market opportunity. And at one point, I got so frustrated with this question from a, you know, probably 26-year-old venture associate who said, I don't have life insurance. Is this a big enough need? And I think I snapped back, well, you also probably don't use tampons either, and that's a big market.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that was kind of it. And so we were pitching the associates at venture firms are the ones who take these initial meetings, right? Your average associate or junior partner is like 25 or 26, right? And we would often get asked, is insurance a big enough market? I don't have life insurance. Why does anybody care? I can't tell you how many times I heard that from a 25 year old venture associate. Say, I don't have life insurance. Is this even a market need, right? Or I don't have homeowners' insurance or, you know, I don't have disability insurance”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But nobody did startups in insurance. When we were pitching, There were zenits, which was on the employer benefit side. There was, I believe, Oscar was then maybe a year after us.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think one of the early folks that we pitched was like, guys, you gotta drop the McKinsey stuff and you have to tell a story, right? You're not going to have a lot of time to really capture the attention and excitement of a potential early stage investor. So, you know, ditch the footnotes, ditch the 30-page back pocket appendix and focus on a really compelling story. And that was great feedback. So we went back to the drawing board, redid our whole pitch, and still got nowhere. Still got a bunch of no's.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knows we pitched every early stage venture capital firm in New York and got all nose. I think some of the feedback early on was actually helpful. I think our initial pitch was far too McKinsey in that it was heavy on data, heavy on research. I think our pitch deck might have been the only pitch deck in the history of pitch decks to have footnotes on every page about where the data came from, as well as a 30-page backup appendix in case you wanted to know more about the data.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did yeah, we knew we needed to build a team to build this platform and to work with us to build and launch this business. So neither we did not have between the two of us enough liquid cash to pay for a head of software engineering to pay for a head of product design. So we said, great, we've read a dozen TechCrunch articles about companies raising big C in Series A rounds. How hard could it be?”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT