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

“It was through a couple areas. One is once we got the first few visitors to our website, right? And we got them far enough down the funnel, but they ultimately didn't buy disability insurance. We reached out to them to say, hey, could we interview to understand how you found us, first of all? Why are in the market for disability insurance and why you ultimately didn't buy through us, right? You read content, you got quotes, but you ultimately didn't buy. And we'd love to understand why.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God, maybe. Certainly, certainly no more than 20 to 50 people in those first six months. I'd never sold anything before. And we often talk about sales. Sales is the hardest job in business school, for example. And Francois went to business school. They don't teach you sales. So this was a crash course in sales and customer acquisition. And so, you know, those first couple dozen buyers was absolutely thrilling. It was a real dopamine rush.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very slowly. So before we raised any capital, we were funding this with our own money. And so it was small amounts spent on Google advertising, stupidly spending money on Facebook because neither of us knew how to do any of this, right? So Francois had some marketing background, like maybe six months more than I did. So we said, okay, you're going to be in charge of marketing. I'll do whatever else. And so just trying to figure out how to drive online traffic basically via Google and Facebook in those very, very early days.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't get it they just looked at us like we were going to be just another you know insurance agency you know located in New York City they kind of didn't care how we got our customers and so when we tried to explain no this is the model this is different I think for the most part we were met with blank starers and saying okay I don't care how you guys get the business but to keep these appointments you have to write business so they didn't care how we did it”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were working with a few disability insurance companies, and we were, yes, appointed to be an independent agent with them.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, it was, we had our last engagement at McKinsey was with the big disability insurance company. So I think we suffered from a bit of recency bias. And we said, let's try it out on disability insurance first. We knew we didn't want to do auto insurance because auto is just really competitive to do lots of agents going after that. So we said, let's try disability. We created a rudimentary website, a rudimentary back-end experience, and started messing around with online advertising on Google, on social media to see what it would take to get people to, you know, into the top of the funnel and pull them through to the funnel to be disability insurance buyers.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of people think confuse it with SSDI, right? So something that the government gives you after you're disabled. And then I think it's terribly named because when you think of disability, you think of something like truly debilitating, right? And in fact, most disability is like a back injury or Crohn's disease is a big one, right? Where you can't work full time, but you're not completely debilitated from the condition. So I think that's a misconception as well.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disability insurance is income protection insurance. So if you were to get sick or suffer an injury and couldn't work, it replaces your paycheck for a defined amount of time. So, probably the most important type of insurance for working individuals to have. Most people are dramatically underinsured here, right?”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was one the market and consumer research that we did. The more we did. In terms of understanding the consumer problem, the market size, the competitive landscape, I think the more comfortable we got that there was a big opportunity there, right? That nobody else was paying attention to. That was one. And two, it was, it all boils down to timing, right? So at the time, it was, yeah, 35. You know, I didn't have kids, didn't have a mortgage, had some savings from my time at McKinsey and said, you know what? It's now or never. From that perspective, I thought, why not? And just said, okay, let's do it.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see, we read books like The Lean Startup, or at least I did because I've. Had no idea what I was getting into. Spoke to other founders Not from an insurance perspective, but hey, what does it look like during the first year or two of starting a company? And then building out that first prototype, which was basically a landing page, some educational content. We started with disability insurance because we were like, well, let's start with the absolute hardest product, which is disability insurance, and then got appointed to be able to sell it on the back end with a handful of disability insurance companies. first six months to a year was seeing how the thing comes together and getting to a go-no-go decision about do we quit our jobs in McKinsey and commit ourselves to this full time.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. No. You had. Couple lead generation companies that would put up a landing page, promise you quotes or insurance, but then sell your contact information to either insurance companies or to insurance agents. You had e-health insurance that focused on health and now largely just focuses on senior health and Medicare. Nothing that was multi-product, nothing that was like full service end to end, right? From figuring out what type of insurance you need to comparing what are the options that are right for you to actually getting the policy in your hands without getting handed off to an agent or an insurance company. There is nothing.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Selling it, yes, so you could actually buy it through us, but it's also a marketplace where you could compare. Figure out what you need. Get advice on insurance because most people are not experts in life or auto or home or disability insurance.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, that's what we said. And the firm Was very supportive and said, okay, we'll see in six months or not. And so we took six months worked on an idea, put together a very rudimentary prototype, and we're also testing working together outside of McKinsey.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The team on the ground and being really in the problem solving piece of it. So that's, I think, the thing that got me started with, huh, do I really want to be, you know, not necessarily lifer, but a partner at McKinsey and really invest the next several years in that. And we ended up taking a leave of absence from the firm.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was basically like that. So we were out of town working at an insurance company. We'd have dinner every night and he'd start talking about, hey, this could be something. We should be thinking about this. I've been doing research. I don't think there's a good alternative to these government exchanges. Seems like there's something we could do in insurance and distribution. And I said, sure, that's great. I don't know what it means to start a company or why I would leave a pretty good gig that I'm happy in. So it was slowly, you know, as we started getting into it, talking about it, kicking around the idea more. I also then got promoted McKinsey to associate partner, which is the step before partner. And I didn't like that role as much as I did being a manager.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not have a bunch of ideas. So I was probably, I enjoyed McKinsey. I was doing well there. And I was probably, I don't know, a year or two away from making partner. I was happy. I was thriving. I was not dissatisfied, to say the least. And I was wired to do well in an environment like that.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the brokered model where you're working with brick and mortar brokers who are putting health insurance and life insurance and disability insurance into companies or to consumers, and now you're going to be directly consumer facing on these online government-run exchanges, right? And so we were working on this and started talking about, you know, if these government-run marketplaces and because they're government run, it's likely going to be super clunky and not great, why isn't there a private version of this, right? Why is this such a revolutionary thing that these insurance companies now have to be consumer facing online? That was the initial light bulb that we started talking about, you know, over dinner.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we had, we started working together on insurance engagements, and this was around 2012. That detail is important because the Affordable Care Act had been passed, all the implementing guidance and what it was going to look like had not been hammered out yet. So what happened was you had a whole bunch of insurance companies in the life and health space saying, oh, what does this mean that there are now going to be these state-run and government-run marketplaces? At the time, nobody knew what was going to be on these marketplaces. As it turns out, it was health insurance. But back then, there was an open possibility that it could be health insurance and disability insurance and life insurance, right? All of the benefits that you would typically get through your employer. McKinsey had quickly spun up a practice as well as a marketplace simulator to advise these insurance companies around how to now move away from”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such as a house fire. Or death, or getting hit by a bus, right? So how do you sell something that does not check any of the boxes for something that people want to buy, right? So it's an interesting behavioral psychology question. It's an interesting marketing question. It's an interesting consumer insights question. How do you get this product that people should have and people know that they need to have, but absolutely do everything they can to avoid thinking about it, get them to think about it, and get them to get it, right? And what I tell people is, listen, if you can figure out how to sell insurance to millennial consumers, you could sell anything to anybody. Full stop. That's an interesting consumer problem. Easier than selling like a beautiful pair of Nikes, like Nike sell themselves. Everybody wants, you know, the latest shoes or the coolest jeans that make you look skinny, right? Try selling life insurance.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The original quote unquote data scientists were actuaries, right? So these were people who were looking at mortality tables, morbidity tables, dating back hundreds of years, right? Because insurance has been around for hundreds of years and creating models to price that risk appropriately. So that's one piece that's interesting. The second piece that's interesting is the consumer problem, right? So when you're selling something, it's easier to do it if it's a tangible thing, like a pair of shoes, right? Or a really beautiful cashmere sweater or lip gloss that you can see touch, feel, see it on somebody else, or something that's fun, right? Like a trip or an experience or travel insurance is none of those things, right? You can't see it. You can't touch it. You hope to never use it. It's not something that's fun. In fact, it forces you to think about a lot of things that aren't fun at all.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does sound boring, but once you start peeling the onion, there are so many interesting pieces to it. So I'll give you a couple examples. Data science. There's nothing hotter in the tech world or in the business world than quote unquote big data and data science, right?”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was fascinating. One, this was my first real crash course in business, right? And this is a company that's fighting for survival. That was interesting too is this was my first, get my hands dirty, like digging into a P&L. We were trying to figure out where they could cut expenses. We were trying to figure out whether they could reprice certain financial instruments in a way that would be compliant and also preserve the business and also do the right thing for customers. So the complexity and the breadth and the depths of the problems that we had to tackle on a daily basis was fascinating and energizing in a way that I had never really experienced before.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good stories. Suffice it to say it was a large Fortune 100 insurance company that had Life insurance annuities, asset management, you name it.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first assignment was with a big insurance company, one of the top ones in America. And that insurance company was in a lot of trouble because of the financial crisis. So they had a whole bunch of obligations that they couldn't meet Was threatening to bring down the entire insurance company. So they brought in McKinsey to help figure out what to do. So that was my very first engagement. So at a big insurance company.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically. As I think most people who go to law school do, what I knew was I was going to do basically a hard reset of my career, right? So moving away from the international policy, international development world, I knew I wanted to do a hard reset and go to the business world after grad school.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are, after having spent a couple years on the inside and seeing very mission driven, very, very smart and passionate people, but you are a gear in a very, very large machine that has inertia and doesn't tend to move very quickly or drive a lot of innovation in the space that you're in. And I fast forwarded what would my life look like in five, ten, fifteen years if I stayed on this. And it was looking more like, oh, great, I would be a senior portfolio manager of one or two countries doing a lot of desk work. And that wasn't for me.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit. So, what I ended up doing was creating a very rudimentary software system for the municipal government of Santa Barbara and had actually talked to a few folks, so there were some consulting firms down there who were working with the U.S. Agency for International Development. They got wind of what we had done in Santa Barbara. We're talking about how do we replicate this in other municipal government. And so I was like, huh, I wonder if you can make a business out of this and sell this software to other municipal governments, not just in Honduras, but elsewhere. And I literally had that thought for maybe a month and then put it on a shelf. So I think that's where the gear started turning for me about business, but was still very much set ahead on international development, international policy work.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. Yeah. All of their property tax records, all of their records about who should be paying for water sanitation were just on little paper cardboard files in a filing cabinet. So they had no way to understand who was overdue. They had no way to send out bills. It was really reactive. So if somebody came in to pay their property taxes or their water bill, great. Otherwise, there was no way to collect or enforce that.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a very atypical assignment in the Peace Corps, so following my college graduation, I actually did some postgraduate work as part of a Peace Corps prep program. So I studied urban and regional planning and got assigned to the Urban and Regional Planning Sector in Honduras, where volunteers are assigned to an embedded with local municipal governments to work on municipal projects, be it water and sanitation or public services or planning, any sorts of assistance that the local governments need. So I was assigned to the Santa Barbara Municipal Government. My counterpart was the mayor of Santa Barbara. And so I worked pretty closely with the mayor and the municipal corporation for two years working on what eventually became digitizing their preference. Tax records and overall information management in the municipal government.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Training in the outskirts of the capital city, Tegusigalpa. And then I was assigned to Santa Barbara, Honduras, which is a department capital city in the west. So it's up in the mountains, coffee growing region, probably four hours away from the capital city, three hours away from the largest city on the north coast, which is San Pedro Sula.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was acutely aware of how lucky I was having grown up in America to American dad and a mother who eventually became naturalized. But my mother grew up in pretty severe poverty in the Philippines. So I was always acutely aware of just by luck of the draw being in a very privileged position. And also just wanted to put in some time in service in the developing world.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was part adventure, right? So just something completely adventurous, extraordinary, getting dropped in another part of the world. So that was a big piece of it for sure. Part of it was, again, being very ambitious and a total gunner looking ahead that the types of jobs that I wanted in the State Department or in the UN required international experience. So you kind of have a catch-22 of how do you get international experience without having prior international experience. And PCOR is a good way to do that. And the third piece was more personal”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. I don't even think I took a single business or finance course in college. I took economics. That's part of the social sciences program that I was in, but not a single course in the business school”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I in high school and through most of college, what I was envisioning myself was along the lines of Secretary of State, Secretary General of the UN. So just a couple of”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fair to say, yeah. Now, yeah, no disrespect to the region. I had a wonderful time in high school there. I've made some great friends and really enjoyed my time there, but I've always been a bit ambitious and looking ahead to what's next and was counting down the days to when I could go off to college and onto bigger scene.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. I mean, it is beautiful country. We were up in the East River Mountains. I highly recommend anybody who loves the fall foliage to... Take a drive through that part of the country during the fall because it's spectacular, but it is pretty rural and pretty remote from any major, like so if you want to take a flight, you're either traveling to Charleston, West Virginia or Charlotte, North Carolina.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was 14. So my dad hit 20 years when I was 14 and retired right after my freshman year in high school. He took a civilian job in Bluefield, West Virginia, which is a small town on the border of West Virginia and Virginia. And so at 14, the entire family moved from San Antonio, a big urban city. To West Virginia. So, you're about three hours, three, three and a half hours from a major city, which is Charlotte.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is correct. So we lived in Ohio for two or three years, then moved to Balaki, Mississippi. We all crammed into a tiny trailer in Baloxi, Mississippi because there was not family housing on Keesler Air Force Base. Stayed there for a little bit, then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. My brother was born there, and then we moved to San Antonio, Texas. We're actually there was a decent amount of stability. So we were in San Antonio for probably. Seven years.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dad got stationed in Ohio. That was my mother's first time out of the Philippines, was a Dayton Ohio in the middle of winter. So it could not have been a bigger shock for to this day and no disrespect to Ohio, but she just has the worst memories of Ohio.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very slowly. So before we raised any capital, we were funding this with our own money. And so it was small amounts spent on Google advertising, stupidly spending money on Facebook because neither of us knew how to do any of this, right? Had no idea what I was getting into.”
2021-05-24 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT