Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - 2 Cutting-Edge Companies in 2020
Episode Date: December 25, 2020In 2020, Zoom Video grew from 10 million daily meeting participants to 300 million daily meeting participants. How has Zoom managed to scale? How will Zoom maintain its culture? What’s it like when ...your company becomes a verb? Motley Fool senior analyst Bill Mann explores those questions with Zoom Chief People Officer Lynne Oldham. One of 2020’s most successful IPOs was insurance company Lemonade. Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner and Motley Fool contributor Asit Sharma talk with Lemonade co-founder and CEO Daniel Schreiber about disruption, data, and the future of insurance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Chris Hill. Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money.
From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money.
It's the Motley Fool Money radio show. I'm Chris Hill. This week, we've got interviews
with executives from two of the hottest companies of the year. Later in the show, CEO Daniel
Schreiber of Lemonade, a stock which more than doubled on its IPO in July. But up first,
Zoom Video. In terms of daily meeting participants, this year's Zoom grew from 10 million to 300
million. Motley Fool senior analyst Bill Mann talked with Zoom's chief people officer, Lynn
Oldham, about the company's incredible growth. I just wanted to start from the beginning because
Zoom in 2020 has been one of the most fascinating, important companies in the country,
perhaps the world. And it's been an incredibly unique working environment for all of us.
What do you think in your role, what even is corporate culture in the year 2020?
Hmm. That's a really, really good question. You know, culture is, is, is what you feel in the air,
right? It's, it's, um, I think the things that drew me to zoom, um, when I walked in the door
of our lobby and in every lobby we have across the world, we have two words in the wall. Um,
and it says, we care. And that's the way it feels like everywhere you went, right? So I saw the
words in the lobby and have worked for a lot of companies that those words are a little less
meaningful than they are at Zoom. I see it. You feel it in every interaction you have with
employees, which is fantastic because that tells us all culture doesn't live in the walls of an
office, it lives in your people, right? And that's a critical thing that we all have to remember.
I think it's going to be harder to make sure that remote employees, and I hear that from my
compatriots at different companies, to ensure that they feel connected and as important these
days. But I think if your culture is pervasive, the pandemic can't keep it down, right? You've
just gotta, you've got to keep doing what you've been doing and not let that, let that fall by the
wayside. I think, you know, surveys or we we've been doing surveys to find out what people are
thinking, how they're feeling. Um, you know, we're being responsive to those. We have this great
all hands. You've met Eric, um, every two weeks we have, um, an all hands where people can get on
and leave anonymous questions and we answer everything doesn't matter what it is we answer
it because transparency i think is a big key to that we care so we're we're not hiding anything
we're talking about all of it and then finally the the thing we did culturally for our group
is we saw that people were struggling lots of meetings all day long back to back hardly a
chance to go to the bathroom. We did Wednesday, no internal meetings. So no internal meetings
Wednesday is our day to get stuff done. I'm a little excited to hear you say,
because it's fair, right? To say that people who work at Zoom have a little bit of Zoom fatigue.
I think, you know, we were best equipped to do this better than most companies, right? So
on March 4th, Eric and team turned it on a dime. Um, but meetings in general, you know,
you got to examine your day and its makeup and, and whether you're getting the things done that
you really want to get done. Um, and I think that's what we saw is that just, we like seeing
each other. We care about each other. So we're in a lot of meetings and some of them maybe aren't
as necessary as others. So we're, we're learning how to parse through them, um, in a bit better
away how has zoom managed to scale and how have you managed to scale i think back to february and
march we we i was in firefighting mode right because you're right in in a couple of weeks time
we were doing the numbers that you know we were expecting to do a little bit further in the future
not not in that many you know that short of time period so firefighting mode from everything from
how do we, um, get ourselves to, to the size we need, you know, to some of the privacy, uh,
things we were working on. And I mean, that there was a lot of work to be done in February, March,
April, May it's continues. Um, but, but it most important was, was making sure that we had
the people because that's, you know, with that volume that we were doing, you, you need,
you needed help. You just needed more arms, legs, um, and brains. Right. So the, the shift
over the year now is back on, you know, for me is back on strategic and, and really what does
the next year plus look like? And, and what is that future work for zoom and, and, you know,
our, our customers and how do we make sure that we can get there? That's, that's, so I see it.
I mean, this year was ups, downs, sideways, but for sure from firefighting to strategic again.
Yeah. What is the big work for you now? So obviously you have added on hundreds of employees.
Yes. Few of whom have set foot into the office. So they have been meeting and interacting with
each other in the same way that you and I are interacting right now over Zoom. How do you go
about getting them integrated in such an unbelievably dynamic environment as we've seen?
And I think the word unbelievably is somewhat overused, particularly by me. It's one of my
top five words, but I think in this case, it really is unbelievable. Yeah. Sometimes I wake
up and I don't, I don't know how we, how we got to where we are, but, but for sure, it's been
a lot of sweat equity. I think the, let me tell you, that's about 40% of our workforce has not
seen or stepped foot in a physical office at this point in time um and we're you know it starts all
starts at the beginning right how do we recruit and making sure that we're we're speeding but
in that speed we do not want to compromise quality that's pretty critical for us it always has been
and even more so now so we've um instituted a values interview where we're asking um very
deep questions about how folks, uh, and experiential questions around how folks feel
around that. We care about you. We ask a bunch of different ways across the interview panel.
Um, then once you get here, we've got a whole onboarding, um, set up for you that, that really
gets you from day one, understanding and feeling like one, you joined the company you thought you
joined and two, uh, giving you a sense of, of how we all live that value. Um, so it's very
experiential. We do a lot of breakout rooms. We don't talk about much at all, actually about the
products. We talk a lot about, um, delivering happiness and joy to our delighting our customers.
That's what we talk about for, for the day and through experiences that come with these people
into the room. So it, it, you, it's a very visceral feeling that first day. Uh, and so
between the interviewing and, and the onboarding, we're really trying hard to get everybody to feel
like, um, a Zoomie from, from, from minute one. So, uh, on your LinkedIn page, you, you, you,
you set out as your goal that you're trying to deliver happiness to both your employees,
the Zoomies, and to customers. I don't know if you've met him, but we have spent a lot of time
over the years with Laszlo Bock. He was the chief people officer at Google. I imagine
that he's someone who you know or know of. I love how he talks about employees at the
organizations and the importance it is at the outset for both these employees and the end
customers about finding and bringing the right people in, right? The identification from the
outset. How do you go about doing that? Yeah. So, so I think there's a couple of things we're
looking for in people who join Zoom. We're looking for people who have lived or feel that value of
care, however it shows up. I don't mean it always has to show up in a customer perspective. It can
be community. It can be your family. It can be teammates in your last opportunity. So it's,
it's seeing how they demonstrate that. You need an empathy gene, right?
Exactly. Exactly. The other is we're very logical thinkers. So our way of doing things is what's the
problem, what's the roots cause and what's the solution. If you bring a solution to the table
first, that's not going to work. So you have to be that kind of a thinker. Um, I think the other
thing is we're looking for voracious learners. Eric, um, instituted this benefit long before I
got here, but I love it. It is, um, we, we pay for books, descriptions. We want people to read
and learn and keep going. So somebody who's, who's got a pension for that is, is someone who would
do well here. And then I think finally, just somebody who would like, just wants to get after
it. You know, when I say speed, we don't want to compromise quality. We are speedy. We, we, we,
we can turn on a dime. So I think that's, those are the things we look for in people who, who
really thrive here. And we've been really lucky. We know what we, what we are and who we are,
and we find it in people, which is fantastic. More after the break, you're listening to Motley
Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Here's more of Bill Mann's
conversation with Zoom video executive, Lynn Oldham. What are some of the things that you
realized as May moved into June, into July, as you're growing very quickly, as we're realizing
that this is going to go on for a while, were there things that you suddenly needed to pivot
and get into your tool chest to be able to, uh, to operate most effectively during this period
in time? Yeah, I think, I think if I think about it, Bill, I think about it in sort of
three big things that any and every company should be doing. One is listening. So whether
that's a survey, whether that's this little thing we did called connecting conversations,
where we put intact teams together to talk about how they were doing and not the work per se,
but how they're doing. Um, we just did a bite-sized gratitude in the month of November.
So we're trying to get people talking together, um, because we think listening is, is mission
critical. Um, and, and as we progress through and now the, the, the curve deepens again. Um,
I think the second thing is making sure that wherever your employees sit, wherever they sit,
and now I know we're all remote, but when it is time to potentially go back to a different
situation, to make sure that they feel a part of the company. So that bleeds into my third thing,
which is around leaders. So at this point in time, we're building muscle in our leaders to
ensure that they can be deliberate, that they have the ability to be empathetic, like we said
earlier, right? Because that's really critical. If you're an empathetic leader, you're hearing,
you're figuring out how to unite the workforce, you're trying to get the best out of your teams
and making sure that they can deliver on results. I think those are the things that I think about
as we move through this are the essentials. I think a lot of people would probably
describe thinking about Zoom as a cultural phenomenon this year as something that came
onto scene on the one hand, fairly reverential. It is lucky and yet unlucky that we're going
through the pandemic at all. But if we'd gone through this five years ago, a lot of the tools
that are in place now, and I think Zoom is at the top of that list, we're not ready for us.
But at the same time, there's been some psychological costs for people being isolated.
So you can go with this question anywhere you want to go, but what would your company say,
what do you want things to look like where Zoom is most helpful in a society that's healthy
as we come out of this pandemic? Yeah, no, I, I, I think, I think that's, um, what we're thinking
about all the time now, Bill, I think we want to ensure that, you know, companies that there's
enhanced communication, um, collaboration, because those are the things that really,
you know, make, make companies, um, right. Um, we're trying to really whatever remote working
trends that we can, you know, assist with. I think the idea is that given the world that has
embraced Zoom technology, along with changes in behavior, we think these trends are going to
continue in a post-COVID world. We think the future of work is hybrid, regardless of where
your users choose, you know, our users choose to work, Zoom is going to be there. We're going to
have exciting portfolio products to, you know, fit the work from anywhere world that we're going
to experience. I think some of the things, if you were able to attend Zoomtopia, we saw something
that I think is the coolest. It's called Smart Gallery. And basically, once we're back into an
office setting, the office is equipped, the conference rooms are equipped with additional
cameras so that when we're on a Zoom meeting, even if there are three people or four people
in a conference room, we all show up this way, rather than that picture of everybody sitting
in a room and then one or two faces that are remote. And that's what I love about what's
happening now is we're all the same size. We have equity, right? And I think that is what
I want to preserve of what has happened through pandemic into the future. And this smart gallery
is just such an awesome addition to that. Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. I'm sure at some point
you have to pinch yourself for where you are and what you're doing, because I think about where
zoom is and what you all you've literally saved lives this year. You think about, you think about
telemedicine. My best friend in the world is a cardiologist. And a year ago, none of his patients
and none of his fellow doctors would have accepted the thought of having evaluating sessions through
a Zoom call. Wouldn't have done it. Research has been done over Zoom. Medical appointments have
been done over Zoom. All of these assessments have been done over Zoom. What your company has
meant to society over this last nine months has really been incredible. And I want you to hear
it from me, but do you ever think about this, what it is that you all are doing?
you think about it all the time it is it is it is almost a two-sided coin it is the it is the
the thing that keeps us going um when we're not feeling like we want to keep going and it's the
thing that gives us the most joy about um about about you know just what we do every day we have
um, bill, a cool and inspiring stories chat, um, in our chat tool that is just full from day one,
people just keep putting things in there. And if you are down, you don't have, you know, you're
like, it's just too much work, too many meetings. You go to that and you just get all jazzed up all
over again. It's got to be breathtaking. Yeah, it is. It really is. Um, I'm hoping somebody
takes it. I think we, you know, put it together and almost like a, what do you call that? Like a
anthology of the year at some point. Yeah. But it's great. I think that's, um, that's what keeps
us going for sure. Well, here's the degree to which zoom has meant to society. I actually did
some work and I figured out that, that, that you are one of the few companies that is now a verb
And in putting together a spurious correlation portfolio, I was thinking of other companies
that are also Verbs. And it's not many. There's Uber. There's Google. There's FedEx. There's Xerox.
You can tweet. You can use bubble wrap, both of which are Verbs. But it's a pretty special place
to be. It really is. Even when you're talking to people and they're talking about the other guy,
they're saying they're Zooming. Up next, a conversation with Lemonade
CEO Daniel Schreiber. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money.
Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. On last week's show, Ron Gross
said that outside of the ripple effects of the pandemic, his business headline for 2020
was the return of the Blockbuster IPO. By far, one of the biggest of the year was Lemonade,
a tech company that is disrupting the insurance industry. The stock rose 140% on its first
day of trading back in July. Recently, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner and contributing analyst
Asit Sharma talked with Lemonade CEO Daniel Shriver. Let's kick things off with Tom asking
about the problems that Lemonade is trying to solve.
So, it's foundational to our lives. It's got a tremendous variety of entrants into the game
that even by having a few percentage points of market share can become a Fortune 100 business.
And yet, with those qualities, foundational, many entrants, huge potential. It's a category
that very few people like as customers. It has very low, let's say, net promoter scores or
very low regard in the world. Probably you as a 13-year-old weren't dreaming about being
a salesman of insurance. And I guess we know, and certainly from watching some of your great
presentations on YouTube, we know some of that is the conflict that exists between the company
and the individual when it comes to a claim. So it's very important, I think, for the understanding
of all of our members to hear clearly from you how that claims process is different at Lemonade.
What is the problem that Lemonade is addressing that I would say clearly the data is showing
like the younger demographic is buying and the older demographic has been working with these
tall building insurance companies in the center of town, gives them comfort that they exist.
But overall, they have some questions about how they're being treated as individual, and they don't like the process very much.
Now, Lemonade emerges.
They hear about it.
Maybe they're a member of Motley Fool Service.
Now, they've heard about it, and they wonder, so what are they doing differently?
What's the alignment that they're trying to create between their stakeholders that doesn't exist in this very large category that's 100 plus, a couple hundred years old?
Yeah.
Well, it's definitely something that's new and dear to our heart and we've given a lot of thought to.
So myself and my co-founder, Shai Willinger,
don't come from the world of insurance.
We came to insurance after 20 years of entrepreneurship
in the field of direct-to-consumer digital
and tech products.
And when we came to insurance, we
were asking ourselves the exact question
that you just asked me.
Why is this product, which is so foundational,
which at a mathematical level is a social good,
It's about people pooling resources to help the weakest in the hour of need.
That is almost a dictionary definition of a social good.
Why is it so despised?
I saw some surveys saying it's distrusted even more than politicians in the U.S.
And quickly, we did a Google survey in the early days just asking people to classify insurance as either social good or necessary evil.
The overwhelming majority of Americans said necessary evil.
And did another one ask them, do you believe that the insurance company is going to pay your claims without putting you through a rigmarole?
And the answer was no, overwhelmingly.
So certainly insurance companies have exactly the kind of association that you were saying a minute ago.
And then the question to us was why and how could we do something differently?
I've heard you, Tom, quote Charlie Munger talking about incentives and the idea that he says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
and that was something that preoccupied us a lot to quote somebody else ice tea he says
yeah don't hate the player hate the game and that was really part of what animated our thinking
early on which is to say i'm assuming that every person working at every insurance company
has wonderful moral fiber mine is certainly no superior to theirs so this isn't about picking
good people in order to engender trust. It's about a system and about incentives.
And I talk about the game, but I really do think in terms of game theory. And in fact,
in founding the company, I reached out to a Nobel laureate in game theory and spent some time with
him trying to think through the elements of the game. And the problem with the insurance game
is that it pits insurance companies against their customers. Certainly in the eye of the customer,
this is true. We have the data to support that. And the reason is that insurance companies,
one of the ways they make money is through underwriting profit, which basically means
after I paid the claims, how much money is left over? Which means that if I don't pay a claim,
I make more money. And basically means we're fighting over the same coin. Now, maybe I'll
zoom out a bit and broaden the point a little bit more, which is to say the following.
it is such an obvious thing it almost doesn't bear saying that insurance companies results
depend on how many claims they pay out but there are actually three problems that ensue from that
at a business model level the first we're talking about now which is the distrust that that
engenders one of the founding team members at lemonade is professor dan arieli one of the most
preeminent behavioral scientists and he wrote a book called the honest truth about dishonesty he
spent 10 years studying what makes people honest and dishonest. And he concluded that
if you set out to create a system with a stated aim of bringing out the worst in humanity,
it would look a lot like a modern insurance company. That everything that his research
said you should not do is manifest in spades in insurance companies. Asymmetry of information,
I understand the policy you don't. Asymmetry of power, I have your money, you want to extract it
from me, a win-lose value proposition. If you get it, I don't. All these elements of his research
said that that's not a good thing to do. And Ford, indeed, is a huge problem in insurance.
So that's one problem. The second one at a financial level is volatility of results.
So one of the beautiful things about insurance companies is that they have highly predictable,
highly recurring top lines. One of the problematic things about insurance companies is that they have
massively volatile bottom lines that literally fluctuate with the weather. Now, what were the
wildfires like in California this year? What were the hurricanes like in Texas? Answer me those two
and I'll tell you what the profitability of the insurance company was. And the third one, which
is a corollary of that is they become capital intensive because if I've got these massive
surprises waiting for me, I better put aside a chunk of change in order to take care of those
rainy days. So you end up with a conflicted business model, highly unpredictable bottom
lines and capital intensivity in order to contend with that volatility. So we set out to rethink all
of that. And we decided we're going to try and create an insurance company where our results are
at least that first blush, not so intimately connected with how many claims we pay out.
And we do that through two ballasts that stabilize our business. And what we say to you as our
customers are following, you'll pay us for insurance. Every dollar that you pay us, we're
telling you right now, we're going to take a 25% fee out of that and we're going to keep it. That's
going to pay for our salaries and for everything else. And come what may, we're going to take 25%.
Now, we don't know how many claims are going to be this year. So the remaining 75% may be enough
to pay all the claims and there may be money left over or it may be inadequate and there may be
insufficient money. We take care of that volatility with these two ballasts. One is
reinsurance, which is that residual risk we pass on to reinsurance partners. And you can actually
do that. You can trade in risk in insurance companies. So we take an element of our risk
and we say, beyond this, it's your risk. And we pay a fee for that every year.
And that means that if there's excess claims, the reinsurers pay the excess claims, not us.
To you as a customer, it's entirely invisible. This is behind the scenes
a financial work that we do with them. But it means that our books aren't hit if there are a
lot of claims. And conversely, if there's money left over at the end of the year, we say, we're
not going to keep it. We're going to give it to a charity. Hey, Tom, which charity is near and dear
to your heart? And that really changes everything. It changes, first of all, the relationship between
us. Because beforehand, it was an adversarial relationship, a two-party system where you and
you're fighting over the same coin. Now we've introduced a non-profit into the room. It's a
trilateral relationship where I don't make money by denying your claim because my fee is capped
and fixed. And you might think twice before embellishing your claim because you're not hurting
the nameless, faceless behemoth with whom you have a conflicted relationship. You're hurting
your church or your kid's school or the soup kitchen you volunteer at or whatever is near
and dear to your heart as a give back. And that changes the whole nature of the relationship from
being transactional to being much more meaningful. And it also takes care of the other things that
we said in terms of volatility of bottom line results and turns us into a capital light
insurance company, which is something of an oxymoron. Coming up, what is Lemonade like for
the people actually using its service? The answer is next. Stay right here. You're listening to
Motley Fool Money.
welcome back to
Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Here's more of our recent conversation with Lemonade CEO
Daniel Schreiber, led by Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner. You mentioned, well, you've now spoken
about kind of the behind-the-scenes system that you all created. We're very big fans of Dan Ariely
at The Motley Fool, and we'll dig a little bit in the system with some more challenging questions
for the fun of it in the next segment. But I just wanted to end this segment kind of getting the
backdrop of the business by hearing you express what happens on the front end for the user. So
somebody who signs into Lemonade for the first time and it's going to get pet insurance or
renter's insurance. Who are they on average out there in the world? Who's buying and what's the
difference in the experience that they have when they sign into Lemonade versus a traditional
insurer? And this part of our talk is something that everyone can experience for themselves. If
nothing else i'd love to get some sales out of this so everybody should download the app and
give it a try um so yeah we do renters insurance homeowners insurance condos pet and we're about
to launch life insurance as well and the user experience in all of those cases is um a delightful
chat with the chat bot so you go to lemonade.com you download the app and you're talking to a bot
called maya um she's the alter ego of a real person maya was one of our founding team members
in the early days and runs a big chunk of our business today. But that's a day job.
Our alter ego is busy selling insurance as an AI. So you chat to Maya, the median time to buy a
policy at Lemonade is about 90 seconds. I read somewhere that the median time to buy a coffee
at Starbucks is three minutes. So you're talking about, really, you can order the espresso and
while they're making it, you can enjoy your home. That's the kind of experience. And generally
speaking, you'll find it a fun experience. It's no jargon, no insurance speak. It's a playful,
she's kind of impatient, she makes jokes, and it's just a delightful experience. So you buy
insurance without any trouble at all. I think the more striking thing is not so much how easy it is
to buy insurance, but how easy it is to make a claim. Because that's really where the gotchas
come in. And actually, it's the same thing. You do that by chatting to a bot. This time,
the bot is called Jim, AI Jim, based on our chief claims officer by the same name.
Jim will ask you a few questions, say, hey, Tom, what happened? You'll say, oh, I was at Starbucks
actually, and I was getting an espresso, and I turned around, my laptop was gone. You'll do that
by picking up your phone and talking into the app. You just talk into the app, plain natural
language, explain what happened. In about a third of our claims, the bot will handle the
entire process start to finish and we'll approve or if needs be to deny your claim without any
human intervention and we pay about a third of our claims in as little as three seconds quite
literally so it's one of those wonderful things and hopefully this will be a recurring theme that
we'll come back to but crushing costs while delighting consumers because you do end up with
a really fun experience simple experience easy experience um so that is that the front end
experience. It's entirely digital. You can call and speak to a human if you want to, but people
don't. A hundred percent of our policies are sold through the bot. 97% of our claims are handled
through the bot as well. Although sometimes some of those will require human intervention on the
backend as well. Many will not. If I may just one afterthought, because I gave an incomplete answer
to Tom. You asked me not only about the front end, but about the customers. About 75% of our
customers are under the age of 35. I don't think that'd be shocking. We do have people of all ages,
but since this is such a digital experience and an irreverent brand that has a certain appeal
that skews young. And more striking, I think, is that 90% of our customers tell us that they're
not switching from another insurance company, they're first-time buyers of insurance.
And that is kind of shocking. If you watch more than five minutes of TV, you'll know that
the TV commercials bombard you with I switched and I saved messages. I switched to Liberty Mutual
and I saved $913, all that kind of stuff. 15 minutes can save you 15%. So the whole business
model of insurance is predicated on this I switched, I saved. And at Lemonade, we're not
actually playing that game. We're competing with non-consumption. We have become, I think in terms
a market share, probably the lead market share in terms of first-time buyers of insurance.
And perhaps nothing is more predictable of ultimate market share than new, new market
share. Where are the new customers who are joining the funnel? Where are they going? And they're
going in droves, thankfully, to laminate. So we are seeing this skew of younger consumers,
first-time buyers of insurance, not limited to them, but a big part of our business is predicated
on capturing customers at a time that they're not really attractive to large insurance
companies because our cost acquisition, our cost to serve with the digital experience
just changes the whole economics in a pretty fundamental way, which allows us to offer
insurance at about 50% the cost of a traditional insurance broker for these first-time buyers of
insurance. Then so long as we delight them, they stay with us as they go through lifecycle events,
and maybe we'll come back to that a bit later. One of the things that everyone is excited about
is your commitment to charity. There is something great at the end of the day if the company does
well. It's got something left over in the kitty. You make a donation, and I, who paid in my premiums,
can select some of that for charities of my choice. But what do you say to the skeptics who
remember Etsy's early stumbles? It's a great example. Another B Corp, a company that everyone
really loved in terms of melding a great business model with a sustainable bent, a commitment
to its space of artisans. I remember so vividly that the very inspiring CEO, God forbid this
should happen to you, Daniel, Chad Dickerson, eventually had to leave. And Etsy has done
enormously well since then. I think they would have succeeded anyway. What do you say to those
who say, look, the commitment to charity is a distraction, and in fact, it may be harmful to
your business model? I can't talk to your Etsy example. I haven't followed them closely enough
to be able to do a compare and contrast. But I think the most costly problem in insurance
is distrust. People estimate that $40 billion a year goes on fraud in insurance, which is
staggering and stunning. And it's not hackers from the Ukraine. It's people like you and me
who consider ourselves law-abiding citizens in other aspects of our lives. And when it comes
to insurance something, apropos what Dan Ariely said, something about insurance triggers us
and makes us feel it's OK to embellish claims, to level the playing field.
And it also means that it's a category with incredibly low loyalty.
Most people can't even name the insurance company.
So the brands don't matter.
The insurance companies don't matter.
Perceived as a necessary evil.
I mean, just think about it.
if you're trying to change insurance and bring it back to being a social good and for people to
have an emotional connection with a brand, something's got to change. And then you start
asking yourself, well, what is it that needs to change? And then I go back to the business model
and the game theory. And I think about what we're doing with charity as enlightened self-interest.
And I say to you and through you to our investors out there, I'm not apologetical
fine for our charity. Now, I would be if I thought I was being charitable at their expense. I would
have a problem with that. I don't think it's real charity to be charitable at somebody else. To take
your money and give it to charity is nothing admirable about that. But I think we've created
a business model, and this was so important to Shai and I in founding the company, where
we think this is a win-win-win. We think that we are solving a real problem that the industry
suffers from which is distrust using game theory to restructure the business model so it becomes a
trilateral relationship rather than a bilateral one keeps you honest keeps me honest takes away
temptation and makes it more fun to work at lemonade makes it more meaningful to work at
lemonade makes it more meaningful to have a relationship with lemonade as a customer
and you start getting to a virtuous cycle of instead of distrust and tit for tat you get to
place of pride. And then word of mouth spreads. And Tom, you asked about NPS. We've got NPS that
is Apple and Tesla level, 70% to 80%, whereas the insurance sector struggles to get into positive
territory. That's going to do it for this week's Motley Fool Money. As always, people on the
program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal
recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear.
The show is mixed by Dan Boyd. Our producer is Mac Greer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening.
We will see you next week for our preview of 2021. So be safe on New Year's Eve.
