Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. We are sitting here in our somewhat cramped podcast room with Frank Chen, who runs our deal team, and Mike Paulus, who is on the deal team. Welcome, guys. Thanks so much for having us. Great to be here. Frank, last year around this time, you wrote a piece for our 16 Things package, and it was about insurance.

Of all things. Of all things. And, you know, it was about this trend for the future. And it turns out,

actually, of all the things, and I won't say of all the things, but of some of those things,

it got this incredible response. And all of a sudden, there were waves and waves of startups in insurance.

I have to say I was the most surprised to see the reaction to this post.

And in fact, Mike joined us after having read the post and saying, hey, look, it's an adventure firm interest in insurance.

So insurance, look, I personally pay for insurance. I don't get excited about insurance, but what is going on? Why are there entrepreneurs and people like yourselves focused on what seems to be a fairly hidebound and, you know, explainable, obvious kind of thing?

Well, let me go back to the post and the original motivation, which is,

you're right. If you think about your relationship with an insurance company, I remember buying

life insurance. I literally filled out forms in triplicate. After they wrote the policy,

they sent me letters that I swear were generated by their mainframe application because it

comes in one font

and it's all caps and that was the only app, the font available when they had the mainframe

application. And I really don't have any other interaction with them. Once a year, I get this

mainframe generated app that said, a letter that says send me your premium. And so if you think

about the opportunity to completely reinvent all of that, we can

reinvent all of that with technology, with mobile first, with data. We can reinvent how they

find me as a customer. We can invent the types of products that they sell me. We can rejigger

the prices that I'm paying for those policies. We can reinvent how I change claims. So if you just think about it as a startup entrepreneur might think about it, which is let's change every single aspect of the relationship an insurance company has with their insured. Let's just do it. And I think that's a lot of it.

I mean, we're used to at the front end seeing the, you know, the, the go gecko. And so there's a marketing aspect to it, but I would, I want to get deeper into

what else can be changed and what the components of insurance are that in our software,

eats the world way, can be attacked by software. I think the really interesting thing about

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