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[00:00:04.88] REID HOLZWORTH: Welcome to the Insurance Technology Podcast. I'm your host, Reid Holzworth. Joining me today is Michael Vega-Sanz. Michael is the co-founder of LULA and GAIL. Welcome, Michael.
[00:00:19.49] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.
[00:00:22.23] REID HOLZWORTH: Before we get into LULA and now GAIL and everything you're doing there, let's get a little about you, Michael. Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you come from? Where were you born and raised? What did you like to do when you were a kid? What were you into, man?
[00:00:34.85] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So I was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Now, when most people think of Miami, they think the exotic lifestyle. They think beaches, all of that. I grew up on a small farm. So I grew up on a small farm with horses, chickens, and goats.
[00:00:49.08] And the background story to that is my father was born in Cuba. And my mother's family is from Cuba, but she herself was born in Puerto Rico. And so when my family eventually made their way to Miami, they ended up settling on a farm about 15 or 20 miles inland.
[00:01:05.86] And so I grew up on one of those small farms. And so it was a really unconventional childhood for somebody from Miami. But it was an amazing childhood. And I would say, from early on, I always liked tinkering, building, just being competitive and active. And I'll tell you some funny stories.
[00:01:26.25] One time my brother and I, we wanted to go ahead and see if we could build, disassemble, and put it back together-- a lawn mower. So we wanted one of the nicer lawn mowers on the farm. We wanted to take that apart. My dad said, absolutely no way. And so my dad ended up getting us as a gift, from a junkyard, a lawn mower so that we can try to disassemble it and assemble it back and forth. And so we would do things like that.
[00:01:54.76] I remember we would like to go ahead and look for snakes on the farm. Matthew and I had an obsession with snakes. And there was a canal nearby. We would go and look and see if we could catch, like, iguanas and stuff like that.
[00:02:08.47] REID HOLZWORTH: Totally.
[00:02:08.91] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And so we were always getting ourselves into trouble and always tinkering and trying things to play and build with. I remember one time we tried to build underground bunkers. So we literally went to the back of the farm and tried to dig these massive holes that didn't go well. But we were just always really--
[00:02:26.52] REID HOLZWORTH: It's more like dig like four feet, and you hit water.
[00:02:29.68] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Exactly, just really, really, really rambunctious. And then just in a really strong sense of curiosity, I loved to read. I love to read. I would read anything that I could get my hands on. I would read the back of a shampoo bottle. If I was at a-- if I was at a birthday party, I would read the instructions on the bounce house.
[00:02:48.84] And so I'd say just innate sense of curiosity and just like to build and try to get myself in or out of trouble. And then I love sports, so I was extremely competitive. And so there was nothing from an early age, I think, that really indicated, oh, yeah, Michael's going to go ahead and start his own company. That certainly was not my objective. I think that happened naturally.
[00:03:15.02] But long story short, born and raised on Miami, really great childhood on the farm. And then after high school, I had an opportunity to go to Babson College. And so it was at Babson College that I eventually start what would become LULA and what would get me involved into the insurance industry and where I am at today.
[00:03:34.51] REID HOLZWORTH: So let's so let's talk about that. Well, actually, before we go, go there, let's go-- like high school, what was your first car? What kind of music were you into?
[00:03:42.89] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So my first car was a pickup truck from 1996, a blue Chevy pickup truck. And funny, my grandpa bartered it for me by exchanging chickens and goats for the blue truck.
[00:03:58.48] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome.
[00:03:59.09] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And I'll tell you something really funny. When we first got it, there was no air conditioning in it. And so, obviously, I went back to my grandpa and really meekly said like, hey, Grandpa Mike, this doesn't have air conditioning.
[00:04:10.90] And it also didn't have any internal lights. And one day Matthew was driving. And he turned a corner, and the door just swung open. And so we would have to drive the car while holding on to the door. And so my grandpa, being an amazing grandpa was like, there's no AC. We need AC in Miami.
[00:04:27.65] The guy takes the truck, brings it back a couple of days. And I've never dealt with colder air conditioning. I mean, to this day, it felt like it was a freezer. But that was my first-- that was my first truck-- that was my first car. It was amazing.
[00:04:44.14] And I wish I still had it. I don't have it. The first car I ever bought for myself-- my brother and I first actually purchased ourself was-- in college, we got a Nissan Rogue. And then when I came back to Miami, I got a Volkswagen Passat. And then in terms of what type of music I listened to, I loved rap.
[00:05:05.25] So I love Kanye. I love Jay-Z. Later on, I loved Russ. Russ is still one of my favorite musicians. And then in terms of books, I loved fiction when I was younger. And then I eventually started to just get really, really big into biographies. So I've probably read more biographies than 95% of the population.
[00:05:32.54] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. So after college?
[00:05:38.90] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So my college experience is interesting. I'll tell it to you. What happened was, when I got to college-- I'm very transparent with this. I wanted to make money. I was sick and tired of being broke and always being short on capital and stuff like that. And so I knew that one way to get wealthy would be go work on Wall Street, become an investment banker, and then end up as an MD or a partner at a hedge fund or PE firm.
[00:06:12.12] And so my objective, when I got to university, was I'm going to go through undergrad. I'm going to get out. I'm going to go work at an investment bank or something. I'm going to get my MBA from HBS or Wharton. And then I'm going to go work at a hedge fund or private equity firm. And by the time I'm 40 or 45, God willing, I'm a millionaire, and I'm doing well for myself, and that's pretty much it.
[00:06:34.47] And so that was my career path. And I remember going into university, I used to watch these Bill Ackman videos. He has some really, really great beginner videos for how to read an income statement, what's a P&L, all of that stuff.
[00:06:50.35] REID HOLZWORTH: Who'd you say it was? Who was it?
[00:06:51.52] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Bill Ackman. So I used to devour that stuff. Well, what happened was, long story short, when I got to Babson-- Babson is in the heart of-- it's in the heart of Massachusetts. It's right outside the city of Boston. That's where I first got introduced to technology.
[00:07:08.34] I mean, that is where I really got into and learning about programming and building apps and building websites. And again, if you think about my childhood, I really liked to tinker. And so what I found was a new medium that allowed me to tinker, which was technology.
[00:07:26.08] And so that just drew me. And I fell in love with this world of building product and building technology. And what I really liked about this-- what I really liked about this was that I could have a problem. I could think that problem.
[00:07:42.19] So it's just an abstract thought. And then over the course of a couple of minutes, hours, days, or weeks, I can turn that abstract thought into a concrete solution that could not only solve a problem for myself but could solve a problem for somebody else.
[00:08:00.07] And so I realized, OK, that's what I like. That's where I get energized. And so I started spending more and more and more of my time on those types of things. And I realized you know what? Not only do I enjoy this more than I do cranking numbers out for IB. But I could also make a lot of money. There's extreme upside here. So that is how I got into tech.
[00:08:26.25] In terms of what's the actual story, how do I get into insurance, LULA, and all that stuff? Well, that's really funny. Matthew and I had been ideating a few different ideas. And again, at no point did Matthew and I sit around and say you know what? Let's start our own company.
[00:08:41.20] At this point, Matthew and I are still applying for internships. We're still looking for jobs and stuff like that. We're still looking for things to do in the context of either investment banking or maybe even something tech related. And one day--
[00:08:54.71] REID HOLZWORTH: Was your brother going to school with you too? Did you guys go to school together as well?
[00:08:58.24] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: By this point, yeah. So Matthew and I went to school-- our freshman year of college, we did our-- we went to the local community college in Miami, Miami Dade College. He wanted to go to NYU. I wanted to go to Babson.
[00:09:12.07] So I applied to Babson. He applied to NYU. We also applied to a few other schools. Long story short, I got a scholarship to Babson. And so my dad said, Matthew, you can probably get the same scholarship as Michael. And a school like NYU is not known for financial aid or not known for great financial aid.
[00:09:31.52] So my dad said, you should go ahead-- you should go ahead and apply to Babson. Matthew ended up applying to Babson a semester after me. He got a very similar scholarship to me, and then he ended up joining.
[00:09:44.06] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow. That's awesome.
[00:09:44.95] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: By the time that I start getting like into tech and all that stuff, Matthew's already at Babson with me. And as a matter of fact, Matthew got to Babson after me and jumped into the tech world more than me. I mean, Matthew would go to Cambridge Square in Boston, and he would spend Saturday and Sunday in The Coop, which is like this Harvard bookstore, just reading books on programming, how to program in Python, C++, HTML for websites, and all that stuff.
[00:10:12.56] And so what happened was one day I had an idea for an app that would allow college students to rent cars from each other. So think Turo but just for college students. And I went to Matthew. And I said, hey, look at this idea. What do you think about it?
[00:10:30.26] And Matthew said, why don't we build it? So we built the ugliest app you've ever seen. It was just good enough-- it was ugly. It was really ugly. But it was just good enough that it allowed me to rent a car from another student on campus. And that started very organically. I mean, that started off with maybe a rental or two a week then a couple of rentals a week then a couple of rentals a day. And--
[00:10:57.75] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:10:59.09] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --in the early days, you can imagine the big question that everybody had was what's the insurance like? What are you going to do with insurance? If I rent Reid's car and I get in a crash, what happens to Reid's car? And in the early days, the answer was, I don't know.
[00:11:14.94] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:11:16.80] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That's Reid's problem. I don't know. And you would be surprised. If you're a college student, sometimes you don't care about that stuff. You're just like, I want $20 for beer and pizza, so I'll give you my car for two hours. I don't care. I'm not going to use it anyways.
[00:11:35.42] But as the platform grew, we needed to go ahead and solidify things around the insurance. And so the platform ended up growing quite a bit. So within a couple of months, the app ended up becoming a top-100 app on the App Store. It became--
[00:11:50.87] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow. That's badass.
[00:11:52.29] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I know. It was crazy.
[00:11:53.79] REID HOLZWORTH: So the ugly app became the number one app?
[00:11:56.67] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Yeah, well, it became the first app in the United States that allowed people under the age of 25 to rent cars without restrictions.
[00:12:04.77] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, man.
[00:12:06.57] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So--
[00:12:06.89] REID HOLZWORTH: I didn't know about that.
[00:12:07.45] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --that's why it blew up.
[00:12:09.48] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:12:10.58] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That's why it blew up. Now, in the early days, like I mentioned, we didn't have a good solution around insurance. Eventually we ended up getting some stuff figured out there. But--
[00:12:21.77] REID HOLZWORTH: So did it start to become like a problem, though? You're running this business. And you're like, dude, we had like nine wrecks come in this week. Are you just starting to like-- what do we do with this? I don't know. It's their shit.
[00:12:33.84] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Well--
[00:12:34.22] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:12:35.96] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --so we got really-- so I mean, this is really getting-- this is pretty funny. Early on, the platform, number one, I didn't expect that it was going to grow the way that it did. I remember that when I launched it-- when we launched it outside of Babson, Matthew told my mom, Mom, if we can get to 20 campuses in the next 6 months or 12 months, I'll be super happy.
[00:13:00.85] Well, the problem is that within six or eight months, we had cars physically available on more than 500 college campuses in all 50 states.
[00:13:08.09] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:13:10.81] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Exactly. I'm talking about, you could literally rent a car-- and I would do this. I would go from Boston to San Francisco. And I would rent a car from a Stanford kid or from a Berkeley student.
[00:13:21.45] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:13:22.68] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: But what was happening in the early days was, within the first couple of weeks, it was so crazy that we quickly started to go ahead and have to get really stringent around our acceptance criteria. Who are we going to accept on the platform?
[00:13:40.32] I remember there were instances where-- in the early days we didn't have a lot of crashes. We were very fortunate, but we had a lot of really weird incidents. There were instances of-- somebody left a gun. There were instances--
[00:13:52.64] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:13:52.92] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --where somebody left alcohol and drugs. There was an instance where somebody took the car, drove it to Times Square. They were about a day late in returning the car. The car owner was calling this guy and saying, hey, you need to return the car. And the renter was like, screw you, I'm not returning the car. You know what? If you want it so bad, come pick it up. And he drops it. He just stopped driving in the middle of Times Square, like literally--
[00:14:20.43] REID HOLZWORTH: No way. He just left it there--
[00:14:21.75] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --left the car there--
[00:14:22.20] REID HOLZWORTH: --in the middle of the road? Wow.
[00:14:22.87] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --just literally there. So we didn't have a lot of crashes early on. But we had a lot of these really weird experiences. And almost immediately, we started to go ahead and try to figure out how do we get more stringent with our underwriting criteria, meaning who we're going to accept on the platform or not.
[00:14:42.27] And in the early days, we started to go ahead and do things really simply. We started to go ahead and verify whether they were actually associated with the university or a job.
[00:14:52.74] REID HOLZWORTH: True.
[00:14:53.13] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: If you're using your school email address or you're using your email address for JPMorgan, I mean, immediately you saw incident rates drop by over 95%. And subconsciously people are thinking, if they have my university address or they have my work email address, if I do something stupid, they can just go ahead and reach out to the school.
[00:15:14.46] So that was a huge driver in terms of reducing risk. Another one was not necessarily background checks because a lot of times, you're doing background checks on 18, 19, 20-year-old students. They don't have a lot of experience or much of a driving record. So they don't even have enough time. Not enough time has passed for them to really develop a driving score.
[00:15:39.74] But you could do a lot of things. So for example, we would go ahead, and we would try to verify does this person's first name and last name match phone records, public phone records--
[00:15:51.65] REID HOLZWORTH: I got you
[00:15:52.12] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --things like that. You would go ahead and you would use-- if somebody is trying to rent a car for seven days within the next five minutes, that's a very different risk profile than somebody that's trying to rent a car for 7 days, 30 days in advance.
[00:16:07.27] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly.
[00:16:08.35] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Another thing that was interesting was we would, in some instances, be able to track people. So from their phone, they would give us tracking capabilities. And so since we were aimed towards college students, we'd be like, hey, bozo, you're driving too fast, slow down, or you're going to get removed from the platform.
[00:16:24.66] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:16:25.10] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And so immediately you would see a change in driver behavior. Literally, immediately you would see that change, which meant they were looking at their phones, which we didn't like. But you did see improvement in driver behavior.
[00:16:36.00] So what ended up happening was that we initially thought we were going to start building this app, and it was going to be an app business and a car rental or car sharing business. And very quickly it really became an insurance business, meaning we had to figure out how do we make sure that when somebody signs up on the platform, they're not a crazy-high risk? How do we make sure that when somebody is involved in a car crash or somebody gets pulled over, they have the appropriate policies to show the police officer?
[00:17:05.52] How do we make sure that if God forbid there's a claim, well, that claim gets appropriately managed? And so there was a lot of infrastructure that we started to have to build. And so, quickly we started to spend 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% of our time on the insurance side of things. I mean, that was the special sauce for the business. The go to market, the customer acquisition took care of itself.
[00:17:30.45] It was really, really organic. It was a great product. And there was not a lot of competition. And if you think about 2017, 2018, 2019, the shared economy, shared mobility, was taking off. So that was a nice way for us to serve. And then, in terms of how do we transition from LULA Rides-- that was the name of the application. How do we transition from LULA Rides to LULA?
[00:17:52.86] Well, what happened was when the pandemic hit and college campuses shut down, we didn't have enough-- we just didn't know what we were going to do. Our college campuses were our bloodline. And that was done. I mean, we didn't know when they were going to open up.
[00:18:07.22] And so the craziest thing happened. The United States military was looking to launch a car sharing program on military bases in Korea, Germany, and North Carolina. I don't know why those three. But that's where the bases they were looking at-- and so this consultant that I had met in the past reached out to me and said, hey, I have this opportunity with the United States military. They're looking to do a car sharing program on military bases.
[00:18:35.03] And I said, OK, what the hell are you calling me for? And they said, well, it turns out military bases are very similar to college campuses. You have a lot of 18, 19, 20-year-olds who want to get off base. They want to go to dinner. They want to go do groceries. They just want to get out. And yet they don't have a car. So what if we can let them rent another service member's car? And we can't figure out the insurance.
[00:18:58.37] And I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. And so I jumped on that first call, and I gave them every single secret sauce. I said, hey, this is who you talked to from an insurance carrier perspective. This is how you sell them in terms of how you're going to present to them. This is what you're actually going to do, so that you can get them comfortable with the risk and manage the book well and all that stuff. And I gave them all the secret sauce.
[00:19:21.59] And at the end of the call, they said to me, well, we don't want to do that ourselves. We don't have anybody internally that can do that. Can you do that for us? And that's when I started to realize, OK, you know what? Maybe the car sharing business is not the big opportunity here. Maybe there's something on the infrastructure side.
[00:19:37.15] And so what LULA ultimately became was very much an infrastructure play. And so we would often pitch it as the same way that Stripe eliminates the need for businesses to build out payment infrastructure, we said LULA eliminated the need for companies to build out their own insurance infrastructure.
[00:19:53.62] And so if you go back to 2008-2009, if you were a developer and you wanted to build an app or a website and capture payments, well, not only did you have to build out that website, and not only did you have to build out those payment systems, we wanted to do the same thing. So if you wanted to launch a car rental business, a trucking company, a car sharing platform--
[00:20:15.33] REID HOLZWORTH: I get it now.
[00:20:16.42] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: We wanted you to be able to focus on building that platform, on getting customers, on getting drivers. We didn't want you to have to worry about how do I conduct background checks. How do I determine if Reid is a high-risk or low-risk individual? How do I actually go ahead and distribute these policies? How do I actually go ahead and process a claim?
[00:20:34.37] We found that a lot of small to medium-sized business owners, when they're purchasing commercial policies, they often end up managing the claim themselves. And so they end up, for lack of a better word, playing the role of a public adjuster. So not a CPA necessarily, but they try to go ahead and adjudicate things on their side.
[00:20:52.76] And so that's where we said, hey, what if we can take that off of your plate? You spend more time on your business. We'll go ahead and triage that either to a public adjuster. Or if we have a special relationship with the carrier, we'll find a third-party administrator that both of us feel comfortable with and process or triage the claim that way. And so that's how LULA came to be.
[00:21:12.20] And we first collected revenue from LULA August of 2020. And that business just blew up. Within 36 months, it was about $50 million in annual recurring revenue.
[00:21:24.62] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:21:26.00] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And that's not premium. That's revenue. It was a really, really substantial business.
[00:21:30.83] REID HOLZWORTH: That's amazing. That's insane.
[00:21:33.22] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Thank you. We had over 5,100 companies that were using us on a daily basis by the end of 2023, early 2024.
[00:21:42.40] REID HOLZWORTH: How did you scale it that fast, though, people and whatnot? Was the product just go buy online and sign up? And I mean, because that's a lot, a lot of companies.
[00:21:51.95] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: No, so remember it was an infrastructure play. And so, for example, I'll give you an example on the rental side. And I'll give you an example on the trucking side. On the car rental side-- we weren't going after car rental companies that were running their operations on pen and paper. We were going after car rental companies that were using software solutions, like HQ Rental Software.
[00:22:15.68] So these are-- HQ Rental Software is a software provider for the car rental industry. They have probably 500 or 600 different car rental companies, commercial fleets that use their software on a daily basis. And there's a ton of them. I mean, you have HQ Rental Software. And then you just have maybe another dozen or so.
[00:22:37.06] And so what we would go ahead and do is we would go and partner with somebody like HQ. And we would say, hey, you guys have 500 companies. We will go ahead and pay you heavy referral fees if you go ahead and refer your customers to us.
[00:22:51.19] And not only was it helpful to have those types of partnerships, but we were embedded. So we had full integrations into these systems. And so now, for example, HQ Rental Software would promote us to one of their customers. And because we were integrated, we can get the underwriting criteria from the carriers. We can extract all of that information around the vehicles, rental information, rental history. And then we can go ahead and share that with the carrier.
[00:23:18.58] So essentially, the car rental company didn't have to lift a finger. They just had to say like, get a quote. LULA would extract all of their vehicle information, all of their company information, all of their office locations. Carriers are going to care about how often do these vehicles get rented, who do they get rented to, who had access to-- how often are these vehicles rented? Who had access to-- who are the renters?
[00:23:39.87] REID HOLZWORTH: Totally, because you have access to the platform, all of it, exactly.
[00:23:42.90] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And so carriers were pretty keen on working with us. And so we would go ahead-- and so anyways, we would embed ourselves there. HQ Rental Software, for example, I think we've probably got upwards of 100 companies just from HQ.
[00:23:57.35] And so that was really powerful. And when you go ahead and you do that with 5, 6, 7, 10 different-- call it platforms-- that was extremely, extremely beneficial to us from a growth perspective. There was another aspect to it as well, which is we really leaned on referrals. So one thing that I realized around LULA Rides, around that app, was the insurance industry is not the most customer-centric industry, certainly not back in 2016, 2017.
[00:24:26.35] I think it's come a long way over the last seven years. I mean, the experience I have today with Progressive or GEICO is very different than what I had even seven years ago. And so a lot of kudos to them. But we realized if you just take a really customer-centric, customer-obsessed approach, that goes a long way in terms of referrals.
[00:24:47.41] So between channel partners and between just leveraging referrals, asking customers for referrals, like running referral campaigns, all of that stuff, the business grew really, really, really, really fast. So we got to about $20 million in revenue with a sales team of less than 10 folks and without a marketing function. And so by the time we added a marketing function and by the time we started to increase the sales organization, the business just grew almost exponentially.
[00:25:17.11] And so I would say a lot of it was, from a distribution perspective, just meeting the customers where they are. They didn't have to come looking for us or come searching for us. I would say, making sure that just extreme customer centricity-- this is graphic, but I always told the team, if you have to wipe the customer's butt, you do it, just really customer-centric approach.
[00:25:41.52] And then, to your point, trying to go ahead and do it, try to build a great product. So try to go ahead and make it really, really easy to get onboarded. Try to make it really easy for you to get your insurance cards or your COIs. The funniest thing is a COI and insurance card is really easy to get. But for whatever reason it becomes a million times more difficult when you really need it. Suddenly it becomes like the most difficult thing in the world. And so making those things really, really accessible and available to you--
[00:26:11.50] And so anyways, the business grew. And then we were very fortunate that we raised about $45 million in equity capital from some of the best investors in the world. We raised it from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, from Vinod Khosla and Khosla Ventures, from Bill Ackman, from Softbank, from a ton of different folks. So there were a lot of different factors at play.
[00:26:32.77] REID HOLZWORTH: That's badass. So, dude, tell me about that. You and your brother-- I mean, I know you guys were in the grind. And you were just--
[00:26:39.31] [GRUNTS]
[00:26:40.51] --dealing with all the demand and everything and just crushing it. But you guys had to be popping bottles on that shit. Come on. At a certain point, you're like, Jesus, look at what we've done in such a short amount of time.
[00:26:53.38] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Yeah, for sure. I will tell you this. One thing I regret-- and we're doing it with GAIL here a bit more. One thing that I regret is in LULA, I tried to be this hardass that, sure, we just hit this milestone, and I would try to brush it off as like, job's not finished yet. Let's go continue.
[00:27:12.59] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:27:14.41] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And I would say, in retrospect, I wish I had enjoyed the moments a bit more. This time around, certainly, I'm enjoying the moments a bit more. Hey, have we hit a milestone? Let's actually go do a dinner as a team or do something fun.
[00:27:29.78] But certainly, there were instances where I would get out of a dinner. Or I would-- I'll never forget this really well-known venture capital firm found out that I was a basketball fan. And they had us fly out to San Francisco, and they surprised us with a full suite to go watch the Warriors play. That was really-- and I remember after that night, Matthew and I were like, wow, just two or three years ago, I couldn't get a VC meeting or an investor meeting to save my life. And now look at this.
[00:28:00.22] I've never flown on a private jet. And then last year in '22-- actually, in 2023, I got flown out by an investor on a beautiful private jet to Las Vegas for InsureTech Connect. So there were instances where Matthew and I certainly were like, yeah, this feels like a movie. It almost doesn't feel real.
[00:28:21.21] And it was awesome. It was an awesome experience. And I would say the thing that I enjoyed most about it and that I've enjoyed most about the journey is I'm really fortunate that I still have my parents around. So for me, one of my driving factors has always been to take care of my parents. My parents and my grandparents made so many sacrifices to give me the opportunities that I've had today that I feel almost indebted to make the best use of that.
[00:28:48.21] And so for me, a big driver-- I always envision myself at the end of my life. If somebody says what's success? Success is, I'm able to look God and I'm able to look my parents and my grandparents eye to eye. And they tell me I'm proud of what you achieved. And so for me, probably the best thing was that my parents have been able to see the ride.
[00:29:06.21] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome.
[00:29:06.83] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Whenever I could, I would take them to the trips. I'd take them to nice dinners. I'd invite them to come to the office and stuff like that. For the GAIL office, my dad actually has a spot here now. So he works out of the office with us. But I would say that part has been the most enjoyable. I've really, really been thankful and fortunate there.
[00:29:24.21] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome, man. That's so cool. That's really cool. It's cool for everybody to be able to enjoy that with you. I mean, dude, that's big success. I mean, that's insane. Dude, did you say 36 months at $50 million in ARR?
[00:29:40.62] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Yeah, so we went-- I mean, I'll give it to you. We went from $0 to $2 million in annual recurring revenue in about 18 months. And then, over the next 18 months, we went from about $2 million in annual recurring revenue to just under 50, it was like 47.
[00:29:55.73] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:29:59.10] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: It was really crazy.
[00:30:00.60] REID HOLZWORTH: That's insane. All right, but now you shared with me that you exited out.
[00:30:10.39] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So in early 2024-- so actually, I'll tell you a really-- I'll tell you the real story. I don't think it's ever been shared before. But I'll tell you the real story. So we started to raise our series B in March of 2023.
[00:30:26.82] So in March of 2023, we started to raise our series B. And we went to-- there's a venture capital firm called Khosla Ventures. Vinod Khosla started that firm, really well-known firm. In the context of AI, they were the first VC to invest in OpenAI. So I mean, when it comes to AI, there's probably not a better venture capital firm and also fintech, things like Stripe and whatnot.
[00:30:53.41] So in March of 2023, I had already seen ChatGPT. I actually had a behind-the-scenes look into it before the world did. And I remember texting Matthew, "this is the most insane thing I've ever seen." But in March of 2023, we had this meeting.
[00:31:10.51] And this guy, which, ultimately, they led our series B, says to me, I think what you're doing with LULA is phenomenal. I think there's a huge business here such that we're willing to go ahead and give you a term sheet. But by the way, I don't even think that's the big opportunity here. And I'm like, what? Somebody's going to go ahead and give me a term sheet, and they don't think that's the big opportunity. He's like, no.
[00:31:33.47] REID HOLZWORTH: And by the way, I just want to say something. I told you this. I would never ask. But $50 million in ARR and somebody's coming with a term sheet? That is real money. I just want to be clear. That's real, real, real, real money.
[00:31:48.03] [LAUGHS]
[00:31:49.00] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I mean, I'll tell you, my dad-- I was over my parents' house for the holidays. My dad just showed me my tax returns from 2015, my freshman year of college. It was $1,200. That's what I made--
[00:32:00.27] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:32:02.32] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --what I made for a holiday season working at Nordstrom.
[00:32:04.99] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS] That's insane. That's awesome, man.
[00:32:13.94] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That's exactly what I'm talking about. I'm like, whoa. So anyways, this guy, Vinod-- I'll never forget-- he goes, imagine introducing the internet or imagine introducing the world of software to the insurance industry or the banking industry or the financial services sector.
[00:32:31.49] And I'm like, yeah, I could imagine it. He's like, do you think that's a big opportunity? I'm like, yeah, that's a pretty big opportunity. And he goes, well, you have that opportunity. You're at the intersection of technology, of insurance, and of artificial intelligence. And he said, you should think about what an AI strategy looks like in the context of insurance in 2023 and beyond. And so that started to go ahead and really get the ball moving.
[00:32:57.29] REID HOLZWORTH: So this is the same guy that's like, hey, I'm going to give you a term sheet. But FYI, this AI thing is bigger than what I'm about to buy from you.
[00:33:05.03] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Yeah, that's exactly it. And so actually, whatever they-- thankfully they offered us a term sheet. We ended up going with them and another firm called NextView. And then in May of that year-- I'm going to make it-- I'm going to over exaggerate. But my brother and I had lunch with Bill Gates.
[00:33:23.94] Not really, I was at a small lunch with Bill Gates. He was like 15 feet away from me, and he was talking. I had no interactions with him whatsoever. But he was talking. And one of the things that he said that was really insightful was they said, what's been the most impactful thing about AI or what has impressed you the most?
[00:33:43.95] And he said, well, probably the fact that ChatGPT was capable of passing a bar exam and passing some AP Bio exams. And Matthew was going through some of his continuing education courses for some of the agency stuff just around that time. And Matthew said, hey, I wonder if Gemini, which is Google's large language, model or ChatGPT could pass any of these insurance licensing exams.
[00:34:11.79] And so he went ahead and threw a few questions in, and it got the answers wrong. And so Matthew went ahead and said, wait, this is really interesting. These are really, really intelligent models, but they're still not capable of even answering some of these really basic insurance questions.
[00:34:28.41] And so Matthew initially started to think about, hmm, what if I could build an AI that is capable of passing insurance licensing exams? Not so that you can go ahead and game the system or anything like that but just so that it's just a cool benchmark. Hey, I've built an AI that's really, really intelligent on insurance. And what benefit could that provide to an insurance carrier and whatnot?
[00:34:51.60] So we started to go ahead and internally work on that project. And initially, we didn't know whether we were going to go ahead and focus on the underwriting side of things. We didn't know if we were going to focus on the claims side of things. We didn't know exactly where to apply the AI.
[00:35:09.79] And I'll never forget, Matthew had a really good meeting with an executive over at Marsh. And the guy said to him-- and funny, he's talking really about the carriers, not the agents. But he said something that was really interesting.
[00:35:24.51] He said, look, if I was starting an AI product today, I actually wouldn't necessarily start it on the claim side or the underwriting side or on the legal side. And we said, why not? That sounds like the most obvious place to start.
[00:35:37.96] And he said, well, if you think about it, say, $100 of premium, you're maybe spending three to $4 of that. So 3% to 4% of premium goes towards software infrastructure cost. You have maybe 1% goes to the actual underwriting. You have maybe another 1% goes to legal.
[00:35:57.73] So it's going to be very difficult for you to go to a carrier and say, hey, you should go ahead, rip out your existing legacy systems, and try something new. That's going to cost them a couple of percentage points. So in order to save one point on underwriting, you're going to go ahead, and they're going to incur a couple of percentage points just in replacing legacy systems.
[00:36:22.89] And so he went ahead and he said, but if you look at premium flow, you have 15%, 20%, 25% that is going towards customer support and customer acquisition. And so you're much better off trying to find a way to empower, enable support, customer acquisition, and support.
[00:36:45.81] And that was really interesting for us because we had been realizing-- and I'm sure you saw this-- that the last 10, 15 years of the insurtech industry, every company came with some form of this pitch. Hey, we're going to underwrite better than the carriers. We can find data that they can't. We can recognize patterns that they can't. And we can not only make the underwriting more profitable for the carriers, but we could actually reduce the rates for the consumers.
[00:37:09.11] And that hasn't worked as well as everybody had hoped. I mean, we tried that, and it didn't work as well as we had hoped either.
[00:37:15.98] REID HOLZWORTH: Why? Why do you think so?
[00:37:18.38] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Well, I think there's a lot of different reasons. So the first one is I actually think that if you look at a company like Progressive or you look at a company like Chubb, I actually think that they're pretty efficient at underwriting. So I don't think--
[00:37:32.50] REID HOLZWORTH: Well, I would say that-- and I shouldn't say it's about-- I would say that most carriers really model things off of Progressive. So Progressive is on another level.
[00:37:42.18] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Correct.
[00:37:42.46] REID HOLZWORTH: I mean, generally speaking, everybody follows Progressive. I'm in the rooms of these guys. They do. Progressive is badass around that shit.
[00:37:52.08] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I actually have an idea for-- I was ideating this thing. At one point I said, I want to start an insurance company. And the only underwriting-- and I don't want to have an underwriting team. The only thing I want to go ahead and do is when Reid submits his application to me, I want to go ahead and run that application through Progressive and just use Progressive's price and undercut them by like three points. And then I'm not going to take a commission fee. And now I have-- that's to me a pretty good underwriting model.
[00:38:21.50] [LAUGHTER]
[00:38:24.73] I think about that.
[00:38:25.97] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[00:38:27.88] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: If Progressive's running at a 70, I have this idea. I'll say, here, I have this idea for commission-free insurance, which could be-- if you go to Progressive and you know that they're allocating 70% of premium towards losses and you have 20-- let's call it 20 points going to the agents or the agencies-- I'm like, well, you could conceptually keep--
[00:38:55.66] You could conceptually sell that same policy now with AI for-- if you have $100 premium and $70 is going towards losses, that's leaving you with 30% on the expense ratio. I'm like, you can actually just sell that same policy now with AI, still have $70 reserved for the loss fund, and sell that same policy for $75 because AI is going to reduce your expense ratio significantly.
[00:39:22.92] And so I had this idea of OK, I don't need an underwriting team. I don't need a lawyer. I don't need this huge legal team. I'll just go ahead and take Progressive and mark it up 75% to 80% of whatever they're selling it for. I'll still have those $70 go to the reserves.
[00:39:41.09] So anyways, that's how much respect I have for Progressive. I think they're phenomenal. But the thing is I don't think that many people are going to be able to beat Progressive at scale.
[00:39:52.16] REID HOLZWORTH: No, they don't, and they're all trying. But to be fair, to go back to your point-- and the reason why I was calling you out on it a little bit-- it's like there are big companies that are very good at underwriting. And it's hard to beat those guys. But I think that there's also a lot that aren't that good. There's a lot of pen and paper shit still out there.
[00:40:08.10] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: But this is-- so I'm glad we're on this topic because-- so I was listening to-- one of my favorite podcasts is a podcast called Founders Podcast. And there's a book that Steve Jobs's wife, Laurene Powell, actually put together after his death. It's called something like To Make Something Wonderful or Make Something Wonderful.
[00:40:29.99] One of the things that's really insightful there is Steve Jobs is getting interviewed. And he says something-- this is towards the end of his life. He says, I don't think I have a much better sense of product design than you may have. He says, I don't think I have a much better eye than maybe the average designer or the average product person, which is shocking. You say, Steve Jobs is saying that?
[00:40:58.08] But he follows it up with-- he says, I've just had a lot more time. He says, one of the benefits that I've had is I've had a lot more time to build great products. And the lesson that he's saying there is sometimes it actually takes a lot of time to build a really great product.
[00:41:14.88] And so when I look at the insurance industry, one of the challenges that you have of the wave of insurtech is if you look at the top 10 largest insurance companies in the world today, only two of them, I believe, have been launched in the last 50 years. One of them--
[00:41:30.03] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[00:41:30.15] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --is UnitedHealthcare. And they launched in the '70s. And the other one is a Chinese company backed by the CCP. And they launched, I believe, in 1988. And so most insurance companies have been around for upwards of 50, 60, 70 years. And I say most insurance companies that you and I use, whether it's GEICO or-- so what does that mean? They've had a lot of time to really improve their models, to understand underwriting, to manage the balance sheet risk accordingly.
[00:41:59.59] And I think one of the challenges with insurtech, over the last 10 or 12 years, is anybody that knows insurance says, hey, for you to even understand your book, that's a three to five-year timeline. Well, who are they raising capital from? They're raising capital from people that are saying, hey, a three to five-year timeline to see whether this thing is working or is not acceptable to us. We need that like three to five months.
[00:42:27.16] In the venture world, if you're taking venture capital dollars, they want to see you on a triple twice, double thrice framework, which is a framework that within five to seven years of you launching the company, you're at $100 million in annual revenue, which means that it's going to impute a billion-dollar valuation. Put an 8 to 10x multiple on a software company that within five to seven years hits $100 million in revenue, it's going to impute $1 billion valuation.
[00:42:53.96] And so the problem that you have in insurtech is, fundamentally, to get really good at underwriting, it actually takes quite a bit of time. But that's fundamentally at odds with what venture capital wants to see. And so that's where it becomes-- you have this paradox. And there's this duality that probably doesn't mix up together.
[00:43:13.28] And so I do think that it-- I actually do think it's possible to go ahead and build a really profitable book if you're starting from scratch today. But you're going to have to do it on a much lower lifecycle than if you go ahead-- than venture capital wants to see.
[00:43:27.98] And I think a lot of the reason why insurtech, from an underwriting perspective, has not worked out the way that we anticipated is because you did not have the incentives aligned. You did not have the timelines aligned. So that I would say the first one is it's difficult to optimize and get better than Progressive. They've done really well.
[00:43:49.97] Number two, I think that it's really difficult to try to build a business or an insurance book to $500 million, a billion, $2 billion in premium or revenue over the next 7 to 10 years and do so in a manner that's really, really profitable. I really respect the team over at Oscar, at Lemonade.
[00:44:10.61] I know insurance guys on LinkedIn love to bash them. But I'm like, hey, understand they're not only having to deal with insurance-related metrics that you guys care about. They also have board members filled with VCs and investors. And they're trying to go ahead and make everybody happy. And as I'm sure you know, the worst way to make everybody happy is to try to make everybody happy. [LAUGHS]
[00:44:36.82] So anyways, I would say there's a lot of factors. But one of the insights that I realized was-- and the other thing that I would say is a lot of the people building an insurtech are actually not necessarily good or know insurance, that technology.
[00:44:50.21] And I remember that when we were building LULA, one thing that we quickly realized was, over the last 10 years, every insurtech founder, it felt like they were looking at the carriers and saying, hey, look at these bozos. We can build and do better than them. And you had the insurance carriers looking at the tech guys saying, hey, look at these bozos. They don't know what they're doing from an underwriting perspective, and we can do the tech better than them.
[00:45:12.06] And I think where a lot of that has played out is the insurance folks saying, hey, we know insurance really well. We don't know technology really well. Let's go ahead and work with them. Let's partner with them. And I think the insurance guys even like myself, the insurtech guys said, hey, we don't know how to manage a balance sheet. We don't want to take that risk. We don't like taking balance sheet risk, but we like being in a room coding and programming and building technology. Let's go ahead and stick to that. And I think that's where you're starting to go ahead and see things evolve.
[00:45:41.49] And so for me, the opportunity-- really Matthew-- not me, Matthew started to go ahead and see this opportunity. What Matthew was starting to look at was, hey, the last 10 or 12 years, every insurtech company has said, hey, we're going to make insurance more profitable for the carriers. We're also going to reduce rates for consumers, and that's going to be a byproduct of just better underwriting, better data analysis, better pattern recognition.
[00:46:05.32] And what Matthew and I started to realize-- really Matthew more than me. Matthew started to realize, over the next 10 or 12 years, you're still going to want to see insurance carriers have a strong desire for profits. That's not going away anytime soon. It's never going away. It should never go away.
[00:46:21.25] So you're still going to have this strong desire for profit. You're also going to want to go ahead and see reductions or price stabilization on the consumer side. But now that's going to be a byproduct of what? It's going to be a byproduct of labor costs reducing. And that's going to be a byproduct of workplace efficiencies increasing.
[00:46:36.55] And so that's going to ultimately be a byproduct of AI. So we went ahead and said, everybody's been trying to figure out how to reduce rates for consumers while increasing profits for carriers. And the last 10 or 12 years has shown that it's really difficult. But AI has shown, hey, maybe there's something here.
[00:46:54.37] So we went ahead, and we started working on GAIL. And I'll tell you this. GAIL is growing two to three times faster than LULA.
[00:47:04.71] REID HOLZWORTH: Back up, though. So then all that said, what did you build? What is GAIL?
[00:47:11.14] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So that's a great question. So the last thing that I would say is one of the frustrations we had with LULA was we never were in control of our own product, meaning one of the ways that we anchored our customers is we sold a lot of insurance. So we would sell insurance, and then we would upsell them, or we would provide additional value beyond a traditional broker or agent by helping them with their claims, digital platform, all of that.
[00:47:38.17] But I always said an insurtech company is kind of like Macy's. It doesn't matter how many customers Macy's has banging on their door. If they only have 100 Nike shoes to sell, they could only sell 100 Nike shoes. It doesn't matter what the demand is.
[00:47:53.05] And I found that to be the case from LULA, which was we had all of these customers. All of these people wanted to find digital-first solutions for insurance. They wanted to go ahead and find ways to reduce their rates and all that stuff.
[00:48:05.11] But you also need to go ahead-- on the supply side, you're always having to strike deals with carriers for their capacity. You're always having to find ways to use their paper. And so back in 2021, 2022, even the early part of 2023, you had a lot of capacity providers that were really, really open to working with insurtech companies.
[00:48:22.68] Towards the end of 2022 or early 2023, you had a lot-- you had some natural disasters. You had some insurtech companies go upside down. You had some significant fraud. And so, suddenly you saw capacity markets just tighten up. And that became a lot more difficult to just build a huge company.
[00:48:40.33] So for us, if you go back to 2022, I saw a clear path to how we would get to $300, $400, $500, $600 million in revenue. By the start of 2023, I could see a clear path to get to $100, maybe $200 million in annual revenue. But how the hell we got to $500 million in revenue? That was becoming a stretch for me.
[00:48:58.52] And so that's where we started to go ahead and think about, hmm, maybe we should really start considering more things around gen AI solution. Maybe we have the core business going. We're going to go ahead and reduce the resources there. And we're going to go ahead and start indexing more on AI. And long story short, we started to get some acquisition opportunities, right after the series B. I mean, people started hounding us for that.
[00:49:24.61] I politely declined. And then in early 2024 is when I finally said, you know what? Let's go ahead and sign-- let's go ahead and offload and sell the business. And it's been a good outcome. So I'm pretty happy about that. But in terms of GAIL, what is GAIL?
[00:49:43.52] So I told you this whole idea matrix and this whole idea maze. Ultimately, what we realized was-- and I'll give you the real thing. So we realized that there's a lot of excitement around AI. A lot of people look at AI, and the benefits are obvious.
[00:50:02.90] Hey, it can help me improve my customer experience. It can help me reduce my cost. It can help me be more efficient. I don't have to sell you on the benefits of AI. Almost any insurance executive, almost anybody that I talk to knows the benefits.
[00:50:16.46] Now, one thing that I found that was surprising was that today there was a consulting group. It wasn't Gallagher. It was somebody else. It was Catalyit. Catalyit came out with a report that said-- and they're an insurance consultancy. They came out and said 92% of insurance companies and agencies they've surveyed are not using generative AI on a day to day basis.
[00:50:39.83] And so that to me was interesting. I said, if the benefits of AI are so obvious, why the hell is nobody using AI? And it ultimately came down to there's a few different reasons. But the two primary reasons that I really saw was-- the first one is general purpose AI like ChatGPT is really great if you want to talk about American history, if you want to talk about the Civil War, if I just want to know what is insurance.
[00:51:05.70] But if I want to know what are the statutory limits required in Florida or in Georgia, that's where it gets a little bit scary. And there's this TikTok trend that's kind of scary. If you search up #InsuranceAgents, you can see some of the most viral TikTok videos. Our insurance agents that make videos, it says, what is insurance? They click Google, search, and then that's how they describe what insurance is to a customer in an email.
[00:51:37.07] And the caption is like, "what my job as an insurance agent actually looks like." And so we realized that, wait, whether it's a search engine, whether it's an answer engine, or whether it's an actual large language model, like ChatGPT, they're really useful for things like tell me about the Civil War or what is insurance but gets a little bit scary when you want to go ahead and get into what are statutory requirements in Florida, Alabama, Texas, et cetera. What limits do I need on my car in Florida versus California?
[00:52:11.25] So that was number one. We realized general purpose AI didn't work really well for highly-specialized or highly-regulated industries. And then the second thing that we identified was it's really, really hard to implement. A lot of the AI solutions today are geared towards very technical audiences, people that know what artificial intelligence is or machine learning or know programming or are going to spend the next 30 days reading up on this stuff.
[00:52:35.83] So there are not many AI solutions that say, hey, Reid, you're an insurance agency. You have an insurance company. You want to start using generative AI today. Here you go. You can get started by end of day. And so for us, we said, let's build artificial intelligence specifically for the insurance industry. Now we work with a lot of banks too. So it's broadly speaking financial services.
[00:52:58.15] But we go we went ahead and said, let's build artificial intelligence specifically for highly-regulated industries like financial services, banking, and insurance. So we don't try to build for any other industry. We're not trying to build for the retail industry. We're not trying to build for the hospitality industry. We want that when somebody thinks AI and insurance, they're going to think GAIL. GAIL is the best performing. It's the most accurate. It's the safest. It's the most trustworthy. It's the most reliable. That is what we want GAIL to be.
[00:53:26.35] So that's number one. And number two, we want it to be really easy to implement. We don't want you to need to have machine learning or AI engineers internally. We don't want you to need to have a huge programming team. We want you to be able to go ahead-- if you're a small to medium sized business, we want you to be able to set it up within a day or so.
[00:53:45.85] And then if you're a larger company, we want to go end to end implementation and push to production. We want to be able to do that within a couple of weeks. So those are the two things that we wanted to go ahead and do. And so now you're asking, what is GAIL?
[00:53:59.77] So GAIL today is an AI agent that is really able to go ahead and play three roles. It's able to go ahead and play customer support. So it can help a customer walk through submitting a claim. Hey, I need to submit a claim.
[00:54:16.06] If a customer is at the dealership and they need to add a vehicle to their policy, they can call a company or their agency or the carrier say, hey, I'm at the dealership. Ally Financials is trying to verify my insurance. Can you verify? And they'll go ahead and they'll ask you for your credentials. They'll go ahead and verify who you are, and then they'll go ahead and say whether or not you have an active insurance policy.
[00:54:39.58] So frequently asked questions, they can go ahead and-- assistance with submitting a claim. Should I submit the claim? What's the deductible? How does the deductible work? All of those types of things. If you want to add a vehicle to your policy, if you are looking for a quote, you have a homeowner's policy with a carrier, but now you want to go ahead and upgrade to-- you also want your auto policies.
[00:55:04.36] All of those customer support conversations and inquiries, GAIL is able to go ahead and support. GAIL is able to support it 24/7/365, in English and Spanish and Japanese and Portuguese. You can go ahead and customize the voices to speak like a Southern woman, like a Bostonian man. You can have it speak like a Latino that speaks perfect Spanish but has kind of an accent in English. You can have it speak perfect English but kind of a gringo accent in Spanish.
[00:55:33.20] So there's a lot on the customer support side of things. On the sales side of things, there's a lot that GAIL can do on the sales side of things. So we refer to--
[00:55:43.47] REID HOLZWORTH: Hold on. Is this primarily, though, personal lines, I assume?
[00:55:46.73] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Right now personal, yeah. And the reason we started with personal is we still see commercials a bit more hands on, a bit more wine and dine, let's go get dinner at Ruth's Chris.
[00:55:56.81] REID HOLZWORTH: Totally.
[00:55:57.42] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So we started off-- we do have commercial carriers and commercial agents that are using us. But I would say, upwards of 80% of customers today are on the personal side of things.
[00:56:07.19] REID HOLZWORTH: Makes sense.
[00:56:08.63] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So there's a lot that's done on the support side. On the sales side, one of the things we did not want to go ahead and do was become a robocalling system. So it's very difficult. We have a lot of restrictions on just outbound campaigns, like just calling a million people. That's pretty much impossible on GAIL.
[00:56:27.57] But what is it that we want to go ahead and do on the sales side of things? Well, for example, this is stuff that we're actually doing already, 24/7/365 support or sales conversations. So a lot of people work 9:00 to 5:00. They shop for insurance in the evening or over the weekend.
[00:56:46.97] Your agents are not always going to be available at those times. And you may be outsourcing a lot of that work if you're a larger carrier to people in other parts of the world. They're not as well versed in insurance. They may not be well suited for these conversations.
[00:56:59.70] So what's great about GAIL is GAIL now can have a really intelligent conversation with Reid about what Michael's insurance company offers, services, different coverages, who we work with. Do we go direct? Do we work with agents? All of that stuff GAIL is able to have a really intelligent conversation with you about.
[00:57:23.00] GAIL is able to go ahead and, OK, great, you're looking for a homeowner's policy. This is the information that I need from you to actually get a quote. GAIL will capture all of that information. This is what I need for personal auto. This is what I need if it's a health insurance policy or life insurance policy that you're looking for. So GAIL is able to go ahead and manage all of those conversations and upload it into your CRM or your agency management system.
[00:57:48.63] Other things that GAIL is really-- that we love with GAIL, reengagement campaigns. So if you have a list of 200 customers you've spoken to in the last 12 months and you want to reengage them, you can run a reengagement campaign with them.
[00:58:00.16] We've seen renewal campaigns as well. So, hey, we have 50 customers that only get auto policies with us. They have renewals next month. Let's call them, remind them of renewals, but let's also see if they're interested in homeowner's policy. So you have renewal campaigns. You have upselling campaigns.
[00:58:16.99] We find that a lot of people right now are using GAIL to be more proactive with their customers. Hey, Reid, I want to let you know that your payment is due in three days. Hey, Reid, your payment is past due three days, just sending you a reminder. These are different payment options.
[00:58:33.72] A lot of people like to speak to their agent as they're making payments or like to speak to somebody as they're making the payment on the portal, to just make sure things go through. So there's a lot of support that we're doing there.
[00:58:44.43] One of my favorite things-- probably my favorite use case that I've seen is a couple of months ago in North Carolina, you had these hurricanes. And you had carriers that historically have just hired tons of people for four weeks to go ahead and take all of those calls. And that could be quite messy.
[00:59:03.67] And so we had companies that were using GAIL and saying, oh, my gosh, I would have never been able to manage all of these phone calls or all of these inquiries without GAIL being able to manage those conversations for me. So that's what GAIL is able to do.
[00:59:21.31] REID HOLZWORTH: So then do you price it? I assume you price it per policy or policy holder, however you do that.
[00:59:27.47] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: No, I mean, we--
[00:59:30.79] REID HOLZWORTH: It's got your costs for dealing with that and powering all of that. It's got to get up there.
[00:59:36.67] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So if it's a carrier and they're using either-- once you start getting into a few hundred hours or a few thousand hours on a monthly basis, we tend to go ahead and charge you on a per hourly rate.
[00:59:48.65] REID HOLZWORTH: Got you. OK. Interesting.
[00:59:51.91] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So we are live with text messages and emails with our largest customer. Our largest customer last month did over 50,000 hours of conversations through GAIL.
[01:00:01.76] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.
[01:00:02.98] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: But we haven't released that to our entire customer base today. But the objective is-- so most of our customers today use us for voice. But the objective very much is we want to be available omnichannel. So we want to be able to support your customers through voice, through text, through email, through WhatsApp.
[01:00:24.26] And then that would be-- we have to adjust the pricing there. Right now we just do per-hour pricing. And then we charge on a per-SMS basis or on a per-email basis. We just do a pass through.
[01:00:39.10] REID HOLZWORTH: That makes sense, totally. That's cool, man. That's awesome. Wow.
[01:00:44.86] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And then what I also like-- what a lot of people don't realize is a lot of people think about the AI as like, great, you can handle my customer support. Great, you can handle some of my sales. These are some of the second and third-order effects that a lot of people don't realize.
[01:00:57.08] Well, what happens now if GAIL is handling your customer support interactions? Well, guess what? If GAIL spoke to your customer, Reid, six months ago-- Reid calls back-- guess what? GAIL now knows, hey, Reid, how's your dog doing? I heard that you mentioned you were having some issues a couple of months ago. Or how's your daughter doing? Or how's your son doing? So you could actually-- it actually, in a weird way, makes it really personable.
[01:01:25.25] There's other instances where-- right now we're coming out with a really cool reporting mechanism, so a lot of-- wouldn't it be cool at the end of the day, if you can just get your customer support team or your sales team to say, hey, these are all the conversations that we had today? These are common trends. These are common complaints. These are common concerns.
[01:01:43.55] REID HOLZWORTH: Totally.
[01:01:44.67] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So we're providing all of those reports to our customers.
[01:01:47.76] REID HOLZWORTH: That's pretty cool.
[01:01:49.22] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: We're starting to get proactive. So we know that there's a hurricane coming in Florida, for example. We're going to go ahead. And before you can even think about it, we're going to go ahead and say, hey, you have 74 customers in Florida. Do you want to go ahead and send them-- do you want to go ahead and call them or send them some tips or give them some advice or give them a checklist of things? So we call that weather advisory campaigns.
[01:02:13.86] So our objective is that we want GAIL to do a few things. We want GAIL, and we want the AI, whether it's our AI or somebody else's AI-- I just think there's a lot of benefits. We want GAIL to be able to go ahead and be the best employee you can think of. Imagine the best customer support. Imagine the best salesperson. Imagine the best receptionist. Imagine that's what we want to embody. That's what we want GAIL to embody.
[01:02:44.34] And then my brother always talks about this. We want GAIL to get promoted. So initially GAIL starts off with basic customer support tasks and basic sales tasks and basic receptionist capabilities. And then we want you to get so excited with GAIL that you promote GAIL. And now you say, hey, GAIL, what do you think? What are some of the insights that you can give me? So now GAIL not only goes from a customer support rep, but now GAIL becomes one of your business analysts or one of your data analysts.
[01:03:09.26] Or, hey, GAIL, I want to send out these marketing communications or these emails, or I want to put up this Facebook post. What do you think? And GAIL could say, well, based off your customer base, this is a marketing message that would work well for them.
[01:03:22.59] So that's our goal. Our goal is really to go ahead and build this digital employee layer for every single business. And the net of that is, God willing, it helps carriers reduce their costs, become more profitable. And it helps customers see their rates stabilize.
[01:03:44.42] And I always say, our goal-- and we still have a lot of work to do here. I'm like, our goal is to be our customer's wingman. You know how if you're at a bar with one of your buddies-- you see a girl you think is pretty-- you're like, hey, make me look good. I'm like, that is our role. Our role is to make our insurance carriers look good in front of their customers.
[01:04:07.54] So if you're an insurance carrier and you deploy GAIL to provide service to your customer, I want that customer to say, wow, that was an insane experience. This AI from Chubb-- Chubb is not a customer. But this AI from Chubb is just really insane. I think it's amazing. So anyways, I'm like, obviously, really excited about this sector.
[01:04:34.38] REID HOLZWORTH: It's really cool, man. That's badass. So now you're off to the races with the new thing, doing it. And so then the whole-- so then are you guys still doing LULA? You just have a bit of an earnout, and then that's it? Or what's going on there?
[01:04:50.41] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: There's a 24-month earnout period. But my day to day, I'm pretty much all GAIL. I mean, LULA takes a couple of hours out of my day. And it wasn't actually-- I actually-- we retained the LULA IP or LULA Technologies did, the company. The core business was sold.
[01:05:10.75] Matthew and I wanted, to the extent possible, try to get and keep that LULA IP. So you can think about it as LULA's business was sold. LULA.com, my brother and I were able to keep it.
[01:05:23.44] REID HOLZWORTH: That's cool. Nice.
[01:05:25.19] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: You're exactly correct. I have a 24-month earnout period. And then I'm full time GAIL basically.
[01:05:32.38] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome, man. Well, that's great. Well, congrats on all the success, dude. I mean, that's freaking nuts, in such a short amount of time. I love your stories too about--
[01:05:41.62] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Thank you.
[01:05:42.52] REID HOLZWORTH: --dude, 10 years ago I was working at Nordstrom or whatever it was. And I just looked at the tax return, like $1,200. It's a little different now. [LAUGHS] No, that's awesome, man. I got a couple more questions for you, and then we'll wrap this up.
[01:05:59.03] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: No problem.
[01:06:00.01] REID HOLZWORTH: So a couple on leadership-- I mean, getting thrown into this, building this thing, doing all of that, what has that been like? I mean, now you are-- you're leading people. You're leading a company. You didn't really do that in the past, right? So what is that like? Do you consider yourself a leader? What does leadership look like for you?
[01:06:23.93] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That's a really good question. It's been really difficult for me in the sense of-- so I never even finished college. So LULA was starting to take off around the time that I should have been graduating, within a year or so, not LULA Rides. LULA Rides I dropped out in-- that was 2018. That was right after my sophomore year at Babson or after my second year at Babson.
[01:06:52.54] And then LULA-- so anyways, I never had a real job. I worked at Nordstrom for a couple of months. But that was for the holiday season. I never had a real job. And when I started LULA Rides, even LULA, at no point did I ever think like, oh, I'm starting a company.
[01:07:12.02] I found an interesting problem to work on. And I went ahead, and I worked on that problem. And over time, that problem became-- that solution became a product. And that product became much more than anything I ever anticipated.
[01:07:24.75] And so I've made every single mistake that you can imagine from a hiring perspective, from a cultural perspective, from a company perspective. And a lot of it was just learning on the fly. And I think one of the things I really tried to go ahead and do with LULA was I had a really amazing opportunity at LULA, where not to brag but 2% of America's billionaires-- I had never met a billionaire before. But almost 2% of America's billionaires are investors in LULA. And now a lot of them are back in GAIL again.
[01:07:55.76] So I would go ahead and take those opportunities to go to dinner with them, go to breakfast with them, visit them in their offices, ask them questions, and then just shut the hell up. And just what is this? What is that? How should I do this? What would you do if you were me?
[01:08:11.22] And then I also found biographies to be really helpful. In the early days, I used to read a lot of management books. I used to read a lot of these self-help books and stuff like that. I actually found that biographies, to me, are a lot more helpful in that regard. Why? You're able to take these really-- you're able to see and look at these really, really great people and how they navigated in the real world.
[01:08:31.80] They navigated things like leadership, like adversity, like building product, like focus, like mental health, things like that. So a lot of just finding potential mentors, people that I could learn from, picking their brains to the extent possible, and then, also, reading as much as possible and then, again, learning through the fire.
[01:08:56.85] I've never been one that-- I've never been one that if I have-- if we have a VP of sales and I'm technically his boss, I've never been one to shy away from sitting down with our VP of sales and saying, hey, I want to know how does a great sales organization work. I've never been a part of one. You have. Hey, tell me what did you learn from this founder or that founder.
[01:09:20.05] And I don't think a lot of founders will do that because they're like, I'm the founder. I'm the boss. I should be the one giving the wisdom.
[01:09:25.87] REID HOLZWORTH: You're humble, dude. A lot of people are not humble like that.
[01:09:30.90] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Exactly.
[01:09:32.02] REID HOLZWORTH: They got to show everybody that they know their shit although they don't. And you're just like, yeah, I don't really know. Can you guys help me out? [LAUGHS] And people do. They fucking love that shit.
[01:09:41.08] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: They love it.
[01:09:41.31] REID HOLZWORTH: Who doesn't like to help people?
[01:09:42.27] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: They love it. They love it. And especially if you're young, I'd say you have that advantage too or especially if they don't see you as competitive.
[01:09:50.26] REID HOLZWORTH: Fair enough.
[01:09:52.51] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: But anyways, talking about leadership, to me, the biggest thing that I've learned, at least from my perspective in leadership-- we had some amazing times. It's been an amazing journey. But there certainly were moments that were difficult and stuff like that.
[01:10:07.29] Probably one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in terms of what I have found to just make a really big difference, just in terms of who the team is willing to run through a wall for and who's not-- we hired a lot of different executives and stuff like that.
[01:10:26.07] This player, coach mentality, if you're the VP of engineering or you're the CTO and you guys are going through a really difficult sprint, and deadlines are looming, and everybody's really stressed, are you the type of leader that gets on the keyboard and starts coding with the team? Or are you the type of leader that just screams at them and pushes them harder?
[01:10:48.64] And I think that one of the things that I've seen that's most beneficial, probably the biggest leadership lesson that I've experienced is-- excuse my French-- get in the fucking trenches. Get in the details.
[01:11:01.63] REID HOLZWORTH: You have to.
[01:11:02.19] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That I think is one of the biggest-- I think that, to me, is just-- I would say if you talk to people from LULA and now you talk to people from GAIL and they say, why do you continue year after year working with Michael and Matthew? It's because they would go-- they say Michael and Matthew care about their team. Michael and Matthew will never ask the team to do something that they would not be willing to do themselves.
[01:11:28.10] And so anyways, I would say, from a leadership perspective, I found that to be a really, really effective way of leading. And then, one thing that's interesting that I have found is there's a really different-- I'm 28. So people of my generation, people that are a bit older than me, there's a lot of-- even in people younger than me, I'd say there's a lot of doomerism of like, oh, man, work-life balance. Don't become a corporate shill, all of this stuff.
[01:12:03.67] And what I found is that it's negatively affecting a lot of these college students. So we look at college students, and you look at their resumes. And you find yourself asking, what the hell is this? We hired a young kid recently. His first day in the office, he leaves at 4:58 PM. Second day--
[01:12:22.39] REID HOLZWORTH: I fucking hate those dudes. Oh, my god, I'm sorry, dude.
[01:12:25.16] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Second day, he leaves at 5:03 PM. Second day, he leaves at 5:03 PM. And I'm thinking to myself, what the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I was about to go and just get really upset. I said, what the hell is going on here? I said in his interviews and stuff, what I liked was his work ethic.
[01:12:46.80] And I've had this experience already with a few younger folks coming out of college. And I'm like, dude, as part of the interview process, you were telling me how you were staying up till 3:00 in the morning. You were working nights and weekends and stuff like that.
[01:13:00.50] He's like, yeah, but I see on TikTok and stuff like that and in my university-- work-life balance, and don't become a corporate shill and work 9:00 to 5:00. And I had to talk with him. I said, dude, you have an opportunity to do something really special here. Do you enjoy your work? He said, yes, I love my work. I enjoy my work a lot.
[01:13:23.13] I said, then why would you want to do less of it? If you really enjoy your work, why are you staying till 4:58 PM or 5:00 PM? We're here till late. We offer the team dinner. We do things as a team. And guess what? Two days ago, this was-- the day after New Year's, I walk into the office early. Guess who's here?
[01:13:44.31] REID HOLZWORTH: Heck yeah.
[01:13:44.96] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Guess who's staying till 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM? And it's not that I'm asking him. But for me, one of the biggest leadership lessons that I've recently learned is our parents' generation worked like workhorses. These people were animals. The younger generation gets this hit for they don't work as hard.
[01:13:59.61] And I don't think it's that they don't work as hard or they're not willing to work. I think it's that they just don't know. They've grown up with this work-life balance culture. Don't become a corporate shill. Your corporates don't care. And guess what? I guarantee you Reid cares a lot about his employees. I guarantee you that if, God forbid, Ivans had to do a layoff, as painful as it would be for the employees, it would be a million times more painful for Reid.
[01:14:24.18] REID HOLZWORTH: 100%.
[01:14:24.49] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: So it's trying to-- I found that a lot of the leadership-- a lot of it is education. It's not only me showing by example and being in the trenches there with you, but a lot of it is education. It's, hey, there's nothing wrong if you're enjoying what you're doing and you really like what you're doing and you have this once in a lifetime opportunity. Work a couple of hours. We're all here. It's fun. And guess what? If you get your work done at 3:00 PM, go home for the day.
[01:14:45.78] But I found a lot of it is it's not that they're not willing to do the work. They've just been misinformed. And I find that if you go ahead and you talk to them, you sit with them, you invite them to lunch, invite them to dinner, a lot of these younger folks will really go, and they actually do bust their butts. And they're really intelligent and really competent.
[01:15:03.76] So I would say those are two things that I've learned from a leadership perspective is really lead by example. And then a lot of leadership is actually education. How do you educate your team? And I would say those are two really, really impactful things for me.
[01:15:16.56] REID HOLZWORTH: Do you consider yourself a leader, Michael?
[01:15:20.52] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I would consider myself-- I would consider myself a leader, yeah. I would consider myself-- and it's not that I grew up-- and it's not something that I pontificate about and I'm like, I'm a leader and I'm so-- but I do think that-- as the founder of the company, I do think that it's a role. And it's a role that you should-- it's a role that you should embrace.
[01:15:43.09] And it's like, again, going back to the Founders Podcast that I mentioned, David Senra, the guy that does it, he has this saying of-- he's like, if you want to start a company and then complaining you're complaining about how hard it is, it's like getting into a boat and then complaining about getting wet.
[01:15:59.29] It's like, if you don't want to get wet, don't get in the boat. And so I find that being a leader is really tough. Being a leader often means that you have to go ahead and spend more hours than anyone. Being a leader means you're often privy to information that would make others cry and scream. It means showing up on days that you don't want to show up the most. It means oftentimes you eat last.
[01:16:22.21] I mean, I've never been the highest paid-- I've never been the highest paid person at any of our companies. I've always been-- from a cash perspective, on a salary perspective, I've never been anywhere near that. Oftentimes, it means you eat last.
[01:16:36.85] But you also have a lot of benefits. You get the most upside, right? But anyways, I would say I'm a leader. And it's not something that I sought out to do. But I think it's something that's a function of the role that I play. And it's something I do take seriously. And if at any point I thought that I was not a good leader or that I didn't have the potential to continue improving as a leader, I'd have to go look for somebody else because I find that if you're not a good leader, you're doing a disservice to your company and your customers.
[01:17:04.84] REID HOLZWORTH: 100%. And the reason why I asked that question-- I've said this here on this podcast before-- is because, for me, personally, I didn't really consider myself a leader all along. And similar to your story, I just was thrown into it. Dude, you're just doing the thing and making it work and trial by fire and all of that.
[01:17:24.89] But you get to a point-- at least I did my story. It's like, holy shit, I am leading these people and providing for their families, the whole 9 and the community and everything. And then it becomes-- really, as you go on, it really becomes a responsibility that you can't let go. And you have to show up as a leader and be a leader in that way.
[01:17:49.52] And it's interesting. Not everybody answers that question. Yes. And all these people in my mind that come on here are leaders in their own way. But it's like they haven't-- OK, no, I get it. I am. And this is a responsibility that I have to uphold moving forward kind of thing. And so for me, that was transformational over the last number of years and just kind of recognizing that. So that's why I ask it.
[01:18:16.28] But that was good, man. That was really good. It was really good. All right, I'm going to ask you a couple more questions. Then we're going to--
[01:18:21.08] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: No problem.
[01:18:22.19] REID HOLZWORTH: --wrap up. All right, outside of family stuff-- actually, you know what? You're 28. Kids, married, what's your deal there?
[01:18:31.95] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: No, I'm not married. And I have no kids.
[01:18:34.52] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow. Good for you, man-- I mean, good and bad. But I mean, hey, you're doing all right. That's cool. That's awesome. 28, wow. That's good.
[01:18:45.45] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: But I have five nephews, which--
[01:18:47.63] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome.
[01:18:48.29] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --I adore.
[01:18:49.55] REID HOLZWORTH: So what do you do for fun?
[01:18:52.82] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I hate to be that guy, but--
[01:18:54.03] REID HOLZWORTH: I know you read a lot and stuff like that. But what do you do for fun? Are you just still grinding it out so much?
[01:19:02.01] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Man, I'm really fortunate. I actually really, really enjoy what I do. I think I live an amazing, really, really cool life. I get to-- in many ways, I think of myself as an inventor. My products in the past, LULA Rides and maybe LULA, that wasn't so inventive. But I found GAIL.
[01:19:18.72] AI is such a new industry that anything that you build, you're probably the first person to build it or ever build it. And for LULA and LULA Rides, that's just not true. Those markets were a lot more established. And so I actually have a lot of fun here. I spend most of my time here in the office working on product stuff, just ideating.
[01:19:37.83] But there are some things here that we do for fun. We recently got an Xbox One in the office. So either every morning or every night, I play a couple of games of Call of Duty. So I do enjoy that.
[01:19:49.13] REID HOLZWORTH: Nice.
[01:19:49.62] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I love to go eat. So whether it's with my girlfriend, whether it's with my parents, whether it's with my siblings, I love at least one or two good meals a week. I love Cuban food. I love steak. I love Italian. And I love dessert.
[01:20:03.13] So I mean, I do that. Anybody that knows me knows Michael and Matthew love food, even so much that for Christmas or for my birthdays, my parents or my family are like, what do I get you? I'm like a Reese's bar is more than sufficient. I love that. I just like food.
[01:20:22.40] And so anyways, I say, what do I do for fun? And it's like something like, I read a lot. Call of Duty is fun. Eating with my family is fun. I work out. I go to the gym. I play basketball. But I'm very fortunate I get to do-- I'm very fortunate that my job, what I tend to do on a day to day basis, is my fun. And--
[01:20:46.60] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome.
[01:20:47.46] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --it's not something that I try to run away from. And I realize that a lot of people have that. So I'm fortunate in that regard.
[01:20:54.18] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome. All right, last question, what is your favorite drink? Do you drink? If so, what?
[01:21:01.95] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: No. So I don't drink so much alcohol. I'll drink here and there. So I'll give you an example of where I would drink, if GAIL and Ivans ever did a deal together. Ivans has been a company that Matthew and stuff has admired for a long time.
[01:21:19.42] I just recently found out about you guys. I just have to say it. But Matthew's known about you. Are you serious? He's like, it's so amazing and all this stuff. He knew all your history and all that. And I'm like, OK, if GAIL and Ivans ever did some sort of collaboration, that to me would be a pretty big deal. That's where I would be like, OK, let's go get some drinks. Let's go celebrate. That would be fun. And--
[01:21:38.95] REID HOLZWORTH: Awesome.
[01:21:39.21] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: --in that instance, what would I be looking for? I'd probably be saying Moscow mules or some tequila shots. That would be fun.
[01:21:48.31] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[01:21:49.47] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That would be fun. That would be fun. Some Tito's Vodka, that would be nice. But that's like for a celebration. On a day-to-day basis, what do I drink? This is going to sound bad. I drink a lot of Coke Zero. I'm always drinking Coke Zero.
[01:22:04.92] REID HOLZWORTH: That's your jam--
[01:22:05.61] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: That's my jam.
[01:22:06.15] REID HOLZWORTH: --just slamming them down?
[01:22:08.35] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Slamming them down. I mean, I've had two already through this podcast.
[01:22:12.96] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]
[01:22:18.21] That's awesome, man. Well, hey, Michael, this was really good, dude. Thanks again for doing this. And congrats on all the success, man. It's really, really awesome. Get somebody on this show, at your age, that's done this much-- and you're just getting started. And you're having the best time ever. And, dude, you're going to do some really, really cool things in the industry. So--
[01:22:39.00] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Thank you.
[01:22:39.49] REID HOLZWORTH: --I'm happy to have you.
[01:22:40.02] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: I appreciate it.
[01:22:40.38] REID HOLZWORTH: Really awesome, man, for real.
[01:22:41.20] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: And coming from somebody like you, that means the world.
[01:22:43.59] REID HOLZWORTH: For real, man, it's badass. So thanks, again, dude.
[01:22:45.85] MICHAEL VEGA-SANZ: Thank you.
[01:22:46.12] REID HOLZWORTH: Thanks again.