David Soloff on O.T.T Risk

David is the founder of Ottrisk, a startup building technology to support the underwriting of business interruption Insurance. Previous to Ott-risk, David was a founder of Premise, a collector of ground truth data, where he remains Chairman, and co-founder of Metamarkets, acquired by Snapchat. David serves on the advisory board of Columbia University’s Institute for Data Sciences, was a punk rock musician in the 80s and almost got his PdD in Mediterranean archeology.

https://www.ottrisk.co/

https://notunreasonable.com/podcast

Show notes:
https://notunreasonable.com/?p=7317

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Transcript

David Wright: 0:00

My guest today is David soloff, the founder of Ott risk, a startup building technology to support the underwriting of business interruption insurance. Previous to Ott risk. David was the founder of premise a collector of ground truth data, where he remains chairman and co founder of meta markets acquired by Snapchat. David serves on the advisory board of Columbia University's Institute for data sciences was a punk rock musician in the 80s, and almost got his PhD in Mediterranean archaeology. David, welcome to the show.

David Soloff: 0:24

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

David Wright: 0:27

So first question is the the big premise behind Ott risk, which is it's a subject that I'm fascinated by is to push for actually for more insurance, so businesses to purchase more insurance coverage. This suggests that there's under consumption of insurance coverage. So why would you try and do this? Or at least under consumption of business interruption insurance, though, I'd say that surely this would apply to other areas of insurance as well, this perhaps your model for this? I'm wondering, what is your general model for why insurance is under consumed? Or why there's an opportunity here?

David Soloff: 0:57

I don't know that it's under consumption of insurance. I think it's maybe misappropriation of cover. That's one way to look at it, as in are the right things being insured, and are the things that are being insured, being insured to the right degree. So maybe it's more of a reallocation approach that is required rather than people ponying up more, or spending more, right. So if we think about insurance kind of more broadly, and I should, you know, caveat, I'm not an insurance professional, though I do play one for the purposes of podcasts and my day job. I'm a technologist. And I like to think of things in terms of systems. And what's so interesting is that, when you look at insurance, it is a, it's actually a very elegant and wonderful invention, and a really important one. And if you look at its origins, and what it grew up doing, and supporting and why it emerged, it was a physical set of risks that were being approached, right, you know, basically ships and cargoes going across the Atlantic or going around, you know, Cape of Good Hope, or Cape Horn. And, you know, these cargoes are precious, the ships were precious human life, not so much. But you had, you know, the the capital providers behind these, these expeditions, like wanting to essentially swap risk with each other, basically, build a portfolio of expeditions, and, you know, good transit routes. And, you know, fast forward 400 years, and the idea, there is more important than ever. I'd argue that the physicality of things is much less important than it once was. You know, so if we just think about things like GDP, GDP is going intangible, value is intangible, you know, what businesses do and how they earn money? You know, maybe yes, it may be physical, but it may just as well not be physical. So it's a function of that. One would think that insurance should be able to facilitate increasingly intangible types of transactions or business arrangements. It's not the case. It's still really overly focused on what it's historically been focused on a burning building, a smashed road, an earthquake, crushing a car, a windstorm, ripping off the roofs of houses, those are all really, really devastating and important events to cover. But the question becomes given a finite pool of premium and a finite pool of capital that can backstop risks, how much of that should be covered visa V, the emergent kinds of risks that businesses right now have kind of been silently carrying, right? So a political action, a civil action, reputational hit a cyber intrusion, a government lockdown, some of which are all of which might be spurred by some kind of physical event upfront, like a catastrophe, or an attack or a terrorist attack or a bomb. However, the kind of secondary and tertiary loss is intangible, hey, my business is not operating, my revenues are taking a hit. I have to lay people off my business and my inventory might be completely intact and untouched. But the reality is that I'm suffering a lot of damages and loss. So that's kind of what I mean by misappropriation. Or maybe it's misstep, maybe sort of a redefinition is kind of in in order. And I'm wondering whether the pandemic and you know, the way business interruption claims are being contended in courts in various places is going to force a reconsideration of things. You know, we've got our own point of view on it. So With that said, like, you know, I don't think I don't think insurance is being under consumed. I think it's underperforming in the way that it's supposed to. Right. I think that, again, to take the pandemic and look at like all of the property and casualty policies that have been in effect for businesses in all of the affected geographies around the world. A lot of these people thought that they had business interruption cover embedded within their property and casualty. And only to find that Well, no, actually, guess what you haven't you're not covered in the case of some sort of force majeure or government event. And no, you haven't been paying premium had you wanted that, we wouldn't even know how to begin underwriting it and no, you don't have it. So that's a problem. And then you've got sort of the punchline to the joke, which is that and I'm not taking this lightly, nor am I making it making light of it. It is a little bit of a punchline, though, or kind of a cruel hoax, which is what regulators are doing in the UK, and what they're going to increasingly do in the US, which is now make the insurance companies pay out on the BI claims that they never collected premium out in the first place. Because it's such a sort of publicity, catastrophe, and the public is up in arms about it. So you've got kind of a little bit of a circular firing squad going on here. So I guess we have the good fortune of kind of coming into this with a clean sheet of paper and just thinking, Okay, if we start from the the supposition that these kinds of systemic, nasty, hybrid, physical, non physical, trigger events are going to happen more and more, and even since COVID, we've had Texas, you know, frequent or storm grid failure, that's another one of these kind of weird systemic things. In the face of that you've got sort of political gridlock and policy response failure, you've got new classes of risks that are impacting businesses and individuals in really profoundly different ways. Um, you know, kind of attack us very, very actively and very aggressively, and maybe reallocate how the capital is being backstopping.

David Wright: 7:18

Yeah, there's been lots there. I want to talk about so previewing the entire, no, but I mean, it is a very rich topic, a very, very rich topic. Because anytime you get an innovation insurance going on, right, there's gonna be some underlying theory for a market failure, right? Or at least, you know, the current allocation of resources is not optimal. And we want to bring your startup along to change things, you know, something that aren't aligned, you know, it's the typical startup stuff that happens everywhere it happens insurance. And, and I'm just fascinated by digging into kind of like some underlying hypotheses. So you're saying reallocation. And the reason why I brought up this sort of under consumption idea is this white paper, one pager actually came across on the internet, which is this pretty cool publication that chamath sent out over Twitter, at least, that's how I came across it, but your business plan, and in it, there's this reference to $20 trillion of economic loss. And because of COVID, and the current capitalization of the insurance industry is like, or the current limit outstanding of the insurance industry is about 100 trillion. was, was an estimate, which I mean, who knows that stuff is hard to tell. But that sounds about right, you know, the relative kind of magnitude, I think is on track. And, you know, if you take 20, and you added 200. If I got the numbers right here, now, it's 120. But maybe you're saying that 100 should go to 80. You know, maybe there's a reallocation that should go on, and we're ensuring the wrong stuff. We're pointing in the wrong direction, and then we should shift that around. So maybe you could kind of help me with that.

David Soloff: 8:42

Yeah. Good. So maybe let's press on some of the terminology, because that might help us. So what you're describing in terms of a coverage gap? You know, there's two different ways to slice this. And maybe it's a bit of both not to, not to hedge, you've got an undercapitalization problem. Right as him there isn't enough money set aside or denoted to support these losses in, in in the eventuality that they occur. That's one thing, right? And then I'd argue kind of the others. I guess, if I think out loud, if you think of it in terms of a market structure, there's equally a lot. So if that's the supply side of things, there's also a demand problem. And that may be is getting at what you're talking about with under consumption. Right, like people, people, businesses, whomever insurers, reinsurers, they don't know they need this or they kind of know they need it. They don't know what to call it or how to bound it, where there isn't a mechanism that makes it consumable, and they're all bearing it silently or frankly and also silently. And so, you know, maybe people know they need something, but they don't know what it is, or they don't know if there's anything in the offing. And so they can't consume it because they're not being offered a tool or an on ramp for it. So you've got almost like an isometric problem where you've got an inability to coalesce demand, maybe because of a lack of definitions or structures or analytic mechanisms, or pricing mechanisms or market mechanisms. And then I think as either as a function, but also as an aggravating circumstance, you don't have a ton of capital that's dying to solve this problem, because it doesn't know how it doesn't know what the economics of it would be. Right. So I think that it's, I think that's maybe a backdoor answer to your under consumption problem. And it also talks a little bit about little things like mis allocation and inefficient market structure with respect to this, and also how, and this is something where, you know, this is a slam door, we're running right into how do you even innovate? In the insurance industry? If it's not, you know, the only innovation that seems to be permitted, in many ways is, is cutting costs on the delivery. Or on the underwriting side, it's like, you know, it's an industry that is, you know, obsessed with deploying technology to do things like minimize fraud, minimize basis, risk, reduce the margin, around delivering a policy or delivering benefits, and those are all important things, but it's, it's sort of like a, you know, it's like a wish sandwich, you know, it's like two pieces of bread, but like, the real opportunity is like the protein that isn't there. So like, how do we, so that's, that's kind of how we're tackling it, which is like, Yeah, all those delivery, and kind of risk scoring models for known problems, those are all very, very important. Or even user experience, those are all important from a consumers, you know, how many comparison engines are we going to have already? You know, how many like instant underwriters on the phone for your, for your crap on your shelf? Are we going to have like, what's can we get it the real problem here, which is that like, you know, the social and commercial fabric of like American cities, and is being completely eviscerated and there is zero credit or insurance mechanism to fill that gap. Like that strikes me as a much bigger problem than, you know, some of the some of the issues that technology is being pointed out right now. I'll get off my soapbox.

David Wright: 12:48

No, I mean, I love it.

David Soloff: 12:49

I mean, we're gonna answer Sorry, man.

David Wright: 12:51

Now this is, this is great. So let me let's let's kind of keep coming at it. You're you referred to both possible forces supply and demand, right? Is it a problem of supply insurance companies don't want to give it? Or is it problem demand? People don't want to buy it? Right. So what is the missing piece here? And I think a lot of people are very quick to point the finger at an insurance company and say, you don't want to sell this. And so right. And so that's where the kind of market failure is. But, you know, I'm a little biased, haven't been an insurance industry for a long time, but never worked for insurance company. So maybe, maybe not quite so bad. But I think that the like, the modal failure of insurance innovation is complete nonconsumption, like insurance companies, they actually produce new products frequently enough small little pilots and the like. And basically, nobody cares. And, and I think that the model that I like to invoke for why that's the case is, is to observe first, that the vast majority of insurance is compulsory, you don't have a choice, right? So auto insurance, most property insurance is is governed is enforced by some regulatory entity or by a mortgage company or something like that, right? And people, nobody wants to buy it. Because for a variety reasons, I mean, for auto insurance, you're not protecting yourself, you're protecting the person you're going to hit. And you don't think you can hit anybody. So like I'm a good driver, why would I ever want to buy auto liability insurance go simple chain of logic. And for that matter, in property insurance is my house and love people who don't have a mortgage are under insured because the bank doesn't force them to buy a mortgage or sorry, buy insurance, so they don't buy insurance. And then they have a big problem. But they know they have a note wealthy enough to own a house outright, so good for them, maybe until a disaster hits. And so I think there's like in this this aligns with a lot of literature on cognitive bias, right? So we have a kind of like a pre wired weakness for thinking about the kinds of things insurance protects us against. We have availability bias, we have overconfidence, bias, we have all these things that makes us not realize that the risks are out there. And so we underestimate the risks that exist. And a long time the government comes to government, which is an interesting evolution of itself because we're voting for people to tell us to buy insurance, but we do. And the government says you must buy it. And so I would have Imagine if that's true and are very interested in your thoughts on this, if you've thought it through that the best way for you to reallocate the consumption of insurance is not by convincing businesses to do. So it's by convincing the regulator or the government to say, you're going to have to rewrite the the accepted language of an insurance policy, which was approved by regulators, to force people to buy this cover over here, and then everybody goes along for the ride. What do you think?

David Soloff: 15:25

That's a possibility? I mean, it's what's happening in the UK right now. Right? You know, the regulator there is, you know, they're, they're engaging in some preliminary actions, where, you know, they're going to effectively force property and casualty products to embed or supply or answer for the kinds of business interruption scenarios that we've seen with COVID. And, you know, it's going to be a tax that is borne by the buyer of the insurance, they're gonna have to buy this cover embedded, and it'll be you know, the surcharge will be an upcharge. And, yeah, Hey, your policy has new features, you know, click here to learn more, and oh, by the way, you know, it's, you know, we're adding 7% to your premium. Because you've got this, you know, souped up bi, that's, you know, a very sensible way to

David Wright: 16:20

do it.

David Soloff: 16:21

Not that I'm, you know, a fan of regulation in that regard. But like, your point, there, there are all sorts of cognitive biases, and insurance is an unpleasant thing to consider, because you're necessarily considering, you know, suffering a loss or failing, and nobody wants to buy for that. With that said, You know, I think what we've seen, and you know, how markets harden and new products get born and gain traction is off the back of previously unanticipated or unmodeled or partially unmodeled, and fully unreserved events coming to pass where businesses, you know, a grocery chain or you know, global, multinational, corporate, they're now suffering losses in within a scenario that will remain rather fresh in their minds for one to three years in the near term. Okay, so here's your window. There's a host of problems. But But if there's ever going to be a time to make manifest, why a product like this, and covers is important. It's right now, you have to design the product such that it actually fills that coverage gap and supports a business or a group of businesses or an individual even getting from point A to point B until things normalize or stabilize, or until a government entity or somebody can actually support on a more sustained or ongoing basis, that's certainly not going to happen here in the US, I mean, look at, you know, what, how long it's taken Congress to get to a COVID relief package. And yes, people are going to receive, you know, direct payments from Treasury. But those will go away, and at some point enhanced, jobless benefits will go away. And businesses themselves have actually been hosed. I mean, they haven't really gotten what they've needed at all, if they've survived this long. So I don't think relying on the public sector or even thinking of the public sector here in the US as an alternative or a partner in this or an immediate stopgap solution is feasible. I mean, one could argue that FEMA should have stepped into the breach in the way that they would have any, you know, a massive flood.

Unknown: 18:41

That That would

David Soloff: 18:42

have been, you know, that's the government agency, we seem to have here in the US that actually, you know, steps in and fills that gap. There's an emergency declaration of some type of some type and, you know, then that that releases the funds and, and the President does his flyover, and in a helicopter, and then you know, you've got like, people lining up for benefits, and, you know, cover and, you know, they help filing insurance claims and jobless claims, and all those things. That hasn't happened here. So that's, you know, I guess that's another. It's an adjacent topic and a quite interesting one. So, to your point, I think that if there is, if there is now the opportunity to, you know, take current situation as an object lesson, and to present a product in the context of what people already businesses already buy, or we're required to carry, and we can economically present it and they can, and the consumer of insurance can be assured and reassured consistently, that know what just happened will not happen again, namely, insurance will not pull up the stakes and argue the claim against you. But in fact, this product is designed for precisely these circumstances, and yes, it costs X percent more, you still have another problem. So that so you're you're now progressing towards a solution. But now the problem becomes the entity that is most likely to buy it is going to probably be the one that least needs it, and can most

David Wright: 20:14

often the case,

David Soloff: 20:15

always, always the case, that's always the case, the people who need the insurance, most of the ones who don't have it.

David Wright: 20:21

And the ones who don't need it are the ones that is easy to sell to. Because everybody's okay with that.

David Soloff: 20:26

Do you? Do you use foul language on this podcast? Or is this a family

David Wright: 20:30

Go for it, man? Now, at that point,

David Soloff: 20:33

I literally don't know what the fuck the answer is there. I think. So I got a couple of ideas or guesses. You know, the the grand, you know, if I haven't lost, you know, most of your audience this, you know, this, this will probably this this, this particular mini monologue will probably, you know, drive the rest of them away. So, apologize,

David Wright: 20:56

as long as it's controversial. David, then

David Soloff: 20:58

controversial, it's like it's like preachy, maybe. So, when we get to that segment of the market that we're talking about, and this can be classes of businesses, or geographies, you know, they're the ones that most need it, it's like going to be someone who owns a restaurant or retail out, you know, a store in a in a small in a small city or small town. It's gonna be a local business person who has been cut to shreds by this. They have they don't have the cover, their businesses have been shut down. And like they're laying people off. And it's and this is happening again and again, times 100,000. So how is cover brought to those individuals or those businesses in the circumstance where, yeah, you got an analytic mechanism, and you may even have government capital, but the zero political will actually bring it to bear. I'd argue that PPP was an attempt to bridge its business continuity cover, it was a way to try to make sure that people who run businesses had enough capital coming to them to support payroll until they could get to the other side whenever that would be. And that's what insurance should do. Right. So, the question becomes, do you have the political will the analytic framework and the capital public and or private, to form a pool, or some sort of facility, as has been done with things like terrorism or flood, or earthquake here in California or elsewhere, where when there is a force majeure, or lockdown that causes broad based economic devastation? Is there a pooling mechanism that brings low or no cost subsidize cover to small business people, or midsize business businesses within a region? That to me, isn't nice to have that is critical. I mean, it's totally unless we want to go to a universe of super endowed massive sort of monstrous global corporations and nothing else and people baking bread in their kitchens like you. That's where we're heading at this point. You have these monstrously well capitalized, companies that can borrow at basically zero cost can sell equity at inflated prices and can borrow and sell convertible debt. They're able to capitalize their own way through any sort of dislocation, and they just get stronger, they eat everyone's lunch. For those who can't afford the capital, those are also the people who are not being insured. So you know, it's. So what do we did, right, as a company is trying to build a scalable business with favorable unit economics. We've got to sell some product to the those big corporates, you know, they they deserve cover for continuity just as much as anybody else. But can we use that mechanism? Can we take the premium flows? Can we invest them in such a way to generate outsized returns? And can we then use that to buy down or subsidize the cost of cover for mid and low end of the market? That becomes a really interesting business model question for us. And it's one we're actively engaged in thinking through.

David Wright: 24:09

That's pretty interesting. Because I I'm struck by the the, you know, we're talking about small businesses. I mean, nobody's going to nobody's going to argue with the point that you know, hosed. I think it was word you used, you could get more colorful than that. And I think though, an insurance salesperson of which I have been, would say to you, well, I agree. But I tried to zone over last year and didn't want right and then you know, they want something for nothing, right? They want the bailout deal. They want the one where the government says you didn't pay for the last year, me with my infinite credit, US government, you Treasury can just start pouring money all over everybody after the fact because after the fact, it's obvious, right? We're gonna have this conversation right at you know, kind of nearing the end, let's hope and I believe of the COVID pandemic. And now we can look back and be like, we were nuts. Why didn't anybody buy any pandemic Have any sort? And and because they bought it rather, they would have said Why am I you know, imagine if you put some legislation forward a couple years ago and by the way, the government has been kind of stripping away a lot of its pandemic relief, you know, in the government has actually had reserves a variety of things, masks and all that. And they've gotten rid of it. After the, after the Asian flu, the SARS version zero and 0.1, you know, 1015 years ago, it you know, they got rid of all those stores. And so they're actively uninsured or D insuring our society against it. And this is, you know, this is the organization that was supposed to have unlimited resources, right. And yet, it's still constraining itself. And so like my story for that, and tell me what you think, is that people just, this is this is like this kind of like risk assessment kind of flaw that we have. And here's the sympathetic story. With my sympathetic story for that is risk is infinite, David, like, so we're talking about pandemics, but what about asteroids? And what about like, you know, we don't have any Star Wars defense program, and, you know, on and on the list can go of things you could imagine, which would be really bad. And out in the tail, there's a whole bunch of stuff that could wipe us out that we don't, we can't insure against everything. And so you kind of have to draw the line somewhere, people might say, and, and where and how should you think about drawing that line, except to say, Look behind you and say, well, what's happened in the last 15 years? I'm gonna read about those risks.

David Soloff: 26:16

Yeah, I think what you're, what you're describing, actually, is just late stage capitalism. You know, which is like, you know, where, you know, the answer is just fucking deal with it. Like, like, literally, it's like, it's vicious, no one's going to help you. You better have some mechanism to acquire the capital you need, but we're not going to give it to you. You're too stupid to know that you should have this cover. No one's taking the time to explain it to you. You're not going to buy it anyway, even if you understand it. Because you're going to convince yourself either one is not going to happen to me. Or two, if it does, the government's going to bail me out because they bail everyone out, don't they? Well, no, they don't. They only bail out a narrow sector of the economy in the market. Actually, we're seeing that right now. But everything you're saying is right, there risk is infinite. When you take, you know, all risk, but some risks are not, you know, some risks are actually, I won't say they're known. But they're not infinite. There is a quantum there. And there is a way to measure it. Especially that's

David Wright: 27:28

what, that's what we haven't even talked about Ott risk is and maybe we should, maybe you can tell us like,

David Soloff: 27:33

we're talking about it. We're talking about it right now. I mean, like, you know, this is the argument I have with myself and with my colleagues and investors all the time, which is are people actually going to buy it, you know, yeah. You know, and what do they need to be forced to buy it or they do they need to be sold it without knowing they're buying it.

David Wright: 27:54

But in your case, like, it was really interesting about your business model, as I understand it, is that you're actually kind of taking a pretty narrow slice out of this, which is to say, we're going to work on analytics platforms, which ties into your personal history, which I'd love to get into, as well as background for this. But you're saying, Let's get the data and the analysis together to understand the risk better, and use that as kind of our point of leverage in which to try and create change around us. You're not you're not boiling the ocean, right? You're trying to be focused?

David Soloff: 28:21

No, I mean, absolutely, we don't have enough capital at our disposal to boil the ocean to try to ensure the ocean, I mean, we're just using a technology driven approach to taking a seemingly infinite risk, and identifying slices or tranches of it, or factors of it, that will impact a insured or cedent adversely over some period of time, during the policy period. We're looking at our historical models to assess how frequently certain classes of named trigger perils have happened, and what the macro and micro economic impact of those dislocating events have been. And then we're also adding a hybrid layer to the model, which is understanding that historical models are necessary but not sufficient. We're also then looking at the current volatility regime for those risks that we believe we're operating in. And we make a calculation and we say, hey, for$2 million of business continuity cover and defined in some more specific way that I won't go into now, we will serve as your Counterparty will make you whole or will make you partially hold depending on how much you want to pay in premium. And here are the parametric triggers that we agree or are agreeing upon, to structure around and it will be evident to us whether there are breaches and will make you whole and it's our belief that based on the analytic enterprise We've built that what we're effectively doing is identifying business interruption, non physical damage, business interruption scenarios, for your business, in your geography for a given timeframe. So it's not us trying to backstop the system. It's not us trying to backstop the industry, it's us trying to backstop either an insurer who's delivering an insurance product with an enhanced or embedded bi cover to a specific customer or is going directly to the corporate, and eventually the SME and serving as their Counterparty. And rather than trying to generate a lot of enthusiasm among capital providers, or public sector agencies, for the approach, we're bringing our own capital to it. So we'll serve as the counterparty we want to, we're confident in the approach and we want to hold the risk. We think that there can be a profitable trade here.

David Wright: 31:00

And so like, what I also want to touch on too, is your own background here. Right, which is, you know, this is a, again, there's there's a theme, and you know, in my research I I kind of have seen and you've also articulated a pattern in your own personal professional development, which is about finding data that can help with kind of messy problems. Yeah, right. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the context here. So maybe go back to premise and maybe metal markets a little bit to sort of say, though, how else have you approached this kind of challenge in your, in your history in your career? Yeah,

David Soloff: 31:37

so I don't know if it was you I said it to or maybe I said it to myself in a dream. But um, you know, if you're lucky, you get one good idea or concept in your life, and, like you spend your whole career just iterating and reiterating and just trying to get it right. That definitely is my story. You know, I I've always been interested in things that are hiding in plain sight, and harvesting information that is, you know, right in front of us, or flying past us in order to make evident these things and and do something with them either risk, manage or profit or make better decisions from them. I mean, if I had to put it down to a word, it just be indexing indexation, right? It's this elegant and kind of wonderful, amazing set of businesses that get kind of can get built around it and a set of exercises that can get built around it. In my

David Wright: 32:43

indexing, I'm not sure I understand the the

David Soloff: 32:46

the as in as in taking a bunch of disparate or even related data points that could be transactions or prices were responses to a question, taking them and collecting them over time, and aggregating them in meaningful ways such that you are using the Delta or change from one point to the next in that set of answers or aggregated answer, to tell a story about how things around the question are changing, and how people's relationship to the question or the transaction is changing, right. So an example of an index would be a stock market index, right? It's a single number, with a change that people use as a real shorthand, which serves as a proxy for a whole host of things. Some amazing leverage point, like it's an amazing intellectual leverage point. And then you can do all sorts of derivative things off of it. You can tell all sorts of stories, or you can build a whole narrative around it, you can make the mistake of causation or correlation with it, and you can do all sorts of things. So all of the businesses that I've started, have related to that in one way, shape, or form. And what I've always wanted to get to the point where I hope we get to with Ott, which is risk management, and using this indexation approach as a mechanism for navigating increasingly turbulent times. And, yes, someone involved in that transaction might be doing it to make a profit. But someone on the other side of that trade, hopefully is deriving a more significant benefit than profit as in, maybe they're getting paid out when they need it most. So when people you know, bet on derivatives, or use derivatives in the financial markets, there are all these different motives that are behind people's decision to put spate in those markets, some of them are out of necessity, as in their operating a business. And they they fear they're exposed to a surge in raw materials costs, that would be catastrophic for them, they have no choice but to essentially buy protection in the form of a derivative. On the other side of that trade, there might be the sharks list of sharks who are selling that cover. And they're only motive they could give a rat's, you know, knows about who's on the other side of it. They just like the price. That's great. I mean, if that if that that's a wonderful situation, because both both actors are having their needs met in that regard. So but in order to let these really strange bedfellows come together, you need to have a common mechanism, a common analytic framework and a common understanding about why the index works, what the components of it are, you need to have some confidence in it. You know, there is, there's a really, really smart guy that I had the good fortune of talking to a number of years ago before I started my first business. His name's Peter borash. And he he's one of sort of the godfathers of quantitative trading. He, he worked for, he was head of trading a tutor for a while, and he's done all kinds of systematic trading on Wall Street. And I was talking to him about indexation in connection with my first business metal markets. And he had kind of three rules of thumb regarding the utility of an index. One, he said is, it needs to have utility, it needs to be useful. Nobody wants an index around that's like cool, but actually not useful. You need to make a very cogent argument for why it's important and how it relates to things in the actual world. business decisions you're going to make investments are going to make something risks you're going to cover or hedge away to, it needs to be transparent, but not so transparent, that someone could reverse engineer it. So it needs to be transparent enough that people can understand how it's made, they need to have confidence that's being made the right way. But it still needs to have some special sauce with respect to the aggregation and collection of it or you need to be protected by trade trademark or patent. Or it needs to be adjudicated by a nonprofit public domain entity like the World Bank or the US Treasury. And the third is that it needs to be repeatable. People who are going to bet their livelihood or use this as a tool, they need to make sure that it continues on and on that doesn't go away the next day or the next month or the next year. So I've always kind of kept those things in front of me, I've memorized them right and like, because I think they're really good rules of thumb. So to bring that back to Ott, in the case of understanding what business interruption risk is, you know, we focused around not doing the indexation, but rather coming up with an analytic framework such that we can use indexes that are in the public domain, or that are out there. That not that we're collecting, and not that we own. But we're using them and we're back testing them one against another through different categories, to narrow down the risk than sorry, to narrow down the basis risk of the risk that we're going to take on on behalf of a business or corporate or an insurance company. The other businesses have focused on things like indexing transaction data for the media markets. with minimum, that's what we built was, I had this grand vision that you know, we were going to build the Bloomberg for the digital media ecosystem. You know, this was going back to the late 2000, aughts. And you know, everything, all advertising dollars were moving online. It was a very, very lumpy kind of arbitrary mechanism that was used to price ad spots across all of these digital properties. There was no kind of data hub for any of it. And so I thought, hey, what better way to risk manage, and to enable different parties in that market, to risk manage, and to hedge? There's no better way than creating a data hub or a data bus for all this transaction data. And if we could somehow compel all the different actors to supply their transaction information, then we'd be able to create a data utility. And then we'd also be able to build derivatives off of it and let people risk manage, right, familiar, same idea over and over again. Well, we didn't even get close to doing that.

David Wright: 39:44

Why not? You think?

David Soloff: 39:46

Well, I mean, I could go into a lot of I mean, there's lots of different reasons, the, the the answer that's most fit for the current audience consumption. I have a whole riff I can go on about co founder risk and investor risk and market risk and during this, but the I think all of those things were exacerbated by the more fundamental risk, which was I was trying to answer a problem with the market really didn't perceive as a high value problem. And where there were much bigger problems to solve first. But I was so in love with the idea that I didn't see the risk inherent in trying to push on it. And I wasn't content with giving the market what I was asking for, given the technology we'd built. Ultimately, we did. But there were a host of painful lessons, we had to learn in between what we wanted to build and get into the market versus what the market was going to value and reward us for. And that's more about like entrepreneurship and startups. And

David Wright: 40:51

yeah, because if I, if I could dwell on that just for a second, because I like this, there's an interesting juxtaposition. I don't know attention. I don't know what the right metaphor is here. But the the, you know, you're clearly a passionate guy. Right? And that's the sort of thing that gives you the energy to start your third startup dude, my God, very impressive. And yet, I think we were listening there a little bit is there's a little bit of a downside to that, which is you can get a little bit, you know, overly committed to something right, you fall in love,

David Soloff: 41:21

you have to be it's it's it is the, you know, it's the true, it's the true definition of a two edged sword, right, which is,

David Wright: 41:31

right.

David Soloff: 41:31

But it was so optimistic and so passionate and so stubborn. And so embracing of risk, almost to a psychotic level. That, well, you know, it's funny. I mean, I do want to talk about entrepreneurship.

David Wright: 41:51

Let's go, man. Yeah, sure. I mean, shoot, like, how, like, how risky is entrepreneurship, you know, because here's, here's something the audience is gonna be thinking about here, right? Let's because as, as I kind of mentioned to you, when we were kind of setting this up, the audience has provided family insurance, veterans, and I know what an interesting things you've done, is, you've talked to a bunch of insurance veterans and developing the business plan and the model for your company. And so you're interested in that kind of, like, real feedback, and some of the learning to sit in the audience thinking, you know, dismissive, right? They're gonna say, this guy, you know, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't really know. And there's a bunch of bunch of things that you know, you could you point out little flaws in the like, but that's not how you innovate? Is it? Right? The way you actually bust through these problems is you have the passion, you have the drive, you know enough about this to not realize it's not like completely insane? I don't know, maybe sometimes it is, but you got to push through it. Right. And so actually, you being on the show is enormously encouraging. I would say if I was investing your company, sign because you're trying to figure it out, you know, you're gonna shout this guy, you never met an actuary. He's gonna grill you for an hour and you didn't know anything about me. And here you are. And so the passion is driving you through this.

David Soloff: 42:57

Yes. So. Amen. So many things to say to that. Gosh, where to start? So I love being told I'm wrong. And I and and maybe the only thing I love better than being told I'm wrong is being shown I'm wrong. Because that's, you know, a great way to learn. And it's always short circuit mistakes. And like, one thing I've learned, and I've gotten progressively better at, over the course of my three companies is I was very afraid to learn I was wrong. early on as an entrepreneur, that's for a lot of reasons. One, you know, I was younger. I was hurts, right?

David Wright: 43:43

I mean, it hurts for people to tell you wrong and for them to be right.

David Soloff: 43:46

Worried, right? Because at a certain point in your career or your life, you know, being wrong poses an existential threat. Right? It can block you out, you know, it might be just the thing that a potential investor needs to say, you know what, we love you. And we love the idea, but we just can't get there. Get there as code for investors saying we're not going to back you. Right. It's like, Oh, we were so close. But we just at the end of and the reason I know this is that it's burned in my soul. At the end of the day, we just couldn't get there. Yeah. But we'll be cheering you on from the sidelines,

David Wright: 44:28

it's all the same words, right.

David Soloff: 44:29

And everyone love to touch base with you. And keep in touch with and, and keep on top of the progress you make. And hopefully, we can work together in the future. Which is, yeah, you know what, sorry, do later and I'm going to completely forget that I've ever spoken here. And that's okay. Like, All right, good. But when you're early on and you don't have any demonstrable success, and like You know, you're working some, you know, in my case, I was starting my companies and working as a, you know, contractor consultant to other companies. And it was, you know, I wasn't going to do that for the rest of my life, I had no choice. You know, and I also knew that there was no other way to bring these ideas to life other than to start my own enterprise. And then, and then there's, like, the quirks of personality of the founder, which is that like, I am delusionally optimistic. And I am. I do have a high pain threshold. You know, and I am comfortable with trauma. Like, these are things like, you know, you know, there's a really wonderful investor, who's like, the most intellectual, I mean, if anyone were to make entrepreneurship and investment, a kind of elegant science or almost artwork, it's someone named Mike Dearing, who is he runs a fund called Harrison metal. And he's a sole practitioner. He's a craftsman, if that makes sense if you can be. And he's an intellectual about it. He's kind of built his own university curriculum around entrepreneurship. And, like, the sociology of entrepreneurship, and the psychology of entrepreneurship. And, you know, he's got a whole riff that he's done about, you know, the sort of cognitive quirks of startup founders, you know, there's five qualities that they that the best founders demonstrate. And, you know, he hadn't he goes into some depth about it, but there's a reason why a lot of founders are from, you know, first generation families or immigrants. You know, there's a fear of the events, you know, it's it's like succeed or die. You know, they do have a delusionally, large ego, you know, large sense of their own rectitude, they have outsized egos, they're sociopathic. You know, like, they will do things, regardless of what the conventions are. It's kind of alarming to read and talk to him about this over because he, here's the first capital in my second company premise, and it was alarming to read, like, I was like, Wow, he was he looking for these hallmarks in me. So anyway, like, there's obviously a lot I can say about it. But all of that, like, the good thing is, I have gotten more rather than less successful as I've stayed in it. And so I feel like wouldn't company number three, I am looking actively at the very early stages to be told and shown why and how I'm wrong. I'm not afraid of it, it actually is the most efficient thing. And I may choose to ignore it, just because I'm being shown and told that I'm wrong doesn't mean that I am following the advice or the input, right. I may choose to actively defy it. But at least I know how and why I'm being perceived as wrong.

David Wright: 48:04

What was the last thing that you were shown to have gotten wrong that you incorporate it into your your integrated into your plans for Ott risk?

David Soloff: 48:13

Oh, that did that is a great. So you're presuming that I have a plan for a TT risk?

David Wright: 48:19

Oh, you could pretend you didn't have to tell anybody that David. I saw that one pager.

David Soloff: 48:26

I hey, ma'am. I know that one pager quite well. Okay, so the question is, what is the last thing that I have been shown is wrong about my plan that I have incorporated into my plan? Wow. I think the idea of being an own capital provider,

David Wright: 48:55

interesting,

David Soloff: 48:56

using a proprietary technical approach, to carve out and push forward on a new type of standalone cover. You know, there's three different things I've been told, can't happen. But the one that has made the most active appearance in our business plan is raising a balance sheet to get our approach into the market more quickly than it ever otherwise would be possible to do. So I was told by someone don't do that. That's a catastrophic mistake. You'll be sowing the seeds of your own destruction before this product ever sees the light of day.

David Wright: 49:39

And you you so you're at one point had plans to raise a balance sheet and now you're going to operate through existing balance sheets. Is

David Soloff: 49:46

that a plan bus Okay, let's analytics provider, ISIS pricer. Let's be the hub around which things get originated but we're not going to hold any of the risk and we won't ever own capital. You know, be the arms dealer, you know, and my, you know, from businesses I've started, I've learned that, like, it sucks being the analytics provider. Because like, you don't participate in the value you create, if this thing works, you know, you're like on the sideline like, you know, being proud that people are having a lot of success. You know, using your stuff, and getting more and more successful, generating, generating more and more margin or solving bigger and bigger problems, and all you're doing it's not it's not, it's not trivial. It's just that I want to be a principal, you know, and so that there's that there's the ego involved. There's also I think, maybe more importantly, is the recognition that in this industry, in insurance, reinsurance, if you're not bringing your own capital, you're wholly dependent on someone providing capital to enable you to test whether your product can work. Yep. And that's, that is definitely a major, that's an operating risk, it could even be an existential risk. And if you're, and if you are successful in getting that capital, it's still not your capital, it's someone else's. So here, yes,

David Wright: 51:22

there's a lot of hand wringing in the insurance, business, Davidovich, maybe you've gotten clued in on a little bit about how the pure balance sheet play is a commodity. And so it doesn't command very great returns. And so there's a sort of ever present. All the talk, let's put it this way, the insiders talk is usually about how disintegrating the value chain and is actually, you know, the source of a lot of innovation, I mean, it would keep up with everything. So I shouldn't be too, you know, I don't want to reduce this too much. But, you know, wherever you can pull out a trans balance sheet. And now you can sort of, you can just sort of pay them, you know, 4% or something like that. And then you can assemble everything else around it and command higher margins. So people were kind of obsessed with this. Now, that is not an innovation forward plan, right? That's about extracting, it's about optimizing. Right? And you're talking about something very different here, which is like bringing something wholly new to the marketplace.

David Soloff: 52:18

That's right. That's right. So you know, capital in and of itself is not valuable, boom, it is valuable, it's really nice. It's valuable, valuable is the cap

David Wright: 52:27

literally has a price on it, which is plus the availability

David Soloff: 52:30

plus the cost of it, right. So it's one of those things that's necessary, but not sufficient here. You know, we're not i'm not building, we're not building an investment fund. We're not trying to evolve as an alternative capital provider. capitalist, an instrument, just like technology is an instrument to bring a new product to life and hopefully have a market develop around it. In this case, we want it to be resilience market, you know, because, you know, business interruption business continuity really is the ultimate resilience play. You know, there's a real market need and a market hunger for ESG and resilience investments. There's a supply shortfall. There's more capital that wants to participate in it, then there are slots for availability. And here we have an absolutely burning need in the world, for capital to support resilience. At the moment when on the one hand, government is nowhere to be found, and on the other insurance is nowhere to be found. The insurance industry is not playing an active role, and it doesn't have an intention or a solution to do. So. It's going to do something that's hand is forced. It's not even, like responsive to public relations fiascos. No, it's only regulatory. That's the only thing that's going to get it to move. Yeah. Dude, that's bullshit. I mean, like that, you know, I understand that you've got a good franchise, I totally get it. But like, seriously, this is a there's a huge business opportunity here. It's not like I'm, I'm not a charity, you know, I'm gonna work. Hopefully God Willing build a high impact, very profitable, tech technology company that brings its own capital bear to get this kickstarted.

David Wright: 54:18

That's the hope. Tell me where you are kind of in your developmental process right now. So like, all kinds of stages, startups go through what it was to kind of the problem you're focusing on right now? Are you getting customers ready for that? Is that just pure tech build, like, tell me,

David Soloff: 54:32

we're actually building on the tech and we've got something that works. So call it a minimum viable product, call it you know, version one Dotto. Whatever you want to call it. We've got capital and you know, hopefully, we're going to be underwriting our first transactions by the end of the second quarter. Now that could get delayed or it might fall through and you know, but We're going to be getting into the market this year. Now, what does that look like? Well, it means that it's either embedded or standalone bi or ntbi. Cover, it means it's either insurance, reinsurance or retro cover, it means we are either the entire or partial holder of the risk. And it means that we've used our analytic and pricing approach to support that transaction.

David Wright: 55:26

That's pretty exciting. What is one thing from an like an analytic perspective of just talking about the model? What's something in the model that surprised you guys? Oh, I didn't think this would matter.

David Soloff: 55:39

What? how relevant history is, to this new type of approach to ensuring and even how important and revealing history is, even when dealing with quote, unexpected draw downs and dislocations that if you cast a wide enough net on the perils end, and you're looking for the right connections, or correlations at the economic level, you can build a very, very powerful historical model. That's not going to be sufficient if your starting point is that things are fundamentally different and changing rapidly right now. But it is a critical critical input or lag in the model. What's so what surprised us has been how effective that approach has been for us.

David Wright: 56:34

And you're defining these crises generally. I mean, it's not just pandemics wherever we're at kind of example, events. And

David Soloff: 56:42

yes, it wasn't history. Yeah. So there's, there's so many different ways to slice it. But, you know, the, I guess the the easiest answer for for right now, and maybe the crudest is to say there's kind of two categories, there's included and excluded. You know, and if you think about exclusions and perils and named perils, you know, in the current in the current cases, being adjudicated or argued, with respect to the pandemic and government enforced lockdowns, you've got a list of trigger events, many of which are excluded explicitly, others of which are unnamed, but being argued should be excluded. So that's and that's within the context of maybe two, potentially three categories, a global health event, a government mandated lockdown, and then a much trickier and more numinous and potentially more powerful, aggravating peril, which is disinformation, misinformation, which I'd argue is made the pandemic and the pandemic response. So foggy and so complicated and so protracted.

David Wright: 58:09

What does that mean? disinformation? I mean, I understand that, I think but

David Soloff: 58:13

in a universe where people are not doubting the efficacy of vaccines, how much more quickly can you recover from a pandemic villain, in a scenario where 50% of the population believes that it's going to make them unhealthy to take the vaccine, or in a in a world where information or misinformation or disinformation, is convincing people that they should not take certain protective measures to stop the spread of a virus? How much worse? or How much longer? Or how much greater is the burden on health systems, when you've got actors and then counter actors? Right. So that's, that's, I think that that is that that sort of multi that lets the word that nexus of events and perils is increasingly what we're going to see. Right? So you've got a global health event. You've got almost out of the gate arguments and contentions about how severe or not severe this thing is, which in and of itself slows the response, but also magnifies the spread at the same time, then you've got a very, very long stretch of time where people don't quite know whether they should or shouldn't engage in commerce and education. And now you've got sort of the third act, which is an argument or a fight over vaccines and vaccine and availability here in California. Reading the press, one would think that we have an under supply of vaccines, looking at the vaccination rate in the state and looking at the press cover and looking at what is being talked about online and Facebook or elsewhere. The reality is that in the state, you've got 1000s of facts of shots being thrown away every day because there are no takers because people are being actively discouraged from signing up for slots. Because they believe that it's impossible to candidate. So like, that's what I mean. And then that's not even getting into who's behind that. Is that a coordinated action? Right? Like not to sound like a, you know, a tinfoil hat person. But it's been it's it's been monstrously effective, whatever it is, right. So that's what I mean by that. So you've got, like, different levels of peril.

David Wright: 1:00:25

Can I can ask you about that, like, how do you validate that component of the model? So I have no idea. I've never been you've done something? I would, I would think that you guys would have to like, I mean, if you're putting in the model, you're gonna have to, you know, put some testing to it's not.

David Soloff: 1:00:40

It's not in the model, it can't be on, I don't know what it is.

David Wright: 1:00:44

Right. Okay. That's what I'm getting at now that, because like, I'm thinking, like, I could imagine I could I could, I could, I could tell you a story, David, for how that would contribute to a pandemic story that would even believe. But can I go back in history and say, Well, if the 1918 flu had had more disinformation, how much bigger of a loss would be like? Again, I could tell you a nice story about that. But do I have any idea? No.

David Soloff: 1:01:05

And I and I, you know, this, this answer can be complete bullshit. I mean, maybe Actually, it's been the most effective response ever. And no, vaccines I am, you know, the triumph of, you know, developing this and rolling it out in 12 months time is unbelievable than it is. Right? It This is an argument or debate about whether the response has been effective. What I'm saying is, how much more or less effective have things been as a function of this related phenomenon? That's all? Yeah, so I don't know, yet how one can quantify it. But, you know, we've got some ideas for that. But I will say that, you know, we can look at the frequency of certain kinds of global health events and declarations. And then we can look at the macro economic impact and some time window after that's happened, we can look at that historically. And we can focus underwriting or pricing or transferring the risk associated with economic fallout, rather than the binary event of a global health event being declared. Right? I, you know, I think that a big point that we've become increasingly convinced of is that the over rotation on the naming of and risk modeling of the trigger peril, I think, is a tension that should be paid elsewhere, to the mid and long tail, economic impact and human impact of those events, not in a physical event, like not in the person who's gotten sick, but rather, in the business owner, and the employees have been impacted by the government shutdown, because everyone's worried that more and more people are going to get sick. That's a secondary peril.

David Wright: 1:02:44

Could you could you talk about that a little bit more. So you're saying de emphasize the naming, right. So like, almost, you know, and discretize these events? Because I think it's like the naming what's nice about that is that you can

David Soloff: 1:02:56

think about it being you know, is so you know, one of the one of the important questions we're asking ourselves now in modeling out is, is there really, truly in this product that we're talking about here? Which is really economic catastrophe cover? Right? Is there really is there a qualitative or quantitative difference in a single named peril or an all peril product? Do they function the same? Right, because really, all we care about is when there's been a macro drawdown, and some event upfront has happened, there may be one of those events for a given region like a hurricane. That's more and more frequent. And we can see what the impact is on the gross economy of a region. And that can serve as an initial trigger. But when we tally all of those different events up across multiple categories, and then look at when a macro economic drawdown has been affected, and where a parametric trigger would be activated. Do we care? Or do we only care how frequently that macro economic event has happened? And how severe it's been? Does it almost not matter? What the trigger cost has been? Because the impact it's having on people is equally severe, irrespective of what's caused it in the first place? Maybe that's an intellectual or abstract argument.

David Wright: 1:04:21

I don't think so actually, because I think it's actually a really important point. And let me let me sort of give you what I my my kind of like, summon the insurance industry, conventional wisdom here into the conversation. So I'll say that typical insurance person would say, well, the customer doesn't care. But moral hazard says I should care. Because if every time the customer trips over a break in the sidewalk, and then claims on me, or for that matter, just takes the money and says, invokes you know, the claws saying, oh, there is no definite event here. But you know, this year I kind of had a bad year. So I'm going to take your money. I'm going to I'm going to submit a claim. Right for for if you don't have as tight definition for an event, you expose yourself Tu, Tu, Tu Ulta moral hazard, right. And so like I had experienced my own career designing stop loss products, which is a version of what we're talking about here. And in the end, you kind of have to de risk it somehow. So just Nick your wallet, and and or it's merely a promise to litigate. Right. So you might say, you know, here's a, I mean, there's one, there's one famous dealer insurance business for systemic systemic cover, which is another version of this. And it was like a three or four page definition of loss, right? And effectively, we joked in my moments, my former colleagues, this is just a promise to go to court, because nobody's ever gonna agree on anything here. Right? So react to that.

David Soloff: 1:05:42

So the effort we're taking is to look at the scenarios you describe as the things we want to avoid. We don't want to ensure an aptitude. We want to be protected against moral risk or moral hazard or social inflation. And we think we've got some mechanisms for doing so one, we look at that broad parallel universe and broad parallel set, and look back over history and look at the frequency of breach across one or some combination, or all perils. We then look at to this. So that serves as a first parametric trigger. A secondary or second parametric trigger is macro economic drawdown, when those events have happened and trigger one, what has been the macro economic impact as measured through things like Purchasing Managers index or consumer sentiment or GDP growth or tax receipts? Okay, you're starting to narrow basis risk. However, that's still way too broad a brush for parametric payout for a business that would be covered that could be covered. When one and two have been breached, there's still too many actors have not suffered a loss. There's still too many people getting a benefit who don't need one and the inverse is also true. So then we go to a third trigger, which is macroeconomic or industry specific data. When there's been a trigger breach, when there's been a macro economic drawdown, what has been the impact on a specific industry or sub sub sector within an industry as measured through revenue growth, profitability margins, or industry specific metrics, like miles driven or passenger seats flown or room nights booked or interest, average revenue per user? Okay, you've narrowed basis risk yet again. And if we do that by geography, or region of a country, you can go even further. So at that point, you've got a fairly effective narrowing mechanism that's parametrically focused, where you're eliminating circumstance Now, within that, Could someone had their losses? Right? It's like when companies restructure in a bad quarter in a down market?

David Wright: 1:07:45

Yeah, yeah.

David Soloff: 1:07:47

So someone would be paying for the privilege to do that as and they'd be covering a larger amount and would be paying a larger premium? Would that ultimately lead to a bigger payout for them as they pad their losses? Yes. So then you can go to a fourth trigger, which is either another parametric or hybrid indemnification. The fourth parametric would be okay, we're going to look at your historic company, company specific data. And we're going to look at how it's performed visa V, the industry sub industry, the macro, the broader macro environment, and the trigger environment. And we're going to essentially, determine that we're going to ensure that your business is also similarly responding during a down market. But because you've aligned with everything else, what we're doing is making sure that we're not paying you for company specific episode, what we're paying or for management inaptitude, we're paying you now, again, there's still some basis risk there, right? Because, well, because you could have maybe effectively managed your way out of this, but you chose not to, because you knew you're going to get paid out on your claim. I don't know, the the hybrid indemnification would be literally enabling an audit of financial statements or business performance metrics. When a claim is filed, to ensure that the diminished performance is a function of not extra charges, or writing off inventory, when in fact you didn't write it off, etc. But you literally have an audit, that is a much heavier lift from an implementation standpoint. But if you do want to get obsessed about eliminating that basis risk to the extent possible. That would be the structure to do it with him. You know, we like the pure parametric approach, because it's lightweight. And it means that we're willing to live with some degree of basis risk, but I think large scale fraudulent behavior would be more difficult under the reg ime I've described.

David Wright: 1:09:52

So you got a pretty sophisticated understanding of how all this works, David can attest. Now I'm curious and we have to close on this because I think we're out of time Here. But has this surprised you? I mean, you have done a pretty good job articulating the complexity of, of, you know, the different trade offs and designing insurance products going into it. I imagine you weren't aware of kind of how you know how that you probably wouldn't imagine yourself recreating all this complexity, I would think. So tell me about that journey, you've been on learning about insurance?

David Soloff: 1:10:26

Well, I've been on a journey. Because I've been in the same chair for a year. You know, I feel like it's come to me in a lot of ways. And what I mean by that is, you know, we've put something out there. And because everyone's literally in their chair on their computer, the feedback has been really, really fast. And the barriers to getting kind of meetings or conversations set up, has gotten, you know, the barriers have gotten much lower, things are happening much more fluidly, and much more quickly. And I really like it. I don't think that's a function of the insurance industry. I think it's a function of the time within which we're starting the business. So it's been really that's been really refreshing. I am, I'm an insurance industry novice. I, you know, I have a once I have a reverent approach to the industry, I've respectful approach. There's a lot of capital here. There's a lot of expertise. And there's a reason things have been done the way they've been done historically. I just feel like we're in completely unprecedented territory, given you know, the nature of society. You know, risk is different now.

David Wright: 1:11:45

So, Are you hiring? What can What can you even ask for the audience? Tom, tell me how I can help you, David.

David Soloff: 1:11:52

The simple answer is yes to everything. Customer partner, underwriter, engineer, capital provider, seeding, broker, blogger, skeptic, Patriot, lover, fighter, I mean, anything. I mean,

David Wright: 1:12:11

come one come all.

David Soloff: 1:12:12

Well, you know, there's no such thing as a bad intro or a bad connection. I just, you know, serendipity plays a massive role in entrepreneurship. You just never know where it's gonna go. And you just got to kind of be open to it.

David Wright: 1:12:24

Great. My guest today is David soloff. David, thank you so much for your time.

David Soloff: 1:12:27

Thank you. This is awesome.