Property Risk Data with Bob Frady from Hazard Hub

James BenhamOn episode 25 of the InsurTech Geek podcast talking about property risk data with Bob Frady from HazardHub. The InsurTech Geek Podcast powered by Jamie Knowledge is all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. We're interviewing minds behind the technological innovations and doing deep dives into specific technologies that we see changing the industry. We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech, so enjoy the ride and geek out. Man, always a good day to talk about Insurance Tech in particular when it's summertime. I've got a guest from one of the most beautiful places in the country, Orange County, California.

Bob Frady, how are you doing? I am fantastic.

Bob FradyLiving the COVID

James Benhamdream. Right? I mean alright. So some beaches are open and others are not? Or are they all closed I right don't I have I have zero idea. I I'm a hermit in my own home. I have a pool and a yard and a new grill. So leave me alone. Nice. Tell me that it's okay to go outside. I literally just moved into a new house a year ago, and it has a backyard pool cabana grill. Like, it has a whole combo thing. I a basketball court in the backyard, like a little half court in the backyard.

It's got a little playground, too, because I have a 10 year old who was nine at the time, and she's still young enough to enjoy that kind of thing. And I was like, thank the Lord, I've got something to do on my property. You know what I mean? Oh, It's amazing. It's like so thankful. There's so many people around the world that have been locked in condos and apartments that literally can't go anywhere. And that's tough, man. So you got your little Orange County backyard dreamscape, Yep.

Bob FradyYep. You know, it's I really feel for people who have been just tremendously impacted by this. And we're really lucky. Yeah. The creating data takes focus.

James BenhamAnd when you can't go anywhere, it just means you have more focus. Yeah. There's a there's a lot of really productive work going on in the last four months because people are like, I mean, the amount this is the that's what's so fascinating. And by the way, of course, we have the illustrious, the most interesting man in insurance, Rob Galbraith, good buddy of mine. Another Texagander that's right Texas and Michigan comboed into one. He's in Texas. I'm in Michigan right now. I'll be back in Texas in a few weeks because school is quote unquote starting.

We'll see. The Texas Education Association keeps changing the rules every three days. So we'll see what what it looks like August 13. But, Rob, good to see you. Good to see you, James. You know, Rob, what's been interesting and you track start ups and, of course, you know, Bob, you're you're a you're a tech company. I'm a tech company in insurance. What happens during these and every single time people get laid off and they start idea generating what they want to do, and they start new companies.

And so right now, we're already hearing of people splitting off and starting new ventures and, you know, getting started on new ideas. They have a lot of time to themselves. So they decide to whiteboard the idea and start writing code and connect with some buddies. It's usually pretty interesting two years after one of these things, because you have

Bob Fradya lot of companies that come out of the other side. Right? So Bob, I mean, I'm sure you Bob, I'm sure that's what you're referring to. Yeah. It's well, for us, we were a little bit further down the road, but even increasing the frequency with which we're able to look at our own stuff. Sometimes you get to creating things and you sort of like, okay, I've done that. I'm to push it over here. So well, now I have all this time. Let's go back and make it better and better.

And then you're right, on the carrier side, you see some people who are like, finally, I'm going to get out of here and do my own thing, which is great. But then other people who are still there are like, it's time to go through the junk drawer of all the things I've always wanted to do, but I've been tied up in meetings for such a long time. And, you know, my budgets are going to get cut at some point, so I need to be more effective.

And so it's,

James Benhamin some ways it's a threat, but in other ways it's a tremendous opportunity to do things better. Yeah, I think there's a whole lot could say wrapped around that. Like, we had this period of time in April and May where it was like Zoomapalooza, and everybody's just like in video meetings all day because they're freaking out because they can't see people. And they think that the answer is to manage by Zoom, And it's it's like MBZ is gonna be a phrase or, manage by Zoom by just, like, Zooming the hell out of our employees.

And I think people have backed off a little bit. I've been in fewer Zoom meetings on a weekly basis. I've seen the webinar count come down. People kinda freaked out and started doing a ton of webinars. Now they've cooled down on the webinars. It's like they're starting to settle back. I even had a couple people recently, Rob, that said, hey, look, instead of Zoom, can we just do a phone call? And I'm like, that's cool. No, seriously. And I was like, you know what? I'm not dressed for it.

Sounds great. You know, I've been dressing up every day, you know, and I'm an old I'm an old ROTC cadet from A and M. You know, I liked I liked wearing a uniform. So this is my Friday uniform. I really like my Hawaii shirt Fridays, but

Rob GalbraithI was into that. Rob, have you seen that? Have you seen that, Rob, where people are like, can we just talk on the phone and not see each other on video? Yeah, I know you're spot on, James. It's kind of funny because it depends on the group. It depends on the time of day. We're about an early morning meeting, right, or mid afternoon. You can tell, everyone's trying to figure out the protocol, right? And there's kind of like, one or two people turn their camera on.

But if we don't get a critical mass and those people turn it back off, right? But then if you get maybe at least half the attendees turn the camera on, then everyone else is kind of guilt shamed into turning those on. Yeah, very interesting time on the zoom meeting camera etiquette

James Benhamscale here. Yeah, they got to figure it out, man. There's They a lot of etiquette about working from home. The sheer number of memes that came out in the early COVID days where people forgot their camera was on. And then they like, there was one of like a lady like in the middle of a zoom call started going to the bathroom, like on the video camera. And I was like,

Bob Fradygot I got three kids. I've had them all. Oh, gosh.

James BenhamAnd they all the number of things kids have done. It's been amusing. So let's let's talk about

Rob GalbraithRob. Oh, just gonna say one thing I've noticed on a call this week, which I hadn't seen before. So right. My background is just kind of my office, my bookshelf, right. All that. And it's real. Like, that's actually I haven't dressed up. Right. But obviously people have the virtual backgrounds, but I've seen people now toggling their virtual background based on what they're saying, like to be the theme of what they're talking about. Yeah. One that was like a bank lobby. And then he switched to like a nightclub because he's now switching to talk about something with the music industry.

And I was like, okay, wow, this is now we're we're we're going a little too far here. Yeah. So I've been I I

James Benhamget Guitar which? Guitar has been my Corona project and I I went from never playing guitar. And I've played piano my whole life, and I've been singing in choirs my whole life, but I never play guitar. And I love guitar, and I'm a huge Led Zeppelin fan. And so I've been working on different backgrounds that represent my love for Led Zeppelin when I want to get the lead out. And that's been fun. I was in a meeting the other day, and I had my Aggie shirt on, my Texas A and M shirt on, and I I had to use the bathroom, like, really bad.

You know? Like, it was, like, an emergency. And I was like, I gotta go, but everybody has their video on. And and they said, like, video manage participation is mandatory. I'm not gonna explain what meeting this was. But but I was like, what can I do? And so I literally screen capped my video. So imagine I had a maroon shirt on right now, and I had my Minecraft background on at time because I love Minecraft. So I had this on with my maroon Aggie shirt. And so I screen capped it, made it my live background, and then I did this and I stepped out.

And so my virtual background was me smiling at the deal. So focused. I'm staring. Like, for those of you who can't who can't understand what I'm doing, I literally screen capped myself and made it my virtual background and was smiling. So it it did provide the bathroom break I needed, and I got back and then turned live video on, and no one noticed a thing. So it was awesome. You just you just need the animated GIF version of that, James, where you're kind of nodding but have a concerned look on your face to cover all your bases.

Yeah. And I tried to do that, but like I was doing it live and I couldn't I couldn't figure out how to do the video editing, like, while I was on video. And so look, it was a bathroom emergency. It was the most I could do. Just a reminder for all of you out there in listener land that you can subscribe to our weekly email that has the show notes and the link to the email and the audio link and anything that we talk about all by texting Geek Out to 66866.

That's Geek Out, g e e k, Geek Out to 66866. Make sure you never ever miss an episode. We have a lot of really good folks on here like Bob Frady. And Bob, let's come back to you. A bachelor's in applied economics with Cornell. Yep. Do you remember? Do you did you watch The Office? I did not watch The Office. Although, was a guy I do know there was a guy Andy. Andy. Who used to talk about hate the fact he went to Cornell all the time.

It's all he talked about. He goes, did you know I went to Cornell? By the way, do you remember when I was at Cornell? Look. When I was at Cornell, we had this he was actually in a acapella group at Cornell. It was Andy from The Office. I've watched every episode of The Office five times each. My daughter, my 13 year old is, like, super duper into it. I'd already seen every episode twice. She's watched all of them at least five times. I've watched a bunch with her because they're so funny, and the and Andy is obsessed with being Cornell.

My own personal Cornell connection is that was it was my very first video conference. I'm 41. So when I was in high school in the early nineties, we got on right after we got a high speed internet connection, like the year we got it. There was a professor at Cornell that did video conferencing technology. We got on my very first black and white five frame a second video conference with a computer science professor at Cornell. And I got, believe it or not, I was in the newspaper, Baton Rouge, Louisiana newspaper for having a video conference in 1994.

Did I tell you that I went to Cornell? Yeah. Did you mention that? Were you in a acapella group? A guy named Andy? Cornell is a great school. You studied economics, which I think is a really great foundational field of study for business and pretty much life in general, because you have to understand so much in economics. Led you from an econ degree to CEO and founder of an InsurTech? After I graduated,

Bob FradyI went to work for a company in New York called National Decision Systems. And what we did was geospatial technology before there was a name for geospatial technology. So we did a lot of things like site selection for retailers, you know, what's the traffic inflows and outflows, what's the crime like, things like that. So I've always been a spatial type of guy. I ended up running over the course of ten years, the insurance and investments practice for NDS. NDS got bought by Equifax, eventually got bought by Claritas and big, big, long chain of purchases.

So my career has always been, how do I take data and make sense of it geospatially rather than just either point by point or, you know, in general. And so I ended up doing a bunch of stuff in the geospatial area, worked for CoreLogic for a little while. My co founder needed some help with some major accounts, so he called me in to help him out. And that's where we met our third co founder, which is Doctor. Brady Faust. And then left that, did a bunch of marketing stuff and saw that there was a lot of new data, and there wasn't a lot of new effort around that data to make it actionable and workable.

And I thought, well, nobody else is going to do this. You know, it's a pain in the neck business. It's a humongously long sales cycle. It's really detail work. We might as well do it. So we built an MVP, we got a couple of people to raise their hand and off we went. And that was probably five years ago we had that meeting and we'll have our fifth birthday sometime next year. Did y'all just work on it after hours or was this something that you'd done on your own time and then you brought it together and bootstrapped it?

I mean, what was the origin? Well, what happened is when I was at another company, my former mother in law's house flooded And I looked up all the data because I knew how to, and she wasn't in a flood zone, but she was right next to one. And I said, did anybody ever tell you that you were right next to a flood zone? And she said, nope. And the river did its thing, wiped out her basement. She wasn't insured for it. And I was like, Man, that would have been good to tell people.

And I knew there was a huge imbalance between what consumers knew and what insurers knew. So I figured that's a fun problem to solve. And then just decided to say, okay, it was one of those issues I couldn't quite scratch. And finally I had a designer, I'm like, okay, let's design something. You know, let's just put it down on paper. So I spent a few dollars to do a design and that became the MVP. And the next thing you know, here we go. It's it was and yes, we did work on other jobs, but it was always a part time thing.

And then I got fired from my last job and I So probably have some time I was the first employee. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like people who get fired because it means they got a little fire in their belly. And if you could harness that properly, you can get a lot of productivity because a lot of times people get fired because they wanna do things better. They don't wanna keep the status quo. Did you have fire in your belly from that? I had fire in my belly from a lot of things, but that was one of them.

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's interesting to separate out the business from the business. You know, sometimes life just tells you things and life was telling me you need to start your own business. You need to stop working for somebody else and go start your own business. And this was an opportune time. I'd already been working on it. I was hoping to last another year at the job to, you know, to make sure that everything transitioned nicely.

James BenhamI was going to do it anyway. And so I got fired and became the CEO, employee number one. Okay. So just so we can overview this before we hand it off to Rob. What does your product, what does it do? I mean, is the core service offering for Hazard Hub?

Bob FradyAnd then what's, tell me about free home risk as well. Sure. Basically we tell you all the bad stuff that can happen to a property. Wind, hail, tornado, lightning, earthquake, underground storage tanks, commercial, personal doesn't make a difference to us. We like to think of the insurance world as three different games. There's the pregame, which is I walk up to a building, what can you tell me about it? Not just about the characteristics of that building, but also what are the perils that might impact this building.

The second is the in game. There's something going on. There's a fire. There's a flood. Something's going on. And then there's the post game, which is the claims area. Something's happened. We live in the pregame. So give me an address, and I will tell you 800 pieces of data about that address To give you a better opportunity to underwrite that and price that appropriately, or if you're on the agent side, to explain to your customer, here's the parallels that are probably going to attack your property, Why don't you take some steps to make sure that you're protected against those as much as you can?

And that's what we do in a very big nutshell. And this is because Free on risk is for consumers. Type in your address and get a scorecard. It's, we always believe in giving this data to consumers

James Benhamor insurers, if you will, just type in the address, get a report card, see what we have to say about your property. And a lot of times, interestingly, it's become not necessarily a lead gen tool for us, but a proof tool for us. So people will say, well, what do you say about this property? We'll go run it. And if they like it, then they talk to us. And if they don't, then they don't. That's okay. Yeah. And I ran my house on free home risk just as a precursor on this.

Check it out. It's really fascinating what you can find out. You know, it says 34 risk checks completed, 20 trigger for your address. They were all green. And I look, I'm super geek. So I I drone mapped my property before I bought it. I have I have I have seven drones. So I went and mapped everything and I did all the add ins and drone deploy where I pulled a lot of data. Then I went into the GIS database that was on city council. So I knew, you know, I had more data than your average bear.

I didn't use the city's GIS database, but I I knew where to find the public GIS database that was available to citizens. And I looked for, you know, flood map zones and one hundred year flood zones, which honestly don't mean much in South Texas anymore after we had three hundred year floods. But you still it's so good to know if you're in one. And I love this because there's a lot of there's a lot of people who really want access to this data, but they can't they don't have the the money or the time to build an application and build a dataset like you do.

That's what I found so interesting.

Bob FradyWell, thanks. It's, you know, we we like to think that all data is like a wild horse. You got to learn how to break it before you can ride it. And we're experts at breaking data, whether it's federal or state or local or data that we create, that's what we do. So it is really difficult. It's just, you know, we don't think about it as a special skill because we do it every day. But when you talk to people, it's really a special skill because like, even if you went to the city or the county GIS tool, sometimes it's just impossible to find what you're looking for.

Like I'm reviewing fire stations right now and you'll go to a county website and it's like, in your address and find the nearest fire station. Like, just tell me where it is. It's like, it, so they're presenting it logically to themselves. We have to present it logically to a lot of people. So it,

Rob Galbraiththat's the thing we do. We wrangle that data. Rob? So it's great to have you on Bob. So Bob and I go, go way back in insure tech time, I guess. Before the book. Before the Before the book. I was kicking the tires in a previous life on Hazard Hub and as a consumer of exactly the type of information that that Hazard Hub sells. So Bob, knowing a little bit right from a carrier perspective is somebody that was a consumer of the type of information that you're selling and, you know, having bought from some of your competitors and being really intrigued by your business model, there's a couple of things.

Number one, you guys truly are data geeks. Right? And I remember you telling me, I kept saying, well, how do you deliver the data? You say, you know, API. Right, what is this? We did get our stuff on CD ROM and we literally did. Yeah.

Bob FradyAP what? Is that a special Not long ago. Okay, hold on a second. Let me tell you this story. I went to this place where I first met Rob and I said, you know, we deliver stuff by API, so you don't have to get the file and then try to update it and then try to load it to your system. And it's six months later, you know, and finally using the data you bought six months ago. And Rob's eyes got really big and the GIS guy with him, his eyes kind of rolled back in his head and he's like, oh shoot, I'm going be out of a job.

And, so that was an interesting dichotomy of the being a little bit too soon to the party. But yeah, we are super geeks when it comes to that stuff. And you guys have gone beyond a lot of the standard, right? So you've got information right on on wildfires

Rob Galbraithand sinkholes and all this stuff that people care about. But you've got proprietary data as well, like on your fire hydrants and others. So you've got more accurate data and more than practically every other vendors out there. So maybe you could just kind of highlight. Yes. What are some of those things that really set you apart from a lot of the other competitors in the space? Quite frankly, competitors that have been there for a really long time and have not necessarily innovated the space over the last two, three decades?

Bob FradyWell, I think there's a few things. You know, the industry to a certain extent is satisfied with close enough. Like, ah, it's close enough. And then like we had a customer who did an analysis of us versus another provider whose three, the three letter acronym shall we name, name was, is where's the nearest fire station? 30% of the time they didn't know. And we knew where everyone was. And it's like, how can you live with this as an insurer? And the answer is, well, because, you know, that's the way we've always done it.

So the first thing that we look at is we always want to try to figure out how to do things better. So that's why we build our own fire station database. We were joking around with the people from AAIS about using their fire protection algorithm. And they said, well, really, you have to have the actual hydrant locations to be within the letter of the law. And I'm like, oh, so then we started building a hydrant database of 3,000,000 records. So, and now it's 11,000,000 records. So we always want to do better and better and better.

And then we went to a customer and they said, listen, these wind hail tornado models, they're great, but they're all like, you know, 50 kilometer cells that are gigantic. I want to know the risk of lightning hitting this property. So we went back to work and we figured out all the math and we were like, okay, now we have the probability of wind, hail, tornado and lightning at the property level on a one year horizon. People talk about it's funny, you talk about flood. It's like that's a one it's a one in a 100 chance.

It's a 1% annual chance of flood. In Texas, in some of the areas where you are, the chance of lightning is over 9% per year. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, it's no big deal. I'm like, really? Are you kidding me? But, know, this is the kind of stuff we're always we're always trying to improve because we don't have the luxury of being a billion dollar company. We have to be better than everybody else. And that's that's how we focus. Yeah. It's it's better. It's interesting. I

James Benhamam geeking out pretty hard right now. We've had some on both my this podcast and my construction podcast, micro forecasting technologies that have come on that really get down to, like, the, you know, this specific property weather forecasting. And what I like that you're doing is you're taking a different angle on it, right? You're looking at the entire historical prevalence because the reality is that weather is an interaction of the atmosphere and the geography, the land itself. And you have to acknowledge and look, as a pilot, that's certainly something I've learned the hard way.

Right? Is weather is a dynamic situation, and there are certain properties that are much more susceptible to wind and water. It changes over time as their surroundings change. If you build a large building near a property, it's going to change the dynamics of wind around that property and a flooding because they're going to have, yeah, if you don't have a zero rise ordinance, even if you do have a zero rise ordinance, a commercial development can change the absorption rate of water underground on nearby properties, which can increase runoff onto your own.

And so like these, these things, it is such a difficult challenge. And it makes you wonder, like, I was giving my company a thirty minute TED Talk this week. I do like these monthly TED Talks with my company on just the history of insurance. And we ran all the way back to Babylonian insurance. And, you know, underwriting started 4,000 BC. The Babylonians used to do bank loans that were forgivable if the cargo got seized en route. So it was the very, very first insurance contracts was the ancient Babylonians.

It's because they sat between the two major trading bodies of water. And you wonder how they underwrote all this risk without access to any data. Like we have almost like an infinity data now, compared to the past. By the way, listening to y'all talk about, like, the past made me remember this song that I used to listen to in the nineties since you're talking about, like, CD ROMs. I just wanna I just wanna point this out. Let me see if I can My ears go back.

Way back. Back into time. Y'all remember this song? Sorry. You probably don't remember this song. That was Blackstreet. Some of my favorite bands in the nineties. And y'all are, like, talking about grind on the CD ROMs and the v three API. I mean Oh, Rob, is it not Look, being slightly older than your average 20 that's starting in InsurTech, you have this benefit of a couple decades of insight here. Is it not wild to you that we essentially have, mathematically speaking, infinity data now? It's crazy.

And yeah, so I talk to people about I'm curious to get bobsleds too, right? One of the things I talk about at the end of insurance as we know it is you've got sensors, right? You've got cloud, you've got artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms. You've got this localized knowledge in a way that you've never known before. Right. And then you've got efficiencies

Rob Galbraithand that might be back office robotic process automation, workflow automation, things like that. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that we couldn't do as insurance industry before. And exactly what Bob's saying. It's like, you know, we kind of do things in our industry because of the way we've always done it. And we don't necessarily appreciate all the emerging technology that's come our way to say, Hey, all those things that you learned in your first five years as an insurance professional that, Hey, the reason we do it this way is because we can't do this, this and this.

Well, that can't do this, this and this. Those are all melting away. And so you know, I think we kind of internalize all of that and then we're like, oh, we can't do those things. And then we go for the next twenty five years as an insurance professional telling everyone why we can't do those things. And so it takes folks like Bob, right, coming on the scene to say, like, I know you've been using this for a long time, right? I know you've been using your three letter acronym, you know, rating score or whatever.

Right. But so, yeah, Bob, I'm kind of curious to your thought, too. And maybe you can share about how does that conversation go with carriers and how do you I know, right? It's not a one and done sales, as you mentioned. Yeah,

Bob Fradyit's the long walk through the desert with a very small bottle of water is how we like to tell people. And, you know, I've asked, I've answered questions as basic as, you know, what's an API? In which case I know that we're not gonna do business with them, but that's okay. You know, there's a couple of factors. It's really three as I see it. The first is that the insurance business has been successful for a long time without data, back to the days of the ancient Babylonians, because frankly, the law of large numbers is a fantastic law to have on your side.

It's like, you could be wrong about an entire state and the other 30 states doing great. You know, that's fine. So that's number one, it's worked for a long time the way it's worked. So I don't, I never get upset when people do things the same way because that way has worked. But I think the second thing is, you know, it's funny you showed that Led Zeppelin,

James Benhamthe dirigible blowing up. I wonder if that was most of the legacy carriers on the day that Lemonade went public. Oh. Oh, I got calls from my I got calls let's just I'm not gonna say who or what kind of companies, but I got phone calls going, how on earth did they get that valuation? I mean, they are they are ticked off. Oh, yeah. In particular, if they're a publicly held insurance company, they are raging mad right now and looking because they're, of course, peeling through some very red negative financials going, what are we doing that we can't get this valuation?

And the stock is not tanked post IPO. And that's that's it's interesting because, you know, the other SoftBank IPOs or attempted IPOs have not gone well. But this one has gone well despite despite, you know, if if this were not a technology centric IPO, it would not have gone well, you know, from insurance speak. And so you look at it today and it's still kind of hanging in there, man. It's it's wild. It's wild with the what's going on with the market. Yeah. I I think that Lemonade and Hippo do two things really well.

They do the UI and UX really well. They eliminate a lot of the friction in the process.

Bob FradyAnd the second is that they manipulate data very well. They're very comfortable with a lot of data. Yeah. And those two things are the real threats to the incumbents. It's not becoming, it's not the statutory, it's not the regulatory, it's not the capital requirements. All of those can be overcome. It's how do you fundamentally change the interaction that people have? Like, I lived in my house for ten years, I've never seen an insurance agent knock on my door, never. So why should, I don't know any people who have insurance friends who've tried to recruit me, so I'm going to the internet and that's happening more and more and more.

Not that the agents won't be important, but that's the thing that these Insurtechs have done really well that should scare the pants off of the legacy carriers because they're so locked into their existing systems. So the first is, that's one. The second is the, I forgot what the first one was. And the third thing is Amazon. Everyone's concerned about Amazon entering the insurance business or Google. Guess what? They're already here, but they're not here as a carrier. They're here as a technology provider that makes all these InsurTechs possible.

Like, we live on the Amazon stack, and you could use Azure or you could use Google Cloud if you wanted to. But back in the day, you had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just on building your technology infrastructure. And now I can spend a couple $100, get it right, and then multiply it by 10,000. And now I have essentially a supercomputer of capability and that is a fundamental change in the business. Yeah. So Amazon's already in our industry. They're just not where you think they are.

They're on the back end providing all this great technology to allow companies like ours to be small, but really, really efficient. Rob? No, I'm so glad you brought that up, Bob, because, you know, I was having a conversation with someone

Rob Galbraiththat is a broker and he works with a lot of kind of small to midsize carriers and agencies and others and was asking me, Hey, Rob, you know, tough market environment, all that. Do see a lot of consolidation? Do you think there's any hope for the small and midsize guys? I said, Yeah, we'll definitely see some of that. That's what you see in every recession, I said. But honestly, the small and midsize guys have access to enterprise software now that they would have never been able to afford and never had before because of cloud computing.

Right. And software as a service models. And so exactly to your point, like these are the enabling technologies that are allowing companies like Hazard Hub and others to do exactly like you said, tinker, right, get it right and then scale quickly. And I do think that's a very underappreciated dynamic. When we talk about emerging technology, a lot of it's kind of some of the stuff we've already talked about, but that enabling. Right. That's necessarily behind the scenes isn't necessarily consumer facing. I think that's a great point.

Bob, one thing I want to talk to you about and ask you, you guys partner with a lot of different companies. I think you've been you're all over the map, right, in terms of some of the names that you partner with. And I I see like you're constantly announcing new relationships with folks like Cape Analytics and others. So, you know, maybe you can help break us down. I'm not expecting to name every single company you partner with, but, you know, how do you think about your partnerships?

What is your approach? I'm just kind of curious kind of your mindset because you've done a great job of really integrating with the broader Intritech ecosystem. Well, there's a few things. When you're a small company and you decide to take on $2,000,000,000

Bob Fradycompanies, you can't necessarily take them on where they're strong. You have to take them on where they're weak. And the weakness in both of our primary competitors is partnerships. Ask any Intrutech who has to deal with one of the incumbents and they're like, it's a tremendous pain in the neck. But we always looked at it like, I can't afford to hire any salespeople, the ramp is too long. So John and I do the selling for the company and we're pretty good at it, but I'd rather have 10% of, you know, 500 salespeople than to have, you know, 500% of one salesperson.

So we built the, our underlying idea is that we want the technology to do the work and that applies to not only how we run businesses direct our relationships directly with carriers, but also how we do it with partners. So the API is plug and play. It's like, here's the API, you can sign up in a minute and off you go and you're live, you're in the system. So for us to onboard a partner takes about ten minutes and that's something that hadn't been in the industry before.

So we understand that a lot of times as a carrier, you don't want to knit together 25 different pieces of information to come up with an answer. You want somebody to do it for you. You want the component stereo. I mean, you want the combined stereo versus the component. And so we partner with these companies who are already providing another answer. And our data helps to make their answer more complete. So we plug into CAVE, we plug into BetterView, we plug into SpatialKey. We just had our first Majesco customer the other day, we plug into Water Street, we plug into 65 different partners altogether.

And it's because we know that people aren't looking to us just as the absolute end answer, that they have more that they want to do. And so we're happy to partner, you know, we don't have the extreme expense of a big sales force. We let the partners do that for us. Now, sometimes the carrier says, want to deal with you directly. I don't want to go through a partner because I want to control the relationship. And we're allergic to not taking a check. So if somebody wants to go come with us directly, fine, you know, we're even partnered, we're partnered with the Verus company because the

James Benhamcarrier wanted to deal with us directly and they used a Verus company. And it's like, I don't want to partner with them, but the client wanted us to, so now we're partnering with them. And just keeps growing. It's interesting, you know, I could definitely see some carriers and, and what not just carriers, but just some potential buyers for you feeling very threatened by you because they they they view this as special secret sauce. And if they use you, and everybody else uses you, you'll have access to the same data, then there's not much special left about them.

Right? Like that like, yeah, that there's at some point, have to ask yourself, what is a company? You know I mean? Like, is a company is a is a company just an aggregator of API data calls? Like, I know I'm getting a little existential here, but like, you know, you you what is a carrier? If they reinsure a lot of their risk, and then they aggregate data through API calls from a bunch of data collectors,

Bob Fradythen what are they other than a other than a marketing brand? Right? It's a brand. You you know, that's that's the interesting thing is the other thing that the lemonades and the hippos of the world represent is the branding aspect of things. Know, brands are real, brands count for a lot. And I come, I've done a lot of direct and target type marketing in the past. And the more I do that, the more I believe in the power of the brand. So the power of the Hazard Hub brand is we try to tell you all the bad stuff that can happen.

That's our brand focus, and we try to do it better than anybody else. That's it, everything else drives from that, but that, you know, you're right, it could become commoditized special sauce, if you will, but we also look at it like it's the application of the data that really matters because we not only give you the score of something, we give you all the inputs that we use to create that score. So you can customize your own scores if you want to. You can really fine tune that data.

And what we see is that people who spend the time to fine tune the data jump ahead of people because they're smarter about using the same data than other people are. And because we make our pricing model, basically once you buy three data elements, you get them all. It gives people a real playground for opportunity to invent things. Like we have a client who came to us today and he said, you know, I don't want to give away any special sauce, but he says, if you look at the density of the hydrant network and the fire station location, you come up with a pretty good approximation of what the protection is for that location.

And I'm like, we've been putting that data out for two years and it's just taken till now till somebody finally got it. You know, oh, that's a more interesting way to look at things. And so we just sort of sit back and wait, we don't push people, We don't make them do a minimum. We don't get up in their shorts about having to give us their data. It's like, it's like, we're just like, hey man, here's the day. It's tasty data. Go get Yeah, it is.

Well, there's, it's a fascinating time right now in insurance technology. This week, The only article we only have time to cover this week, a rapid quoting insurance startup,

James Benhamout of Columbus, Ohio. We're not talking about nationwide. This is another company out of Columbus, Ohio called Branch. This is has raised $24,000,000 this week. Co founder and CEO Steve Likus, who spent eighteen years in the insurance industry, estimated the company could grow to a 150 employees from currently 25 by middle of next year. Says he already has a thousand policyholders signed up, 600 in Ohio, and they have licenses to write in Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and Texas. So, an eye on this one. They're trying to be another pure digital rapid sign up, all digital, no broker Insurtech out of Columbus, Ohio, which is Insurance City USA.

And if you watched one of my favorite books that became a movie all about virtual reality in the future of the world being on virtual reality, you guys know what movie I'm talking about? It just came out. Ready Player One. Ready Player One is the movie. It's about the future that's obsessed with the nineteen eighties. And in the future, the the the world's VR headquarters is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, which I thought was fascinating. But this one is branch insurance. Pay attention to them. They raised a bunch of money.

The co funding they're they're rounded. This is the deal is that the the old mainline insurance companies aren't gonna get left out of this because they are the funders. New York based Greyhoff and HSCM Bermuda. This is the the insurance investment arm of Hudson Structured Capital Management. So I mean, there's some old school money that's investing in this new tech. They're like, hey, look, we can't be left out of this and our companies aren't doing this fast enough. So but a lot of these companies are leveraging tech like yours.

Just like ours. Exactly. Exactly. And so we'll leave it at that. And it's really exciting because now, and you're like, y'all hit it on the head, and I'm gonna wrap with this. When I started JBKnowledge, I had to buy servers, and I had to build a server farm. And we had to write every line of code. We couldn't reference third party object libraries. We couldn't go in and call APIs. We had to build all of our own data sets. We had to build all of our own data structures.

They built our own database. I mean, you literally write about 75% less code than you did nineteen years ago when I started Jimmy Knowledge. And Oh, yeah. And and and you don't have the cap of the upfront. Now your overall hosting cost is the same as what I paid in in inflation adjusted dollars, except it's prorated over time and over usage. I had to get and buy all of it upfront. And so it's you know, the barrier to entry now is so much lower, and there's so much more capital available because interest rates suck.

So money is looking for a home. And so there's just a lot of crazy stuff all happening at the same time. I love what I'm seeing. Go to freehomerisk.com and run a report on your own house. And when you're done with that, go to Hazard Hub. And if you're the type of company that could use this type of data and and really could leverage it into your product line, go check out that's hazardhub.com. And you can check out the tools they have there. You can look at the executive bios, can read through and, you know, the free home risk.

That's a really cool example of how you can see kind of data they can produce. Obviously, home risk is not through an API. It's just through a public website. But you can experience what you can get through an API. Bob Frady, thank you for being on the show today. Any closing comments for our listeners? The the one thing I will say is that I think it was

Bob Fradynational underwriter just published a list of the 10 fastest growing P and C carriers for homeowners insurance, three of the top seven hazard hub customers. Nice. So if you want to be where the growth kids are,

James Benhamcome on over. That's great. That's awesome. And Bob, Rob Galbraith,

Rob Galbraiththank you so much for being here today. Appreciate you. Any closing comments? Absolutely. No. So thrilled to have Bob on. Like I said, he's a grizzled veteran of Insurtech now. And I miss seeing you at conferences, buddy. I miss golfing with you for sure. So hopefully, we can do that again sometime this decade. Hopefully,

Bob Fradyit's a

James Benhambeing on. Thank you both very much. That's awesome. So, and to you out there in listener land, again, appreciate it. Listen in next week, we have another great episode coming up. And as always, this is The InsurTech Geek Podcast powered by Jamie Knowledge. It's all about technology that's transforming and disrupting the insurance world. I've been your host James Benham at jamesbenham dot com with co host Rob Galbraith, endofinsurance.com. Big thanks to Jim Greenlee, our podcast producer, Cara Dalton, our our creative producer, and thank you for joining us today.

We're taking you on a journey through insurance tech. So enjoy the ride and geek out. See you next time.