"AI in Life Insurance" with Jake Tamarkin

Jake Tamarkin’s startup, Everyday Life, uses machine learning to match people who don’t fit the traditional mold of buyers with insurers eager for their business. Jake’s personal experience in buying a life policy surfaced this compelling opportunity.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Jake Tamarkin

• The Problem Everyday Life Insurance is Solving

• "... Basically, what they're saying is, if you're poor, you're riskier, because of this very blunt instrument that they're using, which is credit score..."

• What Sets Everyday Life Insurance Apart

• Everyday Life's Founding Story

• Why People Don't Want to Talk About Life Insurance

• "...We basically pivoted out of banks and into insurance companies and that's been going much better..."

• How Jake Tamarkin Came to Life Insurance

• Advice to the Audience

ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:

• Purdue University entrepreneurship

• Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson

AI in Life Insurance

Guest: Jake Tamarkin

Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston Podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty for its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the start-ups which I'm involved, including a start-up, came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.

[music]

Welcome to Angel Invest Boston conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher, an angel, who is very curious about how to best build promising technology companies. Today, we are very privileged to have with us a really tenacious, a very pleasant founder, say hi, Jake Tamarkin.

Sal Daher Introduces Jake Tamarkin

Jake Tamarkin: Hi, Sal. Thanks for having me on today.

Sal Daher: Jake Tamarkin is the founder of Everyday Life Insurance. Before everybody runs away, this is a machine-learning start-up, in a sense that Jake is figuring out the mystery of how to sell life insurance to people who get rejected a lot on the existing websites. The first and second generation of online insurance marketing has not been successful and has its own problems built in. We'll get into that later on.

Jake has a very, very interesting approach to this. He is someone who comes at this from a very big background in consulting, he was with Ernst & Young, E&Y as a consultant in the insurance industry. He knows the industry backwards and forwards. He's been at this for three years. This is really interesting, because he's beginning to get some sprouts. Anyway, Jake, explain to our audience of founders, of Angel investors, and of people who work at start-ups, what the problem is. What problem are you solving?

The Problem Everyday Life Insurance is Solving

Jake Tamarkin: Definitely. Thanks, Sal. Well, to really boil it down, it is harder for people to buy life insurance today than it was for their parents.

Sal Daher: Why?

Jake Tamarkin: Well, it's several factors. The first is that, from the distribution side, the agents that were out there over the last decade or so have either moved upmarket and are focusing on really on the most affluent clients, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves, or the agents that have stuck around, have pivoted into selling health insurance. Medicare Advantage has become an incredibly popular product, it's very easy to sell, and it's an enrollment process, and it's free.

Sal Daher: The insurance broker who gets some piece of the action of the premium action in the insurance policy, would rather be taking notes for a health insurance policy instead of the more complicated thing of a life insurance policy.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes, exactly.

Sal Daher: Interesting that that should be, because I guess, health insurance, they're not allowed to discriminate very much based on the risk.

Jake Tamarkin: Right, exactly. That market has evolved a lot in the last decade or so. There's also individual health insurance becoming more common, and then also with the expansion of senior health products, in particular Medicare Advantage. They're easy products to sell, in that you don't have the to underwriting, the chance of an applicant getting declined, like you have in life insurance and other kinds of insurance because they can't discriminate. Then some of the products have a zero monthly premium.

Sal Daher: Let's just unpack it for people who are not familiar. Underwriting is the process that insurance companies use to make sure that they understand the risks that they're taking, right?

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: Can you explain what that entails, usually?

"... Basically, what they're saying is, if you're poor, you're riskier, because of this very blunt instrument that they're using, which is credit score..."

Jake Tamarkin: Yes. Well, in the world of life insurance, historically, this has changed a lot and actually is contributing to the problem. Historically, what life insurance underwriting consisted of was the underwriter might look at an applicant's medical records, might even talk to their doctor and maybe even ask the applicant to undertake their own health exam at the underwriter's expense, so they can get some independent or more current data. That's historically how it worked. In the last few years, underwriters have moved to streamline their operations and make it more convenient for applicants.

I've been doing all that by basically replacing the exam, talking to your doctor, and reliance on health records, with access to big data pools that they use to make decisions. For example, criminal history databases, motor vehicle driving records, credit history, and other kinds of readily available data they've been able to find correlations with mortality risk. As I was saying, that has actually contributed to the problem of making it harder for people because, for example, where credit history is now one of the most important data elements that underwriters use, credit history is correlated to affluence.

Sal Daher: Basically, what they're saying is, if you're poor, you're riskier, because of this very blunt instrument that they're using, which is credit score.

Jake Tamarkin: Exactly.

Sal Daher: They're turning away a lot of people who may not have a high credit score. Perhaps if you did some deeper analysis, you might discover that they're not such bad risks after all.

Jake Tamarkin: Exactly. Even beyond that, it also just has to do with the challenges of making a big decision. For an underwriter approving a policy is a big decision and with relatively few data points. To give you a quick example, I own life insurance, and I bought it through a traditional process. Then when we were with my company going to start offering a product, I went to go buy it myself as a test run. I actually got rejected, I got declined.

Sal Daher: By your own platform?

Jake Tamarkin: By your own platform, because the algorithm was looking at the same data that the previous insurer had approved me for the best possible rate. They're really looking at a subset of all of that data. They're trying to make a binary Go/No-Go decision. Whereas a human underwriter was able to appreciate the nuances in my data and get comfortable with it. An algorithm that is making a split-second decision with less data wasn't able to get comfortable.

All this convenience is coming into the market, which is great. It's coming at a cost of making it harder for people who don't fit into the perfect profile that these insurance companies target. Makes it harder for these folks to actually get coverage.

Sal Daher: This resonates with me because it reminds me of the story of another guest on this podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weigel, who is a urologist in New York City. Who treats among other things. He's a specialist in pelvic floor disorders, which include incontinence that women who've just given birth, sometimes frequently have. His wife had the problem. He said this publicly in the podcast. I'm not revealing any confidences here.

He had a hard time coordinating the cure for his wife. It's not just the urologist, there is a physical therapist, there are some devices. The data is scattered. It's a problem of integrating data. The same thing that you're doing, integrating data. It's the same thing that Connected health is doing, bringing together disparate data that's all over the web in front of a primary care physician.

In your case, you're gathering a whole bunch of data and putting it in front of an insurance company to make the decision better. You're just in time for this kind of market. This stuff is everywhere. It's resonating everywhere. Machine learning has made this possible. Basically, the problem you're solving is a problem that, if you don't fit, didn't come out of the cookie cutter of what the life insurer that you're talking to prefers to cover, risks they prefer to cover, you're, I'm sorry to be impolite, you're SOL, you're out of luck. You've discovered that if you do some magic with machine learning and around the workflow that is strictly driven by interaction, did you say 97% of the algorithm with the consumer directly? There's only 3% of the time that a human being has to get involved instead of 100% of the time and in the other cases. The other cases where there is no human involved and the rejection rates are like 75%.

Jake Tamarkin: Exactly.

Sal Daher: You've been able to beat the odds, but without getting too much into the weeds. I know that my colleague at Walnut, Mike Nolan, and your co-founder, went at this. Can you explain a little bit how it is that you're able to do that which the market cannot do at present?

What Sets Everyday Life Insurance Apart

Jake Tamarkin: The first thing to understand is that there are hundreds of life insurance companies in the US selling thousands of products and they all have different risk appetites and criteria. There's probably a good product for everyone. The hard part is finding it. That's what a great human agent does, historically, is they know after a career of working with lots of customers and lots of insurance companies, they know when they meet someone and evaluate their situation, they know where this customer with their unique health profile is where they're likely to get the best deal.

That's really, we're doing the exact same thing, just doing it algorithmically instead of relying on a person, so we're really equipping the consumer to find the right product for them in a very complicated marketplace. We just ask the customer a few basic questions that people know off the top of their head, and we do it anonymously. We're not asking people for personally identifiable information. It's very personal information about their health history and lifestyle, but we do it anonymously.

We then supplement that with some third-party data and things like tax return data. Not your individual tax returns persay, but just aggregated data about maybe your zip code and your taxes in there so that we can do a financial planning type of analysis, but still in a very convenient way for consumers.

We coupled that financial planning analysis with analysis of your health situation matched up against the risk criteria for our insurance companies that we partner with and then figure out from there. Based on what we understand right now, this is going to be the best deal for you. In addition to that, making that recommendation. That's all based on machine learning, which is a technical way of learning from the past.

Sal Daher: Machine learning, actually deep learning which is what he big breakthrough in machine learning is the use of stacked chips that were originally used for video gaming, and they can run through a lot of calculations. The idea with deep learning, which is the hot area of machine learning, is that it can take unstructured data and make sense of it.

That's the whole point. You see all this data points and then it tells you patterns and it sees that you could never see in your lifetime.

Jake Tamarkin: We use that to figure out what's the right product for a given person. The key is to be able to do it in a way that isn't too intrusive for the user and something they can do easily and quickly. One other thing I was going to add is we actually do that at two places in our initial upfront triage and recommendation process. Then as the person is what we make that recommendation.

If they like it and they choose to proceed, they start completing an application for insurance online. We monitor all of that and before they submit the application, we actually review it again and decide, does this still look good because now they've disclosed a lot more information through the application process. We double-check, is this still look good or if not, we might reroute them to another product based on what we've learned since they started the application. These, again, are things that a great human agent would be doing for people.

Sal Daher: Taking a second look.

Jake Tamarkin: Taking a second look because once it gets submitted, there's no takebacks.

Sal Daher: Right.

Jake Tamarkin: The consequences can be severe in the sense that, on many life insurance applications, one of the first questions is, have you ever been turned down for life insurance? If you have to say yes to that and by the way, they know because all these insurance companies share information behind the scenes, so they actually know, they know the answer to that question. They're really just testing your candor. If you have been turned down it makes it that much harder the next time. It's really important to get this right the first time.

Everyday Life's Founding Story

Sal Daher: Excellent. Tell me the founding story of Everyday Life. What was the event that sort of said I'm going to give up my life as a well-compensated, well-remunerated consultant, management consultant, who knows tons about this field, doesn't have to take any risks, doesn't have to stay up at night and then have to spend three or four years in the wilderness trying to build a startup and so forth? What is it that got you out the door?

Jake Tamarkin: Well, the catalyst for me were two things that happened simultaneously, more or less. One was that I went to go buy some life insurance for myself. I had a very clear idea, as you can imagine, someone who's been in the industry for 20 years. I had a very clear idea of what kind of insurance I should get, how much I should get, and exactly who I should be working with. Even though I didn't need any help making those decisions, just executing on those decisions turned out to be incredibly complicated.

I was trying to use one of these cool tech-forward brokers and they didn't really understand what I was trying to do, even though it wasn't that complicated. When it got to the insurance company, they were confused. They thought I was possibly trying to pull a fast one on them. The whole process took months and months and was very frustrating back and forth.

Meanwhile, while that was happening, I was as a management consultant sitting in a boardroom of one of my clients. I had started a conversation with them about customer centricity. In the insurance industry, many insurance companies feel beholden to the independent agents that sell their products and they're always competing for shelf space and attention from those agents.

Well, I thought I introduced to the board a very straightforward conversation. I thought it was a straightforward conversation about, hey, maybe we should be customer-centric and think about we spend so much time on the agents, but what about the people who actually pay us every month? Maybe we should be thinking more about them. What ended up happening was a lengthy two-hour plus debate over who was our customer here. Is it the policyholder or is it the agent? By the end of the conversation, the decision was it was the agent.

By the way, that conversation I shared that story with others that's played out in many insurance companies' boardrooms. I thought this is no wonder why this industry is so messed up. We've got the wrong person at the centre of everything. I was experiencing it firsthand as I was trying to buy this policy. I thought this is badly, badly broken. The pathway to fixing this is quite clear. Let's put the customer at the centre of everything we do and just start from that principle and never deviate from it, and let's see what happens.

Sal Daher: This is so analogous to the health insurance industry. It's interesting. The electronic medical records that doctors spend all their time inputting stuff into and so forth, they have become the centre of medicine. Everything revolves around these chronic health records instead of the patient. Why? Because the providers, meaning the physicians, the hospitals, they get paid through that electronic health record.

The electronic health record system was established to be a way for them to get paid, get compensation for services rendered, and it wasn't created to help them keep track of patient health. There's this massively complicated system, and patient health comes second. Number one is feeding the beast. They get paid. That is equivalent dysfunction in the medical world.

Now we're just beginning to get to the point where electronic health records are going to be useful. My brother-in-law, Martin Aboitis; I'm an investor in his company, Health Jump, that's working on one little aspect of this. Ryan Hess, who you've met, of Connective Health, is also working in another aspect of this. Slowly, slowly, electronic medical records are going to start putting patients at the center of this.

Jake Tamarkin: What's incredible to me both in the health insurance world, healthcare world, and life insurance, these are gigantic industries. It's so incredible. In the US, there's 747 Life insurance companies. Collectively, in a given year, those companies will bring in a trillion dollars in income and yet, this trillion-dollar industry is so backwards and broken fundamentally. I think there's a lot of parallels like you said, to healthcare and health insurance. In that way, they're big, broken industries.

Sal Daher: Very much so. Jake, we talked about problem you're solving, how you got into this, is there anything else that we should talk about with our listeners who are founders and angel investors about Everyday Life Insurance that you think is worthwhile for them to hear because I'd also like to get into a career path. By the way, our listeners should know, my niece, Lia Daher is auditing the podcast.

Lia, if it's okay to use your name put your thumb up. Okay, Raul, that can stay in. She is a senior in college and there are people like that who listen to this podcast, and for them an explanation of how you just discovered the direction that you want to go in life can be useful. We can get into that in the second half but first, please get across to our audience, other things that we haven't touched on that you think are important for them to know about Everyday Life and what you're doing?

Why People Don't Want to Talk About Life Insurance

Jake Tamarkin: Well, it's been a humbling journey for sure, but also there's nothing more exhilarating than serving someone well and giving their praise and gratitude.

Sal Daher: I understand you have tremendous feedback from very satisfied customers.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes, we do and that's very special for us. When someone takes the time to let us know that we made a difference. That's huge. We really appreciate that, but we've also learned as we put the customer at the center from the get-go, it's humbling sometimes because you think you know. You set out when you're designing something, especially a digital product.

You set out with a certain intent but just that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be received that way. It's been very helpful for us as we've iterated on our product, how we talk about things, the different interventions and messages we use to help people along their way. It's like solving a complicated math problem but it's very gratifying as you make progress.

Sal Daher: It's like solving a complicated math problem, but when you get the solution, other people smile at you, which is even more fun.

Jake Tamarkin: That's very true. The learnings that humbled us, started from the first day when we grabbed some clipboards and went out to different parts around Boston, different neighborhoods to talk to pedestrians about their take on life insurance and just to learn. The big learning that we had that day was that the fastest way to turn a walker into a runner was to approach them with a clipboard and ask them what they think about life insurance.

Sal Daher: Well, that reminds me, because people, it makes them think of their mortality. Lia, my dad, your grandfather, when he was a young boy. My dad was a brilliant man. He's a mathematician. He was not cut out for marketing or sales and you'll see why here. He was at his grandfather's store. He had a general store like so many Lebanese people in Brazil and his grandfather said, look, we have a lot of black cloth. Why don't you try to talk to customers and encourage them to buy the black cloth?

Just say, hey, how would you like some black cloth? The first person that walked in was this woman of a certain age and says to her, "Oh, we have some black cloth for you, for when you become a widow." The woman was like, "Ahh!" and ran out of the store! My father immediately got sent to stocking shelves and not talking to customers.

Jake Tamarkin: That's hilarious.

Sal Daher: You remember your grandfather, he was not cut out for marketing. He was a polymath. Everything he did, he did extremely well but not sales because he was too blunt.

Jake Tamarkin: That's hilarious.

Sal Daher: Well, that's probably life insurance. It's like telling somebody, your husband is going to die, or you're going to die, and so people run away.

Jake Tamarkin: It's true. The way we've applied that learning is, there's a common credo in the startup world to give first. Before looking for help, start by helping others and that's the best way to get what you need.

Sal Daher: It's very true. It really is very true.

Jake Tamarkin: Well, we take the same attitude toward the experience we deliver to our customers. Before we ask them for their contact info, we deliver to them expert quality recommendations. Instead of just jamming ads down their throat that talk about how great we are, we produce content that is educational, entertaining, and inspiring, that people appreciate and that builds the trust that makes them want to deal with us.

Sal Daher: I saw the TikTok videos, people saying, "Hey, I'm leaving a legacy. I'm leaving something behind. I'm not leaving a problem for my heirs, and so forth." That's a nice touch.

Jake Tamarkin: Thanks.

"...We basically pivoted out of banks and into insurance companies and that's been going much better..."

Sal Daher: One thing I wanted to touch on that occurred to me just now, is I understand you pivoted. Would you care to talk about that pivot?

Jake Tamarkin: Sure.

Sal Daher: Why have you pivoted?

Jake Tamarkin: Well, I feel like sometimes there's a stigma to pivoting and I don't understand that, because, every expression out there that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Sal Daher: I like the formulation of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who planned the D-Day invasion. Plans are nothing, planning is everything.

Jake Tamarkin: Oh, yes, that is good. Another variation, I think was from the boxer Mike Tyson, who said everyone has a plan until I punch them in the mouth.

[laughter]

To me, pivoting means applying what you're learning. To me, I don't understand why there's any stigma attached to it. For us, what happened was, as we're starting out, we've got this consumer brand. The big question is, how are we going to acquire customers in a profitable way? It's hard to build a consumer brand, especially, in a competitive category, like life insurance.

As we're thinking about that, we recognize that everywhere in the world, but the US, the biggest channel for selling life insurance is banks. It's the biggest and fastest growing in literally every market outside of the US. There have been some regulatory and technological and business culture changes that now made it more possible to sell life insurance through banks than ever before. That was our initial go-to-market plan.

What we learned, as we're going through that, was that it was just taking too long. We were getting banks interested but it was taking too long to get to market through them. We launched with a few but the ones that were the brick and mortar, traditional banks were just taking way too long. Ultimately, we learned at the end of the day, insurance is a secondary product for these banks.

Sal Daher: It's not their bread and butter. They grew up as lenders, they didn't grow up as insurers.

Jake Tamarkin: Exactly.

Sal Daher: It's a second language for them.

Jake Tamarkin: Right. A big learning that I wish I had listened to this podcast, when I was first starting out, and I would have heard this learning that-- When you're working with a channel partner, or it's true in general to always be solving like an urgent problem for people. That's also true of potential distribution partners and business partners in general. It just wasn't an urgent enough problem for them. Despite the effort we put into it in the investments we made, we felt it was not the best use of our time and resources to continue going down that path. I still liked that channel overall, but I just don't think it's a good one for us to make our first million off them.

Sal Daher: You thought that going directly to the 748 life insurance companies who cannot figure out the best way to find the life insurance customers that suit them, they have particular preferences, but it's really hard to find those customers. You have indications that this is correct now, right?

Jake Tamarkin: Yes, we basically pivoted out of banks and into insurance companies and that's been going much better. It is an urgent issue for them and I had a network of contacts from my previous work that made it much easier to get those doors open. The insurance companies, like you said, are having a hard time, but always on the lookout for their ideal customers.

They're also trying to figure out how to-- I was explaining to you all the dysfunction of the independent agent distribution system, and they're looking for alternatives at least to diversify. The rest of the world has moved online, life insurance would like to move online, and they don't know where to start. We can help them solve what has become an urgent problem for them. We know how to sell online, we know how to find and attract and develop the customers they want.

Those partnerships have been going really, really well and then we're getting that validation. At the same time, it's also given us an opportunity to do more direct-to-consumer marketing, which our insurance company partners really appreciate because we're developing skills there that they value, and that they actually pay us for marketing support. It's all fitting together very nicely.

Sal Daher: Interesting. Who do you think would acquire you? Or don't you want to get acquired?

Jake Tamarkin: That's a good question. It depends on the situation but I think it's very likely that we will get an offer that we can't refuse because these insurance companies are sitting on a ton of capital.

Sal Daher: From an insurance company?

Jake Tamarkin: From an insurance company.

Sal Daher: One of these 748 --

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: -- Life insurance companies who are having such a hard time finding the right type of life insurance customer.

Jake Tamarkin: Having a hard time selling online, generally. There's too many insurance companies sitting on too much capital and too desperate for innovation for me to imagine any other outcome. We've already seen this in the market with other companies. I think that, as we continue to succeed, and scale the casual conversations we're having now, are going to get a lot more serious.

Sal Daher: Well, before we pivot away from talking about the start-up, and talk about how Jake found his career path, and by the way, there's a secret reason why Jake is such a fun guy to talk to, you're going to discover when we get into his career path. I just want to ask listeners who're joining this podcast, if they could go to Apple podcasts, formally, iTunes, and leave a review. If you leave a rating, of course, only a five-star rating, it's helpful, but it's even more helpful if you leave a written review, doesn't have to be much. It can be like, "outstanding podcast!" and then, "Jake Tamarkin really rocked in his secret start in life. An insurance man with a secret was really fascinating".

If you leave a review like that, it doesn't have to be long, it helps us rank in the algorithm to get found and more people will have the benefit of listening to this really fun content that we've had here, this really nice chat with a guest who has learned tons.

Anyway, Jake, tell us how it is that you came about becoming this big guru of management of life insurance companies. Did you just start out as a young life insurer with a briefcase and a three-piece suit in high school?

How Jake Tamarkin Came to Life Insurance

Jake Tamarkin: It may surprise you to know I did not. In fact, my main interest at that age was music; jazz music in particular, and being a musician and that's actually what I ended up going to school for.

Sal Daher: Oh, I understand that Berklee School of Music here in Boston.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes, exactly.

Sal Daher: Listeners should know it's a very urban school. It's like a ride on the Back Bay, but not the nice part of the Back Bay. It's near Symphony Hall. It's the more artsy part of the Back Bay. It's a little bit grungy, it's an area transition.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: It's a great place to study jazz, and there are tons of jazz musicians and you're going to hear those Berklee students busking in the subway and in the corners if the weather's nice, and so you finished at Berklee?

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: What was your next step?

Jake Tamarkin: Well, then I worked as a musician for several years.

Sal Daher: Lost a lot of weight, did you?

Jake Tamarkin: Yes, exactly.

[laughter]

Really got to appreciate all the different flavors of ramen noodles. I really understand those. I think it was an incredible experience. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I eventually realized that it was not going to be the best path for me for where I was going to make my career.

Sal Daher: There are people who manage to do it, they turn their art into a business. Raul Rosa, who is the sound engineer of this podcast, who is a composer and musician, done compositions for lots of films and so forth. Katharine Woodman-Maynard, who was the graphic artist for this podcast, who has written a graphic novel, who does 100 things.

Jake Tamarkin: It's awesome.

Sal Daher: Both Raul and Katherine are artists who have a business sense. These are people who show up on time, are sober. Not your idea of the dissolute rocker.

Jake Tamarkin: The vagabond.

Sal Daher: The vagabonds. No, they're very business minded. They think about the bottom line. They know how to promote their product. They're responsible people. It's sacrifice because Katharine and Raul are people who they would probably make a lot more money because they're so talented. There's such, brilliant people, and they see things other people don't see, they understand things, but they just love to be artists. Not all of us can do that. I might have liked to have been a musician, but it just wasn't to be.

Jake Tamarkin: Well, it was probably generous of my parents to not give me too hard of a time as I was playing that out. There's a lot that I learned as a musician, that was been very valuable to me. One thing very specifically, that's been extremely valuable in the startup world and building a customer-centric business, which is when you think about great musicians, you think about their dexterity and virtuosity.

Really, the most important thing could be a great musician, is to be a great listener. If you are playing in a group with other people, you have to be very open-eared, for your whatever you're playing to fit in.

Sal Daher: Or singing in a choir.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes, exactly. It's not just the conductor that's keeping the orchestra together, it's all the players listening really carefully to what's going on. Those listening skills have proven extremely valuable, as we did our initial research on consumers and as we develop our products, and as we're all in sales and marketing. You're always got to be listening to what's going on and things change over time, too. That's one thing that I feel like music taught me that I applied directly to our startup.

Sal Daher: Jake, your experience, interviewing potential life insurance purchasers, may be helpful in the weight loss program that I attend, I'm going to suggest to them, because you said you're turning walkers into runners-

[laughter]

How to help people get more exercise, you ask them about life insurance. Have a little box that says, "Have you thought about life insurance?" "No ahh", they go running off.

Jake Tamarkin: Exactly.

Sal Daher: Increase your physical activity.

Jake Tamarkin: Get your steps.

Sal Daher: All joking aside. Let's think about as we wrap up, why don't you take a moment and think about what you'd like to leave our audience with? Any thoughts? It could be about everydaylifeinsurance.com or it can be about the things that you've learned, things if you were strongly about.

Advice to the Audience

Jake Tamarkin: Well, one thing that is true in our business, but I think is true in general, that I've learned and really, since I've got the bully pulpit here for a second I will-

Sal Daher: Oh, please.

Jake Tamarkin: -take advantage of is that no one achieves anything completely on their own.

Sal Daher: Oh, that is so true.

Jake Tamarkin: For us, as even in our business model as a broker, we need customers, we need insurance companies, we need marketing partners, and we're, of course, a team of people all collaborating together. I think that's not only true in our business model. I think it's true in any endeavor. I meet other startup founders who tend to be maybe overly secretive or concerned about maintaining control and are prioritizing that over the opportunity to learn by sharing. Since I have this opportunity here, I would just encourage your audience to be more open to collaboration and to sharing information, and embracing that gift-first ethos that has served me and many other people so well.

Sal Daher: This is very true, you've put it really well, Jake, completely endorse that. That's very, very important. We're all operating on 8K working memory, and so human beings need other human beings to make sense of life of things.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: My friend, Jackie Olds, who is a psychiatrist, who sees couples, she says that every person, every human being has these thoughts when they wake up at 2:00 in the morning, and they're worrying about something, and that's horrible, it's terrible, and so forth. It's seven o'clock in the morning and they're having coffee. They talk to the person sitting across the breakfast table, and the husband and the wife will set everything in context.

All of a sudden, those 2:00 AM panic evaporates. It's all cut down to size, and this is what we do for each other. It's the same way. It's a little bit like grooming. Why does the little animal groom? Because they can reach the little bug in a place where you can't nibble at? There's an exchange, it's built into animals and into humans. If we cut ourselves off from that, there is a trend towards that, because you wrote a book called The Lonely American.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: People think they can do things by themselves, it's tragic. In the startup world, the result that's the most supported by research in all of the study of entrepreneurship is that, more founders, better chances of success. Two founders are better than one, three founders are better than two, and one, four, it's equivocal, but up to three founders who are complementary, is just tremendous.

Getting co-founders or getting support from advisors, talking to people about your startup or about your life, talk to people. Don't be afraid that you're going to get hurt, because maybe somebody is going to react in a way-- At the end of the day, the risk is worth taking, because you may have your burden lifted.

Jake Tamarkin: Yes.

Sal Daher: Jake, that is very deep, tremendous. I really appreciate that you've made the time in a very busy period for your startup to be on the podcast with us. Thanks a lot.

Jake Tamarkin: Thank you, Sal. I really appreciate the invitation, this has been a lot of fun.

Sal Daher: I really enjoyed it and I think Lia enjoyed it too. She's smiling, it is a wonderful smile. Listeners, I thank you for listening, and do leave a review at Apple Podcasts. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher.

I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa, our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.