Digitizing the Insurance Industry with Jon Corrin

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee My coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach. Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon. SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom. Come on. Startups get the party. Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador. And together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party.

Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for being an instrumental resource to our startup and tech community here in San Diego. As a partner in San Diego Startup Week, quick pitch and top tech awards, Cox Business has helped our ecosystem grow into the community it is today.

And welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I am joined with John Korn, co founder and CEO of Zylo. John, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Neil. Very excited to be here.

Yeah, we're excited to get to know you and learn about your background, learn about what you're building. Do you want to give us a quick one minute overview of what Zylo is?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So Zylo is software for insurance agencies. And what we're doing is we're automating and making the experience better for insurance applications. So traditional agencies have a lot of manual processes, a lot of pen and paper when it comes to their insurance applications. And the people who are hurt are the agents and the customers, we're automating that process for them and making the experience a whole lot better so that everyone is a lot happier when they're dealing with insurance.

Thank you. Every year when I got to go renew and fill out that new PDF for all my insurance forms, man, you got to know that that could be automated and improved. So looking forward to that coming to my carrier soon.

Absolutely.

It sounds like you might have some insurance experience, but I'm curious where else you got your start. Where were you born? Where'd you grow up?

I actually grew up in Delaware. Dover, Delaware? You've probably never been there.

I've been in Delaware.

Oh, really?

Yep. And I subscribe to, you know, the Wayne's World, putting Delaware on the map as well.

Absolutely.

I'm in Delaware. But how'd you find your way all the way over to San Diego?

So I had a startup that I started right out of college and my co founder at the time, who was another one of my best friends, so I co founded Zylo with one of my best friends. I co founded Atlas with my other best friend. He was out here in San Diego because he was a Naval academy student who got stationed here after he graduated. So I came out here to follow him.

Got it. Okay, so sounds like you'd already done some tech before you got here. What was Atlas?

Yeah, so Atlas was, It was true car pulling. Back in 2016, when we started Atlas, the ride sharing craze was getting even larger. Right. Uber and Lyft were becoming even bigger. They were becoming the behemoths that they've become. And at that time, there was no good way to do long distance traveling together with people who might be already going to, let's say, I don't know, Northern California, or in my case from Philadelphia down to southern Delaware or Florida. And so we built an application kind of similar to blah blah in Europe, if you've ever been exposed to that company. That was some of the inspiration behind Atlas. And our kind of immediate goal was to get college kids home to take rides home together for breaks. We got a lot of good publicity. We had some pretty. We had some good usage for two kids just tinkering around, but ultimately we couldn't handle the tech and so it ended up failing, unfortunately.

Got it. Interesting. I mean, obviously super needy and super important at the time. And now we've seen so many other use cases, funny enough, during COVID of delivering food and packages using the same rideshare network, which has been fascinating to see. Do you wish you kind of stayed with it and worked on it, or you were good. Like, it was like, all right, onto something new.

You know, I always do regret moving on. I just. I'm the kind of person who, when I do get inspired by something, I'm very guns to the wall. But I'm so much happier here with Zylo. I mean, we've obviously grown so much more than Atlas ever reached, so I'm super excited about the opportunity that we're working on right now. But I always have in the back of my mind, maybe one day that would work again.

Yeah. So no one had the tech capab on your. On the team at the time, did you? Was that kind of the impetus for you to go learn how to be a dev?

Yeah, actually, my co founder was a computer science major. He was able to code. He taught himself swift. Right. But the problem was in October of 2016, he was getting deployed because he was Navy. And so we had to either go raise funds to hire another dev so that we could get coding, we could continue to code while he was gone, or the business would stop. And we couldn't raise those funds because we had no idea how to. So that actually. But to answer your question, that actually did get me in debt. I knew I was going to start another business eventually, and I did not want kind of the inability to create a product to be the problem. That stopped me again. And so I started learning how to develop myself.

Okay, was it just like a bunch of videos online, or did you go through a formal program?

I actually probably have one of the most interesting coding journeys that you'll hear. When I was graduating from college, I got some pretty good offers from companies like Vanguard and a few others. I turned them down to start Atlas. And then when I. When that failed, I was kind of flat on my butt. So I started Ubering in order to make money. And so I had to uber, like, 10 hours a day in order to pay the bills. And so, as you can imagine, it was pretty hard to code during that time. But I found a kind of loophole in the system that allowed me to code on the road, but not literally. And so if you're ubering near an airport, you're put into some sort of queue system, right? And you usually have to wait one to two hours to get a ride, but it's typically longer rides. You get paid out as if you were driving the whole time. In Philadelphia, there was a Wawa right at the edge of the queue bubble that Uber had set up that allowed you, if you. If you kind of drove around and went to the back of the Wawa. You would be within their queue system. And at the same time, Wawa had free WI Fi. And so I would spend the one to two hours waiting, coding, whether it was in a book, on my laptop, whatever it might be, using, things like free code camp, YouTube, Udemy, like all over the map. And then once my queue was up, I would go drive, drop the person off, and then come back and just cut code again. And so I was actually able to get in like four to six hours of coding a day, just doing that. And then on the weekends, this is also where it gets a little wonky. I had a friend that went to UPenn and he gave me kind of his access code so that I could go to UPENN classes to sit in on the theoretical classes of computer science. And so all that led me to learning how to code.

That's awesome. Quite the hustle. And getting paid to learn to code. That's the way to do it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Were you using the idea of Zylo already to build as you were learning or what were you working on then?

No, actually, I was trying to build Atlas myself. Even though it had already failed, I was seeing if I could put it on the web as like a web application. I dove deep into like, Angular and Node js. I did a lot of also Java when I was at UPenn studying there. Over time, all the work efforts started compoundingly adding up. You know, I would do things like try to integrate Stripe into the application or try to integrate Google into the application. And, you know, the more I challenged myself, the more I was able to learn. And eventually when I got to San Diego, I still continued that hustle. That was probably a year after that whole situation had happened. I joined a company here called Parallel 6, which was a health tech company. I originally joined as a business analyst. And then about three months in, I asked them for the opportunity to start coding. And so they transferred me over to a software engineer and I was working on the SDK there. And that's how I got my professional software engineering experience.

Oh, got it. Really cool. We know Parallel six in town from one kind of buying up another startup I was working with called Improve, which was working in the clinical trial space. And then I think they got eventually acquired as well too, right? Parallel six did, yeah.

They got acquired by PRA right when I joined. And I think. Was it Brad Pruitt that owned Improve? Yeah, I remember Brad.

Yep. Brad and Sommer were kind of with us together in Evo Nexus back in 2013, 14 and 15.

Yeah, I used to have great talks with Brad about his Southwest flight points all the time.

Got it. So you were new to town, new to San Diego, working at a tech company, developing. Where did it go from there? How did you go from working for a company to starting your own?

About a year after I joined Parallel Six, I got the bug again. I wanted to start my own company. I'd been hanging out with Dave who kind of ran Parallel six. He was your typical entrepreneur, had multiple businesses and that kind of stuff excited me. And so I decided to start venturing out and peeking around to see what I could develop. Atlas was a big kind of B2C operation. It kind of had a large user play to it. And I visited San Francisco with one of my buddies up there. Obviously a lot of things, there's a lot of energy, a lot of tech stuff going on. And I kind of sat down and said to myself, I really want to this time. I want to focus on. And it's kind of weird how all these things end up working out. I want to focus on building something that just saves someone a bunch of time. It's a very specific group. We leverage software to do it and that's how we make money. It's just like a value driven business. One to one with the user in a specific group of users. Coincidentally, that's what I ended up doing. But that didn't just lead to Zylo. So I also at the same time started working or kind of tinkering with a project for fashion designers called Digitizely. It was actually a computer vision project that would digitize their patterns. And so they usually they have paper patterns and they have to. Then if you're not a rich fashion designer with all this software, you have to then kind of trace it manually through Adobe and do this whole process in order to digitize it. We were trying to do that automatically. At the same time, I called up one of my best friends from back in Delaware, Ellie. He was running an insurance agency and I asked him what. What processes does he have in his business that are slowing him down that are inefficient? I asked him to show me the software he was using and both projects started at the same time. Digitizely was never able to get up off the ground. We could never finish the tech. But Zylo was more straightforward tech and we had Ellie and his agency that we could base it around. And so it wasn't kind of like a one hit wonder type of deal. It was more of a slow growth type of thing. We started developing. Over time it picked up, it became more and more real and eventually it became a business.

That's awesome. How did you make the leap? When did you go all in? What was like the, I'm curious, always like the milestone that people saw the light to rip the band aid off.

Yeah, that was when we sold our first few customers. So I was kind of half. I wasn't half in. I was full in at heart. But I had been working on other things, doing digital marketing or project management for a couple of my friends and networks here in San Diego. And so I kind of had some source of income and some job while I was working on Zylo. And it was during that time I started really investing into the San Diego network. So I started going to a ton of networking events. Start San Diego 1,000,000 cups. Different events around the San Diego environment or ecosystem in order to meet more people somewhere down the line. I can't even remember how I got introduced to Taylor Cavanaugh from Pet Desk. I'm sure you know Taylor and he actually taught us the Challenger sale. Him and Brandon Hanno there taught us the Challenger sale, taught us about SaaS metrics, taught us about like the sophistication behind a SaaS business. And within two months of learning their process, we started closing deals. And that's when it became like, okay, we got to do this full time. End of 2018, beginning of 2019, we closed our first three deals and that's when we why I went full time and then Ellie followed shortly after.

Oh, that's awesome. Shout out to Taylor for that. He gives great talks on that, runs a great sales org and it probably was out at Startup Week that he gave one of his talks on that. I'm sure that's awesome though that that was kind of the impetus to get going and it was always for the insurance space. Was that always the plan or some pivots to kind of get get and find that first few clients?

No, it actually, I mean aside from starting two projects at once, funny enough, our mission has always stayed the same. During the part where I was interviewing my co founder and his business and trying to find inefficiencies, we also noticed that their market was one that a lot of VCs are trying to disrupt the traditional broker. And so if you look out there, you'll see lemonade just IPO Hippo just announced a soon to be IPO. Esurance has been around for years. There's Neptune and all these different digital insurance companies that are not all of them are disrupting brokers, but all of them are shining a light on how bad the broker process is. And so since the beginning, funny enough, our mission has just been to provide that same technology that the Lemonades are using to the independent agencies so that they can continue to crush it for years to come. And that hasn't changed. The technology has gotten better and it's improved and we've discovered more and we've, you know, if we've gotten a lot of feedback, obviously you get that as you start to get more customers, but the direction of the company hasn't pivoted, luckily.

That's great. At what point did you realize or decide that you needed some outside capital to grow this?

So we raised a pre seed back in January of 2020, and it was probably three or four months before that. We just felt like we were growing too slowly. You know, just Ellie and I, we were barely paying ourselves. We might have been paying ourselves two grand a month each. It was an efficient business in terms of capital, but we were growing so slowly. I mean, we could only sell what he could, you know, what he could do. We could only build what I could do. And then I was also doing support at the same time, and he was also doing other things as well. And so it was very challenging. And so we raised somewhere around $400,000 in a pre seed back in the beginning of 2020. And that helped us bring on a couple people. But it didn't really move the needle. Right. We made a lot of advancement in the product. We did a lot more in sales because we were able to make our processes better on the sales process. But it was still one person selling and it was still really me just developing maybe one other engineer kind of halftime on. And so then we decided over time to raise the true C, which once you start, once you get enough capital, you can actually start moving the needle. And that's kind of what spurred it. It's just really our desire to go quickly. Luckily, because we are going after a very specific group of people, right? Insurance agencies. We've been able to define and iterate over the product roadmap many, many, many times. Agencies will just tell you what they want and they will tell you where they think you're doing stuff wrong. They will not hold back. So it's very helpful because with that and a good sales process, we've been able to have very specific reasons for raising money, very specific features we need to develop out, and a very Specific and repeatable sales process that we need to put gas into. So we decided maybe in October or the month before that to raise funds.

Got it. Okay, so now you've raised a formal seed and growing the team. You still growing or you kind of got everyone you need and full speed ahead?

Oh, no, we're still growing. We are definitely hiring slow. They say hire slow, fire fast. We are 100% hiring slow. Maybe too slow, but we're just very concerned about bringing on the right people. We want to create the right organization. We want to have a great team of great people that really enjoy working with each other. So we're still growing as fast as we can, but taking heavy caution into who we bring into the organization.

That's great. So growing the team slowly. What's the trajectory? What's the big plan for this year? Is it all sales or are you building out a lot more products still?

So it's both. It's a lot of sales and a lot of product development. We're looking to somewhere around 5x. Yeah, 5x revenue this year. And so we hired our first two sales reps a month and a half ago and they're already closing that quota. Well, what my co founder's quota was, which is very exciting. And this all goes back to creating that repeatable sales process. So now we're bringing on more account executives to do the same thing. And so we're very happy about that same thing. On the engineering side, we brought on a couple of exceptional engineers through that funding and they're just, you know, moving forward, moving fast, doing things well and quality because we did vet them heavily coming in, and we'll bring on more engineers to do the same. And so we're heavily expanding on the product, but also throwing a lot of gas in the fire for sales.

That's great. I mean, you mentioned you're getting a lot of customer feedback. I've got to imagine there's been some other kind of besides the lemonades, but like other kinds of SaaS for the insurance process. Are you finding your button up against a lot of other competitors or it's really more just. There isn't much out there and it's kind of a blue sky opportunity.

No, there's definitely competition out there. There's a lot of players in the CRM space, but we're not necessarily a CRM. We hover more into the form and insurance application space. And then there are a few players, maybe three players, including Xylo, that are in the form space. The other two competitors are Predominantly on the commercial line side. So we're fairly unique where we sit today. But it's not like clear, smooth, open door type of thing. There's definitely some people have their toes in on this side, some people have their toes in on this side. We're unique in our spot, but we need to move fast in order to stay a leader in this area that we're okay.

Well, you got your work cut out for you. Luckily you got some capital behind you now. And then, you know you're in San Diego, America's finest city. Curious, we got to know, do you have a favorite taco spot that you found or do you have a multitude?

My go to is Roberto's in Del Mar. I love that place. Every time me and my fiance go to Torrey Pines or the natural resorts over there. Oh yeah, we always get a nice burrito, California burrito. But she really likes fish tacos from Brigantine. She loves fish tacos from Brigantine. I love taco salads from LA Guadalajara in Old Town also. Old Town is such a fun place to go to. So I love Old Town. So it kind of. It depends on what the mood is. Right. But those are my three kind of favorite places to go.

Those are great ones. Roberto's, a burrito and a view, right?

Yes.

So peaceful right there. And then you got coffee shop right next door to it. Bird Rock Coffee. Can't go wrong, that's for sure. Well, John, it's a pleasure to get to know you and we're excited for you to keep building here in San Diego and build a great solution that's going to help a lot of us founders, entrepreneurs with our insurance issues and take on the world. So thanks, John.

Thanks for having me, Neal. Really appreciate it. Excited for San Diego to continue to grow.

Absolutely. And you're now part of that story. So thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest coworking in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter, Neil Bloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and tech Pod on Twitter too.

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