CEO of A.I.-Driven Insurance Start-Up Lemonade Says Mockery Is the Highest Form of Flattery
*By Conor White*
Lemonade, the insurance startup that uses A.I. and chatbots to pay claims within seconds, saw exponential growth in the U.S. in 2018, but the company is setting its sights on Europe for its next phase of expansion.
"We've decided that if people in Berlin, and Tokyo, and New York are using Spotify ($SPOT), and Netflix ($NFLX), and Uber, why not Lemonade?" CEO and co-founder Daniel Schreiber asked in an interview on Cheddar.
The burgeoning company's tech-driven approach has caught the attention of some of its more traditional competitors. That includes State Farm, which [released an ad in October](https://youtu.be/KIWfc9aI1YI) poking fun at artificial intelligence and robots, a not-so-thinly veiled dig at the startup. But Schreiber said he didn't mind the mockery.
"We found it remarkable that ... the largest insurance company in the nation, that \[is\] a thousand times bigger than Lemonade, would spend millions of dollars taking us on," Schreiber said. "I really found that interesting and deeply flattering honestly."
The company even took the unusual step of paying to promote the ad online.
"They're mocking us," Schreiber explained, "but I really think it's a bit of a boomerang that comes back and hurts them much more than it hurts us."
The CEO highlighted some of Lemonade's 2018 accomplishments, including $57 million in sales and increasing the number of homes it insures by more than 300,000.
But Schreiber said he is proudest of his company's reputation with customers.
"You go now to any of the consumer ratings sites, and you'll find that USAA and Lemonade compete for the number one spot in terms of customer satisfaction," he said.
"Growing fast is fabulous," he said, "but if you do it at the expense of customer satisfaction, that's a price not worth paying."
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/lemonade-insurance-plans-european-expansion).
Catching you up on today’s top headlines with Bitcoin falling below $24,000, U.S. gas prices reaching above $5 on average, Tesla shareholders voting on a 3-for-1 stock split, and more.
On this episode of On The Job presented by ADP: Gemma Burgess, CEO of Ferguson Partners, explains what people are looking for in an employer, and how to convey positive work culture to potential employees; Amy Leschke-Kahle, Vice President of Performance Acceleration at The Marcus Buckingham Company, an ADP company, breaks down how encouraging employee engagement and empowering employee voices can benefit every workplace and busts a myth about employee engagement while working from home; Jim Huether, CEO of Hyperice, discusses Hyperice's new employee mental health initiative, known as the Workplace Alliance, with 100-plus companies to combat the ongoing mental health crisis and how they're taking a hands-on, data-driven approach to the mental health crisis.
Amy Leschke-Kahle, Vice President of Performance Acceleration at The Marcus Buckingham Company, an ADP company, joins Cheddar to discuss how encouraging employee engagement and empowering employee voices can benefit every workplace and busts a myth about employee engagement while working from home.
Jim Huether, CEO of Hyperice, joins Cheddar to discuss Hyperice's new employee mental health initiative, known as the Workplace Alliance, with 100-plus companies to combat the ongoing mental health crisis and how they're taking a hands-on, data-driven approach to the mental health crisis.
Consumer prices saw an 8.6 percent jump in May, with fuel prices showing the biggest surge, climbing 17 percent last month. As inflation continues to climb to levels not seen in 40 years, President Biden took to calling out ExxonMobil and other major oil companies, accusing them of holding back production while continuing to collect huge profits at the cost of the consumer. Mark Avallone, the president of Potomac Wealth Advisors, joined Cheddar's Opening Bell to discuss. “They have reduced long-term expenditures. But why? Because the world is going to alternative energy and as consumers, if we thought that that welcome change to alternatives was going to happen without pain, we might have been mistaken," he said. "The less investment they make in oil because they're getting ready for a new world of electric vehicles, the less we're going to be prepared for oil shocks such as the one we got when Russia invaded Ukraine."
Catching you up on the stories you need to know this morning, the U.S. could soon get its first major gun safety law in years, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. capitol holds its second hearing, and today might just be the day the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, and decides on new gun laws.
