Big ambitions + big funding - is YuLife the future of insurance?

[Music] You're listening to VenturePod, the official podcast of VentureBurn. Insurance is a great purchase. We buy because we have to, but let's be honest, none of us are really terribly excited about it. And in all the years, we've all been buying insurance. We hasn't been much innovation in the industry. In fact, ULIFE, the tech-driven insurance company, believes that the $6 trillion insurance industry isn't fit for the future due to low-trust, low-priced value and low engagement. To unpack this and to understand exactly who ULIFE is, why they're different. And when we're coming to South Africa, I spoke to co-founder Jonathan Rubar. [Music] Jonathan Rumour, which by the way is a very interesting surname. I'm very excited to have you on the VenturePod podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us all the way from the other side of the world. Thank you. I'm not sure London is considered a decided world. I mean, it's far, but Australia is the other side of the world. It's the same hemisphere, well, not China, but Australia. Fair enough, but it is far, and at least we speak mostly English in the South. They tend to think that they invented English in the country, but they do speak it wrong. I will admit that as a proud South African, the people in England, United Kingdom, don't speak English very well. But unfortunately, they haven't listened to me when I keep on trying to tell them things like it is not called a traffic light. It is a robot. But unfortunately, that has helped me with my popularity in the 12 years that I've been here. No. When I travel overseas, I automatically want to say, "Oh, when there are, but no, it's when the traffic light." I've got to remember when I'm not in this country that other people don't call things the same things, you know. Like, when I explain to someone about loadshitting, they're like, "What happens now?" I'm like, "Yeah, loadshitting is just a really fancy term for we have no electricity. It's a good marketing scheme that they set up there." So, South African overseas is a very unique experience, actually. It is, but it is fun to always just reconnect with everybody back home. I mean, yeah, I get it a lot from all my UK friends, which is always interesting to me because I'm like, "Hey, this is where I am all the time." So, you know, I don't have that same sense of homesickness, I guess. But anyway, we're not here to chat about being a South African London, although that could be fun. And what it's like to hear the South African and African accent on the tube, which I'm sure you hear more often than people think. We're actually here to talk about a company that you co-founded called ULIFE, which is why you allow Fee, not why are you allow Fee. What is ULIFE, Jonathan, before we even get into anything else, explain to the listeners what ULIFE actually is. Cool, thank you. And just thank you for having me today. It's just so much fun to have this conversation. ULIFE is a global financial services brand, aiming to inspire millions of people to live their best lives every day. And at the moment now we focus on insurance, specifically group life insurance, so that's company life insurance for their employees. And with the insurance, there is an app that helps and inspires and rewards people for living their best lives. And it's very game of violence, lots of fun. We encourage people to do healthy behaviors and then reward them for doing it. And I think it all comes from the way that we view insurance, which is a little bit different to I think the way historically it's been viewed. So historically insurance has been about claims compensation. So it is something goes wrong and the insurance is there to pay out. But we are redefining insurance and see that everybody else will do as well in the future where insurance is no longer about the claims compensation. It's about risk mitigations, about risk partnership. It's about helping the people who you're protecting to avoid the bad thing that you're protecting against or to delay it or to reduce the severity. So when it comes to life insurance, that means helping people to live longer. And now obviously this is something which is probably a win-win for everyone. People would generally like to live longer, healthier, happier lives. From an insurance company perspective, that means we'll pay out less or later or less frequently or hopefully never. But in the case of life insurance, never is, is kind of hopeful to not pay out. But clearly it's good for everyone. So that is what insurance will be and what we are making insurance. I mean, that was probably one of the most succinct but also well-rounded answers I've ever heard to a question of what does your company do? So thank you very much for that. It's a very comprehensive answer and I appreciate that. But I think the question then is what makes it different because you've spoken about the gamification and things. You know, in South Africa, we've got things like discovery health and the discovery offerings. Which do similar things to what you just mentioned. So what's different from your life compared to what else is on the market at the moment? Of course, it's a great question. Discovery is an unbelievable company who's been spear-hitting innovation of insurance for 30 years. They're absolutely incredible. And we in some ways are solving similar problems to them but in different ways, which is absolutely incredible. I think for the whole world that more people take on this view of promoted well-being and health. I think where we are different and it comes in a few different ways. The number one, because we knew we can build and have no legacy. So the things that we are building are all based on the latest technologies and are smooth and are fast and work beautifully and is totally digital. But that's just kind of the base layer. I think where we are quite unique is in two ways. Number one is our focus on holistic well-being. So we focus on an entire person with our mission to inspire them to live their best lives. That's not just physical, it's not just going to the gym. There's also very much helping people to look after their mental health and also their financial well-being and social well-being. So what we want to do and what we are doing is bringing all of those things together within the act to encourage people to live their best lives holistically. So that's one of the big things I think that differentiates us from a lot of the people that are out there. I think the second thing that really differentiates us is the way that we do it. So I'm going to ask you a question and then I'll come back to answering the question you asked me. Do you know what the most successful fitness app ever is? The most successful fitness app? I want to say it's probably not a fitness app. It's probably something like Pokemon Go or some type of thing. You are such a champion. It's such a real pleasure for me when people actually get this correct. It's such a real pleasure because almost everybody, as you would expect, would say Garmin, Fitbit, Palaton, whatever. Any of those fitness that they're wrong and you are correct, you are absolutely right. And why was Pokemon Go the most successful fitness app ever? Because it wasn't a fitness app. It got more people walking than anything else ever. And they still have tens of millions of daily and monthly active users, even though they had 500 million, I want to say, it's still very successful. And why were they successful? It's exactly what you said. It's because it was not a fitness app. The app didn't say go for a walk. It said go and catch this invisible monster on the side of the road and move these people and we did and I did. Until the point that my wife turned around and said the invisible monster or me and it was a lot of things but I'm happy to say I'm still happy to marry. That's a good thing. Exactly. So it was very difficult to stop catching those invisible monsters but more people got out and outside and walking. And that is because what they did was two things. Number one, they gave you an objective which if you did the objective, the result was automatically for you to effectively become healthier and do the exercise. They didn't say do the exercise. And this is where games are really good and it's not the mechanics of the games that are often things that's about creating an emotional connection. So Pokemon go created an emotional connection with their users that encouraged them to go and do these healthy behaviors. And that's what we do within the new life app and that's where we are different to everyone else is that when you see the app and when you use it when you experience us as a brand, we are creating a positive emotional connection with people. And telling them or helping them to encourage them to do things without specifically say go for a walk each or apple. You know, have you done a budget? It is making it unaccessible and easy and small bits so that the end is automatically people are getting healthier and looking after their well-being without just being a peddharmacent. Now you see, I know that I kind of knew the Pokemon go thing because besides doing startups and all of these sort of things technology is my life. You know, I pretty much live and breathe this industry. And it was one of those nuggets way, it was just buried in the back of my brain somewhere because I've got a friend, I guess we can call them, who just is very obsessed. Like we were walking along the Seapoint Promenade the one day and I was like what is your hand doing on the inside of your jacket and he's like oh, is playing Pokemon go in secret? I was just play Pokemon go I don't care. And that's the thing, you know, I've seen, I think I've seen the article somewhere and I was very surprised by it. But it makes a lot of sense with everything you've said because just yesterday for example, I was on my way to an appointment and I could have taken an Uber. But I was close enough as I can walk and I was like well you know, you get my steps and you know, you get my 10,000 steps, you know, for my discovery of my reality, for this for that. And it's great, you know, I get rewarded for it, but it starts feeling like it's a chore. Like I have to achieve this thing for me to get this free water. It doesn't feel like, oh, this is something I want to do. It feels like I don't want to say it feels like a grudge thing, but it does almost start feeling like, oh, my watch is buzzing. You know, every hour, 10 minutes before I've got to stand up and move. But I'm busy right now. And I feel bad when I don't do, you know, something. And I think this thing that was meant to motivate people is now making people feel like we're not measuring up when we don't quite achieve these things on the exact time frame or within the exact time frame we are told we need to achieve these things. So, okay, for you know, I totally agree. And that's why the model that we follow for behavior change or one of them is called the hook model. And there's two parts to it. Number one is starting with an external motivator, which is exactly what you've just mentioned and what I was mentioning about the rewards. Do you get an external reward? Ooh, this sounds good. And in a lot of ways when it comes to help are prevented to medicine and these types of things, you have to start this way because I know I should eat better because in 10, 15, 20, 40 years time, I will be healthier and I live a longer life. But honestly, right now, I just want that fifth piece of chocolate cake, you know what? I just need it because I just just need it. So, you have that problem of the long term bias where it does count the long term benefits for the short term. So, you need this reward to almost count that to say go for the walk, get a reward right now so that you make them equal, which is great. But if you ended that point exactly as you say, then it becomes, you know what, I really don't want to do my 10,000 steps today. And then what happens the next day you take off the watch and then you never put it back on. So you get an initial exactly what I did. Exactly. And that's classic because you get the motivation, you get the external rewards and you go, this is great. Then if you feel pressure and you don't carry on and you infect often end up worse than you were before. So what the hook model is and whether whether this is something we spend a lot of time is how do you turn an external motivation into an internal motivation. So the reward, that external reward, whatever it might be, becomes less important to you and it's the act itself and the way that you feel what drives you to carry on doing it. So that's what we focus on. So all the things in our app take it into account. There is a range of things to do. It is not go one of the challenges that we have because we split the activities into effectively two things. One, we reward people for what they're already doing. So just for walking, cycling, doing mindfulness, you open the app and update and says that's amazing. But then there's a second part which we actively encourage people to do is something new. So this we call our quests. So we have worlds in the app. There's the desert, the mountain, the ocean and the forest and people go through them and in 50 levels each. And in each you get to do a different thing and it could be a five minute work, ten minutes of mindfulness or a half an hour walk and many other things. But there's variety and it's small and it's fun and there's no pressure to have to do it. So that is the thing that it becomes an internal motivator because it's not, you're not being forced to do it and there's also no loss a version. So a lot of people in the well being world like to focus on loss a version because loss a version does create strong behavior change. It's like give you the reward at front. But now you have to, if you don't exercise, we're going to punch you. People do it, but it's begrudging. So for us we very much only care at focused most things. So if you do it amazing, well done. If you didn't do it, that's okay. Like small steps, small steps every day. I'm sitting here and I'm just sort of nodding along and I'm smiling. You know, obviously people listen to this can't see that. But I'm smiling because this is a such a big beautiful smile. You're missing out and seeing a ray of sunshine. Well, I have no power right now. So you know, we've got to have some light summer. This is why I don't understand if my jokes are very bad. The very dead jokes. My friends hate me for it. And I was like, well, it's your problem now, my guys. You wanted to be friends with me. But no, I'm smiling really, really hugely because I'm sitting here and it feels like it's this obvious thing that you're talking about. It's like, but why has this not been a thing before? Because everything you're saying makes so much sense. And it really does feel like, hi, the aunt says being there for everyone else all the time. Why is no one else done this? Is that a sort of response you guys have gotten from, you know, people when you've spoken to them before about this is what you life is? This is what we offer. And this is why we could be a great option for you in your business. It's an interesting point to me. Listen, everything is obvious in retrospect, right? Everything is obvious in retrospect. That is a wonderful thing. Exactly. But, you know, I think what we've done and why we've been, I think, very successful so far is that we're very true to our mission and our values. And that comes out. And people see that authenticity and drive to really help people and so our mission. The technology and the way we deliver it is absolutely part of that. The philosophy behind we do is absolutely part of that. And there are a lot of companies who are doing similar things. But ultimately, you know, people pick something that fits with their values and their outlook. So, you know, the classic thing I certainly know was was big in back in my days until Africa is that, you know, oh, am I a Sadie person or a B&W person? Excellent cars, very fancy cars, both very expensive cars, are pretty much equivalent. But people put themselves in a camp. I am this one or I am that one. And in a lot of ways, like, you know, we have that as well. So obviously, we better, of course, but that is a lot about just, you know, making sure that people align with the values. Well, I mean, these days, it's not even just in South Africa. It's everywhere. It's, are you an iPhone person or are you an Android person? I mean, that's not even a question. Obviously, it's iPhone or nothing. I mean, like, come on. Well, then I want to show you what phone I'm using because it's not an iPhone. And I've got a friend, I've got a friend who you happen to know who's also. He's like, why are we still friends if you're not on an iPhone? It's been a very touchy subject in our friendship for many years. Anyway, let's talk a little bit about the massive announcement you guys just made at the time of recording. It was yesterday at the time of release. It'll be just over a week ago. And when I got the news, I sat there and I was like, you guys raised how much in your series, even think because that's, it's not a small number. It's 120 million US dollars or 95 million pounds. You know, obviously, I give it a quick exchange rate these days. That's not a small feat that you guys have achieved for a series. For any sort of start up, walk us through some of that because, you know, on venture burn, we cover start up startups are sort of a love outpatient, a bread and butter. And it's always interesting to see when you see, you know, in this case, I suppose we can call you an insure tick, although that's not a full sort of roundup of what you guys actually do. But it's always great when you see a company do really well with finding we people are investing because they believe in what you're doing. No, thank you. It was a very humbling and proud day for us yesterday to be able to announce that fundraise. You know, for us, it's just it's a real validation that we are living up to our mission of inspiring people to be our best lives. And there's incredible investors out there and companies who want to join us to help us achieve that. So it is very humbling to be able to go out there and say, look, this is who we are. This is what we want to do in people go. Yeah, I think I think this is something special we want, you know, we want to be involved. And so it was very special to be able to do that. And, you know, the investment will help us to really expand. I think this is where we're going next week. We have a very good idea of what we're doing now. We've had phenomenal growth. We obviously want to double down in the UK and now look towards some international expansion as well. So it's just about now trying to help millions and millions of people from the hundreds of thousands that we're currently doing. Now, you kind of almost lead into this question. You said expansion. The question, I think you know what the question is going to be. Are you coming to South Africa at any stage? So yes, we definitely will. We have our expansion plans in the books at the moment. South Africa and the US will be very much top of that list beyond that kind of TBD. But yes, real life will be coming to South Africa. We will come and have fun in Cape Town and everywhere else as well. I just want to see the giraffe because I've been on your website and it's like this giraffe looks amazing. I actually mentioned it to Kevin once before when I was like, I almost came more about the giraffe than anything else like the base mascot you guys could even have chosen. I'm just really excited. So so I did a giraffe who we call Yugi is a very much the name thing of of of you. So the giraffe is our mascot. Yugi is our our guide within the app. Yugi is is the guide that kind of helps people along on their way. So why the giraffe? Girards are fascinating animals. But primarily the primary reason that we we went for for the giraffes that the giraffes have the largest part out of any land animal. And for us, that's what we're all about. We really love them. Yeah, love and the passion back into insurance and financial services. It's very much about about that. So we are parrot and parrot passionate about giraffes. They come up everywhere. Every staff member every time they see a giraffes ends a picture every time you go to the shop, they buy a giraffe. So we wanted the incredible gifts that we give out to our customers and people here are pink giraffes. But they're very special pink giraffes. We get key ring ones and then bigger and bigger and bigger. They all handmade in South Africa. We have an incredible lady who makes them for us in Johannesburg. They're all handmade, beaded, pink hot pink giraffes and we ship them by the 100 and now the 1000 across the United Kingdom. So it's just a little bit of South Africa coming and people absolutely love these handmade pink beaded giraffes. I need to go find these pink giraffes. I want one of these now. I'll see if Kevin has any to give you back there in South Africa. He won't share. He will hold them because they're probably more precious than gold. And I don't blame him to be fair. So that's fine. I want to jump to. So the Prisha Lisa was sent out about the funding announcement. There was a lining there which I found very interesting. And it says, "You like the leaves of the six trillion dollar insurance industry is not fit for the future due to low trust, low perceived value and low engagement." I'm not saying that you're wrong but I am going to ask if you could sort of expand on that a little bit. What exactly do you mean by that? It would be a lot more fun if you did tell me I was wrong because then we could have a debate. I think of Jonathan, you completely 100% of you are wrong. I don't know what you're talking about here. I can dare we go now. You know what? No, you are wrong. You're wrong. Much better. You see, there's much more fun for the listeners. Because if we all just come on and agree, then it's just kind of, you know what? So so. So I honestly don't think it's going to take much for me to convince the vast majority of people out there that insurance is a bit broken. I mean, it's one of the least trusted industries out there. And it's a crime shame because I studied insurance. I'm an actor by profession. I actually love insurance. It's a beautiful product. Unfortunately, the way it's been delivered over the last while hasn't matched up to, I think, what insurance was designed to be. And if you look at the history of insurance, insurance or life insurance specifically started about 2000 years ago with the Romans. And they kind of clapped together when they went out to doing terrible things across the world. They got together and they said, all right, if in our little region, if anybody dies, we'll clapped together and we'll send the money to the family to look after each other. And that was the birth of life insurance as as a more formal industry. And then for most of the last 2000 years, it kind of was very much like that until 250 or so 300 years ago, where mortality tables were were invented. And it was a guy named Edward Rose Moore, 1672, I believe, who was the first actor and said, well, it kind of makes sense that if we pay out life insurance, it should be based on the risk of the person dying. And the biggest risk of someone dying is their age. So this was he invented this concept again in retrospect, well, obvious. The inventive the concept or certainly brought in more strongly the concept of age rating mortality. And effectively, if you look at a insurance policy document, and I've got one that I keep saved on my desktop, which is great, from 1812, the application form for the life insurance is how old are you, how much do you weigh, have you had these diseases, do you smoke, like I think I'd ask if you smoke, but it is nearly identical to the questions that are still being asked today. So the level of innovation within the way that we assess and quantify risk has not changed much in 250 years. And at the same time, the legacy systems that underpin that have not changed that much. There's been a lot of technical innovation and within insurance, there has been a lot of technical innovation, but the fundamental way that risk is assessed has not changed that much. And also, it is static. So at the moment, if you get a life insurance policy for the vast majority of the time, it's once and done, which means that you ask those questions. And for the next 30 or 40 years, how have along that policy last, you are never assessed again. So you have these very small factories, like me, very, very smart, although I didn't really ever enjoy being an engineer, I ran far away from the African-political side, is to say, all right, you've answered these questions based on millions of other people's data points we believe you will live to expect to as old. So and you never come back and assess that. So the policies are very static. So we're I think insurance will certainly change, and we're working towards that insurance will become more dynamic. You'll be able to understand and reassess risk as you go along and to reward people who are making improvements for reducing their own risk during the policy. And that's beneficial for everyone. Insurance have to hold a lot of capital in case these bad events go on. So if they're able to reassess their risk during the policy term, that means that they can hold more appropriate capital as they go along. So it really is beneficial for everyone. There are downsides there, which I'm happy to talk about as well, but I will pass it back to you to see if you have more answers on the topic. I'm enjoying this. I actually would just be very happy to listen to you talk all the time because this is I like learning things and this has teaching me a lot of things that I didn't know I didn't know. So thank you. But I mean if you want it, if you want it carry on expanding, I'm happy for you to do that. I'll let you do all the talking, Jonathan. Now I'll touch on one more point, which was they are part of that six billion in the statement in there. So what we spoke about there was why it's not fit for the future because to be honest, it's not really fit for the present. And one of the reasons that it's exacerbated is there is the trust and the engagement. So the trust is disappointing because if you look out, it looked the actual statistics. Most insurers actually do pay out the vast majority at the time. But unfortunately, sometimes they do get it wrong. And when when people are denied a claim, often it's because they were they didn't understand what they had or the policy wasn't set upright. But the main thing that really drives everything is that there is no positive engagement with insurance company. So what in general, in general, for most insurers, this is what a policy looks like or a customer journey looks like. The person decides to buy insurance after probably seeing 6,000 ads based on if you don't have insurance, something bad is going to happen. They're indecipherable. They're going to do it. So they have an interaction with the insurance company or with a comparison website, with a broker. And the first thing that they do is they have to pay money. Now that's never a good experience. That's always a negative experience because you you're paying and you're not giving anything back immediately. There's nothing physical or tangible getting back. You're purely giving the insurance company something. That's a negative experience. That's not a good user experience. You're giving. You're you're not getting anything. For almost all insurance companies or insurance policies, that is the lost interaction person will have for the insurer for a long time until one of two things happen. A customer in your at which point the insurer says, give me more money and even more money. And when you're like, oh, this is another bad experience, you're still taking from me. And the only other interaction that people can have is if there's a claim. So now, even if an insurance company gives somebody an unbelievable experience, they pay out quickly and they do everything. The person is still ahead. A bad experience happens to them because a loved one has died or they've gotten sick or their car has been stolen. So there are almost no opportunities for an insurance company to have a positive engagement with their customers. So how can engagement? Good. How can trust be good? So that's very much what we focus on in customers and companies like Discovery have done a good job over this over many years. It's creating touch points that can be positive with your with your with your customers. So you can build engagement and you can rebuild trust. It's interesting because it feels like a lot of industries are moving towards, I don't know, what sort of more relationship building types of relationships with the customers because before it seemed to have just been more of a one-source transactional kind of thing. It was cool. You know, you're a customer, you're a client because you paid us money once and that's kind of as you, you know, as you said, that's been the only sort of engagement anyone's ever had with many companies. And in the past couple of years, it seems to have been a change from that and it moved towards, you know, it cannot be a once-off. It needs to be a relationship built on engagement, which obviously brings back returning sort of interest, brings back returning potentially capital revenue. But it also helps people feel a sense of, you're not just a company taking money from me. We have some sort of connection and I have some sort of buy-in to this brand, to this company that I've given so much money to. I agree. I think there's, it's an interesting thing and a lot of companies and as consumers as well, there are multiple ways of engaging or interacting with companies. When I go to the store, I'm happy just to buy the cheese that I normally buy. I literally know desire to have a deep and meaningful and positive experience with my cheese brand other than hoping the cheese does taste nice. I don't need anything lasting beyond that. And for a lot of people, I like that with their insurance and that's okay. For me, for my car insurance, I'm happy as long as it's just there in the background that doesn't do anything. At the same time, there are a lot of people and a lot of consumers and a lot of companies who want to be aligned to the people they work with and to give value. And for us, it's not about creating a relationship or loyalty. It's not a loyalty scheme. It's about giving value every day. It really is about helping people to live their best lives and the way that we do that is by creating those deep relationships. So in the insurance industry, there's very much a split in terms of the future of insurance. And both might be okay, both might be right. So a lot of times when people say, what is the future of insurance? You either get one of two answers. The one you will say a lot of people tell you embedded insurance is the future insurance. So embedded insurance is where insurance effectively becomes invisible. It gets relegated to the background or the back end. So for example, you will never have to buy home contents insurance because when you go online to Amazon or whatever the equivalence there in South Africa was a loot or what to take a lot. And as you buy the product and pops up and it says, for an extra 12 round, do you want to have this product insured? And you go, oh, fine. Yes, click done. That's embedded insurance because you never deal with insurer. There's no big thing. The insurance itself is just hidden basically within the value chain. That's very valid and I think that that will have a place in the future. But for me, as somebody who's passionate about insurance, I would hate for that to be the insurance because I believe that insurers can do so much good in the world that we should be shouting about it and we should be at the forefront of the consumer relationship, not relegated to hiding it. So that's why for us in life insurance, we want to be the front-end relationship owner with our customers. We want to be the ones driving value and if people want to get the result rewards through us, that's amazing. If we want to facilitate the other things, I want to make buying from Amazon embedded within your life as opposed to the only round. So, you know, we want people to look at us as that first and only point, not only the first point of call when they want to look after themselves whether it be financially, emotionally, mentally or physically, that they will look at us as they're insured because nobody else has the incentive to look after them as much as we do from a financial perspective. We want people to live. We need people to live. You know, the thing that I love the most about all of this right now is how passionate you are about this and I don't say this lightly. I think anyone who knows me knows that I'm a very difficult person to convince me when someone's trying to convince me, "Oh, we genuinely do care about something." I like to say to people, I'm a little bit jaded in this industry because I've been in this industry from a media site for about a decade now. But, give or take a decade, just under. But before that I used to also work for one of the big five global tech companies, doing product launches and all sorts of things that I've dealt with, the Googles and the apples that I've sat in the calls where you've had an estimate and you've had Tim Cook and all of those guys. And I know how these big companies operate and it's like, you know, I'm so used to hearing from that, you know, from from being at events, from covering, you know, launches as a journalist. "Oh, we care about this and this is what we're doing." And I was like, "No, you don't. That's the thing you conveniently saying to sell it to me. I do not believe a word that you're saying." It's very different with you because I've never heard someone this passionate about insurance in my entire existence on this. And it's not a bad thing. It's just the fact that you also passionate, I think, goes a long way to explaining why you life is having the success that it is. And I don't believe it's obviously just you that's such driving the passion because you can never just be one person. It's certainly not me. I'm a very small car in what's an amazingly hopefully well-willed machine now. I have incredible profound and an unbelievable team who just, you know, who puts that with me and helps me to live my best life so that we can move on and move forward. But that's the thing. It's like I said to you all fair, you know, I've got a friend who works at your life, who works in your team. And not only for many, many years and he randomly, regularly, almost every single day, I'll get a message, I'll get a voice, I'll get something. A DM on like TikTok or Instagram or something. And it's just randomly be telling me about how great your life is today. And I was like, it's the weirdest thing to me because, you know, I've known him for his entire professional career. You know, I've known all the companies he's worked at before. He's never gone on like this about any company he's ever worked at. Or even worked worth in any sort of partnership before. And I just kind of sat there. And I sit in one day, I quoted him that line from the devil whiz product, I was like, did you fall down and smack your little head on the pavement? Because you sound like you, I said, you sound like you've gone to cool aid because what is going on? And he's just like, no, he's never worked at a company like this. And the fact that I've heard this from him, you know, I can hear it in your voice. I go and LinkedIn. And I see people are randomly commenting, you know, like you lifestyle commenting and things. And I say, if you want to so happy and passionate and excited and say, this seems a little bit weird, I think, because we're not used to it. I think our society, we're not used to what people being that passionate. We embrace who we are and we embrace being unique and we embrace each person as to who they are. And so much credit goes to Samuel, our CEO who really embodies and lives our values so, so, so, so much. And I'm sitting here listening to this, can't see wearing a Tardar t-shirt, which I might tell you. I could never even imagine happening a few years ago, certainly before my U-Live days. I joined U-Live out of KPMG, as I mentioned, I'm an actuary and I, you know, very professional, much more, more down the line in my thinking, you know, things like happiness is for hippies was a blog, I was once writing about, you know, like my thoughts on a lot of these things. And, you know, my wife does look at me sometimes and he's, what's happened to you over the last few years. But I think when you see somebody as passionate and happy to be themselves as Sam years in, you can't help but to embrace that. And then we've, as the co-founders take in that on and hopefully then brought that to the company and then everybody feels, feels the ability to be themselves and to just let go and be happy. So when I joined you with the guys to start U-Live, I was very much wearing much smarter clothes, buttons, I'd accept. And now, as I mentioned, happy to be wearing my tie dye and just being out there and just having, helping people and helping us not to live our best lives. Well, I think this, this really nicely brings us to the topic of culture because that is a very valuable thing, you know, from what I've seen within U-Live. And I find it very interesting because the phrase that I hate these days is the new normal, you know, COVID has resulted in the new normal for so many things. I'm so tired of that phrase, the new normal. But anyway, you know, we've now seen remote working, work from home, become such a big thing and you've got staff not just sitting in the UK, not just sitting in what, by the way, looks at the most amazing office I've ever seen pictures of in my entire life. I just have to say that. The very jealous when I saw those pictures, I was like, Kevin, do you guys, are you hiring? Do you, do you, does anyone even a system I can make tea? Like I will do anything. But, you know, when you've got people working all over the show, you know, all over the world, surely culture, especially a culture as dynamic as yours, is a difficult thing to maintain and to, to, I don't want to say keep us standard, but I suppose that is probably the best way to say it, you know, because at the end of the day, company culture is such a big thing for you guys and I think for many companies in terms of a bolding, growing, adapting, scaling. Yeah, 100%. The culture is so fundamental to us and everything that we do with our question. How do we maintain culture? How do we continue growing our culture? Something that we focus on heavily within the business. It's always one of our quarterly objectives is, is making sure that the company and everybody in the company is working towards being their best selves. But I think there's a few practical things that we do that are, are really useful. The first is that we have a pretty long interview process at something that we, we're not afraid to tell people about, you know, technical skill will be assessed pretty quickly, but then there are multiple interviews that are very much just about trying to lift that lid on the person, which is really hard to do, especially when it's via Zoom, etc. to see if the person is going to be what we just call a U-Lafher. Is this person going to fit within the culture? Are they going to add to it or not to track from it? And it's a little bit amorphous. It's hard to say what a U-Lafher is, but it's sometimes easier to see when somebody isn't. But, you know, we generally want people with, with a growth mindset that are open, that are happy to be themselves, that are here to contribute, that are aligned with the vision and the mission. So there is quite a long interview process to make sure that we feel that the people are coming in, are adding and not detracting. Do we always get arrived? Of course not, but I think we do a generally pretty good job in general. The next thing that we do is very much focus as well on being a very fun cult effectively. I mean, joke about that, likely, because there's, we focus on some of those things that people look and go, wow, that looks like it's a cult and that's really just. I have to jump in on that because I'm so glad you said that because you guys recently did your little, three-clamping thing. And I saw pictures of you. Thank you. I couldn't remember the name of it, but when I saw pictures, I immediately, in the back of my mind, I was like, I just finished watching We Crasht on F1 TV+. And I was like, hi, hi. Okay. Yeah, you're not the first to draw that comparison. I said, we work, I'm not going to cover it and we work there. An interesting case study in how to create a successful business, how to destroy a successful business, how to do, I don't know, whatever else. I think for us, the thing is that we're authentic to who we are as the business, regardless of what that looks like to other people and what has or hasn't been done before. And for us, the real goal is always to create this community of people working together towards the same mission, following the same values because the mission is what we want to do, the values are how we do it. And the rituals that we do are very much towards that. And I'm talking now, people are probably going to go, whoa, this sounds really wacky, but it's not. It's actually just very practical stuff, which we'll talk about. So every Monday morning, we have an all-hands with the company, which Sammy will usually Sammy will speak. And the all-hands is not focused on what the company is achieving and what our results are, or what we want to do this week. It's always a reminder of why we are here and what is the the values of the company and how How does that fit in with the world? So every Monday, but morning, the very first thing that we do as a business is to remind ourselves why we're here and how we want to achieve the mission. So how we want to live by our values of love, building a world that we want to live in, being open, being vulnerable, acting with gratitude, all of our values. So the Monday always starts with reminding us why we're here. So it sets the tone for the week. And then on Thursday, afternoons, we have another all hands, which is now focused on the more and the strategy of the business and it's focused on how we're doing the results. But it is very much also focused on gratitude. So we have shout out. So everyone in the business can send anonymous or not shout out to other people in the business. They all get collated and we have this just really incredible, fun experience of people putting out. Thank you for this, some of them are silly, some of them are fun, some of them are heartfelt. So it's an opportunity to come together just to show communal gratitude. And those are the two primary things that we do every single week with everybody that helps to keep culture aligned and keep people on the same page. And one of the things that is difficult is that because we are remote and even though the majority of the staff in the UK, most of us work from home. And we have now stopped across the whole world. This is incredible. So it was important for us to bring everybody together to meet and to bond and to talk about non-work things. And that was the festival of you which reminded you of the we work some of them. But it was fun because you had 150 people wearing tie-dye t-shirts in a field in Norfolk dancing around the fire. So actually it was no dancing around the fire. But yes, it was an incredible experience where we had three days of strategy sessions of learning, of focusing on well-being. So it was just an amazing experience for the company. You know, I'm again sitting here just sort of laughing at it because it sounds great, but at the same time I think anyone who's been in corporate life in any sort of role, you know, for anything longer than six months will know that what you're talking about is a very unusual and uncommon thing. But I think also the long-eaf spainting corporate life, the more difficult it is to, you know, who you are. When you're at a company that's essentially saying be who you are. I think it's a very difficult thing because after time you become so conditioned to certain degrees to this is what is acceptable and this is what is not acceptable and this is how much of myself I can show and cannot show. Yeah, and this corporate life and I spent a good few years in the corporate world actually really enjoyed the vast majority of my time in the corporate world. It wasn't who I wanted to be when I grew up. It's an amazing career for a lot of people. It really is. For me, I wanted something different and that's why I moved on. But there are huge differences between the corporate world and the startup world and probably your life is being a little bit unique amongst a lot of them. But it is, I think a lot of companies now, certainly in the UK, I don't know so much in South Africa, are encouraging people to bring their whole selves to work and being genuine about it, corporate startups, etc. So I think that's something which I'm proud to say we're not totally unique in that it is becoming more acceptable. It is, it's just different because at the end of the day we want it to bring our whole selves to work but sometimes if you're just going to do a job to be transactional, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think for us, we're really all looking and creating just more of a community of people working towards the common mission and building an incredible business at the same time. Well, surely building that incredible business has come with very unique challenges, especially you know, COVID having happened. It's got to, it cannot have been easy. Let's put it that way. Nothing is easy. Nothing? Nothing? Nothing is, John, as I'm surprised. What could be worth doing? That's not true because some things are easy and then it works, which is great. But certainly building a startup is not easy in any situation. You have challenges, you have to overcome and sometimes you get lucky with the timing, sometimes things work well. So, it was a unique challenge. I think in a lot of ways we were able to adapt very quickly and then benefit because others weren't able to adapt as quickly. So, you know, as soon as lockdowns were looking like it was going to happen, the entire campaign went remote. We were up and running instantly because you know, new tech startup, there was no delays in just continuing and picking up so the business was great. But more than that, our message of well-being and looking after your staff was just so important and the time that it was almost the first time I think I can ever remember an insurance perspective where insurance was actually being bought and not sold. That people were looking at us and saying, "This is amazing because you're protecting my people from an insurance perspective, but you're also giving them the tools and the ability to look after their well-being because part of our service is not just the app which rewards people. It's also access to things like a virtual GP. You can get video calls for doctors, we have counseling services and mental health support and financial coaching. So, this is an incredible array of services and the messaging was just so appropriate for companies who were desperate to look after their staff and what was an absolutely crazy couple of years. So, I think we were able to go out and be sensitive to the market to show that we could add value and you know, through that we grew I think it was 10 or 20 fold over that period of time. Okay, wow. Jonathan, I think we're going to cut it there not because I'm not enjoying chatting to you but because I'm running on battery power which is not doing really well. Thank you Escom, love you so much. But I think this is a great point to leave this conversation because when you guys come to South Africa then we can carry on the conversation and I think it will be a great time then. But I think it's also been very enlightening and it's making me look at insurance from a very different way that I never thought I would actually. Good. Good. And as my day has been worthwhile. I mean, seriously, this has been such a great conversation and listen to you. It's amazing news on the funding and the expansion and we cannot wait to see you in South Africa and just to touch on something you said earlier where you kept saying you know, maybe Amazon always what take a lot. Rumor has it that Amazon is launching in South Africa next year. So. Yes, I love it. It's it is the single most highly used. I mean, Amazon is so great. I love everything I buy. It's from Amazon. Everything. Everything. Well, we thank you because that was the company used to work at this. We've all got a lot of things on that place but thank you. Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time I really appreciated. Great. Very excited for more news from you life. Brilliant. Thank you so much. I enjoyed the chat. We'll speak to you soon. And that's a wrap on this episode. Huge thanks to Jonathan Ruma and the entire ULIFE team for making this happen and for taking the time out to have this conversation with us. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, share it with your friends and as you know, you can catch us on most of the platforms where you listen to great podcasts. If you want to hear more about entrepreneurship, venture capitalists and the latest in all the startup news in South Africa and across the continent, make sure to head over to ventureburn.com. Venture Part has been a production of the Reframe Group. We will catch you in the next episode.