Jimmy Williams, Co-Founder & CEO @ Urban Jungle

This episode is sponsored by Deckdolphin. Fun raising can be tough. You build a deck, you send it out and you hear nothing back. You don't get enough feedback. Deckdolphin changes that. Get honest actionable feedback from real VCs within 48 hours. Submit your deck today, go to deckdolphin.com and start booking more investor meetings with a better deck. Welcome to Riding Unicorns, the podcast about growth startups. I'm James Pringle and I'm a technology entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Pringle Capital. My co-host is Hector Mason, Hector is a partner at B2B Investor Episode 1 Ventures. Our mission is to uncover what it takes to build a unicorn business. For season 3 we're speaking to some of the best founders, many from Unicorn companies and asking them about their journey, operational insight, tips and lessons they've learned along the way. Today's episode is with Jimmy Williams, co-founder and CEO of Urban Jungle. Urban Jungle is an inshortack for contents and home insurance. They've raised over 22 million dollars from ecoventures and some top angel investors. In this episode we cover the launching of Urban Jungle, fundraising, metrics and much more. Let's get started. Hi Jimmy, welcome to Riding Unicorns. Thanks very much for having me on. It's our pleasure. So Jimmy we're starting each episode for season 3 with a broad question which is what does entrepreneurship mean to you? There's a couple of things that a lot of people think it is that I disagree with or are found and not to be true. So one thing is it's not a getwitch quit scheme. In fact, I'm probably better described as a getwitch quite slowly with a lot of hard work and an incredible amount of risk scheme. So definitely not a getwitch quit scheme. I mean the other thing people often talk about is that it's the opportunity to be your own boss, particularly with the topic of this podcast. This is about not building your own businesses, about building unicorns. Nearly everyone on this journey is going to go and raise your capital. So as soon as you raise your capital you've got a board, you've got people you're reporting to, you are not really your own boss anymore. So it's not that either. So what is it? For me, it's all about having a vision of the world or a version of the world that you want to make true and you want to make happen because it is so hard and because you've got to push against the standard and whatever analysis doing, everyone constantly wants you just to copy what's out there and you have to try and rip up every rulebook to get there. The only way you have the energy to do that is if you have this really strong vision of what you want the world to look like in the space that you're in. So yeah, from my point of view, when we started the business, I was driven by the insurance industry as crap. I've had personal bad experiences and I just want to make this not true anymore. That's to be honest what drives me and I think that is for me what entrepreneurialism is about is having something you want to build and building it. Whether it could even not be in a company, that's not company specific, but that's how I think about it. Yeah, it's a great take on entrepreneurship. I wonder whether you always thought you would be an entrepreneur or whether whether you're sort of early career helped shape you as an entrepreneur and I know that you're at OC&C and there's a group of you B2C founders including Tom Blomfield who were at OC&C and I think there are a few others, can't remember who. But yeah, I wonder how you're early career and actually your time at OC&C shaped you as an entrepreneur and whether you think that helped in your journey. Yeah, it's a good point. Tom and I started on the same day at OC&C as our first sort of post-unit job. But also people like James who was one of the K-Fan as a funding circle, Mandip who started truver and kind of that. So there was a good first. I think probably you start early on that right and kind of growing up on the background. So my dad, not sure he described necessarily as an entrepreneur, but he did start a couple of small businesses. He was a lawyer and he started his own law. And I think there is something that's somewhere in the back of your head about WISC. So I know my wife, her, both her parents, her teachers, her dad's a university professor and her mom's a teacher. They had one single employer their whole life to her. The principal of starting business is absolutely nuts. Like you cannot have it in her head that you could take that much risk with your career. Whereas for me it's like yeah, you know, that's what people do. They start businesses, they take some risks, there's some more than that. So definitely there's like something that started there. Obviously started my career in consulting. Like that was particularly driven by just a fascination with business. I've always really been interested in, so I studied economics university with never interested in macroeconomics. It's always interested in micro. Like how do companies work? How do they make money? How do they differentiate from each other? And it kind of, still, if I go to a shop and it's badly laid out, that really annoys me. And I'm like maybe I should write a letter to the CEO of this company and tell them how they to reorganise the store to make a little money. And then I'm like, go straight to this new year. I love that. Exactly. Yeah, I'm a bit busy to take this up. Probably a bit busy for that. Maybe like, you know, one of the tires, I can write all these letters. But it's always like super interesting in business. And you know, particularly interested in the kind of details of making a proposition really work. And as entry, I listened to your episode about Chessman the other day. And the word he kept on saying, "Well, time," which I'll take you with his proposition. And just thinking about like, sometimes you can get carried away with new business models or, you know, grand visions of this new world that you're going to create. But actually, what off for matters is the detail of how does your product fit together. Does it all make sense? Can someone navigate it well? Does it all add up to your brand? Like, the details of the proposition really matter. So it's always been obsessed with that. And then, yeah, I think particularly making the jump out of consulting into that was very like, I guess, encouraged by the fact that those guys have done it. You know, when you see someone else, you know, do something, then you're like, "Okay, well, if they can do it, I can do it." And so, yeah, actually, with Tom, the first thing I did when I was like, "I think I'll probably do this entrepreneur thing." I like text Tom and say, "Let's go for a beer." Is this fun? Was my sort of basic question to him, to which he was like, "Yeah, sometimes, but I went ahead with it anyway." But yeah, just having those kind of, yeah, I guess, role models of people you've seen do something is definitely impactful. And you mentioned earlier that you'd had a bad experience that sort of led you to wanting to fix insurance. So what was that sort of experience? And when did you realise that this is what I'm going to do? And what did you do to get started? Because I think a lot of people probably sit on ideas, fill it from zilch, so entrepreneurship sort of bias to action, and how do you get started? So what did you do to take that leap? Yeah, good question. So, it's my pain accumulated. It wasn't like a one-nightclub moment. So the first thing was we were in a house share, and when I'm doing my first move to town, and no one would offer us insurance because we were in a house share, and we were, we thought, "Good rest, we were nice people, we had the old party." That was about it, but literally no one would be sure of us, and I was like, "That's really, it wasn't no one doing that." Again, like a propositional point, right? Why would you not help to get people? Then I had this current insurance claim where mine sure literally shipped me to this third party that tried to fleece me for all of the money and like, use me to get money out of other people and make claims for what Blashdard didn't have, and I was going phone calls constantly for the next three years about all this weird stuff that I could do with my insurance. I was like, "This is totally broken." And then actually I started at this, and see doing some insurance stuff, and I think getting into the sector and speaking to the people in it, and what was totally crazy, was to remain socially crazy about sector, is everyone knows it's broken? It's not like people are like, "Oh yeah, it's fine." Everyone's like, "Oh, I only know it's really bad that we do that, isn't it?" But everyone does it, so you've got to do it that way. And I think. Because the people in charge are dining out on it, they're taking their margin and having beers at lunch. Yeah, I think so. I've been trying to, that definitely was my kind of incoming assumption. I've been trying to reconcile that with reality. I think it's less that. They're like fundamentally nice people, and they're well motivated, but the people in charge are just money people. So they're just thinking about how do I make the most money? How do I squeeze margin out of everywhere? And not thinking about what is a customer one? What experience do people want? How is this changing? How do new customers think about this in different way to all customers? So I'm going to give them a break on its carelessness rather than malice, but who knows? And then I think your other question was about how did how did I get started? So I think some tech founders are like, when they start out, there's only one thing. They know exactly the one thing. When I quit my job, I was like, I wanted to do the central mineral thing, sounds like an adventure. And I had two or three ideas that I was talking about. They were all stuff I had had persons experience over and looked at, but yeah, a lot of it was looking at those two or three opportunities, turning them over, looking at is there as any investor remotely interested in this area? Was definitely one thing I looked at? Yeah, well, are there any other examples of early versions of this around the world that I can sort of learn from? And definitely that's where I got to ensure it just felt like the industry was new, was crap. Investors were saying, hey, listen to this, [BLANK_AUDIO] to use crap, maybe some of us use move out of it, and there were a couple of businesses starting to pop up by the hand-wraiting sort of broken out, yeah. So that's what really kind of inspired me to sort of give it a go. One thing I did, which is very specific, if you think your audience are like thinking about doing this, is I definitely recommend. So I went freelance in the industry that I wanted to disrupt. So I became a freelance consultant after I lived with consulting and basically went and worked at my supermarket for a while, and did a couple of other things in the insurance base. That was incredibly outfall, like disproportionately make it helpful because I then had that on my CV, so I could talk to everyone about how it had worked there. It gave me time where I was getting paid. I was working on the business to think about the business and think about the problem, but the clock wasn't really ticking yet on my savings or anything else that I'd like to do. So that was definitely a pro, and then also the big thing to me was when I quit my job, I didn't have co-founder, so it gave me time to find out my co-founder Greg and get that all going. And then for me actually getting Greg, I was saying in Greg as the first person who's like this amazing tech superstar, he has this incredible CV persuading him that this might be a good idea. That was the worst shared moment for me, because I was like, okay, someone who's not me thinks this is a decent idea. That means I should probably do something here. And also, I mean what's amazing is I was working on things like on my laptop and not really doing that much to be honest on the business. But then as soon as I had Greg, it was like, okay, someone's expected some stuff out of me. So I sent him business plans and thoughts of what we could do with the product and supplies we should be speaking to. And suddenly because they were another person, it was not me, this whole thing became an entity. So how did you find Greg and persuade, because that is the first step that many founders will tell you, I suppose, often you would have a meeting of minds with someone and an idea would come out of that, but the other way of starting businesses is your way. So how did you sort of go about that? Incredibly deliberately. I was like, this person's probably going to be somewhere in my network. So let's be very deliberate about that. So I drew up a list of everyone I knew who remotely worked in technology. I'm a good thing about having already quit my job, as I was pretty flexible. So I can have lunch and coffee with anyone I like whenever I, and yeah, just just network. And every person I went to have a coffee with, I asked them if they knew anyone and then they'd do at least one person and then I wanted to come with them. Like Greg actually, I was really a friend of his wife at university and did kind of know him before. But I guess if I hadn't done that whole process, I would never realise that he had just quit his job. I was looking for any challenge. And once you do this stuff, you can't wait for certain difficulty. You've got to be very, very deliberate about the one problem I have is an okay, that's my number one problem and that's my only problem. I'm going to solve that first. Then we'll think about that next thing. Yeah, it's brilliant. I mean, we love this kind of advice on riding unicorns. Practical advice on how to start a business. So that's great. So what is urban jungle doing differently to existing providers? Yeah, so there's three things effectively that makes different. So first of all, it's just, I guess what you did expect of a challenge of tech startup is just being really customer-centric. So our reservation was that the big and sure is, are very, very generic. Like to pick your insurance company that begins with A and their insurance policy is going to all look the same as each other. It's basically no difference. And no one's ever spoke to a customer ever. So let's turn that on its head. Let's talk to customers a lot. Let's build for what they want. Let's make it flexible. Let's make it modular. And actually have something that is tailored to what customers want now, like young, particularly younger customers. So that's a big factor of what we do. And that kind of leads into our products being really different to the big guys, particularly in terms of their flexibility. And then there's two things on the tech side. So one is we automate everything. So if you think about your big insurer, typically they've got these huge call centers with lots of people picking up the phones. There's a very small customer operations team here picking up phones and giving a very, very high service. But the tech is doing most of the work. And as a customer, you can basically do everything you want online. So really averaged tech to reduce that. What is one of the biggest costs elements of having insurer? And then the faith of which you might see is a customer. Then there's a third, but you can't see as much as a customer, which is fraud. Is this really big problem in insurance? And we use, effectively, we use AI to spot fraud in customers' behaviour. So whenever they come on our site, there are these sort of destruction fraudsters that are buying with the intent to commit fraud. And it's kind of low level, and it's kind of like thing. And we can in the way they interact with our site and the behaviour they use using AI, we can spot that fraud. And then say no to those customers so that genuine customers come through. That's actually really important to us overall, because we have this sort of one of our girls is around financial inclusion. Essentially what happens a lot is the insurance industry is full of fraud. Everyone kind of knows that. What the big guys tend to do is they'll just decline huge swathes of the population. So particularly, lowering come post-codes. It's very, very hard to get cover because the big insurance is just like, "Ugh, there's quite a lot of claims there. I don't know why, but I'm just not going to cover it." So what we can do because we can spot fraudsters in any given demographic, we can underwrite any demographic. And that means we can run really high eligibility and help lots of different customers. And Jimmy raised, well, ContraBase says you raised over 22 million dollars from people like Eke Ventures and Alma Mundi Ventures, which is a Spanish fund, and also some top angels. So how far into launching with Greg, did you raise your first round? And what was that experience like? Your first VC round, I should probably say, you had a lot of success with angels. So when did the first VC come in? And yeah, what was that experience like? Yeah, so again keeping it super practical. So we did the first, first bit with angels, as you say. And there is in the UK this kind of benefit of EIS. That's relief, that means that it is in our experience probably easier to raise from on that group. And we did have offers from kind of suicide recies from earlier than we eventually took one. But I think, you know, certainly at the time, we were ducking and diving on the proposition a lot and like testing a lot of things. And I think we just kind of felt like some of the VCs were had more of a perspective, like they wanted us to pursue a very specific strategy and not dive out from that. Whereas we were kind of more like, we're going to change the strategy once a quarter and see what happens. And so that was why we sort of did the angel thing for perhaps a bit longer than we could have done. And actually also, I think the CD ecosystem in the UK or Europe in general is definitely like evolving really quickly and was smaller a couple of years ago when we were starting than it is now. So probably perhaps we'll have done something that differently, you know, kind of don't know now. So the first, yeah, the first institutional investor we've got on was ECA. I think again, really on VCs, like a lot of people say that you should like run this process, meet everyone in five minutes and make it super high-p and then like, you know, choose the best of what for I think that is true for this kind of 10 to 20% of max hype companies that are in the news every day. I think the reality for most other people is actually the relationship building is more important. So particularly with ECA guys, we've known them for at least a year before we actually kind of made, you know, made the jump and actually came in an investment. Most times, she would have been less than that. But kind of what we know, you know, that and then similarly with the money guys, we got to know them over a period of time and then they got excited about the business and come again. So I think, you know, the question a lot of founders have is should I, what's the split between A, always be raising and then B, run a process. I think there is a happy medium dream, the two and it's called take a coffee whenever it's on offer and there's no harm in being some for a coffee and going to know them and meeting them at a conference maybe in person these days. But when you're raising, be raising and then be very clear that you've got a process and you're going to get through it. Yeah, I think it's really difficult that there are so many conflicting opinions from really credible sources and you know, you read from like YC who say, either you should be raising or you shouldn't be and then you hear from founders saying the relationship super important. So I think I think there are different routes that can work no matter who you are because also it's so dependent on what kind of founder you are. If you're one of those founders who's happy to just absolutely smash out a process and hype your company up loads then maybe that's the approach to sort of take a really condensed process but if you're not then the other strategy is probably better. Yeah, and I think the thing that is challenging as a founder, especially around fundraising is everyone who's got their advice. Everyone's got their small sample opinion and certainly in Europe there aren't many people who've done it multiple times. Very very very very for you and the ecosystem changes every week like new people are entering and so I think you've got to feel your way and I think you know in some instances one of the things I found most helpful is having a bit of like we mentioned the agency guys earlier who are very helpful to me but I've brought a group of other founders where we just like there's a lot of intel shared about you know this is what the market's like at a moment this is what you know even when you get to terms this is what's market for this certain term whatever it is like building your network of founders. So they're also when you're having a rough week and you've had a lot of nose then you know you can hit your founders like oh yeah we had you know 10 days last week then we're about to you know that I'm next week kind of playing. And I think that's probably more important than having a singular strategy. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I'd almost say that even founders who've done it a few times will have seen less than investors. If you can find an independent VC, if you have a friend who's a VC, ask them what the latest and greatest tactic is because they're the ones who are seeing loads of founders going out and running fundraising processes. But yeah, super interesting. So going back to sort of your business in particular, have you found there being any challenges kind of specifically with starting an insure tech business, what have been the real, the really difficult things on your journey so far? I would say the standard startup challenge is always distribution. Like, how do you crack distribution? So I certainly spend my time with a big team here who thinks about that every day and it's like, how do you differentiate? How do you communicate? How do you get in front of people economically? Like, that is the obsession that you have. But I think that's not unique to starting an insure tech. There was another thing that makes an insure tech harder, which is about the supply side. So there's this weird dynamic and insurance where I basically have to partner with generally speaking people who are the incumbents. So every time I write an insure and it's policy, I might sell it for £5, but the person that turn around the next day and climb £2 million. So I can't balance it down myself. I've got to work with a possible third party and by the way, they're like, I'm kind of interested in working with innovative companies, but you haven't raised any money. You haven't proven anything. I'll come back to me in a couple of years. That will definitely be getting was a very constant story. So you almost needed to get investment from your suppliers in a way, which is a kind of exactly weird thing in the industry. It's like in comments where you just fly to China, find a factory to build your things and then you start selling them. So managing that supply and getting your head around it has been probably one of the toughest things. Good news is now massive variety of entry. So there are actually very few fast followers in our space, which we're kind of grateful for. And there's a few businesses that I can't really believe, but it's a reasonable number because of this supply side challenge. So it didn't feel like it at the time, but it's a blessing looking back that it was that it was hard. Jimmy, so what were your after you see raised money from angels, you and Greg work in the proposition? Who were your first hires beyond you guys? And what did you get right or and maybe wrong in the early days with hiring? It's such a key theme with all of our founder, I guess. So our first employees still with us. So amongst the four Greg and I paid ourselves a penny, we put some of our savings into the company and started paying another engineer so that we could get moving a bit faster on the product build. Because actually what our product is pretty complex, so it is quite engineering heavy. So that's all we start in the first couple of engineers, a couple of high school engineers. And he's now ahead of engineering. So we hired well. So it's a good start. The next couple of people we hired actually didn't last that long, so maybe we'll be right. I'm going to ask that too much. But I think one of the things and it was again slightly unique to us in that because of this real supply side challenge, the first sort of six months, 12 months, quite slow, where we're about getting a supply base, getting regulated, which is obviously a difficult thing, building this quite complex platform. So it was mostly engineers doing stuff and then occasionally like submitting stuff to the SCA. So I had some time. And what I did then that I'm very thankful we did and would definitely recommend every time I've kind of cornered off some time to do in the very early days is I wrote down what I wanted our culture to be like. I wrote down really simple stuff like how I wanted us to set objectives as a business. I wrote down how I wanted our review process to work. And I thought through all those things and I talked to other businesses about how they were doing it. And broadly speaking those work, the same now as they did then, we've tweaked them obviously and you know as we've got the things that have evolved. But broadly speaking that kind of framework is still there. That has made life so much easier as we've scaled. And like do you obviously run and you hit these big infection points where it's like, oh crap, we need to hire like you know 10 people this week. And the last thing you want to be doing is hiring 10 people a week and rewriting your recruitment policy and your hiring policy and your culture deck and all that stuff at the same time. It's just really really tough to do. So I think if you can get some of those like fundamentals out there early, that's really helpful. And I think it depends what kind of founder you are as well right. So like now there's loads of really good open source stuff out there. So I think for example the Monzo guys we have been source of load of there kind of internal documents like that that are really kind of helpful to build on. From my point of view, one of the reasons I started business is I wanted to build a unique culture and I wanted to do people differently. And so we come up with our own version of OKRs. We come up with our own version of review processes. Nothing is taken from anything. You can't use any software because it doesn't need to be like, I have to have all our own stuff. But that was really important to me. If that's not your thing then you can do things a different way. But for us that was big. Can you go into that at all? What was your people vision and how to do execute on it? Yeah, so driven by context. So both Greg and I had seen and been in organizations that were really high growth. We did a lot of hiring and we loved that. I mean that was one of the reasons we started business because like having this thing where you're constantly hiring, you're constantly getting new fresh people in, you're super enthusiastic, it's just really fun. And there's definitely a muscle for hiring. Just knowing that you have to allocate 30-40% of your time to hiring. If you work in a normal company that's not that's weird. But having that kind of gene. I think what we've seen in a lot of companies was that especially in high performing cultures, what can happen is bad behavior can be tolerated from really talented people. And actually you can be very, very difficult to work with but perform and get rated and paid very highly whilst frankly not being very nice. We're not looking after your colleagues very well. And I guess that was the one thing that we wanted. We wanted to have really high from culture but not have that. And so from very early we had this hypothesis that we could hire an entire team of high performing really nice people. And that's what we do. I mean it's incredible when people join. They're like, oh you told me about this. But it really is true. Everyone is so nice here. Almost paying for your nice. What's been interesting about that is high performing nice people tend to have quite common traits. So I tell the team this, it's not like speaking out of school but they're all a bit new after. So they all really want loads of feedback. And so actually there is like this direct consequence of only hiring really nice ambitious people is that they just constantly feedback hungry. So we've had to set our whole culture up like everyone's getting feedback almost daily but written feedback probably once a month, definitely once a quarter. And so we just like much more on some of that stuff than others because that's the I guess the kind of the basis on what's the whole company's built. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean I think there is a strong correlation between neurotic people and high performing people. Probably something for another conversation. So sort of moving the conversation on slightly and something that you touched on a bit earlier was kind of around how do you scale economically and how do you acquire new customers economically. I imagine just kind of fascinated myself because when we may need to be investing so we don't see a huge amount of a huge number of companies sort of going from early stage to you know through to much later stage and so we don't see how those sort of numbers scale. I wonder what that journey is like because of course it's so important for investors to see great CAC 12 EV for listeners who don't know what that is that's cost to acquire customer versus their lifetime value. But yeah, it's super important for the investors or at least to have belief in where those numbers are going to go. So yeah, just keen to understand how as you scale, how do you keep those numbers really compelling and think about kind of increasing that further? That's a big question that we got how many hours you've got. So like one of the things and one day when I'm not really busy with the business I'll write an extensive blog post about this but I genuinely feel that people are too obsessed with the Unicronomics in the first phases of businesses and they expect to get seed deckwires all proven out and certainly that just not been our experience. So basically what we've done all along is painted this vision of how we get to real strong numbers and our customers are really strong now but that's because over time we've really iterated on retention, we've really iterated on average basket size. We have thought about how we expand from kind of you know, lower spend customers to higher spend customers. We've thought about how our product works in different customer segments and that has moved significant like you know 4X5X over time as well. You can make those sorts of changes and I think you know if we had investors who would just like I can't see how these two numbers are dealt right now then you know that the one, they were those people and they said no to us. So, unfortunately, they are investors who can sort of see a bit further along the line. And I think, if anything, you can actually write a mathematical proof that sometimes it makes sense to blast through your economics a bit in the early days because your people burn us so much more. So if you're building a tech company, you probably got engineers, you probably got product people, you might have data scientists, they are not contributing usually directly to growth, right? They're building this platform that allows you to grow very, very quickly, but they are a fixed cost. And they will burn your cash. And so sometimes it is rational to get your revenue growing more quickly at tighter, you know, maybe it's not negative, I'll do you can't, but two to one instead of three to one or whatever. It's actually, if you do the math economically rational with the wrong way that you have to grow quicker and so you can amortize and grow that car. So one is, I encourage all seed investors out there to put your economics like to one side as often as possible. I think, you know, for us, what I always try and encourage people to do is look at the economics of the big players in our space and they are profitable, right? So, and in some case, the society profitable. And so let me tell you how, okay, let's start with, there's a really profitable player in the space. I'm a look in detail at their your economics and the way that stacks up and I'm going to tell you how I'm going to beat them on every metric over time using technology, etc. But I think sometimes that can be the discussion. But yeah, I would say actually, sort of weirdly, the logic some people have is that it gets only gets worse over time and then our experience very definitely has the lot better. Yeah, that's great advice. I think that looking at incumbents and sort of making them your reference point is actually just a really great idea because theoretically, if you have a better brand, if you're smart or about things, all of these, they should add up to in the long run, having better unit economics. So it is. It's part of it. It's painting the vision, right? As it's as it's soft in the case in these things. Yeah, and I think what what people look at to really is growth margin and often like the ultimate profitability of a business is by what the growth margin is. So, and you can actually get a view of that pretty quickly. And then a lot of the, you should be able to get rid of, you know, you shouldn't have to have that core centre sort of people like I said. So you can take that kind of, you know, if it's crossed out or whatever and then change the whole economic stack. But to an extent, there's only so much you can do with growth margin. So if you really understand the growth margin of your space, then that really helps. Yeah, I do also think there's a lot of the seed consumer investors in the UK do lack of it of conviction. And so they try and use these like series A metrics at seed stage and they mess out on, I think, bigger opportunity, higher risk higher reward deals than maybe the ones that have got their unit economics right earlier. But there's less barriers to entry and so they've kind of done it quickly. And there might only be a 50 to 100 million pound business rather than a full blown global unicorn. And I do think there's a problem in the UK consumer space around that. And it's interesting to see that you're from your experience that you can get those unique economics better as you scale, as you optimize, as you iterate through software, which is the whole point of venture capital essentially is to invest, invest, invest into something that is then very defensible. And so just on metrics, apart from kind of LTV to cat ratios, is there a North Star metric that you guys have, and which other metrics have you maybe measured for a period and then dropped because they weren't that useful, any kind of vanity or useless metrics than your opinion that you would advise founders from kind of avoiding. So to be careful, I'm not going to get my investor, kill me about some of this stuff. So until recently, we didn't really track unit economics that much in turn at least. So we reported our investors, I would have a close handle on it, but I think it can be quite a difficult abstract metric for the team. And sometimes just simplifying things is a lot easier. So for a long time, I mean, it is getting more sophisticated now, but for a long time, the North Star we get people with just as many customers as possible. That's it. Going to find us more customers, going to find us places we can find customers. And those customers may have had different retention profiles and different average and reduction values or whatever. And you can find a pool of new customers. Like, it's like, go and find a pool of new customers. If they're good customers, great, we'll have loads of them. If they're a wishful stop, but just team, go and find us some customers. And that's a really simple message, rather than like, oh, the gross margin in this section of customers and their retention rate on a three basis is like, people just go understand that. They're not finest people. So I think that will be the one thing is like, if you can possibly get it down to literally one metric as much as possible, that is really, really helpful. And is there anything that we have tracked that we shouldn't have done? I think that's how I put it slightly different way. So I guess I was consulting background very, very number driven, very, very legitimate here. And we always try to make decisions with data as much as possible. And we're very particularly, I think one of the mistakes you can make as a startup is not understanding statistical significance. So two numbers are different. Are they really different or is it just random variation? And the trouble is when you were at a startup and the numbers are small, especially in consumer, like, you can have a data of the zero, right? So you can look at two things and go, yeah, this was definitely better than that one because it's 40% better. And you're like, well, the sample size is eight. Like, this means nothing. This is the same as random variation. So I think one of the things we did quite well was actually say, we basically started, I remember the first three or four months in meetings we had, I made the guys make a deck with all these sides and all these numbers. And then they didn't really move very much. To honestly, they were a bit depressing because we were going to ask if we'd like rather beginning. And we were learning nothing. There's nothing to see. It's never going to get. So we changed it to like, right, what are we going to do? But why does that, like, we know that if we build these products for these customers over this cadence, that that should deliver the plan that we want to build. So we're much more focused on how have I done this thing? Has this shipped? Has I? I've got this supply signed up. And then I think if you can do those things and they're the right things, right? So there's a bit of like, we choose the right stuff to do. But if you do those things, the numbers should take care of themselves. So being very alert to statistical noise, I guess is probably one of the big things that we've got. Yeah, it's great. And Jimmy, just as we draw the episode to a close, I just want to ask where you see urban juggling kind of five, 10 years. Do you think it will still be contents insurance? Will it have branched out? What are you excited about? So we've already branched out. So we do have insurance now. So we do have a run. So I guess one of the things we've always thought is trying to move forward. He's trying to make the platform as applicable to everyone as possible. And we talked about a little bit about how that's really driven our metrics, finding like new pools of customers in new places. So ultimately the vision is all insurance to everyone everywhere. That's the ball we're trying to build. And we have thought very carefully about the proposition to just not excrete people and sort of not put barriers in the way of anyone by line. So we want to be, you know, we're not for everyone. We want to design for everyone. Like we are to begin design for slightly younger customers. But everyone's welcome. And we want everyone to be welcome for every product. So I guess we're blessed that we are in these massive domestic markets. So don't need to do 17 countries to make a really, really big business. In fact, you know, they're already been built. Plenty of insure texts in short, unicorns are a single country. So I think you've had a good moment. You're going to focus as well. So that's nice. That kind of, you know, it makes stuff easier to build. But yeah, helping more people with their insurance in more categories is the plan. Awesome. Well, it's a great vision. And we wish you all the best for that. Jimmy, we'd like to wrap things up by doing our dinner party guest game, which you may have heard on a few other episodes. So if you would have dinner with three people, anyone in the world, who would they be? Yeah. So you've prepped me before this. I have thought about it. I don't like really talking about work at dinner is what I decided. So I want to talk about the back things that I love or interested in at dinner. So number one is a bit of a thanks task of the moment. I'm a big washroom fan. So I'd probably have a war in Katlandau for dinner and talk about the glory years of the last Grand Slam's over dinner. Big into adventurous travel, particularly overland. So I think Michael Pellan has done a lot of really super interesting stuff. I want to talk to a guy around WorldMate days and then also really into outdoorsy camping stuff. And I've always loved rain years. So he'd be, he'd be my three. So it's interesting like something we're through. But. Well, Jimmy, those are great answers. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on and telling us your riding unicorn story. Yeah, great stuff. That's it for this week. I hope you were able to take away many learnings from this episode. Thankfully, we have plenty more amazing guests and insightful conversations coming your way every week, every Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe to riding unicorns on Apple, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts. 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