Ep. #1011 - Embedded Insurance

Matt Watson 00:00
And we’re back with another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is your host today, Matt Watson. I’m excited to be joined today by Matheus Riolfi from Tint. We’re going to be talking about embedded insurance today. We’re going to hear about his journey as an entrepreneur and how their business can help other companies. This sounds like reselling insurance and selling insurance products built into their service offerings. So it’s pretty cool. And before we get started, I do wanna remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult. Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Matheus, how are you doing today?

Matheus Riolfi 00:45
Hi, man. I’m doing great. How are you?

Matt Watson 00:48
So I thought it was interesting that I guess we both kind of have the same name but from different languages. So I’m Matthew, and you’re Matheus in Portuguese, right?

Matheus Riolfi 00:57
That is right. People, when they typically see my name, they get a bit confused and uncertain about how to pronounce it. Finally, the different buddy is as simple as it matches but is in Portuguese. So it’s kind of very mainstream, actually.

Matt Watson 01:13
I’ve always known I’m Mateo in Spanish. I think so. But I’ll answer whatever people call me. But welcome to the show. You’re actually from San Francisco, right?

Matheus Riolfi 01:28
Yeah, I’m originally from Brazil. Call me from San Francisco. Yes.

Matt Watson 01:34
All right. Well, so tell us a little more about your background. And what led you just to, you know, be one of the founders and CEO of Tint.

Matheus Riolfi 01:43
Yes, so my background is, as I mentioned, born and raised in Brazil. A city outside of Sao Paulo, and I spent most of my early professional career in college in Sao Paulo. I was a consultant, but I knew I always wanted to start my own business. And then, I was deciding what to do next. And it made sense for me to come to business school, or to go to business school, or come to the US for it. So I ended up getting into Harvard Business School. And I saw that as my kind of gateway to the United States and to Silicon Valley more broadly. So I wanted to start a global company in the tech space. And then HBs was a way to allow me to get connections and to end up here in the San Francisco area, which is what I did. So after graduation, I was one of the early employees in a company called Turo. At the time, to call really, REITs were a series company with about 15 to 20 employees. So very early in their journey, and I was not fortunate enough to be with a company for four years. And by the time I left, it was already a very successful business with over 400 people at a time. And that’s where I met my co-founder, Jerome. So Jerome was also an early employee. He joined a little bit earlier than me. And he was running all the data in engineering, data engineering, of the company. And we ended up spending, you know, 80% of our time on insurance. He was building models and doing kind of fancy data, things around insurance. And I was launching the business in different countries. And it’s been 80% of my time kind of sourcing insurance. And every time I wanted to be in a different country. And that was the origin story of Tint. So I went from being in Brazil to full circle here in the Bay Area, running my own tech startup.

Matt Watson 03:50
So for those who aren’t familiar, Turo is the company that allows somebody like me to rent my sports car for the weekend to somebody else that wants to rent my car, right? It’s like a car-sharing program.

Matheus Riolfi 04:02
It is absolutely so easy to think that it is an Airbnb for cars, right? It’s the idea that you can share your cars with others, but you can also rent cars from any individual now in many different countries. So back in 2014, the sharing economy wasn’t as big and mainstream as yesterday. Even companies like Airbnb and Uber were relatively small startups at that point. So it was very interesting to see the evolution not only of Turo as a company but the sharing economy more broadly.

Matt Watson 04:40
Well, so what I love about your story and a lot of entrepreneurs go through this, right. They work in a specific business specific industry, and they find pain points, and then they decide to go out and start their own company to solve those pain points. Right. And for you, that pain point was seeing how difficult it was to find insurance for this type of car run, you know, car sharing service, and then trying to find it in all these different countries, right. I mean, is that a fair statement?

Matheus Riolfi 05:08
It is a fair statement. So you’re absolutely right that we’ve suffered the pain point, both my co-founder and I. And so we tend towards the product that we wish existed when we were working at Turo. And I do agree that that’s a very good sign that entrepreneurs and founders are into something because it means that they spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, they suffer, they already had to find some solutions themselves to execute what they’re trying to do. So there’s a very, there’s a higher chance that they can actually empathize with the customer. And especially in the early days, when there’s not a lot of data and not a lot of signal that, you have to be based on intuition and any knowledge that tends to be a good high signal of our group good signal for startups.

Matt Watson 06:08
Yeah, I worked at one of the first jobs I ever had, which was at a company that resold concert and sporting event tickets. There’s a company called Ticket solutions. And one of the things that they did is they sent hundreds of FedEx and UPS packages a day. And they noticed that like dozens of them a day would be delivered late or whatever, and they should get refunds from them. And actually, the guy who owned it, you know, recognized that problem. And then, we built some software to audit all the labels to get refunds. And then he eventually spun that out, and it became a huge company and was one of the number one companies in the industry to audit shipping labels. And you know, I always love those stories where, you know, as a byproduct of one business, you find another problem, and that’s why we talk a lot about as being an entrepreneur is pivoting is sometimes is working on a problem, you figure out that there’s actually a different problem that maybe needs to be solved. So I always love that story. And so, from your guys’ start for Tint, you know, what was the original problem you were trying to solve? Was it had to do with car insurance, or was it a more specific thing that you or more broad thing that you were trying to solve?

Matheus Riolfi 07:21
Yeah. So for Tint. Two, we were trying to solve the problem that was this to the same vision, which has been helping companies like Turo to create and launch and succeed exactly in launching their embedded insurance products, right, which means that insurance and protection products, they are a feature of the car business. So if you think about the Turo example, whenever you want to rent a car, suppose your culture I’m traveling, I’m going to rent somebody else’s Porsche 911. I’m offered in the checkout an option for an additional value to protect myself against any damage that may happen to this car, right? And Turo can give you different packages and make half. So it is very similar to how car rental companies do. But obviously, Turo does, in a much better way, less pushy with fair pricing. There is no adjusting to the risks. But the idea is like, No, we had the vision from the beginning that we want to support more companies to do exactly that and not have as much of a painful journey as we had when we were trying to do it ourselves. So we had the vision. We had the big picture. But obviously, we are now four and a half years down the road, and we haven’t built the full journey yet. It is a very big and ambitious journey. So what we did is like at the beginning, we tried to focus more on problems. We knew it to grow more focused on analytics and more focus on the data aspects of this problem. And over time, we started to build more and more of the blocks right building blocks that are required to eventually be able to power any tech company in any space to create their own embedded insurance products.

Matt Watson 09:16
So today, do you focus on specific industries, like specific verticals, specific kinds of things.

Matheus Riolfi 09:23
Our platform is horizontal in a way that it can support any vertical, so today, we have customers in over Tint different verticals, from crypto deposits to shipping to car-sharing, but we do have a special focus today in shipping. So all use cases as it relates to shipping goods, like in the country, mostly through trucking. We also have a good big focus on vacation rentals. So all the use cases around sharing your property for liking Airbnb or verbs or those platforms, that’s another use case that has, has gotten big for us. And our customers. Typically, they are tech platforms. They are venture-backed startups from what we see now starting a Series A, B, all the way to some kind of public companies. And then what they all share in common is that they can see ways that insurance or protection, more broadly, can help their customers now and can remove some intrinsic risk of their core business so that customers can trust them more and convert better, right? So the example of Turo, imagine there was no insurance for it like the host will never trust, like some stranger with a Porsche 911. Right? Second, even for the renter, you are now driving a very expensive car, and if something outside of your control happens, you’re suddenly liable for a big financial loss. So there’s always a different example where insurance makes things work, but we can see the same pattern in different types of business.

Matt Watson 11:13
So is that the key to your guyses platform, dynamically figuring out what those insurance rates are? So it’s not like, Oh, you’re renting a car that’s worth $40,000. And the rate is always, you know, $100 a day or whatever. I mean, it is the key to what you guys do being much more dynamic and how you figure out what those rates should be.

Matheus Riolfi 11:35
Yeah, so one day, the big transformation that is happening, right? So I think one thing I learned about startups is that your chance of success increases exponentially when you connect yourself to a big trend, right? There’s something big happening. And then you’re just kind of part of this, this movement, or this phenomenon. In our case, the big trend, or the big trends behind it, embedded insurance and embedded finance more broadly, is this idea that not all those tech platforms are generating so much data about their customers held them again, going back to the tour example how people use cars are the first time users age, like what kind of car do many different types of platforms are creating this trove of data that no a traditional insurance company doesn’t have? And they own the customer, right? So they have already paid to acquire the customer, the customer is already using the core business of that company. So in Crete, like offering insurance is an add on revenue that comes with virtually no acquisition costs, right? So when you come back combining those two things, the availability of data, plus the customers already there, it enables companies to, to your point, create a product that is personalized. It’s much more relevant to their audience that now only has a higher conversion as a maintenance product. But he kind of catalyzes the core business right? So Turo converts better like is our Think about the shipping right? So you’re buying a sneaker and a sneaker costs $2,000? Well, ideally, you have some protection that if something goes wrong, if the item is damaged, you’re gonna get paid the full value of the merchandise. And I think we can again see that happening all over. Many kinds of different industries use cases to think about how Tesla is creating their own insurance. Apple Care is a form of insurance, no app, Amazon was getting insurance. So like, if you look around, and if you fast forward Tint years, the brands you love are going to be the ones providing you a lot of the insurance protections because most customers don’t necessarily want to think about insurance. And if that protection can come with the things they love, that it’s a better, much better user experience. And if they have to download an app and think about it and have to go purchase it separately.

Matt Watson 14:02
So when somebody uses your platform to provide these insurance offers, like say shipping, you know, I sell shoes or whatever. And I’m like, as you said, who is actually the underwriter? If those shoes get lost since she’s also on a claim, is it still the business owner that somehow it becomes liable for your guys’ platform or is there still a third party and you know, ensure that that carries that or?

Matheus Riolfi 14:28
Yeah, in our platform, our customers can choose how much of the risk they want to take. So if they tell us that now I don’t want to take any risks that we will find jump bite underwriters. So our platform works as a marketplace. So we have underwriters and then they will match the best underwriter with the risk that you’re offering as a platform. But we see that our customers some of them, they decide to either take all the risk or to You take some part of the risk, because the reality is that after again, going back to the data element, after a year to three years in business, the data that those companies generate, it’s already very predictive, right risk. So if they do it, well, if they monetize the well, they can create programs, they are fairly profitable, right? So some of our customers are like, Yeah, I’m doing all the work. Why would I transfer this risk, but it does not depend on the strategy of each company, but our platform is designed to give them the option to choose how much of the risk they want to take.

Matt Watson 15:36
But in your company is never the underwriter? You guys, you guys never have to carry that risk.

Matheus Riolfi 15:41
We are not Yeah, we are. We see ourselves as the platform. And they are orchestrators of making sure that things are working. So we see ourselves more like stripes than a bank or insurance company.

Matt Watson 15:56
So I would imagine the hardest part of this is trying to match some of the weird things that people want insured to these underwriters, right? Like, how do you, how do you convince an underwriter you know, how much, how much risk there is and what the price should be for somebody borrowing a Porsche, right? Like, that seems like a kind of a hard thing to do until you’ve got a lot of data, like you said, yeah, no, you’re absolutely right.

Matheus Riolfi 16:21
And this is why we spend countless hours working on this. And sometimes it’s very hard. Sometimes it’s like, it’s more obvious, but your point, the answer will come from the data, right? So I did the underwriters have some data, some some similar use cases that they can try to use, or in many ways is the platform that Ken has to take the leap of faith based on what they said about the customers and the data they currently have. And then because the key, this uncertainty you’re talking about is especially true in the beginning. But after a few months that you’re doing, you have enough data to say, Oh, this is the price, too high to low, how’s the conversion going?” And again, we build our platform with tools with that in mind, they kind of change in experimentation in mind, so that our customers and the underwriters, they can have the tools to make those adjustments. And when the time comes like what we learn as if we want to have both sides, right of this platform happy. Because if one side is making money, the other isn’t, it’s obviously not a sustainable relationship. So if it goes back to the data, do you guys also get it?

Matt Watson 17:36
Do you guys also have customers that are in e-commerce or retail, like when I go to Best Buy or Target and they try to get me to buy a protection plan for $3 for a toaster like your guys’ platform do that kind of stuff, too? Or is that like something that’s been around for so long? That it’s kind of more of a commodity or something then you guys don’t do that part of it.

Matheus Riolfi 17:59
That’s a great question. It is interesting that you seem to understand a lot of this space, which is great.

Matt Watson 18:08
But the short ones I worked on. I worked at Sears 20 years ago and sold appliances, and they’re crazy as protection plans.

Matheus Riolfi 18:16
I see. That’s great. That’s great. So basically most of our use cases are innovative, right. So I think it’s more likely that this use case your point people have been doing for a while. But what we’re seeing is like sometimes, like the seers like you I probably use a very simple pricing logic that doesn’t take much into account other than the price of the good and they just say something like I it’s it’s Tint% of the price or whatever is the logic they use, like well we see that we will we can help innovate there is like okay, suppose now the best buyers in example want to sell it online. And online, they’re gonna have a lot more information right there beyond the price of the item. So can we help them use that information to price them more accurately so that they price less for the cases where the risk is now the price is too high? Because the risk is low? And then they can probably charge more supposedly, no bicycles break a lot of man just making up here but Right, yeah, and they can charge down the bicycles and the bicycles in California, whatever the factors, like more than they will do for the toasters. So they can sell more protection for toasters and price the bicycle in one accord. So the idea is that every insurance use case is changing. But the more mature it is, like say auto or home insurance, things like that, the higher the probability that the incumbents have already established a good competitive advantage that is harder to change versus like Airbnb or risks from home sharing, which is something that didn’t fully exist. like 15 years ago, or so, alto underwriters have been doing that for probably 80 years at this point.

Matt Watson 20:08
Well, I do want to take a second to remind everybody that finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs, and then see what available developers testers and leaders are available or ready to join your team visit FullScale.io to learn more. Yet, at Full Scale, we’ve worked with a couple of different local companies that do insurance that, you know, like Medicare Part B are like some other kinds of insurance platforms and other customers that do like pet insurance. It seems like there’s a, there’s a lot of technology and innovation going on in the insurance space.

Matheus Riolfi 20:50
There is even a name for this, which is called insurer tech, right, which is the intersection between insurance and technology. And now if you go there’s a conference going through Tech Connect in Las Vegas, and is now attended by tens of 1000s of people. So definitely InsurTech has grown to be a major part of the or at least growing part of the insurance industry and the comments, they understand that and they’re out trying to make some investment and try to change some of the ways they do. What we do think you will find exciting is that then going back to embedded insurance, this is a space where say Airbnb, Uber, or the tech platforms have a lot of advantages, right? And how they can do things. And they’re creating something new that wasn’t possible before their core business before their marketplace even existed. So that’s why we see economics and the patient insurance industry for innovation. It’s getting faster, but embedded is very fast, because then you can work by the speed of the tech platforms, and try to match that with the speed of an insurance industry. But you can move faster.

Matt Watson 22:03
So it sounds like most of what you guys do is probably kind of more one off like transaction or event based? Or do you guys also do recurring insurance, like home insurance or car insurance, health insurance and that kind of stuff?

Matheus Riolfi 22:20
So we do, I think you’re right, the most of our use cases are typically like for the case, shorter policies, right? We don’t have I’m trying to think here anything that is necessarily auto or home or those a standard insurance, but we do have customers, for example, one of our public customers is a company called do they help startups hire contractors in different parts of the world. And they provide all the infrastructure payments, they contract the other regulatory things compliance around it. And to do like you can as a company you sign up for their plan is a subscription. So this month we helped create what they call deal premium. So the idea is that you pay extra for something like a premium tier service. And that comes with a protection, right. So if, if there’s anything goes wrong in the contractor relationship, GL will compensate you up to a certain amount for this classification risk for things like that. But a long way of saying that in that case, it is a recurring policy, right, that the companies cover every month, as long as they have the employee, the contractor is still being paid to do the platform.

Matt Watson 23:43
Yeah, I think it seems like insurer tech is still really, really far behind and Tech Tech wise compared to some other industries. You know, we’ve I’ve had other people on the show, and I mentioned that Full Scale, we’ve done some work for some people that it seemed like for some of these things, to get to figure out what the rates should be, and to get things underwritten can still take like days, like the decision making for certain types of insurance is still extremely slow. It’s not fully automated. Is that kind of what you see across a lot of the industry?

Matheus Riolfi 24:22
Yes, I think it depends on the company depending on the type of insurance, but anyway, I think it is. It is true that overall the innovation in insurance, finance, broadly but insurance, it’s even lower than finance, like the innovation pace has been slower than folks anticipated. And now part of it is just now you can it’s how the system works, how the system has been designed. So there’s definitely a lot of opportunity for innovators in the space. Part of this is just So that it’s now a highly regulated industry, right? So you can, you can move as fast as you want, but you can if depending on the type of insurance, your point, if you have to file rates at a certain state and wait for them, like three months for their approval, yeah, there’s so much you can do. Right. So I think one of the challenges that all intrapreneurs that work with insurance face is how can you find those pockets where you can innovate faster. And as you start back insurance, such a large industry, that they are definitely niches and places where innovation can be done faster? And that’s where we see a lot of the innovation happening, right. So in places like know, like claims and licks, in places like some of the underwriting and pricing technology in the like, core software’s like those are, those are places where you have, like things happening faster, let’s say the new trying to launch a new alter insurance, because all insurance is extremely regulated. So every time you want to get to your point, you found a better way to price great, you’re gonna have to comply with new regulations in 50 different states and how you can price this car insurance and then take months to get through the approval. So yeah, I think one of the names of the games here is trying to find, like an angel, and we obviously want to be compliant with regulations, because the regulations are there for a good reason, right? One of the, I’d say core mistakes that entrepreneurs make an insurance is to assume that, like regulations slowed down for no good reason. But no, it’s absolutely right. They’re there because they’re there to protect consumers. And insurance is ultimately a promise, right. So if you don’t have the guardrails in place to make sure that people will honor their promises, a lot of bad things can happen.

Matt Watson 26:55
Well, as you mentioned earlier, I think you said that you guys provide your insurance platform for about Tint different verticals. So across all those different verticals, some of them are really a pain in the neck in regards to compliance and regulation, all that stuff. And then some of them are just kind of wide open, and there’s not a lot of compliance to deal with.

Matheus Riolfi 27:18
Yeah, so I mean, I don’t know how much were you? How much do you want to get into very deep of insurance, but it’s in the broad, very broad terms, there are two types of insurance lines one is called immediate, which is the same mainstream insurance Auto Home, this kind of things where it, they’re very regulated, like you have to get approval everywhere and things like that. And there are more and for every kind of more of the innovative types, let’s say the risks from Airbnb, right the the home sharing risk of sharing your home with a with a stranger, like, those are typically places that is called surplus lines we like those are kind of they can they can run with less kind of, let’s call it oversight because they admitted market. So if you go to progressive, if you go to Geico, and you want to get insurance for this kind of thing, they will say no, like, that doesn’t fall under my kind of normal business. So for that kind of use case there’s less oversight. So you see, you know, you have you know, the basics are in place, but at least you can have some streamlined innovation. And there are also certain products for certain use cases. They can be structured as a known insurance product, right? So if you think about your when you go to Avis, and you say I want to buy insurance, what they’re selling you is not insurance is a laws damage waiver, which kind of has the same kind of frameworks and modus operandi as insurance but is effectively a different legal classification. So has different oversight. So again, I think that one of the hard things of operating this is in the insurance industry issue, really understanding all of these nuances and complexities without getting paralyzed.

Matt Watson 29:14
That’s why I asked because I’m thinking like a man, starting a new company and insurance insurer tech like this. It’s like is there is it takes 612 1824 months just to figure out like how do we even do this for specific industry and go through all the regulation and all this versus like, you know, doing insurance for shipping sneakers seems like a pretty easy one compared to you know, home home insurance or car insurance. Other things. I just was a huge hindrance. You know, for you guys when you first got started.

Matheus Riolfi 29:49
I hear you summarize as well. So some kinds of insurance or protections are a lot easier, right? So sure I’m on the hook for shipment that is going to take two days. Isn’t the maximum loss, it’s $100 or $200? It’s a much easier use case than if you’re ensuring some auto liability that potentially is some bill that will be paid for the lifetime of somebody and cost millions of dollars. So I think your intuition is absolutely right. So that’s one of the things I mentioned about, do you have the ability of knowing this base and kind of be able to find this bucket for us, because we’re connecting back to to our background, where we came from this kind of short term sharing economy, types of risk, and our first customers were in this space, which kind of checks all the boxes that we’re talking about here is typically, like I’ve short not to completely go back to the Porsche 911. Right? Like, even that being already a very high risk, if you insure the physical damage of this is up to the value of the cars or $50,000. So it’s not easy per se buddies like it is a lot easier than millions of dollars of potential loss, you know, the kinds of risks. So we were fortunate that we were part of this new world where not a lot of issuers or other companies understand and or want to play, and those are risks, they are insurable and are not as hard as any other kind. And it’s kind of how we grew up from there.

Matt Watson 31:19
So what’s the future for Tint? What are you guys focused on right now? Or do you very much look like you raised a bunch of money earlier this year? Congrats on that. You guys are very much in growth mode. Like what’s expanding the products and the verticals? You know, what, what are you guys focused on right now?

Matheus Riolfi 31:38
Yeah, we are definitely focused on growing. So you are right that we raised our Series A earlier this year. So we have had a runway for quite a bit of time now. But we are definitely high and we’re growing. We grew our team, probably like five times since like, last year, then we continue to grow more, next year as well. So we were like, and what we’re doing is like we’re definitely expanding our product, like going through more verticals, we’re making work better, right. So there’s a can, as any startup, you have the first round when things are working, but then you kind of can’t keep going for years, just making that better and optimizing each of these states. So we’re primarily focused on the United States. So we will continue to be there. I think one of the main challenges not only for us, but I guess from what I would imagine any other founder today is like knowing how fast you go, right? Because on one hand, you have the opportunity, and then that probably drives you to go fat as fast as you can and increase barn and just things like that. But on the other hand, you have the financing environment where you probably don’t want to be in a place where you really need the money today. So we’re really trying to navigate now, day by day, seeing how the world is developing, and kind of trying to get this balance right.

Matt Watson 33:08
Are you guys doing any hiring? Does everybody listening need to go? Go check out your openings?

Matheus Riolfi 33:13
We are so if you go to jobs.ten.ai, you can see all the positions that are opening, but we’re opening a few more that we’re going to start hiring for early next year as well. So I mean, yeah, we absolutely are.

Matt Watson 33:28
So what do you see as your guys’s biggest challenges going forward? What do you see as the the big challenge on the horizon for you guys?

Matheus Riolfi 33:38
The biggest challenge, I’d say again, going back to the insurance and the regulation is like, how can you scale? There is definitely a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of like activity and tailwinds on the insurance. But your point is we get to the details like how can you support more verticals? How can you scale? How can you find more underwriters? So our most of our challenges today, I’d say our growth pains like No How can we do what we’re doing? Better, Faster scale without no having to redesign everything that we did before? I yeah, I think it’s definitely no because no series A you have an early product market fit, you prove that it’s like a big market and prove that there’s something exciting there. But then by Series B right, you need to now show that you no longer like a good product but as you have a fully functioning company that is ready to go to higher scales and that’s definitely where we are in our journey.

Matt Watson 34:42
Well remind everybody that today’s episode of the Startup Hustle is brought to you by FullScale.io. If you need to hire software engineers, testers or leaders Full Scale can help. We have the people on the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts when you visit FullScale.io. All you need to do is answer a few quick questions and let our platform match you up with our fully vetted, highly experienced team of software engineers. At Full Scale, we specialize in building a long term team that works only for you to learn more when you visit FullScale.io. Well, I’ve really enjoyed having you on the, on the show today. One thing I’d like to do is, as we round this out, as do you have any other kind of final tips for other entrepreneurs out there, it could be about, about anything about you know, being a business owner and entrepreneur.

Matheus Riolfi 35:29
My tip is something that we luckily had, and I didn’t know that was very important. And looking back, I think it is his mission critical is like having grit, I cannot stress how important it is for founders to have grit. And, and if you can’t figure out a way to just just keep going, regardless of what happened. And you know, find a way to not like not not even like not run out of money, but keep finding creative ways that you can keep going having the fire keeping it like not the fire burning side, you find a way. And eventually you find the kind of growth paths and then you kind of find the next chapter unlock the next chapter of the story. Like it took us at least two years to find a good traction to see things starting to click. And we’ve been doing that for for a year and a half. And we’re far far far from being now where we want to we want to be. But I think for us, like the main lesson so far was that Nike we could and I think many others would have stopped. And we didn’t. And I think that’s something that now if you can, you hear this startup advice all the time is like programs, like from Y Combinator is that can be a coverage impossible to kill any sounds like a little bit too vague, but is incredibly true in the founder journey.

Matt Watson 37:01
Yeah, at some point in time, you just have to be very passionate about what you’re doing. And it’s that drive every day that gets you up every day and keeps fighting the fight. And you know, it’s a never-ending sense of problems. And one of the main ones of my all-time favorite quotes is from Mike Tyson. It’s like everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And it feels like as an entrepreneur, you know, you gotta have grit because you just get punched in the face every week for some stupid reason that you don’t see coming.
Matt Watson 00:00
And we’re back with another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is your host today, Matt Watson. I’m excited to be joined today by Matheus Riolfi from Tint. We’re going to be talking about embedded insurance today. We’re going to hear about his journey as an entrepreneur and how their business can help other companies. This sounds like reselling insurance and selling insurance products built into their service offerings. So it’s pretty cool. And before we get started, I do wanna remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult. Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably. And has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit FullScale.io to learn more. Matheus, how are you doing today?

Matheus Riolfi 00:45
Hi, man. I’m doing great. How are you?

Matt Watson 00:48
So I thought it was interesting that I guess we both kinds of have the same name but from different languages. So I’m Matthew, and your Matheus in Portuguese, right?

Matheus Riolfi 00:57
That is right. People, when they typically see my name, they get a bit confused and uncertain about how to pronounce it. Finally, the different buddy is as simple as it matches but is in Portuguese. So it’s kind of very mainstream, actually.

Matt Watson 01:13
I’ve always known I’m Mateo in Spanish. I think so. But I’ll answer whatever people call me. But welcome to the show. You’re actually from San Francisco, right?

Matheus Riolfi 01:28
Yeah, I’m originally from Brazil. Call me from San Francisco. Yes.

Matt Watson 01:34
All right. Well, so tell us a little more about your background. And what led you just to, you know, be one of the founders and CEO of Tint.

Matheus Riolfi 01:43
Yes, so my background is, as I mentioned, born and raised in Brazil. A city outside of Sao Paulo, and I spent most of my early professional career in college in Sao Paulo. I was a consultant, but I knew I always wanted to start my own business. And then, I was deciding what to do next. And it made sense for me to come to business school, or to go to business school, or come to the US for it. So I ended up getting into Harvard Business School. And I saw that as my kind of gateway to the United States and to Silicon Valley more broadly. So I wanted to start a global company in the tech space. And then HBs was a way to allow me to get connections and to end up here in the San Francisco area, which is what I did. So after graduation, I was one of the early employees in a company called Turo. At the time, to call really, REITs were a series company with about 15 to 20 employees. So very early in their journey, and I was not fortunate enough to be with a company for four years. And by the time I left, it was already a very successful business with over 400 people at a time. And that’s where I met my co-founder, Jerome. So Jerome was also an early employee. He joined a little bit earlier than me. And he was running all the data in engineering, data engineering, of the company. And we ended up spending, you know, 80% of our time on insurance. He was building models and doing kind of fancy data, things around insurance. And I was launching the business in different countries. And it’s been 80% of my time kind of sourcing insurance. And every time I wanted to be in a different country. And that was the origin story of Tint. So I went from being in Brazil to full circle here in the Bay Area, running my own tech startup.

Matt Watson 03:50
So for those who aren’t familiar, Turo is the company that allows somebody like me to rent my sports car for the weekend to somebody else that wants to rent my car, right? It’s like a car-sharing program.

Matheus Riolfi 04:02
It is absolutely so easy to think that it is an Airbnb for cars, right? It’s the idea that you can share your cars with others, but you can also rent cars from any individual now in many different countries. So back in 2014, the sharing economy wasn’t as big and mainstream as yesterday. Even companies like Airbnb and Uber were relatively small startups at that point. So it was very interesting to see the evolution not only of Turo as a company but the sharing economy more broadly.

Matt Watson 04:40
Well, so what I love about your story and a lot of entrepreneurs go through this, right. They work in a specific business specific industry, and they find pain points, and then they decide to go out and start their own company to solve those pain points. Right. And for you, that pain point was seeing how difficult it was to find insurance for this type of car run, you know, car sharing service, and then trying to find it in all these different countries, right. I mean, is that a fair statement?

Matheus Riolfi 05:08
It is a fair statement. So you’re absolutely right that we’ve suffered the pain point, both my co-founder and I. And so we tend towards the product that we wish existed when we were working at Turo. And I do agree that that’s a very good sign that entrepreneurs and founders are into something because it means that they spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, they suffer, they already had to find some solutions themselves to execute what they’re trying to do. So there’s a very, there’s a higher chance that they can actually empathize with the customer. And especially in the early days, when there’s not a lot of data and not a lot of signal that, you have to be based on intuition and any knowledge that tends to be a good high signal of our group good signal for startups.

Matt Watson 06:08
Yeah, I worked at one of the first jobs I ever had, which was at a company that resold concert and sporting event tickets. There’s a company called Ticket solutions. And one of the things that they did is they sent hundreds of FedEx and UPS packages a day. And they noticed that like dozens of them a day would be delivered late or whatever, and they should get refunds from them. And actually, the guy who owned it, you know, recognized that problem. And then, we built some software to audit all the labels to get refunds. And then he eventually spun that out, and it became a huge company and was one of the number one companies in the industry to audit shipping labels. And you know, I always love those stories where, you know, as a byproduct of one business, you find another problem, and that’s why we talk a lot about as being an entrepreneur is pivoting is sometimes is working on a problem, you figure out that there’s actually a different problem that maybe needs to be solved. So I always love that story. And so, from your guys’ start for Tint, you know, what was the original problem you were trying to solve? Was it had to do with car insurance, or was it a more specific thing that you or more broad thing that you were trying to solve?

Matheus Riolfi 07:21
Yeah. So for Tint. Two, we were trying to solve the problem that was this to the same vision, which has been helping companies like Turo to create and launch and succeed exactly in launching their embedded insurance products, right, which means that insurance and protection products, they are a feature of the car business. So if you think about the Turo example, whenever you want to rent a car, suppose your culture I’m traveling, I’m going to rent somebody else’s Porsche 911. I’m offered in the checkout an option for an additional value to protect myself against any damage that may happen to this car, right? And Turo can give you different packages and make half. So it is very similar to how car rental companies do. But obviously, Turo does, in a much better way, less pushy with fair pricing. There is no adjusting to the risks. But the idea is like, No, we had the vision from the beginning that we want to support more companies to do exactly that and not have as much of a painful journey as we had when we were trying to do it ourselves. So we had the vision. We had the big picture. But obviously, we are now four and a half years down the road, and we haven’t built the full journey yet. It is a very big and ambitious journey. So what we did is like at the beginning, we tried to focus more on problems. We knew it to grow more focused on analytics and more focus on the data aspects of this problem. And over time, we started to build more and more of the blocks right building blocks that are required to eventually be able to power any tech company in any space to create their own embedded insurance products.

Matt Watson 09:16
So today, do you focus on specific industries, like specific verticals, specific kinds of things.

Matheus Riolfi 09:23
Our platform is horizontal in a way that it can support any vertical, so today, we have customers in over Tint different verticals, from crypto deposits to shipping to car-sharing, but we do have a special focus today in shipping. So all use cases as it relates to shipping goods, like in the country, mostly through trucking. We also have a good big focus on vacation rentals. So all the use cases around sharing your property for liking Airbnb or verbs or those platforms, that’s another use case that has, has gotten big for us. And our customers. Typically, they are tech platforms. They are venture-backed startups from what we see now starting a Series A, B, all the way to some kind of public companies. And then what they all share in common is that they can see ways that insurance or protection, more broadly, can help their customers now and can remove some intrinsic risk of their core business so that customers can trust them more and convert better, right? So the example of Turo, imagine there was no insurance for it like the host will never trust, like some stranger with a Porsche 911. Right? Second, even for the renter, you are now driving a very expensive car, and if something outside of your control happens, you’re suddenly liable for a big financial loss. So there’s always a different example where insurance makes things work, but we can see the same pattern in different types of business.

Matt Watson 11:13
So is that the key to your guyses platform, dynamically figuring out what those insurance rates are? So it’s not like, Oh, you’re renting a car that’s worth $40,000. And the rate is always, you know, $100 a day or whatever. I mean, it is the key to what you guys do being much more dynamic and how you figure out what those rates should be.

Matheus Riolfi 11:35
Yeah, so one day, the big transformation that is happening, right? So I think one thing I learned about startups is that your chance of success increases exponentially when you connect yourself to a big trend, right? There’s something big happening. And then you’re just kind of part of this, this movement, or this phenomenon. In our case, the big trend, or the big trends behind it, embedded insurance and embedded finance more broadly, is this idea that not all those tech platforms are generating so much data about their customers held them again, going back to the tour example how people use cars are the first time users age, like what kind of car do many different types of platforms are creating this trove of data that no a traditional insurance company doesn’t have? And they own the customer, right? So they have already paid to acquire the customer, the customer is already using the core business of that company. So in Crete, like offering insurance is an add on revenue that comes with virtually no acquisition costs, right? So when you come back combining those two things, the availability of data, plus the customers already there, it enables companies to, to your point, create a product that is personalized. It’s much more relevant to their audience that now only has a higher conversion as a maintenance product. But he kind of catalyzes the core business right? So Turo converts better like is our Think about the shipping right? So you’re buying a sneaker and a sneaker costs $2,000? Well, ideally, you have some protection that if something goes wrong, if the item is damaged, you’re gonna get paid the full value of the merchandise. And I think we can again see that happening all over. Many kinds of different industries use cases to think about how Tesla is creating their own insurance. Apple Care is a form of insurance, no app, Amazon was getting insurance. So like, if you look around, and if you fast forward Tint years, the brands you love are going to be the ones providing you a lot of the insurance protections because most customers don’t necessarily want to think about insurance. And if that protection can come with the things they love, that it’s a better, much better user experience. And if they have to download an app and think about it and have to go purchase it separately.

Matt Watson 14:02
So when somebody uses your platform to provide these insurance offers, like say shipping, you know, I sell shoes or whatever. And I’m like, as you said, who is actually the underwriter? If those shoes get lost since she’s also on a claim, is it still the business owner that somehow it becomes liable for your guys’ platform or is there still a third party and you know, ensure that that carries that or?

Matheus Riolfi 14:28
Yeah, in our platform, our customers can choose how much of the risk they want to take. So if they tell us that now I don’t want to take any risks that we will find jump bite underwriters. So our platform works as a marketplace. So we have underwriters and then they will match the best underwriter with the risk that you’re offering as a platform. But we see that our customers some of them, they decide to either take all the risk or to You take some part of the risk, because the reality is that after again, going back to the data element, after a year to three years in business, the data that those companies generate, it’s already very predictive, right risk. So if they do it, well, if they monetize the well, they can create programs, they are fairly profitable, right? So some of our customers are like, Yeah, I’m doing all the work. Why would I transfer this risk, but it does not depend on the strategy of each company, but our platform is designed to give them the option to choose how much of the risk they want to take.

Matt Watson 15:36
But in your company is never the underwriter? You guys, you guys never have to carry that risk.

Matheus Riolfi 15:41
We are not Yeah, we are. We see ourselves as the platform. And they are orchestrators of making sure that things are working. So we see ourselves more like stripes than a bank or insurance company.

Matt Watson 15:56
So I would imagine the hardest part of this is trying to match some of the weird things that people want insured to these underwriters, right? Like, how do you, how do you convince an underwriter you know, how much, how much risk there is and what the price should be for somebody borrowing a Porsche, right? Like, that seems like a kind of a hard thing to do until you’ve got a lot of data, like you said, yeah, no, you’re absolutely right.

Matheus Riolfi 16:21
And this is why we spend countless hours working on this. And sometimes it’s very hard. Sometimes it’s like, it’s more obvious, but your point, the answer will come from the data, right? So I did the underwriters have some data, some some similar use cases that they can try to use, or in many ways is the platform that Ken has to take the leap of faith based on what they said about the customers and the data they currently have. And then because the key, this uncertainty you’re talking about is especially true in the beginning. But after a few months that you’re doing, you have enough data to say, Oh, this is the price, too high to low, how’s the conversion going?” And again, we build our platform with tools with that in mind, they kind of change in experimentation in mind, so that our customers and the underwriters, they can have the tools to make those adjustments. And when the time comes like what we learn as if we want to have both sides, right of this platform happy. Because if one side is making money, the other isn’t, it’s obviously not a sustainable relationship. So if it goes back to the data, do you guys also get it?

Matt Watson 17:36
Do you guys also have customers that are in e-commerce or retail, like when I go to Best Buy or Target and they try to get me to buy a protection plan for $3 for a toaster like your guys’ platform do that kind of stuff, too? Or is that like something that’s been around for so long? That it’s kind of more of a commodity or something then you guys don’t do that part of it.

Matheus Riolfi 17:59
That’s a great question. It is interesting that you seem to understand a lot of this space, which is great.

Matt Watson 18:08
But the short ones I worked on. I worked at Sears 20 years ago and sold appliances, and they’re crazy as protection plans.

Matheus Riolfi 18:16
I see. That’s great. That’s great. So basically most of our use cases are innovative, right. So I think it’s more likely that this use case your point people have been doing for a while. But what we’re seeing is like sometimes, like the seers like you I probably use a very simple pricing logic that doesn’t take much into account other than the price of the good and they just say something like I it’s it’s Tint% of the price or whatever is the logic they use, like well we see that we will we can help innovate there is like okay, suppose now the best buyers in example want to sell it online. And online, they’re gonna have a lot more information right there beyond the price of the item. So can we help them use that information to price them more accurately so that they price less for the cases where the risk is now the price is too high? Because the risk is low? And then they can probably charge more supposedly, no bicycles break a lot of man just making up here but Right, yeah, and they can charge down the bicycles and the bicycles in California, whatever the factors, like more than they will do for the toasters. So they can sell more protection for toasters and price the bicycle in one accord. So the idea is that every insurance use case is changing. But the more mature it is, like say auto or home insurance, things like that, the higher the probability that the incumbents have already established a good competitive advantage that is harder to change versus like Airbnb or risks from home sharing, which is something that didn’t fully exist. like 15 years ago, or so, alto underwriters have been doing that for probably 80 years at this point.

Matt Watson 20:08
Well, I do want to take a second to remind everybody that finding expert software developers doesn’t have to be difficult, especially when you visit FullScale.io, where you can build a software team quickly and affordably use the Full Scale platform to define your technical needs, and then see what available developers testers and leaders are available or ready to join your team visit FullScale.io to learn more. Yet, at Full Scale, we’ve worked with a couple of different local companies that do insurance that, you know, like Medicare Part B are like some other kinds of insurance platforms and other customers that do like pet insurance. It seems like there’s a, there’s a lot of technology and innovation going on in the insurance space.

Matheus Riolfi 20:50
There is even a name for this, which is called insurer tech, right, which is the intersection between insurance and technology. And now if you go there’s a conference going through Tech Connect in Las Vegas, and is now attended by tens of 1000s of people. So definitely InsurTech has grown to be a major part of the or at least growing part of the insurance industry and the comments, they understand that and they’re out trying to make some investment and try to change some of the ways they do. What we do think you will find exciting is that then going back to embedded insurance, this is a space where say Airbnb, Uber, or the tech platforms have a lot of advantages, right? And how they can do things. And they’re creating something new that wasn’t possible before their core business before their marketplace even existed. So that’s why we see economics and the patient insurance industry for innovation. It’s getting faster, but embedded is very fast, because then you can work by the speed of the tech platforms, and try to match that with the speed of an insurance industry. But you can move faster.

Matt Watson 22:03
So it sounds like most of what you guys do is probably kind of more one off like transaction or event based? Or do you guys also do recurring insurance, like home insurance or car insurance, health insurance and that kind of stuff?

Matheus Riolfi 22:20
So we do, I think you’re right, the most of our use cases are typically like for the case, shorter policies, right? We don’t have I’m trying to think here anything that is necessarily auto or home or those a standard insurance, but we do have customers, for example, one of our public customers is a company called do they help startups hire contractors in different parts of the world. And they provide all the infrastructure payments, they contract the other regulatory things compliance around it. And to do like you can as a company you sign up for their plan is a subscription. So this month we helped create what they call deal premium. So the idea is that you pay extra for something like a premium tier service. And that comes with a protection, right. So if, if there’s anything goes wrong in the contractor relationship, GL will compensate you up to a certain amount for this classification risk for things like that. But a long way of saying that in that case, it is a recurring policy, right, that the companies cover every month, as long as they have the employee, the contractor is still being paid to do the platform.

Matt Watson 23:43
Yeah, I think it seems like insurer tech is still really, really far behind and Tech Tech wise compared to some other industries. You know, we’ve I’ve had other people on the show, and I mentioned that Full Scale, we’ve done some work for some people that it seemed like for some of these things, to get to figure out what the rates should be, and to get things underwritten can still take like days, like the decision making for certain types of insurance is still extremely slow. It’s not fully automated. Is that kind of what you see across a lot of the industry?

Matheus Riolfi 24:22
Yes, I think it depends on the company depending on the type of insurance, but anyway, I think it is. It is true that overall the innovation in insurance, finance, broadly but insurance, it’s even lower than finance, like the innovation pace has been slower than folks anticipated. And now part of it is just now you can it’s how the system works, how the system has been designed. So there’s definitely a lot of opportunity for innovators in the space. Part of this is just So that it’s now a highly regulated industry, right? So you can, you can move as fast as you want, but you can if depending on the type of insurance, your point, if you have to file rates at a certain state and wait for them, like three months for their approval, yeah, there’s so much you can do. Right. So I think one of the challenges that all intrapreneurs that work with insurance face is how can you find those pockets where you can innovate faster. And as you start back insurance, such a large industry, that they are definitely niches and places where innovation can be done faster? And that’s where we see a lot of the innovation happening, right. So in places like know, like claims and licks, in places like some of the underwriting and pricing technology in the like, core software’s like those are, those are places where you have, like things happening faster, let’s say the new trying to launch a new alter insurance, because all insurance is extremely regulated. So every time you want to get to your point, you found a better way to price great, you’re gonna have to comply with new regulations in 50 different states and how you can price this car insurance and then take months to get through the approval. So yeah, I think one of the names of the games here is trying to find, like an angel, and we obviously want to be compliant with regulations, because the regulations are there for a good reason, right? One of the, I’d say core mistakes that entrepreneurs make an insurance is to assume that, like regulations slowed down for no good reason. But no, it’s absolutely right. They’re there because they’re there to protect consumers. And insurance is ultimately a promise, right. So if you don’t have the guardrails in place to make sure that people will honor their promises, a lot of bad things can happen.

Matt Watson 26:55
Well, as you mentioned earlier, I think you said that you guys provide your insurance platform for about Tint different verticals. So across all those different verticals, some of them are really a pain in the neck in regards to compliance and regulation, all that stuff. And then some of them are just kind of wide open, and there’s not a lot of compliance to deal with.

Matheus Riolfi 27:18
Yeah, so I mean, I don’t know how much were you? How much do you want to get into very deep of insurance, but it’s in the broad, very broad terms, there are two types of insurance lines one is called immediate, which is the same mainstream insurance Auto Home, this kind of things where it, they’re very regulated, like you have to get approval everywhere and things like that. And there are more and for every kind of more of the innovative types, let’s say the risks from Airbnb, right the the home sharing risk of sharing your home with a with a stranger, like, those are typically places that is called surplus lines we like those are kind of they can they can run with less kind of, let’s call it oversight because they admitted market. So if you go to progressive, if you go to Geico, and you want to get insurance for this kind of thing, they will say no, like, that doesn’t fall under my kind of normal business. So for that kind of use case there’s less oversight. So you see, you know, you have you know, the basics are in place, but at least you can have some streamlined innovation. And there are also certain products for certain use cases. They can be structured as a known insurance product, right? So if you think about your when you go to Avis, and you say I want to buy insurance, what they’re selling you is not insurance is a laws damage waiver, which kind of has the same kind of frameworks and modus operandi as insurance but is effectively a different legal classification. So has different oversight. So again, I think that one of the hard things of operating this is in the insurance industry issue, really understanding all of these nuances and complexities without getting paralyzed.

Matt Watson 29:14
That’s why I asked because I’m thinking like a man, starting a new company and insurance insurer tech like this. It’s like is there is it takes 612 1824 months just to figure out like how do we even do this for specific industry and go through all the regulation and all this versus like, you know, doing insurance for shipping sneakers seems like a pretty easy one compared to you know, home home insurance or car insurance. Other things. I just was a huge hindrance. You know, for you guys when you first got started.

Matheus Riolfi 29:49
I hear you summarize as well. So some kinds of insurance or protections are a lot easier, right? So sure I’m on the hook for shipment that is going to take two days. Isn’t the maximum loss, it’s $100 or $200? It’s a much easier use case than if you’re ensuring some auto liability that potentially is some bill that will be paid for the lifetime of somebody and cost millions of dollars. So I think your intuition is absolutely right. So that’s one of the things I mentioned about, do you have the ability of knowing this base and kind of be able to find this bucket for us, because we’re connecting back to to our background, where we came from this kind of short term sharing economy, types of risk, and our first customers were in this space, which kind of checks all the boxes that we’re talking about here is typically, like I’ve short not to completely go back to the Porsche 911. Right? Like, even that being already a very high risk, if you insure the physical damage of this is up to the value of the cars or $50,000. So it’s not easy per se buddies like it is a lot easier than millions of dollars of potential loss, you know, the kinds of risks. So we were fortunate that we were part of this new world where not a lot of issuers or other companies understand and or want to play, and those are risks, they are insurable and are not as hard as any other kind. And it’s kind of how we grew up from there.

Matt Watson 31:19
So what’s the future for Tint? What are you guys focused on right now? Or do you very much look like you raised a bunch of money earlier this year? Congrats on that. You guys are very much in growth mode. Like what’s expanding the products and the verticals? You know, what, what are you guys focused on right now?

Matheus Riolfi 31:38
Yeah, we are definitely focused on growing. So you are right that we raised our Series A earlier this year. So we have had a runway for quite a bit of time now. But we are definitely high and we’re growing. We grew our team, probably like five times since like, last year, then we continue to grow more, next year as well. So we were like, and what we’re doing is like we’re definitely expanding our product, like going through more verticals, we’re making work better, right. So there’s a can, as any startup, you have the first round when things are working, but then you kind of can’t keep going for years, just making that better and optimizing each of these states. So we’re primarily focused on the United States. So we will continue to be there. I think one of the main challenges not only for us, but I guess from what I would imagine any other founder today is like knowing how fast you go, right? Because on one hand, you have the opportunity, and then that probably drives you to go fat as fast as you can and increase barn and just things like that. But on the other hand, you have the financing environment where you probably don’t want to be in a place where you really need the money today. So we’re really trying to navigate now, day by day, seeing how the world is developing, and kind of trying to get this balance right.

Matt Watson 33:08
Are you guys doing any hiring? Does everybody listening need to go? Go check out your openings?

Matheus Riolfi 33:13
We are so if you go to jobs.ten.ai, you can see all the positions that are opening, but we’re opening a few more that we’re going to start hiring for early next year as well. So I mean, yeah, we absolutely are.

Matt Watson 33:28
So what do you see as your guys’s biggest challenges going forward? What do you see as the the big challenge on the horizon for you guys?

Matheus Riolfi 33:38
The biggest challenge, I’d say again, going back to the insurance and the regulation is like, how can you scale? There is definitely a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of like activity and tailwinds on the insurance. But your point is we get to the details like how can you support more verticals? How can you scale? How can you find more underwriters? So our most of our challenges today, I’d say our growth pains like No How can we do what we’re doing? Better, Faster scale without no having to redesign everything that we did before? I yeah, I think it’s definitely no because no series A you have an early product market fit, you prove that it’s like a big market and prove that there’s something exciting there. But then by Series B right, you need to now show that you no longer like a good product but as you have a fully functioning company that is ready to go to higher scales and that’s definitely where we are in our journey.

Matt Watson 34:42
Well remind everybody that today’s episode of the Startup Hustle is brought to you by FullScale.io. If you need to hire software engineers, testers or leaders Full Scale can help. We have the people on the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts when you visit FullScale.io. All you need to do is answer a few quick questions and let our platform match you up with our fully vetted, highly experienced team of software engineers. At Full Scale, we specialize in building a long term team that works only for you to learn more when you visit FullScale.io. Well, I’ve really enjoyed having you on the show today. One thing I’d like to do is, as we round this out, as do you have any other kind of final tips for other entrepreneurs out there, it could be about, about anything about you know, being a business owner and entrepreneur.

Matheus Riolfi 35:29
My tip is something that we luckily had, and I didn’t know that was very important. And looking back, I think it is his mission critical is like having grit, I cannot stress how important it is for founders to have grit. And, and if you can’t figure out a way to just just keep going, regardless of what happened. And you know, find a way to not like not not even like not run out of money, but keep finding creative ways that you can keep going having the fire keeping it like not the fire burning side, you find a way. And eventually you find the kind of growth paths and then you kind of find the next chapter unlock the next chapter of the story. Like it took us at least two years to find a good traction to see things starting to click. And we’ve been doing that for for a year and a half. And we’re far far far from being now where we want to we want to be. But I think for us, like the main lesson so far was that Nike we could and I think many others would have stopped. And we didn’t. And I think that’s something that now if you can, you hear this startup advice all the time is like programs, like from Y Combinator is that can be a coverage impossible to kill any sounds like a little bit too vague, but is incredibly true in the founder journey.

Matt Watson 37:01
Yeah, at some point in time, you just have to be very passionate about what you’re doing. And it’s that drive every day that gets you up every day and keeps fighting the fight. And you know, it’s a never-ending sense of problems. And one of the main ones of my all-time favorite quotes is from Mike Tyson. It’s like everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And it feels like as an entrepreneur, you know, you gotta have grit because you just get punched in the face every week for some stupid reason that you don’t see coming.

Matheus Riolfi 37:32
Absolutely. And you get punched many times in SharePoint. If you’re not passionate, it’s going to be hard to keep the fire going. So you know, the related thing is to pick something that you are passionate about because you care that you really want it to be solved. Because that’s kind of one of the ways you can keep the grid and keep going.

Matt Watson 37:51
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. Again, this was Matheus Riolfi from Tint, which is T-i-n-t.ai. Check them out. And well, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Matheus Riolfi 38:05
Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate their chat, and thanks for having me.

Matt Watson 38:09
All right. Take care.

Matheus Riolfi 37:32
Absolutely. And you get punched many times in SharePoint. If you’re not passionate, it’s going to be hard to keep the fire going. So you know, the related thing is to pick something that you are passionate about because you care that you really want it to be solved. Because that’s kind of one of the ways you can keep the grid and keep going.

Matt Watson 37:51
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. Again, this was Matheus Riolfi from Tint, which is T-i-n-t.ai. Check them out. And well, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Matheus Riolfi 38:05
Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate their chat, and thanks for having me.

Matt Watson 38:09
All right. Take care.