Sara Lindquist:
I'm Sara Lindquist from FUSE. We're an early stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started.
We believe that founders deserve more. More urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability, more of everything, and we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio companies in the FUSE family to date.
Today I am joined by Jackson and Jamieson Fregeau, the founders of Quandri. Join us as we discuss how these two brothers teamed up to build an RPA platform to automate workflows for insurance companies. Let's get started!
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Sara: Jackson and Jamieson, thank you so much for being here today. It's great to have you in this virtual room of course, and obviously an exciting week for you all with the recent announcement and obviously some fun things going on in the personal life too. But just to kick things off, it would just be great to hear a bit about the journey and starting off first and foremost, what is Quandri and how is it serving customers?
Jackson:
Sure, thanks Sara. And thank you for having us. We're a platform for insurance automation. So what Quandri is is a platform that allows currently insurance brokers to deploy software robots to automate a lot of their time-consuming repetitive high-volume processes that they need to do on a day-to-day basis. So basically, vertical automation and AI to automate processes.
Sara: And so walking back in time a little bit, Jackson, Jamieson, feel free to both jump in on this, I would love for you to share both about your backgrounds and then what got you intrigued by the problem in the first place and then how you decided to come together to build Quandri. Basically, what's the aha moment for both of you?
Jamieson:
I can start this. My background is in computer engineering originally and I worked at a startup while I was in university actually. I was actually working on the electrical components of that startup. I was working on the software components of that startup. It was a startup to build ocean navigating boats that were solar-powered to essentially replace crude vessels, much cheaper option for scientific research.
And it was while I was working there that I really became enamored with startups and realizing how much you can accomplish in a small team if you're all working towards the same goal and working well together.
And from that time onwards, Jackson and I were probably bouncing ideas for different startups around every few months or maybe shorter than that. And we were pretty focused on the idea of starting a company together. We have complementary skills.
We tried a few different things. We even started a few apps. We talked about building something in the cybersecurity space, but nothing really seemed to have the impact potential that we were really looking for and I think that our ambitions strived for until we came across the idea for what eventually became Quandri.
The idea originated from Jackson's previous role, or I guess a few jobs ago for a team he was managing. And so Jackson, I'll let you just dive into your background and how the idea for Quandri really came to be.
Jackson:
I was always really interested in entrepreneurship. It was always something that I saw myself going into. Just the impact that you can have at a really young age through entrepreneurship I think is somewhat unmatched in other areas, so it's always something that drew me to it and I think that's part of what drew Jamieson to it as well.
Didn't seem like the thing you went to school for, so I did a business degree, started working for a startup right after that degree. I was in an operations role there, was the COO there, and part of my team was doing a lot of high-volume repetitive data entry work into a software application that we couldn't read or write what we wanted via the API.
So what we needed to do was build a couple bots. So I built a few bots to solve that problem, and there were ample problems in that business where we could have built more bots to solve it.
And Jamieson and I started talking about that, we started looking around at other businesses. And it didn't matter what business we were talking to, whether it was a tech company or a construction company, all of these businesses had significant manpower and labor that was being put towards these high-volume repetitive processes, which just seemed somewhat insane to us in the year 2020 that so much work was still being done manually.
So we initially wanted to start Quandri kind of experimenting around that problem space to understand what's the product and what's the company you can build around this. What we did was target more traditional industries, so healthcare, financial services, legal, construction, and then finally insurance, and building different solutions in those industries for different customers.
And the aha moment was after we worked with our first two insurance brokers as customers and realized how massive of a pain point and a problem that there was in the insurance industry that nobody else was solving it or doing anything about it and that nobody was going to be doing anything about it in the next couple of years. There wasn't really anybody solving that problem, and it was really a hair on fire problem in the insurance industry and we were just getting pulled more and more in that direction.
So after doing some more research, kind of understanding the structural reasons for why those problems existed, we decided to pivot Quandri and use the insurance industry as our beachhead to build out the initial version of what Quandri would be. So we pivoted to insurance and took a step back, built the generalized versions of the products that we have now, which are now different types of robots to automate different processes within the insurance ecosystem.
Sara: Yeah. And I was going to say, can you jump into those a little bit? Because my next question for you is just going to be about kind of the digital transformation efforts or shifts that have been even attempted in insurance and why Quandri is coming in at such an opportune time, and really the key pain points you've identified?
Jackson:
First part of that question in terms of why now is a good time, there's a couple of reasons. One, the insurance industry and specifically the brokerage or agency side of it, InsurTech has been around around for a while. A lot of initial InsurTech companies were either enabling the insurance carrier or replacing the insurance carrier and going direct to consumer with insurance.
In some cases, that has worked really well. In other cases, it hasn't really made the change to the industry that everybody thought it would. And the agency and brokerage channel, the distribution channel for a lot of these carriers is as strong as ever and is not going away anytime soon.
So that second wave of InsurTech and where Quandri plays a role right now is on broker tech or on agent tech, enabling that agent, that broker to be a lot more efficient, a lot more productive than they would be otherwise. And that's a segment of the market that has been rather overlooked by a lot of innovation.
So I think with all of the digital transformation that happened during COVID, it forced further digital transformation of the insurance industry and I think it caused a lot of these agents and brokerages to look around and question why they were so far behind compared to a lot of other industries. So I think timely in that sense.
Additionally, a lot of these companies are moving on to the cloud infrastructure, which is unlocking a significant amount of data that was previously on-premise, which just makes it more accessible and easier to build products on, and we think that's going to unlock a big wave of innovation in the insurance space that we're going to play a leading role in.
Sara: Yeah. Thank you for providing that color. And so next question for you is actually about team. How big is the team now?
Jackson:
We are, I think, 18. 18 or 19 people.
Sara: Let's go. That's awesome. Almost getting into the twenties there. That's exciting. So my next couple questions are just going to be focused on leadership at a startup. And for you as you're both building this team, how would you define the culture you're trying to build at Quandri? You can both share whatever comes to mind.
Jamieson:
There are many ways to define culture, and I think a lot of those ways are difficult to do in a few sentences, especially when you're only 18 people. It really morphs over time.
But I think initially one of the aspects of our culture that has been really important is ownership. Our team cares a lot about the work they do, about our customers, about the direct results on our customers from the work they do, and they really own what they're doing from end to end.
From the beginning, we've had a number of different robots that do different processes with a small team that has forced us to somewhat divide our team so that people build a lot of domain knowledge around what those specific robots do. And that has just, I think, somewhat forced but also enabled us to have our team really own their results, which I think has just been a large part of the small amount of success that we've had so far, is that our team really cares.
Sara:
Yeah, that's great. Jackson, do you have anything to add to that?
Jackson:
A way that I've liked to describe it is Type 2 Fun, if anybody's familiar with that. It's a climbing term, right?
Sara:
Yeah.
Jackson:
And it's not-
Sara:
Very familiar.
Jackson:
Yeah, it's not like work hard, play hard, but it's more so like work hard is kind of play hard at the same time. The reason that you climb a mountain is not because it is easy, you climb a mountain because it is hard and what you get out of that is a really big sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, and you're doing it to push yourself. And that's kind of how I view startups.
If you're signing up for a startup because it's easy, you're definitely in the wrong career. It's hard, people should know it's hard. It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of effort, it can be stressful at times, but it's by far the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life.
And I think the growth that you get out of that is what keeps you coming back. The growth you get out of it, and we want people that want to change the world a little bit. So people who want to do something because it's hard and pursue that for that reason. And the rewards that you get out of that sense of accomplishment I think is something that Jamieson and I really believe and I think is something that our team as well is I think they really embody that.
Sara:
Yeah. No, that's great. Well, we certainly think you all are changing the world more than a little bit, a lot of it with what you're doing. And I love that Type 2 Fun and ownership mentality. I think that's so spot on. I love it.
Jamieson:
To add onto that a little bit-
Sara:
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Jamieson:
... just with one anecdote. I think during a team-building event seven months ago or so, we were asked to write a quote on a piece of paper on our own, and Jackson and I both wrote a quote by JFK of, "We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard." In some way without speaking to each other we both wrote that quote down and I think that just that entire concept has been infused into Quandri quite a bit.
Jackson:
Which I don't think we told our dad about, but he'd be pretty excited if he knew that we were quoting JFK in business meetings like that.
Sara:
Oh yeah, sure he'd be thrilled. That's some good family brother telepathy right there. That's awesome. It's a killer quote. Well, thank you for sharing on that one.
So my next question for you again is kind of about the startup journey at large, and I think probably a lot of this will tie into the answers that you just shared about just motivation, but what keeps you going and how do you keep your team going? Startups are going to be hard, as you just said, and there's a lot of moments and a lot of people who start companies and then they hang it up and they throw in the towel. So in moments where it does get challenging or where it will get challenging, what will keep you both going and how will you inspire your teammates to do so as well?
Jackson:
There's probably two answers to this. One answer is that I think for both Jamieson and I, quitting is just not an option, never has been.
But the bigger answer to that, our view of what Quandri can be and our goals with what Quandri can become are not a year out, they're not two years out, they're not three years out. We're looking out at 10 years, we're looking out at 20 years of what we can build, and we want to build a generational technology company that lasts much longer than we do.
And if something's hard in the short term and you're thinking out a year or two, it's probably easy to lose steam. But I think when you have a long-term perspective on what you're building and the impact that can have, it's easier to push through in times of difficulty because you know that's just going to be a short period of time or you know that's just a roadblock on the way to something bigger and greater than that. I think for me at least, it's having that long-term perspective and knowing that this is just a building block on the way to building something great.
Jamieson:
To add onto that, I agree with both of those, surprise surprise. But I think one thing, we tend to agree on a lot of things, so for context on that, but I think something I would add onto that is I view what we're doing as being very [inaudible 00:13:14], and that whether we are here or not in the next five to 10 years, what we're doing is going to be done, and so we should be the ones to do it. And yes, it will be difficult and times get really tough, but if these are things that are going to be worked through, there's no reason it can't be us that does work through these things.
Sara:
Yeah. Why not us? Love that, you [inaudible 00:13:41].
Jamieson:
Yeah, exactly.
Sara:
Yep.
Jamieson:
Exactly.
Sara:
Yep. And obviously you both are really aligned, and love you sharing the same quotes, because actually one additional question I wanted to ask you about was about the fact that you guys obviously work really well together and are brothers and co-founders. So how do you find balance in the midst of that with kind of the dual roles that you're playing together?
Jackson:
Yeah, it's tricky. I think we definitely over-index at times as co-founders. When we're in the office, it's kind of funny, my fiance will often tell me things about Jamieson that I have no idea, and she'll be like, "Aren't you guys in the office all day?" I'm like, "Yeah, this is not stuff we talk about when we're in the office."
I think at times we over over-index on the co-founder side, but we definitely still take the time to make sure that we're hanging out as brothers as well. And I mean, Jamieson's the best man at my wedding this weekend, so I think we're doing okay on the brothers side as well.
Sara:
I'd say so.
Jamieson:
We get a lot of questions of whether it's difficult to work together as brothers, and I think both of us were quite surprised at the beginning of how easy it was. There's just a lot of past we have, a lot of trust that we have in each other.
Sara:
That's such a good point. Yep.
Jamieson:
Yeah, I think that the concept, the part that doesn't come through is keeping that relationship as brothers when we do work so closely together, and just startups have a tendency to take over anything they are near. It's important for us to make sure we invest in our relationship as brothers as well as working together and not being so important.
Sara:
Totally. And the reason I ask is I think you both do it really well, and there's certainly a lot of founders that go in with siblings or family members and it can be tricky, so good to get a little insight into your perspective so others can just learn and benefit from it as they embark on a similar journey. So I appreciate that.
So in closing, I have one final question for you. What right now do you need more of? How can anyone listening in, tuning into the video and podcast, how can they help or get involved?
Jackson:
The number one thing for us right now is on the hiring side. We are looking to bring the best possible people that we can in the Pacific Northwest onto our team to build an amazing technology company here.
So we're looking for a lot of different roles on the engineering side. We're looking to hire a lot of our first leadership roles as well in the company now that we're past the Series A point. So we're looking for somebody on the operation side, we're looking for somebody on the HR side, we're looking for leaders across product and across revenue as well.
So if anybody listening is excited about what we're doing, interested in the company that we're building, the culture that we're building, even if there's not a direct job posting on our website, feel free to get in touch because we are consistently looking for the best people in this region that we can talk to to come and help us build an amazing company.
Sara:
Yeah. And what's the best way to get in touch? Just through the website, do you have a kind of a general email?
Jackson:
Yeah, if you go to our careers page on the website, if you see something you're interested in applying for you can apply directly to that role. We also have a bucket for future roles. If you don't see something there that you want, you can also reach out to automate@quandri.io. If you just want to get in touch with Jamieson and I, we see all the emails that go to that email, so we'll see it.
Sara:
Perfect. That's awesome. Well, Jackson and Jamieson, thank you so much for doing this. It was so awesome to hear the story and have you both on here to talk about it, and really looking forward to coming alongside you as you change the world in big ways with this company. So thanks again, and Jackson, let's go get you hitched, dude.
Jackson:
Let's get me married. This is my last meeting before wedding prep, so we ended on a good note.
Sara:
Well, it's an honor. It's an honor that you're sitting down with us. And thank you, really exciting stuff ahead for you and the company.
Jackson:
Thanks a lot, Sara, and we're really excited to be partnering with you guys and the FUSE team. It's been great so far, and yeah, really looking forward to working together on this.
Sara:
Well, we couldn't agree more. We're super grateful to be a part of it, so thanks you two.
Jamieson:
Yeah, thank you Sara.
Sara:
As Jackson mentioned, if you are looking for your next gig, check out the job openings on Quandri's website and be sure to get in touch. There's no better time than now to get involved with a company and culture that's going to do whatever it takes to transform the insurance industry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.