Building Safer Futures: Mo El Mahallawy at Shepherd

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast from the ground up where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their successes, challenges and lessons learned. We hope you'd be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal and here with us today we have Mo El Mahallawy, the co-founder and CTO of Shepherd, an insurtech startup that's raised $8.5 million in funding and they're thriving. Mo, welcome to the show.

Mo El Mahallawy: Thanks for having me, excited to to do this.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, background on Shepherd. Shepherd is a startup focused on commercial construction insurance. Prior to Shepherd, Mo was a senior software engineer at Airbnb where he helped launch Airbnb Luxe, then went on to build a marketing tech tool that powers all of Airbnb's marketing emails, push notifications and... wow, you've done a lot there Mo.

Mo El Mahallawy: It was uh it was definitely you know one of my funnest experiences uh throughout my career, working at a big company like Airbnb. Um obviously you know really kind of like chang- changing the world, changing the way we travel, changing the way we kind of experience cities, so it was a lot of fun to work there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, before we dive in and talk about your current startup, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into technology?

Mo El Mahallawy: Yeah, so I uh I grew up in Canada, uh right outside of Toronto, went to school right outside of Toronto as well. Um went to a university called McMaster University. It's really big on the medicines, my folks wanted me to become a doctor and I thought that's what I wanted to do as well. Halfway through I realized it's actually not the path that I want to take, um and so I I'd convinced my folks at the time that I should do a double major in research psychology and economics. Um my dad was a little bit disappointed but he said, "Why don't you think about being an entrepreneur?" um and he would tell me about the days of you know, how how Dell started and you know Michael Dell assembling computers in his dorm room, or how Microsoft started, or how a lot of these like big entrepreneurs started young and said, "you know, this could be you one day."

Um I kind of brushed it off, but uh I did have this like really interesting idea and I did actually start a tech company with some friends. Uh we ultimately didn't work out, we didn't have someone who knew, who knew how to code. Um and again, medicine school. So everybody was chasing going down med school or doing eventually doing a master's in PhD, uh nobody's really thinking about learning to code or doing software engineering, going to work at Google or Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And so when that failed, I decided to teach myself to code. And um you know, the funny story is I uh while I was doing the startup I watched a video of Joe Gebbia talking about the early days of Airbnb and how you know they started, and some of the successes. And this was back in 2012. Um so it's kind of crazy to see you know their story back then and then what the company is today. And I was like, "Damn, one day I want to be, I want to build something like that." Uh little did I know that you know however many years later, five, six years later I would actually work at Airbnb. But um you know, after I graduated I knew I wanted to be here. And so I, I hopped on an airplane with a suitcase, moved out here, and uh started my career as a software engineer working at various tech startups uh in San Francisco. So that's, that's a little bit of you know long-winded answer of how I got to technology.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's great. Proximity is such a key aspect of what you end up doing. If you grow up in the Midwest, maybe you work in automotive. In Silicon Valley, it's technology, which is where I grew up as well. So you made the journey to Silicon Valley and you got into one of the marquee companies. Um, is Shepherd your first startup? And you said you kind of worked on one and didn't quite succeed, and then just kind of got into software development. But was there any other software companies before launching Shepherd for you?

Mo El Mahallawy: Not, not to the extent where you know, I put my name on an incorporation paper and signed some documents and made it official. Um you know, tried many different projects, some you know with, with some strong success throughout you know my time. Um but uh Shepherd was really the true thing where I decided to lean in heavily. Um started a company, find a co-founder, raise some money, uh grow a team, solve a big problem. Um and so Shepherd is you know, I would say it's, it's really the first.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: And how did you find your co-partner, your co-founder?

Mo El Mahallawy: Good question. Yeah, my uh... so this was back in uh early days of 2020. You know, as I mentioned, I'm a Canadian, so I was very close to actually getting my green card and I wanted to you know, I had the itch to want to do something for a while but I just didn't, don't know when. Um and things were going really well. And um and so I thought "alright, any minute now it's going to arrive in the mail and I'm going to you know finish my time up at Airbnb and then start." And so I had joined On Deck at the time, and uh this thing called COVID-19 hit in March 2020. Um and so I found myself in On Deck, no green card. Um so this is a really great time to actually go through the co-founder dating you know uh process. And that's how I met Justin, who happened to be also in On Deck. But we had a mutual friend who behind the scenes was like, "Hey, Justin, you should meet this guy named Mo." And then you know, was telling me like he was, he was at the time trying to get me to join as a founding engineer, and I was like "Thank you so much but I want to start my own thing." Um and so he's like "Oh, you should talk to this person." And so it just happened to be two parallel tracks where we ended up getting introduced to each other, and um you know here we are um a couple years later. But what was really cool is him and I got an opportunity to work on many different ideas and projects and test them. Some even people are paying us money for, or committed to pay money for. But um we didn't feel a strong calling for some of those as much as we feel for what we're building today, which is Shepherd.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well Shepherd is an insurance platform company. What was the calling for you to get into insurance?

Mo El Mahallawy: I uh, you know I was really interested in these re- really big antiquated industries. Um you know I always felt like you know even if you're 1% market share of something that's massive, then that still 1% is pretty massive. Um and so you know, when we look at insurance and when we look at construction, those are two independently massive industries and the overlap with them is massive as well. Um and so my, my calling to that is I had a lot of interest in just throwing myself into an area where I would have to learn a lot, experience, and try different things. But also come in and you know, bring fresh different eyes to uh an industry that has been slow moving for a while. And I got lucky enough where my co-founder came from that industry. So Justin started his career as a civil engineer, risk manager, owned you know risk management for some big um construction companies in New York City. Started a company to solve his own problems, um eventually sold it up to a Series B company in San Francisco which then sold to Autodesk. And so um he had that domain expertise which I liked, but I had the technical you know acumen and the ability to build things. Um and just a fresh set of eyes that when we kind of came together, it felt like this was you know, the right uh ingredients to, to take on this like big challenge. I also think, to be honest with you, being a little bit naive really helped because it's such a you know, it's a, it's a really difficult problem space. Um and so just jumping in two feet first and then starting to learn and understand the value chain and how things work in this industry... if I knew a lot of that, I don't know if I would have done this. But I'm really happy that I did because we've really brought something very different and unique to the market and it's been really helping us quite a bit in, in terms of like owning market share, getting our brand out there, attracting really talented people. So um yeah, I'm really happy I'm doing this.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well I love businesses that are required and also are sticky. Insurance ranks number one in my book for that. When you look at insurance as a whole, what's your operational expertise in that space? Do you do everything from underwriting to delivery? What encompasses the insurance aspect from your perspective?

Mo El Mahallawy: So we are, the technical term for it is we're an MGU, which is Managing General Underwriter. Which really just means that we own everything from sales, marketing, underwriting, um you know, the document, the documents, the policies, handling claims etc. What we don't own is the risk. Um so it doesn't sit on our balance sheets. We may elect to own some of the risk, but in you know, in cases we, we decided not to. Um and we work with you know other carriers as well as uh reinsurers in order to supplement you know the risk-bearing aspect of it. And so we're responsible for everything. You know, we, we go out and we get our own opportunities and deals, we take a look at them, we price them, we decide if you know the terms, we create proposals, we eventually bind them if you know, if, if we're selected. Then we handle you know claims if they were to happen, we handle renewals when you know the, the next renewal cycle comes up, and so on and so forth. Um so we're responsible for all of that. Um so we're an insurance company. Now again, we don't take the risk. Uh we may eventually elect to, um but at the moment we don't. And this is very similar to a lot of you know challenger banks if you will, that startups that sit on top of a bank but they don't actually own, for example, the licensing you know with the states and so on, or maybe even holding the deposits. They're just a layer on top. And you could kind of compare us to that, but we're a little bit deeper because insurance requires a little bit more.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: What makes Shepherd a little bit different than other insurtech companies in the market today?

Mo El Mahallawy: There's three value props. Uh the first one is um, specifically for our target market, which is Middle Market and like larger contractors (ones that are doing $20 million and above in business). Um they're fairly complicated to underwrite, right? They're, they're complicated risks because they could operate in different states, um they could operate through different geos (you know, Buffalo, New York for example). They do different kinds of work, um flooring, plumbing, etc. They subcontract work or they are the subcontractor themselves. They're just very, very complicated risks. They're not you know, you and I starting a plumbing company and we buy a truck and we're you know ready to go. Um these are really complicated organizations. And so the procurement of insurance is fairly complicated. You still need a human in the loop to take a look at: what is the you know, what is the business? What is your projected business? What is all these things? How do we come up with terms? How do we come up with pricing?

And so what we've done is we built a lot of technology to assist our underwriters that work at Shepherd today to do their job a lot faster. And so value prop number one is we're able to um respond to opportunities significantly faster than competitors. So right now we're averaging less than 12 hours, but about 7 hours average, excuse me. The industry takes from three to sometimes even 10 days to respond to an opportunity. And that's because they're antiquated, they have a lot of different systems, even their kind of org structures are really complicated. We don't have that. We're very flat, our technology allows us to move really quickly. So that's number one.

Two, we reward contractors that use technology on their job sites. So if you're using, let's say for example, a telematics or a camera or water sensor, we actually offer you insurance credits. So, lower your premium if you were to use those tools.

Finally, a lot of the carriers today are just offering you a piece of paper saying "we promise you know to pay claims when they happen, um give us a call if something happens." We do that, everybody does it. But what we also do is we say, "Here's some software that you're going to get for free that's homegrown and built by Shepherd. And we believe that this is going to assist you with some of your back office." As a matter of fact, this also offsets some software that they are buying today. And so instead of going out and buying you know some software to help you fix some of these workflows that you have internally, spending 20 to 30 or $50,000, you get it for free through Shepherd. And so that's been a very, very cool and compelling you know value prop that others have not been getting. Um it's, it's, it's analogous to like, "Here's a credit card, but also you get lounge um and you get like free this and free that." You're like "Yeah, I want this credit card! This is awesome! I choose this one instead of the other one." Now all credit cards give you some sort of perks, uh because you know lounge is like not that difficult to offer, but, but, but that you know in the initial introduction of that, and why Amex even was like really cool and popular is because they gave you more than just credit on a, on a card. And so we, we think, we think quite a bit about that as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I want to go back to that a little bit. You talked about workflows or process what your software actually does for a customer. Say I'm an insur- uh a construction company. I need a $20 million loan, I need to get insurance. You're going to provide that insurance to me, you're going to give me the software too. How do I use that inside the company?

Mo El Mahallawy: Yeah, I uh... one of the... we've tried many different experiments. One of the ones that have really caught the attention of a lot of our customers and is being used today quite a bit is a compliance tool. And um, if you're a general contractor, you're typically you know subcontracting to different vendors and, and trades to do some certain works. Part of that, when you contract them you have insurance requirements for them to come and do work with you. Um the challenge is like, you need to now get you know, ask for or, or get provided proof of insurance, um and you need to be able to track that, verify it, make sure it meets the requirements that you need. And then those things expire. Insurance expires on a yearly basis, so you need to now go and get refreshed and pull that information again. And for the most part the way the industry solves this is by kind of shooting around PDFs. And so people are solving this through spreadsheets, through outsourcing to like an external team or something like that, or some pretty expensive legacy software that we think is commoditized. And so this is actually a software that we built out and is being used today, which is it's a compliance tool to help you pull, track, request, verify. It pulls a lot of information from documents for you automatically. It sets reminders and alerts for you, etc. And we're providing that completely for free. And our competitors today are you know charging from like I said, 5 to 10 to even $50,000 a year for. You get it for free when you become a Shepherd customer.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's amazing. Irresistible offer right there for sure. I love that. For those that don't know the operations of an insurance company, are there some specific things that have the whole industry from moving as fast as they do? You talked about 7 to 12 hours uh that you operate in and getting approvals for companies. But why does it take 7 to 10 days for others?

Mo El Mahallawy: You know, to your point, like you said, uh it's required and it's sticky. And so the status quo is "you need me, um and I don't really need to innovate or do things different or kind of push the envelope." Um and so you know as, as a result um, why you know, why what we're doing is really attractive to a lot of folks and really interesting is because we're saying, "No, like technology could kind of solve a lot of that, and we can make it better for everyone." Um and we could kind of be an example of like what you know insurance should look like and what can it, what it could look like. Um and so you know, that would be my answer to that is, you know, that's number one. And number two um, the very successful insurance companies are very successful at underwriting. And they're like best-in-class at underwriting. They may or may not be best-in-class at technology. Um and so you know being able to bridge those two. When you look at our you know insurance side of the company, we have best-in-class folks, like top top tier talent, um you know that left some very, very you know strong positions at other insurance companies to come and assist on this mission of Shepherd. And then we have some top tier talent on the, on the engineering and product side. And when you bring those two together you end up getting this really beautiful marriage of you know taking the best-in-class underwriting, taking the best-in-class in technology, and like really kind of setting an example of what it should look like. Um and so I think that's why you know the industry has, has had that status quo, and I think that's why you know we're, we believe that we're, we're breaking that status quo as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's amazing. Your focus uh today is in the construction sector. Um how do, how do companies find you and, and who's the buyer within those companies?

Mo El Mahallawy: Yeah, we view ourselves as B2B2B. So we work with brokers and then brokers have the relationship with the client, the contractors. Um and you know, it's, it's great because we work with the top brokers in the, in the country. So Aon, Marsh, Willis, Alliant, and I could name a whole you know, a dozen more. Um so these are the biggest brokerage shops in the country, um and people trust them. People trust their brand, people like to work with them because they're you know, they're best-in-class at what they do. And they really understand you know, insurance is not just price, it's a lot of terms as well. They really understand that side of the business as well. And so we work through brokers. Our job is you know to respond to brokers really quickly, to make brokers really happy, to be very easy and flexible to work with them. But ultimately the decision maker is the buyer, which is the contractor. And so that's why you know, when we, when we talk about our you know three value props, like value prop number one really hits on the broker um because their job is to go and fan out to different carriers to get proposals back, to help guide the client through the decision-making process. And mind you, like some of these clients are buying like a 100 million of, of limit, which no one carrier is going to offer. And so as a result you have to syndicate from different carriers different pieces of insurance. And so oftentimes if you're let's say for example buying a 100 million of limit, you're working with over 10 different carriers. And so syndicating that is a lot of work that a broker has to do, and then presenting that to the client. And that's where we you know, the other value props come in is "hey, we actually lower the price, we could compete on price because you use technology, so we're going to reward you for that." And then in addition we're also offering you more than just insurance coverage. Um and so that's, that's how we're hitting on like the B2B2B is you know: making the brokers happy, get us more business, respond quickly, um you know, you know, have the ability to close deals with, with the brokers. And then we make the buyer really happy because we're able to compete on price and provide more than coverage.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Sounds like the experience you would go through at Airbnb where it's really the beginning to the end of the experience and you're left with a feeling of not just it being a great experience, but also something you want to talk about too. Which I think in insurance maybe doesn't happen a lot.

Mo El Mahallawy: It's, it's, I love that you say that because...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh sorry, go ahead.

Mo El Mahallawy: No, go ahead, yep.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh I, I was going to say I love that you say that, because um when I was at Airbnb um there's on the fourth floor there was a wall that showed you, they actually got a like a Disney animator or Pixar animator to like create this. And it was like different slides of like the host experience and then like different slides (and I think it was 10 or 12), but uh slides of like the guest experience. And so you know like the host experience is like "heard about Airbnb through like a dinner party or something like that, went online and like you know... and then like put a listing up blah blah blah, first arrival" and like so on and so forth and like "then the goodbye." And so it was really fun because you know you get, you get to see that experience. But also you know Airbnb's thinking was "we need to make every slide magical. Like how do we make the host onboarding really magical? How do we make the guest search you know, or when they pay or when they arrive at the home, how do we make that experience really magical?" And so even with us, you know, we think quite a bit about like, how do we make every you know slide, if you will uh, or scene of, of you the Shepherd experience really magical? Um whether it's like the email that you get from us, when an underwriter you know picks up the phone and speaks to you, our proposal, um just the quality and service of like working with us. Like how do we make every part of that magical? And even the software that we provide you know, how do we onboard you, how do we kind of teach you about what the software does, how do we like take your feedback, how do we kind of make the software beautiful and really easy, intuitive to use. Every part of that is you know, we think about how do we make that process magical.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah I love that. One of your investors, Sam Hodges, is one of the founders of Vouch, another insurance company for businesses uh in general. And you know, every company that we talk to that uses his product has one thing to say and it's always, "Oh my God, Vouch. I love that company! Great experience. Like all my friends use them." And that's from the product to the delivery of their service, which people talk about. They feel that. So it's, it's, it's great to kind of hear that that's part of your you know DNA as well. I think it, I think it goes a long way. Uh and take it from someone who just had to go through this whole insurance process for our own company doing a different service (and we did talk with Vouch and they're awesome), and used another service to kind of understand their process of onboarding. And it was just... the emails were like old school fonts from the older technology insurance company, which was very boring. And everything about that feeling felt like I was going back in time. Versus Vouch, everything was more modernized and just ultimately you felt like you're in today's era. Which was a really comforting feeling.

Um, you went through Y Combinator. When, when you started at Y Combinator with your thesis and the business problem you're looking to solve and where you're at today, did that change at all? Did you make any major pivots from then to now?

Mo El Mahallawy: Well when we started uh, the funny story is we, we went into Y Combinator with um a very different idea. Um and uh, and when we got accepted into Y Combinator, um Justin and I took a moment to, to just kind of "let's take a backseat for a second. Is this the thing that we want to really work on?" Um this very different idea. And it was like, "uh, I don't think either one of us really knew or had strong expertise." I think, I think the YC founders uh sorry, the YC partners that interviewed us probably were like, "We like these guys. They're hustlers, they got hunger, they got grit. We don't really love their idea, but maybe they'll pivot, because a lot of YC companies pivot." And so we did just that. Um Justin, Justin and I brainstormed two different ideas. And um one of them was kind of like Asana or Jira for construction, but it was like, "uh you know, like it's not Procore but it's like different." Um and then the other one was "what if we create Lemonade?" And you know, people love Lemonade. Uh Lemonade the, the renters (what started off as renters insurance, now does homeowners and, and vehicle and so on). Their, their experience is like amazing. You look at their website, you look at the design, um just everything is so delightful. Um you know, so a lot of like you know very similar to Vouch, but this is consumer side. Um we're like, "What if we create the Lemonade for construction?" And it was like, "That sounds like a great idea. I don't know where to start or what that's going to look like." And so when we got, when we got into Y Combinator, our first meeting with our, our Y Combinator partner, we're like, "Yeah, do you remember the idea that we got into? Yeah, we're not doing that anymore. We're doing Lemonade for construction." And uh he was like, "So what does that mean?" And we're like, "We don't know yet. But we're going to figure it out." And so we actually spent like majority of Y Combinator going through the process of assembling all the different pieces and figuring out like, what it is that we want to do? What are we bringing that's different to the market? Where does the value chain you know look like, or what does it look like sorry. Um and what can we do that's, that's very unique. Um and so we pieced a lot of that, we didn't even do Demo Day. Um and we ended up raising our seed a month after Y Combinator. Um and so that also brought on Steve, who is the third co-founder uh of Shepherd. Um and so that's when we really had you know the Avengers uh you know. Justin who like I said earlier had the experience of uh you know the construction tech side of things. Um I had built a lot of software at big companies. And then Steve left as an Executive Vice President at Chubb, and he had oversight of the construction book for all of North America. Um and so he truly was the domain expert, the underwriting kind of machine. Um and so you know when, when that brought the three of us it was a real thing. It was like, "Okay here, here's we're, we're, we're a real company." And um he obviously had a lot of different insight and perspective of what we can do. Um and then Justin also brought on like the construction tech side of things. And that's when we formed what you know, Shepherd is today.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, sounds like three perfect partners for a company going into a new domain and modernizing it. Uh you've raised capital in a tough market, what's been your recipe for success?

Mo El Mahallawy: Um man, there's, there's a lot of different things. But um I think one thing that I'm pretty proud of is we've stayed fairly diligent, we didn't over um... we made sure to kind of um you know I, I think I think like instead of you know... we didn't overhire. We hire people that are great, we hired people that are excited about what we're doing, people who believed in the mission. Um and then people who wanted to kind of take things to the next gear. Um and so you know, when we look back, um you know when we look back at our last 12 months, the business has grown by 5x. Um but the headcount has stayed the same. Um you know we're, we're, we've had a couple of like very, very close to profitability months, which is really cool to see. We're a 15 person company, you know, but we've, we've kind of relatively stayed the same uh in terms of like the way we work. And I mean obviously we work smarter, but, but it's not like people are working harder you know or overtime or something like that. That's, that's not the goal. Um and so I think the big recipe for success is just being very diligent and being very kind of honest and um, and kind of you know, taking it slow uh when we need to and then stepping on the gas when we also need to. So um I think that's one part.

Um you know, and, and like I think the, the other part is we just are tackling an industry which there isn't a lot of um, there isn't a lot of tech you know competition. Like we're kind of, sometimes I kind of joke around where I'm like "we're kind of in our own little island and we're you know competing against like behemoths. Uh but, but we're kind of you know in our own little island where we have to kind of figure it out, and um have to kind of like dig in and hustle." Um and so I, I think that's been great as well. Because again, like I said you know, even owning 1% of a massive, massive, massive industry is like a pretty large company to begin with. And so we're starting to also see really exciting signs of that, which is um the company's growing, we're generating real revenue and strong revenue. And there's still like more than 99% to go!

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's a huge, huge market. Um I want to go back to hiring a little bit. You talked about your 15 people today. You're a company that was really built during the COVID days and remote, and you've drawn a, you've drawn a, a line in the sand of "the people you hire are going to [be] in the office, they're going to be local at a minimum maybe." What's been your mindset behind that and what have been the pros and the cons in that decision?

Mo El Mahallawy: Yeah, that's a good question. The thing is, insurance is fairly complicated and it's very complicated to build and it's very complicated to compete in. And so what we've kind of realized is a lot of the insurance folks, insurance folks uh, or most insurance folks haven't worked at a tech company, and most tech folks haven't worked at an insurance company. And so how do you kind of bridge that gap? Uh, and how do you transfer information really quickly and have the ability to move really quickly? It's putting people in the same room. Uh, and then putting them close to each other so they could exchange ideas, they could ask questions, they could brainstorm, and so on. Even the things that kind of come up during lunch! When you know we order lunch every day to work, even you know as we kind of eat together during lunch and kind of brainstorm different ideas, the amount of things have actually turned into product um or solutions is much more than I expected. And so I think those are the things that you don't you know... you're trying to solve a really big complicated problem, like put people in the same room and they'll figure it out!

But then even you know outside of that, the, the, the kind of the growth of ideas and the growth of kind of problem solving really happens because you have people in that situation. When they're in the same room, whenever you have a question you could kind of roll over your you know your chair to the other person and ask them that, and vice versa. And so even you know the ability for you know the engineers and the product people and the insurance people to cross-pollinate has been because we're you know in-person. When we did this, this was back in like 2021. People thought we were kind of going backwards. But I think you know the trend has kind of changed now where a lot more companies prefer to have in-person again. Um and you know companies are starting to realize the importance as well as the benefit of, of having people in person. Whether again that's like to share ideas, to build bonds between people, um to build friendships with your coworkers and so on. So um it's really helped us out quite a bit, and I, I, I would say that's one of the big things that like helped us succeed to be honest with you.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's a competitive edge for sure amongst other companies that don't have that quick collaboration where you can get answers solved maybe faster and maybe get into markets quicker. And there's a lot of benefits that companies you know may have realized in the past they want to get back to. But for most companies they're still trying to figure out what's the best choice for them, and it's kind of all over the map. I think it's whatever you decide is the best uh solution for your own company, you just make a decision as the founders and you just go forward. So I think that's great that you've made that decision and you're, you feel great about it.

Um, diversity hiring.

Mo El Mahallawy: It's been a competi- like, it's, it's been actually it's given us an edge! We have candidates that are really, once they hear they're like, "What? You're in person five days a week and you like have lunch and you have snacks and all these things and you know people do hang out you know here and there outside of work?" Like, "Oh my God, I want that because I really miss that. I really miss you know that part in, in my career pre-pandemic." And so it's really given us an edge for sure with, with many candidates that are very much looking for like what we're offering today.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I agree. Uh diversity hiring is top of mind for a lot of companies in Silicon Valley uh prior to COVID and post-COVID. What's your position on diversity hiring and why is it a real critical benefit to companies as they, as they scale in your opinion?

Mo El Mahallawy: I think especially you know looking at our industry, industry, um you know our industry is um... our industry lacks you know when I talk about our industry, insurance uh lacks, lacks diversity. Uh and so I think you know when we look at "what do we want to do with Shepherd?", like let's you know think first principles. "What is it?" We want to be very different. We want to be unique. We want to bring something that's just unseen in the insurance industry. And so designing every part of the company to fit into that mold is like really important to us. Whether that's the brand, the products that we offer, the way we kind of you know show ourselves to people, but even the you know the way we hire. Um and so diversity is core to our DNA. It's not just like "here's an aspiration" or "what we want to be doing", it's part of like what Shepherd is. We want to be very, very unique in every single aspect and facet of the company. Uh and so that's become really important to us very early on. And it's something that we're going to hold true onto for as long as we can, if not the entirety of the company. Um and so like you know the way, the way I look at diversity is like it is, it is, for us it's, it's a must. It's like, it's a very, very important thing to, to us and it's, it's our DNA. So we're going to continue to you know push efforts into that. Um and um and yeah, for people that are listening today...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: They might be engineers, we interact with 100,000 a year, and, and oftentimes they just want to know who are the companies that are emerging, growing, scaling, might be great to work for. In your opinion, as the, one of the founders of the company, what makes it great to work for you and what makes it great to work at Shepherd?

Mo El Mahallawy: Ooh, that's a good question. Um because the first one is very personal. It's like "w- what makes it good to work for..." well I think first, first and foremost I, I actually don't really like to say people work for me, I like to say people work with me. And I actually you know, I, I tease, I tease my, I tease my team when they're like, "Yeah, that's my boss." I'm like "No, I'm not your boss, I work with you." Um and so you know, that, that is actually part of my philosophy. Yeah like I'm the CTO and co-founder of the company, but um I kind of see myself personally as like a platform for seeing people grow. Um like I want you know, the engineers that, and the you know the PMs and the designers that come work at Shepherd, um and who work on my team or who work with me, I want to see myself as a platform to see them grow and achieve their goals.

And so to give you an example, you know, two of my engineers have very early on expressed they want to start companies, they want to be founders one day. And they joined Shepherd because they want to be on the ground floor and they want to learn what it's like to build every part and piece of the company. Um and so my job as a result is to help them get exposed to every part of that. My job is to kind of push them into areas that are not you know, are not inside their comfort zone or are kind of part of an engineering role in general. Because my job is to you know, give them exposure to what it's like to be a founder. So that then you know, when, when they start their own thing they have like priors and those past experiences. And you know they probably are, hopefully have seen like "when we did this or when Mo did that, or when with Shepherd did this, this is how it worked out and or here's how it didn't work out and what I'm going to do differently." Um and so that's my job, is to be a platform to see people succeed.

Um now working for Shepherd is, it's a very exciting time to work at Shepherd. You're going to get exposure to something that touches every part of our lives. Insurance and construction is literally every part of our lives. The buildings that we you know work in uh, or the buildings that we live in, the roads that we drive on, the bridge that we go over, the electricity poles above us and whatever it is, uh it touches every part of our lives. And so getting exposure to that industry and then getting exposure to all the challenging and you know solvable problems that we're going to take on and we're going to try to, to solve, um that's number one.

Number two is like I said, it's, it's a great time to join and see what it's like to build a company. And see good decisions and how they play out. And see bad decisions and how they play out and what do we learn from them and how do we correct them. Um and so being able to take a lot of these experiences and really bring your own piece of the puzzle to shape what Shepherd looks like in the future, um it's a really, really exciting time right now.

And then thirdly like, the company is growing. You know, we actually have a really strong good business, um which sounds funny to say but you know in the tech world there's a lot of "everything". Um and so you know, having, having a company that actually is working, has strong fundamentals, is required, has existed for a while, but we're taking on a very different interesting angle, um I think it's a really you know it's, it's exciting to be part of that journey and to kind of see it through.

Um and then finally, because I know I talk a lot, finally there's a lot of really cool engineering challenges that we have. It's still an industry that you know relies pretty heavily on documents. Um it's still an industry that's fairly complicated when it comes to pricing and terms and modeling and so on and so forth. And so there are some really interesting and challenging engineering problems that need to be solved here um and we're solving today. And I think we're going to set an example for not just like folks in our industry but I think just in general across the tech world. I'll give you a very funny little example. Like we're, we're hosting an event today, it's an AI and insurance event. And there's like 120 people showing up to like you know... so I think there's some really cool challenges you know with, with like when people think about AI even, which is on the forefront. It's like a lot of people come to us and they're like, "So how can I apply AI to insurance?" Because that feels like a natural thing when it comes to modeling, or it comes to documentations, or it comes to you know contracts or whatever it is. So I don't know, I feel like it's an exciting time to be in insurance.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You led me right into the next question around AI. Where we see it uh really being integrated in multiple different industries, insurance seems like just an absolute target for AI from automation of processes. But you still need people in your business. But what are some of the low hanging fruit that you see AI um tackling in, in your sector?

Mo El Mahallawy: There's still a lot of manual work. Um there's still a lot of manual human work that needs to, that could be automated quite a bit through AI. Um and it's not to say that it's going to replace people's jobs, actually no I think it'll make people more efficient and so therefore they could take on more work, um but do it a lot faster. That's one part of it. The second part, and the one that we're really excited and we're investing a lot of time and attention to, is there's a lot of information that lives in documents. Documents are still the you know, preferred form of transfer of information in this industry. And there lives a tremendous amount of information in these documents that can be unlocked if using AI or LLMs to extract that data out of it. So I'll give you an example. Um you know, we, we, we have this like one workflow where um you know carriers will generate this PDF of all the different claims that you've had over however many years. So imagine you're a big contractor, you have you know 10 years worth of claims. That could be like a 400 page document of just like "here is every claim, uh $50, $1,000, uh $500, blah blah blah blah blah." That's a lot of information that you know could be really useful to do something with, but it lives in a document. And so you know, we're using OCR and AI to actually pluck that data out. And what you normally would take an underwriter you know three, four hours to do, it takes us 15 seconds. Um and so that, that's an example of like "okay, what can we do now with that data now that we've unlocked it? Can we share that back? Can we generate charts? Can we do some analytics on it? Can we do something really interesting here?" But more importantly, it's saved [an] underwriter 3, 4 hours of their time that is administrative work that they could otherwise be spending on generating more opportunities or try to understand a deal further beyond just like administrative keyboard work. So that's, that's where I see AI you know making strong paths into insurance. And um I think it's gonna have a huge effect on the industry for sure.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's on the roadmap for the future of Shepherd? AI sounds like it's right in the target zone. What, what else are up-and-coming things that you're excited about?

Mo El Mahallawy: There's three things. Uh first and foremost is we want to dig deeper into construction. So we want to grow vertically, um so continue to offer more products, insurance products within construction. Um vector number two is we want to go horizontally. So take our playbook in construction, and a lot of the insurance products that we offer in construction can then be applied to other industries. So manufacturing, uh agriculture, energy, and ultimately real estate. And so we sell for example general liability or auto liability insurance (auto being vehicle) um for construction. Well guess what, you know agriculture needs that as well. And so does you know energy. And so take that playbook and go horizontally. Um and then finally the third vector is continuing to invest and build those software tools that we give for free. And it just happens to be that a lot of the you know the tools on our roadmap also apply to manufacturing, energy and agriculture and real estate. And so um again just kind of taking that playbook and just applying it to different industries.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great Mo. You're on an amazing journey and I love your story. Not just the story but seeing it actually come to fruition and understanding the growth in front of you. Thanks so much for spending your time with us today. I really enjoyed hearing your story really from the beginning all the way through and where you're at today. If people wanted to find Shepherd, where would they go?

Mo El Mahallawy: Um they can find us on our URL is withshepherd.com. And it's Shepherd like Shep and then herd. Um I, we, we realize that people spell Shepherd with like P-P-A-R-D for example, so it's Shepherd. Um on socials we're @withshepherd as well, you know both on uh Twitter/X and uh if you really want to get fun you could follow us on Instagram, @withshepherd. Um I don't think we have a TikTok yet but we should. Um yeah it's coming soon. Um but yeah, that's the best way to find us is at our website withshepherd.com. Um and then feel free to email me if this is interesting. Um I'm at mo@withshepherd.com as well. Um and you could follow me on Twitter. Um but yeah, that's the best way to find us.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well Mo, thanks so much for joining and thanks to all of our listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose your time to spend with us today. I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, signing off for now but can't wait to connect with you all again soon on the next episode. Until then, take care.  

Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. We can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.  

This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.  

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