Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast born in Silicon Valley where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges and lessons learned. We hope you 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 David McFarland, the founder and CEO of Coterie Insurance. David, welcome to the show.
David McFarland: Thanks Jake.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, a little bit about David. He is not just the leader of the company. It's an insurtech company focused on bringing speed, simplicity, and service to the SMB insurance space. David is a fellow in the Casualty Actuarial Society and has an extensive background in creating and managing insurance programs. David, before we dive in here, give us a little perspective. Where are you calling in from?
David McFarland: Yeah, I'm calling in from Cincinnati, Ohio. Uh the Midwest for some reason has a, has a... it's a great breeding ground for insurance companies and insurance folks. Not sure if that is because insurance translates to farming or farming translates to insurance, but for some reason we pop out of the ground here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Are you originally from there?
David McFarland: No. No, unfortunately. I, I, I probably shouldn't say unfortunately. Uh I, I, I was born and raised in South Florida. Uh, so I'm trying to shed the Florida Man moniker. Um, but you know, it's uh, it's one that's sticky.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I hear you. Yeah. From a great place, and Cincinnati's got some good sports teams going on there for years and um excited to see what happens there with some of their, their teams. But um thanks for joining here. Um I guess you know we're going to talk about you and your company. Um before we talk about your company, give us a little background of yourself. Were you entrepreneurial from the perspective as a young kid having paper routes, lemonade stands, selling things to your friends? Kind of give us a little bit background of yourself first.
David McFarland: Yeah, I don't know. I, I think I didn't really think I was that much different than anybody else. I, I think my, I, I'm the product of a or at least the progeny of a uh like playwright, opera singer, musician, and a businessman. So, uh my dad's a businessman. My mom is like a true artist. And when they got together uh I, I, I popped out. And I've always had this kind of balance between you know having some type of business acumen and quantitative approach along with a desire to be very creative. And I, I think that's just happens to be very conducive to being an entrepreneur. My mom is pretty entrepreneurial. She always sees things in a fairly different way. Not the most logical way. She will admit that. But, but different enough to where it can inspire some type of change. I, I think my dad's healthy dose of quantitative analysis has really helped me have a little bit more of a you know business logic approach to things, uh which counterbalances the creativity. And as a kid you could see that in a variety of things. I, I, I, you know, I didn't start a business when I was five years old but, you know, doing various things here and there to be creative and solve new problems has always been a key part of my life.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's kind of from a educational perspective? What, what did you study? What uh, what did you really master when you were going through college and getting degrees?
David McFarland: From a pure passion standpoint, I really enjoyed history and I was actually a history major for a while. I love learning about other people, civilizations, just various problems and how people have overcome them. However, going back to kind of this, this balance between art and math, I then found mathematics when I was pretty late in my college career. And just the, the ability to solve problems and employ my quantitative abilities was, was just a delight. I couldn't get enough of it. It was like, it was like playing with Legos. Like you, you just had like, there was this structure and you could build and you can create and you could, you could solve problems. And I, I really enjoyed particularly pure mathematics, not just because pure mathematics was so much more creative than just like rote memorization of formulas and application. You really had to think outside the box to solve some of these problems. Formal logic, abstract algebra, those types of things were really interesting to me. So, I, I, I got very heavy and, and, and majored in, in that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, we're going to talk about how that ties into your current company. I know you had uh experience at another startup that you were part of early stage, but this is really the first one you founded and have built. Um you've raised over 70 million, 75 million, something of that nature, 140 plus employees. So, real business, real operation. Um talk, talk to us about sort of the, the inspiration behind what you built and what problem is it solving today?
David McFarland: Yeah. When I... So, once I kind of figured out that math was really where my, my skill set was at, uh I became an actuary. And if, if you don't know much about actuaries, actuaries basically quantify the transfer of risk. That's probably the most succinct way I can describe it. And so when you, when you look at risk, right, you're looking at your home, right? There's risk that like a hurricane comes through and just wipes it out. So you buy home insurance and what that does is it transfers the risk. You know, it's not going to stop the hurricane, but it's at least going to transfer some of the financial risk associated with it so that, you know, you can trade this like massive fall in your income or, you know, your hit to, to your, to your, to your um uh assets uh by the insurance company paying you, right? They give you money in case something bad happens.
So actuaries quantify what that risk transfer is. So how much you pay in premium. And I started off more so in the commercial space uh with workers comp. And I saw this massive underserved market. Like 30 million small businesses who no one wanted to touch, and they had good loss ratios. I mean like they, they were good businesses, they, they wanted to write them but no one could touch them from an expense ratio standpoint. In other words, it was just, it was too costly to, to manage these PDFs and, and the small businesses that would come in. And so what would happen is the agent and broker didn't want to touch it because every time they got on the call that, you know, they're, they're making only like 75 bucks and they're spending hours of work to get these done. And then the, the insurance companies didn't want them because they're not making anything because the premium is so small.
And so what I, what we did was, over the years I looked at this and I, I said "I think this is a problem that can be solved with data and technology." Most insurance companies treat the micro and small business space as one that uh just follows the same path as all the other businesses. And I was like, "If we carve this out and really build out data and technology to particularly focus on this segment, we can really unlock something that's heavily neglected." 30 million small businesses, half of them aren't even getting the insurance they need or are completely uninsured. And so when we look at that massive TAM... And so really built uh, built out a thesis fairly early on in my actuarial career and then went from job to job really figuring out how can I start this insurance company. And uh ended up helping start another insurance company, learning how to do that previously uh and then started Coterie in 2018 really focusing on speed, simplicity and service for the small commercial space.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Amazing. It's something that we as, as business owners, we need. It's mandated. Uh, ironically, uh, insurance companies and the bigger carriers actually are leaving certain states. Like, for example, I live in California and I, you know, [was] having a conversation with my broker and he's like, "Hey, by the way, your insurance is actually going to be leaving at the end of the year, so we, we got to find another insurance policy for you." And, you know, that's just crazy to me. But, at the end of the day, there's reasons for it. Uh I think that the system is broken in multiple ways. Um from your perspective, what do you do different that say other insurance companies do that makes it simpler, faster, easier?
David McFarland: Yeah, we, we do three things particularly well. Uh the first is we make it super easy for the small business or the agent broker to get a policy with us. That, that, that's going to unlock the floodgates, right? If you just make it easier for the agent broker to actually bind these policies, it's like, "Okay, we're, we're in. We're in." And we do that by speed and simplicity really. Like, we make it very simple to enter in the information. We just ask for business name and address. If you don't know your business name and address, well, that, that's a problem. You probably shouldn't have a small business. Um, and then, uh, we, we take care of the rest. We go out and we get 3,000 pieces of data on your business. We're pulling everything. Uh making sure that's a risk that we actually want to underwrite. If it is, we say, "Great. Here's a price." That's it. It's really that simple.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, the experience that I have gone through and many other business owners have gone through is, you know, they ask for a ton of, ton of data, uh lots of applications. You have to carve out a portion of your morning, afternoon, or evening to do it. You don't want to do it. Then once you do it, then you want a quick response. And usually, you know, three to five to seven days later, you're going to get a couple options that look pretty challenging to understand, and you're not sure if your broker is working with you or against you. And ultimately, you're signing up for something you need, but you don't necessarily understand the true value, what it's giving you. And you know, it's expensive. And take that headache away and sign me up and sign a lot of companies up. Uh, so that's, that's incredible. So you've created a, a different way of getting the insurance and the delivery of it. How long does it really take from, you know, applying to, to getting it? And um, is there a cost benefit too?
David McFarland: Yeah. The, the amount of time it takes from like submitting, so business name and address, like starting the, the application process to getting to a true bindable quote, right? So many people like that, like the teaser quotes. No, no, like true bindable quote. And we actually provide uh recommendations with like, like, "Hey, you should probably get this endorsement. You know, you're a restaurant, right? You need to have this and this and this." So, we do all that using our ML behind the scenes. So the, the median, I'll give you the median submission time uh from submission to bindable quote is less than a minute.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Whoa. That's crazy.
David McFarland: That, and that's not uh someone flying through. That means of all of our universe of people doing this, the median time it takes someone to do all of that is 57 seconds. You can do it in 15 seconds. Like not 10 seconds. It's, it's very quick. Um but you know just looking at the universe of people who are actually going through it right, 50% of them get it done in less than a minute.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's amazing.
David McFarland: Now you've got, and we have, we have no under-, we do not kick out and do that underwriting kick out, supplemental applications. It's basically like we either going to write it or we're not going to write it. And we write a pretty, pretty good chunk of the universe.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Sounds exciting. God. Um it's just the headache and the time suck. That's terrible.
David McFarland: You know, this, this is the problem. This is the problem we, we set out to solve.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yes. Now, is it a technology platform? Do I go to a website, log in, and put my data in and I get a response, or do I call you and talk to somebody first, and then I get a response in, in a minute?
David McFarland: You can, you can really do it any way you want. You can call us and we can help you uh get a policy. You can go on to our website and, you know, go, go that uh, go that way. We, we, we recommend, we heavily recommend go to an agent that you trust. We work through a number of different agents and brokers. Uh going to an agent or broker really it's going to make sure you get the coverage you want. You're going to feel well represented. Buying in- commercial insurance can be sometimes a little scary and just having someone uh to hold your hand through it can be a, can be a good idea. This is, this is your nest egg. You care a lot about it so it, it doesn't hurt. Um, and yeah, some people think like they're getting, if they're getting a worse deal or not if they go with an agent. They're not. It's, it's the same, same price.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Got it. That's cool. So, is the technology for the agent, brokers, as well as for the end user?
David McFarland: Yeah. There, there's a, there's a few components to our technology. Uh so one is the agents and brokers as well as an end user is using it to get the policy. But it's, it's not just speed and simplicity, it's also service. So even after you've bound the policy, we help out our customers with very simple self-service interactions, right? Let's say you need a certificate of insurance for some reason. We have, we have a very simple process for doing that. Instead of having to call up and do all this stuff, we basically enable all that submission to, to happen like fairly instantaneously where we're able to return these certificates of insurance quickly. Uh updates to billing, payments, all of that. So there's a whole service side on the back end that's fueled by our technology as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Makes sense. When you talk about um you know 30 million small businesses, what's worked for you in terms of go to market? And there's a lot of companies out there on the insurance side. I mean, I get pinged every day and see ads every other minute uh about insurances and you know what the coverage is and this and that. I ultimately, I want to build a trusting relationship uh because I want to know that someone's got my back if I'm going to you know, go down the tubes in whatever format that happens. Um but how do you get your name... What's worked for you from a marketing perspective?
David McFarland: We, we have focused solely on partnership based distribution. That is working with agents, brokers, uh some non-traditional as well to help the small businesses out there get the insurance they need. We don't do any uh you know like pay-per-click uh that SEO type advertising. We, we really want to make the lives of agents and brokers extremely easy because that's going to help us reach the most small businesses. Like 93%, 94% of small businesses still work with an agent and broker to get the insurance they need. So in order for us to have the most impact, we think, "Hey, let's, let's put it in the hands of agents and brokers to help the 94% of the small businesses that are out there." Now, we still enable small businesses to come to us if they want to, but we always encourage them to go to agents and brokers.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I like that strategy. A channel strategy is always helpful. You look at a lot of the big companies, in fact, almost every big enterprise company that we've talked to has a channel strategy and it's 20, 30, 40% sometimes of the business. Um maybe 100, 100% sometimes. So, it's uh it's a cost-effective way of going about it. Um you've got 140 people. What's the majority of the work being done with your employees today?
David McFarland: It's probably more uh front lines. So, our teams on, you know, operations stuff like uh taking calls from customers, helping agents and brokers. Th- those types of team members probably make up not, not more than 50% but the largest block of employees. Next would be uh would be technology. Now technology is tough because you have product managers, you have data, you have software engineers. Um so all of those are... if you put, probably put all of those technology would probably actually, it is number one. Uh so I'd say technology number one if you include you know data, product, engineering, design, all of that in one. And then you would have the, the people who are on the front lines talking to our customers and uh agents and partners.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, for all practical purposes, it's a technology company from, from what you're sharing. And obviously there's the data and the service behind it as well, and it's an insurance focused company. But um what was your learning curve of building a really an engineering company for a lot of ways?
David McFarland: Got it. One of the things that we really strive to do is um implement insurance and an understanding of insurance in everything that we're doing. Uh I mean this is at the heart of it. You know, we, we've built a really strong insurance entity uh that is fueled by technology. And a lot of times people want to build an insurance company that like has some technology, you know, somewhat helping it along a little bit. Uh we, we marry those two, I think, exceptionally well, the insurance and the technology portion. Um my background is, you know, from the insurance space. I'm, I'm a fellow in the Casualty Actuarial Society. That is about as nerdy insurance as you can get. And uh we, we have extremely strong insurance professionals throughout the organization. A lot of the people on our data team are, are you know actuaries who have actuarial backgrounds. We don't actually have anyone at the company with a title actuary, but we have people who have strong actuarial experience doing various jobs throughout the company. And that kind of insurance-fueled technology has allowed us to do some really remarkable things and not fall prey to some of the problems that uh are, are more common across startups in the insurance space.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. Well, you've got a good team in place. It sounds like you're executing well. Um talk about performance. We talked briefly about this before the podcast about how you look at your teams and you know if it can't be measured, it can't be improved. Talk us through that a little bit of what's your philosophy around you know managing teams and team performance and improvement of that? And specifically you mentioned gravity which I think was really interesting.
David McFarland: Yeah, there's you know we, we measure performance uh ac- across the company. We're, we're a remote company. And I think if, if you're going to be a remote company then you, you have to be pretty uh transparent around what, what we're doing as a team and there, there's various ways to, to measure performance. Uh I won't get into the specifics of those, but I, we'll highlight, high- highlight at least some, some macro things that, that we've done that we think have, have helped. Uh what you just mentioned, Jake, the whole, the whole idea of gravity. Like there are, there are natural laws, physical laws that enable or disable us from doing certain things, right? Like it'd be really neat if I could just levitate from my seat and start flying in the air, but gravity doesn't allow that. Um and but instead of just giving up and you know settling for a life on the ground, we have figured out how to use gravity to get airborne, right? An airplane is made in a specific way that utilizes gravity to you know get enough lift so that you can go, go up in the air.
And that's really neat. Like, "okay what does that have to do with performance?" Well, in similar ways, there are performative laws, uh, human sociological laws in a way that at least initially seem to limit our ability to perform. Um, but if harnessed in the correct way, we can actually create high performing cultures. An example is Price's Law. So for those who don't know, Price's Law says that the output of a unit or at least 50% of the output of a group is, is going to be attributable to the, to the square root of that group. So for example, if you have nine people who are responsible for your sales, well three of those people are going to be producing 50% of your sales. And this works with Pareto. Everyone hears Pareto, right? That 80/20 rule, right? Well, Price's Law. And this is, this is a law. This is actually not just true for humans. This is true for like tomato plants and other things like that. It's found in nature.
Um what, what we see is, is at a small scale, this makes a lot of sense, right? Four people, well, two people are responsible for half the output. Well, duh. That, that, that one's obvious, right?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
David McFarland: So, everyone's getting, you know, basically their 25% share. As we go nine, it's three people, right? And you're like, "Oh, well, that means three people are doing 50% of the work and six people are doing the other 50%, the other 50% of the work." Well, let's go to a bigger number. Let's go to 100, right? So, that means 10 people are doing 50% of the work and 90 people are doing the other 50%. You're like, "what, what are these 90 people doing?" And you look at this and you say, "We're hopeless. What are we going to do? We're going to be a thousand person company and like a few people are going to be doing the job." And so, you know, instead of getting demoralized and saying "gravity's holding us down, we'll never be able to get to the sky," uh, we say, "okay, how can we make this work for us?"
And I'll shout out, you know, our ops team. What they did is instead of just having a group of people handling all customer interactions, we separated them into small pods of about five to six people. And we don't want them to be bigger than five to six people so that we can get the most out of Price's Law. And we say, you know, "this team is responsible for text-based interactions. This team is responsible for, for let's say phone calls. This team is responsible for uh agency based. This team is responsible for you let's say first notice of loss on claims." And when we have specialized units who are measured as that unit, we saw performance change overnight. All we had to do was put people in smaller groups, measure those groups, give them a focused responsibility and performance increased. You got to make it, you know, make it transparent, but it's, it's fascinating.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's insane. Yeah. Um there's a lot of different tools that have come out. And you know, AI is you know coming into every sector of every business it seems like. And I know there's a lot of better, different ways to track activity and people and performance. And um but to, then to visually see the improvements too is the other part of it. So it's one thing to actually carve out a different approach, but then how do you actually see that approach and measure it and understand if it's actually working? So to me that sounds fascinating. Um and, and we are always excited to hear about ways that our guests can help others learn and try and, and strategize. So thanks for sharing that. As a company, um you know, we're just starting out first month into 2024. What are you excited about? What are you seeing that is on the road map that you know keeps you up at night but also gets you up in the morning?
David McFarland: We are continuing to build out more and more efficiencies for our agency base and our broker, our broker base. So basically the, the agency brokers who, who sell our policies uh we love to make their lives easier and just provide more self-servicing things, more, more options uh also more class appetite for them. So that means we'll go, we'll, we'll write more businesses. Uh we really want to aim to be just an extremely convenient space for them to go to get this off their desk. They... this is no offense to small businesses, but these agents and brokers are not making much money writing your policies. And having a system, an ML-infused system that's going to you know, with business name and address gives them "hey, these are the coverages that they need. Here's a good price, get it done in less than a minute," right? Like that helps them so much to, to make you the small business owner feel like, "hey, that this agent actually understands" and uh make sure that you are well taken care of on the servicing side. So, we really try and just bring that, that level of efficiency and speed to the new business side, but also on that back end, that day two, day three stuff, make it a delightful experience on the servicing side, so everyone's taken care of. And we're just doing more and more of that this year.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's the long-term vision of the company? Where do you see this going? And do you have ideas of going public? Do you have ideas of acquiring companies, being acquired?
David McFarland: You never know. It's we, we've been saying this from the beginning. We are creating a great company. And the focus is not on a particular exit strategy. It's... I mean granted we have venture capitalist investors, you know, all that kind of stuff, but we, we firmly believe that if we focus on doing the right things and bringing value to our customers, our policy holders, our agents, our brokers, then we'll create a valuable company. And the IPO, the acquisitions, whatever it is will take care of itself. And thankfully we have a group of investors who are aligned behind that and they, they've been extremely supportive of what we've been, what we've been focused [on].
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's really cool. Well, let's switch gears here. We're going to talk a little bit more about you. Uh just three simple questions. Uh as you're building this company, continuing to innovate. What do you do to stay positive when there's ups and downs of a roller coaster ride in a startup?
David McFarland: There are ups and downs every day, as I'm sure you know. You know, something my dad said to me when I was a kid really helps. And it, it's, it's more attributable to people, but then you can, you can extend it to circumstances as well. I, I was a large kid. I'm a large person. I'm like 6'5". And when you're, when you're a tall kid and you're somewhat nice, uh bigger kids really like to pick on you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh wow.
David McFarland: Because you're, you're, you're like three years younger but you're the same size. So like big guys will pick on you. And uh you know sometimes I you know, I wouldn't want to go outside and play because you know this kind of stuff. And my dad would say, "You're going to let these guys control you. You're going to let this stuff control you. And like you know, you're going to be a prisoner in your own home." And at a young age after hearing that you know probably a hundred times I said, "You know I, I really don't want other people to control me. You know I don't want... it's, it's not, it's not a world you want to live in, right? You don't want to just be in a prison your whole life." And the same can be said for circumstances, right? If, if you're swayed by every little circumstance that happens or big circumstance that happens, it's like what, what kind of life is that sometimes?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
David McFarland: I mean, bad things are going to happen, but ultimately how you react to them, that, that's on you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
David McFarland: And so it's like whatever the circumstance that's going on, you can take a breath, realize it's going to be okay right now. No one's shooting bullets at me. And today sometimes that happens. Uh but, but you know, you take a breath, you realize, you know, hey, we're going to get through this. And you can think much more clearly. When you stress out, when you freak out, when you get worried, your brain shuts down. No one's smart when they're being stressed out and fearful, right? As, as uh you know, from Dune, right? Fear is the mind killer.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
David McFarland: And you just got to breathe, let the fear pass, and keep going.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I love that. There's a state of mind too that you can actually change the state of mind and wherever your focus is. You know, energy follows. So, if you're going to focus on the issue, you're going to make that issue bigger. But if you can change your mind, you actually can physically and mentally change your state and all of a sudden things dissipate. And that's, that's a practice, that's something that a lot of leaders that we've talked to do. And, and it helps them throughout their day, week, month, year. Um that's good. From your perspective, um what advice have you gotten from your investors, from other founders, from other leaders that you felt was priceless that you could share with the listeners that could be helpful?
David McFarland: The, the one that I use every day is: make decisions that are first order negative, second order positive. And what the... you know, there's, there's tons of examples of this, right? Like uh exercising, right? You work out, right? It's painful. You have to wake up and go to the gym and, you know, lift heavy weights. You... and it's hard initially, but you benefit long term, right? Your body stays healthy, right? You can actually, you know, do a squat when you're 65 years old. Uh, saving for retirement, right? Like you, you put away a little bit of money that you can't spend right now, but you don't have to eat cat food when you're 80, right? Like there's, there's benefits to this. Uh, and there's a lot of benefits in business. You know, some people say, "I don't want to have that conversation with that employee. I don't, I don't want to." Yeah, it's, it's easier to ignore. It's easier to ignore it. It absolutely is. But it's, it's first order negative. I'm sorry. It's first order positive but second order very negative. We all see what happens when we don't have that hard conversation.
So do the hard thing first. Do the first order negative thing and you will reap benefits long term. However, if you spend your life, you know, doing first order positive things, the easy thing first. Well, then the second order, I promise it's not going to be very nice. I've never heard anyone say, "I'm really glad that I just like pushed off that conversation for a few years. It all really worked itself out."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, the, it's funny you say that because we have a lot of founders say that you know, one of the advice and the old adage is you know, "hire slow, fire fast." And that's something that we all know is the right thing to do. And it's also the one thing that almost nobody does initially. You know, it's, it's a human experience. It's a personality. It's somebody that you know, that the pain of letting them know is far more difficult than actually doing nothing. And um...
David McFarland: Yes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So this, that sounds like that plays right into the, what you're talking about, which is "God, you know, sometimes you need that little push behind you too and someone to say 'yeah, it's time for you to step up and take action, otherwise we have a real problem.'" So um really cool to hear that one. Last one for you is uh you know where do you go to get inspired, to think big, to, to create?
David McFarland: I read. I love to read. I... and I would say probably the most inspiring books are non-fiction. However, I think you need a healthy dose of fiction as well. I, I, I do both. I'm a big sci-fi reader. I, I don't know why, but I really like sci-fi and that, that I feel like helps me absorb non-fiction a little bit better, too. So, and when I, when I say non-fiction, I typically don't read... I have no issue with self-help books or anything like that, but I'm, I'm typically reading like Michael Lewis type stuff or, you know, Chernow, like biographies. Um, I, I really enjoy those types of books. Uh, especially books on broader groups who have, you know, made uh, has either done something very stupid or had very successful, you know, outcomes. I just read one on LTC, on Long-Term Capital Management and that whole like giant flop. I think it was called uh When Genius Failed. That was... that's an excellent book about a group of very intelligent people who ended up screwing up royally and that happened in like the late 90s. And so those types of books help me one, get inspired. Like I see some good ideas, but I also see what not to do, which is arguably just as valuable. And so, uh, grabbing on to those types of books and devouring them is a, is an area that I particularly find a lot of inspiration in.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Do you take ideas from those that you can implement into your own strategy and company, or is it more just kind of get you away from the day-to-day and you come up with at some point inspirational ideas out of that?
David McFarland: I think it's the latter where I, I never, I, I don't think I've ever pulled an idea directly from a book. But I can definitely tell my brain is working in maybe a particular way that's more aligned with how the people are in the book. So it, it's almost like um I'm playing a different game in my head which helps me see different ways to use strategies in, in my work life. So if you, you know, when you play various games you learn different types of things. So that picking up on these different types of things, different ways to, to implement strategies, says, "Oh, okay, I can now use this, this allegorically to my business."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. I know that there's a huge value to reading and listening to books. I listen a lot to books when I hike and whatnot. And one I'm listening to right now, it's fascinating, is the, is the story of Sam Walton of Walmart. And uh uh it's not one that I would have thought of because I'm like a non-fiction guy. I like to learn about other people's life stories. You know, if you can learn in an hour what took someone 50 years to go through and you can learn from that and there's some value there. Sam Walton's story was amazing. Um, and he's telling it when he's dying of cancer. So, it's like okay, he's through his life, they've already built the company. He passes away in '92 and it's his story and his words and I think he actually narrates it too of what it really was like to build what they built and how they did it. And it's uh it's fascinating because it, it's such a story that we all know about how big Walmart is. But when you really learn about all the little steps it took to build it, uh it's uh, I'm inspired and, and there's actually, to be quite frank, some of the ideas that he started with and changed and marketed the company, like we're actually using some of that too and it's still really works. So anyway, I, I need to pick it up. What's it called? It's uh, I'll send it to you um and I'll add it in the description here on the, in this episode. But I think it's uh Sam Walton's Story or Journey. Yeah, it's, it's fascinating.
David McFarland: U- I've read a little bit about Sam Walton and what you know, obviously what he started in Arkansas and how it...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, just it's amazing the growth that it had in such a short period of time. I mean that, that's... I know people think like all those years, but to grow from you know, the little store that he had to what Walmart is even in 1992, that, that's incredible. Yeah, it's fascinating. Um but anyway really appreciate uh you coming on here David and spending your time here with us and sharing your story and to all the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me, so thank you for that. Uh, my name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, host of the show. Signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, David, you and the listeners. Take care.
David McFarland: Thanks, Jake.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that are joining 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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