#183: Laura Bennett & Alex Krooglik (Embrace Pet Insurance) — The Story of A Cleveland Unicorn

--AI Generated Transcript --

Laura Bennett [00:00:00]:
I just think that our tenacity and creativity in what we had, we couldn't have gobs of money to go out and spend. We didn't have gobs of money just to throw at paid search, which makes no sense because the cost of acquisition is more than the lifetime value of a pet, you know, that kind of stuff. We have to be creative and create more sustainable approaches, and that does take longer. But when I look at our results and look at what Embrace has become, it's a really solid company based on a really solid base, and that isn't rocked so easily by challenges. So I feel very proud of that, of what we've built

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:39]:
Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Laura Bennett and Alex Krugeland, cofounders of Embrace Pet Insurance, which was sold in 2023 for one $500,000,000 to JAB Holding Company. The duo founded Embrace Pet Insurance after graduating from Penn's Wharton School of Business in 2003 and moving to Cleveland, where they built it and grew this e commerce specialist insurance company selling pet insurance directly to pet owners from their first policy sold in October 2006 to insuring over 500,000 pets across the country and handling over 4,600,000 claims to date with more than 1,000,000 in 2023 alone. Having both stepped away from their business a few years prior, this conversation is a truly reflective one. We cover the crucible moments for the company, effectively creating a new market category and overcoming the complex regulations of pet insurance, the evolution of their relationship as co founders, the sheer tenacity, persistence, determination, and consistency required of entrepreneurship, earned lessons on founder equity and on company ownership, becoming one of Jumpstart's first investments here in Cleveland, the significance of immigrants in entrepreneurship in the US, and a whole lot more.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:17]:
I believe Laura and Alex's story is one that should be familiar to far more in Cleveland than it may be, and I'm very excited to share it with you today. So please enjoy this awesome conversation after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Boulder College of Business, widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the region. As we've heard time and time again from entrepreneurs here on Lay of the Land, many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University, success success in this ever changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technologies and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen, all qualities nurtured through the Buhler College of Business. With 4 different MBA programs of study spanning professional, online, hybrid, and 1 year flexible, the Buhler College of Business provides flexible timelines in various class structures for each MBA track, including online, in person, hybrid, and asynchronous. All to offer the most effective options for you including the ability to participate in an elective international study tour providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture. The career impact of a bowler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University's bowler MBA programs, please go to business dotjcu.edu.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:49]:
The Buller College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a college of business can have. I'm always thinking about where the the best place to start these is. And I was thinking that if I were to tell a random Clevelander, even one who may listen to this podcast and have their own entrepreneurial proclivities, that there was an insurance technology organization handling many millions of claims, covering 100 of thousands of lives that was acquired in the early 2000 twenties in a deal estimated to be $1,500,000,000. I am not sure that Embrace Pet Insurance would be top of mind for folks. And, you know, maybe that's because people think about human insurance and not pet insurance. But to me, your collective story is one of these incredible local stories that I am very excited for for many more to learn about and to hear. So thank you for coming on to share it.

Laura Bennett [00:04:49]:
It's good to share this, which has been a long time coming.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:53]:
Absolutely. So I'd love to start with how the 2 of you, you know, with origins in completely different places internationally around the world, respectively, find yourselves as cofounders in Cleveland.

Laura Bennett [00:05:06]:
Well, well, so Alex and I, we were looking sort of considering who was gonna say what. So I I've been assigned the founder's story. Each of us have our own stories, but, we both met at business school and we had friends whose cat got sick. They spent over $5,000 on their cat back in 2,001 at the veterinary hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. It's a very expensive place. And they said, we should have had pet insurance because they came from the United Kingdom. And back then, it was, over 12% cats and dogs insured. So it was actually fairly common kind of insurance, and they just hadn't got around to it.

Laura Bennett [00:05:49]:
They looked at what was available in the US, sort of kind of like would've, should've, could've got, and it was terrible. It was it just wasn't adequate, and it wouldn't have helped them in their case. And so they came to do entrepreneurship. They said, let's see if this is a good idea for a business plan, and started that. Now I was the only one in insurance in the class of 760 people. We went to Wharton. We basically 4 of us put together this business plan, and it was very interesting to to look at it. In some ways, it was a bit of a joke.

Laura Bennett [00:06:24]:
You know, I mean, like, you know, that's it it seems so silly, pet insurance. Right? But then I realized it was real for me. It was like a real thing, like, that had real consequences. And, I knew lots of pet owners. My mom was a vet tech. I could understand why people would want this. Yeah. And and adding in this actuarial that's my background.

Laura Bennett [00:06:44]:
Actuarial sort of focus on it designing product. So that's where I came from. And Alex can sort of, you know, he could sort of say, but, you know, we both were there looking for something different in there. And it just happened that this turned out to be the same. At the end of it, we won the business plan competition. Split ways as a team of 4 into 2 teams of 2, and moved on. And we cofounded Embrace Pet Insurance. And so that's sort of how we ended up doing that.

Laura Bennett [00:07:12]:
It was sort of a strange sort of thing. And I think, for me personally, Alex was a very perfect partner in that we we are very different people, have different we have complementary skills and knowledge and but we both wanted both saw the same vision and the same future, so we were both running together in the same way. So we I think we brought a lot together to create a good start, and we both worked our asses off. That was just good to have in a partner. And and we our families became, like, well, family, literally. Yeah. We both had young children. We both had babies at that time.

Laura Bennett [00:07:53]:
So we had much much of much fun and mutual admiration together, I think.

Alex Krooglik [00:07:59]:
Totally agree. Everything Laura said is a lot of times too.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:03]:
What I what I was going to ask is I I'd love to understand what transpired over the project at business school that allowed you to change your perspective from, you know, this is something that maybe is more of a joke to taking it seriously, to both actually commit yourselves to building a company together.

Alex Krooglik [00:08:23]:
So I thought it was an interesting idea and, certainly, a great lens through which to take a bunch of classes at business school, right, to work on something meaty and fun and different. But I didn't have an insurance background, although I did have a an analytical background being an engineer. So I found it kinda interesting. And the journey towards it, one of the professors at Wharton said, you know, you you should, you know, validate your idea. Go do some marketing. So I go, alright. So this is back in the very, very early days of of Google paid search. We rustled up, off the top of my head, something in the vicinity of 2 1,000, 25 100 pet owners to take a very comprehensive survey on their pets, pet health, their attitudes to paying for veterinary care.

Alex Krooglik [00:09:11]:
And there were a handful of folks that also had pet insurance at the time, either had it or had had it. And they were folded into the mix as well. We did this this big, big study, which was the basis of one of the courses we took. And I was on the I wouldn't say I was on the fence. I was I was looking for validation of this idea, right, because because there was just nothing out there. There there was no good information source or person who's gonna tell you whether this was or was not a good idea. And so we sort of let our customers or potential future customers, if you wanna think of it in that way, help guide our decision. So the results of the survey were, kind of, eye opening.

Alex Krooglik [00:09:52]:
A lot of people, we learned a whole bunch of things. People really love their pets. This is true 20 years ago, and it's even true today. Nothing has changed, not really. They loved their pets. They did struggle to pay for veterinary care, and they did struggle with unexpected veterinary bills. And they weren't big fans of the products, the very few that existed at that time, you know, in the early 2000. So the culmination of this this marketing project was a sort of about as good as you're gonna get in telling you that what you're doing is the right thing.

Alex Krooglik [00:10:24]:
Of course, I wish we we had these numbers somewhere. Maybe Laura in her office has one of our original business plans, right? You've got your usual hockey stick of, you know, here's where we think

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:34]:
Up until the right.

Alex Krooglik [00:10:35]:
And I think up until the right, we have a very steep and increasing pace. And, you know, the funny thing is we weren't wrong. The timescale was not what we expected. But we saw early the green shoots in this market, I think, when we were looking at pet insurance in the early 2000. To be honest, Hillary, I think it was 80, maybe a 100,000,000 in premium, totally, totally, entire United States market. And, today, it's approaching 4,000,000. So it's grown tremendously over the last 20 plus years. And I'd like to think that that that survey and talking directly to these pet owners, we went to Yahoo Groups back when that was the thing.

Alex Krooglik [00:11:16]:
We went to the Saint Bernard Group and to this group and to that group, and we would just barge right in and be like, Hey, we're doing this survey with Penn students. We'd love to hear more about your thoughts on pet health and, you know, veterinary care and things like that. And they would, you know, send us out. We got thousands of responses, which was absolutely mind blowing. But, yeah, that was the backbone of sort of the, the reason why this made sense, right? We're like, and these are real people who would spend real money on this product. Like, we've got to do this.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:42]:
So so when I think about early mid 2000, I feel like pets.com kind of comes to mind as perennially the poster child of, you know, the failed experiments of the dotcom bubble. And, you know, layer on top of that, you know, insurance technology, in my understanding, certainly had not been a sexy investment thesis, you know, until much more recently, you know, with companies like Root or Lemonade, you know, well after you had started Embrace. And so I'm I'm specifically curious about what the reception was having, you know, identified a very compelling idea at the time to what combining, you know, both of those areas of pets and insurance was received by people generally.

Laura Bennett [00:12:25]:
Oh my god. That was, yes. Very difficult. No. There was no such thing as InsurTech. No one was investing in insurance at all. Like, just it just was considered a dead end. No returns.

Laura Bennett [00:12:40]:
And no one was investing in pets at all. Like, that was just a joke. And we were in the Midwest, and we were you know, I was the CEO, so listing me as the as the as the CEO, actually a woman. These are all very, very big challenges. And as Alex was saying to me today, you know, we we heard people say this. I pitched he said I was doing the fundraising and pitched the the idea and people I heard it multiple times. Alex heard it multiple times. Why would you buy this? Wouldn't you just shoot your dog? And then I'm like, well, I know.

Laura Bennett [00:13:17]:
Like, exactly. It was so strange to me that VCs couldn't think beyond what they personally would do, not the rest of the world out there. And I suppose I sometimes still see that, but most have learned better. But it was just trying to explain, like, oh, and what would your wife and children say about that? And have you ever had this happen to you? And did you actually ever spend tens of 1,000 of dollars on your vet bills because they begged you? And you just sort of had to dig into it. So it was just a lot of persistence. You know? So so, you know, moving we sort of accidentally moved to Cleveland because my husband at the time ended up getting a job at Progressive. He wasn't an insurance person. He ended up moving into the Treasury Group.

Laura Bennett [00:14:07]:
And so since this is where we came, and and we were one of the very first in the very first tranche of companies for Jumpstart. So that's that's where we got our initial start. And I like to think it's partly because the lead investor was Linane Griese, a woman who also could understand and was also realizing not only is this just pets and insurance and all that, it's technology. Esurance really only started around, I think, 2002, but we always talked to Alex about because I sort of took insurance lead, if you like. And I said, no matter what, we cannot have any paper. No paper. We're gonna go paperless. So Alex is like, okay.

Laura Bennett [00:14:52]:
And so, you know, everything was designed. Alex took marketing and technology. I was sort of a lot of that. We did strategy together. I did fundraising. I did some of the operational elements and and, of course, the actuarial and insurance items. And, between us, you know, that's we we pulled this together. And in some ways, I think it was better that neither of us knew how awful it was it was how hard it would be because of just the fact that it's insurance, and insurance is incredibly difficult to innovate.

Laura Bennett [00:15:24]:
And and, just the way it's regulated state by state. Yeah. So you have 50 plus jurisdictions to worry about. And it's not really it's it's not really meant for innovation. And so even today, that's the roofs, lemonades, and thorns of the world have realized you can't just come in and say, well, innovate our way out of the inefficiencies.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:44]:
Right.

Laura Bennett [00:15:45]:
They've done a great job in many ways, but, a lot of it's still all the same and that they they follow their findings.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:52]:
So yeah. Well, you you mentioned persistence, and it it is my understanding that it it took perhaps over 2 years to selling your first policy after an earnest, you know, giving this a shot. And as a founder, I would imagine that could be quite a frustrating, you know, 2 years span, which is genuinely a a long time and may have required this, you know, Herculean effort to get momentum going and keep pushing through persistence, like you said. So I I would love to hear about, you know, what those first two years were like. What was the first big break? How did it how did it come together?

Alex Krooglik [00:16:27]:
The first two years so as Laura said, we we were accidental tourists in Cleveland, and I turned up, and I had stayed in Philadelphia for an additional year after business school. We were still working on the business plan, you know, pulling levers. And I had applied for a job at Progressive Yeah. Myself. I was on a student visa at the time. Laura was smart enough to marry an American citizen. So so, like, I took the immigrant path to getting off my student status and Progressive was good enough to hire me. And I spent several years there as as a product manager.

Alex Krooglik [00:16:59]:
And in the background, you know, Laura's feverishly, you know, we we we talk multiple times a day, you know, very quickly and, you know, we we we were trying to get this company started. And, you know, oftentimes, it was 2 steps forward and 1.99 steps back. And, you know, we had god knows how many setbacks. But I don't know why. We were just so damn stubborn. We were we refused to let this thing die, and the the idea just sort of took off. So there was no cloud computing back then, so we had our own server infrastructure, which is nuts because I knew absolutely nothing about servers. We knew nothing about building rating agents and the sophisticated apparatus you need to, you know, drive, sort of, the under under the hood operational stuff.

Alex Krooglik [00:17:41]:
We built our first website, you know, duct tape and and, you know

Laura Bennett [00:17:45]:
Nice pictures.

Alex Krooglik [00:17:48]:
In hindsight in hindsight, lucky we didn't get chanced with them being customers on day 1 because, like, probably, we're quick right then and there. So we I guess, we just, sort of, didn't really contemplate the notion of of giving up. And so those those 2 years were focused on acquiring technology, like, how do we actually do this? We theoretically, we knew it, but now we actually had to build it. And I think Laura would agree with this is, you know, we had people who had invested their faith in us, you know, like, in in personal friends and mentors. And they had put money into the company, like, you can't. Like, you just can't do it. You can't. Like, so so we just kept moving forward, you know, 0.01 steps every day.

Alex Krooglik [00:18:31]:
And until we launched in October of 06, I believe, Laura, is that right? We started this journey in the middle of 2003, so it took a good 3 years. Part of it was neither of us was American citizens or had worked in the US before. Neither of us had worked in insurance before, at least in the capacity that the underwriters in the US understood. Right? Laura certainly had the insurance experience. I did not. And then there was this sort of untested nature, like, who the hell is gonna buy this? This is called program business. And, you know, it's typically for things like, you know, commercial liability and, you know, business owners' policies and, you know, in the marine and boats and things like that, like pet insurance, due to a quirk of law, it's considered property and casualty insurance. So, in other words, pets for possession.

Alex Krooglik [00:19:18]:
And so we we battled through all of this. Like, literally, we we formulated so many opinions and thoughts and, like, you know, hacking our way through the thicket of of of objections until we basically slayed them all. People were, like, fine, blunderly. So I think, basically, we just outlasted them. We we we just outlasted the objections. That's how we got through 2 years, 3 years.

Laura Bennett [00:19:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. It was it was really hard. But, you know, we we raised the funding first, which I thought was a miracle because you know how hard it is to raise funding, especially. And then I thought we would get the insurer first, and that just shows how hard that was to get the insurer. And we ended up partnering with Lloyds of London, you know, through a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing. And meanwhile, though, you start it's like a tree. You start with those 5 people and then you end up branching out.

Laura Bennett [00:20:09]:
And one of the ends will be it, but you have to believe that one of those ends will be the answer, that there is actually an answer somewhere. And that's what we just did not give up. And it was the same, actually. We raised our first round of venture funding October 31, 2008. And that was a miracle beyond miracle because if anyone remembers back then, that was the Great Recession. It was terrible. Lehman Brothers, like, there was a massive upheaval in the financial markets and homes and real estate was a disaster, which anyone who was investing as an LP and in venture funds was just, like, pulling just pulling what they could and saying, no. We're not doing anything right now.

Laura Bennett [00:20:57]:
And it was a miracle. It was a miracle and we made that. We just made that happen but just wouldn't take it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:04]:
And you were one of Jumpstart's earliest investments?

Laura Bennett [00:21:08]:
Yes. Yeah, pretty much one of the very, very first. There were probably about 4 of us who were at the very, very beginning. Wow. And, yeah, yeah. And, in fact, when Embrace was first sold, we'd exited ourselves. But that was the first big check that Jumpstart got. And they hung in there and, you know, there was it was challenging being a very early investor in us because it took a long time to get to anything.

Laura Bennett [00:21:35]:
So that hockey stick definitely happened, but it had such an extended period.

Alex Krooglik [00:21:39]:
So, I

Laura Bennett [00:21:39]:
mean, we were, like, 1 pet at a time. It was so slow. We we only raised a total of $7,000,000, not even, I think, around $7,000,000. Wow. I mean, today, that's that's a seed round. I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, now, of course, inflation, blah blah blah. So what if that's equivalent of? But definitely amongst our peers, amongst other pet insurance companies, we were by far the least funded.

Laura Bennett [00:22:03]:
And I just think that our tenacity and creativity in what we had, we couldn't have gobs of money to go out and spend. We didn't have gobs of money just to throw at paid search, which makes no sense because it's the cost of acquisition is more than the lifetime value of a pet, you know, that kind of stuff. We had to be creative and create more sustainable approaches, and that does take longer. But when I look at our results and look at what Embrace has become, it's, you know, a really solid company based on a really solid base, and that is isn't rocked so easily by by challenges. So I I feel very proud of that, of what we've what we've built.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:45]:
Well, I wanna take a a brief but relevant detour down what this actually looked like and how it worked. And and particularly, you know, I would imagine, again, the the model most people would have in their minds for how this would work is analogous to human health care. But, Alex, you already mentioned it's it's more akin to property and casualty insurance. And so what what what did this look like? How how does it actually work?

Alex Krooglik [00:23:11]:
Yeah. That's right. The pet insurance market is characterized by law in every state as property and casualty. And so property and casualty for folks who are not from insurance is everything that's to do with, you know, home insurance, property insurance, renters, things like that. They're all considered e and c. And most states consider that a separate line of business from life and health. So life and health would be, you know, life insurance, the health insurance that governs, you know, you when when you have a policy through your employer or a standalone policy. And so, so, the tricky part is the, the mindset you have to adopt, right? The policies, pay insurance policies behave very much like human health insurance policies.

Alex Krooglik [00:23:53]:
So, you know, we start getting data into the business and it's like, this is health insurance. You know, and and that means, you know, things like high rates of claim, high morbidity, you know, things like that that are characteristic of human health insurance, but you see the same or similar patterns in pet. But you weren't allowed to use the techniques to forecast rates and prices like you were in human health. You had to use techniques that were acceptable to property casualty. In fact, just sort of as a real quick byproduct, this is part of the problem you're seeing now in many states like California and Florida with the property insurance markets are having a lot of difficulty with high rate increases. Finally, it's a result of the structure of the way the insurance companies respond to the regulatory environment. So, the long and short of it is, Pet wasn't immune to that either. We were smaller and off the radar, so perhaps we got a little bit of leeway but not a whole lot.

Alex Krooglik [00:24:47]:
So, we were this little itty bitty company, and we had to file what we call rates of rules with pretty much every state. So, we had helped to do that, helped in the sense of, you know, there are companies that will do that for you, but it's all gone through your under. So, one layer of the cake here is us embrace with the market facing entity that people associate with insurance. But we weren't strictly legally an insurance company. We were an insurance agency. And the insurance company behind us were, we had a few along the way, Lloyd's at London was 1, RLI was another. These are the companies that are ultimately responsible for dealing with the regulators, the individual insurance departments in each state, and doing things like rate increases. However, somewhat uncharacteristically, because Laura and I had a lot of domain expertise in pay, we were the ones going, okay, here are the calculations you need to give to the regulators.

Alex Krooglik [00:25:39]:
Please take a look at them because these staff heads really don't know Pet. They might have multiple programs. They might have a motorbike program, you know, a commercial this program, and a giant jewelry program. And then, pet comes along, and it's completely weird. So, I think the success at Embrace was due to the expertise we had in house. We really understood insurance. And I think, just as importantly, we had partners who were willing to accept that and to work with us and know how to deal with us. So, they weren't, We know more than you.

Alex Krooglik [00:26:11]:
Go suck at it. It was very much of nature of, like, Great! We'll get this done. We'll get this worked out. But, operationally, you have to file the actual wording that the customer gets. You can't change it. Once you've issued that policy, you can't change it. You can't rescind it. You're on the hook for 12 months for that policy and the price you quoted.

Alex Krooglik [00:26:30]:
That's it. There's there's no quidsies, no take backsies. And and and so, someone once said that running an insurance business is like driving while looking in the rear vision mirror. That's strictly true. Yes. So so, in the meantime, why you know, Laura's deal she dealt with a lot of this stuff and, you know, I was sort of the apprentice on the side. I'm, well, that's interesting. Didn't know that.

Alex Krooglik [00:26:50]:
Oh, that is weird. That is interesting. And then on on the front end of the business, you know, trying to bring more policies on board and explain to people, this is how it works. And to your point earlier, Jeff, about human health insurance, like PET is not at all, but it looks and smells a little bit like health, human health, and it behaves a little bit actuarially like human health, in fact, maybe more than a little bit. Laura could comment more on that. That said, from the point, so that the mindset your customers have when they come to embrace is, Oh, health insurance for my pet. They expect it to cover everything. And this is where things start to get wandering because pet insurance isn't structured the same way.

Alex Krooglik [00:27:29]:
Real costs have to be absorbed and paid for, and you learn really quickly that you'll go bankrupt if you design the same policy in the same way. And and, at the end of the day, both tend to one big thing. In human health, your policy is gonna cover a lot of preexisting conditions, and because you don't have a say, right, when you sign up for health insurance through your employer, either you take the insurance or prove that you have insurance through someone else, You don't get a say in opting out in tech because it's basically optional insurance. You can decide whether you want to buy it or not. The possibility exists for somebody who knows something more than you to sign up for policy and to effectively gain company. And I'm not trying to be a pessimist about this. I'm just ultra realistic that that's how insurance will work if you let it happen. So, bringing it all back then, you've got this product that looks and is understood to be kind of like human health, but underneath the wood is nothing at all like human health in a regulatory sense.

Alex Krooglik [00:28:25]:
And so we had to sort of make oil and water coexist to bring the company to fruition. Wow.

Laura Bennett [00:28:31]:
I like that. Oil and water together, that is a perfect analogy of of of what we had to do and the the wizardry that you had to bring together. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:41]:
Wow. Fascinating. So I've come across recently a a term that that I love called crucible moments. You know, these rare, critical, strategic decisions that define a company's journey along the way. And so from the the place, you know, where we are today of having retrospect perspective, I I'd love to ask what those crucible moments were for you over the the course of of building Embrace.

Laura Bennett [00:29:13]:
Mine is more of a, I suppose I mean, I I suppose it was more of an existential crisis more than a a crucible moment. And and Alex has more of

Alex Krooglik [00:29:24]:
a crucible moment.

Laura Bennett [00:29:25]:
But mine was united to raise funding, and we just we had just, spent our last dollars on on our paycheck. You know, the paychecks that went out to everyone. And so it was 2 weeks till the next paycheck, and we did not have the money. And so my very first investor, our first investor, was a mentor of mine and I drove up to Toronto to see him, not to ask him for money but just to sort of I just needed someone to talk to who I could just say just to let it out. It was it was really difficult to, to sort of admit that we we'd run out of money and, you know, any, you know, thoughts. But we did have a VC. That VC that, you know, that Detroit funded us on October 31st, But this was, you know, this was, like, March of that year, and we we didn't know how long it was gonna get to get to that payout that they had promised. And so Bill Acton, my you know, he was a savior to us.

Laura Bennett [00:30:22]:
And but he said, Laura, I I confront you know, bridge you, but just tell me this is not a bridge to nowhere. And I said, I truly believe it's not. We just have to get to this whenever they're going to somehow pull this money out and get get it to us. And so that was that was kind of because when I was on the way there, I stopped off at a competitor, Canadian competitor, and that the head of that offered me a job. Wow. He said, forget all that you're doing. And it would have been, I suppose, the easier path, in some ways, to just say, you know what? I guess, go work for this. He'd said, you could be the CEO.

Laura Bennett [00:30:58]:
We're gonna be publicly traded. It'll be fabulous. You'll be a star. You know, all the alluring things that he thought. And I was like, I just can't it didn't even explicitly say yes. I just couldn't even foresee that given we were so committed to what we were doing. And it was just I couldn't let people down. If I was gonna do to everyone and I couldn't let you know, they'll be walking away.

Laura Bennett [00:31:24]:
I mean, it's an interesting lesson learned because we have lessons learned out

Alex Krooglik [00:31:27]:
of this whole thing that we'll share,

Laura Bennett [00:31:29]:
I guess, later in this. But I was physically ill up to this point, literally making myself ill, and I couldn't, couldn't let it go. And I feel very proud of staying in. Our investors all did very well out of us staying in.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:45]:
Yeah. It's it's deep, deep conviction.

Laura Bennett [00:31:48]:
Yes. Yes. Exactly.

Alex Krooglik [00:31:50]:
Yeah. I mean, I remember living through that with Laura. You know, I felt it acutely as well. Obviously, you pour a lot of energy into a company, and we have it stripped away really quickly. I spent most of my days worrying about, you know, keeping the website up and running. Remember, there was no cloud infrastructure right then. So, you know, we had our own service for this stuff. I mean, my god, I swear, if that poor customers saw the you know, we had backup power and all sorts of stuff.

Alex Krooglik [00:32:15]:
But I honestly lived, I think, on Pepto Biz mall for a couple of years. Stop. With the keeping the bloody infrastructure up and running, it was really, really, really stressful. And we didn't have the money to burn, so, you know, cohost to do anything more. So I felt personal weight of all of this. And so my goal was to make sure that, as many things were done to lend themselves to the scalability and and replicability of the business. And what I mean by that is you you have this website, you go and get a quote for a 3 year old Staffordshire terrier, and you, you know, in in ZIP code 44022, and you expect it to be a certain price, as it should be. Well, the problem at the time we had was that how many of our systems, they they were fine doing that.

Alex Krooglik [00:33:02]:
But insurance is complex because once you buy that policy, you have to freeze that quote in place, and then people would call in and be like, oh, I wanna add a cap to my policy. Or you had to make sure that the rate for the pets was consistent with what you had filed with the state regulators. And building that, our first few versions of that were okay. But it used to bug the hell out of me because, sometimes, we'd recalculate and I'd get customer search shows going, I've got someone on the phone, and the policy is 1¢ off. 1¢, right? The quote they got was 2501 online, and it was, you know, 24 25 exactly in silent. Damn it. So, the solution to this was to basically gut most of the of the internal engines that drove Embrace and to replace them with a more consistent rule based approach. So we did that in 2009.

Alex Krooglik [00:33:50]:
And I remember that project was, I gave myself really bad also and lost significant amounts of weight. I was working ridiculous hours. But it solved those problems completely, but they were gone. We never had any more repeats. I would love to know if Embrace is still using that technology, but it was a company enrolled based in Chicago, fantastic for insurance, absolutely fantastic, game changer. So that was, to me, a real eye opening strategic decision. It didn't make me less stressed, but it it reduced how much time I spent worrying about those small things so that I could start focusing on other things. So me, I I mean, it's very much an under the wood thing, but even those things have consequences to the business.

Alex Krooglik [00:34:34]:
So I truly believed that that was, like, one of the the most important things we did for the health and scalability of the business and for our customers, you know, to help make sure that what what they were charged was exactly what they were charged. It was reproducible. We never had customer service reps coming in with weird, you know, one saying off, 2 saying off errors after that. They disappeared completely. And things got slowly better on the technology front too. Right? As we got, you know, the cloud started to spin up, we were able to move some things out. But, yeah, just the the stress of doing that, I'm never again, like, which was just all of them. That's right.

Alex Krooglik [00:35:11]:
The server I would have an alarm on my phone. If the power went out, I'll get an immediate text look. I had to go in 3 in the morning, turn the generators on, make sure the the servers didn't run out of battery. Just the things you do I mean, even there was no one else to blame if things didn't work out, like, you know, if we're not selling policies that would show up in the monthly monthly financials. And and, you know, it's 3 in the morning, Cleveland time, that's midday midnight out of California, and there's someone buying pet insurance.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:34]:
There's always someone buying pet insurance.

Laura Bennett [00:35:36]:
Yes. Yes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:42]:
Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and Buy 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you 2 are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes. So Embrace ultimately goes through a series of of acquisitions culminating in in 2023. And I would love to hear about what those were like for for you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:56]:
You know, how how did the first one come to be, the subsequent ones come to be? What were your thinking along the way? Was that the ultimate goal when you thought about success? Did the meaning of success change along the way? And, ultimately, the the kind of lessons learned from that transition in in ownership. I realize there's a lot of series of questions in that one question, so, you know, feel free to take us through it however you'd like and have thought about it.

Laura Bennett [00:37:22]:
Yeah. So so just to to clarify, so we had 2 VCs, you know, so that one in October 31, 2008. Yeah. And then 5 years later, we we had we sort of swapped out. You know, 1 VC came and bought out the other VC and some of the other investors, early investors. And we were in a minority position right from Manchley that October 31, 2008. And, that's a lesson that's definitely a lesson learned, you know, financially for us. And this is kind of what people don't typically talk about.

Laura Bennett [00:37:59]:
But it would have made more sense to not take the funding and to not go further. But that's not who we are, right? And I have no regrets. We didn't do that. But financially, being put into a minority position right from basically the get go, We never made it up and our investors all made it. They benefited greatly from our efforts and the follow on, right, the follow on companies. We exited in 2017, so we weren't there. The first actual acquisition of Embrace from the VC was in 2019. And, they sold that NSM brought in, bought Embrace, which is a subsidiary of White Mountains, which is a that invests in insurance.

Laura Bennett [00:38:54]:
And then the second acquisition after that, I am not gonna get my timing precisely here, it was sort of maybe 2 something years ago when Carlyle bought NSM, if I'm getting this right. So, Embrace sort of went along with that. And then recently, JAB bought Embrace out from NSM. And that was the it was reported at $1,500,000,000 It wasn't officially confirmed by JAB. They were not talking publicly about it. But I do have good sources who, you know, I wouldn't be saying that number,

Alex Krooglik [00:39:33]:
but but I

Laura Bennett [00:39:34]:
have good sources that can confirm. Let's just say that it's quite accurate. But so it I have to admit there's a sort of a bittersweetness to it. Yeah. Right? But I must say that I really do believe that what we created and built led to those valuations. And there's a little bit of insanity in the market at the moment, I must say. Some people would look and say the JAB acquisition because of all the investors, Carlyle did the best. They bought it in a little package with NSM and then spun it out separately.

Laura Bennett [00:40:09]:
And, you know, the the current CEO, Brian Macias, apologies, Brian, if I mispronounce your name, you know, has obviously done a fabulous job of sort of growing, growing, what was there. And and I think, hopefully, has appreciated what was what was set up. And there were quite a few senior management people who were from the from our days too,

Alex Krooglik [00:40:29]:
so

Laura Bennett [00:40:29]:
I like to think that things have held up held up well. And I think we I am very proud of what what we've done. But let's just say I'm I'm still looking for a job. I mean, I'm I'm not retiring on any of these 1,000,000,000 of dollars that that, you know, that it's, you know, people people might might wonder. But, you know, I I think it wouldn't change it wouldn't change. I mean, obviously, if you could go back and change things, you might wish to. But we all that we did, what we did was at a certain time period that couldn't really have been done differently. Obviously, if I was a different person, maybe.

Laura Bennett [00:41:09]:
But for me personally, I couldn't have done anything differently. The environment and the timing was such as it was. But we were able to the industry today, I would like to think, is very much influenced by some of the things that we did. And partly, it helps. NAFIA, the North American Pet Health Insurance Association, was founded at the very beginning. I wasn't an actual initial founder because, like, we couldn't afford to fly out to the first meeting. I couldn't I just couldn't do it because it was, yeah, it was out west. And but I joined quickly thereafter and then as a group, turned it into something that was we can measure the size of the industry today because of the work that was put in back then.

Laura Bennett [00:41:57]:
But the design of the products, what we designed, Alex and I, this customizable, risk based approach for pet insurance, did not exist before and not even really in Europe either. And so, I like to think that we brought quite a new approach. Now, some may curse us today because of this because we created a product that covered practically everything except preexisting conditions. And we came up with an innovative wellness product that went alongside. So we were sort of more full service. And there are certainly issues today in pet insurance that that has become incredibly expensive and that there needs to be a more, slimmed down approach to product as well. Right? There's always room for this big product that there should be probably broaden the the the people that we reach if in the industry if we had another product, but also perhaps now either narrow the scope. You know, they've tried the keeping everything covered, but just narrowing what gets paid out.

Laura Bennett [00:42:57]:
And that, to me, just leads to disappointment.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:00]:
I'll bring something back from earlier on, which was, you know, when you were doing the original business plan and you had this chart, and it's up into the right and, you know, kind of forecasting where Embrace might ultimately go. And it sounds like, you know, it it hasn't actually deviated perhaps too far from from where you had thought.

Laura Bennett [00:43:16]:
Oh, yeah. No. It's, it's actually gone well beyond well beyond what we imagined. We were projecting, you know, a 100,000,000 of premium, and it was in a short period of time. So that that was as, you know, it was far too optimistic and much harder to sell pet insurance than we had imagined. And I remember another CEO of a pet company, just not a pet retail company, laughing at me and saying, that's ridiculous. And it was, you know, when when the the time frame, 5 years or whatever came and went, I was like, oh, they, you know, we haven't done what we wanted. But it really hit the hockey stick.

Laura Bennett [00:43:51]:
And and COVID really, really helped things. And we put in a couple of partnerships before we left, USAA and GEICO in particular, that both did phenomenally well for the growth of the company. And they were just getting going, and then they really sort of accelerated forward. So, some really good things, you know, happened to set to tee that up. And, obviously, Brian has done a fabulous job of of continuing that that that growth. And looking at the company results and looking at the industry, Embrace has been a big has become a big player in it on just that 7,000,000, that original 7,000,000. So it was done in a nontraditional way. But, yes, it's exceeded expectations, I would say.

Laura Bennett [00:44:43]:
So with that

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:44]:
in mind, I am curious how, you know, kind of both of you have thought about what success was and how you know, what success is now and, you know, ultimately, the the impact that you that you were hoping to have with Embrace and and how you thought about that, you know, kind of navigating the relinquishing of control, some of the lessons learned along the way, you know, with with minority ownership and and and things of that nature. Just the reflections on on where it is and and how how you feel about it.

Alex Krooglik [00:45:14]:
You know, I bet you never really stop thinking about the companies that you've started and run. And so I think there's there's different levels of at least for me personally, there's different levels of learning. And, you know, some of these occur immediately, right, when you cut your finger by, you know, sticking it in the door or you'd be, you know, out or do that again. So there's immediate stuff like, yeah, no. Don't do that in business. Bad idea. And then there's there's longer term things that sometimes stretch out over years. I think back on all the things we did well, I think we were very picky that we hired, and we had a people first culture.

Alex Krooglik [00:45:53]:
There's you know, you you could be forgiven in this day and age for thinking that that, you know, businesses talk about this. There's a lot of platitudes. We really meant it. And we were picky about the people we hired. Folks who didn't who didn't fit the culture, for various reasons usually didn't stick around for very long. And we were, as Laura and I wrote, you know, founding principles for Embrace, and we were, you know, one of them was being open, honest, and transparent about who we are, what we stood for, resonate with customers, resonate with staff. And so the less the lesson to me there is that stuff's only only bullshit if you don't stand behind it. So, you know, big lesson is it matters, and it matters a lot to the people and to your customers.

Alex Krooglik [00:46:38]:
So it's probably worth the effort, but mean it if you're gonna do it. And then, you know, personally, for me, I came from a from a a background in engineering where what mattered more was the financial and engineering success of the project. People were kind of just a means to an end in a way. And I give a lot of credit to Laura for this. Laura, she used to say she was always tending her garden. These were her direct reports. And and, you know, I I learned a lot from her, not just the how but but the why it matters. And and I I've taken that into my companies subsequent to Embrace, and I actually enjoy that now.

Alex Krooglik [00:47:15]:
That's probably, for me, the biggest takeaway is I actually like working with people if if it's it looks different from Laura's approach. But I'm not the egghead engineer stuck in a room, you know, like in Star Trek. There's Scotty down in the basement. It's like, I'll get our star back down. No. I think it's, it's it's a combination of, you know, finding the right people, listening to them, and helping them be the best version of themselves. And I'm doing that now. And so, I think, for me, one of the biggest lessons is, you know, as I look at what to do with my future, a lot of it's going to come down to what opportunities I have to help other people.

Alex Krooglik [00:47:55]:
I like to think that I'm finding somebody to ultimately replace me. You know, I'm going to do the best job I can do. I want people working for me who are going to be able to supplant me and do a better job than me. And I don't feel bad about it. I really don't because, you know, if they can do their job successfully and and I can spend more time focusing on, you know, the health and wellness of the people driving the business, I think that's success, Big success. And I think it's greatly undervalued today and diminished by the number of lots of great companies that make a mockery of principles like that. And I think they ought to teach you in b schools, and they ought to teach it in high school, and they ought to teach it everywhere. If you're gonna lead people actual demeanor.

Alex Krooglik [00:48:34]:
You know? So so to me, I say that's a huge Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:36]:
No. It resonates.

Alex Krooglik [00:48:37]:
I

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:37]:
think in a lot of ways, the the mark of great leadership is is how well people do in your absence.

Laura Bennett [00:48:43]:
Yes. Exactly. Yes. I would like to like to take that. And your your sort of we talked about the minority experience, you know, starting off that way. I mean, you know, it I have seen it still happen today, particularly with with women's female founders, but that's because the female founders come to me. I do a ton of mentoring just because often I'm the only woman they know done somewhat well despite all the challenges of VC world and so on. And, you know, I I I tell people, if you start off in a minority position, you will not get it back.

Laura Bennett [00:49:21]:
You will not work your way out. They will not feel sorry for you. They will continue to, benefit from your efforts. And so, you have to decide, is that okay? I mean, you know, it's that. And we chose what we chose. And I am very proud of it. So, there's definitely that, but I think there's a reality to it, and no one is out to help you. If you got stuck where you are, then, oh, well, do you want to keep going or what? We'll all decide.

Laura Bennett [00:49:55]:
So, there's that. But I do I do keep in touch with some, as we call them, embraces. And, you know, they're they're dear friends. And I'm very, very, happy that they're still enjoying their work and the the purpose of what they do and that it means something good to them and that they still continue to learn. So I think that's pretty awesome and cool. And, you know, I know we don't Embrace doesn't show up because technically, oh, were we actually a tech firm? Or were we, there's many real things about Embrace. It's got real people answering phone calls. It's got, you know, both highly tech enabled, digital end to end experience.

Laura Bennett [00:50:39]:
I'd say yes. We're a tech company, and I would like us to show up on the list. When I say us, of course, you know, it's not my company anymore, but I feel like that Embrace is owed that recognition

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:50]:
Yeah.

Laura Bennett [00:50:50]:
As to what it is and should show up on the lists of, tech companies that are unicorns, etcetera today.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:58]:
Absolutely. On this topic of people and culture that both of you have have raised, So there's almost this comical stigma about group projects in college and university. And so I kind of love that that is the origin story and where your collective, you know, begins because it's it's so evidently not the case for for both of you. So I I'd love to how you would describe the evolution of of your relationship with each other through these various stages of of growth over the years.

Laura Bennett [00:51:30]:
Oh, that's, that's a that's a fun gosh. Actually, we would we would because we were sort of a male and a female sounder

Alex Krooglik [00:51:37]:
Yeah.

Laura Bennett [00:51:38]:
One of my always I'd always tell people this. So people would ask us if we were married, and I'd say, yes. We are, just not to each other. But we had many life things that were very similar. I mean, I'm 9 years older than Alex, I believe, so 7 years maybe, I think, older. I don't know. And it didn't really matter, but we were sort of, I suppose, like brothers and sisters, although people would at work, when we would get mad at each other, they would say, oh, mom and dad are arguing again. But, you know, we actually, for the whole time, we were like, at the beginning, Alex was in Philly and I was in Cleveland, but we were very tight in what we were trying to do and achieve.

Laura Bennett [00:52:26]:
And that was, as I said, we started off running. We knew where we wanted to go. We both had the same work ethic and ownership and responsibility for what we were to do and contribute to the whole. And so we when we actually physically lived next near each other, we're, like, a mile away, we would meet every Friday mornings at at and we lived in this little town called Chagrin Falls. I'm sure, you know, because this is Cleveland based, Chagrin Falls, and at the Starbucks, it's right on the falls looking out. You know, the goslings jumping off the, you know, the the waterfall there. It was actually you know, we met every morning on Fridays to kinda get out of the office and just kind of reconnect because sometimes we wouldn't speak to each other all day at work because we I would go into work all the time. We did from the very beginning, it was 3 3 days in the office and 2 days off for everybody.

Laura Bennett [00:53:21]:
So the whole hybrid thing was is not new, but we just wanted that. And, and so we just, yeah, reconnect and we developed over the years. I mean, we've had, like, events happen to each other. I mean, we are family, and we see each other now still, not as frequently, but we still have this amazing connection and understanding. It doesn't need to be much said about certain things. You know? It just is what it is, as we used to like to say.

Alex Krooglik [00:53:50]:
And when I fill out forms for travel and stuff and it says, you know, who's a non family contact, I always put Laura's name down. So, you know, if I ever go down in a fiery trash somewhere, Laura's phone cell phone's gonna light up and go, like, oh, miss Bennett.

Laura Bennett [00:54:06]:
They'll be like, oh, that damn Alex would be on the list, didn't he?

Alex Krooglik [00:54:12]:
Yeah. In in many ways, I think I think entrepreneurship is a journey that's best done with 2. In fact, I've heard of I've heard of of venture capitalists and, you know, seed funding outfits that basically won't fund single founders. They want cofounders. And I think there's there's to me, there's a lot of common sense in that. But, also, I think what Lauren and I had, you know, from a strictly strategic relationship, you know, as far as embrace is concerned, was incredibly valuable. We generally saw eye to eye on what the most important things were even if they were nebulous. What did Einstein say? Just because you can measure it doesn't mean it matters, and not everything that matters can be measured.

Alex Krooglik [00:54:53]:
And I think that's really true in entrepreneurship land. If you if you put a value on the if 2 cofounders imagine if they were, like, you know, talking cheese and they didn't like each other and they get along, they would be destructive to the value of the company, and there's just no way that that would be sustainable long term. Investors would probably go one or both of them. But in our case, I think we were stronger together. And, you know, the core the core of, of anatomy consists of, you know, protons and neutrons and laurinib are protons and neutrons, right, very hard to unstick. And we stood by each other. It was, I wanna say it was probably one of the healthiest relationships I've had. This is not to say that all my relationships are a bit unhealthy, but it was a good relationship.

Alex Krooglik [00:55:33]:
Right? Like, we disagreed on things, but we resolved things objectively and amicably for the most part. And, you know, Laura was a sounding board. I go, hey, Laura. I have this crazy idea. And she'd be, like, sit on that one for a while, shall we? You know, which is her way of saying, well, you know, let's let's dig into what but but the answer was never, like, no, right, and vice versa. So we think, in a sense, we let common sense prevail. And, you know, one of my favorite sayings was, you know, cream will always rise to the top, right? The good ideas keep coming up again and again and again and again. And we would acknowledge this and unfold it in its way every day.

Alex Krooglik [00:56:07]:
You know, so we were beneficial. Like, you know, Laura built this incredibly detailed financial model that drove the business and that was worth its weight in gold. And we were able to kind of see around corners with it. And it enabled us to do a lot of very long term planning and be very deliberate about the things we do. And we're like, okay, we need to hire a person to do this in this time frame, and that's gonna cost this much, and we need to invest in, you know, server this and, you know, software platform that and blah blah blah. And it was all very methodical and structured. And so when investors came looking for data, they're, like, here you go. I like to think that that, you know, it was a fantastic relationship.

Alex Krooglik [00:56:46]:
I I wish I wish there was there was some sort of workshop we could do where, you know, like, how did you tell if you're compatible with your potential cofounder? And if you know them, that's great, right, as a friend or a family member or whatever. But what if you don't and you're forced to work together, how do you decide if you're compatible? I don't know. Interesting. Something to think about me. Oh, I

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:07]:
love that. That's it's very special.

Alex Krooglik [00:57:09]:
It's awesome.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:10]:
Well, I think, you know, we've covered a lot of ground. I know there are many more more things we could we could talk about, but I wanna leave a a little space before we we bookend the conversation to ask if there is anything you feel is unsaid that is particularly salient in your reflection on the journey that is important that you'd like to to share or or bring up.

Laura Bennett [00:57:31]:
I don't know. We've we've said a lot. I mean, I would just add I would just add to that. Actually, I mean, I think also what really is a call we have huge respect for each other, and you can't I don't think you can have a relationship if you don't have respect. You don't have to like someone. And sometimes, I didn't like Alex. I mean, it was just, you know, just, it was a struggle. You know? It's hard it's hard to imagine it just for a moment, you know, and be like, oh, really? Yeah.

Laura Bennett [00:57:55]:
But always always respect. So, I mean, I think that's true of any relationship in general, but, this was very important for us. But, no. I I think that it's interesting, the changes in Cleveland. Sometimes I feel like not much has changed as much as as it would as it would be desired. And I would like to say that during this time, I had 2 children. Ellie is 20 and Erin is 18. They grew up with Embrace.

Laura Bennett [00:58:24]:
And we have many and Dialect has 3 children, and they grew up with Embrace too. And I think there's a lot to be said about stories around children and having children and doing all that you do as an entrepreneur, so that could be a good, interesting, different podcast. Just in general, I'm sure you could find lots of people who could contribute that. It's not really talked about. But I I think that my daughters, you know, one day, one of them said to me, I looked you up on Google, Mom. And I was like, Oh, what did you find? She goes, You're kind of stainless. It's like and I'm like, well, not really, but, yes, okay. If you wish to think so, absolutely.

Laura Bennett [00:59:09]:
And this is an Embrace is an amazing company and was was it's just ridiculous to think how it just came from nothing. 2 people with a business idea. I stuck with it for 14 years. It was 14 years when we,

Alex Krooglik [00:59:25]:
left. Mhmm.

Laura Bennett [00:59:26]:
So, that's a long it's a long time in there. Hard, hard slot. I needed time off after that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:34]:
But it's funny you mentioned the children because and just kind of a a fun aside, I and I don't have the exact numbers on this. But anecdotally, I I would say across, you know, all the founders who've been on the podcast, one of the the real patterns is that the story of their parents is really embedded within their own story, which is, I think, generally true of of parenting. But the entrepreneurial folks of today often had entrepreneurial parents. And, that is what they they grew up in it, and they they have this, you know, lack of aversion to risk and and just trying to, you know, figure stuff out for themselves.

Laura Bennett [01:00:10]:
I think in this case, we we have, you know, we we are immigrants and, have immigrant experiences, and both our fathers were in the military, and we moved frequently, both of us. I think there's something in that. And my mother was she she was a small business owner, and so there's there's a little bit of that. But I didn't know I was an entrepreneur until it revealed itself, that I was. And and I was I could not accept that. It was a wonderful thing to discover.

Alex Krooglik [01:00:42]:
Yeah. You know, I wanna follow their law on the immigrant path. You know, I became a US citizen a number of years ago and practically myself both an Australian and an American. I pick and choose which one I feel more strongly about depending on who's playing during the Olympic games. I'm saying, but, no, but in all seriousness, you know, this is a country that is built by, honestly, entrepreneurs. I mean, think of all the big companies, you know, they may be big today. And, you know, some of the people may be a bit scandalous, but it's been immigrants are a huge part of the success of the United States in all the different, you know, countries of origin. But, you know, I see so many founders.

Alex Krooglik [01:01:21]:
I think, as a country, we ought to make it easier for people to come here to the US to live out their dreams and to give it a shot because if there's one country on Earth that really lets you do that, it's the United States. So I hope we continue to do that as a country. I feel really passionate about it. I love meeting people from all walks of life, all different countries, and God knows there's a lot of them doing their own thing. And I think we need to encourage it. We need to encourage our kids to do it. Again, it's not a journey for everybody. There's nothing wrong with not following that path.

Alex Krooglik [01:01:50]:
But I hope we, as a country, don't change that. I hope we continue to encourage the entrepreneurs among us, those who are willing to, you know, to take that wild swing into the future because I think it's it's the key economic driver of this country is innovation. And, you know, you read about us versus, say, Europe, like, the US is killing it in terms of productivity and growth. Other countries are lagging behind. And I think a lot of it has to do with our our, sort of, individual entrepreneurial spirit even if that's with that in the corporate environment. So for what it's worth, you know, that was a huge like, I've never been anything less than blessed and grateful for the opportunities I've had in the US.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:30]:
That's powerful. Yeah. That cert certainly resonates. Well, I want to then ask about Cleveland as we we we wrap up here for, know, just parting thoughts and reflections on on what it had meant to to build Embrace here, then ultimately for our our traditional closing question, which is for a hidden gem in Cleveland, you know, something that other folks should know about that that maybe they don't.

Laura Bennett [01:02:56]:
Well well, my, husband and I came to Cleveland, because of his job and, but I must say many things were very good coming to Cleveland, and the cost of living, the fact there were a lot of hungry people who were smart but really, you know, were looking for something interesting to do, and the desire, the location for me, my parent my parents, my sister in Canada, in Southern Ontario, so not too far away. So it has has been good, but definitely lots of challenges doing it here. But in terms of the people and and the friends I've made, you know, it's a great place, and it's the longest place I've ever lived is, is here in Cleveland. So that's that says a lot, I think.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:45]:
I think so.

Laura Bennett [01:03:48]:
And if I was to say a hidden gem, well, I live in Chagrin Falls. It is a lovely place to live. I mean, there's plenty of hidden gems that I could specifically mention, but the I found that the the parks around Freerring Meadows is a beautiful little park that I can walk to from my house. And it's, it's a when I say park, it's an outdoor area that's owned by it's become an official space that's been designated. It's an amazing space. So, just those kinds of little pop up little spaces that you don't know where they're at and then you can walk 5 miles in them, it's just, it's beautiful. And there's a lot of that. I'm sure everybody has their special place that they that they love going to in, in the Cleveland area because there's many, many of those.

Alex Krooglik [01:04:40]:
I'm gonna be young, gonna be less less about the parks and stuff all the way, believe me that, I enjoy them. But, I'm a foodie. Love to go out, try, you know, new places. And one place that I've consistently most enjoyed is Le Petit Treangel. I have no affiliation with them. I just think that they got a whole lot of bonkers. Their beef sandwich is out of this world. Sorry to offend any vegetarians.

Alex Krooglik [01:05:05]:
But but, yeah, the the combination of, you know, prices and food and and drinks, and not to mention the grapes. Like, just I may be a little bit hungry. That may be influencing what I'm saying. But but I genuinely genuinely love those guys, always enjoyed it. And then, you know, in Sugar and Fall, I'm gonna be 2, Jeff. I'm gonna be a naughty boy. I'm a I'm a big fan of Jojo's. That's become, like, a swift this is where I hang out with my buddies, and I drag Laura there, and, you know, that's sort of the the go to spot.

Alex Krooglik [01:05:31]:
So, I don't know. Again, no no affiliation with them other than just a good local watering hole that, you know. And Chagrin Falls has changed the last 10 years. It used to be kind of sleepy and a little bit boring. And then, there were some fires a few years ago. People who lived there will know what we mean. And then there's been a bit of a rebuild. So the the Phoenix side of the ashes there is that, you know, it's become a hoppin' little place.

Alex Krooglik [01:05:53]:
So, yeah. So when when I'm in Cleveland, I have a house in Sugar Falls and, you know, catch up with Laura and and and my other friends there and really enjoy it. So, yay, Jojo's.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:04]:
Well, those are are both awesome hidden gems. Thank you for for sharing. And thank you both for, you know, just sharing your your story. Again, I think this is, this is really fun to to have gotten to listen to you and and learn a lot more about what this this journey entailed for for both of you.

Laura Bennett [01:06:21]:
So thank you. Thank you.

Alex Krooglik [01:06:23]:
Thanks for providing, Steph. It's been a pleasure.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:25]:
Absolutely. If folks had anything they wanted to follow-up with with either of you about, where would be the best place for them to do so?

Laura Bennett [01:06:33]:
Well, LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to, to find me. So, you know, you you're it's pretty straightforward. Type in Laura Bennington. Look for the person sitting on the green stairs in the picture. There. That that's easy enough. So reach out on LinkedIn.

Alex Krooglik [01:06:48]:
Yeah. Same. And and always open to ideas and, you know, mentoring, getting involved with with local companies. So always happy to hear from fellow entrepreneurs. Amazing.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:59]:
Well, Alex, Laura, thank you again. This a

Alex Krooglik [01:07:02]:
lot of fun. Thanks, Jeff.

Laura Bennett [01:07:03]:
Take care.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:10]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.