etn.
00:12:42 · Ed Leon Klinger, Sam, William Loveday Powell, Kosta
[00:12:42] S3: Thanks, etn, boys. [00:12:44] S1: Thanks, Ed. We'll see you soon. That's Crab Pint. That is the James Bond of the insurance. Okay. Right there. Thanks, Ed. That's it. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you for pitching live. Appreciate it. We'll see you soon. [00:12:55] S2: See you [00:12:56] S0: soon. Nice one, mate. Ciao. Go well, buddy. First ever live pitch on etn. Our next guest, I believe Is an absolute legend. He's so good. These questions are great. Got James Lowe coming into the studio. James James, coming to you. Cofounder of ethos. [00:13:15] S1: I'm so good. I'm so good. [00:13:16] S0: So good to see you, bro. You well? Please take a seat. Put yourself with these headphones. There [00:13:22] S1: you go. There you go. [00:13:23] S0: Okay. Go. James. I think we have to start with [00:13:26] S1: a quick how are you? The last time we saw you, our jaws were on the floor with how insane this company is. Give us a... Yeah. We need a temp check. What's the update from me, Kosta, and you?
00:13:26 · Sam, James Lowe, Kosta
[00:13:26] S1: a quick how are you? The last time we saw you, our jaws were on the floor with how insane this company is. Give us a... Yeah. We need a temp check. What's the update from me, Kosta, and you? [00:13:37] S4: Yeah. It's been a crazy, crazy six months. Oh, no surprise. So we have actually roughly 200 x ed in the last six months. Which is crazy. We pay out more than a million dollars per day to experts around You the world know, we've passed around 500,000,000 ARR. We generate around a 100,000,000 in net cash annualized a year as well. And so it's just gone completely crazy. We are serving experts all around the world in like over 45 professions. And so lots of people benefiting from this. We actually have a documentary crew all around the world that are following the stories of these experts. Wow. Clever. In Amsterdam, in Nigeria, in The US, everywhere. And so we're gonna be telling those stories very soon in probably a month's time. [00:14:21] S0: Could give us a sense of the speed of the scale. Right? Because I mean, we've been we were with... You came on the show, I think, for the seed round and then for the a and, like Mhmm. I mean, I don't even know where you guys are right now. It's growing so fast. But just talk to us about the speed at which things have scaled. [00:14:34] S4: Yeah. So, you know, I think when we did our a back in probably roughly March, we were at roughly 2,000,000 ARR at that time. Yeah. And so we've gone past 500,000,000 now, and so it's 250 x in that, you you know, six months or so.
00:14:34 · James Lowe, Sam
[00:14:34] S4: Yeah. So, you know, I think when we did our a back in probably roughly March, we were at roughly 2,000,000 ARR at that time. Yeah. And so we've gone past 500,000,000 now, and so it's 250 x in that, you you know, six months or so. [00:14:47] S1: You have to be one of the fastest growing companies ever. [00:14:49] S4: Yeah. I think we're we're we're trying to get compliance approval to say whether this is the fastest growing company ever in Europe. Okay. Okay. But but but, yes, certainly, we're we're probably in that camp. [00:15:00] S1: Okay. In terms of hitting... In terms of running a business that is hitting those milestones, I mean, you mentioned 1,000,000 a day in payouts. How do you guys operate as a team building a company that fast and building a sustainable business? We talked to it was yesterday we talked to the CEO of Lemlist who are a bootstrap company and they're building, you know, an incredibly sustainable company. And we asked him, you know, what what... What's the difference there with an incredibly fast growing VC backed company and and a company that's been bootstrapped and maybe growing slower, but, you know, I guess growing more kind of sustainably. What is that kind of difference? How do you guys grapple with building a sustainable company while you're growing so quickly?
00:15:00 · Sam, James Lowe
[00:15:00] S1: Okay. In terms of hitting... In terms of running a business that is hitting those milestones, I mean, you mentioned 1,000,000 a day in payouts. How do you guys operate as a team building a company that fast and building a sustainable business? We talked to it was yesterday we talked to the CEO of Lemlist who are a bootstrap company and they're building, you know, an incredibly sustainable company. And we asked him, you know, what what... What's the difference there with an incredibly fast growing VC backed company and and a company that's been bootstrapped and maybe growing slower, but, you know, I guess growing more kind of sustainably. What is that kind of difference? How do you guys grapple with building a sustainable company while you're growing so quickly? [00:15:38] S4: Yeah. So interestingly, there are things that we didn't expect to scale so smoothly, which is mostly in the network growth. Okay. So the network is compounding almost on its own, where, you know, roughly 24% of our new users now come from referrals. And when you look at those referrals, like 32% of them were referred themselves before. And so basically, this is cascading referral that's growing in this network really, really fast. [00:15:58] S1: Yeah.
00:15:58 · James Lowe
[00:15:58] S4: So network's growing much faster and smoother than we thought. The difficulty is like, okay, now you're managing tens of thousands of experts around the world who are literally, know, in some cases like literally their whole living is dependent on some of the projects that we're working with them on. Sure. And so you have so many different types of issues, right? You have payment disputes, you have fraud, you have like operational hiccups, you have to build customer support at scale to... For all these people around the world. And we basically had to stand all of that up in the space of six months, and you know, throughout the entire period it felt like we were constantly catching up. At one point, think our Trustpilot dropped to something like 3.7 because it was just so difficult for experts, then we dragged it all the way back up to 4.5, right, just with all the improvements that we're driving with the team all across the board. And we're really lucky that, you know, we have t team members who have been building giant marketplaces, like people who have been GMs at Uber and so on and and launching new cities and stuff like this. Yeah. And so we're bringing a lot of that, you know, expertise in. And we've been doing things like round tables of experts just coming in and they join us and they tell their stories, they, you know, they tell us all the horrible things that, you know, they're experiencing on the platform, how do we change it, we demo the new parts of the platform and help them change it, and we're doing this not just The UK, but also around the world where we see experts everywhere. And so that's been super, super helpful. We're just trying to stay as close to the expert experience as possible, and and try to build it out. But it's been a bit of a crazy journey.
00:17:20 · Sam, Kosta
[00:17:20] S1: Yeah. Well done. [00:17:21] S0: Well So talk to us about the... It's been a recurring theme throughout every single appearance you've had on the show, but how is... How do you see the future of work evolving?