1220: At Hippo, Growth and Risk Work Together | with Guy Zeltser, CFO, Hippo Insurance

0:00Guy Zeltser: Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from Salesforce. Unify selling and billing for a seamless customer experience. And one stream, trusted data, faster decisions. Hello, this is Shiv Verma and I'm the CFO of Robinhood and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1220.

0:27We worked for a few months on this digital strategy, and it ended up getting approved by the board. And we presented it to the board, to the CEO. They all loved it. It required a lot of investments. And again, they all said, yeah, we want to do it, including the head of this business unit. And then they told me, okay, guy, now you need to go to our internal finance team and make sure that this plan is getting the sufficient budget. And they said, okay, how much revenue this thing is going to give us in the next six months? And I said, what do you mean? It's a five-year plan. You need to invest a lot to get big things, but it will take some time, right?

1:08Like every big thing you're trying to do, you need to put some money up front. Before the revenue comes, you need to make some bets and you need to believe in what you're doing for ultimately the revenue to come. but he asked about the next six months and I said probably not much, here is what I think, but probably not much he said okay, so you can get 10 % more resources and I said what do you mean, your board just approved the entire thing, which means 10x more resources not 10 % more, and he said yeah it doesn't really work like that and when we came back to the leadership of the company they said look, okay, again our finance team is our finance team you've got to work with them and it is what it is

1:50Guy Zeltser: Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Guy Seltzer, CFO of Hippo Insurance.

2:02Guy Zeltser: There's an interesting paradox in the insurance business. Companies get paid to take risks, yet investors want predictability. And for a CFO, reconciling those two things is no small assignment. At Hippo, that challenge has become especially interesting as the company expands its business model and decides where to retain more risk and where not to. What's striking is that better financial performance can sometimes begin with deliberately making a business smaller. Our guest today, Guy Zeltzer, has been part of that experience, and his perspective raises an important question. When does pursuing less growth today create the conditions for more growth tomorrow?

2:51Guy Zeltser: Our talk with CFO Guy Zeltser begins after this.

3:01Guy Zeltser: What is a forward finance organization? Finance leaders are under pressure to move faster, adopt AI, and guide decisions across the business. But here's what most people miss. AI doesn't create value on its own. You need the right operating model behind it. That's what Ford Finance is. It's the blueprint for building trusted data with finance and IT actually aligned, and AI working right where decisions are made. OneStream brings this to life. As the AI operating system for modern finance, it's all in one platform. Your financial and operational data in one place with purpose-built AI embedded across planning, close reporting, and analysis.

3:55Guy Zeltser: The result? Faster decisions, less busy work, stronger governance, and more value from AI. Explore the Forward Finance Blueprint at onestream.com. slash forward finance. And see how to turn AI ambition into real business value. Visit us at onestream.com slash forward finance. That's onestream.com slash forward finance.

4:35Guy Zeltser: Hello, CFO Guy Zeltzer is with us. Guy's path to the CFO office includes an early chapter running a retail business. Before moving into strategic finance and later strategy consulting at McKinsey & Company, he joined Hippo in 2020 and over the next five years advanced from director of strategic finance to CFO. Along the way, he gained a front row view of an evolving insurance business where decisions around risk, capital, and growth increasingly intersect. Guy, welcome. Thank you for having me, Jack. Really excited to be here. So, hey, take a look back for us. I thought this was interesting. You have a very interesting resume relative to some of our guests.

5:24Guy Zeltser: But go back in time for us, share some of those experiences you feel prepared you for a CFO role. Yeah, so exactly as you mentioned, my career started in my family business. So this retail gig that you mentioned, that's a family business that I actually started working there as a teenager. And what did we do there? We sold toys like Lego, Disney dolls, balloons, like whatever, just named it. And, you know, that was, frankly, like that was my introduction to the business world. Because, you know, I worked a lot with my dad and he said, look, it's very simple. Here are some numbers. Here is how much money is getting in.

6:06Here is how much money we're paying out. And our job is to make the spread the largest, as much as possible. And that's indeed how it all started.

6:17Guy Zeltser: What do you think that business taught you that maybe finance didn't? So, a few things. But, I mean, a few things. The one thing that I will always go back to, and that will always be something that as a finance business today, I go back to these times. And it's the customer, the human element, right? You are serving real people. and I think that as finance leaders in many cases, right, we're sitting in an office, we're looking at our models, excels, dashboards, we're saying, okay, we need to invest more money here, cut cost there, moving stuff around. When you start in a simple retail business and you price physical products, you serve people, you enjoy it when everything goes well and sometimes you're getting yelled at because someone is unhappy and you gotta you know you gotta solve the situation it's it's it's very special because i think it allows me when i'm sitting in front of my computer and um you know like all of us looking at dashboards models numbers um i remember there are real people real products real services real life behind it um and i think that is helping me to see the downstream implications in many of these cases.

7:39Guy Zeltser: I'd love to hear about your experience at McKinsey & Company and what the takeaways were there. Again, it has such a sort of a unique culture, I think, among strategy houses. What would you tell us? So here's what I'll tell you. So after this family business, I spent some time in the military. I'm originally from Israel. And then when I was in college, again, because of all these experiences in my family business, it was obvious to me that I'm going to study something in the intersection of finance, business, management. And I ended up majoring in accounting and economics. And I actually was supposed to start my internship with one of the big four so I can be a certified public accountant.

8:25And I bailed. I decided that that's not what I wanted to do. so I actually started my I would say my post-college career in an FP &A team in a medical device company back in Israel and what I really realized even then even though it was way earlier on in my career is that I want to be a CFO I looked up at our CFO then and I really, I was like okay, I want to be like this guy but when I thought about what is at least back in Israel, what is the, I would say, the traditional or the normal route to ultimately be a CFO, it was the accounting route. You start as an accountant, you go all the way up to controller, and then CFO.

9:11But again, I bailed, so that was never an option. So I started FP &A, and I always, again, I'm not sure why, and I think I was, like, some of it was for sure luck and maybe good instincts. But I thought that maybe an alternative route to be to just have this strategic thinking that I thought McKinsey can offer. McKinsey was always a name because my boss in this company, in this FP &A team was ex-McKinsey. My brother-in-law also came from McKinsey. So there was this thing. And then I went to business school and joined McKinsey, as you mentioned. And that was a career-changing experience because what you're doing at McKinsey, instead of starting from, again, the models, the excels, the dashboards, the presentations, you start with solving different problems for different customers.

10:08And you see different businesses. And you get to, I think that made me a much more well-rounded person. and you also again get to help people and people have different challenges that they deal with and the other thing that I really liked about it is the human element of working with executives and you realize that you can come up as a finance leader, you can come up with the best theoretical solution but eventually you have to move your client to action and if it all stays you know in the theory and it doesn't move to action it doesn't really worth anything and I think that prepared me also well for my current job because a lot of what I do today right is you need to move people to action whether it's my you know our CEO our management team our board and McKinsey was an amazing school you know even as an associate to just sit in the room when you see people talk to CEOs and board members and you take notes, you take notes, you know, do's, don'ts.

11:18And that was a special experience.

11:21Guy Zeltser: Did you observe anything just as you mentioned, observing those leaders up close across the table? Did it change your opinion of leadership? Yes, actually, you're actually bringing me back to a specific experience that I had. actually that made me realize that i do belong back to the you know the finance side in the corporate world whether it's startups or not um so what happened is uh it was a strategy project that we did with a client and um we worked for a few months on this this uh digital strategy and it ended up getting approved by the board and we we presented it to the board to the ceo they all loved it it required a lot of investments um and again they all said yeah we want to do it including the head of this business unit and then they told me okay guy now you need to go to our internal finance team and make sure that this plan is getting the sufficient budget in the upcoming planning season so i've done that of course um and they said okay how much revenue of these things is going to give us in the next six months and i said what do you mean it's a five-year plan you need to invest a lot uh to get big things uh but it will take some time right like every big thing you're trying to do you need to put some money up front before the revenue comes uh and and you need to make some bets and you need to believe in what you're doing and and then you know for ultimately the revenue to come but he asked about the next six months and i I said, probably not much.

12:59Here is what I think, but probably not much. He said, okay, so you can get 10 % more resources. And I said, what do you mean? Like your board just approved the entire thing, which means 10x more resources, not 10 % more. And he said, yeah, it doesn't really work like that. And when we came back to the leadership of the company, they said, look, okay, again, our finance team is our finance team. You've got to work with them. And it is what it is. and that made me realize that again as a leader you have to you you have to ignore some of the short-term noise even if it's a publicly traded company if you're trying to do something big and that's also my spirit personally you have to take some bets and you have to you really need to remember what is the big thing you're trying to accomplish and and solve for that even if it means that you might suffer a bit in the short term, because again, you need to sometimes, you know, again, make some bets in order to be successful.

13:58Guy Zeltser: We're going to ask you about HIPPO insurance. We're just a question away from that. But I'm wondering, why did you leave consulting ultimately? And you joined HIPPO, but I imagine there were a number of opportunities that you, you know, you were going to land an industry somewhere. Why did you ultimately leave consulting? I was, I really missed being part of a company and actually building things myself versus giving advice to other people on how to build things themselves. Like, that was the biggest thing. If I, as you mentioned, we'll talk about Epo in a bit, but, you know, I'm sure you'll see the passion in my eyes when I talk about Epo because to me, there is, there is a big difference between you are part of something and you helped taking, you know, building.

14:49your baby or growing your baby from toddler phase all the way up to teenage, ultimately to adulthood, and then making things better and better, I really miss that. In consulting, what you're doing instead is you're just moving every few months from one thing to the other, and I was really missing owning things, doing things myself, and actually building and seeing the impact. A lot of it for me is about seeing the impact with my own eyes. that's where I get my joy, my pride, and so on and so forth.

15:20Guy Zeltser: For someone new to Hippo, then let's kick things off. What is the business today? Who does it serve? And where is the opportunity? So Hippo started actually around 10 years ago here in the Bay Area. the original vision was to simply

15:45simplify and improve the shopping experience of people who need insurance, home insurance specifically. And the idea was really, instead of, you know, if you think about the traditional shopping experience, you usually call someone, whether it's a large company or your local agent, and they start asking you a bunch of questions. You know, what's the material of the roof? was the square footage of the house uh and how do i know like that that was the experience for me when i bought my first house in chicago where i will live where i lived at that time and um and i didn't know all these questions because i didn't yet move to the house uh so hippo the original vision for hippo was through technology to really simplify that and you just click a button and we were i think the first or one of the first for sure to really simplify that and shorten it from It took me an hour and a half to buy my first policy.

16:40With Ipo, you could get a quote after a minute, and you can actually complete the shopping experience after a few minutes, probably three to four minutes. And that's how we started. You mentioned that in the beginning. We have evolved ever since. And if you look at who we are today, we are still in the homeowner's business, but we have evolved to be a diversified, technology-native carrier that has a diversified sources of business, so not just homeowners. But other areas of insurance, like renter's insurance, different lines in casualty insurance, we have personal commercial, because diversification is the name of the game in insurance.

17:23And like many other businesses, if you don't put all of your eggs in one basket, but in various baskets, you are getting much more predictable returns, which is what we're doing as a, you know, it's very crucial for us as a publicly traded company that needs to demonstrate growth in both top line and bottom line, but also demonstrate predictable results.

17:47Guy Zeltser: Hippo has chosen to retain more insurance risk. What gave you confidence to make that shift? it's a great question it has been a journey uh it has been a very it has been a definitely a somewhat of a very interesting journey um we indeed started not participating at all in the risk but then slowly as we improved our underwriting results and as we actually started making or generate underwriting profit so meaning for let's say an insurance policy that we sell for, let's say,$2 ,000, we actually generated money on that, which is the name of the game in insurance. And when we started seeing that we are indeed producing much better results and started generating returns on, again, started making money on these policies that we sold, this is when we said, okay, now we can actually enjoy and bear the fruits of our own hard work.

18:53And that gave us the confidence. you just see that you are not again on a unit economics basis it is absolutely positive which again in insurance it's not that trivial if you go back to all these other insurtechs as you know as we were all bucketed as some of them are no longer with us some of them are still losing money even after 10 years in the game and we actually moved to the positive side a few years ago. And all of that has given us the confidence that we know what we're doing. It's much more predictable now. And as a result, we increase the risk so we can generate even more returns to our shareholders.

19:34Guy Zeltser: We'd love to sort of unpack Hippo's economics here. I mean, where is the more important story happening today? Is it underwriting results, fees, investment income? Where's the story? So the story, so the entire story is in all of these, but I'm happy that you asked a question like that because it is indeed how we want people to think about the business. If you actually look at the evolution of our results and you specifically look at 2026 and what the analysts are thinking, a lot of it is actually coming from fees. Yes, we do have investment income. We do have risks we are retaining. But a big portion, a big portion of our revenue is coming from fees and commissions we're charging.

20:29And that's great. Investors love it. One of the reasons why in the last three years our stock price is up about 200 plus percent is because of that. the more fees you collect, the more commissions you collect. Investors perceive that as to be as close as you can get to risk-free, or at least, again, not in this underwriting bucket as you're framing it, which has really helped us a lot, and that's absolutely the direction. So we started as a company in the homeowner space, and as you mentioned, we are taking more risk. But over the years, the evolution of the business model was to actually support additional insurance companies.

21:11Like we started with the homeowners program to support other companies through, because of our tech nature, because we understood the space. And now we support more than 60 programs. And when we support programs, then we start collecting these fees. And that's absolutely the direction that we will continue to go to essentially enlarge the offering, provide more services so we can collect more fees. And again, that means more predictable outcomes for investors, which, you know, we all humans love predictability.

21:44Guy Zeltser: We always like to discuss the visibility into a business. Before the financial results arrive, which operating signals tell you whether HIPPO is performing as expected? What are you looking at? Absolutely. So we look at it through a few different lenses. So you mentioned this bucket between investment income, commission, and underwriting. Let me actually start with the commission because I think it's the most straightforward. Commissions, unlike many other businesses, let's say SaaS companies, let's just use that as a simple example. right what SaaS companies are doing is they are you know their job is to grow their customer base and then just we even with each customer base to just increase the size of the pie or the share of wallet and that's how they make more revenue for us it's very similar so what we are looking at is as I mentioned we started with only one program in the homeowner space but now we have more than 60.

22:57So we want to see this number keeps growing. And we want to see the overall volume of money that is flowing through this platform growing and growing. And you can know well in advance, because we are talking with these programs, and they're indicating to us how much, again, volume they're going to drive to our platform. So that's the first thing I'm looking at. I just know already, and I'm trying to understand how much volume is going to flow. and that is going to tell me that's giving me a very good visibility to my revenue in the next 24 months. On the underwriting side, you don't want to wait to actually see the results.

23:36You want to know in advance. So one of the things we're looking at is pricing trends. We're trying to understand whether the pricing of our products is going up, whether it's going down. In insurance, especially when you take underwriting risk, there is the pricing side, but there is also the loss aside because again that's the name of the game so we are trying to understand essentially the trend of these two how pricing is moving on the one hand and how the losses or the inflation is moving on the other hand and again I want to see that pricing is behaving stronger than the losses and that is also going to tell me it gives me predictability that the underwriting is going to look or how is the underwriting going to look into the future.

24:27When HIPPO decides

24:29Guy Zeltser: how much insurance risk to retain, what evidence really drives that decision? So the main evidence is you're taking this lens that I talked about of do you think, like when you look at the 60 programs that we have, each one of them, before we choose to take the risk, you're building your own view of how pricing looks like so how much money you're going to make and how much losses and commissions you need to pay out and we actually get the front seat view which is one of the strengths of our business model we we get to see it it's it's you can think about it as a try it before you buy it if you will because we start by seeing all these volumes that i mentioned uh flowing on the platform and and then we can see even if we're not retaining the risk and we pass the risk over to ranchers, we can see month by month whether these ranchers made money or did not make money.

25:32And that is giving us a lot of confidence to say, okay, we now have evidence of, let's say, 12 months or 18 months or three years, because it depends. Like some programs, you need a bit more time to really see the results. and that is giving us the confidence to say, okay, now we want to get another bite in the apple, which is exactly, if you look at, I mentioned initially homeowners, the next line that we participated in risk at is renters. So renters, we have 10 years of experience with. For the first few years, we did not retain risk, but then we saw the results and we really loved what we're seeing.

26:11And now we do take a significant chunk of that.

26:15Guy Zeltser: Guy, we want to touch on AI with you. We know Hippo has rolled out various AI tools. Where are you seeing meaningful business value, though, rather than just faster work? actually in many areas of our business so technology is in our even before ai came to our world technology is in our dna if you look at the headcount of people still more than one third of the employees i would say even closer to 40 percent are in the tech organization um that that has been again in our dna and that has always been a focus and if you look at ai and we've actually been public about it with a few different press releases, including one that came actually yesterday, we're seeing AI and we're seeing real impact and we're deploying it in many areas of the business.

27:13So if I go back to the customer experience and I talked earlier about the moment when you actually shop for insurance all the way through when we service the policy. So let's say customer now has a question or they want to make a change to their policy. AI is there. And I also mentioned claims. So when our customers are in a moment of need and they really need us the most because something, God forbid, happened, AI is there. And specifically, if I touch on the press release that we released yesterday, and that was in the claims environment, that's really impact. It's not just work faster. We did say that more than 80 % of what we're calling first notice of loss, which is exactly this moment where the customer is calling and they need our help.

28:02More than 80 % of these calls are being handled today by AI. And what that does, it enables our team, our humans, to actually continue to serve more and more customers because we keep on growing and serve them in a great way. Because if you also look at the customer satisfaction scores, they're at all time high for us and again that is also enabled by AI we also said about claims while we're at that topic and we said it a few months ago ever since then the numbers have really improved that what we're calling adjusters, individuals who are actually processing the claims they have been, six months ago already 30 % more efficient so can handle more because of AI and I can tell you that even ever since then.

28:54It has grown and now it's probably 50 % and it's not going to change. So that's real impact because it means that we can continue to grow the business. Just to give you an example, between not even when I joined, but between when I became the VP of finance, so my previous role in the middle of 2022 and 2026, we grew our revenue by 5x to almost$600 million this year. And actually, our headcount didn't really move as much. So that is showing you that we gain real efficiencies. A lot of it is enabled by AI. And again, that's real. This is not just making things faster.

29:35Guy Zeltser: Yeah, so, you know, the organization's decision-making, we wonder how AI is impacting that. And I mean, inside finance, Has AI actually, is it changing decisions yet or mainly changing how quickly your team gets there? Yeah, I think it's the way I would describe it is it definitely makes our teams much more efficient. It helps our teams to spend less time on the day-to-day. As an example, if you look at how much time it took us from the moment that the quarter was closed and over, to when we announced earnings. It used to take us five to six weeks. Now it takes us probably less than four. We're actually ready in less than four.

30:24A lot of it is AI. A lot of it is a lot of work that it took us to close the quarter. That's now less, it takes much less time. And that's again, real tangible impact. And it enables our teams to spend less time on that and much more time on the business. And to your point on decision-making, I wouldn't say that AI is making the decisions for us yet, but it definitely enables us to focus much more time on decisions and it improves the decision-making process. And that's what we want to do in finance. Eventually, we want to guide the strategic direction of the company and then to support the business and to enable the business together.

31:06And we want to literally steer the ship and make sure that the optimal decisions are being made. And again, a lot of it is being enabled by AI, a lot of it.

31:17Guy Zeltser: Just sort of coming back to the risk question and AI together then, has AI changed how you evaluate risk? Or is human judgment still doing most of the important work there? I would say that by and large, human judgment is still doing, especially when we think about risk management, right? insurance is the business of insurance is it's all about risk management whether it's real insurance risks because unlike other companies that are thinking about risks in terms of downside protection we are getting paid for taking risks so that's what we do and I would say by and large and we talk a lot with our board about it AI is still enabling, it helps all of us but I would say in almost everything that we do, the decision-making itself across the different things that we do, you still need humans.

32:15Absolutely. And I don't see that going anywhere.

32:19Guy Zeltser: Well, we are up to what we like to refer to as our finance strategic moment. Again, this might have happened anytime during the course of your career, but we're looking for a moment of insight that you experienced or a story you'd like to share about finance and strategy. Anything comes to mind? Yeah. There's for sure a period in our history, and I go back to, I mean, I'm still within this timeframe at Hippo. As I mentioned, so I've been here for six years, and it has been a rocky path, especially at the beginning. And when I think about a finance story, I go back to 2023. so 2023 we probably had the worst quarter in the history of the company I'm talking about the second quarter and that was probably a pivotal moment in the history of the company because it is especially when you're a public company and everybody is seeing your results we really had to think about what do we want to do next financially, strategically, and the combination of the two.

33:34Are we going to take the time and think things through? Are we going to take a step-by-step approach? Or are we trying to regain investor confidence? And are we trying to really make, again, a big transformation and a big change? And we chose this latter approach. frankly it was a few weeks when we really tried to understand how aggressive we want to go and also what we want to say but we ended up taking a lot of actions that I think was unpopular at that time we were just to give you a concrete example in our homeowners business if you look if you look at the numbers between 2023 and 2024 you will see a reduction of about 30 % in the premiums that we collected because we really realized that we need to be more balanced with the risks that we're taking.

34:30And again, a lot of these things are not easy, right? And it's not pleasant to have internal discussions on actually going down temporarily in the size of the homeowner's business whereas we're all used to things going up only. And that was really a pivotal moment because we we all realize that we need to do something like that to again regain people's confidence not just the street but also our employees um and i think that that has really shaped who we are because we we did this transformation we moved from just to give you an idea we lost about 300 million of net profit in 2022 and 2023 about that number um and we moved to profitability already in 2020 end of 2024, full-year profitability this year in 2026.

35:22And that happened because of all these actions that we have taken. And what that did to us is a few things. It really made us understand that we can do even more than we thought. Like when we initially presented this plan, we had even people internally that said, I don't know that this is possible to do. Like it's really ambitious. and I think we even surprised ourselves. We did it even better than we all thought and it was aggressive. And we also realized how strong we are as a team. We built a lot of resiliency and we realized how strong we are together and how great we are when we are really focusing on execution.

36:04And I think this is an experience that shaped all of us, shaped Ipo. And this is also an experience that when we now look at tripling our profitability between 2026 and 2028, or even forexing that, it's not as scary anymore because we have done something way more, you know, aggressive and more ambitious from, again, a quantum perspective. And now we realize that we can accomplish big things. And again, it's really shaped who we are.

36:36Guy Zeltser: As finance leaders know, Revenue operations is no longer just a sales conversation, especially when the quote, contract, and invoice somehow tell three different stories. Agent Force Revenue Management brings pricing, quoting, contracting, and billing together on one agentic revenue platform with a single source of commercial truth, proven workflows, and built-in governance. It gives people and AI agents the context to make smarter deals across every channel. The result? Finance spends less time playing revenue detective. And what your business sells is exactly what it invoices. Learn more about Agent Force Revenue Management at salesforce.com slash CFO.

37:31Guy Zeltser: That's salesforce.com slash CFO.

37:39Guy Zeltser: Well, we always like to have you look back once more before we go here. I want you to think about when you first stepped into the CFO role, that first 90 days. It's in your rear view mirror now, but what is it that you would have told yourself now that you've been in the job for a while? So a couple of things. First of all, when I think about the journey and when I think about what I thought the CFO role was going to be, especially earlier on in my career, again, if I go back to this initial story with my dad, you have revenue, you have expenses, and you need to make a spread. I mean, I learned at the CFO seat that it's not just about the numbers.

38:26A lot of it is about storytelling a lot of it is meeting with investors, employees explain to people what we're doing over and over again tell your story a bit based on the audience a lot of that is working with management and helping them a lot of that is allowing people to come to you and share their difficulties and I didn't think that I was going to do that as part of my job I thought I was going to focus on finance but again these are all things that i found out about a job a lot after i started but frankly i love it uh but it's definitely something i would uh i would definitely i'm now telling people when they ask me about how is it how does it how does it feel like to be a cfo and what do you do um i i'm i'm giving them a more balanced view than you know it's all about the numbers and the pnl and all that.

39:21Guy Zeltser: Guy, we always like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side for us. What's something most people don't know about you? Something, a milestone from your past, pursuit, an interest that you might have? Anything? Something that people don't know about me. So people probably, especially, yeah, most people probably don't know about me that I love hiking and I love to travel but hiking specifically after I finished my military service I spent six months in South America doing probably every potential hike in the continent it's something that I love doing, I wish I had time to do it more but the good news is that I am very much looking forward to January when And I'm going to try to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.

40:19And that's going to be my comeback story. It's something that I really, really enjoy doing. And, you know, especially, I feel that especially in today's world where technology is around us and we are so connected. And, you know, you wake up and your phone is buzzing and your phone is ringing and you get the news all over. Being in the nature, especially on high mountains. hopefully without cellular reception. This is when you go back, again, this is when I go back to South America and you get disconnected. You get to appreciate what matters. You get to enjoy the nature. It's something that I love doing and I can't wait for my upcoming trip.

41:02Guy Zeltser: How long, what's the span of time required to make that trek? So it depends. It's between five and nine days. and it's frankly it's a lot about acclimation five days only recommended to people who are just used to be at these altitudes of almost 20 ,000 feet which I am not used to I think my highest in South America was probably 15 or 16 ,000 not yet 20 ,000 so I'm going to take the longer route probably need to take less risks at the phase of my life. Speaking about risk management and insurance, need to mitigate the risks. Guy, what about a book or a resource for us? Is there any book out there influence your thinking along the way?

41:56Guy Zeltser: Or maybe it's a book you like to escape with. I don't know. Anything? I love reading. That's also my escape route before I go to sleep usually. I absolutely love reading. And one book, one of the best books I've ever read was Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, the legendary CEO of Disney. And putting aside the fact that I just love the brand, and actually my first trip abroad as a kid was to Euro Disney in Paris. it's an amazing book because what Bob Iger does he tells the story of how he and Disney approached M &As shortly after he took over Disney and he talks about the Pixar acquisition and the Lucasfilm acquisition and others and what's amazing in that is Bob Iger takes this very complex topic of M &A and at least in my opinion it talks about what really matters and what do you need to be careful of because i think that often when we all in the finance world look at mna right we all look at the numbers of course and synergies and risks and all that but what bob talks about is look when you buy when you decide that you want to buy a company and you want to buy it because you see all the potential and the talent don't touch it don't touch it let it shine don't try to change everything right because you are buying something so they can tell you what good looks like and how to do things better versus you go and tell them because otherwise why would you buy them and again when he tells the story about brands that i just love like pixar um lucasfilm that was just like this is something i'm taking with me to my day-to-day job like we had a few acquisitions over the years at hippo and that's what I told people don't touch it remember we acquired this company in Poland software shop five years ago now all of our engineering leadership is based in Poland and we bought them because they're an amazing company and I took all these lessons with me and I said no don't touch it, let them shine and that was how an amazing integration looked like to me Wonderful, thank you for that we are up to our final question This is where we ask you to look forward and we're interested in your priorities as a CFO for the coming 12 months.

44:29Guy Zeltser: What would those be? As a CFO of a publicly traded company, it's all about balancing the short term and the long term. The reality is it's a publicly traded company, so we do announce earnings every quarter. so of course that's that's that's an that's a key part of what i do to make sure that we are always on track to what we told people but then of course equally if not more spending a lot of time on the long term of the company and specifically uh we are in our in the phase of our journey as i mentioned that we are we aim to 3x or even 4xing our profits in the next two years So between 2026 and 2028, so ambitious goals.

45:15So a lot of my time goes to working with the teams on making sure that all these differentiation and growth engines, we are building them in the best way possible. So we are set up for success in the future. And thinking even longer term than that, like what is the ultimate vision, not just for the next two years, but five years down the road, 10 years down the road, because we are trying to do big things in insurance. so I do spend a lot of time there and you know because of that and what I see I'm very very optimistic I'm very proud of what we accomplished again 5xing the revenue in the last four years moving to profitability and even more about the trajectory and what we're going to

46:02Guy Zeltser: achieve big things I'm sure Guy Zelzer thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader Jack, thanks a lot for having me. I had a lot of fun and looking forward to stay in touch.

46:29Guy Zeltser: Hello, we're benchmarking the CFO path. Join 500 finance leaders helping define how today's CFOs rise and lead. If you're a CFO or senior finance executive, contribute your experience. It takes just a few minutes and you'll receive early access to the findings. Visit cfothoughtleader.com slash benchmarking.