Earnings reviews on Rubrik, Broadcom, CrowdStrike & Palo Alto have already been sent this week. My current portfolio/performance can be found here.
1. Lemonade (LMND) – Co-Founder/CEO Daniel Schreiber Interviews with Piper Sandler
The Compelling Insurance Landscape:
Schreiber spoke on the giant and favorable insurance landscape in relation to other parts of FinTech. While banking and insurance are around 3% of GDP, there are 2x as many insurance companies in the Fortune 100 compared to banks and far more is being spent on banking FinTech than on insurance. For context, $5B was spent on insurance in 2025 compared to well over $100B for the overall FinTech universe. Compared to other sectors, there’s so little innovation happening in insurance and so little transition to app or other AI-powered experiences over the traditional broker-led buying process. So a massive market… with slower-moving competitors… that all have low customer service scores. It’s a great setup that should support rapid top-line LMND compounding for a long time if they keep executing.
AI Cutting Overall Risk as a Threat to Insurers:
Lemonade welcomes autonomous driving technology reducing risk associated with auto insurance plans. They are ahead of the curve in terms of releasing slick integrations with leading manufacturers like Tesla and are already offering 50% discounts to those customers. As the technology gets better and risk falls, those discounts will get larger. At the same time, claims will get less frequent as well, meaning these plans will remain profitable, even if the premiums tied to them fall.
Is Your AI Real?
Lemonade was asked how investors can get comfortable with their AI actually being real and better than the competition’s. They reviewed the same evidence that we’ve been talking about for years. Headcount is down over the last 3.5 years while the business has explosively scaled. Loss Adjustment Expense (LAE; overhead cost of handling claims outside of actual damages) ratio is 6%, which is far better than the 10%-11% metric that giant incumbents post despite their far larger scale. Leadership sees this 6% improving to 3% and perhaps even better over time, deepening a structural lead vs. giants and creating room to undercut them on pricing while maintaining strong loss ratios. For example, Schreiber spoke about especially strong pet loss ratios despite hiking prices by 12% vs. a 27% raise for the industry over the same period and having a higher new business penalty (new customers start at peak loss ratios) due to faster growth.
They also handle claims and onboard new customers in tiny fractions of the time it takes legacy competition, which is why Lemonade sports a best-in-class net promoter score (NPS) and it is directly because of its tech talent. Finally, large incumbents are outspending Lemonade by a dramatic amount on technology, yet aren’t able to come close to matching the things we’ve just discussed. That is partially because they have an immense amount of tech debt from the decades of antiquated and improperly integrated systems they all have stitched together. But it’s also because Lemonade has a tech and AI native culture that more optimally utilizes these things in everything they do. Not just since ChatGPT. Since inception.
- Schreiber thinks Progressive is the best incumbent competitor in terms of tech and innovation quality.
Changing Traffic Trends From AI:
Lemonade is actually set to benefit from insurance search traffic shifting to chatbots. These bots are better at finding better discounts and vendors with high customer service scores. Because of this, Lemonade is over-indexing in chatbot outputs and “punching considerably above” their weight.
Lemonade also added its autonomous vehicle (AV) insurance product to Indiana.
2. Alphabet (GOOGL) – Capital Raise & Special Call
Alphabet leadership hosted a brief call following the massive $84B equity raise (less than 2% of the market cap). They reiterated plans to “significantly increase” CapEx in 2027 vs. 2026’s massive $185B level. The equity raise and $20B raised in debt since the earnings call are viewed as ways to fund a lot of this spend. This can be taken two ways. First, CapEx is going to continue to grow and that’s great news for the AI infrastructure cycle. The other read is that companies (Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all rumored to be raising too) have used up their willingness to fund more data center buildouts with existing cash on the balance sheet. That means they’re now more reliant on capital markets to keep boosting investments. Based on previous super-cycle patterns, this is a sign that rapid investment growth rates will likely slow in 2027 and beyond. It’s not a strong enough sign to motivate me to remove my SOXX position. But? It's a small step in that direction because I think it’s a small step towards hearing mega-caps talk about more gradual CapEx growth.
To me, the equity raise makes a lot of sense. Their cloud backlog is massive. The revenue and profit associated with deploying compute is clear, and their main bottleneck is infrastructure. They should be spending right now to establish leadership in this new world. And it's easy to accept, in my opinion, because the financial reward is so clear.