Venture Everywhere Podcast: Arianna Armelli with Scott Hartley
Arianna Armelli, founder and CEO of Dorothy chats with Scott Hartley, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures.
In episode 59 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Scott Harley, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere VC, chats with Arianna Armelli, founder and CEO of Dorothy, a startup revolutionizing disaster recovery by streamlining post-disaster navigation for policyholders. Arianna shares how her background in urban planning and firsthand experience with disaster response inefficiencies inspired her to launch Dorothy. Arianna also discusses the company’s pivot to advocating for homeowners in disputes and explains how AI and automation are driving a more proactive and accessible approach to disaster recovery.
In this episode, you will hear:
Dorothy’s shift on enhancing public adjusters' roles to secure fair homeowner settlements.
How delayed insurance payouts create financial hardship for homeowners.
Policyholders' challenges in understanding coverage and resolving claim disputes.
Community-led efforts can sometimes be more effective than government response.
Conflict between fair settlements for policyholders and insurers' profit motives.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Scott: Hi everybody, I'm Scott Hartley. I'm co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. I'm super excited to be here today with Arianna Armelli. Arianna is the founder and CEO of Dorothy.
00:00:46 Scott: Dorothy is a startup that we've invested in that's transforming disaster recovery and how policyholders can streamline insurance claims, get reimbursements, figure out how to navigate the post disaster recovery which is something that is near and dear to my heart, having been living in Los Angeles for the last few years with all of the wildfires that just hit parts of Pasadena and parts of the Pacific Palisades.
00:01:12 Scott: So Arianna, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for joining us today.
00:01:16 Arianna: I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
00:01:19 Scott: Absolutely. Going back to your days at University of Pennsylvania, UPenn, where you studied something called landscape architecture, which I know is much more than gardening.
00:01:28 Scott: It's actually more like urban planning, climate resilience planning, all of these features. Walk us through your backgrounds and how you came to this passion for disaster recovery and sort of climate resilience and in the orientation of building Dorothy.
00:01:44 Arianna: I actually started my career in the architecture field. That's what I studied in undergrad, based in New York, went into the field, post Hurricane Sandy. So like right when that hit, I was becoming an architect and working on a number of large scale infrastructure projects that were a direct result of that storm.
00:02:04 Arianna: So really got interested in how we were building infrastructure for communities after these big events and how we were preparing for the next one. I got really interested in urban planning through that journey. And I got even more interested in the insurance world from my time spent with a number of communities that were affected during Sandy.
00:02:30 Arianna: So a couple of key things that I found really interesting and also troublesome was just the timeframe that people were waiting to get paid by their insurance company. And also the fact that FEMA at the time was nowhere to be found. And it was just an absolute mess of how they responded to those events.
00:02:47 Arianna: Ultimately, what I ended up doing is I worked in that business for a couple of years, about seven, and then pivoted my own career and wanted to start a tech company and get more involved in shorter term solutions. So I went to Penn in the landscape program because it had a heavy emphasis on urban design and urban planning.
00:03:10 Arianna: And I knew it would be something that would interest me. But in parallel, what I wanted to utilize was the other programs within Penn on the engineering and business side. So Wharton and other classes where I could kind of equip myself with new skills that I did not learn in the architecture field, data analysis, understanding insurance risk and all of these other things that ultimately led to what I do now.
00:03:34 Scott: Amazing. My little sister studied there and spent many an evening at Smokes or the Greek Lady or many of the spots around campus.
00:03:42 Scott: It's really interesting to think about this role of architecture, landscape design, urban planning and how you build resilient communities and even thinking about the Pacific Palisades and how it sits adjacent to a very large wild part of the Santa Monica Mountains, the Pangaea State Park, all of that and thinking about money coming in post disaster from FEMA or other places.
00:04:07 Scott: And just the questions that you have about, okay, do you just rebuild things exactly the same as they were? There clearly were risks associated with some of that, or is there some thinking about what could potentially be done better or more resiliently or more in line with the fact that climate is impacting us in different ways going forward?
00:04:26 Scott: So we'd love to kind of talk about Dorothy and what you guys are building from a product standpoint and the problems that you guys are really addressing and alleviating some of these pain points post disaster, helping people receive their claims faster, help them navigate this really complex world of insurance and maybe also how to be prepared before. But maybe you could walk us through a little bit of the product that you've been building over the last couple of years with Dorothy.
00:04:51 Arianna: I will start with talking about the initial product and the initial thesis around the company, which we did work on for a number of years. And in theory, I thought it was a great product. I do still think it's a great product, but it's incredibly difficult to make successful, not from the team perspective, but more from the market dynamic perspective.
00:05:12 Arianna: So that product that we initially went to market with was essentially a cash advancement against future insurance claim settlements. So we first thought that the problem in the market that homeowners or just policyholders in general dealt with is that insurance claims took too long to pay out. And we thought, okay, it's a bottleneck in the process.
00:05:34 Arianna: The insurance carriers have a lot to deal with when there's big storms, which is all true. And what we built was a way to leverage different types of data and do an analysis and see if we can underwrite an advancement against a future settlement. We launched that product when cash advancements were hot.
00:05:52 Arianna: There are other companies doing it. It was a good market, interest rates were low. And through that product, we spoke with hundreds of property owners that were waiting for settlements and needed advancements. And what we learned was that it really wasn't a workflow issue on the carrier side.
00:06:10 Arianna: It was a dispute and advocacy issue that the homeowners either didn't know of or know who to go to for proper advocacy to help them through the claim. And nine out of 10 of them were dealing with a dispute from their carrier for whatever reason.
00:06:28 Arianna: They're like, "I thought I was covered up to this amount. They're not giving me even a fraction of what it's going to cost me to rebuild or repair my roof or deal with the flooding. They've asked me specific questions in the adjustment process that are now saying that I'm denied for something I thought I was covered for."
00:06:48 Arianna: And what we realized through that first year of going through that was like, okay, there's a misunderstanding on the policyholder side, like a wide scale misunderstanding of what your coverage is or how the adjustment process works once a claim occurs.
00:07:03 Arianna: And the carrier spend a lot of money convincing their customers that they are on their side through and through, but anyone who goes through a claim with most carriers will see that it's a business. They have to make money.
00:07:19 Arianna: So when a settlement occurs, the businesses you pay as little as you possibly can, or get your customer to agree to. That realization ultimately led us to reassess how we were addressing the problem and say, we think that there's a problem earlier in the workflow here or in the event itself.
00:07:40 Arianna: And that the majority of people who are filing claims just don't have access to advocacy or a licensed professional to help them through that process when they need it. Ultimately, what we ended up pivoting into and reassessing our product was we looked into if there was an existing advocacy space, how they operated and why most policyholders didn't know about them.
00:08:04 Arianna: And that's how we landed on learning about the public adjuster industry. What they do, how they help policyholders when there's a difficult claim or how they dispute against a carrier when they're trying to take advantage or undercut that settlement.
00:08:18 Arianna: And we learned about the value of them and how much more successful they are able to get in a settlement once those claims are working through them. So we decided to build a product around their industry and improve how they operate so that more people can go through them when they need them.
00:08:33 Scott: Hmm. It's so interesting. There's a quote that I often reference in talks when I talk about my book or other things and it's a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald and he says that the mark of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
00:08:52 Scott: And I think part of the whole conversation around disaster recovery and what you guys are doing is bringing into the light, it's not good guys versus bad guys. A disaster happened, people are hurting and there are these various resources and how to navigate this landscape.
00:09:08 Scott: And maybe just to take a step back and define some of the terms, you kind of have on one side of the equation, you have the policy holder, right, who is the homeowner or the person that has experienced the loss and now is filing a claim.
00:09:22 Scott: And the claim is being filed to an insurance company or a carrier that you've paid premiums to over months and months and months. And now you're entitled to a settlement of some sort. But that insurance company maybe even works with a third party that deals with their actuarial tables and how they define risk and things like that.
00:09:43 Scott: And so they're incentivized to some degree being a business to pay fewer dollars out in claims than they've received in premiums. And so you have this tension between the policyholder needing the most money because they've lost their home. They pay premiums, maybe those premiums don't fully cover the claims that they now are entitled to and you have this game of tug of war.
00:10:05 Scott: And then on the side of the policyholder, you have what are called public adjusters who can come in and sort of represent that policyholder and help battle on their behalf against the settlements that are being adjudicated by the insurance company. Is that a rough landscape of the ecosystem?
00:10:25 Arianna: Yeah, I think one party that wasn't mentioned is the role of the independent adjuster, which is not a public adjuster, but sometimes, more often than not, when it's like a massive storm, insurance carriers will have non-employee-based adjusters that they hire through a third-party entity that kind of equips them to send out to these sites.
00:10:49 Arianna: And even when they do that, there's normally not enough adjusters that are hired and shipped out to assess the amount of houses that they have assigned to them in a reasonable amount of time.
00:11:03 Arianna: I don't like to say certain things that I can't technically prove, but there's an assumption with a lot of these firms that they want to get rehired by the carrier. So it is in their best interest to adjust these properties at a lower rate. A lot of the time, these people aren't that experienced with the adjustment process and how to assess damage.
00:11:24 Arianna: So they make mistakes and it creates a lot of back and forth. And it delays the process. And when you're talking about someone's home where it's their only home and they can't live in it, every single day is a big deal. And I think that's a massive problem that occurs in the industry that is unfortunate. And we don't know how to fix that one yet.
00:11:47 Scott: Yeah, it's fascinating. It probably gets into maybe a conversation about preparedness and how people can actually get ahead of some of these things and in working with Dorothy or what they can do on their own as well.
00:11:58 Scott: But just thinking about the ways that these adjusters, you know, they're cutting corners in some ways to try to make rough cut. I was just thinking about a kitchen, you know, if you have a kitchen on average, it costs X amount per square foot, but your particular kitchen might be very fancy and you have a really nice grill or you have a marble countertop.
00:12:16 Scott: And therefore your kitchen should get a much greater claim than maybe the average, the law of averages that the actuarial table says that you should get for that kitchen. But how can people sort of prepare and documents and get ahead of some of these things.
00:12:31 Scott: Or obviously the public adjuster that you hire could maybe go through detail line by line and fight back against those averages that maybe you're entitled to much more than they would say that your home is worth or things like that.
00:12:45 Arianna: Absolutely. That specific example is referenced in the policy that you sign onto. There's two terms within a policy that I think is one of the first items that a public adjuster is going to review. And it's either replacement cost value or actual cost value.
00:13:03 Arianna: And the difference there is exactly what you mentioned is that what is it going to cost to replace this specific item at its current cost based on, you know, you could have gotten a really expensive TV 10 years ago that's now broken, but because of this storm.
00:13:20 Arianna: And it's like, well, are you going to get refunded for what you paid for that TV then, or are you going to get refunded for what that same item costs today? Understanding those terms in your policy is incredibly important for navigating that initial offering in a settlement.
00:13:37 Arianna: Understanding exclusions within your policy, if you have potential excess coverage for certain events, this happens a lot with flood events. Those are being excluded. It used to a while ago be a standard in a homeowner's insurance policy, but now most places require you to get a supplemental coverage for flood.
00:13:58 Arianna: I imagine that that's gonna happen. If not, it's already happening in California and other areas that are prone to fires. Those are really important things to look out for when you're signing these documents and what you're actually paying for upfront.
00:14:13 Scott: I was in Miami Beach this last week and I was walking through South Beach. And at one point my Apple Watch showed that I was at negative seven feet and I was walking through a nice neighborhood and I thought to myself, no wonder flood insurance is unaffordable here at minus seven feet, water is inevitable.
00:14:32 Arianna: Yeah.
00:14:34 Scott: It's kind of this interesting conversation again about the business of insurance. They only want to underwrite risks that are somewhat tenable, but then the values and the rights of policyholders and how, what you're entitled to and being able to navigate those documents.
00:14:51 Scott: Are you guys building anything on the technical or the AI side to help people better navigate these documents? Even what you're mentioning, when I sign up for lemonade insurance or something like that, nobody really goes and reads the 200 page policy documents.
00:15:06 Scott: But if there's some way to be able to pull out key terms and highlight or to help people navigate some of these critical moments where they could either push back before they purchased the policy or they could augment the policy slightly to be better covered.
00:15:20 Arianna: Yeah, that's on our product roadmap. It's something we're collecting a lot of data around now. So one thing that we've learned in this industry is that building anything without enough training data specific to the problem is going to be a bit difficult.
00:15:36 Arianna: So insurance data as a whole is quite proprietary and it's not something that you can access open source. And it's also very, very difficult to acquire it like one-to-one just through policy holders. So a big part of what we're doing now is building partnerships so that we can access enough data that we feel comfortable building out a model just like this.
00:16:01 Arianna: So we're giving accurate advice, understanding exactly where the pushback might be on a policy. And it takes time, but it's something that we are working on and we'll be excited about launching, hopefully soon.
00:16:16 Scott: Amazing. Going back to the moment of adjustment, the moment of pivot between doing cash advance against future claims to then navigating into some of these adjacencies in the business model.
00:16:28 Scott: Somebody told me a few years back, she pivoted from being the COO to being the CEO. And she said, you know, a COO, you're the number one employee, you're kind of on the team of the employees.
00:16:38 Scott: But the CEO, once you flip that switch, you're the one who has to see the future, you have to be undoubtedly confident, you have to be charting the course. And people look to you to know the direction.
00:16:49 Scott: And so I guess a hard question, as CEO, how did you make that decision to say, given where the industry is, given where interest rates are going, given that buy now, pay later, or cash advance is losing its luster in some parts of the... maybe investment community, how did you gain that conviction as a founder to step away from something that you're beholden to wanna hold onto because you've got sunk costs, you put a lot of effort, you've put a lot of time, a lot of product into?
00:17:18 Scott: It's such an interesting question, I think for every founder on their journey, is there are always these forks in the road and you sort of have to with conviction pick one. But how do you get to that conviction point and what was it for you when you made that decision?
00:17:32 Arianna: Well, that's actually easy. I saw death staring me in the face. I had worked on a business. I put my all into it, including my own personal capital. I had raised money from a number of people that are close to me and investors that I've grown to trust and admire.
00:17:50 Arianna: And I saw my company slipping away from me in the sense that if we didn't figure out what to do that worked and made money, that product made $0, that cash advancement, because it's a lending product, there's balance sheet, you don't make money for months into the future.
00:18:08 Arianna: And you need to have enough scale with the lending product to really show financial viability. That was like a really easy thing once I did a little self-reflection and said, am I willing to let this business fail because I'm too stubborn to let go of an initial idea?
00:18:26 Arianna: Once I became comfortable with that, I said, okay, well, we're smart people. We have enough product and enough talent here to figure out what is the right product to build. And we had individuals telling us what their problem was, like, okay, so we can solve this. Let's start figuring out a way to solve this. And we'll do that.
00:18:48 Arianna: In response to like the vision or why pivoting made sense besides from I'm going to lose my company was we saw a massive opportunity that at the time was not being tapped into.
00:19:04 Arianna: There are companies that were getting spun out all the time in the climate space that were building data models or infrastructure for understanding climate risk, but the majority of them work on the insurance side of the market and that's who they sell into.
00:19:17 Arianna: And we can do that as well, but no one was really tapping into the policyholder side. It's a massive market. So there was an economic incentive as well to say, okay, well, we can still build a massive business. We can do it with data and technology and not have to take on lending capital, like a debt facility, and all the risks that comes along with that.
00:19:40 Arianna: But being super honest, we had no business being in the financial industry as it is. I don't come from that world. I'm smart enough to figure out how to do it, but it was going to be an uphill battle. I know data, I know tech, I know the risks around insurance now, and that's what I should be working on.
00:19:57 Arianna: So I think as soon as we realized the potential and what the initial product should be, we felt comfortable enough to say, we can do this, let's set a small milestone for ourselves in the business. That means we're going to generate revenue, we're going to get some customers in the door, and then they're going to continue to tell us what we need to be building.
00:20:23 Arianna: And we're going to forget about these massive, big picture visions that you have to have, but we're going to reassess how we view success and milestones and we're going to cut them down into shorter spurts. And that is how we're going to win. And that has been working for us.
00:20:39 Scott: One of the questions that we often get as investors is, hey, what are you looking for in a founder? What is it at a pre-seed, pre-product, pre-Delaware incorporation, pre-anything sometimes, what is it about a founder that leads you to invest or not invest?
00:20:56 Scott: And other than adaptability and sort of the ability to face adversity and work on the second and the third iteration, the fourth iteration. I think one framework that I think about a lot is called the RICE framework, R-I-C-E.
00:21:10 Scott: And it's about motivations and motivations being I'm going to do what's right, so that's the R. The I is the ideology of my belief system and my values. The C is coercion and it's just like I'm going to like twist things and get it my way. And the E is ego. And I think between those four, it's really to your point, it's about the R.
00:21:31 Scott: It's really about getting to the right answer without biases toward ideology, without trying to be coercive and steer the ship overly strongly, and certainly without ego. You have to pivot the ship in a way that maybe means that you're admitting being wrong, but that type of motivation toward the right answer of just what is the market telling me?
00:21:53 Scott: What is the market telling me? And I'm going to keep iterating toward the right answer without any semblance of my own ego, without my own ideology, without my own coercion. I think that's a really interesting framework. And it strikes me a lot speaking to you about just this humility and adaptability, which is exactly why, what we hoped for in backing you and in backing Dorothy.
00:22:15 Scott: But I think these moments we often think of as these crucible moments of, oh, I got it wrong. Uh, oops.. But instead it's actually, no, you were iterating your way toward product market fit and you made the exact right answer to discount ego, discount these other things and maximize what the right answer seemed to be.
00:22:34 Scott: And so I think that's a great framework for people listening to think about your own decision making and how do you sort of minimize some of these other things in your life that steer you toward the sirens, toward the rocks, which are ego and coercion and ideology.
00:22:48 Scott: And really at the end of the day, all that matters is getting to the right answer. And so I think that point, what is it now that keeps you up at night now that you're past that set of rocks? I'm sure there are other rocks on the horizon that are keeping you waking up in the middle of the night. What are some of those?
00:23:04 Arianna: So controversial answer, nothing is keeping me up at night. I am sleeping wonderfully. And that's because I've learned how to also prioritize my health in my path to being a better founder, being a better CEO, and being a better leader. And in no world is someone who is pulling their hair out of their head 24/7, a good leader, unfortunately.
00:23:27 Arianna: There are obviously some struggles that we're dealing with as a business, but I've become really comfortable with those problems. And I also know that I will figure them out or we will figure them out as a team. And they're not keeping me up at night, which I don't know why they're not, but they're just not. I feel like we're in a pretty good position as a business right now. We have a lot of exciting things happening and a lot of hard work ahead of us, but I'm sleeping well.
00:23:58 Scott: That's great. Being a founder is all about contrarian answers that are right. So I like that people should be able to be a CEO and have great sleep at night. That's perfect.
00:24:09 Scott: One question just on this national news scope with the new administration and things that are changing in Washington. Do you have any thoughts around policy changes or national disaster recovery or the announcement three days ago from President Trump about FEMA?
00:24:26 Scott: And just the questions of deprecating FEMA or more things going to states to navigate? Any opinions about that change? Or I guess FEMA in some sense, mostly goes money from federal government going to state and local to rebuild infrastructure, roads, power, public infrastructure not necessarily meant for like the end grieving homeowner. What are your thoughts about this changing policy landscape as it relates to disaster response?
00:24:57 Arianna: When Sandy happened, I think one of the things that catalyzed or radicalized me in my opinion was, this was a short term thing that I was working on, but I was a part of through one of the urban planning companies that I worked with.
00:25:11 Arianna: They were a part of project called the Big U. So the Big U is an infrastructure project in New York City that is essentially like a big barrier around lower Manhattan. It's all landscape parks and other things to prevent flooding. Multi-billion dollar project that is still going on and done in phases.
00:25:30 Arianna: And a lot of it was taxpayer money. I'm a part of that project at the time and I'm working on these gardens and flood gates and all these things. And then I've got friends from college who, their multi-generational family home is completely destroyed and they're waiting for a check from FEMA for a couple hundred dollars.
00:25:51 Arianna: So did it piss me off that Trump said it? Absolutely not. I thought it was like, yes, be a bit more controversial and push back on FEMA because when it comes down to their role or how equipped they are to handle these things at the federal level, I don't think that they do enough. I think there's a lot of negative connotation around FEMA.
00:26:12 Arianna: If you ask actual people who deal with them, I think the infrastructure that they have in place to file and pay out people is so outdated and inefficient. I don't have an opinion that contradicts what he said.
00:26:28 Scott: It's interesting because it's all headline grabbing, but then when you dig into the actual responsiveness and how things get done, that's a perfect example of a multi-billion dollar public park that's great, but takes many, many years to develop with big expensive architecture firms and all bells and whistles where meanwhile, hundreds of people who've just lost their home are completely without.
00:26:52 Scott: And just thinking of a sequencing issue of if you could revitalize those individuals through some sort of injection of capital quicker, that person could rebuild their home, they could bring their family back, the schools might reopen. Maybe they start a business again.
00:27:06 Scott: Maybe it revitalizes that local community talking about your background in sort of urban planning and community development, all these things and which sequence is what. If we have a beautiful park but no one lives there five years later, does it matter?
00:27:19 Arianna: One thing I wanna mention on that I, I witnessed at a later storm. So I split my time a lot between New York and Hawaii. So I was in Hawaii when the Maui fires took place. So FEMA had not paid out a single relief check to any of these people that went through. And the majority, 95% of the people affected in Maui were homeowners.
00:27:41 Arianna: So I was on Oahu, which is a different island. And what I witnessed occur was hundreds, if not thousands of people mobilized on Oahu. And the federal government was restricting aid from other islands at the time. They were not allowing outsiders to send aid.
00:28:02 Arianna: And people with boats on Oahu, they would pick up lines of cars and dropping aid off, like things that people actually needed. They dropped them off at a government building and people were loading them onto their personal boats, jet skis, other things, and driving to the other island.
00:28:23 Arianna: And then they had people on surfboards pulling the items like, this is how the community mobilized in a time of crisis to make sure that people got what they needed. And I had never seen anything like that before.
00:28:36 Arianna: And it made me change my opinion even further around the role of government and how inefficient sometimes they are in times of crisis with helping out actual people who pay taxes and live in the States that they're a part of. So yeah, I'm a bit extreme in my viewpoint now.
00:28:56 Scott: No. I appreciate you sharing that with all of us. And that's a really visual memory and something that I think we could all take to heart for how community mobilizes versus how government sometimes is sporadic and extremely slow.
00:29:12 Scott: Well, shifting gears just to the kind of that, the last few minutes of the podcast, I would love to do a speed round with you just around a book that you're reading or a podcast that you listen to that you can recommend?
00:29:24 Arianna: A book I'm reading right now, nothing to do with my industry, but I'm interested in it. It's called the Nineteen Reservoirs of New York City. And it's all about how New York gets our fresh water and the infrastructure around it. I found it super interesting, almost done with it.
00:29:40 Arianna: And a podcast I'm listening to at the moment is The Diary of a CEO. I really liked this podcast with Dr. Stacy Sims, all about women's health and how our bodies react to different nutrition and other things differently than men, which historically there aren't many studies around. So I found that really interesting.
00:30:01 Scott: On the book front, maybe a book that you've encountered or read before, but if you have 64 free hours to listen–
00:30:07 Arianna: The Power Broker.
00:30:09 Scott: Power Broker. Exactly, about Robert Moses.
00:30:11 Arianna: 64 months to read that one.
00:30:14 Scott: Months and months and months but there's a great documentary about the book and the editorial relationship between Bob Gottlieb, who was the editor at Knopf Books and Robert Caro, who wrote the book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker.
00:30:30 Scott: And incredible for those of you that are interested in New York City, urban planning and park developments and all of these topics. But that's been on my shelf for years, but I finally sort of dove into the audio book and then started digging through the real text. But that's the one that's been on my shelf, in your wheelhouse of urban planning.
00:30:49 Arianna: Okay, going up.
00:30:50 Scott: Yeah. If you could live anywhere in the world, aside from the awesome places that you live, Hawaii and New York City, where would you pick?
00:30:58 Arianna: I, right in this moment in time, would live in Israel.
00:31:03 Scott: Very cool. And productivity hack for you, I'd say as a CEO, as somebody who gets eight hours of sleep a night, how do you do it?
00:31:12 Arianna: A couple of hacks that I've done is one, which has changed my life. I've recently learned about how to silence or set notification silences on my phone and my laptop. So I have built flocks of time into my silencing routine, which has been great.
00:31:31 Arianna: Cause then I could focus more when I'm actually working and not get distracted by an email that just came in. So that's helped. And then I just eat really well now. I exercise most days and that has changed the way that I am productive, just being more healthy.
00:31:47 Scott: It sounds like those are the ways you unwind or that you deal with stress.
00:31:51 Arianna: Yeah, taking up actual hobbies that don't make me money. So that's one thing that I had shifted my perspective on. Like I had a hobby that I thought was a hobby, but really it was a side business that I did for fun, but I made money off of it.
00:32:05 Arianna: And it's like, well, that's not a hobby. So doing things that are not making me any money, like I fish like an old man. I like going fishing. I'm really into deep sea fishing and it's like a retired old man hobby that I have. And it makes me very happy.
00:32:22 Scott: For another episode, just about fishing.
00:32:23 Arianna: For another episode, yeah.
00:32:25 Scott: We'll tee that up for next season. And finally, where can listeners find you online?
00:32:30 Arianna: Just on LinkedIn. I'm not doing Twitter. I'm not doing Facebook or any of those other things. I am only on LinkedIn and an email address. That's it.
00:32:40 Scott: No active TikTok?
00:32:41 Arianna: No, I don't have TikTok. If any country is stealing my data, it's gonna be the U.S.
00:32:48 Scott: Well, Arianna, thank you so much for everything that you're building with Dorothy. We're super proud to be investors and really appreciate your time spent today on the podcast.
00:32:57 Arianna: Okay, cool. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
00:33:01 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere, we're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Arianna Armelli in Founders Everywhere.