EverQuote, Inc. Class A Common Stock Oppenheimer 29th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference

Thank you, Jed. Pleasure to be here.

Sure. Well, thanks, Jed. It's great to be back with you. We always enjoy our being at your conferences. I guess backdrop for EverQuote, right? We're an insurance marketplace. We help P&C carriers and agents help grow their business through digital channels. That is our mission. The thing that has been our attribute of how we succeed is how we use technology and our proprietary data to continue to help drive performance for carriers and agents. So what has been driving our growth and what we think will continue to drive our growth, maybe I'll give you sort of some of the growth levers, Jed, for you. So first is focused on getting better performance for carriers and agents. Number one thing we do and why carriers and agents want to work with us, we help them find consumers online that meet the specific attributes.

The interesting thing about insurance versus a lot of other verticals is the specificity with how the matching between provider and consumer has to be done. Consumers, if you're looking in travel and we want to fly from Boston to New York, Delta Air Lines is happy to sell the same ticket to all of us. You think about insurance, it's very different. Your driving record may be a little better than my driving record, Jed. Sara's obviously better than all of us. How carriers want us is very different, how they price that is very different. How do we drive performance that precisely allows carriers to meet the targets they want? We keep doing that more and more through our, we'll talk about our Smart Campaigns and how we leverage our proprietary data. That's one, better performance. Two is scale, getting bigger scale.

Bigger scale comes from driving more traffic into the marketplace, and the second piece is getting more provider budget from carriers and agents on. That flywheel of getting better performance and bigger scale allows us to continue to drive the performance you're seeing. Third has been how we're helping our carriers and agents succeed. In the summer of 2023, we made a decision to get out of health and life, focus on P&C, focus on the vertical we think we have a right to win. As part of that, we've been going deeper, trying to help carriers and agents be successful in growing their business. Part of that is adding a broader range of services to carriers and agents to help them do that.

We've talked about in some of our earnings calls, particularly with agents, we used to have one product for agents, an online to offline connection called a lead. We've been adding more products for agents. We're now at 1.4 product per agents, 1.4 products per agent, and that reflects that we're helping them grow their business. We're adding things such as digital marketing service and a local presence. We're using conversational AI solutions to bring calls to them at a lower cost over time by using AI. Those are some of the things we're doing to get broader. Of course, if you look at our financial performance, that is driving top-line growth. The other piece is how are we also balancing that with making prudent investments to invest for that opportunity long-term, while still being disciplined and managing the operations of the business and driving efficiency.

The fourth pillar that I like to describe is how we're continuing to drive automation. We've been leveraging AI to do that, both driving innovation for our customers, but also making our own internal operations more efficient and able to move faster.

I think a Goldilocks scenario is a nice way to describe where we're at, Jed. I think what is that backdrop for those folks who sort of don't know the insurance landscape? When you're a carrier CEO, you really want to do two things. You want to achieve and maintain underwriting profitability, and second is you want to maintain and grow policies in force. For the better part of 2 1/2, 3 years after COVID, the carriers focused on getting underwriting profitability, and there were some challenges in doing that. We can talk about what made that such a black swan type period for the carriers. Then the second piece is now maintain growing policy in force. They have rate adequacy broadly. They are broadly healthy, right?

That is measured by a metric called a combined ratio, which represents total revenues, less your underwriting costs and cost running the business equals profit. Combined ratios, the targets for carriers, typically is in sort of mid-90s, in some carriers, even high 90s, where the operating today is in the low to mid-80s, many carriers. They are very, very profitable. So they are leaning into growth, and as we said at the start of our year on our February earnings call, carriers want to grow this year. They're broadly healthy. We expect them to want to grow. We said in our May call, "Carriers are broadly healthy. We expect them to want to grow." We said in our August call the same thing, and we don't see it changing in the foreseeable future. I think there's this dynamic we have going, which is we help carriers.

As carriers are growing, they're trying to do in a way that is creating a more high-quality, enduring book of business, and part of that is really targeting the specific profile consumer that they think meets their attributes. That is what we're very effective at doing, and happy to talk more about how we do it. But I think that's our skill set, and that plays very well in this market. So I think it is a great way to describe it, a Goldilocks environment for us and to help support their growth.

Sure. If you look at, first of all, we had a really strong Q2. We had 25% year-on-year growth on revenues. We had 37% on EBITDA. So really strong growth. First half growth is 20%+, so we feel very good about that. As we look to the second half of the year, we continue to see a very favorable environment. The midpoint of our target for Q3 would imply a 17% year-on-year growth on revenues. We don't guide for the year, as you know. We've given some indications of how things might evolve based on what we're seeing. I think the Street is showing us, I think like 15% or 16% year-on-year growth on consensus. What we would say as we look at the environment is we continue to feel very good about it, right? This is a business where you say, "Hey, well, you're growing.