Irv Grossbeck

Well, the similarities are both companies had borrowers' personalities and weren't afraid to use aggressive leverage techniques.

Against a predictable background, by leveraging up, you're not taking nearly so much risk as you are with a more volatile underlying P&L.

That's certainly one thing.

Another similarity is trying to attract and retain top talent.

It took us a while to wake up to that.

We hired bottom talent for a while and paid dearly for it because the mistakes we made in getting that company started are too numerous to mention.

I mean, the first key engineering person we hired was...

not satisfactory.

We turned on our first systems and we had to turn them off for three weeks.

Customers were supposedly paying and we said, whoops, we have some more work to do on our system.

And we thought it was going to be a few days.

It was three weeks.

And that was all because the person we hired was a very bad choice.

We were both in our late 20s or I was 30 by then.

And

And it was just bad judgment.

Should have known better, but didn't.

And one of the things that both companies did do in its later years is try to attract and retain top talent and be willing to pay them in terms of both equity and current comp.

in ways that made it hard for them to leave.

Ways in which the companies are different is that Asurion is far larger, 21,000 employees now.