Thanks so much for reading it and I've definitely been getting things sorted out. Best of luck to you as well!!!
It was founded in June 1955 by three brothers. When I was growing up in Columbus, I can remember it being advertised locally as American Family Life Insurance/Assurance Company of Columbus.
I'm not sure when they changed the name. It began as American Family Life Insurance Company. Some other company in some other state had the same name. Internal stories when I worked there indicated it was settled with a gentleman's coin toss, which Aflac lost. So they legally changed the name in all 50 states to American Family Life Assurance Company.
Had that not happened, you wouldn't have the name Aflac, which is an acronym for their legal business name, and you would have never had the Aflac duck commercials.
Anyway, it's a homegrown business started locally and they own the tallest building in town, known locally as The Tower. It's the only real skyscraper in all of Columbus that I know of and school kids get taken on tours of it as school field trips. The Aflac Tower is a local landmark and they do Christmas lights every year in the windows. Like making a Christmas tree based on which windows are lit or something like that.
It's a very big deal locally and a lot of the more interesting stuff I know about the company is stuff I never see articles about. I've looked and can't find them. I wrote up a few things at one point on a blog, none of which is online anymore, because the company really is interesting and doesn't seem to talk about a lot stuff I think is interesting.
It seems to have shrunk since I left, but when I worked there everyone would ooh and aaah when I was getting a haircut or a meal and making small talk and people asked me where I worked and I said "Aflac." It's kind of how when programmers work at a FAANG company.
Although Columbus is one of the bigger cities in Georgia, it's really not that big. But it has this big company that started there and grew and grew.
The other big thing locally is the Army base, Ft. Benning. It's a much more sophisticated city than it really should be, given its relatively small size, because of those two things giving it international connections and international flavor. Aflac was getting about 75-80% of it's revenue from Japan when I worked there. The CEO spent about one week a month in Japan and this is another thing that most of the world seems largely unaware of.
So Aflac is a really big deal locally and one of my teammates spent several years trying to get good enough to qualify for a job there. They have trouble filling jobs and have to do a lot of internal development of talent, in part because it's not a very big city and insurance is complicated stuff that requires substantial training, even for entry level positions.
This is the wrong metric to use. It's a metric that's practically guaranteed to lead to unhealthy patterns.
When I worked at Aflac, a lot of my coworkers were enthralled that they were there. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to them and they had stars in their eyes.
To me, it was just a day job. I was punching a clock for a paycheck.
I had done other things that I felt mattered a whole lot more, were far harder and made more of a difference in the world. My psychological relationship to the job was different from that of many of my coworkers.
Don't use suffering or hours worked as metrics to measure your worth. It won't go good places.
Don't get too starry-eyed about getting accepted to YC. It's a first step, not a last.
I'm glad he wrote this. I hope he gets things sorted out. Best of luck to the man.