Closing out the most important chapter of my life
My last week at CoverWallet, an insurtech pioneer
This is my last week at CoverWallet. And it is very moving to reflect on my journey.
The most important and intense chapter of my life started more than 6 years ago when insurtech did not even exist as a word; back then, insurance startups were “fintech’s“ until late 2016 when a new wave of startups that we were part of raised significant funding to reinvent every category of insurance with tech, design, and data: Lemonade, Hippo, CoverWallet, Ethos, Root, CloverHealth, Unqork, NextInsurance, Shift, BoldPenguin, PolicyGenius, Socotra, Insurify, Zebra, Coalition, Zego, Sure, Wefox, … and suddenly insurance became sexy (“insurance is dope” as you can read in big letters in our office).
In 2015 I was literally a dummy on insurance. Today you can find in my house the first book I bought on insurance back in January 2015 “Insurance for Dummies”. Back then, I only knew 2 basic things about business insurance:
- In life, we as humans must always hope for the best but rarely plan for the worse. My dad lost his honey business in the 70s because there was a big fire in the mountain next to my hometown in Alicante, and that year he forgot to pay for his insurance; so when bad things happen, insurance is really good, and
- As a business owner myself, I knew that insurance was mandatory for 30M SMEs in the US so it was a big market. But managing it was frustrating, time-consuming, and analog. It was a no-brainer that SME owners wanted speed, simplicity, convenience, and transparency, so they could spend less time dealing with the intricacies of insurance and more time growing their business. And the power of data and internet technologies (in particular subscription-based state-of-the-art technologies) was the only way to give you that.
During 2015 I became obsessed with the industry, absorbing as much as I could, as fast as I could, like a maniac. And read and learned pretty much everything I could about the insurance industry, including:
- Industry research reports (Morgan Stanley, Oliver Wyman, WTW, Deloitte, Conning, and BCG had good ones).
- Insurance history books: During 2015 Valentine’s weekend, I took with me “Against the Gods, the remarkable story of risk” to the Caribbean, not the most romantic reading — photos here and here; the story of Lloyds; or 2 books about the story of AIG and Hank Greenberg, who later became an investor (“Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG”, and “The AIG Story”). In January 2015, 10 months before starting CoverWallet, I emailed my friend Borja Borrero, an insurance executive, telling him that I had bought 6 books about insurance and my goal was to become an expert in 6 months (screenshot).
- I listened to some boring podcasts and panels of insurance conferences on youtube during my daily runs.
- I read annual reports of publicly-traded insurance companies.
- I did mystery shopping in multiple insurance agencies.
- Subscribed to traditional insurance newsletters and blogs.
- And together with my cofounder Rashmi, I even got my P&C insurance license after 95 hours of courses in Brooklyn (later we ended up recruiting our insurance instructor!),
all before starting CoverWallet in September 2015 with my friend Rashmi Melgiri and raising funding (1, 2, 3) from VCs and angels.
Most successful startups reinventing traditional industries have been started by entrepreneurs outside the industry. Consider Uber with taxis, AirBnB with hotels, PayPal with financial institutions, Seamless with food, Zillow with real estate, TripAdvisor with travel, Amazon with retail, Netflix with video, Intuit with accounting, the list goes on and on. All of these companies were obsessed with learning everything they could about the industry, becoming experts in a short period of time. Balancing the naiveness about the industry with everything they could learn and recruiting some experts and executives from the field along the way. And that is what I tried to do.
We launched in 2016 (press release here which explained our vision) and recruited a highly determined and driven team obsessed with becoming the leaders of a new category we were creating. We invested aggressively in tech and product and became obsessed with our growth and customers (I have spent hundreds of hours reviewing hotjar videos and I am copied in every customer service email). And in just a couple of years, we became pioneers, thought leaders (on how to use data and tech in business insurance), and market leaders of “online SME insurance”. I do not discount the element of luck in our success; we had the tailwinds of an industry that was ripped to be reinvented with technology. But we created a culture of excellence, urgency, focus, determination, “tech and data”, entrepreneurship, trust, and discipline to take advantage of this luck.
After growing like a rocket ship for the first 4 years, in January 2020 we joined forces with Aon, which has the leadership, reputation, and scale to accelerate growth and innovation.
I believe CoverWallet’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it, and couldn’t be more excited about its future.
It’s been an honor to work with such an incredible team of over 500 talented colleagues that I now call friends, in (I wanted to share a few photos and videos so they don’t get lost!):
- NYC, where we have been in 7 different offices to accommodate our exponential growth and company-wide daily standups at 8:30 am ET (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and videos of the multiple offices 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
- Madrid (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and videos 1, 2, 3)
- Rochester, an office we opened in late 2017 (1, 2, and videos of our offices 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
- Valencia, an office we opened in late 2018 (1, 2, 3)
and since 2020, new colleagues in Singapore, Chicago, UK, France, Argentina, Australia, additional cities across the US, and new colleagues from Aon.
I am so proud of the work we’ve done and what we have achieved as a team. And it’s a shame that we could not celebrate more in person during 2020 and 2021, unprecedented years for the world, but 2 fantastic years of growth for CoverWallet with Aon (as for many other online companies).
I’m tremendously grateful for all the hard work and the many sacrifices everyone at CoverWallet has made. And I hope that this journey has been equally rewarding for them.
Thank you, and Viva la CoverWallet!
