David Gritz, co-founder and managing director at InsurTech New York, and Bryan Falchuk, founder and managing partner at Insurance Evolution Partners, discuss the dynamic roles of different players in the insurance ecosystem. David and Bryan also give useful tips for founders to effectively manage the landscape and be successful.
David Gritz, co-founder and managing director at InsurTech New York, and Bryan Falchuk, founder and managing partner at Insurance Evolution Partners, discuss the dynamic roles of different players in the insurance ecosystem. David and Bryan also give useful tips for founders to effectively manage the landscape and be successful.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
4:32 Are insurtech startups effectively paying the insurance industry’s huge technology debt?
9:50 Why there shouldn’t be a divide between incumbent carriers and startups
15:34 Innovation and value creation in insurance is possible when startups and incumbents collaborate.
22:24 InsurTech NY’s role in the evolution of insurtech
26:36 What are startups and insurance companies doing to prepare for the future?
The non-profit organization that David is passionate about: Female Founders in FinTech Foundation
About David Gritz
David Gritz is a co-founder and managing director at InsurTech New York, working to build NYC as the global hub for InsurTech activity. He previously served as the Innovation Director at SVIA and led product for Zero, a loss control InsurTech acquired by EverestRe.
About Bryan Falchuk
Bryan Flachuk is the founder and managing partner at Insurance Evolution Partners and the President & CEO of The Property & Liability Resource Bureau (PLRB). His other roles include: mentor at InsurTech New York; an innovation, motivation & success expert; insurance thought leader; 4x best-selling author and 3x @TEDx speaker.
David and Bryan are both co-authors of a book series called ‘Future of Insurance’.
About InsurTech NY
InsurTech NY is a resource center for the insurance innovation community in the New York metropolitan region and beyond. Its mission is to help support the insurance industry take advantage of the latest digital technology to improve efficiencies and increase revenue, and be ready for the inevitable digital transformation. They do this through their public events, corporate innovation program, competition, accelerator, MGA lab and the venture fund.
About Insurance Evolution Partners
Insurance Evolution Partners is an insurance consultancy that advises carriers and their partners on how to navigate an evolving industry facing disruption and change.
Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode.
Follow Us: Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook
So you ask the business, what do we need? And they'll tell you, well, this widget has to go to this person to do that, and then we have to send it over here, and then we have to print it out and re-key it into this thing cuz that's how they work. Instead of taking a clean sheet view to it.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors, and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision.
Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guests today are two people. I have David Gritz. He's the co-founder and managing director at InsurTech New York, and a good friend.
And I have another guest, special guest, Bryan Falchuk. He is the President & CEO of The Property & Liability Resource Bureau (PLRB), and he's also the founder and managing partner at Insurance Evolution Partners. He also happens to be a mentor at InsurTech New York, closely connected with David. They are both co-authors of a new book that's about to be published. The book is Future of Insurance Series: A Transformative Triology. We're gonna talk about the evolution of InsurTech, the role that incumbent carriers and other players play today, the role of startups in the ecosystem, and how founders can effectively manage the landscape to be successful.
We're also going to talk about some other vendors who play an important role in this space and how they can be useful in the ecosystem. InsureTech is a topic that's close to my heart, so I'm very excited to discuss with Bryan and David.
David and Brian, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
Bryan Falchuk: Thanks, Gopi.
David Gritz: Yeah, appreciate you having us.
Gopi Rangan: Let's start with your journeys. You both grew up in Boston, Colorado, Philadelphia. None of them are insurtech hubs. And now here we are deep into the insurance world. Tell us about your journey.
Bryan Falchuk: Yeah, I'll jump in. I think what you get from almost everyone in insurance is they got into it by accident, and I was no different. I worked on the carrier side for years, large carriers, lots of different lines and geographies. I worked at McKinsey in their insurance practice for a while, so still large carriers and lots of different lines and geographies. And then I went to the specialist world and got deeper into it before making a jump to InsurTech, and so I've sort of seen both sides of the traditional and startup kinda space that's, I think, fueling a lot of really exciting opportunity right now.
Gopi Rangan: How about you, David?
David Gritz: Yeah, with me, very much similar to Bryan as like falling into InsurTech opposed to trying to go the actuarial route or something like that. So I started my career in corporate IT at a company that I would kind of call a mini Accenture. We did IT outsourcing for large vendors like companies like DuPont or MetLife or travel companies taking their old mainframe systems and giving them the ability to upgrade to new modern systems. So I was very fortunate to start my career working for the CEO there and learning a lot about strategy for large organizations.
But I was ready to be an entrepreneur, so I started my entrepreneurial journey four years after that, first diving into real estate. I flipped houses in Philadelphia, so learned very much on the loss control and risk management side of insurance, having unfortunately a couple claims of my own.
Then I got into EdTech. I started a network of startup incubators, and my opportunity to get into InsureTech was just kind of random. A friend of mine called me up who was running a worker's comp insurance company, and he said, "Hey, I need help. We're having more losses than we expected, so can you come in and help?" So together we built technology called Zero. We scaled the company and eventually sold it. And then I came out to the West coast. I spent some time working with the Silicon Valley Insurance Accelerator, helping them with their programs. That kind of inspired me to create InsureTech New York and really have a hub on the East Coast to support InsurTech entrepreneurs in New York. And we also run InsureTech SF. So I go back and forth.
Gopi Rangan: I want to talk about InsureTech New York, the accelerator, and the programs. I've been a speaker at a few of your events. I've co-invested with you as well. But before we jump into those details, let's talk about the evolution of InsurTech. Why is it important for the industry?
David Gritz: So I'll take the first shot at it and, and let Bryan add on as well. But I firmly believe that insurtech is necessary for the insurance industry to realize its promise. So in general, the promise of insurance is to bring people back to the position that they were in prior to a calamity happening, whether it's a natural disaster, it's a human disaster, or it's some kind of financial disaster. And ultimately, most people don't perceive insurance by its promise. They perceive it by its sales process. They might have gotten called on by an insurance agent. They might have seen an ad on the TV for insurance, but they haven't been sold the promise and felt that it was true. I believe in InSurTech because it's starting from customer experience, the technology mindset and a fresh slate has the opportunity to bring the promise back to the industry.
Gopi Rangan: So that promise is deeply embedded in how insurance companies are run and how technology is disrupting that world. Bryan, large companies in the insurance industry don't invest in technology. They have a huge technology debt. They are far behind on R&D, if any at all. What is the future for them? What can they do?
Bryan Falchuk: I think if you ask them, they would say they invest a huge amount in IT and R&D, but I think you're both right. I think they are putting a lot of money into it. And to your point, it's not necessarily moving the ball as it should or could. And so that's almost worse than if they were putting nothing in because then it's wasted. And so, to me this is an opportunity to figure out: how do we get more effective with the dollars that we're spending? The Brits always say, "making a rod for your own back." Are we doing that?
So I consistently find, either directly from living inside of it or as an outsider watching and advising the industry, there are so many things that we do that make things more difficult, that slow us down, that stand in the way, yet there's all these startups out there, these InsurTech, these newer organizations that don't have decades of preexisting conditions, if you will, slowing them down. If we could harness some of their thinking and break out of that, I think the literally billions of dollars that we put into IT, R&D et cetera would actually generate a much greater return. And, I think there are folks who say it's doing really well for them. I think they're maybe comparing it to the past rather than what's possible and maybe patting themselves on the back more than they should and, and not recognizing the potentiality that they're missing out on. We need to get a little bit more honest with ourselves about that.
Gopi Rangan: I think InsurTech New York is one of those organizations that brings large insurance companies to become more honest with the truth of where the world is today. How did InsurTech New York get started and how does it help work with large corporations?
David Gritz: We started InsurTech New York kind of with two drivers. One is the problem, and I think every entrepreneur goes through this where there's some kind of pain point that they see in their life that they feel like is worth solving. So for that, me and Tony originally had met. And we were both advising startups on product management.
Tony was more on the strategy side. Mine was more on the, Hey, you know what you want to do, how do you actually realize that potential and turn it into a working product or software product. And we were gonna combine forces and really build that out in focus in the insurtech space where I had met a lot of founders.
So on one side we wanted to help founders with that. On the other side, we just said, "Hey, we're gonna try and find customers." We went to a lot of the networking events in New York City. Pre-Covid there were ones like every other week that you could go to, and if you were InsurTech person or InsurTech founder in New York in 2019, you were honestly an ugly duckling. All the FinTech people are like, "who the heck are you? Like, we don't care about insurance." And at the time, insurance was maybe 5 to 7% of the FinTech investment. For reference, now it's about 10% so it's grown. But there was no place for you. So we first decided we're gonna create an event to make a place for you, and selfishly to make a place where we could meet more founders to help them, which eventually evolved into our mission to build a community. The rest is history. But we went from events to a competition, to our corporate innovation program, to now we have our MGA lab and our fund.
Gopi Rangan: I remember in 2014 when I bet my career on InsurTech, it was not even a trend. The word was not that popular. FinTech was kind of be beginning at that time. And even now, InsurTech is still a sub-sector within FinTech. My theory when I started Sure Ventures, my venture capital firm, is that just like how FinTech revolutionized the world of banking, which is a $4 trillion industry, InsurTech will revolutionize the world of insurance. If you collect all the premiums, put togethers like 5 trillion of gross written premium. That's a massive industry in itself. It is not a sub-sector of FinTech. It may start that way now. That's how all new sub-sectors start.
Bryan, you researched about 15 incumbent carriers and startups. What did you find?
Bryan Falchuk: What I found is the divide between the two doesn't need to be there per se. Um, what is the divide? There there's been this talk like legacy or incumbent versus InsurTech startup, and that's provocative and interesting and mixed for good conversations. But if you really dig into the stories, and I've got seven legacy carriers in my first book and eight startup InsurTechs in the second book, the lessons from them (and that's the nature of the books is it's case study on what they did and, and what lessons can we pull from the highs and the lows of that journey) the lessons are not unique. They really do transcend. The lessons we can take from a legacy and carrier and what they could do to be better, absolutely apply to the InsurTechs and vice versa. Even things like, you know, we talk about capital, you can think that getting the right capital partners is very much a, a startup story. It's about your venture investors or what kind of debt vehicle you get or whatever it might be. But actually insurance is ultimately a capital story no matter what. So, you know, what kind of reinsurers are you working with and are they a part of your business and are you strategically partnering with them? Or are you just treating them like that backstop that pays when your claims breach a certain threshold? I was a chief claims officer. I can tell you which one the reinsurers prefer to be treated as and how much better they're gonna work with you as you know, maybe your book's not developing the way everyone anticipated. You really need your reinsurers to be there with you, just like a good VC at a startup where you know the business plan is not meeting the reality. Slower adoption, or maybe there were expenses that were unforeseen. If your VC is just a checkbook to you, they're probably not gonna stand by you in those tougher moments.
That's an existential crisis. So this notion that there's just lessons for one side or the other, I don't agree with that. I think there are things we should all be learning from each other - even the failures. You can laugh at someone and say, "oh, that's terrible." And I hear that a lot on the legacy side. Like, "oh, these InsurTechs, they, they think they're so smart and that we're just dinosaurs and they're gonna come in and disrupt us. They don't know, and look how bad they are." Well, even if they're terrible, even if they fail, what if they had your assets and resources? But they are new idea. So what could you do with that idea that they can't? And so you're sitting here laughing it off and taking nothing from them. What if you could pull some insights from what they've been able to achieve, but put it on your platform that is more stable and, you know, underwrites better. Whatever the things that you're throwing stones about, if you do them so well, what if you could take that innovative idea and do something with it instead of just, you know, laughing it off? So I, I think we can learn from both sides.
Gopi Rangan: There are some threads that are common, but they're kind of fundamentally different type of businesses, aren't they? These large insurance companies are fighting to get a little more market share while startups are building solutions for underserved, unserved markets, creating new solutions that defies this whole market where one-size-fits-all, kind of fits whatever's available. That is not what startups do. They try to build a solution that is unique and different.
Bryan Falchuk: Generally, I think what you're saying is ultimately a choice. So, and I, I say this to incumbents all the time, is you're basically just share stealing. Oh, you went up by 3%, that's great, but next year someone else is gonna take that 3% back from you cuz you just took it from them the year before.
That's not really winning. And, and what you're saying is startups do it differently. While many do, a lot of them are still in the share stealing game, they're just doing it in a different way. So it feels new, but you know, you look at the ones who have gotten public. They're telling the same story. They thought they had a very novel approach to it, and maybe in some ways it was, or their marketing was different, or the digital experience was materially better at the time, but they didn't have a profound material advantage that genuinely created a new market. And there are plenty that don't. There are some that do.
So this notion that, you know, the, the blue sky or the green field is just the purview of the startups, I don't think that that holds true just like I don't think the share stealing market is only what legacy folks are left to. In either case, you have to have a material advantage, you have to have a reason for being, and you have to build that business sustainably.
But ultimately, we can choose which kind of player we want to be. What I would say is for the traditionals, they tend to be more risk averse. So the the idea of going after something new that is, well, we've never done this before. Right? They're gonna run into that feeling. It's highly unlikely that you find it.
You know, I worked for specialists for 10 years. We were constantly innovating and playing the whole cyber market as it stands today. That started with a product that one of my carriers created, and it was a dog for like a year and a half. We couldn't get people to buy it, and now it's the standard. All cyber insurance basically is a breach response policy that we were willing to take that risk and create, and we weren't like a $20, $40 billion carrier, but we were multi-billion multinational, you know, had a number of years under us. So you can be innovative. You have to choose to be, and you also need the right kind of structures behind the scenes to support that. And I think startups have an advantage there just because they don't have all the heft and the bureaucracy that if you keep that in place, it's very hard to go after new things and be creative and and willing to try.
Gopi Rangan: So stealing market share from each other, whether it's a large company or a small company, that's one way to play the game. Maybe marginally improving the ecosystem, but what's a better thing to do is create value. Yeah. Like the example you gave with the cyber insurance that really transforms the way people live and how businesses are run.
David, what's your advice to founders? How can they make this partnership with large companies effective? Feel free to give some examples from InsurTech New York.
David Gritz: Yeah, sure. So, we cover a lot of this in the book of things that objectively we found from the data. There's some obvious things and there's some non-obvious things. So maybe I'll share a couple and I'll give Bryan a chance to share a couple. So first is the obvious ones right. It's really important that if you're a startup founder and you want to get buy-in from a carrier, you need to have senior management participation.
Gopi Rangan: How do you verify that?
David Gritz: So you can verify that by having a contract signed, having budget. But I think there's more of the perennial support, which is are they in it for the long run? Does it align with their strategy? Because one of the challenges is it could just be, if you've ever heard the the term, the executive plane read, right? Like they read a book on the plane and then they're gonna come into the office for the next month and tell everyone. "Okay, we need to do balance scorecard. That's really important. And then they'll fly another place. And then they're gonna say, you know, we need to do business process re-engineering."
So as a founder, you have to really dig into the inside of the corporation that you're partnering with and make sure that there's a sustainable commitment to what you're doing that either ties in line with the carrier. Or that the executive that you're working with has a consistency that they're gonna keep up with what they want to do or what they committed to do. Because most of these InsurTech integrations are not, you know, a six-month or even a one- year journey. They're a three to five year journey to get fully realized, especially if this is something that impacts the carrier's core, their claim system, and their underwriting models.
Gopi Rangan: So you're quantifying a lot of these things that are fuzzy. Brian, what other things are important for founders?
Bryan Falchuk: There was something that surprised me. So having been on the buyer side and then selling into carriers, budget matters. You have to have resources. And it's not to downplay that, but having a good budget doesn't change the game.
So the notion there that, I think for a lot of us on the carrier side, it's sort of like, "we just get a systems integrator to do this, and it's gonna cost this much and we need more budget." You have to have enough money to do it, of course, and you need to be willing to spend on the right solution, but you can't throw money at all the other problems and expect them to go away.
So if you don't have executive buy-in and support, if you don't have the right decision making in place, all of the things that you need to have, you can't just spend your way past these sort of fundamental, structural, behavioral issues, if you will, in how you engage in the process. And I think that's a really important one to learn is (A) it means on the good side, innovation and change does not have to be so expensive that you can't do it, cuz it's not about outspending to win, and (B) you still have to change how you work. If you really want this to go right, you can't have, for example, an MGA I'm talking to has been stuck for seven months. An underwriting committee decision where everyone agrees they should move forward, they're gonna give their support, but they have to have all of the decision makers in the room in this monthly underwriting committee to sign off on it.
And every month someone has been on holiday or vacation, whichever you want to call it, so they can't follow the rules of how they sign off seven months of this, where they're all in agreement. And so for me it's like, okay, well if you all agree, could you send an email around and have them do that in writing to say, yes, I agree. No, because that's not the way we work. And that, that's the sort of thing like spend all the money you want and they're spending more money on this now. But for a startup, seven months you could be outta business. You know, you could suddenly have to raise funds cuz you didn't realize you were gonna need to, cuz you've had no revenue for seven months where you had planned to. Founders may not be taking paychecks.
These are very real existential issues for a smaller company. And for a large company, this is a hundred percent. Your choice. You don't have to operate that way, and I don't care how much money you throw at it, you could have just solved this by behaving differently. So I like that one. It's not about just outspending bad behavior.
Gopi Rangan: What's a good example of a success story?
Bryan Falchuk: Luckily, there's a few of them in the book, which is great. And I've gotten to live through a number myself, and I know David has seen plenty as well. One of the cases in the book I like in particular, because it spans two kinds of relationships.
It's both an investment and a commercial customer relationship, and that's a company called Bena kiba. On the InsurTech side, they had a claim solution and Homesteaders Life, who's a life insurer. They do kind of final expense coverage. It was the first time Homesteaders made an investment. So Cash-Before-Cover (CBC) investment and Beva was their first customer. And to be fair, they didn't even exist as a company. The founders were doing this as a side hustle before committing cuz they wanted to make sure they had something that would pay the bills before leaving their jobs. There's so many lessons in that, around the right way to structure the investment side, the right way to structure the customer side, but also the complexities where you have an overlap between the two.
And I think that's relevant today where we see much more CBC activity, either as LPs or directly as investors. Whether you're doing that on your own or you're doing that as part of a round, it matters how you behave as an investor and customer, especially when they overlap. You don't wanna start throwing your weight around from one side onto the other.
And there were people at Homesteaders Life Company that were sort of saying, you know, we want Ben Kiva to do this for us, and we own them, or we gave them all their money. So they have to, and the this, the thing that they're asking for would actually. Be a bad thing for Ben Akiva to develop because it would waste resource that they wouldn't be able to use in selling to other customers.
And frankly, and we do this all the time in insurance, it was things that was just rebuilding the way they've always worked because it's what they're used to. So you ask the business, what do we need? And they'll tell you, well, this widget has to go to this person to do that, and then we have to send it over here, and then we have to print it out and re-key it into this thing cuz that's how they work, instead of taking a clean sheet view to it.
So Ben Akiva knew we need to not deliver what they're asking for, just deliver the business outcome, but in a different way. If H L C had thrown their weight around, either way, either forcing Ben Akiva to do something because we're paying your bills or forcing the team internally, you know, the CEO could have said, no, you're not getting it cause we're, we've got this investment so you just need to live with it.
That's not great either cuz that's gonna gonna poison the well for their ability to work together. Instead, they. Separated those lines and saw how do we work together to figure out the right path through these issues without having one side leverage the other. There's obviously a ton more to the story.
They had this very clear sort of lanes of responsibilities, how they talked about it, and the c e o had to be really purposeful in how he lived that because it's really easy to get sucked into the wrong things.
Gopi Rangan: David, at InsurTech NY, do you track the number of partnerships and the impact that InsurTech New York creates for the founders in these cohorts and the impact for the carriers as well.
How do you quantify that?
David Gritz: So we track it in a more indirect way. I mean, there's some more traditional venture metrics that we track. So for example, for the first three cohorts of the accelerator, we had 80 companies go through after the accelerator, cuz we do have a demo day. The companies have raised more than $600 million in follow-on funding.
And of the companies that have gone through the program, Including some from the competition. We have eight of them that have gotten acquired. So if you compare that to other accelerators, I mean, we're kind of up there with the Y Combinator stats. And considering this is only three years of the program. In terms of partnerships, we look at it the opposite way around.
So how are accelerators organized or run? It's run by our carrier partners. So we have eight carrier partners that are in the program and ultimately we tell the startups, "look, you can apply to the program. There's no specific cohort size, but how you get selected is one of our eight carrier partners has to look at you and decide that it's worthwhile to take that conversation forward with the hope of the partnership." So in theory, there should be a minimum of 80 relationships between carriers and startups that have originated from the program. From the carrier's perspective, we try and identify three to five companies that they can work with and carry that forward.
We don't do a lot to track post program. We stay in touch and obviously we ask the carriers like, "who do you wanna stay in touch with? Which ones are working? How is that going?" And sometimes we talk to the startups, but we co definitely could do a better job at tracking that.
So I would feel pretty comfortable to say that we've created at least a hundred partnerships from the program.
Gopi Rangan: That's amazing. Indeed. The insurance world is different compared to many other sectors where it's important for startups to collaborate with large companies, and it's very important for large companies to collaborate with startups. That partnership is essential for the future of the industry. In some other industries, it's not as critical, but in the insurance industry is very critical. You also developed a metric to measure. Which companies are more prepared for these partnerships? Can we talk about that? How did you develop the metric? What goes into the metrics? How do you measure?
David Gritz: Yeah, so I guess in terms of the precursor to the book, Bryan and I and a few other people got together to create a committee called the Insurance Collaboration Index. And the original idea behind it was we were going to rank all of the insurance carriers based off of their ability to collaborate with startups.
And we had a survey, we had kind of normalized question sets of data that was gonna go towards that ranking. And we very soon found out that the dispersion of relationships between insurance carriers and startups is tremendous. So our original premise was we have to have five rankings in order for the carrier to get ranked.
But what ended up happening is like, there were lots of startups that worked with one carrier that was only ranked once because some startups can build their business off of a super-regional carrier that maybe in their lifetime only worked with three to four startups. So we ended up not having enough data for that specifically, but we were able to kind of organize some of the carriers based off of the data that we had. But we felt that we couldn't directly report on that cuz it kind of crushed some of the am anonymity that we wanted to offer to the startup founders.
Gopi Rangan: This is a difficult metrics to research and be fair to all the players, but it's very useful for both sides to know who is friendly, who's actually doing the real work and not just talking about it.
What's the future? Where are we going? What are startups doing? What are insurance companies doing to prepare for the future?
David Gritz: So I'll give a couple examples of things that startups and carriers are doing to make things easier and more proactive. So first thing that startups are doing is they're taking the puffer fish approach.
So one of the challenge with a startup working with a carriers, the carriers are so much bigger than them, so the startups have to kind of act or look bigger. So a basic requirement to work with a carrier, which if you think for a startup is pretty onerous, is SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, which could mean the startup has to be in two years in existence just to be able to do that.
What startups are doing is they're getting all the things ready early on. There is not really the lean startup approach in InsurTech as much as there are in other industries. They're getting their product ready, they're maybe having a co-development carrier that they can kind of be a sounding board or even do some low cost work for, from a services perspective to make sure that the product is right.
Then they're getting their SOC 2 compliance. They might even have a consultant that helps them with the InfoSec requirements, which is usually a 200 page questionnaire. And then even to add even more, they're partnering with a systems integrator, someone like an Accenture and Ernst and Young, and they're going to market with them.
So they look much bigger when they get at the doorstep of the carrier, and it's a much easier decision for the carrier to make. So that's what InsurTechs are doing. What carriers are doing is they're segmenting off experimental areas of the business. So for example, like Liberty Mutual has Solaria Labs, which they can test and learn with certain small areas or small books of business to see if it works out, and then to scale across the enterprise.
And a lot of them are seeing how they can simplify their processes so they can make approvals faster, easier, and simpler. And then the last thing that's emerging is what Bryan was saying, the blend-the-lines thing. So some of the best customers for InsurTechs that are enablers are InsurTechs, that are distributors.
So some of the InsurTechs that have gone public, that have scaled large enough that now they are insurance carriers. Those are sometimes the best first customers for the InsurTechs that are offering data analytics or you know, technology because they started from a blank slate. They have different, easier, simpler processes.
Gopi Rangan: Bryan, startups are puffing up to look bigger. Insurance companies are breaking things down to make it, uh, smaller chunks of problems to solve, creating sandboxes, and then there's this connective tissue between the two. You've talked about how the disruptive duo changed the insurance industry. You've given a, a talk about how culture is important and change in the culture is the way to transform the industry.
And now you're writing this new book . Where do you see the future of InsurTech and insurance?
Bryan Falchuk: So the third book is called The Collaborators. And I do think that's the story is it's not one or the other. And a lot of the message you've been hearing from me today is that there's possibility on both sides.
So growth and change and, and possibility is not the domain of one or the other. And I think we need to get over that. And I think it is about us coming together, whether that's a solution provider to an old school player, whether it's a solution provider to a startup, you know, as David's saying, or any and all of it.
It's like people say, you know, there was InsurTech for a while, and at some point all insurance will be InsurTech. I don't think we're there yet. I think some people are fooling themselves at times saying, look, we're tech now we have APIs. Like that's great. You've made a lot of progress. You still have more to go. And it's not just about having APIs. But I think we are headed in that direction.
I remember for the first book in the series I had Caribou Honig wrote the forward, and that was sort of his message is it's not an ultimate division between the two. It's not which side wins, it's the coming together. Actually on the back of Covid, it's forced a lot more of that. Because all of a sudden the legacy world had to work with startups a lot more to meet the sudden demands to keep the lights on and claims processing and you know, you can't meet people in person and all the other things that were thrown at them. And I think it forced not just change, but also forced to re-looking at what's possible. You know, all the things were like, oh, this would be a five year project. Well, you didn't have five years, you had two weeks to go virtual or whatever it was. So suddenly things that were impossible are very long, weren't. And it's a nice wake up moment to say, hang on, maybe we can do this.
I don't wanna see us revert back to now that we have the luxury of taking longer. So instead, how do we come together and move faster together? And that does take just an, an open mind on both sides. Startups, there's lots of things you can learn from the old school players and vice versa, and, and I think the startups have it a little bit easier.
I think it's a lot harder to change and ingrain culture. But it's not impossible, and it just takes us sort of being willing to hold hands on that process. I know it sounds all very touchy-feely and not very insurance, but that is kind of what it boils down to. I think the nuts and bolts are clear. You know, we don't need to figure out what does it mean to write profitably or, you know, move to the cloud.
That's all been defined. It's a question of how we actually live through that, and that's where we still seem to be creating some moments of being stuck.
Gopi Rangan: It's great to hear optimistic views from both of you. We're coming towards the end of our conversation, and I want to ask you about your community involvement.
Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which one?
David Gritz: Yeah, so Gopi, one of the things that I realized just being in the InsurTech space for this period of time is that a lot of the InsurTech founders or insurance executives look like me and Bryan and not necessarily like the people that represent the rest of the world.
And I think it's a problem. So what I created with a couple other people with Jennifer Byrne, Co-founder and President of Quesnay Inc., and Michelle Bothe from Finsure is actually a non-profit called the Female Founders in FinTech Foundation. And the purpose of it is really to help support female founders that want to come into finance and insurance and get the resources and support that they need.
So we're still in the early stages, but ultimately our core focus will be identifying insurtech and FinTech competitions that we can support, provide prize money for, and founders that we can mentor.
Gopi Rangan: Brian and David, thank you very much for spending time with me and sharing a lot of insightful stories based on your experience. You have both done extensive research on the industry, both on the startup side and on the incumbent side. It's great to see that you're bringing the tools together. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
Bryan Falchuk: Thanks, Gopi.
David Gritz: Thanks.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs. Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode.