Commerce Conversations

Building Lean InsurTech SaaS with Chris Barrow (EagleView)

Episode Summary

Chris Barrow is most well known for his time leading EagleView, an insurance technology company that provided aerial imagery and data to carriers. Before that he started his career in information technology and then ran up the ranks in sales before making the jump from CRO to CEO at a small public company in Florida and later moved to EagleView. In his conversation with Vivek he shares about piloting the successful exit of EagleView on only 6M of VC funding and carrying out an effective merger in the insurance space. Chris speaks to founders on how to win in scrappy conditions.

Episode Notes

Episode Highlights:

Chris began his career in IT at Nintendo before the company itself had a product.
As he matured in his career Chris began to refine his expertise across sectors and products to deeply understand how to approach the sales process for different conditions.
Chris then walks us through the EagleView and Pictometry merger.
Chris uses the metaphor of dating before marriage to exemplify how the companies became familiar with one another through their customer and supplier relationship before carrying out a merger.
Boards are the needed “adult supervision” for strategic business decisions, Chris believes. It was ultimately with the board of Pictometry that was the best audience to push forward the merger.
While departments like finance or HR needed to be downsized in the merger, they kept the two sales organizations running to expand growth.
“When I first became a CEO, one of my board members gave me some advice. He said, he said, ‘as a CEO, You're gonna experience two emotions, uh, more often than not, and you're gonna experience euphoria and you're gonna experience terror.’”
Insurance is a small professional circle which means if you have a bad proof of concept at one carrier, word will certainly travel.
Chris started a business in 2008 and with such tight capital, he stressed getting to profitability in 3-4 years as a key intention.

About the Guest:

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