Commerce Conversations

Insurance SaaS: The Road Less Travelled with Mike Chen (Guidewire)

Episode Summary

“Death by a thousand paper cuts” is what Vivek Krinshnamurthy calls the demise of InsurTechs that don’t find product-market fit. In an infamously slow moving market, InsurTech is perhaps one of the most difficult spaces to build new technology in. Today, Vivek sits with Mike Chen, Head of Corporate Development at Guidewire, to discuss the dynamics of the InsurTech space and advice they have for founders here.

Episode Notes

Episode Highlights:

Guidewire provides a core cloud platform for property and casualty insurance providers, making the providers smarter and faster with technology. In a corp dev perspective, Mike is always looking for the next thing that will make the business more valuable to its provider customers.
It’s easy to assume that when you build a new and shiny product that it will be adopted, but Mike cautions us that this simply isn’t the case in insurance. You need sector specific experts to give you perspective.
Buying power is extremely concentrated in insurance, you have 30-40 carriers whereas in FinTech you have 100s of banks who are willing to buy new technology.
Most insurance product have 70-85% renewal rates with NPSs of 10 so they are uniquely positioned
Why do carriers view themselves as independent players vs buyers as a collective?
If they’ve got two paying carriers using the tech in production and a pipeline of 10-15 that is traction in Mike’s mine
The best thing an InsurTech founder can do is raise a big round early so they can avoid the spiral of raising everything a sales cycle is delayed
B2B SaaS players in InsurTech can reach out to Mike on Linkedin to connect

About the Guest:

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