InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:12:40 · Richard Gunn
And I'm I'm feeding off anecdote here rather than actual data, but it seems like people are more akin to looking for reasons to qualify you out. And so it's actually been... Like, from a product perspective, we found we achieved what you'd call product market fit very fast, but to sell to the kind of mass market, if you will, kind of anywhere below the XL players in The US market, it's been really important to build out a US team and actually to invest in our product marketing, we very much look and feel American. And a key part of doing that as well is not just building a team here, but also making sure that our executive team are also Americans. We're hiring experienced insurance practitioners from The US, we now refer to ourselves as dual headquartered because half of our executive team are based in The US and many of them are Americans. We've been hiring out practicing actuaries, underwriters, brokers, etcetera, in this team to make sure that we can truly say we're by the market for the market, but from a US perspective and not just a UK one.
00:13:31 · Matthew Grant
[00:13:31] S1: There's a lot of really valuable advice in there. I completely agree with what I've seen. And to some extent, it's a kind of level of commitment. I'd say there's bigger companies that are also used to working with earlier stage companies, or they're kind of, if not bleeding edge, certainly leading edge, they'll kind of look anywhere in the world for the solution. But when you start to go into that, back into early majority on the curve again, a big part of it is they want the confidence that whoever they're dealing with is gonna be there. And that to me is a lot about where the sort of local acts and local people come from. It's just easier to understand, it's easier to communicate when things go wrong. It's always very interesting. I think we can all do our best to communicate with people that are not from the same country or from when things are going well. But what really differentiates is when something's not going well, how do you manage that? So, I can see lots of reasons. Think one of the advantages of having that funding out last year is to be able to commit to be in The US, which in turn generates its own growth.
00:14:29 · Richard Gunn, Matthew Grant
[00:14:29] S2: Yeah. No. Absolutely. It was a it was a very intentional move to bring on US based investors for exactly that. Both the advisers they bring... It's also been very critical for hiring talent as well, particularly with the kind of evolution of AI and many top talent looking to go towards what's the top start up from an AI perspective. It's like by having those investors on the cap table, out agentic capabilities for the insurance space, then you can compete for some of the top talent. But it's been very hard being just a British company bootstrapped, looking to expand into The US and attract some of the top talent in this space. [00:15:05] S1: We'll talk about AI in a minute, of course, but I just want to... Have you discovered the difference between the way The US uses the word quite and the way we use that in Britain? [00:15:14] S2: Do you [00:15:14] S1: know the difference? [00:15:16] S2: I don't think I do actually. I'm concerned I'm about to learn that in a number of meetings, took a completely wrong interpretation, so I'm definitely keen to learn it.
00:15:16 · Richard Gunn, Matthew Grant
[00:15:16] S2: I don't think I do actually. I'm concerned I'm about to learn that in a number of meetings, took a completely wrong interpretation, so I'm definitely keen to learn it. [00:15:23] S1: That's possible, but actually it's a positive outcome. It took me fifteen years of working for Americans to realize this. So, Britain, when we say something's quite good, it sort of plays down and is almost a way of politely saying, don't think it's any good. If an American says quite good, they actually mean it's really good. So when people are saying to you, Richard, we think your product or whatever is quite good, you can take some hope for the fact that actually they're being positive, not sort of just being polite to tell you they don't really like it. Yeah, look for that one. It took me a while to figure it out, and once I figured it out. Although bizarrely, of course, with our American listeners, in some of Britain's case, it's really quite good. It actually means the same as you do do in America, meaning it's actually... It is really good. So, yeah, two two countries divided by a common language, I think Oscar Wilde said.
00:16:06 · Richard Gunn, Matthew Grant
[00:16:06] S2: Yeah. I've heard that before, and I can relate to that. When we were first expanding into The US, one of our investors, he's a director, he shared a kind of some of data that they'd analyzed, think, just the kind of VC portfolio level, and it was looking at expansion from The US into The UK and from The US into Japan. And the likelihood of success is actually higher going from The US into Japan. And it was like... The theory is that because when you're expanding to the Japan, you know it's gonna be very different. You know that you're gonna... Like, do you need a JV or a partner? You know that they speak a different language. It's very clear they speak a very different language. Their markets work differently, so you approach it through that lens. Whereas people take for granted when they expand from The US into The UK that they speak the same language, it's broadly the same market, and therefore we'll be successful just by pattern matching what we've learned in The US. That's something I've tried to internalize over the last year, tried to, like, force myself to reiterate our operating model, reiterate how we kind of approach the market, think about things from zero to one, kind of first principles, to make sure we don't fall into that trap. [00:17:08] S1: And, I mean, you've got the not not just work experience, but you've taken your family over there. How's that going for all of you having to adjust with young children to to living into a different part of the world?
00:17:08 · Matthew Grant, Richard Gunn
[00:17:08] S1: And, I mean, you've got the not not just work experience, but you've taken your family over there. How's that going for all of you having to adjust with young children to to living into a different part of the world? [00:17:17] S2: It's been fun, for sure. A four year old and a three year old and and another on the way, and we live in... Down in Brooklyn. So some people in New York would say, therefore, I'm not living in the real New York, and some people would say, I am living in the real New York. Although I'm down in Park Slope, so I don't think that can be kind of considered edgy Brooklyn by any means. One benefit I found from New York, and maybe this is just being an expat, and my... Most of my experience as an expat is in New York, and therefore I'm just applying it to that. But it feels like there's quite a lot of transient communities in New York, which makes it much easier to actually make friends and build a network. And so I found it... Like, unsurprisingly, found myself hanging out with a lot of other people who have intersection with insurance and technology, having moved to New York, but that's part of fun of it.