Scouting for Growth

Dylan Bourguignon: SO-SURE... how to socialise insurance

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Dylan Bourguignon, who was, at the time, the CEO of SO-SURE, which he has since sold. He is on a mission to restore customer trust in insurance. He has set up his digital insurance platform with a unique model that delivers win-win insurance. In this conversation, the pair discusses Dylan's journey setting up SO-SURE, why he moved into insurance, and how useful sales strategies and skills have been to scale the business.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Having been an engineer twice over, I went into strategy consulting and then private equity for 10 years, and acquired an MBA on the way. In the latter part of my time in private equity, I focused on insurance and came to understand the entire value chain and the chasm between the consumer experience and the margins the industry was making. As an investor, I was looking for businesses that were addressing the issue; sadly, there weren’t any, so I decided to do it myself.
Whenever you try to change the equation for consumers, if you just try to focus on a single element that matters to them, whether it’s distribution, policy admin, or claims, as individual segments of the value chain, you’re only optimizing a sub-optimal point. If you really want a step change in customer experience, you have to take control of the entire value chain and redesign it. That’s what we’ve done. 
Our platform delivers a risk pooling model and a network model. Think about it as Mutual 3.0 (the next stage of the John Lewis Partnership model). The idea is that I buy a policy, I’m covered, I can then connect to my friends and family who I trust, and every time I connect to them, I and my friends each get £10 added to each of our reward pots. We can all connect to as many people as we want until my reward pot is worth 80% of the value of my premium. At the end of the year, if I and my friends have not claimed, the money in my pot is paid out to me. My pot is not dependent on my friends' connections, only on those networks of people I connect directly with.
Embedded insurance is a bit like "the emperor's new clothes." I feel that it is just like dressing up something that’s been around for a long time. "Dixons" was already selling insurance with laptops in the 90s. The only difference is now the ability to make it part of the consumer experience when you purchase a product, as distribution partners you can also build a better understanding of their customers and you can use some of that information to provide a more relevant and bespoke solution for the customers in terms of the insurance. There are all sorts of charges that the industry needs to be mindful of. Think about the issue of over-insurance. If you insure for loss/ theft/ damage for every single item that you own – a couch for example – is that not covered by your home and content insurance already? The solution that we’re creating for consumers needs to be relevant and we also need to be delivering through an impeccable moment of truth -- a superb claim experience -- that needs to be as seamless as the purchase itself.
BEST MOMENTS
‘For us at SO-SURE, we needed to gain control of the customer experience from purchase to claim. What you quickly realize is that there’s no way of fundamentally changing the paradigm for consumers unless you have control over the entire value chain – policy admin, claims, distribution.’'Consumers don’t trust the promise that when things go wrong, their back is going to be covered. Unfortunately, this is broken. Nobody has the consumer’s best interests at the heart of what they do. We’ve addressed all those issues in our redesign of the consumer experience. It’s so critical to focus on what the customer’s experience is going to be when they claim, and how it can be a good experience.’‘Win-win means amazing if you need us. Our insurance products are incredibly competitive, up to 40% cheaper than our competition, it’s very clear and written for consumers, and when you claim we fulfill the claims within 24-72 hours, 10 times faster than the competition. If you do not claim, you get rewards (95% of people don’t claim on insurance) If so you can get up to 80% of your money back if you and your friends in your pool don’t claim. What’s not to love?'‘Be yourself and don’t stop believing.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dylan Bourguignon is on a mission to restore consumer trust in insurance. He has developed a digital Insurer with a unique model that delivers win-win insurance through a social business model that rewards customers for good behavior. 
With 10 years of private equity investing and business development experience across a broad spectrum of industries (i.e., consumer, media, industrial, and financial services). With special expertise in business growth, drawing on sales, strategy, negotiation, M&A, financing, and leadership, Dylan has a lens for what makes sense for consumers. Dylan gained analytical and financial skill sets through an MBA and Chartered Engineer status. Worked in Europe with exposure to Asia and USA. Bilingual French-English with conversational Spanish and basic German.
Dylan built SO-SURE insurance so that one can have their cake and eat it! SO-SURE makes it fast and easy to claim when a customer needs support. And when the customer does not need SO-SURE, the team rewards them with up to 80% of the premium payback.
SO-SURE offers coverage against theft, loss, accidental damage, water damage, and more. It also offers insurance premium reimbursement every year. It offers online claims processing services. It also offers replacement or repair once the claim is approved.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Janthana K.: Who is UK’s on-demand gig economy worker?

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Janthana Kaenprakhamroy, co-founder and CEO of Tapoly, an on-demand gig-economy worker InsurTech startup based in the UK. In this interview, Sabine and Janthana discuss business model innovation, target market and customer segmentation, and what building a lifestyle brand in insurance means. They finally cover company culture, talent acquisition, and business founding.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Tapoly came about because I was so surprised by how backward we were in offering insurance and in the end-to-end process for gig economy workers and micro-businesses. This was an industry in which I thought I could add value.
Tapoly is a timely and much-needed platform because we can operate at a micro-premium level that some traditional players may not be interested in or capable of delivering. Our fully automated process, which uses technology to drive pricing and underwriting, makes it easier for us to achieve economies of scale and save costs, even if the transaction is much smaller than a traditional player would be willing to underwrite. This is needed because someone needs to serve these customers.
We differentiate ourselves from our peers through our product differentiation and our approach, which is from the customer angle, looking at their profile and asking ourselves what we need to do to get the relevant insurance to cover our clients’ flexible lifestyles. To cover this, you need to expand your product range and carrier list, which is time-consuming and costly. The next stage is to grow our business.
Gig workers could work three jobs, each job with a very different risk profile, so it’s very hard to buy coverage to cover all three risks. Offering an on-demand, usage-based solution relevant to a variety of activities will help the insured and us understand the risks we are taking, rather than getting a surprise when the client claims for something that is obviously not covered by the policy.
BEST MOMENT
‘What’s needed in the insurance space is a joined-up system that tracks every single transaction from every single source. That’s why Tapoly has gone from being a reach-out player offering micro-insurances to moving up the chain.’ ‘Our gig workers include either micro-business, sole traders or freelancers that are difficult to make a profit from but need insurance to cover core products like employer liabilities for businesses that everyone must have. There are also professional indemnity, public liability, and other add-ons that may be relevant to their business activity and risk profile.’‘I’m a first-time founder as well as being a female, and on top of that, I didn’t have much insurance experience when I started, and the profit margins are small on microinsurance products. A lot of investors would prefer to invest in a company with larger margins and at a more mature stage of development, still, we are hopeful that we can prove to them that we are one of the valuable platforms that they should invest in.’‘I chose my co-founder, Sam, based on three aspects: Skill to add value, work ethic, and his ability to financially support the business when needed. We both chose our team based on the talent that we know we needed, and individuals that we could coach and teach so they don’t pick up any bad habits. The experience was not necessary for us. An interest in the business and high work ethics were key.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Janthana Kaenprakhamroy is one of the Top 10 Insurtech Female Influencers as ranked by The Insurance Institute. Founder of Tapoly, the first on-demand insurance platform for the gig economy in Europe, as seen in the Top 100 European Fintech Awards 2017. Chartered accountant and former investment banking professional. Janathana was also one of the co-authors of the InsurTECH Book.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Mike Minett: Portabl for gig workers

In this episode of the Scouting for Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Mike Minett, CEO or Chief Ideas Guy at Portabl. Portable is a platform and community that provides insurance, benefits, and savings products for freelance and self-employed professionals. In this podcast, Mike and Sabine cover: Why Mike decided to move from consulting to building an InsurTech focused on the future of work, what Portabl’s focus and core proposition are, what is required to build a gig economy-focused startup, and a little bit of ESG and the Future of Tech.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
We exploded out of the gate and got some opportunities in the US, which was probably too big for us for where we were at in our journey. So, we decided to come back and technically build and launch again out of London. Then we got a bit of Covid interruption when we were due to close our first round of funding in March 2020, and things fell apart at that point, but interestingly, Portabl and our proposition to serve and support the independent, freelance, and gig world of work continued to be interesting, and Covid accelerated everything. So, on the one hand, we lost time, but actually, I think the timing will work out even better for us as we prepare to finally launch into the market. It’s been a journey!
We want to create a portable structure that wraps around the individual and follows them with whatever they’ve got going on, whatever pieces of work they might have on the go, for whichever client they might have on the books, and ultimately, across any geographies that they might be traveling to and working through. The old model no longer fits the way people are choosing to live and work.
Building an insurance business has its challenges, especially given regulatory constraints and risk-profiling requirements, which is our secret sauce – ‘frisk’, our freelancer risk. People’s underwriting score and credit score both drop simply because they’ve become independent, yet this is the same person with the same network, the same skills, and experiences, and potentially the same career trajectory. Why should they face biases and penalties just because they are independent? The only reason is that the models are built for the old world.
At Portabl, we’re trying to tackle risk profiling through data and analytics, gaining a better understanding of these individuals to present that story back to our insurance and credit partners on their behalf, so they get a better, fairer deal. We try to free up a lot of time and stress for our customers so they can concentrate on their work.
Insurance for good is a good thing, but people don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I wish I had more insurance.” They don’t even know what they have, what they don’t have, what they should probably have, and that it’s a lot more affordable than they probably think. A lot of our insurance plans come with really nice features, like access to a virtual GP, counseling and mental health support, physio, etc. 
BEST MOMENTS
‘The fear of startups and the whole concept is that you need to be doing more faster and you’re constantly watching the clock.’‘By 2023, 50% of the world’s workforce is going to be working independently in some shape or form. Who’s looking after this new 50%? While there are few today, they will become a major part of the working population tomorrow. That was the genesis for the idea of Portabl.’‘As an independent, it’s precarious if you lose your health. Your health impacts your ability to earn. And if you lose your ability to earn, this also impacts your health. We really concentrate on the health and well-being piece by trying to keep our members happy, healthy, and productive.’‘The laptop and the mobile phone are the most critical business tool for many of us, do you have them insured? You really should, because all your data, your IP address, and your knowledge are likely to be on your phone or laptop. Independent workers don’t have the company to replace the phone or laptop.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Mike Minett is the CEO and founder of PORTABL. co, an all-in-one, data-driven platform providing portable insurance, benefits, and savings products to the world's freelancers and gig economies – nicely wrapped up in a single monthly membership bundle. PORTABL.co does the heavy lifting for these new and typically underserved markets, saving members’ time, money, and stress with easy-to-understand and use risk and financial products. Mike is no stranger to disrupting the market with unique perspectives on the twenty-first-century workplace – driven by a rich understanding of the impact of demographics. After a 20-year consulting and management career across fintech, insurance, and risk management for global investment banks, Mike launched The Positive Ageing Company, a SaaS-based data business focused on addressing the challenges and opportunities of the global aging workforce. That start-up was acquired by MMC Inc. (Mercer) in 2016.
PORTABL.co is empowering the world's independent workforce and the future of work. Portabl has built the world’s smartest platform and community, providing flexible financial wellbeing, health benefits, and insurance products to the 50% of the workforce living and working in gig-based economies. 
At its heart is our proprietary FRISC Score – set to challenge traditional underwriting and credit scoring of independent workers. Never has our mission to better serve and support the world’s independent workforce been more important and relevant.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Naby Mariyam: Who Is Coverhero?

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Naby Mariyam, CEO of Coverhero, an insurance platform that provides coverage for all types of gig-economy hustle. The first product delivered by Coverhero, Hustlecover.com was recently launched to fill the gap of financial insecurity for the growing gig economy and self-employed generation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Before setting up Coverhero, my last two startups were in the gig economy and supply chain, so I have some experience building marketplaces and gig-economy platforms. I launched Australia’s first ride-share platform, Ridehero, and a last-mile delivery platform, ZipMate.  Before transitioning into tech, I was a social scientist in academia for about 15 years. 
It’s very humbling to go into a whole different industry where you don’t know how it’s done after being an expert in academia. In my area, I was at the top, and then to go to a completely different industry and start from the bottom was deeply humbling. This is core to my existence, to who I am; I have to fight through these barriers pretty much every single day. I left the Maldives to move to another country and started over. I then decided to get into tech, tick all of the diversity boxes, and fight those biases. And building what we have at Coverhero is a huge accomplishment.
There’s no other way for us but to build a customer-centric business. This was truly weird when I first started talking to insurance industry executives who design products around actuaries or loss/expense ratios; it’s very product-centered rather than customer-centric. I then learned how broken the insurance supply chain is, and that got me really excited because I love solving non-sexy, complex supply chain problems. I wanted to find out how we build a product that customers actually want, and how we acquire and retain customers at a lower cost. 
Our philosophy is to build a truly valuable piece of software that connects insurers to distribution. A couple of factors led us to take this direction. When we first started, we wanted to go direct to consumers and acquire customers that way, but along the way, we realized that to build a company that can dominate a category, you need to find a gap, then define, refine, and refine it again. The category that we define is "work integrated life cover", which is for someone who has finished university and who decided to go into the workforce as a self-employed.
BEST MOMENT
‘I wasn’t really interested in insurance, but I had a life-changing experience where I got really sick, and we had an insurance claim rejected. That process led me to be curious enough to think, “Why is this so difficult? Why can’t it be as simple as booking an Uber?”’
‘To leave academia to jump into the startup world was an existential crisis, I think.’‘I’ve always been passionate about creating equity and opportunity for people that don’t have access to networks, this is something the world needs to do a lot more of.’‘The last four years I’ve been in the space, I’ve seen a lot of money being invested into ideas that may or may not work, and the bar that’s being set by the insurance industry is very different from the bar that is set for a startup that is not from the InsurTech industry.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Naby Mariyam says: Graduating with a Master of Philosophy in Management at the age of 22, I have had 18 years of experience in a wide range of industries across senior-level positions spanning Academia (Business studies, Research Methodology and Design), Management Consulting, Documentary production, Travel & Destination Marketing, and Technology. Naby's Research background is in social science, where she deeply studied human behavior in her Academic career. Naby is currently taking a break from her PhD to focus on building technology-driven solutions that solve community problems. Naby shares that she is not a new face in the Australian startup scene, having launched several of her own startups and Business ventures, working closely with founders and catalysts of innovation in the Australian Startup Ecosystem over the last 8 years. Naby advised the United Nations Development Project on building start-up ecosystems and designed accelerator programs to drive innovation in developing Nations. Naby was an Australian delegate at the G20 Young Entrepreneurs conference in Berlin in 2017. Naby is a Keynote speaker, commentator, thought leader, and advocate for diversity of thought in the financial services and technology sector. She loves salsa dancing, poetry, and InsurTech (in that order). When Naby is not exploring her side hustles, she runs Coverhero, an embedded InsurTech startup focusing on revolutionizing insurance services, focusing on the needs of Millennials and Gen Z. Coverhero launched its first product www.hustlecover.com to fill the gap of financial insecurity for the growing Gig Economy and self-employed generation, and its smart home insurance API www.lucci.io in 2021.
Website: www.hustlecover.comEmail: naby@coverhero.au
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Iain Wilcox: Why IoT for commercial property?

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Iain Wilcox, CEO of GWT Insight, a tech company focused on making cost-effective commercial building data available to their owners, operators, and advisers. 
Iain is an entrepreneur, leader, and visionary who successfully launched new businesses from scratch, balancing strategic planning with practical implementation. Over a 30-year period, Iain worked with companies including AT&T and Cognizant, and 5 years ago, he launched GWT Insight.
During the conversation, Sabine and Iain discussed four topics: What is GWT Insight from a company, branding, and team perspective? Why both, property and commercial building IoT, are unique markets around which to build a risk mitigation ecosystem. Benefits that are delivered to the property and insurance markets (including preventative maintenance). Lessons learned from moving to the entrepreneurial space after years of working for large companies.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I’ve been delivering consulting services to large corporations for 13 years and have witnessed just how difficult it is for them to balance the need to provide structure and control over their investments with ensuring they do not hinder their innovation initiatives. The Tier 1 carriers recognized they needed to start working with startups. I was working with a large India-based IT company, and they recognized that both organizations needed the agility and speed-to-market of a startup. This led to the formation of GWT Insight.
When we were formed in 2017-2018, it was in the very early days of people realizing they could save money by how they use and consume energy. Now, with rising utility prices, people are very focused on energy optimization and we see ourselves as not only being able to deliver on the governance part of an ESG model, with the risk management solutions that we develop with our partners, the insurers, and their brokers, but we’re also being able to deliver on commercial property owners’ desire to deliver a better understanding of how their buildings are performing and being able to reduce their costs.
Property can account for 20-30% of the overall premium on a portfolio when you’ve got business interruption, public liability, and employee liability. You’ve got an area of the insurance paradigm and the value chain that impacts quite a wide area.
We’ve got use cases across a variety of different examples and verticals. We use real-time data from manufacturing units, offices, hotels, schools, hospitals, and central government departments (MoD and local authorities). Some of the use cases and benefits we’re looking at are picking up fire control data, so you know that if there is a problem with the alarm, it helps them to proactively go to their clients and warn them. We’ve also been able to identify loss events with our insurance clients and stop them from happening.
BEST MOMENTS
‘When buildings are built, they have a number of IoT sensors built in already. Even though a standard office will have 5,000-10,000 data points, GWT Insight recognized an opportunity to capture that data by listening to the existing in-house building management system. We developed the GWTI Observer to do just this and create a better understanding of risk for our users and customers.’
‘Risk managers want real-time data because it’s about loss prevention. We’ve still got a little bit of education to go through in the underwriting community; a lot of that community still has a very traditional viewpoint on how to use data and what is out there. With regards to owners, a third of this market is bleeding edge and wants to risk manage their properties, a third is interested but not ready for it, and a third does not manage that data and insight proactively.’
‘I think the "data" topic will change the way insurance is sold, because when you’ve got the data, you can make better, informed decisions about how you’re managing your property, the risks impacting your property, and how that impacts the rest of your business.’
‘In every building in every portfolio, there have been areas where we can help improve the operational efficiency of the building and provide a better customer experience for their own customers, employees, and stakeholders.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Iain Wilcox is an entrepreneur, leader, and visionary who has successfully launched new businesses from scratch, including software, IoT hardware, and services companies in the UK and Europe. Primarily worked in the startup development phase, building a unique customer base and revenue streams from the start. 
Iain manages the delicate balance between strategic planning and the practical implementation of market entry, business development, and revenue delivery for new and established operations.
Iain set up GWT Insight approximately 5 years ago.
GWT Insight is a tech company focused on making cost-effective commercial building data available to its owners, operators, and advisers. Whether reducing risk, improving the quality of customer experience, or saving money, access to reliable, real-time, and relevant data is now underpinning new ways to improve business performance. With origins in the insurance industry, GWT Insight has developed technology to address complex data-capture challenges in commercial buildings. GWTI's device is simple to install and works across open protocols and many widely used closed-protocol systems. It is plugged into the building's BMS. Once connected, it listens to building systems, sensors, or business-specific equipment without affecting their operation. Unlimited data can be captured, classified, standardised, compressed, and protected with advanced security protocols. The data then flows via the cloud to client information systems, dashboards, and user interfaces, including tablets, desktops, and mobile phones in near real time. The unique approach to data management and the ability to deliver real-time data on what is happening, and to critically inform ‘why’, make GATTI's solution a highly cost-effective platform to drive material benefits for anyone involved in the performance of commercial property.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Henri Winand: Developing an electronic marketplace

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Henri Winand, co-founder and CEO of AkinovA, an electronic marketplace built to ease the transfer and trading of insurance and insurance risks. During the conversation, Sabine and Henry discuss the importance of strong taxonomy when moving into multi-party electronic placements, tangible and intellectual assets, transition risk, cyber risk, NFTs, and driving liquidity in illiquid markets.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The whole objective of building our marketplace is to access a larger portion of the market. The market is there already, and our goal is to help clients or anybody in the value chain feel that we can do a better job of providing transactional transparency. I’ve done that in the world of energy and in the world of transportation. I’m an engineer who likes to solve problems; more to the point, I really love to build teams that can solve big problems in this world.
The challenge for FinTechs and InsurTechs is that sometimes you can’t patent things because they fall in the business idea realm. Being able to then keep a trade secret – maybe with some patents around it -- which we are exploring big time by the way for a few of our concepts – is a way to not signal to everyone what you are doing, so you can keep the trade secret for a while. But equally, there are some pieces that I believe, patent attorneys believe too, can be patented. This is quite important because it gives you the ability to have a discourse with very large organizations if they try to replicate your IP. IP = value. It is not about sticking a licensing reminder that tells someone they’re infringing on your IP and that they owe you money; that’s not the point. The point is you arrive at an asset that can be valued by clients and investors, which then allows you to have a value-based conversation with your partners, too.
The question is: How do we, as an industry, attract the right talent? Our industry has to be exciting. I got into insurance by accident, and insurance isn’t the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning unless you have to. What do we need to change to be part of the client's journey?
If you break down insurance, you have to start with the risk that needs to be reduced and managed. First, I’ve got to make it easier for the person we engage with and who has a problem we can solve.  Second, they need to be able to articulate it clearly to ensure it is well evaluated. I then need to be able to say what it’s worth and how well or badly it could go based on the information gathered.
BEST MOMENTS
‘An idea is a cost center until you make money out of it. Once you start making money, that idea can then become a profit center.’
‘Time is everything, not money or attending meetings. The only commodity we have as human beings is time. So invest your time wisely.’
‘I’m hoping things won’t change for the worse when we look at the current economy. Still, I think some clear fundamentals have changed. So let's make the best of what we know for now.’
‘When you’re coming up with an idea, the cleverest people in the room are the ones who question the idea. So, if you want to look clever in a group, don't come up with an idea, come up with critiques.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Henri Winand is a growth- and change-oriented CEO with a passion for scaling businesses across a broad set of technologies, using diverse business models and team-based delivery.  Henry now serves as CEO for AkinovA, an insurance technology company that he co-founded with a specialist in ILS (insurance-linked securities and related insurance products). He is also a City of London-based fund manager.  Prior to this, Henry served as CEO of a British tech company listed on the London Stock Exchange Main Market (Intelligent Energy, a $1bn tech IPO) with in excess of $200m raised from a broad range of sources, leading to strong top-line growth, largely from internationally-based customers.
Today, Henry serves on several Boards in the UK, Singapore, India, Japan, and the US in the energy, software services, film content publishing, and automotive sectors.  Henry also served on the Board of an EU-funded PPP valued at €1bn+.  Those also included several advisory bodies to Ministers, Secretaries of State, and Officials in the new energy, automotive, and materials science sectors in the UK, as well as on the Alumni Advisory Board of the Warwick Business School and of the University of Cambridge.
Henry owns more than a dozen granted and pending patents and has several papers published in well-known, peer-reviewed scientific journals, covering topics including composite materials, neutron diffraction, and processes to improve industrial product development cycles.  Henry is regularly invited to speak at international conferences and has spoken in the US and French Senates, too. Henry provides advice to selected major global institutional, venture capital, and private equity funds. In addition to meeting several Heads of State, Henry made several appearances on live TV and recorded TV and Radio programs (e.g., Live CNBC TV, Live Bloomberg TV, Live BBC Radio 4 “The Today Programme”, recorded BBC and other programs, provided thought leadership, and quoted articles in broadsheets, e-newspapers, and The Huffington Post.) 
Henry is married to Anne. They both have one child called Alexander.
AkinovA is building an electronic marketplace for the transfer and trading of (re)insurance risks. By working in collaboration and partnership with the insurance industry, AkinovA helps optimize the risk transfer value chain by providing a capital markets-grade, industry-regulated trading platform and clearing house. AkinovA provides valuable data and analytics to participants and regulators from the aggregated data that passes through the marketplace. AkinovA grows the overall size of the insurance marketplace by enabling new participants to enter and existing participants to transact more business. There is significant pressure from the Capital Markets wanting an appropriate mechanism to access insurance risks that are de-correlated from the bonds and equity markets. Creating an effective secondary market for (re)insurance risks to enable their trading will dramatically increase the volume of business transacted across the marketplace. AkinovA is working with a number of brokers, who act as key channel partners for the existing industry, to kickstart liquidity in the marketplace. AkinovA provides them with a venue to service their clients’ needs in a more efficient and timely manner as well as gives them access to new clients entering the market who would benefit from their advice. AkinovA’s goal is to remain an independent marketplace enabling it to attract and work with all trading parties without undue influence from industry participants.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Simon Schneider: Investing in young ventures

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Simon Schneider, founding partner of Neoteq Ventures. They cover three areas:
Simon’s path in VC Land,
Great minds think alike, and
Startup tips to engage with large companies while ensuring they don't get side-lined when the corporation’s strategy changes. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
It’s a fortunate coincidence that I entered the VC market in 2001. I’d studied to be a lawyer but decided not to become a lawyer because a friend suggested VCs needed someone like me who knew what contracts should look like and who understood people. From the first day of my VC career, I was fascinated by all these founders and their teams with their great game-changing ideas and technologies.
Neoteq invests not just in InsurTechs, we concentrate on early-stage investments which are pre-seed, seed, and Series A. We do not have a specific sector focus, but we look for technology-based startups. The most relevant question for us is which customer problem does the startup solve? It sounds like an easy question, but often when you meet founders and you ask them that very question they have difficulty describing their proposition, and if you can’t describe what the customer’s problem is, why would someone be willing to buy your product? Market, team, and technology, these three key parts, are used constantly to perform our due diligence and decide if the startup is an interesting investment target for us.
Not every startup in our business is successful. There are always failures. Of course, investors have expectations and you have to fulfill them as a team when you get the trust of your investors, but not everything can be handled by the team, there are some things your team can handle, and some things in the market that you do not have a handle on. You always have to look at why each case wasn’t successful in the end when it looked promising in the beginning. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that are impacting startups. I expect that access to capital, especially in later-stage financing rounds will be tougher and tougher than in past years which means valuations will go down a little bit. I expect the rounds will get a bit smaller and that has an impact on the M&A market, perhaps exiting will take more time than you’ve been used to, but if you’re an experienced VC you know it takes time (5-7 years or more) until you can exit your companies from your portfolio. The VC scene won’t freeze though. It will continue to find winners to yield high returns.
We are financially driven. Each startup, from our point of view, needs to have the potential to pay back our complete fund. If we do not see this potential it’s unlikely we will invest. Strategic returns are often combined with financial returns, at least from my point of view. But of course, CVCs often try to get some kind of extra deals with the teams to get earlier access to the product. This is something I would highly recommend startups not to accept, in the end, it’s always unhelpful, especially when corporations change their strategy – which can happen from one day to another – you are no longer relevant to them and the baseline premise of the engagement is over. Startups that want to cooperate with a CVC need to set up evaluation meetings and workshops where they can really create the goals on which they will want to work on. If you don’t find common grounds then stop the conversations because it won’t be a successful partnership. Alignment is key.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Over the last 20 years as a VC, I’ve seen a lot of things. My fascination with the VC business and the chance I have every day to work with special people are still there. I still love my job.’
‘The fundraising process, especially during Covid was not easy. Meetings are no longer possible and investors have to make choices through Zoom calls as to whether they would want to invest in a venture.’
‘Companies working on climate tech and sustainability are really interesting and I see a lot of potential in this sector because it’s relevant for all of us and the better the solutions are the more they will help our planet to survive, hopefully.’
‘Startups that started in previous crises often were more successful than companies that start in normal times. The big question is: Do we have normal times at the moment? I would say, definitely not.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Simon Schneider has more than 15 years of experience as an Investment Professional in sourcing, negotiation, financing, and the support & sale of technology start-ups in the fields of B2B/Cloud-Software, Digital Media, eCommerce, Insurtech & Clean-Tech. Simon has years of M&A experience through the trade sales of several portfolio companies. He also serves as a board member for various companies.
Neoteq Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Cologne, Germany, that invests in outstanding teams and exceptional technology-based companies.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Kobi Bendelak: From retiring twice to building InsurTech Israel

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kobi Bendelak, a 22-year veteran in insurance. Kobi is the CEO of InsurTech Israel, which he established to promote and lead innovation within the Israeli Insurtech ecosystem.
Sabine has known Kobi for over 6 years. He mentored the startups in her European Accelerator and has always been the kindest individual for the startups and her team members to talk to for advice and mentorship.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
InsurTech Israel has four baseline activities: Investment – We’ve already invested in 10 startups, all of them are Israeli InsurTechs, Consulting – we assist the startups to grow, Media and Events – we hold events and bring big delegation of startups to engage with corporations – Tel Aviv is one of the key capitals for InsurTech startups in the world. Still, there was no accelerator programme in Israel, so we started one with great mentors from all over the world who helped startups learn, grow, and scale. 
Building an ecosystem is very hard, but having a success story makes it easier. We have four unicorns that assist us in building and growing the ecosystem and laying the foundation for the InsurTech industry here in Israel. For a good ecosystem, though, you have to have a lot of early-stage startups, not unicorns! It’s hard to build that because you have to find the entrepreneurs, and they need to find you. Israel is very good with engagement and connections. We have a culture of entrepreneurship here.
The insurance world is very orthodox; it’s a long journey for startups to form partnerships with incumbent players. Both B2B startups and investors need to be patient because there is no great success in the beginning, unlike B2C, where you can succeed faster. Soon, it will be easier, though, because the entire industry will be digitised.
The insurance industry is a very logical industry: yes/no, cover/no cover, something happened/nothing happened, which makes it a great playground for AI. The Israeli army has seen many successes with AI, so the entrepreneurs who are coming up are young and well-experienced. They start looking for ‘ideas’ and for ways to use them to solve real market problems. Israelis are the best at solving problems because we live in a very tough neighbourhood. InsurTech is not just technology. Indeed, it is first about solving problems, evaluating options, and then implementing technology to make it happen. Entrepreneurs with strong AI skills bring that knowledge to the InsurTech industry through better underwriting for planes, fraud detection, and healthcare, to name a few areas.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I retired at 45 years old, and after a few months, it started to get boring, so I looked around for opportunities, and the InsurTech space became very interesting to me.’ 
‘Coming into work every day with passion is key.’
‘You need to have mileage and a little money to succeed.’
‘Every InsurTech startup must have insurance domain expertise in the team if they want to get into insurance because it’s a very complex industry that requires subject matter expertise.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Kobi Bendelak is the CEO of InsurTech Israel that he established to promote and lead the Israeli Insurtech ecosystem. The company has four areas of activity: investments, consulting, media, and acceleration programmes. All those activities make InsurTech Israel the leading and most active accelerator program in the Israeli InsurTech sector. 
Previously, Kobi was the founder and CEO of Reshef Insurance Brokers, part of Migdal/ Generali Insurance Group. He has 22 years of experience in the insurance industry and holds a BA in Management and an MA in Law from Bar Ilan University. He was also a Colonel (Reserve) in the IDF.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Farron Blanc: L&G America

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Farron Blanc, at the time VP, Brokerage Distribution & Strategy at Legal & General America (L&G America) where he works with an amazing team of innovators to drive growth within life insurance by leveraging emerging technologies to accelerate opportunities within the brokerage channels.
Farron is an entrepreneur, too. He started Gerry, a concierge Service platform that used data and licensed Social Workers to help thousands of Americans to navigate requirements and deliver the right support within the long-term senior care space. Farron and his team sold the company in 2021, when he moved to L&G America. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I’ve been at Legal & General for about three months. L&G America is the world’s 11th largest asset manager, but in the US it’s a really nimble business. As a corporation, we’ve invested so much in digital. One of the things I’m really passionate about is helping the underserved get adequate, affordable protection through term life insurance. You have to use technology to reach customers today and empower brokers to do that most effectively. I’m loving it!
On the entrepreneurial side, in a venture-backed startup with $4, $10, or $100 million USD, money doesn’t solve anything because – until you’re a big tech like Amazon, Apple, or Google  – that money is an investment in the future, and you will have to raise more capital in 12-18 months to scale. So the default mode is death, as you’ll run out of money at some point because you won't be profitable. Profit is indeed still the rule of the game.
Another thing people don’t understand is that when you receive funding or a specific amount of money, it comes with expectations. For some a $1 billion USD (Unicorn level) exit isn’t big enough, even if they’re only writing a $2 million USD cheque, they want to be in markets where companies can do $10 billion USD exits (Decacorn level.) If you can understand those metrics, unit economics, and expectations, you will do well. As an entrepreneur, you need to stay focused and relevant while hitting all the milestones you promised your investors, so you get there.
Within a corporation, the main challenge is actually "speed to market". You may have distribution, but you may not have innovation because you’re so efficient (e.g., you have processes, best practice committees, procedures, and meetings to ensure that everything that is done gets super efficient) Tech giants like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google do phenomenally well at attracting talent to be able to attack a problem internally, and then by buying companies externally.
At L&G America, we want to cover as many families as possible with affordable protection. The only way to do that is by using technology to digitize processes and personalize engagements and internal processes (i.e., rates, the experience, the journey the policyholder goes through) across product design, underwriting, and claims processing. We’re probably the market leader in the application part of the process. Still, we have so much work to do on the back end. You then have to work with distribution partners to optimize all of this. I’d love to be proved otherwise, particularly in the life insurance or mortality coverage spaces. Let's remember that insurance is sold, not bought. No one wants to talk about death. The best way to sell it is through independent distribution, reaching out to the customer, and engaging with them in the way they want to engage and meet. There’s no one magic bullet.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I’ve always been fascinated by problems and what’s the best way to solve them. Sometimes it’s a clean sheet of paper with no rules, and sometimes it’s leveraging a 100-year-old brand with a $40 billion USD balance sheet.’ 
‘As long as you’re rapidly learning and re-assessing your challenges and assumptions, that’s the most enriching part.’
‘Within corporate venturing, you must have a strategic return lens on things. Whereas financial VCs are purely looking at gross IRR or total value paid-in capital and multiples. You have to look beyond the numbers even though they are so important.’
‘The response to the global financial crisis of 2008 was to print more money to avoid a global depression. I think that worked, but it inflated asset prices, and we were at a 0% interest rate environment for essentially two decades, meaning long-term contracts started to fall apart. What does the value of money mean now? It’s a debt obligation, but the rapid inflation we’re seeing means it’s going to be really interesting to see how we’re going to ride that out. How does being in an era of superabundant capital impact people’s subscriptions?’
ABOUT THE GUEST
At the time of this recording, Farron Blanc and his team help L&G America drive growth by leveraging technology throughout the broker channel. Prior to that, as co-founder and CEO of Gerry, Farron raised $3.75M in VC funding to launch the startup, a concierge service that used data and licensed Social Workers to help thousands of Americans navigate long-term senior care. Farron told us that he sold the business in the middle of 2021.
Farron was named by Digital Insurance as one of the 20 Insurance Innovators to know, as well as one of the top 35 young executives by Intelligent Insurer in 2017. 
Farron is a recovering global reinsurer, corporate VC, life insurance carrier President, BCG Strategy Consultant, and insurance Chief Marketing Officer with deep Asian and North American experience in startups and corporations. Ensure to reach out to Farron; he is such an amazing expert, influencer, and person. 
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Kristian Feldborg: Building Versuvio Labs

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kristian Feldborg, founder of Vesuvio Labs, a venture builder dedicated to FinTech startups and the InsurTech space in particular. Vesuvio Labs calls itself the digital rocket fuelling the insurance sector. In this episode, Sabine reviews Kristian’s journey as a FinTech venture builder and how he made the shift from the traditional tech world to the new world of tech.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I’ve always been interested in new things, startups, and tech. For most of my career, I’ve traveled, lived in different countries, and worked with entrepreneurs. Eventually, I decided I wanted to turn that into a business and create a lab and ecosystem where we could work with many entrepreneurs and help them execute the great ideas they have. 
As a venture builder, what you do is take some degree of risk with the clients and with the projects that you work on. That means someone comes to us very early in their journey and they do not necessarily have a lot of the business there yet, they certainly don’t have the capital, what we try to do at that very early stage is invest in those businesses through our work -- via sweat equity -- until they have launched the very first version of their platform and are starting to raise turnover for their businesses. 
We often work on 15 projects at the same time, and there can be a lot of commonalities among them. What we try to do, though, is to develop technology in a way that enables greater reuse across the different ventures we work with. We work hard to create a shared baseline infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, thereby reducing the risk of getting it wrong and the time-to-market.
Because we are blessed with working with so many entrepreneurs and businesses, we also see a lot of situations where some great people have come together but haven’t invested the effort into figuring out the right framework to help their business get to the destination they set for themselves or how they’re going to work with others. What happens is that it often doesn’t quite work out. There are many things every business must consider. The structure and the processes are really there to support you when things don’t work out the way they should. 
BEST MOMENTS
‘It’s all about finding great people with great ideas that perhaps do not have the technological expertise to execute on those ideas and see if we can partner with them and create great companies together.’ 
‘Insurance and financial services know something about their value chain, and they know how they want to change/ improve/ disrupt. We actually can help build the technology infrastructure around that through our technology and the partners we engage with.’
‘We want to allow people to focus more on the toppings; we provide the base of the pizza, and they decide whether they want to put pepperoni or whatever on top.’
‘You have to be quite conscious about what companies you select to work with. It would be natural to pick many companies that look a lot alike, but that does not work. The ones that benefit from tech services are those companies that have a strong technology fit, but more importantly, they can cover different aspects of the insurance value chain.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Led by Kristian, the Vesuvio Labs team aims to transform the insurance industry into a faster, cheaper, and more accessible one. And their focus is clearly on technical execution. 
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Sebastian Pitzer: Building InsurLab Germany

In this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastian Pitzler, former managing director of InsurLab Germany, a leading tech accelerator for startups wanting to enter the German market via Cologne.
Before moving to the other side of the coin (i.e., becoming an InsurTech startup enabler), Sebastian worked for a very well-known Insurance company, Ergo, a subsidiary of Munich Re. He also has a background in IT strategy; he is a board member and a digital lab development expert.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Within our industry, there has been a significant shift in the last 5-6 years. When I was responsible for the Ergo Lab in Berlin, it was hard to talk with the procurement department to secure a contract between a startup and an incumbent.
The insurance industry approached it from an IT background focused on programming languages and self-developed software solutions. Then they began using standard software such as Microsoft and SAP, and finally, they were open to working with and collaborating with startups.
It’s great to have seen the volume of InsurTech startups increase steadily over the past few years, and that’s because there are a couple of trends coming together: 1) The willingness and acceptance to support startups and corporate management attention that investments are necessary to build and grow these startup ecosystems. 2) The ability to see that startups are able to help and find solutions to major problems in a very short time period, which is something we realised in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been able to create many win-win situations and success stories, demonstrating that a startup solution can help overcome, for example, the bottleneck in internal IT capacity.
Networking the Insurance Industry is what our InsurLab Germany is about: building a strong, reliable network for all parties, including enthusiasts who want to work on innovation and digitalization. From the beginning, the design of the initiative was that we needed to bring together insurance companies on board as well as startups, IT providers, consultancy companies, and universities, all with different competencies to work on issues and topics like innovation and digitalisation.
By setting up the InsureNXT Conference, our goal was clear. We wanted to ensure that the focus was not only on insurance, startups, and tech companies. We also wanted to include the cross-industry and science dimensions because it’s logical that, if you want to develop insurance innovation and digitalization in an ecosystem economy, you need to involve different parties. It’s great to see cross-industry partners joining companies like Garmin, Volvo, and Lufthansa Systems, all collaborating with our startups!
BEST MOMENTS
‘I’m not the classical insurance guy, I’m more of a tech enthusiast.’
‘During the past six months, we have supported 15 startups to develop and grow. We’ve supported them with over 60 mentors from our insurance and expert networks. Those connections helped develop over 40 projects. And some are already up and running as products on the market.’
‘Corporations want to innovate but avoid risks, and the startups want to grow quickly, but sometimes they speak different languages, and we need to be a translator or build bridges between both those worlds to understand the different needs and perspectives.’
‘Digitalisation is about more than technology, it’s about mind shift, agility, customer centricity on a new level. That’s why it was so important, from scratch, to build InsurLab Germany as a network of different parties and drivers besides the member network that we have created and our partner network.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Sebastian Pitzler was the Managing Director of InsurLab Germany. He started in March 2018. Previously, he was head of the ERGO Digital Lab in Berlin and was responsible for setting up and expanding this innovation laboratory in the Berlin start-up scene.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Matt Connolly: Platformifying InsurTech Insights

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Matt Connolly, an entrepreneur and platform builder in the insurance sector. He’s also the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform. In this episode, Matt talks about himself and his idea to build the Sønr platform.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I always knew I wanted to start my own company, but I didn’t know what it would be or what I wanted to invent. The only relevant professional experience I had was working for a digital agency, but my friend and I set up a web design company in 2003 that was going to deliver strategy, creative, and tech for the web. Five years later, the business was very successful and became the number one digital agency in the UK. It was a very unusual position to be in as a 20-something.
I always wanted to push, push, and push again. I’m never satisfied. They are terrible traits in somebody, but they are also great traits for an entrepreneur. I hope I’m able to do that with empathy for those around me. Staff retention supports my belief that I can create a strong culture and be a strong leader within my organisation. And, those traits really do drive me forward. 
Having control over a company's DNA and shaping its culture is a great responsibility and one of the most important things a successful founder can achieve. Once you have that right, the rest of the business will flow. Fun has to be a large part of that. As a founder, you start off with your feet firmly under the desk. You are involved in shaping the operation of the business, KPIs, growth metrics, and all those kinds of things, and you can forget about having fun; that’s where my co-founder, Matt Ferguson, is great at continuously reminding me and us to remember the fun part of work. He makes sure we are going out, and we talk and connect.
You need to set a vision, define a purpose within it, and ensure that vision is brought into, and possibly even co-created by, people within the team. If you have that and everybody buys into it and you set a clear pathway to achieving that – whether you’re ahead of it or behind it – then everybody will rally and do their best to make that happen. I’ve always felt it should be somewhat democratic in a business's culture. Rather than employ people to fulfil specific roles, I’d rather employ exceptional talent, understand where they are best deployed, and allow them to function with that intent. That allows them to do the thing they love the best, and invariably they’re the best at, to create the right resourcing landscape to achieve our vision.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Employ people who are more talented than you.’ 
‘You will always overestimate what you can or will achieve in one year, but you will always underestimate what you can achieve in 10. I need to remind myself of that, I’m an incredibly impatient man.’
‘Always check in with each other and have those “high five” moments and check in and look after yourself en route.’
‘I am much better at encouraging others to have fun than doing it myself. But if you’re not having fun and living another life outside of work, you become a one-dimensional person, and that’s never going to be healthy for you.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Matt is the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform.
Sønr is a subscription-based platform that houses the world’s most comprehensive source of innovation intelligence, designed specifically for the insurance innovator. 
It is used by some of the best-known insurance companies globally, including Allianz, Bupa, Generali, Munich Re, and Tokio Marine.
Sønr connects its clients to innovation globally – the latest market trends, startups, and scaleups reshaping the insurance market. It provides insight into competitors’ innovation activities too... The critical intelligence needed to compete in today’s changing world.
It also has an in-built collaboration toolset that enables teams to work smarter, faster, and be more connected. This results in less duplicated effort and ensures everyone is really on the same page.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures