Scouting for Growth

Minh Tran: Introducing Venture Capital as a Service

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Minh Tran, founding partner of Mandalore Partners (and also her co-founder at Alchemy Crew) about the world of Venture Capital Funds. He has worked in the Corporate VC world for 30 years, most recently in financial services and founding Mandalore Partners 10 years ago.   KEY TAKEAWAYS When you are a Corporate Venturer you have two models, one is to invest in VC outside – that’s not really a corporate venture, but you have that option, the second is to create your own team internally, for many reasons, this model hasn’t worked in the long run. I came up with a third model, which is how to externalize corporate venture funds – to reach out to startups with both a financial interest and a strategic alignment of corporates. This is Venture Capital as a Service. Resilience comes from lateral thinking too when investing. You can enter the market of your core industry, but you can also reach out to new industries that can impact your core industry. If you’re a retailer, you invest in your core business, but FinTech could disrupt retail finance, so you could reach out to FinTech ventures, not just retail. So you’re prepared for disruption. SIDE – Source, Invest, Develop, Exit. Each step of our process has been optimized. Source is the ability to source better than a corporation, we combine public data (Crunchbase) with private data (corporate assignments) to come up with a list of startups. We then invest like a VC. We develop a portfolio management plan like a VC, but I do things differently, more hands-on than VCs. Then Exit, again I use VC techniques to exit at some point with or without the corporate.  Like any VC I look at if the market is growing, how the product would fit in the market, what is the business model/plan, and what is the team? I also look at a fifth element: The leverage we can access from the corporation. This could help accelerate the startup or the valuation of the startup.   BEST MOMENTS ‘The Mandalore Partners name came from a planet from Star Wars because I wanted to look to the future and I found out it was a good name to have because it was about mobility, globality, tech, and now The Mandalorian TV series.’ ‘There’s a bad reputation to having a corporate venture fund in the market that has the same name as your corporation, this is why externalizing VC activities and having a different name is attracting more startups to our fund while also providing the returns the corporates want.’ ‘When we talk to corporates when they’re looking to InsurTech and they want to be exposed to another tech, an external model can help you assess the new industries you seek where you have or you don’t have expertise.’ ‘I focus a lot of work on where to invest to have the best impact tools and platforms.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Minh is the Managing Partner of Mandalore Partners, which seeks to create an innovative framework that enables investors of firms in early stages to achieve scale exposure to a range of traditional, alternative, and tech venture capital assets. In addition to his experience as one of the founding team members at AXA Ventures, Minh was also an integral part of several other VC firms, including Nokia Ventures, Bertelsmann Ventures, and Truffle Capital. Mandalore Partners: https://www.mandalorepartners.com/    ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

Elisa Vlerich: 9.5 Ventures the VC for corporate venturing

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Elisa Vlerick, a partner at Ninepointfive Ventures, the Venture Capitalist dedicated to Corporate Venturing. Elisa loves removing syntax complexity from the proverbial crap, applying creativity and execution to everything she does.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Corporate Venturing differentiates from traditional VC activity in the sense that you have the power/leverage of a corporate to scale faster, to have what we call an unfair competitive advantage in the market. That really attracted me to Ninepointfive. Often there’s a lot of resistance within companies to start cannibalizing their own business, to start new ventures that are often very small. For billion-dollar companies, it’s hard to start something new that is not totally fitting into the existing company. They also don’t always have the skills or the right people to implement a new business model and there’s sometimes not the appetite because the new business would be so small compared to the main business so it wouldn’t get the attention it deserves.  The reason we build the venture together with the corporate is because this provides alignment with strategic interests. What we want to build together with them is a successful company with financial returns. If the strategic interests are not aligned with the financial objective that we have, usually we’re not the right partner.  The assumption is that tech-y people aren’t female. It’s like doctors, 20-30 years ago 90% of doctors were male and 90% of nurses were female, nowadays it’s 50/50, if not more female doctors. I think it’s a matter of time, 1-20 years and it will even out in our industry. It’s said women are more risk averse or less daring – and maybe there’s something in that – but once this idea that it’s really challenging and daring to start a startup is gone, I don’t see a reason why this wouldn’t go up to 50/50.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Our team is very interesting because we come from different angles and that makes our decision making and investment processes more interesting and, hopefully, better.’ ‘Taking the whole activity outside the corporate with our knowledge of building startups fuelled by the resources from the corporate makes a startup better placed in the market than a regular startup.’ ‘The key to our success is finding the right people to make it happen. You can have a great financial plan, but it needs to happen and it can only happen if the team is there.’ ‘Surround yourself with people that are better than you and will dare to go against the tide, or criticise the prevailing opinion, they’re going to make better decisions.’   ABOUT THE GUEST When complexity threatens to get the upper hand, Elisa picks up her pen. With that pen, she cuts through the proverbial crap, and to the bone. Elisa is resolute in her belief that strong business ideas can only prosper when ambiguity and prejudice are left at the door. When things are clear, creativity can flourish. From there onward she’ll tell you: “le bonheur est dans l’action”. https://www.ninepointfive.vc/    ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

David Kwon: A decade of societal change

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews IBM’s David Kwon about how insurance companies have had to navigate a decade of societal change. From the financial crisis and the rise of digital technology to changing consumer expectations, insurers face challenges that are fundamentally altering the very core of our industry. Does the question remain whether property and casualty insurers will be able to keep pace with changes in society over time? Are they focusing on the right priorities? And what about life insurance – is BigTech making any headway here to challenge established practices?  In this episode they discuss these trends and examine how insurers can best position themselves for success during this period of rapid transformation.   KEY TAKEAWAYS To remain relevant, insurers must find ways to embrace change while also ensuring profitability despite the current blurred competitive boundaries. While some insurers have embraced the new environment with open arms, others seem reluctant to adapt or even acknowledge potential opportunities for growth.  Mass-personalisation is the goal of every large insurer, not just for consumer products but insurers targeting B2B customers as well. The technology has evolved to a point where videos on a website can be personalized to each person, not just seeing your name on a website, but addressing you by your first name, referencing your family, etc. There are a lot of new risk pools, including self-driving cars. There are six levels of autonomy here, from level 1 being cruise control to full autonomy. Up to level 4 the liability is still with the driver, but AI is taking a bigger and bigger role in the driving, so insurance writers now have to begin to think about the AI as a risk, just like the driver. At level 5, where there’s no steering wheel, it becomes product liability and the responsibility moves from the driver to the manufacturer, which is a completely different business. It also impacts home and auto bundling. The overall auto market will start to shrink as more people buy autonomous cars. For insurers this is an interesting time, we’re beginning to see new risks emerging as the foundations of risk are getting more attention than before. There are 3 big disruptive technologies: IoT, AI, and hybrid cloud.    BEST MOMENTS ‘Covid has exposed the vulnerability of the interconnected world, the western world was hit first and suffered faster before it spread to third world countries.’ ‘Science and technology are key to solving the toughest challenges in our society.’ ‘The days of easily targeting users by buying third party data is passing us quickly. Insurers must now focus on first party data by engaging directly with the prospects and policy holders and get the data themselves through deeper engagement and better experience.’ ‘Covid accelerated ecommerce by about 2 years. All businesses, even small ones, are relying on technology more than ever before.’   ABOUT THE GUEST David Kwon is a sought-after Digital Reinvention Executive to IBM’s largest US and international insurance and banking clients. David is an associate partner within IBM business transformation services and a member of IBM Industry Academy. David has delivered over 60 strategy and transformation projects as an engagement leader and in executive strategic roles ranging from digital strategy, customer experience, business case for change. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkwon1/    ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

Dr Dietmar Kottmann: The InsurTech Radar

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Dr Dietmar Kottmann, a Partner of Oliver Wyman in Munich and a member of the insurance, and the digital practices. Dietmar has more than 20 years of management and strategic consulting experience. During this time, he has led numerous projects on strategy, IT, operational strategy, organisation, and digitisation. He leads insurance in the DACH region and is the lead author of the “InsurTech radar” series.   KEY TAKEAWAYS One of the most negative examples I had in my consulting career was in the .com days. We did a large ecommerce strategy project for one of the large travel players and the core strategy we recommended for them, we know today with hindsight that it was the right strategy because it was later executed by a startup, but the client was unable to execute it. Even though, intellectually it was spot on, we were unable to set up the client for success. That keeps me awake at night. Consulting is not R&D, or what you do at university, it’s generating real impact for your clients. Oliver Wyman – more or less – has three kinds of clients 1) financial sponsors who want to invest in (digital) insurance businesses, 2) customers who want to build something new in the InsurTech space, 3) helping our incumbent clients transform and become more successful in the digital world. This last one is our bread and butter. There are always three kinds of innovation: 1) efficiency innovations – reducing waste, 20 sustaining innovations – making the product better every year with features, coverages, engagement models, 3) market creating innovations – where you think about how the market is changing and where you position yourself for future success. When you think about a problem you have to start with someone whose life and existence you might want to improve – a company or individual. What progress are they seeking – functional, emotional, social? All three must be considered to help the customer. That is the most fun part of the business, really thinking about what we’re doing in a fundamental way and going much, much deeper and being much more interesting and playing to my curiosity than “how can I advance the next generation of my product”.   BEST MOMENTS ‘I started my career on the nerd side of the universe, playing with computers and programming on a Sinclair Zx81. Since then I looked for a career that allowed me to combine my passion with technology and computer science with effecting something in the real world: Strategy Consulting.’ ‘There’s one big theme in my life: Curiosity, like a child. That’s the big driver that gives me energy and drives me forward so I don’t repeat things and am open to new things and new developments.’ ‘Thinking about impact from day one, and embedding that impact into how you run your consulting project, I think that makes a difference.’ ‘When you look at what makes InsurTech business successful, it’s one of two kinds of business: 1) those who are looking are actually working on an inefficiency in a market and launch something that improves that by a large factor, 2) platform business models, a technology driven business model that rents market access to customers like Amazon.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Prior to joining Oliver Wyman, Dietmar worked at the Boston Consulting Group in Munich and New York, where he led various major strategy, IT and operations projects across an array of industries. Before working in management consulting, Dietmar held a number of technology roles in IT project management, system integration, sales, and education. Dietmar graduated from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) with a diploma and a PhD in computer science with honours and from the University of Hagen with a diploma in business administration. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dietmar-kottmann-19620a/     ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdLLinkedIn: Sabine VanderLindenInstagram: sabinevdLofficialFacebook: SabineVdLOfficialTikTok: sabinevdlofficialEmail: podcast@sabinevdl.comWebsite: www.sabinevdl.com 

Tanguy Touffut: Redining Parametric Insurance

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Tanguy Touffut, founder and CEO of Descartes Underwriting, a top of its space InsurTech company which is recognized as a top-grade growth venture in its category, parametric insurance. It recently raised $120 million in series B funding with the likes of Mundi Ventures, BlackFin, Cathay Innovation to name but a few.   KEY TAKEAWAYS After graduating I really wanted to launch a company shares Tanguy, but lacked some of the skills and I wanted to increase my purchasing power, so I started in the corporate world. There are plenty of benefits when working for a large corporation: the resources, expertise, strong colleagues and you have less skin in the game. But the scope of things you can do as a startup is much wider. The venture capital market is quite bullish about the insurance industry, even if the valuations are decreasing. There’s lots of capital available and you can have a long-term view, compared to large groups who have a short-term view on profitability.  There’s a lot of confusion about parametric insurance. It’s not a line of business or a product, it’s an approach to improve product features. It’s the result of years of frustration about insurance that opened up new ways of thinking within the corporate realm. Customers are poorly served in this space and the economics don’t work that well and there’s a lack of transparency, which was increased by the Covid-19 pandemic. "Parametric" has become a way to address these challenges by offering better product features to customers and improving the insurers' trust by making things more true, and more transparent. When you launch your own company with your co-founders, the team is the most important part of the equation: The most precious asset. You need to convince enough people to believe in you in order to build the best team that works well together. The first years aren’t that easy, you have to work extremely hard and be able to step back and criticize your own way of working. This is something you can’t achieve if you aren’t motivated and resilient, or able to take hits. But you always need to be surrounded by the right minds, energies, and beliefs. Brokers are definitely dominant in the corporate sector. They are very useful for clients to understand how insurance for corporates works. This is why we only want to work and ally ourselves with brokers for them to better serve their clientele. I believe that every link of the insurance value chain will be disrupted in the next 5-10 years. Think banking un-bundling and re-bundling! This is happening to us too right now. Some companies are going direct to consumers or corporates with their strategy (don't be fooled). At Descartes Underwriting, we think this is a mistake...   BEST MOMENTS ‘Working as an insurer in the sector of natural catastrophes and climate change is extremely rewarding.’ ‘As a corporate employee, I used to use data to model the risk and process payments. Looking at wildfires – which is one of the fastest-growing risks in the world today due to climate change – we use AI neural networks to understand the locations and figure out how badly damaged the locations we analyzed were.’ ‘Parametric covers can be based on the number of casualties, the number of shops that must be closed in a specific location due to a lockdown, and much more. Still, the goal is to use parameters to make people whole faster.’ ‘There are plenty of conventions within the insurance sector. Most of all, insurance has a good reason to exist. Still, the industry was created 338 years ago. As an entrepreneur, you must evaluate and identify the rules that make no sense at all, break them and rebuild them better.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Tanguy Touffut was the CEO of AXA Global Parametrics and Head of Security & Agriculture where he worked for 8 years before becoming an entrepreneur. In 2019, Tanguy set up Descartes Underwriting, an InsurTech and MGA working with brokers with offices in New York, Houston, Denver, London, Paris, Singapore and Sydney. Descartes collaborates with brokers across the world to protect their corporate clients & governments against natural catastrophes, weather, and emerging risks, through a unique data-driven approach. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanguy-touffut-584b202/?originalSubdomain=fr    ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdLLinkedIn: Sabine VanderLindenInstagram: sabinevdLofficialFacebook: SabineVdLOfficialTikTok: sabinevdlofficialEmail: podcast@sabinevdl.comWebsite: www.sabinevdl.com 

David King: Using AI for algorithmic underwriting

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews David King, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of fast-growing InsurTech startup, Artificial Labs or Artificial.io to discuss the company's strengths and how sport influences David's choices and business outlook.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Artificial is very much focused on facilitating algorithmic underwriting within the insurance sector. That means that the Artificial team works with brokers and underwriters to get the data into the right format so that it can be shared between the two and, once it’s been shared... define what the process, pipeline and fundamentals should be to improve decision making and customer experiences and interactions.   Insurance is an industry where data AND relationships are really important. We use technology (and algorithms) to help automate the decision making process. The number of variables that a human can take into account in order to make a decision is between 5-7 variables. If you keep on adding more to the decision-making process, then the accuracy of models and algorithms start to decrease. If a business is supported by the right technology, one can make a decision that’s either automated or presented in a detailed and informed assessment of risk. This enables human actors that would make key decisions to make the right commercial risk decisions, even if partly automated.  It’s not just about the ability to train a model to assess risks to improve your underwriting performance and make it efficient, it is also about the ability to operate within ecosystems. Part of our secret sauce is that we have a domain-specific programming language that allows us to codify an underwriter’s appetite and to leverage and integrate with any data source or service in order to make a decision.  More data are going to be available in future. It is a fact. Are underwriters going to have to be more sophisticated in the way they make decisions? Definitely. Is the market going to become more efficient and therefore does the operational cost ratio need to be lower? Even more... Yes. I think underwriters will need to work closely with portfolio managers, people with more maths skills – I don’t necessarily think that means machine learning/ data scientist type skills will become closer to the underwriting decisions on a day-to-day basis, but I do think that you may have a multi-disciplinary team that understands where the data is coming from and what’s driving true decisions.   BEST MOMENTS ‘I’ve always been quite competitive and love "sport." I like team sports probably because my own abilities are quite poor. If you’re a team player you can leverage the abilities of other people and I look to elite sport to understand what cultures drive performance and how people operate too.’ ‘Technology won’t take over and make all the decisions. Still, you’ll have strategies that are set by very data-informed people and you can execute that across a broad spectrum of products, services, and classes.’ ‘The models are only as good as the data you provide to them, but the models don’t exist in isolation, they also exist in a business that needs to be operationally efficient.’ ‘You now need to operate while understanding that you’re not going to have all the components end-to-end, so you need to be able to play nicely with others. This will lead to greater efficiency that provides greater experiences to customers. This also means you keep them longer and can then sell them more things.’   ABOUT THE GUEST David King has worked in digital media and technology since graduating from Nottingham University Business School with a degree in Industrial Economics in 2005. After spending a gap year as Troop Commander in the British Army, King spent time as a Digital Planner for Carat, where he worked with global brands such as Yahoo!, British Gas and Santander. King moved on to become Director at Sure Insurance Services in 2009 where his knowledge of the digital space helped to bring innovative insurance products to market in the medical and health insurance sectors. It was here that his understanding of the insurance market grew, setting the stage for his later foray into space with Artificial Labs.  Following his time at Sure, King set up his own digital services company called Data Stripes in 2011. The company delivered highly polished, data-intensive, digital applications for some of the world's biggest brands.  In 2013, the success of Data Stripes led King to merge with Johnny Bridges' company ConceptMill, creating Artificial Labs. The company provided high-quality, data-led design to global clients such as BMW, Levi's and Betfair.  In 2016, Artificial pivoted into the insurance space, building partnerships with firms such as AXIS and Ambris. King's existing industry experience, combined with Bridges' previous work in insurance companies, meant that the company could take advantage of a growing need for high-quality data and digital platforms amongst insurance companies.  Since 2017, King has been steering the commercial ship at Artificial, helping to develop partnerships with global insurance brands such as Convex, Chaucer, Aon and TMHCC. With years of experience in technological innovation now under its belt, the company is prospering as a provider of algorithmic underwriting technology to the London market and beyond. Websites: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malarkeyking/ and https://artificial.io/    ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdLLinkedIn: Sabine VanderLindenInstagram: sabinevdLofficialFacebook: SabineVdLOfficialTikTok: sabinevdlofficialEmail: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com 

Nick Pester: Growth Ventures and the Role of The Legal Counsel

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Nick Pester. Sabine has known Nick for over 4 years. They met when Nick showed strong interest in the tech startups accepted within Sabine’s accelerator programs and was willing to mentor them with advice when he was leading the Financial Services, Insurance & InsurTech practices at Capital Law. Nick moved from legal advice within a legal firm to becoming the group general of one of the leading InsurTech growth ventures in the UK. He is also an Advisor to the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation on Digital Ethics and the use of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance. On this podcast they catch-up to understand what the past 4 years has brought to him in terms of lessons learnt.   KEY TAKEAWAYS I fell into insurance, the firm I applied to for a training contract was a media and entertainment specialist, which was something I was interested in at the time – advising big bands on tour around the world! But they had a really strong insurance practice and I really enjoyed the fact that there was a dual-layer to all the legal aspects we dealt with: The insurance layer and the underlying subject matter.  My day tends to be partnership focused, there’s always something going on in the partnership front. There’s claims to deal with, but otherwise it’s running around responding to the fires as and when they arise, dealing with them as best you can and trying to have the headspace to look more than a week or a month ahead and think strongly about the strategy of the legal function and the wider business. Law firms and some other businesses tend to be far too fixated on the granularity of academics and qualifications. Of course, you need to be qualified, but actually what turns a good lawyer into a really great lawyer is personality and character. People who can roll with the punches, take something on the chin and move on, most importantly for lawyers, people who can accept being wrong. I don’t think lawyers as a profession are very good at admitting when they’re wrong,  but in a startup environment, you need to be prepared to make mistakes, it’s part and parcel of learning. One of the biggest challenges in the insurance market with respect to data and the usage of data is transparency and fairness, which everybody wants to ensure, against commerciality and sensitive information. The most obvious example of this is pricing. The balance between using data to improve our products and services, and to drive greater revenue and growth against how much customers want to know about them. With AI, it’s a very difficult area in the context of regulated activities, because you need to have explainability, why someone has been priced in a certain way. It’s going to be very difficult to build a genuinely self-managing, machine learning intuitive system with the necessary explainability and insight that goes with that.   BEST MOMENTS ‘I like flying by the seat of my pants. I like a challenge, I like disruption, I’m very passionate about trying to improve things within the sphere of influence that I have in the legal and tech areas.’ ‘Bringing a commercial eye to partnerships is incredibly important as a lawyer in-house.’ ‘To build a sustainable growth venture you need three things: A very clear mission of what you’re trying to solve/address, spend money on getting the best people and focus on one thing/the key offering before moving on to something else.’ ‘The trends I’m seeing is a greater focus on existing portfolio companies and investors looking after their existing stock. Lots of aggressive investment in already trading, sustainable businesses. People are finding it harder in Seed capital, which has been a bigger challenge in the last 18 months.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Nick Pester is responsible for the Legal and Compliance functions at Wheely, a luxury ride hailing service offering on demand professional chauffeuring at the touch of a button.Previously he has been responsible for the Legal & Regulatory functions at the Zego Group, a market-leading InsurTech business focussed on commercial motor where he oversaw a growth period of 80 to 600 employees during which the business achieved unicorn status, completing a $150m Series C fundraise in early 2021.Prior to that, he was Head of the Financial Services & FinTech practices at Capital Law, providing a more niche/specialist offering, grounded in a highly commercial approach.As well, he was Advisor to the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation on Digital Ethics and the use of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance and also acted as an advisor and mentor to a number of individual FinTech & InsurTech businesses in the past, as well as wider accelerator/incubator programmes. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-pester-b2b13738/    ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdLLinkedIn: Sabine VanderLindenInstagram: sabinevdLofficialFacebook: SabineVdLOfficialTikTok: sabinevdlofficialEmail: podcast@sabinevdl.comWebsite: www.sabinevdl.com 

Sid Chakravarthy: Supply Chain Monitoring, the Metaverse and NFTs

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sid Chakravarthy, founder and CEO of StaTwig and a leading expert in emerging technology including The  Internet of Things, Blockchain, Metaverse and NFTs. Sid uses these to develop solutions that have a large-scale social impact.   KEY TAKEAWAYS There are big problems with drugs and vaccines when you look at the last mile delivery system or indeed getting to the people who really need them. They get damaged, spoiled, stolen in order to be sold on black markets, so I thought I could use my ‘Bay-area skills’ to solve some real-world problems and that’s how I started the company.  Supply chains are a very complex network of partners, so to speak, who are working together to bring a product to the final consumer. But there’s a lot of confusion and a lack of interoperability when it comes to sharing information with each other. They all track the product as it passed through their own company, but it stops when they had it onto the next partner. We provide end-to-end visibility of how the product is moving across the supply chain leveraging blockchain. The data that this technology makes available is scalable, it can be used by underwriters to figure out risks in each part of the supply chain: how much product is getting damaged? how do I write a policy for that? you can prevent specific claims from happening because you have full transparent visibility of key data points. And those show that there could be a failure in one part of the supply chain or another.  The Metaverse and NFTs are not that complex at all. Think of a gamer, he is involved in and essentially living in a full-time game, talking to people, buying and selling things, etc. Scale that up to non-gamers, imagine an alternate world where people can plug in and do what they want: shopping, clubbing, travel, building a home, anything. The possibilities are endless. That’s the Metaverse, a digital reality where you can plug in any time and live fully in there. NFTs is a certification of ownership of digital art, 500 million people might have that digital art on their laptop, but there’s only one certificate that says “this is the actual owner of it and all the copies”. Think about your Picasso or Rembrandt. Can you prevent the copies? No, but you may be able to in the future with NFTs! This gives you access to use, sell, brand and rent that product (digitally) for any kind of commercial reason. Think about using your digital art and assets within the Metaverse.    BEST MOMENTS ‘When I started the company vaccines were a very boring product, Covid made it very attractive all of a sudden! But by then we already had a solution to solve some big problems with Covid.’ ‘Internet access and blockchain technology have allowed the birth of a new kind of transparency and visibility. This could never have been done as easily before. Ans this because the customer is asking for it.’ ‘Once the product moves from one touch point to another ("airport to courier" or "from manufacturer to consumer") we are annotating the journey and telling the story of it as it moves along its path transparently. Each item has its own tracking number and lots of tracking data about each individual product within each container.’ ‘NFTs can act as a way of bringing your real-world products into the Metaverse by using what is called a true certificate of ownership allowing you to transact digitally within the new internet.’   ABOUT THE GUEST StatWig is a platform that ensures the qualitative and safe supply of vaccines. The platform provides continuous visibility and actionable insights to ensure the making of real-time decisions. Sid is a leader in emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain. He uses these technologies to develop solutions that have a large-scale social impact on the world supply chains.  Sid launched StatWig 6 years ago to record the journey of products across supply chains from manufacturer to customer to create an extra layer of visibility, transparency and authenticity. The team has worked with customers such as UNICEF, Gavi, NASDAQ and the World Economic Forum among others. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidchakravarthy/ Email: sidchaks@statwig.com Website: https://statwig.com/ & https://www.linkedin.com/company/statwig/     ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdLLinkedIn: Sabine VanderLindenInstagram: sabinevdLofficialFacebook: SabineVdLOfficialTikTok: sabinevdlofficialEmail: podcast@sabinevdl.comWebsite: www.sabinevdl.com 

Tobias Taupitz: The Lifestyle Bicycle Insurance Platform For The Collective

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Tobias Taupitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Laka, to discuss topics including business model innovation, leadership, culture, and expansion into new markets.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Why should you protect future losses when you can look backwards knowing exactly how much you need to charge to cover your costs of claims? We do so retroactively shares Tobi, so as not to incur a credit risk or payment default risk. It is all about balancing the risk, including actuarial risk. This way we know down to the penny how much we need to recover in a month, we can be fully transparent because we’re a high frequency, and a low margin player. Customers get a monthly breakdown from us showing what happened within their risk pool of like-minded people, and we split the costs among them. We have a cost-plus business model in insurance where we add a fee on top of every claim we settle – a success fee almost – so, ironically, the more claims we settle the more money we make.
The Laka model, or whatever it will be called eventually – a credit-based insurance proposition – should be the status quo across the industry because it’s the only way in my mind that it’s a fair and appealing to customers. It will change the game.
In a world where brand trust is at an all-time low and traditional insurers have commoditised themselves to the point of no return (thanks to the price comparison websites for example,) the next big buzzwords such as ‘embedded insurance' do not help create brand awareness. Such buzzwords become more and more interchangeable. We’re trying to build an insurance brand people can trust, that they want to associate themselves with, which allows us to do cool things like horizontal cross-selling, a ‘colour-in’ health product which is a modern take on personal accident cover and vertical expansion.
To all founders: You’re not alone, there are many great people out there willing to help, but it’s up to you to express what you need and how you would like to work together. Be radical and say “no” to advice that doesn’t fit in because you’re the only person that knows your business, the way you do. Nevertheless, highly stimulating viewpoints (as always) are always great to listen to and learn from.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Why estimate when you can be accurate?’
‘Laka is the divine goddess of prosperity and hula dancing – we saw this a very fitting comparison about well-being and having some fun.’
‘We want to be the lifestyle brand within the mobility insurance.’
‘With 125 million active cyclists with a high-end or insurable bike in a growing market is a fantastic place to be. In England alone, 47% of people aged 5 and over owned or had access to a bicycle in 2020. If you focus efficiently, you can own the full supply chain from front to end. That’s what we’re building with modes around sustainable mobility in Europe.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Tobias Taupitz’s aim is to turn a century-old insurance operating model on its head. He launched Laka with his two co-founders after spending years in the Corporate Finance teams at Barclays and KPMG, covering financial technology and insurance clients. Rediscovering his passion for insurance, he made it his mission to align customer and insurer interests, moving from premiums upfront to payments in arrears.
Tobias graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Insurance and Actuarial Sciences from the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and attended University College Dublin and the National University of Singapore to earn his CEMS Master’s in International Management degree.
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

Allison Schneider: A Lens on Vouch The Startup For Tech Founders

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Allison or Ally Schneider who heads up venture partnerships at Vouch, a US business insurance platform for startups. Vouch raised over $160 million in investment funding so far with well-renowned investors including Silicon Valley Bank, Index Ventures and Y Combinator. Ally talks to Sabine about the company’s business model and helps us understand how Vouch helps founders like you grow and scale in the right way.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The product and experience have been very manual; we’ve been able to build a digital-first experience for founders to obtain business insurance. They can apply through our site in 7-10 minutes through our questionnaire, which asks specific questions about their business that give them a customised quote in terms of what coverage and limits we recommend, and they can adjust those parameters to suit them, and their coverage will go live at midnight on the same day. This not only reduces the time for startup founders but also provides a very easy self-service experience for those who prefer it.
When you think of legacy risk classification systems, they tend to be very broad and vague. We break it down into 70 niche codes (from connected home devices to B2B SaaS, AI/machine learning) to get really granular and customised to the customer's needs across different types of companies. That goes into our underwriting algorithm to say these are the coverages that make the most sense for your business today, as well as the ones you might want to consider as the business grows and scales in the future.
We have 10 proprietary lines of covers. We’re in the process of becoming a full carrier, which gives us a lot more flexibility to go direct-to-consumers, to do more from a discounting and bundling perspective, to be more flexible with timing, and to put coverage in place and bind the risk quickly. We also take a really proactive approach to risk management as well.
A founder has so many responsibilities to their business and people, too. There are things that founders are incredible at, and having business insurance expertise typically isn’t one of them – and nor should it. We think about our role in how we can make this process as painless, easy, cost-effective, and high-quality, as we should be able to save these founders time and energy so that they can focus their time and effort on the things that are really important to their business
BEST MOMENTS
‘The energy that you get spending your days surrounded by the most amazing entrepreneurs and founders, talking with them through the most interesting problems that they’re solving: That doesn’t get old.’
‘I get asked if I’m a corporate or a startup person, I actually really enjoy both environments as long as I can collaborate with the other.’
‘When business insurance matters, it really matters. It’s an area where it’s of high importance but low awareness. We saw the opportunity to build really innovative products and services that are really geared towards these types of companies, as we really want to fill that education gap too: or why business insurance is really important for founders.’
‘Our insurance advisors’ expertise sets us apart in terms of how we engage with our customers or the startup founders effectively and directly. They understand the inner workings of how startups operate and what it means to be an eCommerce business vs a SaaS business... the milestones those companies go through and the risks they face.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Allison Schneider is heading Venture Ecosystem Partnership at Vouch Insurance. She is relatively new to the InsurTech world with a background in corporate and startup collaborations. She started her career at IBM Watson through IBM's startup partnership programme, supporting startups building on IBM’s AI and machine learning APIs, providing the technology, support, and resources they needed to grow. Through that role, Alli fell in love with AI and machine learning, technology in general, and the possibilities and use cases for these technologies.
After IBM, she spent some time at a venture-backed startup called x.ai, building out its sales and business development practice and working with corporates on the other side of the table. She then went back into corporate, working at Principal, E*TRADE Ventures, and Labs, leading the startup mission there while engaging with and building bridges to FinTech and enterprise tech startups, shaping proof of concepts, prototypes, and commercial pilots.
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

Roman Rittweger: Insights on building a winning HealthTech startup in Germany

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Roman Rittweger, founder and CEO of Ottonova – a digital health insurance provider for individual patients and self-employed people. Today, seven+ years after it was started, Ottonova has over 100 employees and has deployed a marketplace (or an end-to-end platform) that helps users register for and access health insurance coverage for medical services. By 2022, the team had raised over $145 million in Series E. Some of its investors include great names such as Early Bird Venture Capital and Seven Ventures.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Health insurance is one of the most complicated types of insurance to build. People asked me why I wanted to do this, build a HealthTech InsurTech, and why I wouldn’t just want to be a service provider for a health insurance company. My answer is that I had already been a service provider, and I didn’t enjoy it much because you can’t steer the business your way. I wanted to be able to design the tariff, be the customer’s partner, make the sale at the very beginning of the engagement, manage the customer, make them really happy, and save costs at the end for all the parties involved. To do this, you need to have the whole package.
We work in two ecosystems: the insurance ecosystem, where we are the most modern player in Germany, and the financial services ecosystem, where we have the highest net promoter score (67, where the number two has 34). At the same time, we sell our software in Germany and get into other areas and other ecosystems, like life insurance, where we’re starting to sell products and software to other health insurance providers. 
I definitely see that the lines between health and wellness are blurring. We have created a HealthX Club where, in exchange for participating in our market research, we give our users bonus points to spend on their Apple Watch, fitness club, meditation app, etc. The German customers are insured with us, and we want them to stay healthy. Also, we’re starting to work with partners in the fitness field, and even in cosmetics and dental as we figure out if we can add an insurance part to their product. As we’re digital and relatively agile, it’s very easy for us to build that for them.
Our VCs were very shocked by the amount of regulation and the number of people we had to bring on board to become compliant and obtain our insurance licence. They were also shocked by the amount of money we had to invest. After a while, we began looking for other ways to bring financing into the company. We had to go via new routes, including refinancing. Note that German investment leaders are not tech-savvy, so they invested with us to learn from us. We know that corporate venturing (or the stage where corporates want to partner and invest) will always be there for companies like ours because it is part of the stages of any industry-led startup growth process.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I had to wait for the right time and have a little bit of luck as well to start Ottonova. This took me 10 years.’
‘Finding the right customer was the only easy part!’
‘We ask our customers what they want because what you think they might want isn’t what’s important for them. Here is an example: rather than getting medicine delivered by drone before they need it, they’d prefer bills to be paid within 24 hours rather than 48 hours. Understanding such nuances is truly understanding your customers' needs.’
‘In our case, our direct chat and the service we provide day-to-day is actually much more important for our customers than the ‘sexy’ telemedicine engagement platform we created – we haven’t seen a big uptake in that for instance yet.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Roman Rittweger is a doctor by training, though he didn’t practice medicine for long. He worked as a consultant at the macro level of healthcare and insurance, focusing on the customer and how to provide a better experience for them, and on making it more affordable by steering customers towards the right kind of medical care. His first startup was a medical provider for health insurance, helping the insured population find the right physician or manage their chronic diseases. 
He sold this company to Germany’s largest private health insurer at the time and became a consultant again. He learned about marketing and sales because he’d realised through his experience that this is the most important thing. He eventually began looking for the next big area where he could start more startups, and six years ago, he sold his consultancy and jumped into the world of digital health insurance, founding Ottonova.
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
 

Steven Mendel: Tips on how to build a sustainable growth business

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Steven Mendel, CEO and Co-Founder of Bought By Many, an InsurTech startup well known across the UK market, with a new brand launched in the US under the name "ManyPets." Bought By Many is making the world a better place for pet parents through its tech-enabled insurance products and services. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The first startup I was involved with was in the investment consulting space in the mid-90s. I became a management consultant and went on to set up three more startups, all in the finance space, but none of them directly related to insurance. Bought By Many started in the broader insurance space, but over several years, we narrowed our focus to the pet space.
For many years I’d been troubled by the poor way large corporates treat individuals – in particular in financial services – in contrast, they treat other corporates very, very well. I felt I had to do something to redress the balance between corporates and individuals in financial services.
We asked our pet community members to fill out a questionnaire to understand what they thought of the insurance industry, how they would have improved it, and what their ideal pet insurance policy would look like. We got 40,000 responses and created seven brand-new go-to-market products in September 2016. Instead of going live, we took the opportunity to reimagine every step of the customer's insurance journey so that, when we launched in February 2017, there was nothing about the experience that bore any relation to anything else they would have seen in the pet space before.
We became a double unicorn in eight and three-quarters years. But, in truth, I can’t get excited about the valuation at all. It doesn’t change in any way the business, the people we want to recruit, our existing staff, our focus on our customer base, our focus on the pets, or our focus on the pet parents. It’s an important milestone, of course, but it has not changed us as a business one single piece of the way.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Our first TV advert was at the very beginning on direct to household advertising, and we were able to work with Ridley Scott’s production studio to create something genuinely different and quirky.’
‘The idea behind Bought By Many was creating communities of individuals who had similar but niche insurance needs and to help them get access to better insurance – price, product, and customer experience.’
‘Our Net Promoter Score has never been below 70.’
‘Pet owners do talk, they want to know what pet food you use, what vet you go to, and who insures your pet. Having members of ours who advocate in the marketplace is really important for us and has massive knock-on economic benefits, of course.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Steven Mendel has over 25 years of experience as an actuary in financial services, which has included leading Close Brothers Wealth Management during the launch of their non-advised offering, creating the world’s first art-focused wealth advice offering for Christie’s, working as part of the team that formed Barclays Wealth, and heading the McKinsey UK Savings and Investment Group.Steven founded Bought By Many, now called ManyPets, which is disrupting the pet insurance market through innovative tech and is building a business to become an irresistible employer obsessed with customer service.In April 2019, Steven was included in the London Business School Review of 30 People Who Are Changing The World.
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