The Asia InsurTech Podcast caughtup with Skye Theodorou and Anish Sinha, the co-founders of UpCover to talk about how UpCover has pivoted and redefined their business model. Listen to the episode and hear them discuss the lessons they learned starting an InsurTech from scratch and managing through adversity.
Listen to our first episode with Skye and Anish from September 2020 here.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
Michael Waitze
Hi, this is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia InsurTech Podcast. This is the only podcast in Asia focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, thought leaders and investors a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry. We are happy to have Skye Theodorou – did I get that right? – and Anish Sinha, the co-founder, you can correct me afterwards, the cofounders of Upcover back on. Skye, Anish it’s great to have you both back on the show, if I remember correctly, was September 2020, which in some ways doesn’t feel like that long ago. And in another way, it feels like a lifetime. Yeah. How are you two doing?
Skye Theodorou
Really, really well? Yeah. Thanks for asking.
Michael Waitze
It’s great to see you. Oh, it’s my pleasure. And I think you mentioned this before we started recording the last time. I don’t think we could see each other the last time we did this, did we?
Skye Theodorou
Yeah, it was over Skype.
Michael Waitze
God, whose idea was that? That was a terrible idea.
Skye Theodorou
No, it’s great. It’s great to do a face to face.
Michael Waitze
This is better. So Has anything changed since last time we spoke?
Skye Theodorou
A little bit. Well, I mean, we can start from September 2020, which was when we last spoke, which was Upcover was launching its platform, which was, you know, in Australia, and we’d sourced insurance partnerships and capacity and had built out a mobile app. And we also had a partnership to build out Pay-As-You-Go personal and commercial lines. Very, very innovative, tailored insurance product for food delivery riders in Australia. And it was exceptionally needed, because just after we’d done the podcast with you, there were a number of food delivery rider deaths and didn’t have insurance. Yeah, five deaths in the space of five weeks, on the east coast of Australia. And it became a time when the volatility of the gig economy segment, particularly delivery riders was really profound. And that segment throughout COVID, I mean, all over the world, they were supporting so many people to get meals on tables and help people kind of still feel some level of connection. But we ran into, I would say, a spate of issues. A spate of issues. And I think that happens when you know, your InsurTech and your, your co founders like Anish and myself were very bullish. And we really wanted to transform the entire segments. And we wanted to prove it out in a beater and expand that out to any type of person that worked for themselves. And we started with the food delivery segment.
Michael Waitze
What were some of these spate of issues if you can talk about them, even if not specifically, and then what was the result of all that?
Skye Theodorou
The spate of issues it was, it all really came to a head, like started almost immediately in October and then continued throughout Christmas. And it was just almost every 12 hours, we would hear about an administrative error or what was considered, sometimes, depending on who you speak to a compliance issue, or a misunderstanding about the platform and how it operated. So we were dealing with those types of issues. But fundamentally, it was, it was the fact that the platform was so innovative. And the front end was so innovative, and it was received well, by the b2b partner that we had, which was the largest Asian food delivery platform in Australia. It was working, the mobile app had lots of friction issues, you know, downloading an app to buy insurance, probably not such a great, it’s a bit too much friction. And the fact that in the insurance product wasn’t mandatory in Australia, but it is in the US in the UK. And I’m guessing a few other jurisdictions, too, I’m not so sure about Thailand or Singapore, that also became a bit of a point to try and roll out the product and increase numbers and usage. But yeah, it fundamentally was the fact that although we were innovative and tech driven, everyone else in the value chain and insurance is not. And there’s many, many people who vote in the manufacturing of an insurance product. And that’s where things started to come unstuck. What would you say?
Anish Sinha
Skye to just to add to all your points. Michael, you understand being the InsurTech stack, and the insurance stack and often, both of them don’t speak to each other. So product creation, product distribution, underwriting, pricing, we were innovating on all fronts, and then we were also trying to distribute a product and just product innovation by itself takes so much time. Like we basically build the pricing model for Pay As You Go, pricing the risk on a per delivery basis. And then we built a platform that allowed us to go out and distribute the product started with the mobile app, then build the API’s. So it could be embedded into a partner interface. And doing all of that the entire stack, taught us a lot of things, but also meant that we were a small team stretched beyond scope. And so we had to be scoped a lot of this stuff. And as you can imagine, when a small team tries to do a lot of things, because obviously, you’re trying to figure it out, right, it’s like, it’s like you enter a dark room when you’re trying to switch on the light, but you don’t know where the switches are. So you’re like, you know, you’re hitting, you’re hitting different points. And then we are in that journey in in, in trying to do all those things, we realize where we will, what we are good at, and what we should ultimately do, which is not product innovation, but product distribution. So so what I was saying was you can either innovate on product creation, or you can innovate on product distribution. Innovating on product creation means innovating on the pricing on how the risk gets underwritten, on the underwriting question sets on getting the balance sheet providers and the underwriters on board with the novel risks that you want to underwrite. That’s a longer journey to take. And it’s easier to do when you have critical mass. So it’s good for you to be able to offer for startups to be able to solve what they can, which is build a better mousetrap. So distribution and innovate there. So you can get more volumes in and then product innovation can happen as a result of that.
Michael Waitze
Right. And you were trying to do this the other way around?
Skye Theodorou
We were just trying to do everything
Anish Sinha
We tried both, which is, which is something that which is a very, very ambitious and weedy scope.
Skye Theodorou
And I think I think what I would say is, and this is what I said to, you know, externally to key stakeholders at the time, when we, you know, we went back to the whiteboard, we did have a solution of what we were going to be doing next. But we really had to rehash and rethink about what we were doing and why we were doing it. But it was also just this concept of leaving all of the technical details and all the regulatory and compliance risk as well, to the technicians. And focusing on the things that insurers sometimes do really struggle with and that’s technology and, and distribution.
Michael Waitze
So you both said something that really hits home with me. And I think part of this is that you’re a small team, and you want to do this big thing. And because at the beginning, you don’t know which one of them is going to work, right? So you’re experimenting across the board. Because if you just choose one thing, if you just wake up one day and say, we’re just gonna focus on distribution only, you don’t know necessarily, if that’s going to work in the earliest stages of building your business. And I do this in mind to, like, I don’t know what shows gonna be popular. So I have eight shows. And boy, it’s a juggling match, just to make sure that everything works at the end of every day, right? You just look at your schedule and think when am I gonna fit in fixing that thing? And then if something breaks, you have a real big problem, because you don’t there’s no time scope fixed in to fix that thing. And then those things start to pile up. I know what happens to me all the time. But you do learn a lot. Right? And if you step back, yeah, yeah, if you do learn a lot of what you’ve learned, I think if I get it right, is that product innovation not only is really hard, but it takes a longer time to get traction for that. And that the real problem you’re trying to solve is the problem that the insurance companies have, which is the technology and distribution.
Skye Theodorou
Yeah, it’s it’s like a few interesting things. It’s like, we immediately realized that a pay as you go option for some of the delivery riders, they actually made them really concerned. They were like, oh, why is this amount changing month on month. We actually just wanted a fixed amount. That was a really interesting learning that I found like so maybe appetite, to some some consumers is that they do actually just want that kind of stability of understanding what they are paying for each month, which means then maybe a traditional insurance product might actually be able to suit them really simply. And then as well, like most of our customers ended up coming from what was this experimental project that Anish kind of built out with the team over like six to nine weeks aside a side project, which is kind of what you’re talking about, Michael, like you don’t know what’s gonna work. And I remember I was kicking and screaming the entire time because of the compliance risks and issues. Because it meant we translated a whole bunch of content and the whole experience into Mandarin and English. And trying to do that and stand that up super, super quickly, which we did and, and that’s actually where most of our customers came from this this embedded insurance experience with one partner, which was a super frictionless, super simple, easy co branded experience, and that’s kind of where the learning came from. But I would say executing and getting to execution like I think like InsurTechs it’s so hard to get to launch. Already, you have so many things that you need to solve the fact you get there and do it, you know, I would say don’t give up. But yeah, this is how tired you are at the end of the experience. Yeah.
Michael Waitze
I want to go back to..
Anish Sinha
Sorry, Michael, just making a small point there, you could try and plan everything out as much as you want. And think about all the eventualities and all the possibilities that the product could take. It’s only when you launch the product and when you actually get down to doing it, you realize the specifics. And the specifics give you the insight. So in our case, trying to innovate on product, innovation, going through the entire cycle with the underwriters with the capacity providers taught us a lot of things along the way, it taught us where our edge was, and then we when we tried to distribute, building it on different platforms taught us which platforms would work for us best. The only way through this would have been to actually do it. Because you can whiteboard this stuff. This is not possible. It’s just not how it works.
Skye Theodorou
I think I think was a niche wasn’t from the industry as well. It’s given both of us this whole new lesson and learning. And also I had never sourced capacity before had never done anything like that. So it gave us a whole new appreciation for the underwriting agencies out there and what they get up to to one day out, and it kind of made us decide we don’t really want to do that, we’ll leave that to them. They’re the experts.
Michael Waitze
I want to ask this as well. So you built this side product with of embedded insurance, right? And that’s where things started to grow. You notice that, but you already had this other product that was out there in the market that had been, like rolled out really probably more than beta and had a lot of other stakeholders that weren’t just internal? What was it like for you as a management team, trying to make that decision to say, all the things that we thought we’re gonna do at the beginning, we’re not. And we’re going to focus on the place now where we figured out our edge, how do you separate yourself from the original thing and just go build the thing that’s working, if that makes sense. I remember
Skye Theodorou
like back at the very, very start of it all. And he and I had been having conversations late at night, questioning the scalability of what it was that we were doing, right, we knew we this was a beta, we weren’t ever going to become millionaires at this. But this was a way to prove out the concept and everything that we wanted to do, really. And yeah, and he and I were arguing every day actually needs to remember about how quickly we pivot, and how quickly we switch off things that we promised that we would try and do like just certain distribute distribution strategies. For example, we spoke a lot about the virality, or network effect of a community manager model, right. And that was something that I felt we had to play out, we had to try for two months, we had to try, even though we knew it might be difficult or challenging, but at the same time, running really, really hard on this side project to prove that out. So we kind of had, we’re running two things at the same time.
Michael Waitze
I’m really curious about the difficulty of for the management team, because I think these are the stories that most people don’t hear. I mean, you’re still working on this thing. So something must have clicked right. And in a way, when you’re working on a business project with a partner, it’s almost harder than being married. Because you really have to work hard to stay together and to make sure that this thing works. And you know, if you’re married, maybe you have one or two kids, when you have a business, you’ve got all these other employees, I’m not going to make the equivalency that they’re like your children, but they’re there and they’re not making the decision. So in a way, it just gets super hard. Where does the will to go on come from when things are just so hard.
Skye Theodorou
I was I was really, like emotionally drained from the experience. I, I I’ve, I don’t know any of you would agree. But I definitely got to a point where I tried to protect the team from a lot of the headaches that we were having. But the team like the leadership team and an Asian CTO Sadad had to work crazy hours at very short notice to try and fix a lot of the bugs and issues that were coming up. But there came a point where we had to try and segment we had to try and segment the team away from the existing business that was possibly not going to exist in the future. Right. And, and almost like how do you run that off? While giving the rest of the team, the space, the energy and the freedom to just focus on something exciting and what we thought the future was, I don’t know. What do you think?
Anish Sinha
Yeah, I just added to that sky, I mean, all the things that you’ve said, when you building a business, you’re not always doing the most exciting stuff, by yourself, like, you end up doing a lot of admin because it needs to be done. And people who are on board, you want to give the best stuff to them, because they’ve joined you on the journey. And it’s hard anyways. And you want to give them the so that they can do their life’s work, while you make sure that the ship runs. And a lot of things is just about solving small admin issues, which would get, you know, which would make things unstuck. You know, a lot of persisting is just about making sure you check all the boxes, you make sure that you know, everything’s working fine. It’s not all the exciting stuff that everybody talks about, right? It’s making sure the ship is running, and it has the fuel to run. Yeah, you know, I
Michael Waitze
talked to a lot of CEOs, CTOs, and CEOs, and all of them telling me the same thing. Like this is not the work I thought I was going to be doing. I love this story. And I’m not sure if that’s a great face. By the way. I love this story. From my earliest days at Morgan Stanley. We were hired into a management training program, right? So we were supposed to be like the smart guys anyway, one of the guys would go home and you know, at the end of the weekend, tell his dad like Dad, I don’t understand why I’m doing all this like really boring. unfulfilling work. Why don’t they hire someone to do that, so I can do the good stuff. And his dad, who was a blue collar guy had a beer in his hand, took a sip of his beer and said they did hire someone to do that. You stop complaining and go do it. Anyway. I’m also curious, like we said, there’s a big family of people doing this, right. It’s not just internal, its external. How difficult were the conversations with the investors, the underwriters, and stuff like that people that were external that, you know, wanted you to succeed at scale, and wanted to be there, but had to understand when you went and talked to them that it wasn’t working the way you had expected?
Skye Theodorou
With our existing insurance partner, who I would say like the one that we had, when we launched the food delivery product and supported us. Yeah, I would say that we we all knew, we all knew. So it wasn’t really a case of having to have a hard conversation, because we were having hard conversations every day trying to find a solution. Yeah, and trying to make it work and try and make it work for both of us. But at the end of the day, it became a situation where we we needed to stand up and try and build out something else. And would we do it with them? Or would we try and do it with another potential insurance partner. And this is where I would say, having a plan B, which is quite, I think different for the insurance industry, from all the InsurTech say, speak to a technician, I’ve spoken to quite a few. You just have one, and you kind of put all your eggs in one basket unless you’re an aggregator. So that that kind of helped us transition. It was like a trans transitory experience, I would describe it as over quite a few weeks. And then there was a period of, you know, I personally was so impacted by the experience, I just thought that I thought my career was finished, I genuinely was so impacted by it. I thought, like, I was so embarrassed. Because of because I actually, I’m a lawyer, and I actually love compliance and risk. This is actually exactly what I want to do. And I love doing it. So to feel like we had so many bugs and issues it was like it was it was like a struggle for all of us every day as a leadership team. But what we did was we protected the team. So it was New Year. So the team got to spend a couple of weeks just kind of expanding and focusing on and researching things that they wanted to learn and tools that they wanted to delve into etc. So that’s what the team got to do. And then there was quite a number of whiteboard sessions that nature was driving, rallying the troops being Sajad and myself and getting the juices flowing on. What is the opportunity here? And any? Do you remember what you kept saying you kept saying, There’s something here? Like we haven’t worked so hard, and done so much? To not feel like there’s something that’s that’s going to work? Do you remember I
Anish Sinha
don’t really like I think that was the most interesting part because you’ve done all these things. And some things had work and some things happened. And that was the retro that would lead us to the next insight we’d have about the product we wanted to build. Of course, it would take a whole another level of planning and the entire platform would have to be rebuilt the go to market would have to be thought through new partnerships, both on the capacity provider front and with the customer. So all of that would have to be done from scratch. So one was actually assessing the ROI of wanting to do it from from scratch. And secondly What is it that we are actually going after? Like, how big is the opportunity? Are we on the right track this time and again, there’s no way to know this, like you can do all the whiteboard exercise you want to, and still pretty much, you know, not be able to solve the problem. It’s hard problem to solve. And, Michael, I always like to say that building a startup is a bit like, and I’ve said this previously to one of previous to one of the team members, it’s a bit like climbing a mountain, like this is summit fever. Like you’re looking at the top, and you’re like, I can get there. You don’t know the way you’re trying to find your way through and you could get altitude mountain sickness, and Avalanche would come something could happen. And you just don’t know how you get there. We just want to get there in time and not die. I think a lot. Building the startup is just about surviving.
Skye Theodorou
Yeah, so we also cut back then as a team. So anyone that was, you know, not super cool. We didn’t continue with them. So that meant our team kind of halved in size quite quickly. Yeah, that’s how we were doing this. And it was done in in goodwill, like the team was really supportive. And it was hard of time. But some did stay on. And somehow we’ve continued, like when we’re now in a position to continue on, we’ve reengaged with them. But you did ask about investors, and I’ve been quite coy. But the thing is, is we didn’t speak to investors until we had a game plan. And that’s what I was trying to kind of frame up like, we had a lot to figure out. And it was a transitory period or a couple. Oh, it’s just fortunate it happened over like a December, January period. So everyone’s kind of quite festive, even though it was COVID. So how festive. But yeah, I ended up having a one on one with every investor. And, and I can issue most of them, I think, yeah, I can’t even remember when did you come to all of them? I just remember one in particular, in
Anish Sinha
a haze? No, I was putting out fires, I guess on the on the platform side.
Skye Theodorou
And the idea was just to explain that it wasn’t a it wasn’t necessarily a pivot. It was it was the next stage of the product. And there were challenges and these things that we’re doing, and we had to do all these things. Right. And and it was just absolutely surprising. I was surprised, he misses was so supportive, as so so supportive about what yeah, why everyone describes as a pivot, and what, what our game plan was, and they all like, not all of them, but some expressed doubts about, you know, how successful we were going to be just focused on the gig economy, etc.
Michael Waitze
Really? That’s really interesting, actually. So in other words, they were happy.
Skye Theodorou
They were, they were delighted. They were delighted, which was interesting, because I, some of my investors have figured out now and advisors have figured out that I’m the kind of person I like to really lay things out. When we’ve got a solid game plan, we just did a really big investor update. So been like weighing things out, we’ve got a lot of foundation and groundwork so that people can be informed. When there’s, you know, there’s a there’s a, there’s a really, really clear path about where we’re headed. And yeah, yes, so
Michael Waitze
one of the things that I learned by sitting on a trading desk was that you don’t panic, right. And it sounds like somehow the two of you have learned that as well. And it part of it is endemic to a personality, part of it is a little bit of learning about how to control the panic feeling that you have when you feel like things are falling apart. But this idea that I don’t want to go talk to investors until I have a plan is really important, right? Because you can’t walk in cold, and just say, hey, this isn’t working. But I don’t know what we’re going to do. Because it doesn’t benefit anybody. But it’s just a great insight. And the idea that they were sitting there, at least it sounds like this to me and tell me where I’m wrong sitting there going to themselves. I don’t think this is gonna work. I thought it did at the beginning, but I don’t think it’s gonna work. And then when you show up and say, I don’t think this is gonna work, they can relax a little bit internally in their own mind and think, okay, she gets it to. And Aneesh gets it to, what are they going to do? And this is going on really fast in real time, right? And you’re like, Well, we’re gonna do this other thing, because we think that that’s better. We’ve actually been beta testing it for a while. And it’s starting to work and we think it’s gonna scale and they’re like, Okay.
Skye Theodorou
Okay, so it wasn’t that quick. So. So it was we already have an insurance partner lined up. We’re already building. Yeah. And then it was pretty much three months of building a month of compliance, sign off, and then two to three months of testing. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Michael Waitze
And how sure, were you both of you and you just from an operational side and just sky from the procedural side? Like, were you more sure this time that you thought this was gonna work or no?
Skye Theodorou
Well, we had this experience from the side projects that I was kicking and screaming about everyday with a niche. He just like made me to these things. I really was like, oh my god from like a compliance perspective, we’re really just how do we make this compliant? Like, because Australia’s really heavily regulated? Yeah,
Michael Waitze
I mean, insurances delivery,
Skye Theodorou
right? Is Yeah, and food delivery, right is considered a vulnerable customer, you know, if they’re speaking another language, there’s a lot of things to navigate from the code compliance perspective. But we did. And the upshot was that we experienced a really, really strong uptake of customers from this embedded insurance experience. And this is before I even knew the words embedded insurance, I just really feel like that’s really become super popular this year. And that’s where we kind of saw the opportunity, how can we, how can we actually be able to respond to all of the partnership opportunities in b2b kind of tech startups and marketplaces that approach us and say, we would really love to have, you know, a value added service, which is, you know, providing insurance or ensuring that we can understand the insurance for contractor workforce, which is still a gig economy, or for anyone that has, you know, an SME network of a loyal customer base. You know, what we’ve built now is it’s not just a data see platform, it’s actually the capability of the platform itself to be able to partner with with anyone.
Michael Waitze
And you see want to run me through how that works. And I’ll tell you why. I’m really curious about the a little bit of the minutiae here about how the platform works, because it sounds fascinating to me, it just to give you a context, a little bit of context about what I’m thinking I had a conversation a few weeks ago for another one of my shows with, with the guys and gals that run something called the Mac Alliance. And they talked to me Mac stands for something and M is for microservices. A is for API first. C is for C is for cloud native, and H is for headless. And they’re trying to say that this is their feeling about what the future is for software development. And it kind of sounds like you’re employing some of those things. So I’m just curious how it looks to you and like what changed in the way you were doing this. And that allowed Skye to feel comfortable that it was going to scale properly and still be compliant, but that you could go to all these partners and be able to do those integrations so quickly.
Anish Sinha
Yeah, Michael, that’s a great question. I think I’d love to use that acronym going forward. Because we using all of that we use that informally in our chats, one of the key learnings was to build loosely coupled systems, yeah, which means you should be making it integration friendly. One of the things that insurers suffer with is they have closed ecosystems. So they don’t have API’s, they want to expose a capability, they cannot do that they want to consume third party capabilities, there are people who build the best in the worlds of EHRs, which you cannot use, you can’t use third party authentication services, KYC payment gateways, we built our platform, essentially as imaginated as a transaction layer as a gateway that uses third party services that allows us to put any insurance product on top of it, and then be able to integrate forward and sell that product. Yeah. And if you build it in, imagine it in that fashion. And you start with one product, which is let’s say business insurance. And business insurance is super complex, because the underwriting is complex, you have a lot of questions. So it’s not like travel, or it’s not like I would say some of the other checkout experience is there where you just tick a box, and you pretty much get insured. Right? This is this is really complicated. So how do you embed that offering? And still make it seamless? How do you reimagine the platform. And I think the key insight that led us to that point was the fact that we started with something that was very, very niche food delivery market, almost like a nano business, we made an embedded offering of insurance to these nano businesses, to an on demand workforce within a partner ecosystem. And that was like a really, really, you know, just one use case. But then you can use that use case and all the learnings from there to build a loosely coupled system, because that was like a very specific example of how this could work. And when you know the things in specifics, it’s easy to go macro, and build the system. And imagine what what you need to do from there on. That makes one of the
Michael Waitze
things Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And one of the things that I tried to do when I was sitting on the trading desk, again, just to make an analogy, when we built the same type of kind of non trivial software, if you just think about a new stock coming on, stock coming in an index going out of it, index, all these things that happen that are unanticipated, if you build it in a way that’s rigid and hard to modify, it’s impossible to fix at scale. And it’s impossible to fix quickly. So what I and I didn’t know anything, right, but it was just my brain was thinking this way. I encourage them not to hard code anything. But it almost it’s almost like were you saying have these like loosely What did you call them loosely coupled systems? Right? Yeah. Because if you build that, that meant that you could, and this is the difference between sort of moving something to the cloud and being cloud native and also having the API’s in there as well. If you do that in a way that works. You can then take out one of those services, throw it away and not break the whole system, but you can also add new things. there because you can loosely couple everything that’s in there. And then through the API’s that you build, you can easily expose it to your potential clients, your potential users. And that gives you the opportunity to really build scale in from a software development perspective, but also from a legal and compliance and a usage perspective and allows you to fix those things. And and it allows you to build separate front ends for all the services as well. It just makes it a much better experience across the board. Is that fair?
Anish Sinha
Yeah, absolutely. Spot on. Right. So building an API first system allows you to keep your back end in a fashion and, and the way it works at Akamai is it’s not just an API first backend. But the wrappers, front end is essentially a wrapper. Yeah. And every partner, if you look at the user experience, you can imagine it as a wrapper. So you can you can take any partner’s wrapper, and you can put it around covers API’s Exactly. And you essentially then have a co branded experience a white labeled experience or a native experience, app covers native experience, essentially, the core engine that powers the brain that powers it is what you know, is what is driving this platform, which is the payment engine, which is how we underwrite risk, how we modifying some of those questions to assess. So you see, you can get a chord in three seconds, how are we able to do that? It’s the same underwriting questions. It’s how we work around those details, how what user details we capture in the background, which is not visible to the user, and use that to underwrite risk, we don’t like to call it this AI like that term gets thrown around. And literally, I understand, part of the reason is, when you’re an engineering heavy team, like on our team of 16, there are 12 engineers, you don’t you don’t We don’t throw jargons around because everybody tries to explain to the other person what technology actually can and cannot do. And our CTO, he’s he’s like the most technical person you can find like he’s got a hardware background. He builds stuff at the intersection of hardware and software. So he’s been really cutting edge tech. So when you talk to him about AI, you can actually understand what AI is actually capable of. And then what marketing marketing AI is, yeah,
Michael Waitze
I get it completely. This is one of my this is one of my things as well. So I don’t even ask about it because of exactly what you just said. Did you get a feeling as a team? Was there a time I don’t want to say a day or a moment? But was there a time where you felt like, I think we came out of this thing? Okay. You know what I mean? We’re like you, like, Did you wake up one day and go, Wait a second, I don’t think I argued yesterday with
Skye Theodorou
today’s sessions to say, Yeah, we do monthly coaching, it’s like Sadad worry that it was like the precursor to divorce, you know, like, if you’re doing if you’re going to see. But it was just good to have like, it’s I think it’s good for co founder relationships, because it’s a reason why so many startups fail is because of founder relationships. So we just have this, we have this really nice guy we speak to once a month and it, it gives an independent third party of you. And it actually helps me should I understand each other because we are such different people in every single way, like but super complimentary, which means we could work really well together in a startup. And we do also means we just come from such different frames, frameworks and mental models.
Anish Sinha
Yeah, if you can’t get into a room and talk about your differences openly and honestly, and say why the other person’s wrong and understand their perspective, then you cannot build a bit like that’s the fundamentals of, of being able to have any kind of business relationship or any relation.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, any relationship, I would say, and I’d submit to you, it’s the same thing with a family, right? If you can’t sit in a room with your partner, and just say, here are the things that here’s how they’re impacting me. How can we fix this? Then you may as well just not even try to build it, I think.
Skye Theodorou
Yeah. So but when was the aha moment? I think, I think we started to feel like we could breathe easy a few weeks ago, like only only two ago. Oh, well. We’ve been running pretty hard for a pretty long time. And a lot of the hypotheses in early stages that the playing out really quite well. Nice. Which is really good. Yeah. And really exciting, really exciting to see. And we’re kind of planning for 2022 About what how we expand and grow. So it’s it’s good. It’s it’s a good point. I don’t know any Schwinn, did you think we, I think as well, I would go back all the way to February and I would say the the website 2.0. And yeah, that you built just got me so it’s been so nice. Just will, will like NH and I both types of people. And this is what we look for in our team and I’ve covered too, you have to hustle. And you have to just really want to be able to do everything like whatever you possibly can. Whatever your specialty is, you need to be able to do all of it and an etias builds all of our Have a site from scratch, the new website, and, and then also kind of built and designed a lot of content until we hired a product designer. And now he works really closely with the product designer. But I would say that first frame that you showed me any show about what and how we could transform the business insurance experience that got me really excited.
Anish Sinha
Yeah, I think I think the aha moment for me would be definitely when we started to experiment with the embedded insurance for for delivery riders. And we saw some early results. And we were like, maybe there’s something here. And then we did the BB debrief, sessions and fab. And we kept asking why, why, you know, why do we need to do this? Why do we need to build this? Do we need to actually have this in house? Who’s the best person to do it? Is it up cover? What’s our core value proposition and all of those things. And I think we ultimately came down to the fact that this thing worked for us. And if it worked with one single use case, in a very specific example, maybe it could work in other markets, and maybe there’s a market for it. So we started speaking with other folks. And, and we went back to a conversation logs. You know, every time we speak to a partner, we write notes, and we started looking for insights and trends there. And we saw like, maybe there’s something there like, nobody’s done this before. Nobody’s embedded business insurance. As a complete seamless experience, like the people in the US, we’re doing it but nobody’s won that market so far, right? Unlike the ticketing or the package parcel, or some of those other checkout experience,
Skye Theodorou
that can add on insurance experience where you don’t have a complex underwriting questions that.
Michael Waitze
Okay, look, I’m gonna let you two go. I think this was a great story to tell. And I really appreciate both of your time today, Anish and Skye, co founders of Upcover, this was really awesome. Thank you so much for doing this.
Skye Theodorou
Thanks so much, Michael. Great to reconnect and chat let you knew where we’re at.
Anish Sinha
Thanks, Mike. I loved the questions.
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