Kyle Nakatsuji: The fortunate thing for us is that car insurance is a $230 billion per year market. The fact that one person who didn’t know us wanted to buy was an indication that lots of people we didn’t know would do the same. So we ended up immediately growing pretty quickly, faster than we
Sramana Mitra: What did you do by way of financing? This doesn’t sound like something that was self-financed. You probably started with financing. Kyle Nakatsuji: We did. Right when we were getting started, we raised a seed round of about $2 million. About six months later, we raised another $9.5 million. Sramana Mitra: Is this
Kyle Nakatsuji: The thesis was actually pretty straightforward. In this new breed of insurance company category, almost everybody is focused on one thing, which is trying to find ways to offer people a quality product for less money. Insurance, even if this isn’t necessarily true in every sense, is viewed largely as a commodity by
Kyle Nakatsuji: We thought what if we went the opposite way, and we happened to find an opportunity to deliver a high-quality product by integrating it with other companies where people would prefer to spend their time. Now, I was running around looking for all of the distribution opportunities we could partner with as an
Kyle Nakatsuji: When we started, we had really no money to invest but we had the ability to invest through the typical vendor payment process. We were making very small investments as an entrepreneur would. We were testing out some of our assumptions on how the model would work and why it would work. Then
Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to? Kyle Nakatsuji: Now, it’s 2012. I’ve finished both of the degree programs and I’m looking for a job. I ended up getting a job as an attorney. I was working at a firm that exclusively did tech startup work. I didn’t think I was going
The insurance industry is archaic and offers much room for re-engineering. Kyle discusses how he is going about it. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Kyle Nakatsuji: I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was born