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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
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Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Can you explain to me how this works? Is this a completely online process? Are people making full decisions online or at some point, somebody on the phone is talking to the customers? Karn Saroya: The average basket size at Cover is $1,700. That can be a meaningful part of somebody’s after-tax income.
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: You raised $3.1 million. You finished Y Combinator and you’re walking out with a great network. What happens next? Karn Saroya: From there on, it was about proving out the model and removing dependencies. When we left Y Combinator, we were a lead generation business. All we wanted to show was that significant
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 5)
Karn Saroya: When it comes to segmentation, it’s exactly what you would expect. 80% of our customers are under the age of 35. A quarter of those are homeowners. We tend to get the types of folks who are accumulating assets over time. They may start with getting an auto insurance policy but very quickly
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: There’s some reason why you were drawn to insurance? Why insurance? Karn Saroya: When we were running Stylekick, we worked with some insurance brokers. One day, I walked into one of their offices. This was in Toronto in the financial district. They had multiple floors wedged between investment banks, consulting firms, and private
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You got an offer to join YCombinator. What was your acqui-hire deal? Was it an earn-out deal? Karn Saroya: We didn’t completely vest. It was okay with us largely because we had quite a bit of conviction around what we wanted to do next. The team was most comfortable building products at the
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 2)
Karn Saroya: Ultimately, we were acqui-hired at Shopify. We got to build all sorts of interesting things. We worked on the Facebook Messenger chat bot for commerce. We got to work with Toby a little bit. Having been there for a couple of months, we still had the itch. We decided that we wanted to
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a terrific story of a team that has tremendous expertise in building and acquiring customers for consumer apps, and how they applied that unfair advantage to disrupt a domain (insurance). Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you
