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00:01:43 · Kosta, William Loveday Powell, Sam
[00:01:43] S0: Our first guest. Yeah. Yeah. William Loveday Powell. Welcome to the show. Will, first time on. Yep. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your company, what you're building, and then we can get into a few questions. [00:01:54] S2: Sure. So Bill, me, my claim to fame was first intern at Granola. And off the back of that, I kind of went into the product engineering side of things, worked for a few startups and I always had this thesis that SF was becoming this kind of circular flow of raise, maybe write some research papers in terms of my experience at least and then be kind of absorbed into a bigger player. I felt I wanted to go into an industry where there was a bit more grounding so I actually settled on insurance funny enough. A lot of people say, okay, sounds a bit boring. But we found at least where we started with working with kind of small bespoke insurance intermediaries. They all quote with Excel rating models. Very simple like four or five values and you can get a quote back. Yet none of them have like real digital quoting infrastructure. So our real play now is going to big kind of commercial enterprises and saying, can we give you the same sort of experience as buying kind of car insurance from an aggregator? But for in this case, insurance and reinsurance on a much larger scale. So that's the current push. [00:02:50] S1: Okay, so eight zero nine is the name of the company. Tell us why it's called eight zero nine.
00:02:50 · Sam, William Loveday Powell, Kosta
[00:02:50] S1: Okay, so eight zero nine is the name of the company. Tell us why it's called eight zero nine. [00:02:56] S2: Sure. So I'm from the Isle Of Wight, a lot of sailing where I'm from. And Lloyd's Yacht Club is the yacht club of the biggest kind of specialty insurance marketplace in the world, Lloyd's. And their cell number is 809. So we are 809. Incredibly niche. I [00:03:10] S1: love that. I love that. A lot of aura within that. [00:03:13] S0: And what you're raising right now, correct? [00:03:16] S2: Raising from angels. So we think at least with how the business might run is get past FDA authorization, get the first placement done. The placements are big enough scale where hopefully this kind of is our upwind inflection point to them raise a bit more in scale with trad brokers as I said to you last night. [00:03:32] S0: Chad. Chad. So And [00:03:35] S2: any core brokers in the reinsurance space looking at captives that will come later on. Just, yeah, that's the hope. [00:03:41] S1: Who are Chads? Okay. [00:03:42] S0: Who are Chads? Funny enough, we know a Chad. We... Chad. Insurance [00:03:46] S1: Chad and Chad. Insurance guy. [00:03:48] S2: There we go. First first... [00:03:49] S1: I'm gonna give him a call because I think you should speak to him. [00:03:51] S0: We're gonna give Ed Leon Klinger a call right now live on the show. [00:03:55] S1: Ed Leon Klinger has just sold his company Flock for over a £100,000,000. [00:03:59] S0: And we're gonna see [00:04:00] S1: That's it. [00:04:00] S0: If we can get Will and Angel check.
00:04:00 · Kosta, Sam, Ed Leon Klinger, James Lowe, S5, William Loveday Powell
[00:04:00] S0: If we can get Will and Angel check. [00:04:04] S1: Ed? Hello. Hello, mate. I have a I have a guy who's been an incredibly cool company called Will Loveday Powell here. He's building in the insurance space. You obviously just sold an insurance company, and he's currently raising an angel round. And I think you should definitely get him to pitch you. Can we do it now? [00:04:25] S3: I'm all ears. [00:04:27] S4: Let's go. Okay. [00:04:28] S1: I'm passing you So [00:04:28] S0: can they hear that? Is that picking it up off the phone? [00:04:30] S1: It is. It is. It is. Will. [00:04:33] S0: The phone to, like, the mic or speaker, and we can... Hopefully, the stream can [00:04:36] S5: I'm just [00:04:37] S1: passing you over to Will now. [00:04:39] S2: Okay. Let's get the mic in the right place. Good morning, Ed. How's it going? [00:04:42] S3: Hey, Will. How are you? [00:04:44] S2: Doing well. Thanks. Yeah. Doing really well. It's quite surreal to be on the show with this kind of live pitch scenario, yeah. Doing well. [00:04:50] S3: Well, it's even more surreal for me. I was just in a coffee shop, and I got a phone call, and now I'm I'm live on air. [00:04:55] S2: Candid moments. Here we go. Live on air. Cool. So any questions you have, or should I go straight into the riff? [00:05:02] S3: Well, how about you just give me kind of the the executive summary? Like, what what's eight zero nine? How does it work? What makes you different?
00:05:02 · Ed Leon Klinger, William Loveday Powell
[00:05:02] S3: Well, how about you just give me kind of the the executive summary? Like, what what's eight zero nine? How does it work? What makes you different? [00:05:09] S2: Sure. So, we started with kind of quoting infrastructure for MGAs in terms of automating how they quote in their quote to mind systems. We realized that even the insurers have quite simple rating models. So, our main push is going to captive risk managers who manage big books of like self insured insurance portfolios and then giving them the infrastructure both to monitor their risk in terms of exposure. But then also aggregate quotes across reinsurance. Say they want to reinsure a certain catastrophe risk or any other type of their limit that they'd like to reinsure out to offset some of their own risk. But starting with kind of quoting for captives. [00:05:47] S3: So, Will, that... Really interesting. I I spent the last ten years building Flock, and and it's been a hell of a journey. One of the things I realized building Flock is that when it comes to insurance, getting kind of big traditional trad insurers or brokers to to change their behaviors, to change the way that they work, to change the systems that they use, it's really hard. Yes. Yeah. It takes a long time. Like, sales cycles can take years. [00:06:15] S2: Is that [00:06:16] S3: does that apply to you? Or or are you are you kind of circumventing that?
00:06:16 · Ed Leon Klinger, William Loveday Powell, Fabian
[00:06:16] S3: does that apply to you? Or or are you are you kind of circumventing that? [00:06:20] S2: Well, we started with that pure kind of like how can we tap into existing systems and definitely found that there's no way to speed up these sales cycles. A lot of friends in the space have said eighteen months is the kind of average at least for a data heavy kind of platform. We're saying we're kind of circumventing this in the sense that risk managers are a bit of a greenfield in terms of the software that they have. So, a lot of them are still purely in Excel. So, we spoke to a big bottling risk manager in Dublin. He's managing like a 300,000,000 property portfolio purely in Excel including exposure. So hurricane risk, well not hurricane in Dublin but flood risk and so on. So we feel like just giving them almost like a Bloomberg terminal to manage their exposure is one thing. And in terms of their coupling to their reinsurance broker, it's a bit looser than for the primary. So we feel like it would be easier to circumvent these kind of frictional, but heavyset ways of companies. [00:07:11] S3: Will, you're a young guy. You've had some cool jobs. You worked at Granola, which I think is the cereal company. You're starting an insurance company that focuses on risk managers. [00:07:25] S6: Yes. [00:07:25] S3: That doesn't sound like the sexiest thing. I mean, you're you're combining two kind of traditionally unsexy industries. [00:07:32] S2: Yes. What
00:07:32 · William Loveday Powell, Ed Leon Klinger, Fabian
[00:07:32] S2: Yes. What [00:07:32] S3: what... What's the motivator for you as a founder? Like, what what... Why is that attractive to spend the the best years of your life building enhanced risk management models for bottle companies? [00:07:42] S2: Yes. Okay. I said to the boys at the start, I'd kind of been through that cycle of seeing, you know, you can either be very product focused and win. It's gonna become harder and harder now. Or you're very conceptional and raise a lot of money and kind of kick off an acquihire. I felt like I wanted to build an industry where at least if there's some fundamental change it's seen over a longer time horizon. Purely from an economic perspective but just seeing how that change can actually speed things up, make things better. And the real hope was thinking where can I leave a mark that's kind of a bit more substantial and grounded over time? [00:08:13] S3: What what... So kind of related to this, you know, one of the challenges with Insurtech, and I speak to a lot of Insurtechs is, I mean, the key is in the name. Insurtech. Yes. Two industries which traditionally [00:08:25] S2: Just the position there. [00:08:26] S3: Not been so... You know, they they don't go well together. It's slightly oil and water. Yes. And the reason that's such a big challenge is because if you're building an InsurTech, you're probably working with the insurers or the reinsurers or the brokers. [00:08:37] S6: Of course.