In a few years we'll cover all the categories! Thank you for taking a crack at it!
334 karma · joined December 11, 2015
Please reach out: [gabriel (at) coveragecat (dot) com] if you want to talk, have any questions or feedback, would like to work with us. Owe my startup career to HN in a way so always happy to help out.
In California we specialize in harder-to-insure homes, i.e. stuff that will place with a non-admitted/surplus policy, the goal is to help keep people off FAIR.
RE: cancellation/non-renewal, these do happen but it could happen to your existing deal too unfortunately. No one will force you to switch if it isn't a good deal and our agents do their best to always advise to the user's best interest. Our goal is to retain you as a customer for life (our agents just optimize automatically for you every year!) rather than make a quick buck one year.
Yes, folks come back at the end of their year. Most of the time their price remains the best (non-issue), when there are better options they switch. Carriers have been great partners so far since we bring them much more business than switches (and when the switches happen it's often because risk management wanted to reduce exposure in that region anyway).
They'll enforce the minimums even as a standalone policy, my understanding is it's that the umbrella always "sits" ontop of something. I.e., they want you to clear the other liability limits before they step in to provide coverage.
It is kind of a huge hassle, especially in states like CA or FL where a lot of carriers have withdrawn and the default bundle option isn't necessarily available. We went looking for high pain X feasibility and this is where we landed!
After much trial and error, we've come to realize that trying to separate users from their existing insurance arrangements is very hard unless there's some sort of stark event that triggers the switch.
I.e., folks will usually only make a purchase with us if one of the following is true (even if they could save money or improve coverage):
- they're shopping for the first time and want a modern, online-first, service that avoids hassle
- their premiums have jumped
- they were non-renewed
Most users' experience of shopping for insurance has been historically so bad that they're very averse to optimizing it, even if 10m or so could save them hundreds (and in extreme cases thousands) of dollars.
> Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is no systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms’ growth in ideas (patents) and labor productivity. Average firm growth after controlling for idea growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades.
https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/teresaFort/files/...
The shift is a relic of an older economy and damages folks' lives through worse mental health and driving outcomes [0].
[0]: https://www.coveragecat.com/blog/daylight-saving-time-car-in...
See for example the minimums here: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0300-insurers/010....
Most of the issues here stem from problem the sales as opposed to the claims process. Customers are, structurally, under-educated on what their policies actually cover and this produces unrealistic expectations about what they should file claims for.
Emphatically, this is not their fault but an industry-wide issue that has complex causes like brokers/salespeople getting increasingly squeezed to produce as well as the intense time pressure under which many folks purchase their homeowners insurance policy (folks are often sprinting to check this box to secure a mortgage). Sadly, there is also a strong correlation between consumers experiencing worse socioeconomic conditions and failed claims. This, to me, generally suggests that some behavioral insights should be brought into the sale and management of the financial product to better protect these buyers' interests.
It is important to highlight and understand this point of failure because: 1) claims (even failed ones) are one of the easiest ways to get your rates jacked up as this is a category that insurers are allowed to price on. 2) The common response to articles like this is that "of course insurance should cover more things" but this counterintuitively risks creating more dead-weight loss for consumers broadly in the form of coverage for things that we simply shouldn't be insuring (and instead should be maintaining and replacing).
All that is to say: ask your broker / agent what's in your contract. Do it BEFORE you have a claim to file as in some cases speaking to them (especially captive agents) may in and of itself trigger a claim.
AI-native brokerages (like what we've built) are part of the solution to this problem since well-constrained LLMs can help buyers and users get a much better sense of what their contracts actually cover, and whether or not they should submit a claim.
That said, GP comment is intellectually dishonest. It doesn't account for the negative externalities of his choices/politics that, as you correctly identify, are tied to his values.
More industry exposure to well-managed agentic experiences will create oodles of opportunities to reduce premiums for consumers and offput some inflation-driven increases in cost of coverage.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/postbroadcast-democracy... - absolute banger
That is to say, the whole post is a bit of an internet old-head complaint. Reminds me of baby boomers complaining about a "decline" in homeownership and having children without acknowledging the massive shifts in the economic accessibility that support these milestones.
It's easy to write a post like this when you've already built a following because you started when social media was a greenfield experience. It's much harder when you have to compete for signal while being pressured to build a brand and perform at your day job.
They don't have to be malicious operators in this case. It just happens.
Give it a few weeks.
The shift has been very rewarding and has opened up tons of opportunities and partnerships both personally and for my startup.
The snark:signal ratio section rings very true.
For the more LLM-pilled would also recommend reading the Gwern piece on writing online: https://gwern.net/llm-writing
The second one is from the inside of the observatory (89th floor). Folks with media passes were allowed to get closer so that's the crowd you see pictured. He's climbing in the background.
I had an ace attorney who told me there were no assets to recover beyond the insurance settlement at the minimum limit provided.
My health insurer at the time later tried to take the settlement from me via predatory collections tactics, and I was only able to keep it due to California state laws that protected me if I wasn't made whole (I wasn't hit there but am a citizen of the state).
Most accidents are caused by folks on the lower end of the SES spectrum so a very large number of victims end up like me.
You also don't hear that much of our stories because the dead and the maimed often tell no tales / it's unpleasant to hear. Many settlements also require silence.