ksar

This is true. We've got a human in the loop, who is primed with alot of context around your request. Customer service + advice on coverage is the primary thrust of the feature.

CEO of Cover here. This is super surprising, as we sell our own policies + own a national insurance brokerage. No need to share/sell your information at all (nor would we, as a matter of principle), because we have access to most carriers in the US. We'd prefer to sell you a Cover policy or one from our partner panel that can be managed via our service.

Do you mind sharing which companies sent you physical mail? I'm at karn at cover.com. Would be great to dig in.

Sounding in here - I bought the domain. Let's start with it was a lot of money, and to the credit of some of the folks here it remains to be seen whether or not the purchase was prescient or not from a ROI perspective. Whichever way it goes, the purchase won't be the reason that we succeed, or fail. Reasons for the purchase are enumerated in the article, but more than anything else, we're in the trust business and our customers cross-reference our web presence before spending thousands of dollars with us via our apps. Insurance is a business with consumer scale, and best in class SaaS-like economics (very low churn, predictable CF) - in this context, we became more comfortable pulling the trigger.

As a tech company, many of the things we do to improve the insurance experience can (and perhaps shouldn't, per my prior comments), have zero marginal cost. Say your house burns down - the carrier is going to request receipts, and pictures from your kids' birthday party to prove you owned property you're claiming against. This is not delightful, and is one of the reasons we built out our auto-cataloguing tool.

Insurance companies, largely offer the same products and "differentiate" on customer service. My view is that value-added services, and pressure on price will win the day. Highlighted a few in the article, but perhaps, press a button to get free roadside assistance, talk to a mechanic 24/7, sensors in your home to mitigate risk. The premium volumes are certainly there to support greater value being transferred to the customer.

On the commercial side we offer business property, professional liability, errors & omissions etc. The financial guarantees you're describing do exist:

https://apps.shopify.com/signifyd

We don't yet offer them though, as they tend to be assessed at point of sale.

Thanks for the catch -- strangely, wasn't updated.

> For most of the insurance world, the hardest and most important thing to find is effective distribution and customer acquisition.

This is absolutely true. If you look at how regional, family-owned P&C carriers got their start, you'll find they started as brokers. These brokers found a profitable niche (call it motorcycles in California, or non-standard auto in Texas) that they wanted to own, moved on to become MGAs, and then admitted carriers offering multiple lines of business.

If you can find a way to own the customer as a distributor, you own the life-blood of the entire business downstream. As a result, P&C insurance companies are huge spenders on marketing (GEICO, spends $1.7B/year). It would be game-changing if this cash was used to provide utility to their customers above and beyond the insurance transaction.

I'm of the opinion that insurance premiums could be the new ad dollars - used to create products that promote lock-in, and much more consumer-centric insurance companies.

"An economy based increasingly on rent extraction by the few and debt buildup by the many is, in essence, the feudal model applied in a sophisticated financial system."

The financial services sector adds value to society by providing mechanisms to diversify risk, price assets, and make capital available for productive uses.

These mechanisms are valuable, but are gamed to extract economic rents greater than their value to society. Extract too much, and you kill the underlying economy.

There are prevailing market rates for high profile appearances. There is an associated economic rationale: celebrities who show up at the club, earn those places more money.

Spending this kind of cash on public servants serves an economic purpose too: it buys access, influence, and favour by association. You can't really prove it, but you can reason that this is to the detriment of the public at large.

Multi-line discounts are a key selling point of going with one carrier, something a good independent broker should arrange for you.

As an insurance customer, you have the right to switch agent representation at no cost to you (generally). What other value-added services do you think your local broker could offer outside of accommodating the occasional drop-in? What would compel you to switch brokers?

This is true. Although, we do like the name alot in the insurance context.

1. We're of the opinion the best fintech companies win because they build great products, and find ways to transfer wealth back to the customer (Robinhood undercuts brokerages, Sofi the banks etc). To scale, we need to be a fairer deal, and that involves finding ways for our customers to save money.

2. We get folks insuring cars, homes, pets, jewelry, race horses, boats - just about anything you can take a picture of. It's not so much what you're insuring, but the experience. If you wanted renter's insurance, how cool would it be if all you needed to do was do a video walk through of your place, or snap a few photos?

3. As an independent brokerage, we'd have access to multiple carriers to make a market for most risks. Right now, we're focused on building a large book of business. In the future, we may underwrite products that are tailored to specific audiences (e.g. automagic travel health as soon as you're at the airport for frequent travellers). This we can do via an MGA relationship with carriers.

We’re working on a property and casualty insurance product built from first principles on mobile for millennials. Our product takes in a picture of property you want to insure, and connects you with a network of brokerages across the US & Canada to fulfill the requests. Soon we’ll be binding insurance ourselves.

Depending on the geography, 80-90% of all insurance transactions end up getting bound over the phone, it only makes sense that they start there.

Happy to take any questions. Thanks y’all!

Partly because this wasn't Goldman specific behaviour. Those participating were systemically important financial institutions. In 2008, credit markets/money markets completely froze up and banks wouldn't lend to one another, precisely because trust had been eroded. No one had a clear view on the extent to which financial counterparties were exposed.

As a quick refresher, these guys sold CDOs that they knew weren't priced correctly, obfuscated the mispricing, and then profited on short positions against the securities. Took 7 years to settle for being straight up crooks. Still the Wild West out there.

Agreed. The Slack-esque hybrid command line is a bit of a bait and switch to get the tech community interested. The average user by no means is going to memorize more than 1-2 commands, if any at all. I barely use anything other than Giphy on Slack. At the end of the day content and network effects will determine whether it survives.

You could argue that the 'discipline of debt' imposed on the management of PE-bought companies improves operational efficiency - because they need to generate steady cash flow to delever the company. However, these guys lever to the hilt with tonnes of cheap debt for a reason, though it's cheap it still results in huge tax shields.

Tax-deductible debt as it relates to financial engineering is what is tough to rationalize. For example, the primary function of a PE-fund is to buy ownership of a company by levering it up and then capturing tax shields (US debt subsidy in this article). This is where 99% of the value generated by a fund comes from. In my view, this is more or less a direct transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the PE-fund.

Crashlytics as part of Twitter's Fabric.io suite is awesome. It's our goto for simple things like monitoring crashes/errors, DAU/WAU/MAU and associated ratios across our apps.

It also knocks TestFlight right out of the water for beta testing.

Torontonian Raccoons are resilient but for the most part try and stay out of sight/out of the way of humans. However, I can't let my dog out into our backyard at night in Toronto. I'm pretty much guaranteed a trip to the vet.

Oh man the feels.

Being poor works against you in many ways - but one of the worst things that it does is blind you to what you can accomplish. If you don't have a view of that, it's hard to set out with the ambition to achieve anything. Nevermind that being underprivileged you need an order of magnitude greater ambition to succeed in the first place.

For those of you looking for a quick fix - I've got a Furinno standing desk - sturdy, ultra compact, super light and inexpensive. http://www.amazon.com/Furinno-Adjustable-Laptop-Desk-Multifu...

Congrats Cobi and team, this looks awesome!

YC, with its clout, is probably the only entity that could push something like this through.

Not necessarily. The 'caps' on these warrants are likely to be lower to compensate investors.

In hindsight everything is 20/20, but their survival hinged on their product strategy immediately following the original Storm device. Had they recognized that the original iPhone was being jail-broken to allow third-party developers to build apps/a following, their adoption of something like QNX would have come more quickly.

I'm surprised that he'd still be making ideological bets like this at his age. Diversification could be his friend.

People should hold money in an asset allocation (mix of equities, bonds etc.) that is appropriate for their risk profile - not necessarily in 100% index-tracking funds. You're suggesting that investors beat the market by taking on more risk. As an aside, a great deal of real value has been created by publicly listed companies over the last 15 years.

Agreed on the above point that patronage/network access locks out most accredited investors from the hottest deals. PE/VC is a prime example of this, where the top decile make out like bandits. I'd like to add that speculating on IPOs is like participating in pseudo-alternative asset class - not necessarily capturing value through public equities as the author describes. The level of your earnings/expected earnings, retirement goals, age, level of risk-aversion etc. affect where you place your money. Common sense says that far fewer than 96% of Americans would be well-served having access to this class.