Ep321 Dave Walsh & Graeme Newman Kantara Capital: Pull, not Push

Mark Geoghegan (0:03)

I'm Mark Geoghegan, and you're listening to The Voice of Insurance podcast, produced in association with AdvantageGo, now part of Sapiens, enabling enterprise scale underwriting through a single pane of glass.

This podcast is a real treat, and that's all down to today's guests. They're two of the most successful entrepreneurs of their generation, building Mga Cfc into a multi-billion dollar sustainable business based on consistent organic growth and year in, year out market beating underwriting profitability. That's already good enough to be worthy of your attention, but that alone is not what makes this podcast a must listen.

What makes this interview so compelling is that, yes, my two guests have been exceptional practitioners in their own right, but now they're able to sit outside the industry and look inwards from the point of view of expert investors. The icing on the cake is that they're not running a venture capital fund using other people's money. The only funds they are investing are their own, and this means that they can be brutally honest in what they say and how they say it. Dave Walsh and Graeme Newman of Kantara Capital are now in the business of helping the best new firms in the MGA and broker space realize their potential. So listen on to find out what this exceptional duo have in their sights and what their favorite and least favored investment theses are. You're likely to be surprised by some of their strong convictions and then cheered by their infectious enthusiasm, optimism and good humor. If you've ever wondered what it takes to make it on your own, listen on, this podcast is an encyclopedia of great ideas to get you started and is one of the strongest interviews I've recorded in a very long time.

Enjoy the podcast. Graeme and Dave, welcome back to The Voice of Insurance, but now with different hats on. Something I've been doing that I didn't use to do at the beginning of the podcast, so seven years ago now, was I didn't use to ask people to introduce themselves, and now I've found that actually it is quite useful, because not everybody listening knows everything about you or your career to date. My way of doing that is to run us through your career today. Well, first, tell us how you got into insurance. Again, it's one of the things that often when you meet someone first time insurance, you get to that story of how did you get into insurance? Most people fell into it. We'll find out with you two.

Dave Walsh (2:13)

Okay. Morning, Mark. Dave here. My first job after uni was at Marsh. I was a UK professional indemnity broker there.

Mark Geoghegan (2:21)

Why did you apply to that job?

Dave Walsh (2:22)

Just through word of mouth, really.

Mark Geoghegan (2:24)

You just thought, well, you didn't know what to do, or did you know, you didn't know what to do?

Dave Walsh (2:28)

You didn't know unless it was your career. Yeah, exactly. I came out of uni quite headless, rudderless, all the usual lusses.

Yeah, I was there for four years, really enjoyed it. It was a good place to work, but then was lucky enough to join Howden when, can you believe it, there were literally less than 20 people. So I was one of the really early starters at Howden. They're now 25,000.

Mark Geoghegan (2:47)

Which office was that, still St. Dunstan's?

Dave Walsh (2:49)

I thought you meant which office, as in of their offices. Because I did a podcast with David, wandering around the different offices. Yeah, I know, I heard it was great. It was St. Dunstan's. So was the first one. It was a fourth floor, I think, from memory, which probably had a capacity of 20 people. And was there still the Labrador, though? There were dogs coming and going. I think it was a Labrador, a Vinerama.

Called Fly, if I remember. Sadly departed now. Anyway, so joining Howden when it was such a small team, I went there to run PI, was a real eye-opener, actually, because while Smosh was great, everything felt very institutionalized, as you can understand. And suddenly you join a founder, an entrepreneur, in a tiny small team, and you realize you can take on the big guns. And that was really interesting.

And then, for me, I suppose, the next big seismic moment was in 1999, the dot-com boom arrived, and with it the Internet. And everyone was basically thinking, how the hell is this going to change our lives? And in the long run, no one knew what it was going to do, but everyone knew that everything was going to change. So I think that's actually quite interesting, because here we are 27 years later, and that feels like we're in exactly the same space with AI, of course. So from my perspective, I became slightly obsessed by the fact that businesses were starting to take on new risks, and there was no insurance policy to cover them for those risks. And Hiscox was dabbling and experimenting with what they called Cyber in the UK.