Ignite Startups: Why Distribution Matters More Than Margins in Insurance Tech with Terry Wang | Ep295

Terry Wang (0:00)

I think five to ten years from now, I'd like to think that everybody's going to be a lot more comfortable with insurance, right? Our thinking is that everybody's going to have one of these agents working for them to optimize their insurance, to make it easier for you to buy, to make it to where you don't really have to think about what you're buying or who you have to buy from or what you have to do with your insurance to get the certificate or proof of coverage that somebody is asking you for. All that stuff kind of gets handled under the hood by a company that you're contracting out. The same way that I don't really worry about how my accounting is done. This is a question for my accounting firm and for some of the bookkeeping services I use. We think that that's where the insurance world is going to go. That's where risk management is going to go and hopefully we're the company to bring about that change.

Brian Bell (1:04)

Everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we are delighted to have Terry Wang on the mic. He is a founder who has spent the last seven years pattern matching across some of the least. We have a glamorous Broken Corners of Software, like Over-the-Road Logistics, Senior Living, and Rental Real Estate. He's a previous portfolio founder now working on a new project, so we're excited to have him. Thanks for coming on, Terry.

Terry Wang (1:25)

Thank you so much for having me, Brian. It is a little bit unfortunate to think of them as unglamorous. I always thought of them as the most glamorous actors. I love trucking. I love real estate. I love insurance now. I think they're actually a lot sexier than you might expect.

Brian Bell (1:39)

Yeah, I mean, that's coming from somebody who's never worked in logistics, but I definitely worked in real estate. So we definitely connected on that and kind of broke down. But I'd love to start with your origin story. What's your background?

Terry Wang (1:48)

Yeah, I mean, where do I even start about my background? Well, just to give the... Let's start from today and kind of work backwards. I think that's usually why I like to do it. Like Brian said, I'm Terry.

Today, I'm working on something new, a project we call Clarity Labs in the insurance space. I happen to dive into that later. But the way that Brian and I met initially was from my last startup, which was called Release. It initially had a much worse name. Our goal was to make renting a lot more flexible, both for individuals as well as eventually businesses, which surprised, didn't quite come to fruition. We kind of got stuck on the individuals part. But we worked on that for four years, built out a insurance MGA with a cell captive underneath. A very, very interesting and unique space, put together quite a bit of reinsurance capacity, a little bit of venture capital. And before that, I led kind of product and growth roles with a couple of different vertical SaaS companies, all a little bit FinTech adjacent, all a little bit kind of built world adjacent. Prior to that, my actual background through school was actually in finance with a little bit of statistics, went to school at the University of Ottawa, grew up in Toronto, up in Canada, and have been bouncing around.

Brian Bell (2:54)

What did you do before release? Did you have another startup before that? Like, how did you get to kind of get into that startup?

Terry Wang (3:00)

Yeah, so maybe the best place to start is kind of in the logistics world, kind of what happened with Freight Path.

So, maybe it helps even jump one step before Freight Path. So at the time, I was working in kind of a data science role at a company called Corel. So if you're familiar, Brian, I don't even know how old you are.

Brian Bell (3:17)

I'm 46 46

Terry Wang (3:18)

So you probably still remember Corel, if you remember WordPerfect or CorelDRAW, like we were there. So today, right now, we're recording this in early August. So this is, so Bending Spoons is very, very on the nose. I feel like Corel was doing that just for software that was built between 1995 and 2005, instead of for software that was built in the last 10 years. So we're putting together all these different old kind of box software products and reselling them as this kind of PE-backed entity. A little bit dull, a little bit slow moving, love the people, but I think I want to move somewhere a little bit faster. And ended up meeting a guy named Gwen Malbeck, who had left his job at IBM Consulting to start a company called Freight Path. And what Freight Path did was essentially to... What we were building essentially was a vertically integrated transportation management system for trucking companies. Truth be told, I knew nothing about trucking at the time. I thought I knew a little bit about B2B sales, but Gwen was a fascinating, fascinating individual, super, super charismatic, and it felt like it had all the hallmarks of something that I want to be a part of. So I put aside everything I knew, kind of in kind of PE-backed software world, and I jumped head first, and I was supposed to be working on growth. My assumption was that we had customers. We had real enterprise scale customers. So the promise coming in was that we'd be working with one of the largest distributors of equipment parts. So Toramont Cat, which distributed Caterpillar parts in Eastern Canada. And we'd be working with some of the largest furniture retailers in Canada. I was like, okay, we have a lot of customers. We have good product market fit. I've read a couple of books on this, so I know exactly what I'm doing.