When naming a category means rebuilding the company | Quentin Colmant

Quentin Colmant (0:00)

I think what you need to realize is not only about, you know, naming something and doing some marketing, is how you completely reorganize your product, your organization, your people, your structure, as well as your partnership, because at the end, it's kind of partnership ecosystem.

Brett (0:21)

Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, the show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host, and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.

Quentin, welcome to the show.

Quentin Colmant (0:57)

Hello, Brett. Good to see you.

Brett (0:58)

Yeah, looking forward to the conversation. So let's go ahead and jump right in. How did you get into this world of insurance tech?

Quentin Colmant (1:04)

Look, insurance by accident. You know, after my study, I started at Allianz, kind of boring job, and you never really choose to work in insurance.

But long story short, about 12 years ago, I figured out a very small startup called Stripe and applied to be a beta tester there. And I implemented the API for the business of my wife. She's an art dealer. And I found it so cool that I was thinking, oh, could we do like the Stripe of insurance, enabling any businesses across Europe to integrate insurance and distribute it as in a simple way, like the Stripe way?

Brett (1:37)

Any takeaways from your time at Stripe? I feel like it's just an incredible organization. I'm sure there were a lot of lessons. Is there anything specific that as you were going out on your own to build your own company, like this principle or this thing that I learned, I'm going to bring that with me?

Quentin Colmant (1:50)

So I was not working at Stripe. I applied to be a beta tester during my free time. It was more about learning the tech, learning the APIs and learning the payment transformation. Long story short, actually initially I integrated another PSP, a traditional one. And when I had to go live, it did not work out because we need a merchant account. And merchant accounts were for building like three businesses, business about, you know, online games, an industry, I will not name it, but I guess you know it. And last one, but not least, is the art business. And so at the end, because of being ejected from traditional businesses, I found the Stripe as a kind of transformative solution for my problem.

Brett (2:29)

I see. I'd appreciate you not mentioning that other one. You'll get us censored on the internet. So looking at the company today, you're what, a little bit over 10 years into the journey, what's it evolved to? I'm sure there's a starting thesis. Like, what's the thesis today?

Quentin Colmant (2:44)

So the thesis today is about orchestrating embedded insurance. You know, compared to the US, Europe is a very fragmented market, and every country has a different insurance regulation, commercial law, languages, still some different currencies. And to build a pan-European solution, it's a tough one. But take an example of Tesla or Revolut.

They see Europe as one country. They build one product for Europe. They build one app, one solution, one marketing for Europe. And when it comes to offering insurance to the customer, which makes a lot of sense for a neobank or a car OEM, they have a problem because Europe is so much fragmented that in each and every country, there is a different insurance factory. So there is a massive gap between a kind of multi-country play when it comes to insurance, because nobody is able to offer that. And so our focus is really enterprise-grade company that are active in many different countries, and they don't want to deal with 10 different insurance companies in 10 different countries, and they need a kind of one plug-and-play solution, one API across Europe, and that comply by default with the local regulation. So it's kind of compliance by design, take first solution.

Brett (3:58)

When you look at the category here then, is it embedded insurance orchestration, or what's the market category?

Quentin Colmant (4:06)

That's a cool one. So actually, about four or five years ago, we coined the name embedded insurance orchestration. And I guess you know this famous book Play Bigger, where you build your own segment. And we really applied the book. So you know, we are like a consultancy firm from the UK.