The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wand: VCs undervalue InsurTechs because they misunderstand insurance de-risking mechanics
“VCs don't really understand insurance. So they don't understand the risking that was done behind the scene. To lower the risk and actually bring you to have a customer. They don't understand how you manage your claims, and what you've done on the reinsurance, …”
Wand: Not a single top VC fund truly understands Hippo's business
“There's not a single top fund that truly understands what the hell am I doing?”
Wand: Startup boards overweight top VCs' opinions based on brand, not merit
“Usually, if there is a partner from a top fund, there is a tendency to give overweight to his idea and decision point, where it's not substantiated by the merit of his idea, but just rather from the fact that he came from Sequoia, he came from Benchmark, he ca…”
Wand: Modern data sources give insurtech startups an advantage over legacy carriers
“Data, if anything, it flips. So I'm actually an advantage. I don't have just ten million customers in the US data. I have a hundred million customers data. I have more data that I can actually use. I have more data components that keep on popping every day. I …”
Wand: Startups must gain distribution faster than incumbents achieve innovation
“Because in essence, the fight that you have of incumbents versus startup is a startup needs to reach the distribution faster than an incumbent can reach the innovation.”
Wand: Remote work creates a mercenary culture and increases employee turnover
“This remote work environment creates a bit of a mercenary environment because you never built any relationship with the a person. You never infused the culture of the company. So it's not a really big problem for them to leave and to move.”
Asaf Wand: Remote Work Inhibits Creativity and Complex Problem-Solving
“I think it's very, very difficult to do creative things and solve hard problems. The actual amount of work that's done on some silos is probably fine for engineers. They still close more tickets. Potentially they don't have commute. Maybe it's effective, but t…”
Wand: InsurTech startups look one funding round earlier than they actually are
“In general, what happened, and this is my view for InsurTech, is There's a lot of interest and demand, and a lot of players actually wants to do something in this field. However, every company looks one round earlier than it should be. What I mean is that a co…”
Wand: Fundraising time pressure favors VCs, so founders should run blitzes
“The time value is always in the benefits of the fund and not of the founder, and because of that, I think when you're doing a fundraising, it needs to be a condensed blitz and have 20, 30 meetings in that week, see what's going on, push it to the next level.”
Wand: Strategic corporate investment dramatically increases BD partnership success rates
“If you're having them as a strategic investor with a very specific deliverables, then the likelihood and the chance of these deals succeed are, I don't know, a hundred times more than you thought before.”
Wand: External board members rarely provide continuous ongoing value to startups
“It's going to be very rare for an external person to come up with continuous ideas and value on an ongoing basis. I'm not saying that they can't bring a lot of value every once in a while, but not on a continuous kind of level.”
Wand: Disregard for structure drives Israeli entrepreneurs into insurtech
“As Israelis, we don't have a lot of respect to structures, which is maybe why there's a lot of Israelis working in insurtech, because it's a regulated industry, and to begin with, we don't have a lot of values to regulated industries.”
Wand: Silicon Valley remains the best place to scale a company
“If you want to build a company to scale, it's probably the best place in the world to build it, and it's because of the people that you have around.”
Wand: Scaling $10M to $100M ARR is much harder than $1M to $10M
“It's a lot harder to go from ten million dollars to a hundred million dollars than a million dollars to ten million dollars, and it's not an easy route, and a lot of people fall along the way, and I think that's one of the things that nobody talks about.”
Wand: Legacy backend costs made pre-cloud insurance startups financially unviable
“Anything you wanted to do in insurance, you needed to set up a full back-end system. I guess you could get companies like Guidewire, get Accenture, get Oracle Database Nine, or whatever was in that sense, you know, the options. That would have cost you hundred…”