The following interview is a conversation we had with Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13 Million Raised to Build the Future of Embedded Microinsurance
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone. And welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Harry Croydon, Co-Founder of MIC Global, an embedded microinsurance company that’s raised over 13 million in funding. Harry, how are you?
Harry Croydon
Yeah, good, thank you. Good to meet everybody. Hello.
Brett
Yeah, super excited to have you here. So I know you’ve been in the insurance industry for quite a long time, so what I want to start with is asking about the evolution of insurance and technology since you got your start in the industry in 1999. Yeah.
Harry Croydon
So when you cast your mind back to 1999, the Internet had just been invented. AI was for boffins somewhere. Mobile phones were sort of penetrating a lot of the world. Some people had dial up still, you know, this is the state of the world in 1999. But, you know, people like Amazon had been invented. So, you know, there was a lot of companies around that are very big today that are just sort of starting out back then. And insurance. When I got into insurance, I got into it into a thing called cyber insurance, which is the Internet risks and all the things you get on when you buy things for online and all that stuff. But back then we called it insuring. The Internet is what we thought were doing.
Harry Croydon
So this is how I got into insurance, because I knew a bit about insurance because my technology sort of background, I knew a little bit about technology because of my technology background and I knew very little about insurance. But I met somebody that knew a lot about insurance and we started this sort of ensuring the Internet thing. And because I had a technology sort of base, I thought, oh, what we do is we build a website, put it on the website and sell it to all the people in America. And when went there to sell it, you know, amazingly, nobody had a. Nobody could access a website. They all wanted it done by fax machines. So we’ve gone from this sort of fax era and telephone and posting that stuff in the last 23 years to actually doing things online 25 years later.
Harry Croydon
So, you know, it’s been quite kind of a ride for me at least, you know, going from trying to tell people what the Internet is and how you can email a policy or automatically generate one to people just kind of accepting that’s what you do now. And it is kind of right there and everybody gets on the phone and nobody thinks that particularly clever anymore sort of thing. So, yeah, it’s evolved a hell of a lot over the last 25 years.
Brett
There’s a super funny video from the early 90s, I can’t remember. I think it’s Katie Kerr, someone like that, some famous broadcaster. But they’re like debating what the Internet is. And like the at sign, they’re like, yeah, it’s like an A with a squiggly line. And like, no one can explain the Internet. And it’s just funny to watch people struggle with, you know, something that obviously became, you know, massive, but they just can’t even try to convey what the hell the Internet is. Even back then.
Harry Croydon
Yeah. Now I used to do like, you know, conferences and things. We had this little video, it was back in the dark ages, like a video, you know, a little skit, if you like, of showing somebody explaining to somebody what a book was versus a scroll and trying to work out how a book works differently to a scroll, which was very much like, how does the Internet work? You know, it’s just like getting used to it. How does a website work? And what is the intranet? And what is an intranet? Like, what’s the difference? You know, that sort of thing. So, yeah, a long time ago, with.
Brett
All those changes, I see that company Safe Online. You had the ride there from 99 to 2006. What was it like building in that time? Because when did the dot com bubble blow up? Was that like 2000, 2001? So you 2001 navigated through that? What was that like? Take us back.
Harry Croydon
Yeah, so that was a very interesting time, all those years. So we would be invited to these.com events and you’d have little badges put on you and people would be desperate to sort of give you money and explain your idea to them. And it’s really quite crazy with people literally chucking money at you and wanting to do things and people sort of saying crazy things to us. Like we would say, we want $2 million. And they would say, well, that’s not enough. What about 30? What would you do with 30 million? And were thinking, what do we do with 30? We had no idea what we could do with $30 million, you know, so things like that was kind of quite crazy. We did get funding through that time and very interestingly we also closed around, I think it was in June 2001.
Harry Croydon
And trying to track down the actual VC with the money was quite hard at the end, you know, because they had promised to pay for it, but of course the bubble had burst and they didn’t want to pay the money anymore and we had to track them down to get the money off them. So it went from literally chucking money at you to having to track them down inside like a year. You know, it’s kind of quite difficult. But yeah, we did two rounds during that time and the last one was obviously a much more difficult round, but we still got a good valuation and still work out okay.
Brett
You know, there are a lot of companies obviously at that time that didn’t survive. What do you think you got right? You know, why were you able to survive?
Harry Croydon
Well, I think we had this idea then and I think it’s still the same is if things do take longer than you think, you know, they take a lot longer than you think they’re going to take. And kind of being there is more important than spending all the money quickly. You know, getting through it is actually trying to work out that you need the longest possible Runway always. And you need to always spread out. Even if you think it’s going well, you need to spread out the Runway longer and longer until you are cash flow positive. So, you know, we got our round in June 2001 and then guess what happened on 9 11.
Harry Croydon
And you know, the insurance industry after 911 ground to a halt for several months and any deal we had stopped, everything stopped, we had no income, nothing, all just ground to a halt because of 9 11. So you never know what’s coming your way. So you can’t just crack on and spend money. And you’ve got to kind of protect yourself from the unknown really all the time.
Brett
Let’s skip ahead a little bit to 2019 and the founding of MIC or MIC. So what was it about this problem insurance that made you say, yep, that’s it, I’m going to go back and build another company.
Harry Croydon
Craziness. I think that’s what it was. No. So back in 2000 or so I met my Co-Founder Jamie Crystal and we put some things together and Jamie and he worked for another company. I worked for all these other companies and you know, we just kept in touch over like the 15 year period between then and 2019. And I went over to Jamie and sort of told the story of Where I got to, which was, you know, AI is coming along, you know, machine learning, you know, big data is here. The gig economy, sharing economy had made it, you know, grown a need for insurance by the mile, by the project, by the night, you know, by the job sort of type insurance. So, you know, very short policies, not just the normal annual policies.
Harry Croydon
And more and more people obviously had the mobile phone, which, you know, a kind of a distribution network in people’s pockets. So I came over to Jamie and said, look, all these things have come together in order to enable Microinsurance to be a good thing and we should set up a company. And, well, I said, I’m thinking about setting up a company like this. What do you think? And he said, well, interesting enough, I’ve just bought microinsurance.com. He’d actually bought that URL literally two weeks before. So he was thinking about the same thing and which is big coincidence in many ways. So this is kind of really what brought us together thinking about, you know, the technology change, the infrastructure around the world, the sharing economy, the platform sort of businesses, the new platform businesses that are out there and evolving.
Harry Croydon
And we thought this was the right time to start thinking about, you know, putting an insurance company together specifically to focus on that sort of project.
Brett
So you have that idea. What do the first six months look like?
Harry Croydon
So the first six months is really trying to work out what we thought we would be. So both of us were brokers. Our background is kind of broking, so we thought we like a broker. And so we thought we’d go and find some customers and then go and put the insurance together with some big insurance companies and work on individual projects. So I found three or four projects to do like half a million dollars each, couple of million dollars of work and set about talking to the players like AIG and Munich Re and all those sorts of big companies. And basically the first six or eight months took. Despite having that work and despite having those projects and the clients wanting to do it took us a Long time to get those companies to basically say, no, they don’t want to do it.
Harry Croydon
You know, they thought it was too small or too difficult or not for them. And, you know, we kind of got frustrated in the first sort of, you know, six to nine months with, we can’t place this business individually like this. You know, we couldn’t operate like just a broker. So we started to turn ourselves into an insurance company and so that we could actually say to the client, yes, we can do this. We’ve got the capacity, the ability as an insurer to do it. Because of it took us going to insurance companies, asking them to work on these things was, you know, there’s kind of a lack of innovation, if you like, within the industry around these sorts of ideas.
Harry Croydon
So we decided that we ought to become an insurance company so that we could say yes to these things, and that’s what we did. So in 2020, we set up our first insurance entity and started to place insurance into that so that we could and then work with clients. So that made it a lot easier for us to say, you know, actually design products and then go and talk to clients about those products and our ideas and then accept it, and then we can place business and start writing business.
Brett
At what point did you start generating revenue from the founding of the company in 2019? How long did it take until revenue was coming in?
Harry Croydon
So the first bits of revenue were in the very early part of, you know, in 2020. That’s when the first revenues, you know, came in. Yeah, that’s when the first revenue came through the door. We. We also started then building out some of the tech solutions that we have today and doing that. And we have a team in the UK and India to do that. And we also then started to think about where we want to start selling this business, you know, in terms of around the world. And we decided that we wanted to be, or we needed to be global in our founding, if you like. So, you know, if you work with a lot of these platform companies, you know, the new ones, they get global very quickly.
Harry Croydon
If like a, say like an Uber or something like that, they can start in one country and then very quickly accelerate around the world and be in different countries. And we felt that there wasn’t an insurance solution to sort of service that sort of company. So we’ve kind of built it into that. You know, we started to build it into that type of company in those years and get that moving so that we can actually respond to these global clients.
Brett
What did that marketing strategy look like at that time and then how has it evolved? What does the marketing strategy look like today?
Harry Croydon
So we’ve always thought we would be a B2B player. We would sell through brokers and sell through partners and not going direct. And that still stands today. So we sell where we’ve evolved. I think we used to go direct, you know, trying to find individual clients and that’s hard work if you like. You know, finding these individual clients all the time. You need a big sales force. So we didn’t want to do that. So we started to go through brokers and engaging the brokers, saying that we’ve got a market for you, we’ve got these products, we’ve got these ideas and we started to go through that sort of broker network. And then the other thing we’ve done is also engaged with insurance companies around the world.
Harry Croydon
So we work with insurance companies india, in Saudi Arabia, we’re starting to work in the Middle east, across America and also in South America. So, you know, the broker network is a really big thing for us. And also working with the insurance companies and, you know, we thought it was obvious to go to brokers, but going to insurance companies was a bit of a surprise in a way to us. You know, despite our knowledge, the insurance industry, that they don’t have this sort of product and they don’t have this sort of knowledge and they don’t have the technology. So were there, we’re like, we’ve got the technology to help you, which is like an insure tech if you like, but we’ve actually got the capacity to back up the product as well.
Harry Croydon
So we could sort of plunk that into an insurance company and get them to give us their paper and front it for us in their country and then sell the product in their country and you know, with our technology or you know, in our sort of know how that’s kind of how we promote it through that. And that also enables us to have like a network of insurers around the world. If a platform company comes to us as well, we can actually go to that network and help place business around the world for that platform company. So it’s quite a good balanced, synergistic sort of relationship we can have with, you know, these large insurers.
Harry Croydon
Now we can innovate the product, manage it on our technology, bring the big players in to help us with a bigger capacity and also, you know, to better place it around the world.
Brett
When it comes to your market category, how do you think about the category you’re in. Is it embedded micro insurance or what does it look like?
Harry Croydon
Yeah, so yeah, it is embedded. You know, the word embedded microinsurance is a newish term. You know, there’s been many years there’s been program insurance selling programs to companies, but the embedded nature is really similar to that, but different. Right. So the way we, you know, definitely embedded microinsurance, but it’s the way it’s placed into the channel, into the actual sales channel of the product. So it’s allowing insurance to be sold right at the point of sale with another product that is relevant to the insurance sale. So we’re not pushing some old product down somebody’s throat, if you like. It’s allowing the customer to go on his journey to buy whatever product they’re looking at. So let’s say they’re buying. You know, in our case, we rental, they’re buying, taking a rent policy, a rental contract.
Harry Croydon
Then as they take that out, we position my income product in that sales flow so that when they come to sort of agree to pay fifteen hundred dollars a month for their rent, then we can also cover them for their loss of. If they lose their job, we can cover them for $1,500 a month for three or four months as well for a premium. So that people can then think, oh, I got my rent. Oh, this is a good product. It protects me in case I lose my job. You know, ticked by that. And it’s all within the flow. They don’t have to think about it by going to a broker or going somewhere else. You know, it’s all within that sort of flow to buy the insurance.
Harry Croydon
Another one you see often is like a lost luggage insurance when you’re buying an airline ticket. You know, it comes in the flow. You don’t buy travel insurance kind of separately anymore. You go and buy it in the flow. So it’s embedding it into, you know, other retail opportunities. And to do that, you need a very relevant and very simple product to sell and position there. And it allows the customer to pull that product along with what they want, rather than the insurance company pushing it down. You know, I’ve got travel insurance, it’s got 48 clauses in it. You ought to buy this. It’s $500. No, I only want late flight and baggage. That’s $10. And that’s a simple kind of product to buy. More relevant to most holiday travelers, if you like.
Harry Croydon
So that’s where the embedded nature, the change that I see from just being program insurance, which is what people think of as embedded insurance to what we think of as embedded insurance is embedding it into the final point of sale, if you like.
Brett
As you reflect on this journey so far, what do you think has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made and take us back on how you made that decision.
Harry Croydon
That’s a difficult question. So I think we’ve really evolved selling our selling process. We still sell through brokers, we still sell direct and we still sell through our channel partner. And it’s actually, I think, you know, from my point of view always is keeping that kind of broader multi channel process open rather than just saying right, we’re just going to focus on brokers, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to focus on brokers in America. That’s all we’re going to do. You know, what we’ve done is really focus on this global nature, hence MIC Global and also had a kind of a multi channel approach which is I think different to a lot of shorts that we see.
Harry Croydon
And that’s really, I think the important lesson that we’ve learned on working with this multi channel kind of approach works because it means that when we have opportunities come along we’ve got solutions for them and we can work with them very well. You know the hard part about insurance is really the decision making process around whichever channel you’re in. The decision making process can be quite long and challenging because of that. And you know, you’ve got to keep very focused and keep, you know, you make sure that you’ve got client buy in all the time, you know, to make sure that you keep them on track as much as you on track.
Harry Croydon
Because a lot of things change, you know, during a six months or a year long procurement process and you’ve got to be able to sort of keep the client managed along that route. But you know, I think in terms of kind of go to market idea which is multichannel, I think that is something that we are still focused on and we still quite like given your.
Brett
Experience insurance, I have to ask if you could give any advice to founders who are building insurance technology, what would be that top number one advice that you would give them?
Harry Croydon
Don’t do it Insurance companies, I mean, you’ve got to pick who you’re going to sell it to. Insurance companies, you know, they spend a lot of money on things, but you know, they take a long time to buy technology. This is why we aren’t an insurtech, we are an insurance company enabled by technology. You know, that’s what we are. I’ve been selling technology insurance for a long time and the sales cycle, whether it’s to brokers, if it’s to insurance companies, or is very long. And they all want semi bespoke solutions and it’s very difficult to service them, I find.
Harry Croydon
So if you can keep the system, you know, focused one particular problem that helps or a complete solution that is easier for them to use, like a modeling tool for hurricanes or wildfire or something, these are the things that they want tools, but like a policy management system. I built my first policy management system in 1999 and I haven’t really seen anything that’s much different. Despite everything that people say, even today, they’re all the same, they’re all just there. So don’t build one of those. Build something that is smart and clever for people really, you know, and understand the need. You need to find a need first. Don’t just think, you know how the insurance industry works and you can solve their problems because of. Yeah, I don’t think you can. You know, it’s difficult to just understand.
Harry Croydon
The industry is very multifaceted and there’s lots of people in it and it’s kind of challenging from that point of view.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like here?
Harry Croydon
Yeah, well, for us we are seeing technology becoming much more important. You know, the old word AI and all that stuff getting embedded into our systems, you know, especially around claims management, customer service, fraud management and kind of the customer journey. So I think in three to five years there’s going to be a massive change in the adoption of technology into insurance. And for us, you know, seeing, you know, embedded micro insurance really take off because of people are looking at more risk, you know, being risk adverse and looking at new ways to offset their risks and you know, the ability to write a niche small product just for that audience, then that’s where I think you’ll see a lot of that.
Harry Croydon
And being able to do that quickly, efficiently and manage it all on technology will enable insurance to penetrate, you know, the mass markets, not just in America and South America, but around the world. And, you know, potentially could start to see an actual growth in the insurance numbers, you know, that we’re all excited to see.
Brett
Amazing. Well, I love that vision and I really love this conversation. Before we wrap up here, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with you and your journey as you build and execute. Where should we send them?
Harry Croydon
Yeah, we just send them onto LinkedIn. That’s the best way to get hold of me. I think I’m active on LinkedIn. I do look at the messages and filter out the ones I want to talk to. So if there’s something interesting you want to have a chat about, I’m available.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Harry Croydon
Thanks very much.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast, and for the latest episode, search for category Visionary on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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