My name is Nico. I'm the CEO of Corgi. Corgi is an AI insurance company for technology startup and we'll end this year at several hundred million in ARR. I grew up in San Diego, California. In high school, I had a couple jobs. Anyone who works jobs while they're in high school knows that they suck. You have like a boss that's like an idiot that's like telling you all sorts of like things that are just like wasting your time. I think at some point I I just kind of decided that I wanted to do something that was like big and important with my life. Emily at that time, she was really interested in startups and she was running one of Stanford's entrepreneurship clubs and I wanted her to test out this app and Emily came back with like a Figma page with like a hundred comments about the app.

Nico is very good at identifying good opportunities and I think that actually complements my skill set. I'm very good at helping make sure that we can figure out how to like get all these different things done. Basket, they make a lot of really great games. I got that company to the destination that that I wanted to get it to. I spent over four years there, but it didn't feel like a very impactful company. It's a very different type of company than what Nico and I really wanted to spend the next like 10 years building. We want to do the most like biggest most ambitious thing possible. Often times a young startup founder try to make products that you yourself would use which is normally pretty good advice but the problem is that problems that they they try to solve are often not as big as they could be and I think a lot of people think that if they take a really big idea and kind of scale it down to something very small that that makes it more likely to succeed but actually I think that people should do the opposite and think of the most ambitious version because if you're doing that then suddenly a lot of really smart people will want to join you on your mission.

Historically, it's been very difficult for tech startups to get insurance. I mean, I had to get insurance for my last company and I remember the insurance policy was $60,000 and that's a lot of money to buy anything. But, you know, my experience was terrible. I had to call these brokers. I remember it took several weeks to get the policy, not answering my emails to them for like weeks and of course they never paid out anything. And it was just shocking like how slow the process is. We just looked at how everything was set up and we were like, "Wow, this is terrible." How do you have a hundred billion dollar company that runs like this?

If you look at it as 12% of the GDP, it's about twice as big of a market category as software. But I think that all of the regulation around it and the huge regulatory barrier to entry coupled with the fact that most of these big insurance providers started 40 years ago or more, that's led to them being very comfortable, them being very complicit, them to continually worsening their product quality. It's actually a big advantage for us because we can come in with a brand slay and we can look at things and if something doesn't make sense, we can question like why is it being done this way and is there a better way of doing it?

We applied to YC already licensed to be an insurance brokerage. Our idea there was to embed with contract management companies. We just wanted to be a broker and do the normal thing. Um that's what we started with and actually it was working pretty well. But in reality, what was happening was because they had to rely on these like really old traditional insurance carriers, it made it really hard for them to have a good product. It was really nasty to deal with the insurance carriers like making phone calls to them for every single policy. We had to get a fax machine and we were like sending faxes to them back and forth.

There must be like a better insurance carrier out there. And through doing that, we realized that the problem wasn't like the website. It wasn't the tech. The problem was the actual underlying product, which is the insurance policy. So then we had to figure out like how do we actually go and be the company that is creating and has like control over the product. And the only way you can really do that is to become an insurance carrier. So we decided to shut down what we were doing which was working pretty well. We're building a new type of financial institution where we actually become these highly regulated financial entities and rebuild them from the ground up using AI. It ended up being a very long multi-year process where um our company almost ended on many many occasions. We had to to raise almost pre-revenue like $80 million.

Nico actually lives in the office and a lot of our like team members just like live close to the office as well. That energy is something and that time they're able to spend on these problems is something that's really hard to to compete with. Regulation it's not like some like mysterious thing like they tell you like you can do XYZ and you can't do XYZ and you just make sure you follow the directions. Overall, I think regulation is something that that's pretty difficult and pretty challenging. But once we got our first set of licenses, our revenue started growing very quickly.

Operating in regulated industries it's very difficult and is very capital intensive but once you're able to actually get the core infrastructure set up there's a lot that you can just build on top of it. It's a big moat that it's kind of hard for someone else to make like a corgi 2.0 because we had to spend so much time and so much money like getting the infrastructure set up. I don't think you can change the world if you're reselling someone else's product. So in our case, we decided to become the infrastructure and um it took us a lot longer and a lot more money than we thought it would, but in the end um I think it ended up working out.