In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Kristian Feldborg, founder of the Vesuvio Labs – a venture builder dedicated to FinTech startups and the InsurTech space in particular. Vesuvio Labs calls itself the digital rocket fuelling the insurance sector. In this episode they review Kristian’s journey as a FinTech venture builder and how he made the shift from the traditional tech world to the new world of tech.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• I’ve always been interested in new things, startups and tech. For most of my career I’ve travelled, lived in different countries and worked with entrepreneurs. Eventually I decided I wanted to turn that into a business and create a lab and ecosystem where we were able to work with many entrepreneurs and help them execute the great ideas that they have.
• As a venture builder what you do is take some degree of risk in the clients and projects that you work with. That means someone comes to us very early in their journey and they do not necessarily have a lot of the business there yet, they certainly don’t have the capital, what we try to do at that very early stage is invest in those businesses through our work (sweat equity) until they have launched the first version of their platform and are starting to raise turnover for their businesses.
• We often are working on 15 projects at a time and there can be a lot of commonality between them. What we try to do is develop technology in a way that there is a greater degree of reuse between the different ventures that we have. We work hard on creating a shared baseline infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, therefore reducing the risk of getting it wrong as well as the time to market.
• Because we are blessed with working with so many entrepreneurs and businesses we also see a lot of situations where some great people have come together but haven’t invested the effort into figuring out the framework for how they’re going to work together, then it doesn’t quite work out. There are a lot of things that you should put effort into thinking about. The structure and the processes are really there to support you when things don’t go how you expect.

BEST MOMENTS

‘It’s all about finding great people with great ideas that perhaps do not have the technology expertise to execute on those ideas and see if we can partner with them and create great companies together.’

‘Insurance and financial services know something about that value chain and they know how they want to change/improve/disrupt that. We can help build the technology infrastructure around that.’

‘We want to allow people to focus more on the toppings, we provide the base and they decide whether they want to put pepperoni or whatever on top.’

‘You have to be quite conscious about what companies you select to work with. It would be natural to pick a lot of companies that look a lot like each other, but they don’t benefit from that. The ones that benefit are companies that have a technology fit, but more importantly they cover different aspects of the value chain.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Led by Kristian, the Vesuvio Labs team wants to change the insurance industry into a faster, cheaper, and more accessible one. And their focus is clearly on technical execution.

Website: www.vesuvio.io

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristian-feldborg-a78222/

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, and commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers and accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.

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