Iñaki is cofounder and CEO of CoverWallet, a tech startup reinventing insurance for small businesses. CoverWallet started in 2015 in NY, has 110 employees mainly in engineering, design and product related positions, and has raised $35Million in funding.
Before he was cofounder and CEO of Contactive (which also operated Klink), a big data platform for telephone calls acquired by Thinkingphones (now rebranded as Fuze). Prior to that he was cofounder and CEO of Pixable, a consumer internet startup acquired for $30MM by SingTel, the second largest telco in the world. He has also worked at Microsoft Corporate Strategy and 2 years at McKinsey&Co. And as an research engineer at Intel, NEC Labs America, STMicroelectronics and HP. His career has been featured in The Guardian, New York Times, Bloomberg, El Pais, and El Mundo, and frequent speaker and visiting professor at Harvard, MIT and Columbia.
Iñaki completed a Telecom Engineering degree from UPV, Master and PhD degrees in Engineering at Cambridge University (UK), an MBA at MIT, was a postdoctoral research fellow of the Cambridge-MIT Institute, and spent 2 years as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University.
At the recent New York Summit in November 2017, Iñaki received the Entrepreneur of the Year award from the Hispanic American College Business School, a partner of the US Spain Executives Community. We recently had an opportunity to hold this exclusive interview with Iñaki.
You are currently leading your third tech start-up company, CoverWallet, after a successful development and sale of the previous two, Pixable and Klink. What are the main lessons you have learnt from those past ventures and how are you applying them in CoverWallet?
You need a team of very smart and committed individuals. And they are difficult to attract when you start and have limited resources. But you need to try your best at attracting talent early on, because they will set the culture and the bar of the excellence in the company. A founder needs to spend one third of his/her time, trying to attract the best people for every open position.
How is CoverWallet disrupting the business insurance market and how can it be a valuable resource for members of USEC’s community?
Today in the US there are 25 million small businesses: restaurants, barber shops, contractors, etc. They all need to buy insurance (e.g., general liability). And today, their only option is to go to a brick and mortar broker and go through an analog, time consuming, painful, frustrating, and complicated process that takes one week process (e.g., completing 20 page PDFs, emailing them back and forth, etc) to buy their insurance policy.
At CoverWallet, we are combining data, design and technology to reinvent that one week process of buying insurance into a 2 minute simple internet experience.
You had no prior experience in the insurance industry, having spent most of your career in technology. How were you able to identify an opportunity and make the decision to invest in such a new field for you?
When I started my first company in NY, Pixable, I had to buy insurance. I thought I could go to a website and buy it (like buying any product on Amazon). But realized that it didn’t exist. I didn’t know anything about insurance but I knew the experience I had had, could be reinvented using the skills I had around internet technologies, data science, user experience design and digital marketing. So I decided to do it.
Starting a company in any field is very simple. You question whether the things that frustrate you could be solved differently (usually leveraging new technologies). Just challenge the status quo.
Most people see Silicon Valley as the place to be for tech start-ups but you have selected New York City instead for all your companies. Why? What pros and cons have you identified?
Last year New York received almost as much investments in startups as Silicon Valley. In my case, I wanted to be closer to Europe. California, where I lived for one year, is too far away.
What are in your opinion the three trends in technology that will have the highest impact on our lives in the coming decades?
* CRISPR: A very inexpensive way for gene modification that was invented in the last 10 years.
* Artificial Intelligence: there have been major advances in AI thanks to computational power, data availability for training, and new algorithms; and if it continues advancing exponentially, in not many years (~30 to 40), AI will beat human intelligence. That combined with progress in robotics will create cyborgs as smart as humans. A good example of AI is self driving cars. They are going to be massively adopted in less than 5 years. Something that nobody could have imagined 20 years ago.
* Extension of life expectancy: With tissue regeneration, bionic organs that can be used to be transplanted (or transplanting animal organs modified with CRISPR into humans), or progress in medicines, we are going to live more than 100 years. And if we manage to understand better our brains, we might be able to download it and upload it in a computer brain and live in a robot, so in theory we should be able to live forever.
What advice would you give to Spanish entrepreneurs considering the possibility of moving to the US to launch a start-up company?
The upside and opportunity is much larger in the US; but the quality and intensity of the competition is higher too. So they need to be determined and committed because in every category, there are other teams and companies as prepared as you, willing to innovate, work hard and long, and execute non-stop. The level and intensity of competition in the US (in terms of talent, innovation and execution) is brutal.
It may be a stereotype, but higher risk aversion is typically mentioned as a handicap for Spaniards as compared to Americans when it comes to entrepreneurship. What is your view on this topic?
It is a perception, not a reality. Maybe in tech we haven’t had many examples of entrepreneurs creating leading companies in their fields.
But in many industry verticals, we have created (from scratch) global leaders. Think about Zara, Mango, Mercadona, Desigual, ACS, OHL, Mercadona, Almirall, Gestamp, NH Hoteles, Globalia, etc.
What can Spain do to promote innovation and entrepreneurship?
Invest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education and research. I think that liberal arts and humanities are important for society, but for entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to double down in STEM education.