August 03, 2022

Kristian Feldborg: Building Versuvio Labs

48 minutes

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kristian Feldborg, founder of 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, Sabine reviews 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 traveled, 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 could work with many entrepreneurs and help them execute the great ideas they have.

As a venture builder, what you do is take some degree of risk with the clients and with the projects that you work on. 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 -- via sweat equity -- until they have launched the very first version of their platform and are starting to raise turnover for their businesses.

We often work on 15 projects at the same time, and there can be a lot of commonalities among them. What we try to do, though, is to develop technology in a way that enables greater reuse across the different ventures we work with. We work hard to create a shared baseline infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, thereby reducing the risk of getting it wrong and 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 right framework to help their business get to the destination they set for themselves or how they’re going to work with others. What happens is that it often doesn’t quite work out. There are many things every business must consider. The structure and the processes are really there to support you when things don’t work out the way they should.

BEST MOMENTS

‘It’s all about finding great people with great ideas that perhaps do not have the technological 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 their value chain, and they know how they want to change/ improve/ disrupt. We actually can help build the technology infrastructure around that through our technology and the partners we engage with.’

‘We want to allow people to focus more on the toppings; we provide the base of the pizza, 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 many companies that look a lot alike, but that does not work. The ones that benefit from tech services are those companies that have a strong technology fit, but more importantly, they can cover different aspects of the insurance value chain.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

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

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.

And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

...more

View all episodes

By Sabine VanderLinden

1212 ratings