Ethos Life Insurance is a software company that sells life insurance products.

Software is reshaping established industries such as banking, insurance, and manufacturing. In these large, established industries, incumbents are adopting new technology as fast as they can, but the new technology needs to be integrated with the old technology. The slow rate of technology adoption by incumbents creates an opportunity for new companies to spring up who are building their entire company from scratch, with updated software.

Insurance is a gigantic market that is dominated by companies which have been around for 50-100 years. The established players in the insurance industry are trusted brands, but many of them have not significantly updated their technology from legacy techniques of pricing risk.

Vipul Sharma is the VP of engineering and Lingke Wang is the co-founder of Ethos Life Insurance, and they join the show to describe the insurance business, the technical problems, and the software stack of modern insurance company. Ethos has more than fifty employees and is growing rapidly, so it is a great case study in scaling a modern company in an established market.