Sean Harper is the co-founder and CEO of Kin, a startup, reciprocal insurer focused on markets impacted by climate change, like Florida and California, with materially different unit economics and a data-science driven approach to underwriting that has lead to strong growth and financial performance. He is a several-time entrepreneur based in Chicago. He was behind TSS-Radio and FeeFighters.

He studied Computer Science and Economics at the University of Chicago and got his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Outside of his startup activities he has worked at Longworth Venture Partners and the Boston Consulting Group.

Highlights from the Show

• Kin is a homeowners insurer, built differently in the $110 Billion U.S. market
• They had setup as an agent, then MGA, but kept wanting more control over the product and delivery of it, which is why they decided to go full-stack, and adopted the reciprocal exchange model
• Sean and Lucas Ward, his co-founder, were both management consultants, which got them exposure to a lot of different industries, issues and solutions
• They both had done startups in the payment space, and were looking for some of the same traits that had helped that space to evolve, and found that many were present in insurance yet the transformation hadn't started yet
• Doing some work for a home security company, they learned first hand about more of the complications in insurance, protection, and how insurance tends to ask customers for information
• Sean shared that GEICO, who spends billions on advertising, only spends about 5-6% on acquisition, while Allstate spends closer to 20% because it also has to spend nationally on advertising plus their agent commission
• Kin sees a strong need to tie pricing to marketing, and shared examples from other industries, like credit cards, where Capital One won't send you an offer unless they know you're a customer they want and can price accurately
• Sean addressed Evan Greenberg's comments that the InsurTech insurers are all hype
• Sean points out the roles of different types of companies in the economy
• We talked about Kin's SPAC, and why they're doing it
• The SPAC they're merging with is founded by Matt Higgins, who has been on Shark Tank, and was one of the original backers of Gary Vaynerchuk's Vayner Media company (Gary V is also an owner of the SPAC)
• We talked about Kin's geographic strategy
• While they've achieved a lot, Kin has also had plenty to contend with, like customers who aren't satisfied, bugs in the software, or the issues of greater scale
• Sean shared that being an entrepreneur is asymmetric in a good way

Special thanks to Medallia (medallia.com) for sponsoring this episode.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of UPbeat Music, available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play. Just search for "UPbeat Music"