Kristian Feldborg: Building Versuvio Labs

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, 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, 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 that 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 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 are working on 15 projects at the same time and there can be a lot of commonalities among those projects. What we try to do though is to develop technology in a way that there is a greater degree of reuse between the different ventures that we work with. 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 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 a lot of things that every business must put effort into thinking about. 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 a lot of companies that look a lot like each other, but it does not work like this. 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 wants to change the insurance industry into a faster, cheaper, and more accessible industry. And their focus is clearly on technical execution.

Website: www.vesuvio.io 

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

ABOUT THE HOST

There are over 140,000 FinTech ventures out there, including FinTechs, InsurTechs, HealthTechs, and WealthTechs. And the number keeps on changing every month. One statistic remains the same: 25% of these ventures have received investment and support from the financing world. 75% of these businesses still seek financing support from institutional and corporate investors alongside value-creating commercial collaboration opportunities with Global Fortune 500. 

Through this podcast series, I would like to demystify the world of corporate venturing, including how corporations collaborate with growth ventures, how venture capitalists and corporate venture capitalists make investment and collaboration choices in ventures and give tech founders and entrepreneurs, the strategies, tactics, tools, and techniques to build, grow and scale their business by understanding how those with financing power think. So, listen in, share and comment as you see fit.

Twitter: SabineVdL

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Website: www.sabinevdl.com