In this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, host Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, interviews Snejina Zacharia, SF ’13, who founded Insurify, an insurance comparison platform. Zacharia, originally from Bulgaria and with extensive experience at Gartner, came to MIT seeking to transition from corporate life to entrepreneurship. The idea for Insurify emerged from a personal experience during her time at MIT when a minor car accident caused her insurance premiums to spike, leading her to discover the lack of a comprehensive insurance comparison platform similar to Kayak for travel. Despite the challenges of being a first-time female immigrant founder in a highly regulated, risk-averse industry, she persevered through extensive networking and business development to secure her first carrier partnerships.
The conversation covers Zacharia’s entrepreneurial journey, from the initial struggles of convincing insurance carriers to join the platform to building Insurify into a nearly $500 million business with under 200 employees. She emphasizes key lessons learned, including the importance of maintaining operational focus, never running out of money, building the right founding team, and being persistent despite numerous rejections. Zacharia also discusses fundraising strategies, the evolution from startup to scale-up mentality, and the cyclical nature of the insurance industry. Throughout the interview, she credits MIT with providing the confidence, network, and entrepreneurial foundation necessary to challenge the status quo and build a successful company, while also highlighting her commitment to giving back to the MIT community through mentoring and speaking engagements.
Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they’re doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Snejina Zacharia: I felt that coming into MIT—and, for me, MIT is the absolute number one education institution in the world that provides amazing access and knowledge to innovation, creativity and hands on expertise—was a way to get off the treadmill and build up those skills that I needed to build up my confidence to start a company.
Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. So, what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at Sloan.
Hi. I'm your host, Christopher Reichert, and welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. My guest today is Snejina Zacharia, a 2013 Sloan Fellow graduate. Welcome.
Snejina Zacharia: Very nice to be here today. Thank you, Christopher.
Christopher Reichert: Great to have you. Let's give our listeners some background about you. Snejina is originally from Bulgaria, where she got a degree in international economics, and she's worked in technology industry for nearly 20 years, including with Gartner, where she started and grew three multi-million-dollar lines of business for the operational strategy research business across Europe, US, Middle East and South Africa and more than doubled revenue during that period in 12 months. While attending Sloan, she founded Insurify, which we're going to talk about, in 2013, along with her husband, Giorgos Zacharia, the co-CEO and former president of Kayak.com, and Tod Kiryazov.
MIT runs deep in the Zacharia family, where between them they have five degrees, a Bachelor of Science, an MBA, a Master of Science and a PhD. I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of your conversations around the dinner table. Interestingly, both companies, I think Insurify and Kayak share a similar DNA in that they partner with existing industry players to bring a better experience for the user, insurance carriers for Insurify and the travel industry, hotels, airlines, etc. for Kayak. And that aggregates and produces results for the consumer, searching for solutions. Did I get that right?
Snejina Zacharia: Yep. Insurify is the Kayak of insurance. We want to be the most trusted virtual insurance agent in the industry. We hope to become, and we are today the largest online comparison platform for insurance shopping in the United States. But we want to be also the largest insurance broker in the United States one day.
Christopher Reichert: And I understand insurance is a state-regulated industry, right. You have to add states one by one. Or maybe there are common rules across them. So, how does that work when you I know you started with auto and home and now you have pet insurance. And what gave you the idea to start Insurify in the first place?
Snejina Zacharia: While I was it MIT, I had a minor accident and that caused a spike in my insurance premium. So, for the first time, I was very, very motivated to find ways to save on my insurance premium. So, I ended up online searching on multiple websites, and I was shocked that there was not one place similar like Kayak, where you can easily search compare insurance from apples to apples from multiple different carriers. So, I started researching the industry, and I would probably, if I had known how much harder it will be, starting in the beginning, I may have had different thoughts.
But now that we have succeeded and ultimately become one of the fastest-growing companies in insurance today, you know things were very hard in the beginning. It required a lot of persistence and a lot of hard work to convince carriers to come on to the platform, and I hugely underestimated how much time it would take me in the beginning to get off the ground.
Christopher Reichert: And I imagine the insurance industry is very process-oriented, very risk-averse. A lot of statistical models that and not only well within each different company. Right. So you partner with the various carriers who have their own culture. And how do you navigate that?
Snejina Zacharia: So, in the beginning and why it was so hard is nobody wants to be number one, two or three on the platform. So, everybody that I spoke with and I became a data miner of LinkedIn, looking through hundreds of contacts and speaking with hundreds of senior executives from the insurance industry. Nobody wanted to be in the top three. So, everybody was saying give us a call. This sounds very interesting. Give us a call when you get the first three contracts in place. Setting up the foundation and because Insurify is a marketplace, you don't launch a product unless you have the distribution lined up, and it doesn't make sense to acquire any customers if the product is not in place. So setting the customer side and distribution side make making it right was extremely important. And that's why it took so long in the beginning to get started.
Christopher Reichert: Yes, I was curious about how, when you're creating something new like this, how do you get your vision across to those who can't see it, whether obviously the insurance companies were resistant, but maybe not, you know, willfully, they just were just risk-averse. What about funders? So tell me about that boat that both sides. Right. One, you're building the business. And so you're thinking, how do I keep the lights on and hire staff. And then how do I get this thing that I'm creating, which is partly created across to the partners that I need to work with.
Snejina Zacharia: I didn't hire staff. We decided to actually just be the founding team, and we had an offshore development team in Pakistan. But again, the beginning was just mostly business development, mostly speaking with a lot of executives. Until you get the first contracts in place and then you start building the product. So, on one hand, I used wholeheartedly the MIT brand to open doors, and it does open a lot of doors. MIT, artificial intelligence, and then the Kayak brand and name were the three kind of keywords that I used that absolutely opened the door for me. But again, I explored the MIT ecosystem to be able to speak with founders from MIT and pitch the idea to them. And by doing that, get those first introductions to investors. And it was very hard. I actually didn't spend time with the investor community in the very beginning because being a first, first time entrepreneur, outside of industry, female founder, which is almost ten times harder to raise money and also an immigrant, there were too many no's in the get go to be able to build that confidence to pitch when you don't have anything.
I really needed to work on the execution in the very beginning before I am ready for fundraising. I spent almost a year speaking with hundreds of executives from the insurance industry, lining up the first few contracts. One of them was a distribution contract with an agency that gave us the first 13 carriers to launch with and the second was an integration platform that would allow us with the first APIs, and that was able to accelerate our launch to a point that I felt I have all the pieces in place, and now I can hire more engineers, and now I can hire more staff to be able to work on building the platform.
Christopher Reichert: And what are some of the resistance, the threat that automation is going to lose jobs and put people out of work and the small insurance carriers that are in the neighborhood, whatever. Was there resistance from like a trade association level that we shouldn't introduce this into our mix? We've got it all settled.
Snejina Zacharia: The biggest issue was carriers were scared to be disrupted. One of the reasons why they have benefited over the years on piling up profits is that comparison is really hard. Because it's so hard, people don't compare and we make it really easy for people to find always the best deal on their insurance policy. They've also seen the journey in the UK. 75% of the UK market compares insurance and buy insurance through the top three comparison platforms, and that has eroded the profits of the insurance carrier. So, pitching an idea that could be potentially disruptive to their business and economics was not a great start. And the second is that I wanted to present a business model that was neither the brick-and-mortar insurance brokerage system, and it wasn’t a lead-generation company. I wanted to build the next generation technology comparison platform. So, we didn't fit into any of their frameworks. They couldn't put me into a place where they say, we are either going to be an agency or we are going to be a digital lead generation company.
I was like, no, we will be a digital agency. So, that took a lot of time. They just were not comfortable jumping into a process and they couldn't figure out where to fit me into their business thinking.
Christopher Reichert: What made you choose to go to graduate school and to choose Sloan?
Snejina Zacharia: After spending seven and a half years with Gartner and building an incredible international experience, I really wanted to get off of the corporate world and was thinking about ideas for starting a company. I felt that coming into MIT—and for me, MIT is the absolute number one education institution in the world that provides amazing access and knowledge to innovation, creativity and hands-on expertise—was a way to get off the treadmill and build up those skills that I needed to build up my confidence to start a company.
My idea was drastically different in the beginning. So, only after having the accident during MIT, I got excited about something that I had no knowledge about, insurance, and I started researching it. So, at MIT, I participated at the 100K competition together with a team from MIT Sloan, and that was an incredible experience.
Christopher Reichert: Different idea, different business?
Snejina Zacharia: Insurify was the 100K MIT competition idea. I built up the business model. The first business model for insurify from that competition preparation with my classmates. We pitched the idea and it was one of the best experiences that I had at MIT, because it allowed me to validate the knowledge that I have built. And we haven't really changed a lot of the business model from what we thought about in the very early days, which is very unique for startups, usually with startups go through multiple different pivots points. But we just kept building what we had decided on from the very beginning. MIT has been a life changing experience. Probably the best one year in my life. It helps you believe that you can do anything in the world, that you can challenge the status quo, that you can break barriers and that you can make the impossible. And that's how I started Insurify, because knowing what I know now, I was like, what I was thinking. It took so much longer than I initially expected, but again, it has been one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of my life.
Christopher Reichert: And you were married at the time?
Snejina Zacharia: Yes.
Christopher Reichert: When you came to Sloan.
Snejina Zacharia: Married, kids, the full spectrum.
Christopher Reichert: Wow so you really had a full plate elsewhere?
Snejina Zacharia: That's right, so, if I had to do MIT again, and I didn't have the kids at that time, I would have done MIT earlier pre-kids, so I can take full advantage of all the network opportunities, all the clubs, all the competitions, and also be able to network a lot more than I was physically able to do, because I had to always think about dedicating a few hours a day when possible to spend with the kids. They spent the summer of the Sloan Fellows program with their grandparents in Cyprus, because that was impossible. Like we were in school from 8 a.m. until 12 midnight, so it was impossible. If I have to do MIT again, I will spend a lot more time taking full advantage of the networking, the peer connections, building relationships, meeting with professors, building deeper connections with professors, and taking full advantage of all the clubs and opportunities at MIT and the ecosystem MIT provides.
Christopher Reichert: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a common theme, but it's impossible really to take advantage of everything here, right? You started with the three of you?
Snejina Zacharia: That's right.
Christopher Reichert: Your husband and Tod and yourself. And when did you at what point did you start expanding it to more team members and, well, how many, how many staff do you have now?
Snejina Zacharia: We are just under 200 today and we've been growing rapidly. We are almost a $500 million business today, which is phenomenal.
Christopher Reichert: What is that growth? Is that just more people coming to the site using it to buy insurance. Is it more insurance carriers. Is it a combination?
Snejina Zacharia: Everybody's journey is very different. And one of the mistakes I have noticed startups founders make, and it's often triggered by the moment you raise money, you're expected to hire a lot of people. And at the time we raised our $2 million round was very early 2014. I remember our VCs, the number one question was like, okay, why are you not hiring? How many more people are you going to hire? And I have always been very conservative with fundraising, because I always knew that I have to focus on execution, proving and building with a smaller team as much as I can before I grow the team at a much more rapid rate. So, at that time we were actually just four people. The time that we raised the money and we hired a few more interns, and then we had an offshore team in Pakistan that was again through a connection from Kayak. And that was the development team. So, through that skeleton team, we kept building for another two years until we were ready to think bolder and to raise another round that would allow us to hire a few more people.
Before we raised our $23 million round, we were 12 people in the office and that was before COVID. After COVID, we came back with 120. So, within a year and a half we grew from 12 to 120.
Christopher Reichert: And did COVID change the market. Did you did you see an uptick that people were doing more things remotely and you were poised to take advantage of that?
Snejina Zacharia: COVID froze everything for a few months. So, in the beginning it was wild because our thought was, wow, this is everything is freezing. Fortunately for us, not every state was freezing at the rate of Massachusetts.
Christopher Riechert: Talking to you Florida!
Snejina Zacharia: So, a lot of people were still driving. And after the first few months of sort of, we don't know what we are doing and how this will go, I think things opened up and the year 2020 was pretty remarkable for Insurify. It was also remarkable because there was very lower levels of driving. So, carriers were piling up a lot of profits. So, spend was also very high for the carriers.
Christopher Riechert: Fewer claims.
Snejina Zacharia: Yep! Fewer claims. Well, it all came back with a vengeance. End of 2021 and 2022 from being some of the first top years, claims rose. COVID cost, chip shortages that increased the cost of vehicles 30%. Claims cost 30%. So, carriers ended up in probably their hardest market that they remember in history. We just came out of that very dark time for the insurance, especially car and home insurance industry.
The severity of the accidents increased post-COVID. And, also, probably because of the chip shortages, people were not able to fix their cars. It was actually quite hard. And that was the year that we also closed $100 million round of financing. It lead to some really tough discussions with my board members, because we were growing consistently two x year over year since our inception, and that was the year that we didn't grow. Not only we didn't grow, but we actually slowed down for a little bit. Yeah, it's hard. You never know what comes in front of you. And if you're in a very regulated industry like insurance, that is also highly cyclical and the cycle is every 6 or 7 years when carriers go into a hard market, loss ratios increase. You have to be really strategic of when you fundraise to make sure you don't end up in a hard market with not enough capital to support your company.
Christopher Reichert: One of the challenges that I've heard over the years for startup founders is pivoting from that startup mentality of lots of ideas and lots of creating from scratch something and trying to get it off the ground and trying to have some momentum with it.
So, you've been at this now for 11 years, almost 12, I guess. And tell me about your evolution from scrappy startup CEO to now sitting with a $500 million in revenues, and a large team. How have you evolved and what advice do you have for other founders on that regard?
Snejina Zacharia: At the very beginning it was me, myself and Snejina. That was the business development team of Insurify. I had to wear multiple different hats. It was just three of us. My co-founder who was focused on product and now technical lead. My husband was not operationally involved. He was a part-time co-founder.
I spent majority of my time really building up the relationships with the carriers because somebody had to do it, and it was me. 80% of my time was business development, and then 20% was, How do we create the product and what is the best product we can build out of it?
As the team evolved, networking and making sure that you get access to the right employees and hiring and onboarding the right employees was exceptionally important. And I think that I wouldn't underestimate the success of Insurify is 100% due to our ability to, number one, make sure that we never run out of money. Being exceptionally operationally focused, exceptionally focused on execution and being really true and humble with what we can accomplish on every step of our journey and focus on the execution. Also about the product, because there are so many things you could be building every single time. You can easily lose focus. So, making sure that you are ruthlessly prioritizing every month and every quarter is exceptionally important, but it also dependent on who you bring on your team. So, my husband has been exceptionally fruitful in helping us recruiting from some of the top leaders from Kayak. We have hired 11, but we have built a stellar A+ executive team and leadership team at Insurify. And we also acquired a Skyscanner company in Bulgaria. So, that became now our Bulgarian hub for development. Absolutely brilliant. Skyscanner is the number one competitor of Kayak, so, the team was already trained on how to build consumer tech platforms. So, we didn't have to go through the regular transition, and we were lucky to handpick the top of the team and that accelerated our growth and development even further.
So, team, team, team and ruthless focus on prioritization is my number one advice. But ultimately, if I look back of what has been foundational and important in starting the company, I think picking up the right founders and founding team is extremely important, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. I think it's okay to pivot if it doesn't work.
My initial founding team for Insurify was actually two classmates. Neither of them could afford not being employed and not being paid, so we all agreed as we were getting close to graduating, that we will separate. And then I have to rethink who I want to bring on board for Insurify. It was hard to find the right people. I took months to be introduced to Tod, and I feel so fortunate to have found him and worked through him again through another common connection and a friend.
So, founding team is extremely important. Focusing on execution is extremely important. Making sure you never run out of money. Do not listen to your VCs that are trying to help you spend all the money that you just fundraise, only to realize that maybe you are, maybe you're not ready for the next fundraise. So, when I started raising money for every cycle, every fundraise, I always had at least a year of a run rate because I always knew that I could never afford to just wink it and raise money within two weeks.
So, don't listen if somebody tells you can just create a lot of urgency. There are founders can do it. And kudos to those that create that urgency that they can fundraise within two weeks. I realized that I'm not that type. I need the time to execute, show my numbers, show the metrics, be really, really, thoughtful, have the time to have, built the relationship with the investors, and then really launch a fundraising campaign. Also, be ready when you're fundraising, because one of my mistakes in one of the early phases is that I got a sort of term sheet from an investment company that I didn't expect and I wasn't ready for.
I created a fundraising process when I had no connections, no access to any VCs, and I was not prepared. And it was a little bit painful because I said no to a term sheet because I didn't like the valuation and I had to restart a fundraising process that I was not ready for. So, make sure you're thoughtful about that. I never wasted time too much with VCs either. I have heard founders spending 30% of their time talking to VCs. I didn't do it. I never did it., Number one, sometimes when you speak too much with VCs, you may end up promising things that you cannot deliver. And they take notes. So, if you have too many notes with VCs, you might have to explain some things rather than just restarting the conversation every single time. And sometimes we also grew so fast that the VCs that I was speaking with in the last round were irrelevant for the next round, because I had to go up into the types of VCs that were putting bigger checks. So that also didn't work out.
The other part is think about starting a company not as a marathon, but a journey. It's a destination that you have to always keep focused on and know that if I have to attribute one part to the success of Insurify has been persistence. Do not give up. There are so many naysayers, so many people that will not like your idea, that will not resonate with fundraisers or investors that will pass on you, just keep focused and be persistent and try to surround yourself with positive people and also entrepreneurs that can sort of support and give you some of that confidence that that you might lose a few times during the journey because of, of how hard it is. It has been the most rewarding experience in my life and also the absolute hardest time in my life.
Christopher Reichert: Was there ever a time that you thought, this is not going to work?
Snejina Zacharia: Many times in the beginning, especially the beginning, the one and a half years that everything was it was so hard. I remember having this heart-to-heart conversations with one of my best friends, and she was just believe in yourself. Just keep working. It just takes time. It will happen. Don't worry. And I just needed to hear that a few times to just keep going because it was so hard. Nothing was happening. And I remember having these conversations with her and Oliana, if you're listening. And I was like, should I just give it up? It's just not happening. So, ju st keep pushing. Keep pushing, because there are times when you don't know the answers. And building a startup, you often don't know the answer. Being comfortable with living within the world of failure is just a step away every single day, you have to be comfortable with that. I have built a very thick skin over the years. If something doesn't work out right now, I'm like, okay, it's gonna get fixed.
I've built long term view also on people. If you know somebody makes mistakes, they have a learning opportunity. It has been an amazing learning opportunity for me.
Christopher Reichert: And how about tell us about your board of directors or board of advisors. How do you how do you build that and balance that? I imagine being the board of directors, they contribute a lot. They have a voice. But how do you kind of tap into that? And also, for that matter, maybe some professors or Sloan or elsewhere?
Snejina Zacharia: Number one advice for board members or setting up the board is making sure that you have equal board construct. And what I mean by that is you always want to have two founder members or two investor board seats, or three and three and an independent. I have talked to so many founders, including serial entrepreneurs, that will make that mistake. And as they're going through the multiple series of fundraising, they will keep adding new investor board seats and not thinking about the balance of the board. Why you need that is because when things are hard, I have seen so many companies being destroyed by their investors that became uneasy and decided to short sell the company, just because they lose faith either in the company or in the founding team and so forth. So, that's very important. The other key advice is I have raised the first round from angel investors. They were super angels, which was great. A group out of New York that came through an introduction through one of those big VCs that passed on me.
It is very dangerous to get a top tier VC in a seed round. I've called it the Kiss of Death. Because chances that things are not going to work as well as they're hoping and believing are very, very high. And then you have a lot of explaining to do if a top tier VC is not following you. Every single round, you have to explain why they are not part of the round. And if you have angels or you raise money from those seed stage VC groups and funds that are only focused on seed stage investment, you don't need to explain anything. And also they have a lot more tolerance with all the different paths that you will take. So, it's a much safer way. It's a much less risky way.
I have a co-founder friend that raised money from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, one top tier VC out of Boston. And they didn't follow. And it has been a curse of death for them. So, our round was seed stage first, then we added two strategic investors. We wanted strategic because we were outsiders in insurance. We wanted people that knew insurance and could give us additional introductions to the insurance industry. The third round was from fintech and one of them was an insurance tech focused VC. Also, extremely strong insurance connections. And the last round everybody has followed through every single round, which is absolutely remarkable, including our angel investors, which is very remarkable. And then the last $100 million round was led by a private equity fintech focused.
Another key advice on fundraising, there is so many things you can talk about in fundraising, is don't fall in love with the fund. Fall in love with the partner and make sure that you pick a person with high level of integrity and person that will be there with you. I have been so lucky and so fortunate to have found investors that have been supportive, even in hard times, because there are times that happen that nobody could expect, and especially in the cases of the insurance industry with the cyclicality, it has been really, really hard. And finding investors that are understanding and thoughtful and supportive in hard times is extremely important.
Christopher Reichert: Bill Aulet from the Martin Trust Center has you back in to talk to the students. What do you get from that? And what do you think that he's calling you in for?
Snejina Zacharia: First, I always love giving back to the MIT community. MIT has done so much for me. I feel an obligation to come back and to share stories about my journey and share my learnings. Because so much of MIT is entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurship classes at MIT with Bill Aulet, and the other professors, as well as the Martin Trust Center are great opportunities to really be bold, take risks, learn, and accelerate on the journey while you are at MIT to hopefully build an idea to a level where you feel confident that maybe you don't need to take a job and you don't need to get back on the treadmill and really build and create your own destiny and create your own journey. While at MIT, I also created an entrepreneurship and innovation series, and I did that because I felt that I had access to a lot of senior leaders that were talking about their journeys in the corporate world and building their careers. But I really was missing the opportunity to learn from the mistakes and the successes of local top executives and founders.
So, I created that with just myself and a couple of other classmates, and that grew to be attracting 40-, 50-people audience from MIT, which was truly inspiring. And I thought that that was also one of the best learning experiences for me, and I would not have done it if it wasn't for the MIT brand.
Christopher Reichert: Well, I want to thank Snejina Zacharia, a 2013 Sloan Fellow graduate and founder of Insurify, for joining us on this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies.
Snejina Zacharia: Thank you. It has been my pleasure.
Christopher Reichert: Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced by the Office of External Relations at MIT Sloan School of Management. You can subscribe to this podcast by visiting our website, mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Support for this podcast comes in part from the Sloan Annual Fund, which provides essential flexible funding to ensure that our community can pursue excellence. Make your gift today by visiting giving.mit.edu/sloan.
