I recently attended the LA Tech Summit this year, my first. As a Commecial Insurance broker its encouraged to attend such conferences to help build connections, learn from industry experts, and get a full idea of the market potential. Most would agree with this some would not, I on the other hand agree. My recent attendance of the LA Tech Summit got me to see how intrinsic Tech and LA are becoming. The techiest Mayor I've ever seen discussed ultilizing the bright minds of the Tech space to come up with solutions on Traffic, earthquakes, flash floods and driverless vehicles.
All these interesting subjects that the Mayor wanted to tackle with the assistance of a growing group of Techies. Amazing, I'm sure it's nothing new many times in history occurances such as government partnering with experts create life changing results. This was all in the first hour of the LA Tech Summit. What came afterwards was a great insight into how energetic, passionate and creative LA Tech promotes.
Learning about the Snapchat's about face on Facebook from Mark Suster was a passionate example of a group of entrepreneurs looking to build a company. Not just jumping on a big ticket buy out like $3Billion dollars( who would do that), but an honest attempt at finishing what you started and making it enjoyable for society. I use Snapchat all the time, but can barely understand or explain how a company can be valued at $3Billion dollars? Maybe a reader can explain to me? The point is there was energy in the room. I liked it. Mark Suster also talked about retention of the best engineers in SoCal and attracting them to create or enhance existing infrastructures.
The conference carried on to another amusing discussion with Scott Painter CEO of True Car . I found his discussion to be one of the best from an entrpreneurial spirit, building a company, handling failure, and grooming to be an IPO attraction. I've insured so many companies and new ventures, different sizes, different structures, different attitudes. Just different. What impresses me the most is their life examples of failure, Scott Painter had mentioned "failing" then corrected himself to "challenges" of his past ventures, 14 to be exact. Before True Car hit its stride. Ofcourse I'm being succinct on this blog there was a lot more to it. The point is Scott Painter embraced failure, never said he liked it, but embraced it.
The highlight as a broker was to know I was the only one in attendance( I toot my horn), other professionals asking me questions about insurance. How does this relate to Tech? A lot! more than you know. A lot of "risk" can be mitigated by the "Insurance method". It helped that I understood some of their needs like Cyber Liability, Directors and officers ( big one), and other insurance products that would help their businesses. This added to the theme, Insurance is "creating" products that would better serve the Tech Space. When I came back to my office I had a meeting with the leading Technology underwriter from The Hartford, she explained to me Tech has made insurance evolve, we just cant keep up!...Thats change.
