Ryan Sachtjen is the Co-founder and CEO of Threeflow, building software for employee benefits brokers and insurance carriers.

We start with a deep dive into the nearly $2 trillion dollar employee benefits market, including the structural issues that actually give the smallest companies the most leverage.

We also talk about insurance more broadly, AI opportunities in insurance, lessons from kickstarting a marketplace doing nearly $3B in volume, when his wife got cancer two months after closing Threeflow's seed round, and how his co-founders adjusted to support him.

Special thanks to Bolt for supporting this episode! Join the world’s largest hackathon - up to $1m in prizes. Sign-up here.

Timestamps:

(3:57) Threeflow: B2B benefits marketplace

(5:50) How the benefits industry works

(9:20) The importance of brokers in insurance

(12:32) Benefits broker software stack

(15:36) How to make money in employee benefits

(21:11) Ways to compete in insurance

(26:34) How AI is changing insurance

(31:01) What its like to be an insurance broker

(35:37) Starting ThreeFlow in 2016 pre-LLMs

(40:13) The 128 day walk through Europe before Threeflow

(44:47) When his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer

(50:23) Advice for founders on surviving large personal events

(52:46) Threeflow’s unorthodox Seed round

(59:46) How to vet your investors

(1:04:14) Why insurance brokers exist

(1:05:08) How to build a marketplace on top of Vertical SaaS

(1:10:53) Choosing a marketplace entry point

(1:15:05) $2.5B in premium volume on Threeflow workflows

(1:26:39) Importance of supply side volume in a marketplace

(1:31:21) Fundraising without a formal process

(1:33:03) Hiring for “just get stuff done”

(1:36:22) AI opportunities in insurance

(1:41:05) Building software in insurance

(1:44:56) Tactics for running a distributed team

(1:49:04) Creating your own playbooks

Referenced

Try Threeflow

Careers at Threeflow

Follow Ryan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansachtjen/

Follow Turner

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/

QUELL - Evan Hopper | Into The Necrosphere Podcast #196