""I love the business of risk," Jonathan Crystal tells me. He didn't really have a choice. After a brief career as a consultant, he joined his family's insurance brokerage firm, Crystal & Company, rising through the ranks to become CFO in 2014 before helping broker a sale to Alliant in 2018. But despite spending his career in insurance, Crystal was always frustrated with how slow it moved, joking that the only thing his grandfather would be surprised by now about the industry would be email."
"Having started at his family's company right around the dot-com bubble era, he felt like he'd experienced the craze before. "The gun goes off and everybody starts sprinting," Crystal says. He argues that makes his decades-long experience as an operator all the more valuable, able to root out the vertical software ideas that actually stand a chance of transforming the business of underwriting."
Jonathan Crystal built a career at Crystal & Company, becoming CFO in 2014 and helping broker its 2018 sale to Alliant. Frustrated by insurance's slow pace, Crystal launched Crystal Venture Partners and closed a $33 million fund backed by family offices and global insurers. The fund's early investments began after OpenAI released ChatGPT, and Crystal leverages decades of operating experience to identify vertical software that can transform underwriting. Crystal rejects pitches that use 'disrupt' and emphasizes insurance's capital intensity and regulation. Crystal asserts that AI is already reshaping how startups approach insurance and cites initial portfolio companies.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]