Three Things That Keep Me Up At Night with Patrick Tsao, VP of Products at Getsafe

Updated Aug 3, 2023 • 5 min read

The financial services sector is on the eve of a major transformation. Many fintech and insurtech startups forced incumbent players to change their ways of thinking and doing business.

We’ve even helped a few fintech startups..

Behind any product, business strategy, or excellent idea, stand people. They’re trying hard to outthink the competition, and even early success or winning a large portion of the market don’t let them rest.

I’d like you to meet some of these people.

So, here’s our new format - "Three Things That Keep Me Up At Night". A series designed by Netguru to explore the challenges in the fintech and insurtech industries.

We’ll be talking to managers, engineers, and designers to get to know - as the title goes - what are the most important things on their personal and company’s radars. Each guest covered in the series nominate the next persons within the fintech community to take part.

This series kicks off with Patrick Tsao, VP of Products at Getsafe, one of the first digital insurance platforms in Europe for flexible and customisable coverage on your phone.

Getsafe focuses on three main areas: liability insurance, legal protection insurance, and drone liability insurance. The company, with $22.9m in funding, made it to our “ Top 10 Fintech Companies in Germany to Watch in 2019” list.

Patrick Tsao will be also one of our speakers at oncoming Disruption Forum Paris, the event powered by Netguru and Astorya.vc.

And here are his "Three Things".

1. Engagement

Do people want to just buy insurance and forget about it until it is absolutely necessary? Or is there something we can do as insurtechs to reinvent the face and feeling of insurance to become relevant in the daily lives of people? Our vision for the future requires some solution in this space, and I anticipate it being very challenging for the entire industry.

2. Hiring & scaling

Our strategy for the next couple of years requires some pretty large shifts in how we are organized and how we think about scale. I worry about us not being able to hire good people fast enough to execute on all of these upcoming initiatives.

I think finding a Creative Director will be difficult. Design talent is somewhat hard to come by in our region, plus this person would have to be well-versed in both brand/graphic as well as product/UX design.

They need to have stakeholder management skills to define and maintain a consistent brand across the company. Ideally they also have team-building experience so that they can help scale the team.

3. Personal growth

Hypergrowth companies can often outgrow their leadership team. When I started in October 2018, we had no PMs and 1 designer. Today we have 3 designers, a copywriter, and 2 PMs (plus me). How can I grow as an individual in a way that makes sure I can still be the best person to lead/support this team over the next 3 to 5 years?

Message for the insurance community from Patrick Tsao

Pick your battles and don't try to do everything at once. The insurance industry is ripe for change and there are many valuable things we could do as insurtechs. It will be tempting to want to do everything from scratch, but it's likely more effective to pick a strategy, prioritize, and really execute on some things before others.

For example, Getsafe has chosen to start as a broker, then transition to an MGA. This lets us focus on changing the distribution and customer experience of insurance, rather than creating new insurance products/underwriting methods from scratch.