Insuring the insurers: Andrew Land speaks to Elliot Richardson
Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcastShow Notes
The world of reinsurance may seem obscure to most of us, but it is an elemental ingredient vital in keeping the wheels of business turning. Insuring the insurers; managing the risk of those who manage ours and allowing them to react to the world with more agility. This is ever more important as covid has given way to increasingly frequent catastrophes, high inflation and disruptive world events.
Elliot Richardson, Vice Chairman of reinsurance challenger Howden Tiger, engages the head of Hg’s insurance team, Andrew Land, in a wide-ranging discussion: taking on the history of reinsurance, it’s pre-eminent affinity with data, the more recent application of technology, and the plan for Howden Tiger itself to take on the big three players dominating the industry.
Note: This episode was recorded in March 2023 and may include some time-sensitive statements.
More from Orbit - An Hg software leadership podcast
What does AI have to prove when the buyer is a CFO? Elias Apel, CEO of Lucanet, answers from both sides of the table: he was a Lucanet customer, then its CFO, and now leads the company as it brings AI agents into finance and tax teams. Host Sebastian Zureich of Hg asks where AI can stand alone, where it cannot, and what a sceptical buyer demands of any software vendor.
Published in a week when Lovable's valuation doubled to $13.3 billion, up from $6.6 billion in December, this episode presents Ryan Meadows story of joining Lovable as a customer before becoming its Chief Revenue Officer, and how that experience shapes everything about how he thinks about AI, growth and the future of software. Hg's Tim Harrison sits down with Ryan to explore how they reached $400 million ARR in just 15 months, what it means to build an organisation entirely without legacy tooling, and why Ryan thinks most enterprises are still barely scratching the surface of what AI can do for their people.
Every December, Rob Toews publishes ten AI predictions in Forbes, then comes back a year later and grades himself in public. That habit of putting a stake in the ground, and owning the misses, makes him one of the more interesting voices in the space. In this conversation with Jon Wulkan, he explains why the frontier has narrowed to a handful of Western labs, why even well-resourced challengers have struggled to keep pace, and why the much-feared "SaaS apocalypse" is probably overdone.
In this episode, John Cranmer is joined by Gil Elbaz, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Onyx Security, the company building the secure AI control plane for the agentic era. Gil, formerly in the CTO office at Nvidia working on multi-agent infrastructure, argues that the AI attack surface has fundamentally changed. The old boundary between what is yours and what is not has collapsed, and every agent, every MCP, every tool connection is now part of the perimeter.
The inventor of DevOps explains why AI needs engineering rigour and human collaboration.