I was delighted to participate in our first Advisory Board meeting in San Francisco. It was great to show off our new office in the heart of Union Square with lots of open space and a great set up. It was also a fantastic chance for me to meet several of our newest team members for the first time - it's been 6 weeks since I was last here and there are 6 new people! Ranging from data scientists and cyber economists to software engineers and internal recruiters we are growing fast with a highly talented and diverse team.
It is easy to be skeptical about how an Advisory Board can help, given our day-to-day plate spinning and the distance they are from the front line. This was different. Bringing together experience and expertise from across the (re)insurance industry, our advisory board represents a fantastic depth of knowledge and wisdom which the CyberCube team, and by extension, our clients can tap into.
Jonathan Beach founded Beach & Associates and grew it into the well-respected reinsurance brokerage it is today. Nicki Goodwin is a former lawyer and spent many years at Hiscox in a variety of roles, including Chief Underwriting Officer of their US operations. Don Mango is a veteran of the actuarial world as well as lecturer in actuarial science at Columbia university. David Kimmel is a former investment banker who ran the insurance investment banking teams first at JP Morgan then at Deutsche Bank. Finally Richard Thornton is former head of strategy, Group CRO and COO at Aspen, who has since founded his own Insurtech company called Hokodo, simplifying insurance at the point of purchase for small businesses.
Spending a couple of days in the company of this group has been very invigorating - they bring such a wealth of experience that the diversity and range of opinions has been a very powerful tonic. They rightly challenged us, our expectations and assumptions. We are doing many things well in our second year as an independent company, and it was great to hear affirmation from the advisory board. However we also received some extremely valuable lessons learned from their prior experience and have got a ton of take-away ideas for improvements and new initiatives. As a sounding board, the input as to how best to serve our clients today and in the future has been invaluable.
Sometimes bringing together just the right mix different backgrounds can create a fantastic recipe. We are lucky to have them support us as we grow our team, products to deliver the world's leading cyber risk analytics for our clients.