This CEO Thinks Traditional Life Insurance Can Be a Rip-Off — Does He Have a Better Alternative?
May 16, 2019 by Gabrielle Olya
Peter Colis is the CEO of Ethos, a life insurance provider that allows clients to sign up online, quickly and simply. Prior to co-founding Ethos, Colis was the co-founder of Ovid Corp., an online life insurance exchange. Under his leadership, Ethos has raised $46.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, and the company was named one of CB Insight’s top Fintech startups of 2018.
Each week, GOBankingRates sets out to discover what makes the people behind top companies tick. We like to call this series “Best in Business” — and Colis really is one of the best. He told us how playing chess helps keep him balanced, why striving for perfection should never be a business goal and ways that you can find (or build) your own dream job, too. Below, find our favorite moments from the story of how Colis launched his business.
He Wanted To Shake Up a Long-Standing Industry
Ethos was actually inspired by a personal experience my co-founder, Lingke Wang, had with a life insurance agent when he was just 20 years old. This agent convinced Lingke to purchase a permanent life insurance policy, which he quickly came to realize was not in his best interest. Years later while studying together at Stanford Business School, we recognized that he was not alone in his experience. The life insurance [industry] was in dire need of disruption. We created Ethos to combat all of the things that typically deter people from purchasing life insurance through this often intimidating and confusing traditional model. We believe everyone should have the opportunity to protect their families through life insurance coverage, and at Ethos, we prioritize families through simple, affordable and accessible policies.
When we were first starting out, we feared that we wouldn’t be able to deliver on [our] vision because of the difficulty of execution in the life insurance industry. Whether it was raising enough money to get started or hiring the right people, there was a lot of opportunity for bumps in the road to turn into cracks in the road.
But as an entrepreneur, you need to be an optimist. One surprising part of the process was that it took longer and cost more than I had anticipated. We faced the challenge of launching a technically complex product in a highly regulated industry, that required partnerships with major life insurance companies. We quickly learned having the right people on our team — from engineers to industry partners — was going to be essential to our success.
The hardest part about turning our initial idea into an actual business [was] convincing the best people to join our team. Today, we employ some of the smartest and most capable people in the entire insurance industry. But when you have a relatively unproven startup, it’s difficult to convince these same people who are getting offers from Facebook or Google to take a risk and to buy into a vision. We learned very quickly how to tell our story and how to explain what we see Ethos becoming.
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