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Here’s another one. One day I started an old device which apparently loaded OneDrive and my entire OneDrive (150GB) got wiped.

It still showed links under recent files but the actual files were gone.

Customer support said they can’t do anything about it. 6 years of photos, personal files, university work and co gone.

I happened to have an old notebook with _some_ files on it.

You _cannot_ trust 365/OneDrive.

Laka | Full-time | London, Bristol in UK | Senior Software Engineer | https://laka.co or apply directly https://apply.workable.com/laka

* Software Engineer (Senior)

Feel free to drop me a line at jens@laka.co.uk if you have any questions.

Laka - Collective cover for cyclists.

We have rebuilt insurance from scratch – sharing risk in a true collective. Our members share the cost of all claims, and we only earn our share when settling claims for the collective. We believe It's a better approach to insurance.

Laka is live in the UK, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands and are working with great partners such as Decathlon and Monzo.

Join the ride

The root of this problem is the conflict of interest in insurance. You lose money when settling claims.

There are some companies addressing this problem for consumers.

Look at Lemonade.com, they do not benefit from not paying out as their margin is fixed or Laka.co makes money when claims are paid.

(Disclaimer: I work for Laka)

There are 3 things this article ignores that are crucial to evaluate your risk/value from insurance.

1) The article ignores individual risk and pooling of such risk.

Insurance is nothing else than a group of people sharing the cost of claims. If you are a worse risk than the average person in said pool it’s worth insuring (even without excess) if everyone pays the same. The insurers will use signals to price you but most of the time they are pretty rudimentary.

2) That a higher excess is a good way to reduce cost makes sense generally. It drives down claims frequency and thereby operational cost for insurers but in reality how much is that cost? Is it a big enough lever for you to be happy to give away financial flexibility? High risk activities or products make sense to insure if this adds value to you. That’s harder to quantify in numbers.

3) Assuming every insurance runs big margins is a fallacy. Motor insurance in the U.K. runs at a loss for years but insurers see it as an entry point to other products like home insurance where they have healthier underwriting profits.

It’s called first party insurance.

You are just insuring your own property and for any damages the insurer will just go after the party at fault if it isn’t you (or “you” as defined in their policy wording). Pretty simple way to keep rates down the r profits up for insurers.

Laka | Full-time | London, Bristol in UK | multiple roles | https://laka.co or apply directly https://apply.workable.com/laka

* Digital Product Manager

* Product Designer

* QA/Test Engineer

Feel free to drop me a line at jens@laka.co.uk if you have any questions.

Laka is a collective insurance provider, disrupting the cycling and e-mobility industry.

Our mission is to fuel personal mobility across Europe, sustainably and with benefits for all. To do that, we provide collective cover for cyclists.

Traditional insurance is the best business model in the world - just not for customers. The traditional model is based on insurers taking your money and profiting from not paying out claims. They make money by not doing the very thing you pay them to do. We think that’s insane.

So we have rebuilt insurance from scratch – sharing risk in a true collective. Our members share the cost of all claims, and we only earn our share when settling claims for the collective.

What about damage? Can you get any insurance for that?

Maintenance is indeed tricky.

Our way out is probably that the minimum bike value has to be £500 but the average customer has a multiple of that value and bikes at home. Passionate cyclists buy into our concept.

We are looking into how we can institutionalise maintenance a bit more because there is a strong case to drive down cost further for everyone if a decent mechanic sees your bike at least once a year.

My personal top tip are chain catchers. It’s a matter of time until the chain drops and if the front mech is not well adjusted. And if you get unlucky and have a carbon frame you might rip a hole into the frame.

“What about bicycle insurance? It's fairly expensive here in the UK, usually 10-15% of the bicycle's value annually and insurers typically only pay out when the whole bicycle is taken (so if if your front wheel is nicked, you're on your own) and when you can demonstrate that it was locked to their standards. Often these standards require that it is locked up indoors which means you're chancing it whenever you park away from your home or office.”

None of that is true. I founded a UK bicycle insurer (not your usual one though).

Our price is locked in max at 10% per year but it’s less if people claim less in our collective. On average people have been paying 6.5%.

We settle partial and full theft claims. Stolen handlebars are more common than stolen wheels.

It makes no sense to have customer prove to you as an insurer that the bike was properly locked beyond asking “was it locked to an immovable object?” and “did you own a lock of a certain standard at the time of theft?”. It’s almost impossible to prove and by that you could always reject a claim.

I haven’t heard of a specialist bicycle insurer which requires you to lock a bike inside all the time. Why would you buy theft insurance? A lock of certain rating is enough, depending on insurer between 24h-48h - after that you abandoned your bike in the eyes of many insurance contracts.

Last note.. of course this article focuses on theft but you’d also be covered for damage which can be the bigger risk depending on your use case (e.g road cycling or mountain biking).

Given the relatively small size of their book, a few outlier claims can destroy all their economics. It should regulate over time.

Working in “InsurTech” myself...

I’d say customer acquisition is the biggest cost and insurance companies are terrible at it because differentiation is almost impossible in a price driven by extreme price war.

It’s not uncommon that 30-50% of your travel insurance premiums are going to a broker or price comparison website. Talking about great value.

It’s not as sexy as ML in claims but one of the big innovations Lemonade has developed is looking like the anti-insurer and creating a huge PR machine around that. True or not, it worked.

Let's assume everyone takes a car instead of public transport. Where do you think people will be parking in cities like New York or London?

There is no way cars are the solution to this.

Founder of a bicycle insurer here and I can tell you that the only way to deter people is by parking in secure private or public spaces (never, ever semi-public) and by making your bike less attractive than the one next to it.

2 locks is indeed the standard in big cities. Also make sure they are sold secure gold rated or Art 3. Anything else is a waste of money. There are a few new lock types which are supposed to work better against angle grinders like Tex-lock or LitLok.

Because the average bike price is going up it also becomes interesting to steal parts. A decent handlebar + shifters are easy to sell individually. Companys like Hexlox or Pinheads are working on locks to tackle that.

I was looking for a library who makes creating responsive layouts simple.

If they bring some opinion in regards to styling that would be fine too but I would probably look to apply my own.

Check out unumotors.com

Definitely sendgrid!

If there are outliers and the premium would skyrocket we cap your premium at market rate through an agreement with a reinsurer. It's a standard financial tool insurers are using as well and costs us next to nothing.

That's exactly what it is.

You benefit on the upside but if there are outliers and the premium would skyrocket we cap your premium at market rate through an agreement with a reinsurer. It's a standard financial tool insurers are using as well.

Very good point. Conflict of interest is the real flaw in the insurance business model. What other industry makes more money when their customers slip up?!

Insurers try to protect their margin by finding ways to reject claims.

I am actually working on a company changing that by making money when settling claims instead of losing it.

http://insureathing.com/insurance/wanted-an-insurance-partne...

Regulation is based on country instead of changing from state to state. The EU helped to streamline most of it for all European countries so you can float freely by passporting across regions.

There are alternatives.. we are setting up an insurer with a new business model in the UK.

We earn a flat fee every time we settle a claim for members of our community - they provide the funds to cover for each other.

No conflict of interest, fair pricing, everything instant.

Have a look. insureathing.com

We are actually setting up an insurer in the UK which is doing exactly that by changing the business model to taking fees on settled insurance claims instead of betting on an underwriting/investment profit.

Have a look.

insureathing.com

Just give yourself a month and don't write a single line of code.

Go meet your customers in the first week. Ask lots of whys. Do more structured IN PERSON interviews in the second week. Look at how it has been solved in the past and what competitors do. Draw up a rough solution (e.g. landing page) in week 4 and test it out in person as well as drive some traffic to it from online communities (reddit and FB groups do get you some traffic to have an idea about conversion rates).

GV has some good articles around cust dev interviews on their medium.

You probably have higher chances finding angel money for a well validated idea in the market than a product you built for 3 months full time without knowing exactly what to build.

I know Startupbootcamp has these deals for their batches. A similar deal is available for Google business users.

I also thought about this. Something like Hypothesis (chrome extension) but more focused on public commenting.

"The bug must come from changes colleague XY has made after me! pointingfingers"

Start by never apologizing in advance.

Proceed by talking to people about topics you are familiar with or have common grounds. E.g. if you are a ruby guy go to ruby meetups. To make things even easier you could try finding people speaking your mother tongue in these areas.

Well that's a workaround for now but it could be a little more user friendly (like showing all tags on the top)

Another point: Make cards collapsible/expandable to get a quicker overview about topics. (It is also an aid to the process of memorizing cards)

What a great tool! I will definitly use this to structure my lecture notes! (Topic > Sub-Topic > Definition/List)

Improvement: Allow to filter and color cards. So you can walk through all cards of a given type.

thanks mate!