Ep134 Joshua Motta CEO Coalition: Building a Cyber Muscle

Today’s guest is a former Microsoft, CIA and Goldman Sachs
employee who, perhaps unsurprisingly, has found his way to
somewhere very close to the top of the Cyber Insurance tree in
the past few years. With a billion dollars in run-rate GWP after
just five years, major VC funding, aggressive international
expansion plans and now a newly-acquired US admitted carrier,
Coalition and its CEO Joshua Motta have quite a story to tell.
With his deep cyber security background it was likely that
Coalition was going to build something very different from
incumbent insurers and indeed the firm’s offering is much more of
a joined-up full service than many of its competitors. As Joshua
puts it, Coalition “owns the repair shop” and that helps an awful
lot with risk engineering and loss mitigation. And so far the
results have been excellent. The grand tour of the Coalition
modus operandi is really interesting but it is when the
conversation spreads to more weighty industry topics that I think
this podcast really takes off. Joshua has some really strong
views about how fears around systemic risk in cyber have been
overblown and how to unlock the capacity that cyber will need if
it is to continue its fast growth without hitting capacity
constraints. Now you may say that he would say that, but now that
Coalition is funding more of its own underwriting, Joshua is
clearly happy to put his money where his mouth is. Coalition is
also putting some of its own modelling work out on open source to
help others get comfortable with its view of risk. I definitely
recommend a listen for anyone nervous about committing capital to
cyber reinsurance for fear of earth-shattering systemic risk –
the counter-arguments made here are pretty convincing. LINKS Here
is the announcement about Coalition buying Admitted lines carrier
Digital Affect Insurance Company This coincided with our podcast
recording and as you will hear, it was definitely news to me.
With hindsight I should have probed a lot more. Next time! We
thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/ We also thank this Episode’s
advertising supporter Oxbow Partners https://oxbowpartners.com/