In the short talk, Walid discusses how he shifted from providing services to “an old-school sleepy industry” to building a startup that would compete with them, how knowing your customers (and region in the world) helped him build new services, and how starting and failing, and starting and failing helped him get to where he is today.

A bit about Walid:

Originally a civil engineer, Walid entered the world of insurance in 2016, where he worked as a loss adjuster assessing large scale insurable catastrophes. Today, Walid is leading the development of Hala, a B2C Insurtech that is building a subscription-based lifestyle insurance which aims to protect the cars, homes, and personal belongings of the 450 million people living in the Middle East.

And a bit about Hala:

Hala was built with one thing in mind: Make Insurance Simple. The firm started with selling car insurance, and disrupted a sleepy industry with its end-to-end digital offering. More recently, Hala soft launched home insurance, allowing consumers to insure everything they care about from their clothes and furniture to their most valuable personal belongings. By focusing on being customer-obsessed and transparent since its launch, Hala has onboarded thousands of customers in less than a year. As of 2021, Hala has almost 4,000 policyholders, 30 employees, two offices, and raised $6M.