"Bold." | Insurance Experience with João Cardoso de Jesus, Co-Founder and CEO at Lovys

Since 2017, Lovys has been rethinking the entire user experience so that insurance finally becomes simple, transparent and personal. A single interface, a single monthly subscription for all insurance needs.

Today, we take a look back at the genesis of this adventure and the methods that have led to the emergence of an insurance love-brand.

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Joao, before talking about your entrepreneurial adventures and the success of Lovys, tell us about yourself. How would you define yourself?

Quite simply, I define myself as ‘passionate about life’.

In this day and age, we're incredibly lucky. When I think of my family in the 60s, several people came to France illegally from Portugal and worked in the building trade. It was such a complicated time.

Now we have a magical life, we can go anywhere and work anywhere. The limits are the ones you define for yourself. It's incredible - I lived in Portugal, finished my studies in Belgium, started work in London, launched my first company in Brazil and my second, Lovys, in France.

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So it's a very positive state of mind! You launched several other projects before Lovys. You've been in the insurance business for over 10 years now. Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?

It's scary to think that it's now been 14 years! I started in Brazil in 2011, so 6 years in Brazil, and since 2017 in Europe. Time flies!

In a nutshell, I started my professional life in the UK in 2005. Working in a cosmopolitan city like London at the start of your career gives you wings. I loved investment banking and private equity, but I thought there was something missing. What I'd always wanted to do: set up my own company and have some entrepreneurial experience.

In private equity, I really enjoyed working with entrepreneurs. In those moments, the companies you work with have already developed well, but you know that they started from scratch. As a result, you meet some incredible personalities every time. It's a real eye-opener. I said to myself ‘one day, I want to do this’. It was a time in my life when the fear of staying in my little comfort zone was stronger than daring to take the plunge. It doesn't matter if I fail, I can try again. Of course you can lose money, but there will always be opportunities in life to make money again. On the other hand, in life, the moments when you can start out on your own are rare.

Being an entrepreneur is really an experience, it's a way of living life. When I look at my professional life, I don't see my day-to-day life as a job, but as my way of life.

Running a business makes me happy, I have a great time every day. Even if there are some very difficult moments, I love what I do.

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Your career is like a journey of initiation! Was there a strategy behind it? You could simply have stayed in private equity in London and had a great career.

It was only the beginning of the journey. And I like to mix business with pleasure. So I was looking for a new experience after the UK. I had to take the plunge, but in another country to have a richer personal experience too.

My thoughts at the time were as follows: Wouldn't it be incredible to launch a project in a new country? And why not do it in the BRICS? In an emerging country where it's more unusual for a European to do business.

Several countries came into my decision-making process. I've been to China several times, where the pace of growth was phenomenal, but it wasn't necessarily the easiest country culturally, particularly in terms of language.

Why not Brazil? I started to take an interest in Brazil and to think about the business models that were working well in Europe at the time on the Internet and that I could replicate there.

I had two ideas in mind: insurance comparison sites and food delivery. The two subjects had nothing to do with each other, but the idea was the same - to launch a business in which I could have been the end customer.

Here I am in insurance.

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That's interesting. But you had no idea how to run an insurance business?

I didn't have any insurance skills at the time.

Comparators were a subject that could be considered ‘mainstream’ at the time, and everyone was more or less familiar with it. I was convinced that it was the kind of business that could do well in Brazil. What's more, compared with food delivery, I didn't have the logistical complexity to manage, so it was a godsend for me.

This experience was also a key learning experience for the launch of Lovys. I learned that it takes a long time to build businesses and to be resilient. The trajectory in Brazil took a lot longer than expected - it took me two years to really get going. It was difficult, even with experience. We were one of the first insurance comparison websites, so we had to convince the insurers, integrate them into the platform, put the rules in place and get going... I thought I could do it in 12 months, but it took us 24. All the complex local politics didn't help either.

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Despite the difficulties at the launch, you made a name for yourself... What happened next?

It's true that once we launched, the business grew tremendously.  By the end of the 4th year, we had around 200 people, a great sales team and a great success story.

To put you in context, I had mainly American and foreign investors. Brazil underwent a radical change overnight with a political and economic crisis in 2014-2015. It was the most difficult period of my life. I still remember the email my investors sent me explaining that they weren't going to go back into the pot because of the change in the exchange rate!

I found myself with a cash runway of two or three months and a team of 150 people. And all this was linked to a macro context that I had no control over. You can imagine...
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What I've learnt from this experience is that, as an entrepreneur, there are a lot of variables that you can't control.

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OK, let me summarise: it's 2017, you're in Brazil, in troubled political times... and you're about to lay off more than half your teams.

That was clearly the most difficult time for me as an entrepreneur.

I still remember - it was my birthday - the investors called me and told me that we had to close the company in Brazil. That was on 6 March. At the time, we were 150 people strong. In three weeks, we went from 150 to 30 people.

It was a period of intense stress: we had to drastically reduce the workforce while keeping the company operational: prepare who stays, who goes, realign all the tasks in the organisation. You had to be extremely resilient, because the company had to keep going...

After that, I had to look ahead and find a new project.

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What can you do to get back on track?

I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur, that's my guiding principle. But I had to opt for more politically stable geographical areas, where potential growth may be lower but where there's more security.

And I had a concept in mind.

Let me explain: on a comparison site, it's simple: you see everything that's going on in the industry. It's quite incredible, because you know which insurers are well positioned, which offers are having more difficulty gaining a foothold, the particularities of those that are performing well, and so on. It's a fabulous playground for an entrepreneur. Based on this, I said to myself that if I switched to the other side, to brokerage, we could improve the customer experience, do something really unique.

That's where I come up with this idea: ‘why not transform and rethink the whole policyholder experience? But this time by really changing the way they approach their protection’.

And I had two options: Europe or the United States.

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Let's talk about speed. I remember the early years of Lovys, when you and your team moved very quickly. You were the first to go multi-country and multi-equipment. For the entrepreneurs reading this, do you think that was fast, and what was your strategy for doing it?

Exactly. I've learned one fundamental thing from my entrepreneurial experiences: speed.

Everyone around me wonders what the magic recipe for success is. In the end, the only thing that counts is your speed of execution. We're not going to redefine the rules of the game. If you want to play in a start-up market, if you want to raise funds, there are rules of the game to respect. And everyone's only looking at one thing: the speed at which your revenue, your product, your expansion, etc. are growing.

I have 12 funds and 12 institutional investors. When we gave Lovys demos, investors often said they loved the great experience we were offering our policyholders. In reality, what they were really interested in was seeing growth. That's the way the game works, and the only thing that's really essential for success is the way you manage the business to go fast.

That's been a little less true over the last 3 years, where profitability and performance are the new rules. But when we started Lovys, we had the playing field in mind, and we pushed hard.

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So this is your second entrepreneurial experience on two different continents. As CEO, you've had your share of reversals. How do you manage to overcome them? How do you manage all this pressure on a day-to-day basis?

My experience in Brazil helped me a lot.

As an entrepreneur, you often feel you can move mountains. But you have to understand that there are things that are immutable and bigger than you. We're not going to change the way people think, the way the economy works or the interest rate curve.

So we concentrate on the things we can influence. As an entrepreneur, there are lots of little day-to-day emergencies, those little things that go wrong, but you have to keep moving forward with your long-term plan. This is often extremely difficult because the day-to-day can quickly overwhelm us.

There are several ways of dealing with this pressure. One of them is to have certain rituals. Setting up simple rituals has a profound effect on the way you run your business. For example, I have rituals when I get up and when I go to bed. It's essential to have a sequence of rituals to manage stress and maintain a performance mindset.

I've also created what I call ‘sessions’. I set aside a set amount of time just for thinking, reflecting on the team and reviewing our strategy. I define the objectives, the frequency and, ideally, the structure of the session. I have sessions for both my personal and professional life. This is vital because without it everything becomes urgent.

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Now let's talk about the start-up of Lovys. The traditional players are well established. Launching a European insurance start-up is no mean feat. What has been your reason for existing since 2017?

The launch of Lovys in France is a moment I remember with great pleasure.

To give you an idea of the figures, during the first 24 months of Lovys in France, we spent a total of €400,000. When we closed our seed round, we said to ourselves ‘life is finally going to change, we're going to have the means to make an impact’. We rented some offices at WeWork and took on some staff. It was great to see how resilient the team was in the early years.

And even after that, we always remained frugal.

For example, we've never really rented offices, we've always stayed in coworking spaces, always in this start-up dynamic. I made that mistake in Brazil - I had a big four-storey office with 200 people. You spend so much energy and time making it look nice and pleasant. Eventually you realise that from one day to the next everything can change and that this investment is not the most important thing.

What drives us forward at Lovys is really this vision of how we are reinventing the customer experience, the product itself. The rest - fundraising, recruitment - are just tools to help us succeed. The reason we exist is really how and why we are reinventing and reimagining the customer experience. If we're not in the process of reinventing and improving the customer experience, it's time to close the doors and do something else.

Until now, insurance consumption has come down to buying standardised, inflexible products. It's like buying CDs instead of having a playlist that adapts to your needs. Our vision is like going from CDs to Spotify, it's to move the world of protection towards a world where you have a subscription and you're covered according to your profile. It's fluid, dynamic, and everything adapts to your personal life (moving house, for example).

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On paper, the vision sounds brilliant. But there are thousands of ways to fail. And you can't do it all on your own. How do you surround yourself with people to keep the project moving in the right direction?

I've changed the way I approach the subject over the years. But when it comes to recruitment, there are two groups of skills that I'm going to assess: human skills and technical skills. Both are important.

For human characteristics, I pay a lot of attention to negativity: is the person negative? Is it someone who tends to say ‘no, but that's not going to work’?

This natural tendency towards negativity is ingrained and virtually impossible to change. I'm looking for people who are ambitious, who want to win and who want to excel.

For technical skills, there's a key criterion, what I call the ‘proof of work’, which takes the form of a case study. That's what I put my trust in. I prefer practical know-how to the prestige of employer brands on a CV.

In my career, I've also always been lucky enough to have a ‘tribe’. This is a group of mentors and other entrepreneurs. We could remain in our bubble with our convictions. But it's much more important to keep up with a group of people who are going to challenge us with completely different points of view. It's not about knowing who's right, it's about debating so that we can make the best decisions.

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Thank you Joao, that's the end of the interview. Do you have a subject that's close to your heart? And what advice would you give to people reading this who want to start their own business?

The most important things for me are energy and resilience.

The challenge of being an entrepreneur is managing the problems you encounter on a daily basis. We sometimes tend to forget that these worries are an integral part of our work.

My advice is first of all to realise that it's difficult, that it always will be, and that it's normal.

I'll illustrate this with a final anecdote from my experience in Brazil: just as I was about to lay off my teams, someone knocked on my door to tell me that I had to evacuate the building because the electricity was going to be cut off. At times like that, you get the feeling that fate is against you. But you learn one thing over time: there's always a solution.

To conclude, I would encourage all entrepreneurs to push back their barriers. We need to maintain this state of mind so that we don't forget that we live in a magical world.

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