Company Overview
Dimitris Paterakis is Co-Founder & CEO of Pythia Insurance, sharing the most in-depth actionable insights for insurance pros! AI-driven models powered by 30+ years of insurance and macro data Learn more at https://www.pythiains.com/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting your company?
So I was in consulting at McKinsey for a good part of the past decade. What I’m doing here at Pythia is born out of the work that I did with carriers, with brokers, with MGAs, and with reinsurers. I worked with some of the smartest folks out there, who needed to have the right data and intelligence to take over large parts of the market. And so I realized there is a very meaningful gap when it comes to quality data and intelligence that is readily accessible, rather than intelligence that takes, you know, a team of five or ten people, weeks or months to put together. That’s really the origin story of Pythia.
How did you start your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
I’ll start by talking about the need. The need was something that I was living every day—like, this is the kind of intelligence that IFEA provides on steroids. It was really the kind of intelligence I was trying to put together with an army of people in my consulting days, and intelligence that people paid a very good dime for. So I knew people needed this kind of information. What I didn’t know was: does everybody want this information, or just a few people at the top of the organization?
What we’ve seen here at Pythia is that everybody really needs information. Everybody needs good intelligence to make decisions—from distribution to underwriting, to product development, to portfolio management. We work with pretty diverse teams now. You know, one day you’re a consultant, and you’re like, “Let’s create a business.” The next day, you say, “Yes, I—I’m definitely creating the business.” And the third day, you wake up and you quit. It’s as simple as that. There is no perfect timing. There is no perfect moment. You just wake up one day and say, “Yes, I’m gonna do something different.”
I’m thankful for everything I’ve done so far, and I want to do something that fulfills me. I will tell you that running a business for the past almost two years has been the happiest I’ve been professionally, and it fills me with satisfaction and fulfillment. It really matters in life to do things that count for you.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
So what Pythia does is highly technical. There are very few people in the U.S. market today who understand data to the depth that Pythia does. Being able to go from raw data to the kinds of insights we offer our clients – the insights that provide true competitive advantage for them – takes a lot of work. This is why it doesn’t exist widely.
If you look at other spaces, some very smart people are building businesses, and you see three or four businesses trying to do the same thing. One of these horses will win the race and make millions; the others won’t. But in our space, there’s very little involvement because it’s so highly technical—it’s a huge barrier to entry.
Yes, there are some smart people doing this work, and they work for large insurers. They work for Markel, they work for Selective, and they work for others. But there are very few, and usually, these people rise to leadership positions. At that point, they move away from the data and focus on decision-making. The moment you understand data at this level, you can make decisions that create billions of dollars in valuation for your organization.
So it’s a really big gap that we’re covering, and we’re bringing a lot of expertise into a space that, frankly, lacks it.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
Scaling a business takes a lot more work than I thought when I started. What most people think is that there’s some magical formula—but there isn’t. I would say it takes perseverance and a very thick skin, because for scaling to happen, rejection comes first. A lot of rejection—rejection, rejection, rejection.
You just keep your head up and say, “Yes, these 10 people told me no, and these other 20 people said they don’t like what I do. But these five people told me they love it, they’re using it, and they’re paying for it.” Then the next day, it’s 10 people, then 15 people. Eventually, all of the others who said they don’t need it realize their competitors are using it. They take another look and say, “Well, now that you mention it, it’s not a bad idea after all.” And you’re like, “Oh, really? It wasn’t a bad idea. It was a bad idea six months ago, but now it’s not.”
So scaling takes patience. It takes perseverance. It takes really believing in what you’re doing and enjoying it. Because unless you enjoy what you do, scaling is not going to come. Scaling is the last thing that comes.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
So we are, like everybody else, contemplating how AI changes what we do, and we’re lucky to be in a field that has vast amounts of unstructured data. Insurance is the primary domain of unstructured data. We’re building products that leverage not just thousands, not just millions—our database right now has, for example, over 7 billion unstructured documents: PDFs, JSON, and other types. We’re trying to make something out of that ocean of data and, for the first time, make accessible insights for insurance carriers and brokers – information that, earlier on, they just had no ability, or mainly no time, to effectively analyze.
We’re trying to take intelligence to a level that really wasn’t feasible before the advent of AI.
