From the UN back to Galileo – An Unlikely Insurance Journey
Quentin Coolen, Co-Founder, Waffle Labs
How the heck did I get here? A human rights lawyer by training, I spent most of my career in diplomacy – advising politicians and Nobel laureates, writing their speeches and negotiating international agreements between United Nations (UN) Member States.
And then, somehow, I discovered insurance along the way. Now, at face value, this wasn’t the intended choice. I sort of fell into it. And the main person responsible for first getting me hooked is Rowan Douglas. Lots of people simply talk the talk. Rowan doesn’t. The most powerful aspect of his argument was something that is often buried under a cloak of mixed perception about the industry – at its core, insurance has a fundamental societal value. As a UN guy, this made a lot of sense. In my old job, we saw day in and day out the rippling effects of devastating perils and how they negatively impact both the present and future of a community plagued by disaster risk.