Seven years. 159 guests on the InsurTech Geek Podcast. I've sat with founders, CEOs, investors, and brokers through the full arc of what they're now calling the InsurTech cycle. And one thing I can tell you with certainty: a word has gone missing.
"Disrupt." It was everywhere from 2019 to 2022. Founders used it like punctuation. Every pitch deck, every conference panel, every guest intro. We're going to disrupt the insurance distribution model. We're going to disrupt the carrier relationship. We're going to disrupt the broker.
By 2025, it had almost completely disappeared from how my guests talk about this industry.
What replaced it? Collaborate. Integrate. Partner. Enable.
That's not a coincidence. That's a correction.
The Disintermediation Bet That Didn't Pay
Here's what a lot of InsurTech founders believed in 2019: if you built a clean enough product, a fast enough quote flow, a frictionless enough digital experience, you could go around the broker. Around the MGA. Around the TPA. You could own the customer relationship directly and cut out 100 years of distribution infrastructure.
Some of those bets were smart. Most weren't.
David Bell, CEO of ALPS — that's the largest direct writer of lawyers' professional liability in the country — said it plainly when he came on Episode 168 last October. And he said it without heat. No gotcha energy. Just the quiet confidence of someone who actually got it right:
"Insurtechs, I think, broadly thought that they could wholesale disintermediate an entire ecosystem over the course of a few years with a superior product. The reality is it takes a long time with a slow adjustment process, and so we need to be where our customers are."
That last sentence is the whole lesson. Be where your customers are. ALPS built a tech-forward specialty carrier that works — and they did it by going through brokers, not around them.
The 2023 Hangover
When the easy capital dried up, a lot of companies didn't make it. The ones that did share something in common: they weren't trying to replace incumbents. They were making incumbents more efficient.
The winner in InsurTech wasn't the company that built a DTC personal lines brand from scratch and tried to own the policyholder. It was the company that gave the established carrier a better claims workflow. It was the MGA that built underwriting tools that made the wholesale broker's job easier and faster. It was the API that let the regional agent quote in 30 seconds instead of 48 hours.
Those companies are still here. A lot of the disruptors aren't.
Why the Disruption Frame Was Wrong From the Start
I want to be honest: I used to talk about disruption too. It felt like the right language. Tech moves fast. Old industries move slow. Connect those two facts and "disruption" feels inevitable.
But insurance isn't just a slow industry. It's a relationship industry with distribution networks that go back a century. The broker doesn't just sell a policy — they advise a client, they advocate when there's a claim, they translate a complicated product into something a business owner can actually understand. That relationship has real value. Real trust has been built.
Software can make that relationship more valuable. Software cannot replace it.
The founders who figured this out early are the ones running companies right now. The ones who held onto the disruption thesis too long burned through capital trying to change buyer behavior that wasn't going to change on their timeline.
Why This Is Actually the Better Outcome
Here's what I find genuinely encouraging about where we are: the industry is getting modernized. Just not destabilized.
Policyholders still have choices. They still have agents who know their business and fight for them at renewal. Carriers still have distribution partners who bring them volume and filter for risk. And inside all of that — every step of that chain — technology is making things faster, cheaper, and more accurate.
That's a better result than blowing up the distribution chain and rebuilding it from scratch. Disruption for its own sake doesn't help the person buying a commercial auto policy or a professional liability package. Efficiency does. Better data does. Faster claims does.
The vocabulary shift I've watched happen on my podcast — from "disrupt" to "partner" — isn't founders going soft. It's founders getting smart. They learned what the distribution channel actually does, and they built products that made it better instead of products that tried to make it irrelevant.
The tech that wins in insurance isn't the tech that cuts out the relationship. It's the tech that makes the relationship worth more to everyone in it.