Jennifer Fitzgerald is the co-founder and CEO of Policygenius, an online marketplace for insurance that aims to make the process of shopping for a policy easier and more transparent. Since its founding in 2014, Policygenius has raised $52 million in venture capital — and Fitzgerald is one of only four female founders to have raised more than $50 million in venture funding for a U.S. Fintech startup, according to LinkedIn.
Each week, GOBankingRates sets out to discover what makes the people behind top companies tick. We like to call this series “Best in Business” — and Fitzgerald really is one of the best. She told us why she left a secure job at McKinsey to launch her own company with zero entrepreneurial experience, what she learned from working at a pizza chain — and a few ways that you can find (or build) your own dream job, too. Below, find our favorite moments from the story of how Fitzgerald launched her business.
She Quit Her Consulting Job To Try To Solve a Problem With the Insurance Industry
My Policygenius co-founder, Francois de Lame, and I met while we were working at McKinsey & Company. Together we noticed a recurring theme: Insurers don’t know how to engage with digital consumers. This was a problem Francois and I thought we could solve, so we left McKinsey in 2014 to see if our idea could be viable — and now we have Policygenius.
The most surprising thing about the process of going from the initial idea to the actual business is how hard every little thing is: hiring employees with no brand, finding your first customers, figuring out payroll, finding an office, keeping the lights on. When you only ever work at bigger companies, you don’t appreciate just how much goes into the day-to-day, and how much of a slog it is to go from zero to something larger than zero.
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My biggest fear was probably every entrepreneur’s biggest fear: That this would be a flaming, absolute failure. I’d never started a business before — not even a lemonade stand as a kid. To venture down a path where there is a high risk of failure is pretty scary.
The hardest part is staying optimistic and persistent, especially during the early years when building the business feels like pushing a bowling ball through wet sand. As the founder, your investors and your employees look to you to have the answer and keep everyone motivated.
She Learned an Invaluable Lesson From Working at Pizza Hut
Before starting Policygenius, I had a pretty diverse work history: from working at a Pizza Hut in West Virginia to being a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras to being a management consultant at McKinsey in New York City. There were a few common threads through those experiences that I wanted to bring to Policygenius, including a focus on serving your customer and an emphasis on values and problem-solving.