Meet Loren, our Head of Growth

Starting this week we are introducing a new blog post series where we meet the new members of the growing Cuvva team. We decided to do this so our users can better understand how we work and what everyone does here at Cuvva. As it was Loren who came up with the idea for the series, he gets the honour of being first.

What do you do for Cuvva?

My proper title is Head of Growth, however, I feel that it is just a fancy start-up term for marketing. In general, I am in charge of all Cuvva's marketing efforts and work with Ryan on building out the community and writing the blog every week. What I love about working in a start-up is how varied it is. Since I joined in October I've worked on the Cuvva rebrand, overseen the development of the new website, launched our new subscription product and done lots and lots customer support. It definitely hasn't been dull.

How did you get into this?

If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be working in car insurance I wouldn't have believed you. I originally started my doing PR for music festivals which was a lot of fun and I got to see some amazing gigs which I'll never forget. Eventually, this segwayed into doing PR for alcohol brands and some consumer tech including Nokia. To this day I am amazed at how ahead of the curve Nokia was and they had a lot of great products that were just too early (e.g. Comes with Music, Nokia Maps, N8). After about 6 years I decided I wanted to do my own thing and started a dating app, [Double](http://www.joindouble.com), with two friends. Having never worked in a start-up before, Double was a baptism of fire but a phenomenal experience. You might have seen us on Dragon's Den.

Can you tell us a bit about what you are working on this week?

This week I have been focused on putting the finishing touches on the new website and getting it live. I have been working on onboarding some new partners which is easier said than done as for some reason in the insurance industry a lot of people don't understand how selling insurance via an app is feasible. Finally, I have been working on ways of getting more feedback from our customers and organising all the feedback we already get.

Who do you work with most?

Day-to-day I work with Ryan the most with but we're a pretty close-knit team here and every day is different.

What are you excited about working on over the next few months?

I am focused on continuing to grow our short-term product which is really beginning to scale and it is exciting trying to figure out how to find new pockets of people to introduce Cuvva to. However, I am most excited about developing and evolving our subscription product. Developing a new category of car insurance isn't easy and it is an exciting challenge. I have to say a big thank you to all our beta testers who have been very active and provided some great feedback.

What have you learned in your time at Cuvva?

Two things:

• car insurance is very complicated and regulated, and most people don't really understand what they're buying; also, it is a very slow moving industry - ripe for disruption!
• I really enjoy working in and talking about car insurance (apologies to all my friends who have had to listen to me...)

What do you do for fun?

I am an avid football supporter (#ChelseaFC4Life #Champions) so I spend most of my weekends shouting at the TV or at Stamford Bridge. My wife and I are also expecting our first child so the rest of my time currently is taken up with reading every book under the sun to ensure that I don't break the baby when it arrives.

Tell us something unexpected about you

This is not my first job in insurance. During university, I interned at AIG right before they collapsed and had to be bailed out. I still maintain that it wasn't my fault.