World-class data scientists. Top technology engineers. Industry-leading product managers. And some of the deepest expertise in commercial insurance. All converged on San Mateo at the end of April to push the best APIs in artificial intelligence to their breaking point. It was a weeklong deep dive into the transformative advancements in generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). Maybe you’ve heard about it? There were late-night debates on scalability and volume limits, integration arguments, demands for step-level infrastructure changes, and careful reviews of data sets to train GPT. Passion bleeds into obsession, but that’s where the genius comes from. 

What was the occasion? Just Newfront’s annual hackathon.

For clients and prospects wrestling with business insurance needs, bringing the power of AI to bear on policy management is a matter of extreme urgency. Not a nice to have—a must have. And not tomorrow. Yesterday. Why? The world is becoming riskier and less certain, and attracting and retaining the best talent continues to create challenges. 

Think of it this way: say you’re a CFO at an emerging tech company, or the company’s risk manager, or an IT exec. Just consider what you’re faced with when it comes to insuring your business: 

First, there are hundreds of pages of over-involved proposals and contracts with complicated language and arcane terminology. Not what a CFO wants to spend her Monday morning stewing over. 

But it’s not just that. There are multiple policies, each with different premiums with different due dates that all seem to be up for renewal soon, at least according to the reminder emails that land in your inbox every 12 hours or so. (It’s okay. Hit delete and have another swig of your quad latte.)

Oh, and your boss keeps reminding you to keep costs in check. Only the coverage we need, he says. Do you tell him about the explosion of ransomware attacks and cyber extortion that has cyber premiums surging, or the rise in natural disasters that has property coverage growing pricier by the day? Does he watch the news? 

And don’t forget the policy changes that ought to be implemented now that the market has done a 180° in the last six months. Above all, don’t ignore that small but nagging fear that you might get hit with a class-action claim once you go public. If you don’t have the right D&O coverage, it won’t just be the C-Suite that loses their shirts. 

Now flow all of that into old-school PDFs, byzantine email threads, stacks of messily printed contracts, certificates, and bills, and even the occasional fax. 

Then get to work. The ELT wants a recommendation by EOD. 

Crazed, collaborative, and pretty amazing

Hence the hackathon. Engineers were divided up in cross-functional teams. Bringing together this collaborative group of diverse thinkers is a big departure from the threadbare conventions of the insurance industry. 

Each team had a double mandate: either break the chain of repetitive busywork that plagues insurance professionals across every industry—from transportation to telemedicine; or, imagine how to deliver hyper-personalized communications and insights for all of our clients. Ideally, do both. 

It’s not enough to feed clients the popular cliche of “just trust us.” For Newfront, we stand by our value of Deliver Results. 

Maybe now you understand why we started Newfront in the first place. Seems like an industry ripe for a revolution, no? We may not be wearing bonnets rouge, but we’re bringing some real change to this business. Here are some of the key client pain points we tackled in just a week of (admittedly obsessive) focus: 

Claims – Auto-ingesting hundreds of PDFs and restructuring the loss runs to help build submissions and run claims analytics

Quotes – Automatically extracting structured quote data from lengthy documents, enabling comparative analysis and eliminating time-consuming data entry 

Contracts – Creating AI-powered contract review tools that compare requirements of new contracts within in-place policies, identifying coverage gaps

Benefits – Developing conversational chatbots available 24/7 to answer employee questions and help them better understand their benefits package

Illustrious hackathon voting committee members joining me included: My fellow Co-Founder & CEO Spike Lipkin, Vice President of Engineering Lin Yuan, and Chief Product Officer Aaron Forth. 

As a voting committee, we delivered an unexpected response to the half-dozen demos the teams presented in various states of sleep deprivation and slack-jawed astonishment. In a move unprecedented in the annals of Newfront Hackathons, we declared all of the projects winners, reflecting the exceptional quality of each submission, all which, in the words of one anonymous judge, “just killed it.” 

Spike called the event “an inflection point” for the company, while Aaron said, “The cost of intelligence just became 1000 times cheaper. It's clear that large language models will redefine our roadmap, but also transform this industry and shape the future of work itself.”

Our insurance professionals were no different. They raved on Slack. They high-fived in meetings. They posted on LinkedIn. They said the innovative solutions presented represented major breakthroughs in client service. 

Even though we’re excited by the potential of what we witnessed earlier this year, Newfront has been diligently building a data schema and workflows for the past six years. We are already transforming the business with our client dashboard, which is like a central nervous system for policy management: submitting quotes, reviewing contracts, simplifying renewals, automating billing—everything is easier and faster with the platform. But it’s not just saving time. Using machine learning and generative AI, Newfront is also delivering data-driven insights into coverage and market trends that allow clients to make more informed risk decisions based on real-time data. No small thing.

And yet, the success of the hackathon has, to put it mildly, transformed the product roadmap. Newfront's Technology team is already bringing many of these AI-driven products to colleagues and clients. 

Stay tuned. Or better yet—get in touch. Unless you enjoy the old way of doing business. In that case, we’ll let you get back to your filing systems and spreadsheets and putting more paper in the printer, which looks like it's on the blink again. Better call IT. 

Newfront is transforming the delivery of risk management, employee experience, insurance, and retirement solutions by building the modern insurance platform. Transparent data delivered real-time translates into a lower total cost of risk and greater insights. Newfront makes insurance work for you. Headquartered in San Francisco, Newfront has offices throughout the country and is home to more than 800 employees who serve clients across the United States and globally.

The Newfront team recently held a hackathon focused solutions powered by AI and Large Language Models, and ... things got a little crazy.

Newfront’s AI Hackathon: Unleashing the power of generative AI to de-risk human progress

In 2019, San Francisco customers who ordered a car from Lyft may have found themselves with an unexpected driver – Lin Yuan, an engineering executive with the company at the time. To help her understand the driver experience, Lin spent some time getting real-world knowledge in the driver’s seat.

Her hard work and dedication to stepping into drivers’ shoes paid off – the insurance tech team that Lin built helped lower the insurance cost for Lyft significantly, assisting the company in reaching positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time in its history. Insurance cost is one of the biggest expenses at Lyft, and Lin’s transformation of how the company approached their risks showed her aptitude for applying technology to business strategy.

I’m thrilled to welcome Lin to Newfront as Vice President of Engineering. Her commitment to understanding operational challenges, technological expertise, and deep experience scaling software teams makes Lin a perfect fit for our company as we build the modern insurance experience.

I asked Lin to discuss some of her thoughts about why she joined Newfront and what she’s excited for in her new position.

As a recent addition to Newfront, I’m excited to share a little about me and the reasons I chose to join the team. I have more than ten years of experience in the engineering world, having spent time at Facebook as a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead. At Facebook, I helped build the first iteration of Graph Search, making billions of pieces of social data searchable.

In 2014, I moved to Coursera, an open online course provider, and led the engineering team that built Coursera for Business. As Business became the fastest growing unit at Coursera, yielding several tens of millions of dollars, I realized my passion for leading high-performing teams.

Most recently, at Lyft, I discovered the intersection of technology and insurance as I built the insurance tech team from the ground up, and I fell in love with the work. When I learned about Newfront and its goal of building the modern insurance experience, I knew it was the place for me.

This is an exhilarating time to join Newfront. The merger of a cutting-edge technology-enabled brokerage and a recognized innovator in insurance and risk management mean that we are even more well-equipped to achieve our goal.

Having worked at Facebook, Coursera, and Lyft, I am well-versed in all stages of company development, from hyper-scaling to post-IPO. I have seen all types of challenges during growth mode, and I understand what works well and what doesn’t in a company experiencing explosive growth.

I also truly appreciate the company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to elevating team members from different backgrounds. DE&I is not just a box to check at Newfront – it’s truly part of our DNA.

Insurance impacts everyone’s life. As the leader of our Engineering team at Newfront, I will be focusing on building our platform to provide peace of mind to people and take care of their risks so they can focus on their business. We don’t want them worrying about the tools to get that work done.

To do this, we leverage technology innovations to grow and empower the business. We’re not building technology to eliminate brokers – we’re building it to enable them to do the best work of their careers. We have the opportunity to change the way they’re using technology and make it a much better experience for them and our clients.

I’m a strong believer in leveraging data and technology to innovate and disrupt the industry. Newfront is positioned to do this and I’m excited to help the team to achieve this vision!

“We’re not building technology to eliminate brokers – we’re building it to enable them to do the best work of their careers.” 

Announcing Newfront’s VP of Engineering Lin Yuan

At Newfront, we’re proud of our growing culture of inclusion, collaboration, and improvement. We’re enthusiastic about technology and helping empower our team to advise our clients. For Women’s History Month, we decided to spotlight a Newfront client who also focuses on empowerment by coaching leaders to build diverse and inclusive organizations.

Sounding Board offers an AI-powered coaching platform. Newfront’s co-founder Gordon Wintrob (GW) and Director of Employee Benefits Emily Sugars  spent some time discussing Sounding Board’s vision and agile learning environment with founders Christine Tao (CT) and Lori Mazan (LM).

GW: Tell me about Sounding Board and how it got started.

CT: Our mission and vision has always been to help organizations create their most impactful leaders. That really stemmed out of my own experience working with a coach. I had cut my teeth at Google and YouTube, and then went to a hyper-growth venture-backed startup. 

I was one of two executives promoted from within. I found myself running about 70% of the company's revenue as part of our executive staff and had never done that job before. The company itself scaled to $100 million in revenue in less than three years. 

Our board and our CEO were pretty forward thinking at the time (back in 2012), and gave me a coach to work with. Long story short, it ended up having a profound impact on the way I thought about what “good” looks like when you think about talent development and why it's important to invest in your team and your leaders. 

Lori was my coach and now she’s my co-founder. She’s been in the industry for as long as they've been certifying coaches. So a lot of our philosophy and our approach and why we've been effective stems from her 25-plus years of experience coaching at the highest level.

GW: We were so excited to have this conversation to celebrate Women's History Month. One of the biggest challenges, especially in technology, is the gap in the talent pool between men and women. And this is more of a gap as folks rise up the ranks. When you coach female leaders, how do you coach them through these issues, especially when they might be the only woman in the room?

LM: Honestly, we don't position it as a gender issue. We position it as a style and skill issue. So, instead of looking at it as, "Oh, I'm in the room with all guys," we look at how do those people tend to interact? What's the best way to influence them, partner with them, collaborate with them based on their style? Then we explore how to develop the confidence, assertiveness to really take a place at the table. That would be true, whether it's a female, male, or whoever.

CT: We're a female-founded company, but our vision is broad. Everybody can benefit from Sounding Board. We think it’s particularly important to bring coaching to all levels since we know that part of the problem is the pipeline issue that you mentioned. Another important piece is inclusion. Going down into the organization is one way to impact that. Especially if you can bring a personalized model that's not just a one-size-fits-all training. Now you're able to accelerate how quickly someone can develop those skills to create an inclusive environment.

LM: Leadership has traditionally been like, "Do these five things and you'd be a good leader.” But, you have to remember, those five things are written in a book by older white males. So that may not work for a lot of people who are moving into leadership roles. Coaching is amazing because it's so personalized and it allows the individual to grow into the leader they're meant to be, can be, will be instead of saying “you have to fit in this box.”

GW: I love that. One obvious answer to this next question is “coaching," but what can male leaders do to be better allies to women and create a more diverse and inclusive environment? 

LM: Yes, coaching, but there's actually one thing that's really important that was validated years ago by Harvard research: men can bring women into their networks. What elevates women in the workplace is the men who are inclusive in their network. There's literally one black female CEO in the Fortune 500. Not even Fortune 100, Fortune 500. So really, progress requires men to open the doors for the women.

One way this plays out with coaching is we have a customer who uses coaching for the underrepresented leaders in the organization. They pair them with a sponsor. And the sponsor gets coaching as well because otherwise they don't see their own biases. They learn what actions to take to support this person. This approach really makes development happen on both sides. These folks are stepping up, opening doors into their network, and challenging their own biases.

GW: Can we complete the picture on Sounding Board? Lori, what was it like to start Sounding Board with Christine?

LM: When I was coming up on 20 years as a coach, I began thinking about what I wanted to do next. I talked with Christine and we decided to go in together on Sounding Board for a couple of reasons.

First, it was about diversity. Most of the people that I coached were males, and they were white males, because that's who is at the top of most organizations. So, one of our goals is to bring coaching down through the organization to a more diverse group of users. We want to provide the benefit of coaching to more people, not just at the top. Even those folks at the top said, "Oh, I wish I had this earlier in my career." so it’s that much more powerful to bring it to an entire organization.

Second, now that coaching is accepted and really popular, many companies want to find ways to bring this form of development to the leaders in the organization. But there isn't any easy way for them to do that. It's all small independent folks and there's no management of the coaches. So Sounding Board gives us an opportunity to create a coaching platform that brings this benefit to many more companies. In our first two years, we coached more folks than I personally coached in my entire career.

I’m also not your standard founder. I’m at the end of my career, instead of the beginning. I’ve been able to pour 25 years of experience into Sounding Board, so that's been both beneficial to Sounding Board and just super satisfying for me.

GW: Tell me a little bit about how you are using AI and technology to help scale your coaches and supercharge what they're doing.

CT: Sounding Board offers a front-end digital user experience for coachees but also tackles the back-end administration for managing coaches. This is a big challenge and it’s why coaching hasn't been scaled in many organizations. 

The technology creates an entirely digital user experience for all of our users. You come on to Sounding Board, build a profile, and we use AI in the backend to match you to the coach. That's actually where the secret sauce is in terms of the coach matching. In addition to their regular coaching sessions, users also have the ability to chat with a coach on demand and track goals and progress. 

Customers can also utilize the platform to deploy their own coaches. So, we become more of an agnostic platform that is the centralized coaching management system for the company whether or not they are using our coaching network delivering the actual coaching. 

The last piece is around data. There really isn't a platform for tracking employee developmental goals. Like how do you take the performance goals you gave Emily and translate that into the skills and capabilities she needs to develop? Then, how do you actually offer resources that will help her develop that? At Sounding Board, we have a proprietary methodology to create the right goals and track that progress. It gives us a really unique picture of the insights that drive somebody's development. We have the ability going forward to tie that back into how it impacts the company and business.

GW: Can we talk also about the gender gap in Venture Capital? I know that only about 3% of VC dollars go to female founders. Sounding Board bucked that trend by raising over $13 million earlier this year. Congratulations! What tips might you have for other female founders out there?

CT: It went very quickly for us in our Series A, but we've had lots of fundraising rounds before that didn't go as smoothly. For me, it really was learning fundraising over time through trial and error. One of the things I learned, it's so simple, but with investors, it is so much about the future. What’s your big future vision? Where are you going? Because investors think about future opportunity.

A big shift I had to make was to stop anchoring on what we had done to date and translate that into what's the bigger opportunity ahead. What you've done up until then is just checking the box. I don't want to say that that's a trap all women fall into, but at least for me, it was a big lesson. Because of my background as a Chinese-American, I was taught, "Put your head down, do good work, and then you'll get recognized for that." There’s a very different dynamic needed to successfully engage with investors. 

LM: The other thing is keep trying. Many of our investors we actually pitched them twice. Male founders might have gotten funded the first time, but sometimes females have to develop more trust to get the investor’s confidence since we don’t look like other founders they’ve backed. Don't give up. It might take two times or three times. That's still better than not getting the money at all.

GW: I'm incredibly excited to showcase all the cool things you are doing as women, as founders, as business owners, and in coaching and leadership, I think it's so inspirational. Thank you.

For more about Sounding Board check out their website: https://www.soundingboardinc.com/

For Women’s History Month, we decided to spotlight a Newfront client who also focuses on empowerment by coaching leaders to build diverse and inclusive organizations. Sounding Board offers an AI-powered coaching platform. 

How Sounding Board Makes Coaching More Accessible to All

Running restaurants is a challenge at the best of times, but 2020 has thrown a series of curve balls at two restaurateurs in Oakland, California looking to bring their community together with good food. 

To better understand our clients’ experience, Newfront co-founder Gordon Wintrob (GW) recently met with the husband and wife team behind Chop Bar, Tribune Tavern, and Calavera. Jana and Chris Pastena (JCP) opened up about their road to success and the challenges they’re facing. 

GW: I'd love to hear what inspired you to get into the restaurant industry?

JCP: We both have a passion for creating great experiences for people and for creating community. We’ve channeled those passions into building restaurants. Each space is unique and it speaks to us when we move in and helps us to decide what should go into that space.

Chop Bar was our first restaurant together in 2009. Jana had just started law school and we had just gotten married. We had $40,000, a wish, and a prayer!

It's exciting and it's exhilarating to build something from the ground up and then watch it grow. We had no idea that Chop Bar would be as popular as it’s been. Chop Bar grew from 20 employees to 50 over the years. We moved to a bigger location just down the street last year, which was very exciting. 

We own three wonderful restaurants today. In 2014, we opened Tribune Tavern in the historic Oakland Tribune building, and in 2015 we opened Calavera, in Oakland’s Uptown district. We used to own an Italian restaurant, Lungomare, in Jack London Square, but have since sold that business.

Between our three restaurants, we employ around 160 people. And we feed tens of thousands of residents of Oakland and people across the Bay area.

GW: Restaurants are in a competitive environment, especially in the Bay area. Your restaurants anchor some of Oakland’s most hip and historic districts. What are some of the things that make a concept successful?

JCP: There is no real formula beyond hard work, consistency, and community. You have to be dedicated to doing hard work and you have to have a love for the work. That gives you an extra advantage.

All too often we see restaurateurs come up with a concept, open, get feedback and start to change their concept based on the feedback. That’s usually the wrong move. It's really important to be dedicated and move forward with your vision. Stay the course.

For instance, it’s hard to build a brunch business. But if you keep at it, and stay consistent with the quality of your food, your staff and your training, the business will grow.

We work shoulder-to-shoulder with our employees every day and we're committed to giving them the tools that they need to succeed. When they succeed, we all succeed.

The last component is working with the community. When you're part of the community, people see that. They come out to support the business because they know that you're supporting their causes as well.

GW: What are some of the ways that you create that sense of community for both your staff and the customers?

JCP: When we first conceived of Chop Bar, we chose its name because a chop bar is a community meeting place. In West Africa the local fishermen catch fish and bring it to a chop bar where the cook prepares it for the community and everybody comes to eat. 

There's nothing more important in this world to us than feeding people. To be able to do that for our community is really meaningful, which is the basis of what we built with Chop Bar. 

We also believe that our restaurants have to be bigger and greater than our four walls. We work on a number of different nonprofit boards to make sure we're giving back to the community. We're doing a lot of work with World Central Kitchen to feed the homeless. We’ve also created the Oakland Indie Alliance, which is a nonprofit for small businesses. Close to 500 small businesses are members.

GW: Tell me more about the Oakland Indie Alliance and how it got started?

JCP: As independent business owners, it's really important for us to do a number of things for the people who work with us. One, we want to pay as much of a wage as we can, especially for the kitchen staff who don’t get tips and have to rely on their hourly wages. In 2014, there was a measure in Oakland to increase the minimum wage from $9.25 to $12.00. We all supported it. However, there was no guidance about how to implement it effectively.

So, we came together informally and started asking the City for help in making it work. For example, how would we communicate with our customers that our labor costs would increase 30% overnight, thereby increasing our Workers’ Comp by 30% overnight, and increasing the price of goods from our vendors by 30% overnight because they would have to comply as well. That would mean, unfortunately, that we’d have to raise prices for our guests, which is not necessarily something that we want to do.

We worked with the City Attorney to develop a book of frequently asked questions about the measure. At that point we were just independent businesses working together to solve problems informally, but election season was coming up and we decided to establish a formal entity. That was the origin of the Oakland Indie Alliance.

The independent businesses involved were a sounding board for each other for a very long time and the Alliance blossomed from that collaboration. Being a business owner can feel like being alone on an island sometimes, and working with other people having the same challenges empowered us.

Our membership spans the political spectrum but we focus our advocacy on issues that impact independent businesses. These days we focus more on building resources for businesses. The Alliance was able to raise a lot of money after the first round of riots. 

GW: You’ve talked about the community of people you work with. How did you support them during COVID-19?

JCP: Literally overnight we had to close the doors on all three of our restaurants and lay off about 160 people. That’s never easy. In the month leading up to the shelter in place, we saw a dramatic drop in business. Our revenue was already depleted. So, we took what we personally had saved and made sure we could pay our payroll. That was first.

Then, we had to cover health insurance for those who are enrolled. Nobody in good conscience could leave people without health coverage in the middle of a pandemic. We directed those who did not have insurance to MediCal and to Covered California to try to get insurance as soon as they could.

Next, we identified the people who weren't going to be eligible for unemployment and we continued to support them and pay their wages out of our own bank account until we were able to open for takeout.

We wanted to be exceptionally thoughtful about what it meant to open and bring back any employees. We worked very, very diligently to put together protocols for sanitation, for cleanliness, for PPE, and to reduce the contact between customers and our staff.

It took us several weeks before we felt comfortable enough to open for takeout. The first people invited back to work were those who didn't qualify for unemployment and some of our managers.

Less than a quarter of our staff has been able to come back to work. And now with the end of that extra $600 a month in unemployment, I'm very fearful for some of the people who've worked for us for a very long time.

Now we're just holding our breath, to be honest. We didn't get into the restaurant industry to only do takeout service. This is not sustainable. We're still down significantly and there's no way that that's a long-term solution. 

World Central Kitchen has been a critical resource for our stability. Eat, Learn, Play and World Central Kitchen teamed up to start a food program in the Bay Area where they buy meals from restaurants. They use those meals to feed underserved communities, children, seniors, and the homeless. So everybody is participating in something that is incredibly socially important and we're happy to do our part. We just hope that we can make it through the end of the year.

GW: We know your restaurant was vandalized during the riots and protests and we're so sorry to hear about that. Was there anything you wanted to share about that experience both personally and as a business owner?

JCP: Well, it's very complicated. We're in the middle of very important and necessary social change. That change is often messy. 

Our businesses got vandalized both in May and July. In both instances, people started turning over trash cans, lighting them on fire, and spray painting things. Both events were terrible. And it's not the first time that this has happened.

Oakland is known for having civil unrest around social movements. Usually, the crowd is great and very respectful of the neighborhood. Then there's an element that hangs out at the end, who I'm certain are not people from our community. Often they aren't people who are actually part of the movement or protests. They're not people out there advocating for anything, but who want to destroy things. What that does to us is devastating.

They used the cover of a movement to support Black people to turn around and destroy a Black-owned business. In May we had been scheduled to open Tribune for takeout, but the day before we were vandalized, which kept us from opening for another several days. That meant that people who relied on that job could not come back to work. People of color, Latinx, and Black people.

It just doesn't make sense to destroy something that somebody has worked so hard for. It seems even worse for somebody to come and destroy a Black-owned business in the name of supporting the Black community. It doesn't make any sense, it’s hurtful and, honestly, it makes it very hard to want to continue doing business. 

We keep hanging on and keep moving forward, but how many more instances can we and our colleagues who own restaurants survive being shut down and having everything that you've worked for destroyed?

GW: I'm glad that you're both safe and healthy and thank you for everything that you do. Your tenacity in the face of incredible pressure and your commitment to your community is inspirational. Thank you!

To support Jana and Chris, you can donate to the Oakland COVID Recovery fund or place an order at Chop Bar, Tribune Tavern, or Calavera.

Restaurateurs in Oakland share their path to success running restaurants, COVID-19 challenges, and their experiences of social change

Oakland Business Owners Adapt to Pandemic and Advocate for Social Justice

The outbreak of COVID-19 has unfortunately provided an opportunity for cyber security threats to multiply, and many organizations may find themselves vulnerable. Attacks are now ranging from credential phishing and business email compromise (BEC) to fake landing pages and malware, all tied to the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

There are several steps individuals and businesses can take to prevent a cyber attack: 

Run regular updates on your programs and operating system; developers are continually releasing fixes for security gaps, but these only offer protection if you run the updates

Require devices to have two-factor authentication, which verifies a person's identity before logging in

Ask employees to confirm that their home WiFi connections use WPA2 encryption and are password-protected

Ensure employees have easy access to a list of approved remote work tools for communication

Companies should maintain a reliable backup for their data on a different network

Organizations should make sure their antivirus software is up to date

All employees should be instructed to think twice before clicking links within emails. You may consider holding a phishing awareness training

Amidst the crisis, we’re looking for every opportunity to help our clients. Given that many businesses have temporarily shifted to work-from-home situations, or are in the midst of reevaluating their cyber security protocols, we’re making our IT team available to help you. For a complimentary technology consultation and security review, please contact our IT director at chris.hahn@newfront.com. We're available to discuss the systems you're currently using and offer recommendations to keep your workforce productive and secure.

I love this quote from Gandhi: "Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. And your values become your destiny." Put simply, our values define what we can achieve.

At Newfront, we learned early on that building the right culture was one of our biggest opportunities and challenges. Our business grows by supercharging insurance professionals with technology. We have world-class software engineers from places like Amazon, Google, and Palantir, experienced operators from McKinsey, Uber, and Opendoor, and seasoned insurance professionals from both smaller regional brokerages and some of the largest firms on earth. No other company to my knowledge has brought these groups together, but at Newfront this diversity is our strength.

Note: we refreshed our values in 2021 and you can see the latest on the Newfront Careers page. Please enjoy the rest of the blog post to learn more about how we originally set the values.

Given this variety of backgrounds, our team needs shared values to help ground conversations and work through complexity. Values help people make all the micro-decisions that comprise our day without needing to "run it up the chain." This defines how successful the team is at getting things done and achieving big, audacious goals. The values become your destiny!

In addition to defining our values, we outlined a set of behaviors for each. These provide shared understanding for our entire team and offer real examples of how we live our values at work each day.

I invite you to get to know Newfront by reading through our values: 

It’s people who make insurance work, and our vision of the future has people at the center of the industry. This is the bet we’re making and it will be the key to our success. We deeply value our teammates and the work they do. We’re building technology to empower people, not replace them.

We develop new tools and processes to make ourselves and our teammates more efficient and improve outcomes.

We’re teammates and coaches. We give and receive feedback that is both constructive and delivered with good intention.

We default to respect. We treat people with trust and kindness. How you do something is just as important as the skills you have.

We promote collaborative experimentation. We encourage innovation via collaboration.

We’re modernizing a $500bn+ industry that has resisted change for so long and we’re actively shaping the future of work. We face huge challenges and we’re excited to take them on. 

We are determined to achieve our mission and build a lasting company. It’s what we all signed up for when we joined. We see a better way, and we want to make it happen.

We are bold. We think big. We work hard to get the job done and we’re not deterred by failure.

We take action to make this company better and move quickly to provide the best outcome for our clients.

We are optimistic about the things we can achieve. We're positive and solution-oriented.

We aren’t satisfied with “good enough.” We seek excellence in everything we do.

We act like owners. We happily step outside of our formal job descriptions to pitch in and lend a hand for the betterment of the company. When something goes wrong, we seek solutions rather than point fingers or pass the buck. 

Our industry has baggage and we wouldn’t be here if we didn't think we could shake off some of that weight. Moving the insurance industry forward requires a fresh outlook. We seek out diverse perspectives and question basic assumptions about how things should work.

We celebrate innovation and uncovering new ways to do things better and faster for our clients. 

We question the status quo and we’re open to being wrong. Our dogma can be our own. We believe change happens through curiosity and creativity.

We follow established practices when they are indeed the best, but we're enthusiastic about evaluating alternatives that could lead to stronger outcomes. 

We hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards because a modern brokerage means more than better tools and service. Starting with a deep sense of integrity, we aspire to set a new standard for our industry when it comes to equity, transparency, diversity, and corporate responsibility. 

We do what is right even when no one is looking. We default to transparency and integrity.  

We make decisions that are informed by data and critical thinking. We question our biases and do not make snap judgments or leap to conclusions. 

We celebrate diversity! We seek and value diverse perspectives, and work to create an open, supportive culture.

We critique problems, not people. We acknowledge what works and what doesn't, and we put our best foot forward to change the industry.

To ensure our values are lived, not filed and forgotten, we’ve woven them throughout company processes, from how we interview candidates and conduct performance reviews to the wins we celebrate at our weekly all-hands meetings. Each month, we give our “Golden Cert” award—one of the highest honors achievable at Newfront—to an employee who epitomizes our values. It’s in this way we set up our values to become our destiny.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your feedback on Newfront’s values and perspective on incorporating values into company culture. You can reach me at gordon@newfront.com or connect with me on LinkedIn here. 

Blog ‍

Connect ‍
with ‍
us. ‍

Articles from Gordon Wintrob

Newfront’s AI Hackathon: Unleashing the power of generative AI to de-risk human progress

Announcing Newfront’s VP of Engineering Lin Yuan

How Sounding Board Makes Coaching More Accessible to All

Oakland Business Owners Adapt to Pandemic and Advocate for Social Justice

IT & Cyber Security During COVID-19

Our Values Define What We Can Achieve

Newfront for Businesses

Newfront for Employee Benefits

Newfront for Private Clients

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Articles from Gordon Wintrob

.css-13o7eu2{display:block;}Newfront’s AI Hackathon: Unleashing the power of generative AI to de-risk human progress

Announcing Newfront’s VP of Engineering Lin Yuan

How Sounding Board Makes Coaching More Accessible to All

Oakland Business Owners Adapt to Pandemic and Advocate for Social Justice

IT & Cyber Security During COVID-19

Our Values Define What We Can Achieve

Newfront for Businesses

Newfront for Employee Benefits

Newfront for Private Clients

Blog ‍

Connect ‍
with ‍
us. ‍

Newfront’s AI Hackathon: Unleashing the power of generative AI to de-risk human progress