“Are You the Right Contact?” Is the Question Every Startup Should Ask

Angela Noble opened Episode 43 with a genuinely unexpected admission: she’s a self-taught crocheter, learned entirely from YouTube rather than paid classes, who started with simple rectangle-based projects (potholders, scarves) alongside girlfriends watching TV and has since graduated to stuffed animals. It’s a small, human detail, but it fits neatly with how she talked about her actual job for the rest of the conversation — innovation, in her framing, is fundamentally about people, not technology, and the same patient, self-directed curiosity that got her from potholders to stuffed animals shapes how she approaches her team’s work.

Angela has spent over 20 years in insurance, a little over three of them at EMC Insurance Group, where she leads the Innovation team.

About Angela Noble

Angela Noble is VP of Innovation at EMC Insurance Group, a regional commercial lines carrier founded in 1911, distributing exclusively through independent agents, with about 2,400 employees across 40 states and licenses in all 50.

Innovation Is About People First

Asked to define her role, Angela was upfront that “VP of Innovation” means something different at every company, and that even her own definition at EMC is deliberately still evolving. Her first responsibility, she said, is leading and developing her team — coaching each person individually rather than applying one uniform approach, since everyone brings a different skill set to the table. Her second responsibility is recommending, collaboratively rather than unilaterally, how EMC approaches innovation as a company-wide practice.

Her stated innovation philosophy, distilled: innovation is more than technology — it’s about people, culture, and respecting the way a company already does business while still finding ways to evolve it. In practice, that starts with listening, not talking: understanding people’s actual pain points, but just as importantly, understanding what they’re already good at and proud of, then finding ways to either close a gap or amplify a strength.

Sway: A Pilot Angela Calls a Success, Even Though It Didn’t Fully Work

Asked for a concrete example, Angela described a recently completed pilot with Sway, an internal idea-submission platform. EMC’s 2,400 employees are spread across 40 states, which made it genuinely hard — even before the pandemic — for people to informally share good ideas the way a “water cooler conversation” might in a single office. Over 100 employees volunteered to pilot the platform across EMC’s locations, and the response was strong. But the pilot also surfaced a gap EMC hadn’t fully planned for: what happens after you’ve collected a flood of genuinely good ideas? The follow-through process wasn’t fully thought through, so EMC is now back in discussion about a second phase rather than declaring the initiative complete.

Angela was explicit about why she still calls this a success rather than a failure: the pilot validated that the platform itself worked and that employees engaged with it enthusiastically, and it surfaced a real gap in EMC’s process that the team wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Her broader point: innovation work requires planning toward a clear intended outcome, being honest when you don’t fully reach it, and then genuinely itemizing what was actually learned — not just gesturing vaguely at “lessons learned” without naming them.

Breaking Down Silos, Inside and Out

Angela drew a direct parallel between her own consulting work — she’s a mentor and innovation advisor for Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, having worked on projects with internal teams in Buenos Aires and São Paulo — and what she’s trying to build inside EMC. She was struck by how a 500-year-old Japanese conglomerate like Sumitomo readily accepts that it needs external perspective to innovate internally, rather than assuming size alone solves the problem. She sees the same need inside EMC: breaking down silos between business units so people recognize when a colleague elsewhere in the company is already solving a similar problem, rather than competing quietly in separate lanes.

The One Question Every Startup Should Ask a Carrier

Asked how a startup should approach EMC specifically, Angela described her Innovation team as the deliberate front door — handling practical friction points startups may not anticipate (her example: a founder encountering an NDA request for the first time, unsure what it even requires), and making internal connections across business units that a startup couldn’t otherwise identify on its own. But she was equally direct about a broader truth: there’s no universal answer. The right point of contact varies by carrier, and a startup has no way to guess that in advance — meaning “are you the right contact?” is a fair, necessary question to ask at every single carrier a startup engages with, especially at large industry events where founders meet dozens of people in a short window.

Active in the Ecosystem: GIA and Insurtech Week

EMC is an investor company in the Global Insurance Accelerator (GIA), based in Des Moines alongside EMC itself, giving EMC two board seats — one held by Angela, the other by Beth Nigut, EMC’s EVP and Chief People Officer — plus two committee seats, with Angela on the programming committee and a colleague, Mary Harvey, on the operations committee. Angela credited GIA’s team, including Managing Director Nicole Cook and Program Manager Megan Brandt, for running a genuinely global, mentor-driven cohort program that matches startups with mentors from across the industry, not just from carrier partners.

Advice: Protect the Breaks Between Meetings

For her closing recommendation, Angela pointed to something she’d learned over the prior year and a half: the real value of deliberately protecting breaks during the workday, especially amid back-to-back video calls. Her concrete practice: she moved her team’s recurring weekly meeting from a full 2:00-3:00 PM block to 2:00-2:50 PM, specifically so everyone has ten minutes to reset before whatever comes next. Her broader point was about reclaiming a sense of what’s actually most important, rather than staying reflexively busy simply because virtual work makes constant availability feel like the default.

Key Takeaways

• Angela’s core innovation philosophy: it’s about people, culture, and how a company already does business, not primarily about technology — meaning the work has to start with listening to both pain points and existing strengths, not just identifying what’s broken
• EMC’s Sway pilot succeeded at validating employee engagement and surfacing a genuine process gap (what happens after ideas are collected) — Angela deliberately frames that outcome as a success rather than a failure, since planning honestly and learning specifically from a shortfall is itself the point of running a pilot
• Angela’s advice to every startup approaching a carrier: ask directly whether you’re talking to the right contact, since the answer varies by company and there’s no way to guess it in advance
• EMC’s Innovation team functions as a startup’s front door specifically because it can handle unfamiliar friction points (like a first-time NDA) and connect a startup to the right internal stakeholders across business units it wouldn’t otherwise find on its own
• Angela’s mentoring work with Sumitomo Corporation of Americas reinforced a belief she applies internally at EMC too: even a centuries-old, large organization benefits from deliberately seeking external perspective rather than assuming its own scale is sufficient for genuine innovation