Why Build When You Can Partner

Sabine VanderLinden has spent 25 years in and around insurance, and this episode traced most of that path: from Lloyd’s of London, where she arrived via an Erasmus exchange program from continental Europe and got her start insuring fine art, diamonds, and famously insured body parts as a broker’s graduate trainee; through a stint as a regulator at Lloyd’s; on to IBM (following its acquisition of PwC Consulting), where she moved from writing strategy reports into hands-on execution around what was then called predictive analytics; through global roles at FICO (risk management) and Pegasystems (customer experience); and finally to SSP, a UK-based core systems company comparable to Guidewire, where her innovation mandate and a reporting line into SSP’s private equity owner pulled her toward the venture side of the industry for good.

Gilad and Sabine first met as co-editors of The INSURTECH Book, published by Wiley in 2018 alongside Susanne Chishti, Nicole Anderson, and Shân M. Millie (founder of the growth consultancy Bright Blue Hare) — a connection Gilad opened the episode by thanking her for.

About Sabine VanderLinden

Sabine VanderLinden is Co-Founder and CEO of Alchemy Crew, a venture validation and venture-building firm working with insurers, reinsurers, wealth managers, and healthcare providers. She previously led Startupbootcamp InsurTech, built and scaled into one of the leading insurance accelerator programs globally, and teaches innovation and disruption once a year as a professor at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass).

From Insurer to Accelerator to Venture Builder

Sabine’s leap from corporate strategy into the venture world began informally in 2014, when a group of investor connections asked her to help evaluate what “this fintech thing” might mean. A year later, she’d concluded fintech’s logic had to eventually apply to insurance too, and started advising Lloyd’s on innovation strategy — with Tractable as her very first portfolio engagement. From there, her friend and eventual Startupbootcamp InsurTech co-founder Nektarios Liolios brought her in to lead the insurtech vertical, building on Startupbootcamp’s existing fintech accelerators in London and Singapore.

She described the arc of her own thinking about corporate innovation as a natural evolution: accelerators are the right tool for helping a corporate first observe and understand a genuinely new problem space — she pointed to sustainability tech as a current example of an industry still working out what the category even means. Once an organization has internalized a new topic, the next step is usually more targeted “co-creation labs,” where corporates bring specific, well-defined problems rather than an open call for any promising startup. Her guiding principle throughout that evolution: “why build when you can partner” — favoring fast, proven third-party solutions over reinventing something from scratch whenever time-to-market allows it.

Alchemy Crew and Venture Capital as a Service

Alchemy Crew, which Sabine co-founded with Dan White of Ninety (an insurance innovation consultancy) and Minh Q. Tran, splits its work by core competency across two brands. Dan’s focus is a structured innovation framework helping insurers train for and build the right propositions. Minh, a longtime friend of Sabine’s from their shared ambition to eventually build a fund together, runs the venture capital side under the Mandalore Partners brand — effectively “VC as a service” for insurers who want real investment exposure to insurtech but don’t want to build and staff a full corporate venture fund themselves. Alchemy Crew itself sits in between, acting as the R&D lab or venture builder that helps identify and shape propositions before Mandalore’s investment lens gets involved.

Sabine was candid about why this model exists: many corporate venture capital efforts have underdelivered relative to their ambitions, in part because insurtech follows the same seven-to-ten-year timeline to a real outcome as venture capital generally — and B2B insurtech deals specifically can take up to 18 months just to close with a single large corporate partner. Mandalore’s pitch is bringing dedicated rigor — scorecards, evaluation frameworks, real deal math — to a problem most insurers don’t have the internal muscle to solve efficiently on their own.

What Insurers Are Actually Asking About

Asked what problems corporates have been bringing her over the past 18 months, Sabine drew a clear split: organizations that had already invested seriously in digitization before the pandemic mostly just adapted to remote work, while those that hadn’t have been consumed with “keeping the lights on” — repairing what was already broken rather than exploring anything genuinely new. Her advice to insurers in either camp: be problem-centric, and place a few deliberate, well-chosen bets rather than chasing every promising topic simultaneously.

The specific themes she’s currently seeing insurers focus on: behavioral health (a natural progression, in her view, from the mental health conversations dominating the prior six months), sustainability viewed through the lens of the broader economic transition away from fossil fuels and what that shift demands of insurers’ own technology and underwriting, and emerging risk more broadly.

Advice: The Invincible Company, and a Survival Guide for Corporate Venturing

For her closing recommendation, Sabine pointed to two books shaping her current thinking. The first, The Invincible Company by Alexander Osterwalder, she credited as a foundational influence on a lot of the new methods she’s been building into Alchemy Crew’s own approach. The second, more niche pick was Corporate Venturing: A Survival Guide by Heidi Mason, Elizabeth Arrington, and James Mawson — a book, she noted with some pride, that happens to feature Alchemy Crew itself as one of its examples.

Key Takeaways

Sabine’s career path — Lloyd’s underwriting and regulation, IBM strategy consulting, FICO and Pegasystems, then SSP’s innovation mandate under private equity ownership — is a fairly direct blueprint for how insurance operators end up in venture building
“Why build when you can partner” is Sabine’s consistent operating principle across accelerators, co-creation labs, and venture building alike: favor fast, proven third-party solutions over reinventing something from scratch whenever time-to-market allows it
Alchemy Crew deliberately splits its offering by core competency: Dan White’s innovation framework helps insurers shape the right propositions, while Minh Q. Tran’s Mandalore Partners brand delivers venture capital as a service for insurers who want real fund exposure without building one in-house
Real corporate venture outcomes take time — insurtech follows roughly the same seven-to-ten-year path to a meaningful return as venture capital generally, and individual B2B deals with large insurers can take up to 18 months to close
Insurers she’s advising are currently focused on three specific bets: behavioral health, sustainability as an economic transition problem (not just a marketing one), and emerging risk — rather than spreading attention across every trending topic at once