Staying put

WHY VARUN DUA KEPT RETURNING TO THE SAME INSURANCE PROBLEMS, AND HOW PERSISTENCE, NOT REINVENTION, LED TO ACKO

- AYANTI BERA

IN 2009, VARUN Dua was restless. The global financial crisis had shaken up Tata AIG General Insurance, where he had spent five years after his MBA.

Management churn followed, and so did doubt. Looking for a reset, he moved to Franklin Templeton, hoping mutual funds would be a better fit. It wasn't. “I was bored,” he says.

Outside his office, the world was shifting. Flipkart had just launched, Facebook was scaling rapidly, and the iPhone was changing how people interacted with the Internet. Dua began to feel he was on the wrong side of history. The future was digital, and he wanted in. What he didn’t yet know was that he wasn’t done with insurance. He would return to it, not as an employee or intermediary, but as the founder of Acko, India’s first digital-native insurance company.

There was no founding ambition driving him. “I had no intention of becoming a founder,’ he recalls. Born in Delhi and raised in Mumbai, Dua followed a familiar middle-class path. After a BCom from RA Podar College in 2001, he began preparing for the CA exams alongside college. Midway, he dropped out. It felt too long and too rigid. Almost on impulse, he took the MBA entrance exams and landed at MICA, specialising in marketing.