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This 25-Year-Old Built a 2-Year Moat Nobody Can Bet Against | Corgi, Nico Laqua & Emily Yuan

EO14:14Added Aug 31, 2026

"Pursue the most ambitious version of whatever the idea is."That's the principle Nico and Emily, co-founders of Corgi, built their company around — and Silic...

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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  1. Intro

  2. 00:00It's kind of hard for someone else to make like a Corgi 2.0 because we had to spend so much time and so much money like getting the infrastructure set up.
  3. 00:08Most companies just can't do that.
  4. 00:09We would have [music] been kind of I think a pretty boring company and I don't think we'd be an important company if all we did was resell someone else's product. Um I don't think you can change
  5. 00:17the world if you're reselling someone else's product. [music] So in our case, we decided to become the infrastructure.
  6. 00:23Nico actually lives in the office and a lot of our like team members is like live close to the office as well. That energy is something and that time
  7. 00:30they're able to spend on these problems is something that's really hard to to [music] compete with. My name is Nico. I'm the CEO of Corgi.
  8. 00:37Corgi is an AI insurance company for technology startup and we'll end this year at several hundred million in ARR.
  9. 00:43We're one of the fastest growing B2B companies on the planet and we're just getting started.

  10. Pursue the Most Ambitious Version of Your Goal

  11. 00:54I grew up in San Diego, California. In high school, I had a couple jobs. Anyone who works jobs while they're in high school knows that they suck. You have
  12. 01:02like a boss that's like an idiot that's like telling you all sorts of like things that are just like wasting [music] your time. I think at some point I I just kind of decided that I wanted
  13. 01:10to do something that was like big and important with my life. And it seemed like starting a company was a really good way to make a difference. Before co
  14. 01:19I spent a lot of time kind of in the startup hacker communities and I was working on making apps. One of the apps I was working on was an app for college
  15. 01:27clubs. It's the type of idea that I think a 19-year-old who knows how to program and doesn't know that much about startups um [music] typically does.
  16. 01:33Emily at that time, she was really interested in startups and she was running one of Stanford's entrepreneurship clubs and I wanted her to test out this app [music] and most of
  17. 01:41the people that I knew weren't like giving me that great of feedback at that time, but Emily came back with like a a Figma page with like a hundred comments
  18. 01:49about the app. Hello, my name is Emily and I'm the co-founder and chief operating officer at Cordi. Nico wanted someone to help like promote his app to
  19. 01:58like everyone at Stanford. So, I agreed to help and I kind of just became more and more involved. Eventually, that became the company which was Picnic and
  20. 02:07then it became the gaming company Basket. Nico is very good at identifying good opportunities and I think that
  21. 02:15actually complements my skill [music] set. I'm very good at helping make sure that we can figure out how to like get all these different things done. So, you
  22. 02:22can throw like a very complicated thing at me and I'll go and figure out how to like get it done. In high school, I actually started a nonprofit with a
  23. 02:30couple of my friends called Paper Bridges. I think it was an area where there could be a lot of work done. I could make a lot of impact even like as
  24. 02:37a student without a lot of funding, without a lot of resources. We started off sending letters to orphans and foster kids around the world. As we grew
  25. 02:46and scaled, we started donating medical supplies and to donate like face masks to [music] a lot of these centers in the US. If I'm able to do it, like I should
  26. 02:54just go and like get people together and just go for it.

  27. Walking Away From a Working Company

  28. 02:59Basket, they make a lot of really great games. I got that company to the destination that that I wanted to get it to. I spent over four years there,
  29. 03:06but it didn't feel like a very impactful company. [music] It's a very different type of company than what Nico and I
  30. 03:15really wanted to spend the next like 10 years building. And one thing that I really wanted to make sure I do is that
  31. 03:23I [music] spend my time in like the highest leverage way possible. We want to do the most like biggest most ambitious [music] thing possible. often

  32. Why Bigger Ideas Win

  33. 03:31times a young startup founder try to make products that you yourself [music] would use which is normally pretty good advice but the problem is that problems
  34. 03:38that they they try to solve are often not as big as they could be and I think a lot of people think that if they take a really big idea and kind of scale it
  35. 03:46down to something very small that that makes it more likely to succeed but actually I think that people should do the opposite and think of the most [music] ambitious version because if
  36. 03:54you're doing that then suddenly a lot of really smart people will want to join you on your mission a lot of investors will be more likely to to fund those sort [music] of ideas and success
  37. 04:03actually changes the world in like an interesting way. I guess there's it's hard to say that something's a good idea or a bad idea cuz sometimes things just work out really well in unexpected ways.
  38. 04:12Um but generally I think a good idea tends to be really difficult and tends to be hard and doing the hard things ends up working out much better and that
  39. 04:20makes it hard for competitors to come out and try to copy our stuff. being the 50th app for college students on campus,
  40. 04:28the 500th restaurant in the financial district is not um a good business because it's kind of being the same as everyone else. I think a good business
  41. 04:36means that you're doing something unique and you are like the company in that category. I think in order to be category defining you can't just do something very simple and very easy and
  42. 04:44very capital light. Um I think you need to do something very ambitious and difficult and hard kind of the craziest the highest impact the highest leverage one of whatever their idea is.

  43. How Two Outsiders Broke Into a Legacy Industry

  44. 04:56Historically, it's been very difficult for tech startups to get insurance.
  45. 05:00I mean, I had to get insurance for my last company and we didn't have a lot of money at that time and I remember the insurance policy was $60,000 and that's
  46. 05:09a lot of money to buy anything. I was making less than that in my salary. I think I was making about $1,000 to $2,000 a month at that time. So, this
  47. 05:17was a huge expense. But, you know, my experience was terrible. I had to call these brokers. I remember it took several weeks to get the policy, not answering my emails to them for like
  48. 05:25weeks and of course they never paid out anything.
  49. 05:27And it was just shocking like how slow the process is. Like we were trying to give them a bunch of money to buy this product and everyone was just taking
  50. 05:36forever to get back to us. Like it was very confusing like what we were even buying. We just looked at how everything was set up and we were like, "Wow, this
  51. 05:43is terrible." Like how do you have a hundred billion dollar company that runs like this?
  52. 05:47And I thought, you know, this stuff is a scam. If you look at it as 12% of the GDP, it's about twice as big of a market category as software. But I think that
  53. 05:54all of the regulation around it and the huge regulatory barrier to entry coupled with the fact that most of these big insurance providers started 40 years ago
  54. 06:03or more, that's led to them being very comfortable, them being very complicit, them to continually worsening their product quality. I think a big problem
  55. 06:12with people who have been working in the industry for 20 years is like one, yes, they have a lot of experience, but they kind of like have this like solidified
  56. 06:20mindset of like this is how things are supposed to work and okay, we'll use tech, but we're going to like plug the tech into like this existing like
  57. 06:27infrastructure. It's actually a big advantage for us because we can come in with a brand slay and we can look at things and if something doesn't make sense, we can question like why is it
  58. 06:35being done this way and is there a better way of doing it? we don't really need to do if we're building it from like a AI and like technative point of
  59. 06:43view. We actually didn't think about like too many other industries. When we were kind of thinking about corgi, it
  60. 06:51was just insurance [music] just seemed like perfect like right place, right time and we thought that like we were able to build a team to do
  61. 07:00it and we applied to YC already licensed to be an insurance brokerage. Our idea there was to embed with contract
  62. 07:08management companies. We just wanted to be a broker and do the normal thing. Um that's what we started with and actually it was working pretty well. We sold a couple like tens of thousands of dollars
  63. 07:17of premium and our revenue growth was pretty good.
  64. 07:20But when we first started I don't think we understood like where the problems were in the insurance stack. We thought that hey like these insurance companies
  65. 07:28just weren't being aggressive enough like they should just market more and promote their companies more. But in reality, what was happening was because they had to rely on these like really
  66. 07:36old traditional insurance carriers,
  67. 07:37[music]
  68. 07:38it made it really hard for them to have a good product.

  69. A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Industry Still Runs on Faxes

  70. 07:41It was really nasty to deal with the insurance carriers like making phone calls to them for every single policy.
  71. 07:46We had to get a fax machine and we were like sending faxes to them back and forth. And I would look up these carriers and I'd see they're like 10020
  72. 07:54billion dollar companies and this is the way they work with faxes with people calling them for every single policy.
  73. 07:58[music] And I thought to myself, there's no way that like this is the way a huge part of the economy works. There must [music] be like a better insurance carrier out there. And we checked every
  74. 08:07single one out. There weren't any that were better.
  75. 08:10And through doing that, we realized that the [music] problem wasn't like the website. It wasn't the tech. The problem was the actual underlying product, which
  76. 08:17is the insurance policy. So then we had to figure out like how do we actually go and be the company that is creating and has like control over the product.
  77. 08:27[music] And the only way you can really do that is to become an insurance carrier.

  78. The Decision to Shut the Working Business Down

  79. 08:30So we decided to shut down what we were doing which was working pretty well. And at the time that was not an obvious decision. That was a very controversial decision. I think we could have been
  80. 08:38like well regarded maybe not the top company in our batch but one of the top companies in our batch if we just continued to to do what we were doing.
  81. 08:45But we shut that all down and we decided we're going to become the insurance carrier. It's our vision not to build on top of not to modernize not to fix
  82. 08:54what's already there. We're building a new type of financial institution [music] where we actually become these highly regulated financial entities and rebuild them from the ground up using AI.
  83. 09:02You just really need to come in with new and fresh perspective. It's just really hard to untrain yourself from the
  84. 09:09existing paradigm of like how things are done. At least in our case, being new to the industry really allows us to come in
  85. 09:17with a different perspective, questioning how a lot of these like traditional industries are run and just say, okay, like we'll just go and make
  86. 09:25an IA version of that and rebuild it from ground up.

  87. The Harder It Is, The Deeper Your Moat

  88. 09:31And the problem is you can't just like start one. It's it's something that's very difficult to do. So, we went from a company that was, you know, doing very well in our batch to one that was not
  89. 09:39doing well at all. um and we didn't do demo day. We weren't one of the hot companies in our batch at all. It ended up being a very long multi-year process
  90. 09:47where um our company almost ended on many many occasions throughout this.
  91. 09:51There were a lot of times where we were very default debt. In our case, it ended up taking us tens of millions of dollars in several years and we had to to raise almost pre-revenue like $80 million.
  92. 10:05We raised all this money. We never made a pitch deck. We never went out to market or anything like that. We never did competitive fundraising and I think we just made ourselves a hard company to
  93. 10:13bet against. Actually like the initial investors we had during Y Cominator that came in, they'd visit the office, they'd see it full, you know, every single day of the week. They [music] could see and
  94. 10:21sense and talking to anyone at the company, they could see that we deeply cared about the problem. We wanted to be winners and we wanted to win and that
  95. 10:28the the end kind of destination um would lead to the world being a better place.
  96. 10:33And I think when you kind of combine all of that, it makes it um you know, a bit easier for people to to bet on you instead of against you.

  97. Time and Energy Beat Money

  98. 10:40If you're trying to tackle a industry as big and as complicated as [music] insurance, you really do need to spend a
  99. 10:48lot of time on it. I live very close [music] to the office so I can get here quickly. Nico actually lives in the office and a lot of our like team members just [music] like live close to
  100. 10:57the office as well. if we don't put like 110% effort and a lot of time and [music] energy into it, like you just can't do it properly.
  101. 11:06And I think the superpower that young people have is that they have a lot of time and a lot of commitments. Um the trade-off is they have like not a lot of
  102. 11:13money. And I' I've been there, you know, it's tough, but that time and that energy is worth a lot. That energy is something and that time they're able to
  103. 11:21spend on these problems is something that's really hard to to compete with.
  104. 11:26It was a very long process and I think something that I've always been pretty good at is reading legal documents and
  105. 11:34kind of like really understanding what goes into them. And I think regulation it's not like some like mysterious thing like they tell you like you can do XYZ
  106. 11:42and you can't do XYZ and you just make sure you follow the directions. If you can make sure that you just follow like you stay within the guidelines of like what you're allowed to do, it's all
  107. 11:51doable. It wasn't for fun that we had to raise over $und00 million to to make it happen. And it wasn't for fun that it
  108. 11:58took 2 years. Overall, I think regulation is something that that's pretty difficult and pretty challenging.
  109. 12:03But once we got our first set of licenses, our revenue started growing very quickly. We started looking a lot more healthier and I think the company kind of inflected um after that.

  110. When the Bet Started Paying Off

  111. 12:12People will just go to the easiest, most [music] convenient product available.
  112. 12:17And if you're just that, then people will come. there's not that much additional like marketing we really have to do. [music] That's just fundamentally
  113. 12:24a better product than what's available unless someone else goes and makes a entire new carrier for a startups like there's just aren't that many other
  114. 12:31options. Yeah. So I think operating in regulated industries [music] it's it's very difficult and is very capital
  115. 12:38intensive but once you're able to actually [music] get the core infrastructure set up there's a lot that you can just build on top of it. [music] I think it's a very
  116. 12:47good advantage and it's a big moat that it's kind of hard for someone else to make like a corgi 2.0 because we had to
  117. 12:54spend so much time and so much money [music] like getting the infrastructure set up. Most companies just can't do that. So I think [music] just doing the
  118. 13:02hard thing and just getting it out of the way and getting it resolved I think is a really big [music] advantage for us. It's hard to say that something's a
  119. 13:09good idea or a bad idea, but generally I think a good idea tends to be really difficult and tends to be hard and doing the hard things ends up working out much
  120. 13:18better. Like for us been almost 2 years getting regulatory licensing in order to launch our first [music] product. We would have been kind of I think a pretty
  121. 13:25boring company and I don't think we'd be an important company if all we did was resell someone else's product. Um I don't think you can change the world if you're reselling someone else's product.
  122. 13:34So in our case, we decided to become the infrastructure and um it took us a lot longer and a lot more money than we thought it would, but in the end um I
  123. 13:42think it ended up working out
  124. 13:52every