Ted Pantone on building Turaco, surviving Covid, and aiming for a billion people

Ted Pantone is not a man who rushes his thoughts. The co-founder and chief executive of Turaco, a Kenyan insurance startup, speaks in measured bursts, pausing long enough to suggest he is weighing the question and the implications of the answer.

We meet in the gardens outside Turaco’s offices at Amani Gardens in Nairobi, where the setting makes the city feel distant. Mid-morning sunlight filters through the trees as Pantone takes his first cup of coffee of the day, taken late, almost as an afterthought. 

Ted speaks without rushing, occasionally stopping mid-thought to sharpen his words. The company was built on an observation that runs against industry orthodoxy: low-income households may not buy traditional insurance, but they think constantly about risk. 

Pantone traces that realisation back to his early days in Busia, western Kenya, speaking with farmers who, despite limited incomes, were acutely aware of the financial shocks that could upend their lives. When Turaco began selling insurance through partners like One Acre Fund, more than half of the farmers they reached signed up. 

He speaks about growth in clear, almost matter-of-fact terms: five million people insured today, a path to 100 million by 2030, and eventually a billion. “We want to double the number of insured people on the planet,” he says. It sounds audacious, but he presents it less as a stretch goal and more as the logical extension of a model that already works.

Beyond the business, his routines are steady. Mornings begin with family. He reads the Bible daily and spends time tracking developments in artificial intelligence, two influences that, in his view, shape both discipline and direction.

In this conversation, Pantone reflects on building through uncertainty, the moments that nearly broke the company, and why he believes the biggest mistake in African insurance is not a lack of demand, but a failure of imagination.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What’s a normal morning for you? Are you up early, or does the day drag you out of bed?

Depends on the season. [Chuckles] Some seasons require a lot more than others. My default is to wake up with my family and get my kids off to school and get them started on a good day, and then look after my business in a good way as well. After that, there are some seasons where I’m staying up very late for investor calls in the US, and I will sometimes drag myself more to get out of bed. But I like to be up early.

Coffee or tea, and how particular are you about it?

For coffee, I’m not that particular. I like a bitter drink, but this [holding a cup] is my first cup of coffee, and it’s like 10 o’clock, so it’s not necessary to get me going.

What’s the last thing you read that stayed with you?

I read the Bible every day, which is probably the most important book in my life. Last week I read James 1, where it talks about “consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds, because testing your faith develops perseverance, and perseverance must finish its work in you.” That’s the most impactful thing I’ve read very recently.

I read a lot about AI as well, and listen to a lot about AI. From a business standpoint, some stuff I’ve heard on This Week in Startups or something like that is the most relevant stuff I’ve actually used. That’s two different answers to that question.

You’ve spent years building in African markets where insurance is often an afterthought. Was there a moment early on when you realised: this is either going to work at scale, or fail spectacularly?

It was realising that while the perception of insurance is an afterthought, risk is not an afterthought for people. I talked to my friends. My first home in Kenya was in Busia, and I still have friends back there—people who live on very little in the village, who are farmers—and you talk about the things they think about, and they think a lot about the risks in their lives and how to plan for them. I don’t think risk is an afterthought.

When we first launched our partnership with One Acre Fund—one of our first big partnerships—we were selling to farmers in Western Kenya. More than half of the farmers we called opted in for our insurance product. That was the moment I said, This is going to work. It’s still tricky to make the business work, but the demand is there. Risk is not an afterthought for people in Africa, and there’s a clear opportunity to meet that demand with supply.

What are some of the lessons you picked up earlier that have stuck with you till today?

Many lessons. As a founder, trusting your gut is the biggest one. The times I haven’t—when I’ve been a little more wishy-washy and looking to other people to guide me more than my own instincts—I’ve made worse decisions or let culture shift in ways that didn’t work with what I knew we had to build.

At the same time, be willing to be wrong and admit that you’re wrong and pivot. You have to balance both. At each season and stage of our business, I’ve needed both of those founder skills: being able to trust my instinct and also admit that I’m wrong and make a pivot in very small ways or in big ways.

There’s a quiet arrogance founders must have, the belief that they can see something others don’t. What did you see about insurance in Africa that incumbents missed?

I think if you ask most incumbents, “Do low-income earners across the continent want to buy insurance?” most people in the insurance industry would say no. They’d say this is not a reasonable market—there’s not enough demand, there’s no way to get products to them efficiently.

That’s the core assumption we’re proving wrong at Turaco: there is demand, and there is a way to distribute products efficiently to those people.

The insurance industry is so slow and so behind and so backward. About ten years ago, I had my first real interaction with insurance in Africa. I don’t have an insurance background. I joined a company to help them figure out how to make their business model work better. I came to Kenya for a conference, and the topic was digitisation of the insurance industry. It took me a while to figure out that they were talking about using computers. That was the big innovation: “Guys, we’re going to start using computers. We’re not going to use paper anymore.” I thought, Oh no, this whole industry is backward, slow. It’s ripe for disruption. Those are two things to point out.

Turaco sits at the intersection of fintech and insurance, two industries that don’t always move at the same speed. Which side has been harder to convince: the regulators, the partners, or your own team?

Our model is that we work with fintechs, banks, microfinance institutions, and telecommunications companies to sell insurance to their customers. They all get it. They all move fast. So that’s relatively easy—some move slower than others, but generally the demand is there, and they’re the avenue to connect to that demand.

The regulators are actually pretty fast, too, surprisingly. Every regulator we work with wants to see us succeed and wants to see us insure mass market consumers.

The only piece of the puzzle that was really tricky for a long time was the insurance industry. When we first launched, we weren’t an underwriting insurance company ourselves—we were just an agency or technical service provider, and we were forced to work with other insurance companies. That was always the most painful part of any partnership: getting the products we wanted and then managing them the way we wanted. Some insurers were great—APA was amazing, Ashok Shah was an amazing partner even before we became an underwriter and were competitors. But that wasn’t true for every insurer. The approval process was very long. They weren’t willing to move fast.

Our team moves very fast. We’re ready to launch a partnership way before any partner is ready from their perspective.

What does success look like in your world?

Success for me looks like a billion people insured. That’s the goal we have at Turaco. We want to double the number of insured people on the planet. Every family should have the freedom to get insurance and not have really difficult conversations about whether there’s enough money for mom to go to the hospital. That’s a conversation I don’t want any family to have to have—but many families do. We’re at 5 million people now, making good progress, but still a long way to go.

Take me back to your toughest month. What nearly broke?

[Pauses] Broke? I’ll talk about two months.

The toughest was when we realised how real COVID was. We did a staff reduction of 50%. We asked everybody who remained to cut their salaries significantly; I cut mine by double everyone else’s. That was a really hard month. I had no idea how to lead in that situation. I was getting everybody to join a one-hour stand-up every day just to talk about things and how the business was working. It was very confusing. Eventually, we figured out rhythms that worked, and we recovered as a business and survived by God’s grace. That was a really difficult month.

The other one: we had closed our Series A, we were growing steadily, but not fast. I looked around the room—we had our highest month of burn ever—and I just didn’t love the culture we had created. I felt we needed to make a pretty hard pivot to being quite a bit more productive. 

So, we set a 20x target: everyone has to be 20 times more productive, 20 times more efficient. We really pivoted the culture hard into being not quite as kumbaya of a place to work, and a lot more focused on execution. That was a really tricky thing to do. I’d always wanted it to be a really fun place to work, but sometimes you just have to get things done. Not everyone who had built the business with me up until that point stayed for that next season. Good friends, but it is what it is.

Looking back, do you think the choices you made were worth it?

100%.

How do you manage the tension between patient impact and the pressure for venture-scale returns?

I ignore it. [Laughs] I’m really focused on building a great company—a profitable, growing company that captures as much of the available and potential insurance market as we can. I think we do a really good job of serving our customers and our partners. I want more customers. I want more partners. I’m very ambitious, and we’re very ambitious as a leadership team. We believe every insurance product we sell is socially impactful. 

When it comes to the finesse of impact metrics, I just kind of ignore it. I say, “Listen, we’re selling insurance to low-income people. As long as we’re still paying claims—which we track—we’re doing good in the world.” And when it comes to VC financial returns, it’s best for them if I just build a great company. If I try to finesse it in such a way that it’s the perfect VC outcome, I’m probably going to fail at building a good company. So, I’m hyper-focused on the simple outcome: just trying to build a great company.

What’s the most uncomfortable conversation you’ve had with an investor?

I won’t go into specifics, but I had an investor change terms on me at the 11th hour. Very uncomfortable conversation. We ended up holding our noses and taking the money. I’m glad we did—they’ve been a good investor since then. But it was a very uncomfortable conversation because we didn’t really have a lot of options at the time. Lord willing, I won’t put myself in that situation again, because we didn’t have a different path we could have taken. Term sheets had been signed, terms had been agreed, and they just changed it all just before signing the final agreement. Very painful. 

Investors will do that. It’s not even that the people I was working with necessarily wanted to—a lot of times it’s the people behind them saying things have changed, and a term needs to change. I would just always give yourself as much optionality as possible.

Do you think African startups overuse the language of “inclusion” without fully grappling with the economics of serving low-income customers?

Funny question, because it implies that African startups have to use the word “inclusion” to raise money. I think that might be true for a lot of investors—you have to tell a story that includes words you might not include if you were just talking to a VC from San Francisco about what you’re building. I don’t think it’s overused because of that, because you have to speak the language that investors want to hear if you want them to give you their money. I can’t speak for all founders, but the majority of founders I know don’t abuse that. They’re genuine in what they’re saying. It’s narrative management, but it’s genuine.

If I spoke to someone who left Turaco, what would they say is the hardest thing about working with you?

I can be grumpy. [Laughs] I’ve heard that feedback from plenty of people. I’ve tried to fix it as much as I can, but if things aren’t going quite the way I want them to, sometimes I don’t have the super-chipper, enthusiastic personality. That’s probably the hardest thing. I bring in a bunch of people who have better energy.

And what would your co-founder say you’re uniquely good at, but perhaps don’t recognise enough?

Pete would probably say that I’m uniquely good at execution. I can cut through the noise and get to the thing that needs to get done. He’s said that about me in the past—called it a superpower. Very useful at the zero-to-one, one-to-ten stage. Now that we’re at ten-to-one-hundred, I need to not just bulldoze. But that’s fine.

Why don’t you recognise it enough?

It’s just noise to me. Focusing on the signal is a superpower, but it means you’re going to ignore the signals about yourself to a degree, because you’re just trying to get the thing done.

What do your parents think you do? And have they stopped worrying?

They’re fully aware of what I do. They know I’m building a tech company in Kenya to provide insurance for mass market consumers. They know I’m CEO. Their biggest worry was when I moved to Africa. I’m from California. I came to Africa when I was 24 to do charity work, thinking I’d be here for a couple of years and then go back home to regular life. That was certainly their idea of the plan. I had more staying power on the continent. Turns out that was true. So they were probably worried for the first five years I was out here, but now they’ve just accepted that this is who I am. I’m an aspiring Kenyan; I’ve applied for citizenship, so I’m not going anywhere. I think they’re proud of me.

What used to keep you up that no longer does?

Burn rate. We used to burn money every month. Every startup is a failing business on a ticking clock when you start. We don’t have that fear anymore because we’ve been profitable since last year. That doesn’t keep me up anymore. Plenty of other things do.

If Turaco hadn’t worked out, what would Ted Pantone be doing right now?

I would have started something else. Not my first business. I started a microfinance bank in Uganda with some friends. I had a Pizza Hut franchise with some other investors. Plenty of other small businesses that I’ve started along the way that are not worth mentioning. Those were ones with more significant capital. I like to build things, so I’d be building something else.

What’s the most exciting market at the moment?

They’re all exciting. We’ve just entered Pakistan. That’s very interesting for me because it’s Asia. We’ll get our first customers in Pakistan in a few months. That’s the most exciting thing today because it’s a new thing. I’m a founder—new things are always more exciting than old things. But you have a big team to make sure the old things continue to grow and do really well.

I’m still very excited about Kenya. We have a partnership with Safaricom’s M-PESA that is going to be huge. We’re already insuring one out of every 30 Kenyans today. We’ll be insuring one out of every 20 Kenyans within the next year.