Female Disruptors: Sonny Patel Of Insurtech Socotra On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

Create an environment where people are not afraid to make non-fatal mistakes that are easily recoverable. As a leader, what matters most is how right we are, because we need to be right a lot more than we are wrong. I use the notion of whether the decision is a one-way door, one where you make a decision and it’s hard to come back, or a two-way door where you make a decision and if it does not work out you have a way to reverse it. If a particular decision is one-way, you need to pause and find a way to de-risk the situation. Having those frameworks and tools can lead to making more right decisions than wrong.

As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, we had the pleasure of interviewing Sonny Patel.

Sonny Patel is a recognized thought leader in AI, with over 20 years of experience building and launching products at Fortune 500 companies including Dell, Microsoft and Amazon, as well as conversational AI company LivePerson. Currently, Sonny is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Insurtech Socotra, where she is innovating insurance technology to meet the evolving needs of customers. She holds an MBA in Strategy & Entrepreneurship from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M University.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I have been fascinated with computers ever since I got one as a present in the ’90s. This was just after Windows XP was released, and back then computers were less accessible and only something people who studied computer science or knew programming were into. This sparked the curiosity that led me to pursue both an undergraduate and a graduate degree in Computer Science and ultimately turn it into a lifelong career.

In India, where I grew up, they give high school students an exam to determine the sequence of college course selections. Depending on how well you perform on the exam, you are ranked and given the opportunity to select your major and school in that order. My top choice was computer science, and my fascination was driven by the “coolness” and advancements of the industry back then.

Once I did my undergrad, I had the desire to do my master’s in computer science in the U.S. Microsoft was a dream company to work for and after grad school I made it there following some time at Dell.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

The problem we are trying to solve is not new. The insurance industry is well established and goes back centuries. The notion of making it easy for insurance companies to create a policy and then manage it throughout its lifecycle is something that insurance carriers have had to deal with since the beginning. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, systems were built on mainframes; then people realized how difficult they were to manage using those legacy systems. In the early 2000’s, our competitors saw this opportunity to make the management of policies easier. Socotra is taking a leap further from that. Getting started when we did gave us the opportunity to build a modern tech stack from the beginning so we don’t have to deal with managing a legacy system while trying to build something modern; we have been modern from the start. The Socotra platform is born in the cloud, we have no on-premise set up.

Rather than think of insurance policy management as a workflow to manage, and build a workflow for each type of insurance, we designed a model to store the data in a flexible way so that the type of policy the carriers want to build on top of our system doesn’t matter. We can handle it regardless of the policy type. This gives our platform the ability to support carriers, especially ones that specialize in multi-line offerings, so they don’t have to look for different systems to manage unique products.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When I was doing my master’s at Texas A&M, many big tech companies recruited from the campus. My initial interviews were in my first year of grad school for an internship at Microsoft. I went into this interview with little to no preparation, thinking I would be able to create answers on the spot. At the time, Microsoft had these innovative puzzle and algorithmic questions, which they were the first to introduce into the interview process. Needless to say, this interview did not go well, and this was a life lesson that I did not need to learn twice. I do not go to interviews unprepared now.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

If I look back on the managers I have had, the majority of the people have been amazing sponsors and I truly learned so much from them. My first manager at Microsoft, Bapi Buddhavarapu, taught me a lot about people management, and he was the first one to give me the opportunity to transition from an individual contributor to a people manager. His management style was inspired by a book called “First Break All the Rules,” by Marcus Buckingham. It was one of the first books I read as a manager and has had a huge influence on my people management philosophy. The takeaway is that when you are managing people, focus on their strengths and utilize these strengths to bring the best out of them, and not as much on their areas of improvement. This is with the caveat that as long as those areas of improvement are not limiting their ability to be effective. The second thing that has stayed with me, for over a decade, is to spend the most time with your top performers because the time and effort spent with these individuals yields greater results.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

I would say it’s not “positive” or “not positive.” It is not so much about positive, but knowing when the timing is right for the industry. We might have the most disruptive ideas and the timing is just not right, and as a result the idea fails. This isn’t because the idea itself is bad, but it was not introduced in the right way or at a time when the intended users or customers are ready for it. Microsoft has had a lot of these. If you think about a lot of the hot products we see today, Microsoft had many of those product ideas as part of their research group, created by incredibly smart people. With the launch of Surface, it didn’t work with consumers at the time, either because it wasn’t targeted at the right use cases or the user reception was not there yet.

In today’s insurance market, for example, we have a real opportunity to create the right use cases for AI and use the technology to overcome limitations in human decision-making that have proven to be extremely difficult to eradicate, such as subconscious bias. AI can help automate or speed up routine tasks so that we can free up our time to use it to do things we enjoy and that are meaningful to us.

Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

1. Create an environment where people are not afraid to make non-fatal mistakes that are easily recoverable. As a leader, what matters most is how right we are, because we need to be right a lot more than we are wrong. I use the notion of whether the decision is a one-way door, one where you make a decision and it’s hard to come back, or a two-way door where you make a decision and if it does not work out you have a way to reverse it. If a particular decision is one-way, you need to pause and find a way to de-risk the situation. Having those frameworks and tools can lead to making more right decisions than wrong.
2. Success rarely happens in isolation. Success is one of the worst teachers. We learn more from our failures. The thing we learn from success is the potential to become complacent. So much of what we are able to do depends on the people around us.
3. Trust your intuition. When we are early in our career and younger, we often put aside our own judgment or intuition because somebody else will show up with a lot of confidence and give us advice, even if it is counter to what we know. I had to learn to listen to my own voice more. Especially with people management, I have realized that my instincts usually are right.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

Socotra is bringing a revolution to the insurance industry by simplifying policy administration. To date, it is seen as something that takes years to onboard and millions of dollars to maintain. Our successes with key customers demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be that way. By lowering that operational cost, Socotra makes it easy for carriers to focus on product innovation rather than the management of existing products. We continue to innovate to better support multiple product lines for large insurance carriers, drive greater climate change initiatives with our partners and ensure insurance companies have the technology needed to service their customers quickly and effectively.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?

This is a difficult question for me because of my personal experience in the workforce. For example, on the topic of promotions, there are statistics that show that men are more likely to be promoted than women. However, in my experience, those that are promoted feel as though they have had to work harder and wait longer than their peers. We have this notion that other people have it easy, a sentiment I hear from men and women. It may look easy, but people on the outside don’t typically see all the things that a person went through to get there. I am concerned that attributing a negative outcome to gender bias may move us into a victim mindset rather than empowering employees.

Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?

One of my favorite and influential books is “Crucial Conversations.” This book (and the companion training which I completed during my stint at Microsoft) taught me that tackling difficult topics head on with others either in a one-to-one or a group setting is necessary to build trust. The book also provides an excellent framework to approach and have tough conversations. We are inclined to avoid difficult conversations but it’s not a good strategy, especially with people at work or in personal life with whom we want to establish and maintain healthy long-lasting relationships.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

We talk a lot about AI. Personally, I am concerned about the impact it will have on our children, especially when it is combined with social media. One example is online bullying. AI has made it very easy to create deep fakes and spread misinformation in an amplified manner. At this point, there are no controls. There is a lot of discussion about regulating AI, but this is a more immediate need. Children are the most vulnerable segments of our community; how do we protect them while we figure out the necessary guardrails or regulation?

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite life lesson quote is “Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned.” When I first heard this quote, it resonated with me deeply. Most of us have these moments when we ask ourselves, “why does this keep happening to me?” And now if I catch myself asking that, I check with myself “is there a lesson here that I’m not learning,” and it makes me feel empowered and gets me out of this victim mindset.

How can our readers follow you online?

Readers can connect with me on LinkedIn.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

About The Interviewer: Vanessa Morcom is a millennial mom of three and founder of Morcom Media, a performance PR shop for thought leaders. She earned her degree in journalism and worked for Canada’s largest social enterprise. She can be reached at vanessa@morcom.media