Personal levels of risk tolerance and potential development opportunities are among the factors that job seekers weigh as they consider whether to work at traditional property/casualty carriers or the growing crop of InsurTechs, placement professionals say.

But there are other considerations in the mix, including work-life balance, variety of work experience, company mission and overall industry reputation, according to professionals who have worked for incumbents, InsurTechs and non-insurance technology companies.

In a follow-up to our first article in this series introducing a debate about relative talent levels at InsurTechs and incumbents and recruiter views of trends in talent movement, we asked insurance professionals who lived in both worlds what it feels like to work for one or the other.

Carrier Management spoke to two actuaries who both coincidentally also worked for a different type of startup during the course of their careers—hedge fund reinsurers.

A Career Path Leads to a Startup

Isaac Espinoza, vice president of reinsurance for InsurTech Root, signed on to work at Greenlight Re fairly early in his actuarial career, partly because of a desire to work in the Cayman Islands after visiting there on his honeymoon. The other actuary, who prefers not to be identified for this article, made a later career move to a hedge-fund reinsurer startup about a decade into his career. Both were attracted to the new experience of a startup.