How $400 Billion Quietly Disappears Inside the $1 Trillion Insurance Industry Every Year with Rashmi Melgiri

Americans spent roughly a trillion dollars on property and casualty insurance last year. Only about 60% of it came back as claims, and that number has been falling for decades. Rashmi Melgiri wants to know where the other $400 billion went, and why nobody seems to be measuring whether the industry is getting any better. Rashmi started as an antitrust economist at 21, modeling DOJ and FTC cases, before spending years in telecom and co-founding CoverWallet, which she raised $35M for and sold to Aon. Now she's the founder and CEO of Functional Finance, building the financial rails underneath insurance. Along the way she's developed a framework she calls "infrastructure of life," the idea that insurance, telecom, energy, and healthcare are a different class of industry, and that the only people left with the energy to reform them are founders, funded by a system that routes them right back to the incumbents they set out to beat. She and Brennan get into it: free markets versus regulation, why she went back to build a second company in the same industry she'd already exited, and what it actually felt like to sell to Aon. **In this episode:** - Why only 60 cents of every insurance dollar reaches a claim, and where the rest goes <!--THE END--> - The "infrastructure of life" thesis: which industries we've stopped protecting, and why <!--THE END--> - How selling to Aon showed her the reform path that ends inside the incumbent <!--THE END--> - Why she thinks founders, not government, are the last reform mechanism left <!--THE END--> - The bankruptcy double standard between corporations and people <!--THE END--> - What an antitrust economist sees in insurance that founders miss <!--THE END--> - Why she started a second company partly to test if she could be the CEO New episodes of Not Another Podcast every week. Subscribe on YouTube and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you don't miss one.