Waylon Wong

Insurance for insurance companies is called reinsurance.

Most insurance companies will take out reinsurance policies to protect them in case of natural disasters like earthquakes or hurricanes.

OK, so back in the 1980s, while she was working for that insurance company, Karen was looking into this complicated system of insurance and reinsurance and re-reinsurance.

And she realized that when it came to major catastrophes like hurricanes, the whole market was still mostly operating based on guesswork.

But Karen's like, no, no, no, there's actually a smarter way to do this.

We can use computers to simulate thousands of different disaster scenarios, plug in data about things like how homes in an area are built and how much they'll cost to repair.

That'll give us a much clearer picture of the actual risks here.

And Karen is so convinced of this that she soon starts her own one-person company to build and license these computer models to the insurance industry.

And Karen gets this huge opportunity.

She gets a meeting with them to show off her hurricane model.

So she makes the pilgrimage to their London headquarters.

She flies across the pond, lugging her newfangled portable computer along with her.

The men at Lloyd's, they are skeptical.

Until something happened that grabbed everyone's attention.

In 1992, Karen and her team were tracking this hurricane that had suddenly gotten very strong, very fast.

It was a Category 5, 160 mile per hour winds.

The name was Hurricane Andrew, and it was headed for Miami.

Exactly.

And now that the whole industry was paying attention to Karen's models, insurance companies realized, holy cow, we have not been buying enough insurance for our insurance.

If hurricanes are going to be this bad, we're going to need a lot more reinsurance.