Susheel Agarwal

The year everything looked fine

At 33, Susheel had what most people in insurance spend years working towards. A senior sales role at a broking firm, a team of his own, a client list that kept growing. On paper, nothing was missing.

But something was, and he couldn’t put a name to it. So he quit.

Two colleagues, Sarath Reddy and Sandeep Mukka, quit alongside him. They followed a roadmap he didn’t have yet.

To register as a broker, the regulator wanted proof of capital he didn’t have. His only other assets were his home and his car. He sold both, against his family’s wishes. Ethika started in 2015 and received its IRDAI broking licence on 8 August 2016. It has never taken a rupee of outside money.

For the first two years there was no website and there were no visiting cards. There was just the work.

The person who is never in the room

Group health insurance has a strange shape, and he says it took him years to see it. The CFO pays for it. HR buys it. The only person who ever uses it is never in the meeting.

A few years ago, at the end of a renewal where everyone had spent an hour bringing the premium down, the HR head said, almost to herself, that the family from last month hadn’t cared about any of this. An employee’s father had been admitted at night. The hospital nearest their home was not on the network, and nobody had told them which ones were. That list had been decided in a meeting exactly like the one that had just ended.

So a cheaper plan that drops the two hospitals nearest the factory is not cheaper, in his book. It only looks cheaper in the room. Saying that out loud has cost him a few renewals. It has also kept most of the rest.

In the business of creating people like us

Ask him what business Ethika is in and he won’t say broking, or wellness, or workshops. He says: we are in the business of creating people like us. That is the real business. Everything else follows.

This Diwali he put one promise to his team in writing: as Ethika grows, you grow. Their careers are his personal responsibility, not a department’s.

The formula he gives other founders is short. Take care of your people. They take care of your clients. Profit takes care of itself.

Ethika has been profitable every year since 2015, and the streak is never discussed inside the company. Meetings are about effort, and about whether the client is happier than last month.

He calls the next ten years Ethika 2.0. Not a new product, the same belief with a bigger ambition: to build a company people look at and say, this is how a company should be run. AI is part of that. Everyone at Ethika has learnt to hand the boring work to it, so the time goes to people. Here, he says, it takes the boring work, not the people.

The opposite of a founder

He asks founders a question he once had to answer himself: what is the opposite of a founder? An employee? A boss? His honest answer, eleven years in, is a prisoner. For years every decision at Ethika routed through him, and he mistook that for importance. It was a cage.

Getting out of it started with how he looks at teams. Watch any room long enough, he says, and the same shape appears.

• 2%are destructive
• 70%coast
• 13%search for meaning

Build the room for the 13%, and the company stops needing you. A company that can run without its founder, he argues, is not an HR dream. It is the only real AI strategy.

It is also why he talks about two jobs. A company has two jobs for its people: help them rise, and protect them when they fall. Ethika does the protecting. The everyday half, health checks, counselling, engagement and learning, is run by Ethika Worklife Private Limited, a second bootstrapped company he started alongside the broker. It is a separate company in the Ethika group and not an insurance product.

What the work has earned

When Ethika received Special Jury Recognition for Claims Excellence this year, he didn’t go up for it. Deepa Agarwal accepted it on the claims team’s behalf. The claims desk earned it, he wrote, not the founders.

• Special Jury Recognition for Claims Excellence, India InsurTech Summit 2026
• Asia’s Best Innovation-led Insuretech, Indian Chamber of Commerce
• Great Place to Work Certified 2026
• ★ 4.9 across 4,000+ Google reviews
• Bootstrapped and profitable

Awards for sales I understand. An award for claims is different.

Susheel Agarwal

Away from the desk

Susheel lives in Hyderabad with his wife, Shraddha, and their son, Samarth. An engineer by training, he went back to the classroom in his forties for executive programmes at ISB and Cornell, and still answers questions on Quora most weeks.