Mike Greene

Mike Greene is CEO and co-founder of Hi Marley, a Boston software company that sells an SMS-based conversation platform to insurance carriers. Hi Marley says thirteen of the thirty largest property and casualty insurers in the United States now use it. This is the kind of thing that in most narratives would get compressed into a bullet point on a pitch deck, but it is actually the punchline. The insurance industry, until quite recently, did not really text you. It called you, or it emailed you, or it sent you a claims letter with a policy number on it in nine-point font. Greene's argument, which he has been making publicly since roughly 2017, is that this is bad and also solvable and also has a large addressable market attached to it.

He describes the industry, in interviews, as "a grumpy old uncle." His company's stated mission is to make insurance "lovable." Both of these are, on their surface, unusual sentences for a B2B enterprise software company to build a brand around. On closer inspection they are the whole strategy. Hi Marley is not particularly trying to disrupt insurance. It is trying to make insurance carriers more likable to their own customers, on the theory that likable carriers retain customers, retention is worth money, and money justifies enterprise software contracts. The chain of reasoning is elegant. It is also unusually humanist for a software company whose product is, technically, a messaging API with compliance features attached.

Before Hi Marley, Greene co-founded Futurity Group, a P&C-focused software and services company that Aon acquired in 2010. He stayed at Aon for seven years, running claims practice work, before leaving to build the second company. This is a pattern that shows up a lot in Greene's biography: he keeps working in the same industry. Founders often frame their careers as breaks - I was doing consulting, then I quit and started something. Greene's career reads as a continuation. He has spent essentially his entire adult working life around P&C insurance, first at Accenture's Insurance Solutions Group, then at IBM leading their insurance claims practice, then Futurity, then Aon, now Hi Marley. He has, by his own count, partnered with more than seventy-five insurance companies over the arc of his career, which is the kind of number you can only accumulate by not switching industries.

The origin story he tells most often is about a lawn mower. He was twelve. He borrowed twenty dollars from his mother, bought a broken push mower somebody had put out by the side of the road, and started a lawn-mowing business. The mower only cut when he walked behind it backwards, which he did, all summer. It is the sort of story a founder tells because it is charming and true and also communicates something specific about their operating philosophy, which in Greene's case is: the equipment does not have to be perfect for the business to work.

The origin story he tells less often is darker. In interviews Greene has said Hi Marley started shortly after the death of one of his closest friends, whose leukemia diagnosis had made him uninsurable. His friend and his wife were expecting a child. Greene has separately described a serious car accident on black ice in rural Massachusetts that led to months of physical therapy and a maddening insurance experience. The Hi Marley pitch, that insurance communication is broken and fixing it matters, comes from these two experiences layered on top of two decades of watching carriers work.

He assembled the Hi Marley co-founding team the same way he assembled the Futurity team a decade earlier: a mentor named Judy Merante, a college friend from Rensselaer named John Miller, and a former IBM colleague named Mitesh Suchak. The founding trio at Hi Marley is Greene, Miller and Suchak. This is unusual. Most repeat founders shuffle their cofounder lineups. Greene appears to prefer working with the same people for decades.