Dot-Com Vet Starts Steel Card

After eCoverage.com ran out of venture capital funding last year, its CIO, Max Drucker (who was also anInsurance & Technology Elite 8 2000 honoree), decided he wanted to be part of a company that does what he knows best: build software.

Today Drucker, the former founder, CIO and vice president of operations at eCoverage, is a founder and managing partner at Steel Card (Santa Barbara, CA), a maker of an end-to-end modular platform for P&C insurance. Drucker has teamed with eCoverage's former CTO, Michael DeGusta, in the new venture. "We are building a software company with Steel Card," Drucker says. "It is very different from eCoverage, where I was responsible for not only building technology, but also had to solve the challenges of running an insurance company. Besides building technology I also had to run the call centers and oversee the operations."

Drucker says that, unlike many failed software companies that were built with venture capital funding and a business plan focused solely on rapid growth without regard to the ability to handle the growth, Steel Card plans to grow slowly. Given a changed marketplace, "we plan to take on a small number of clients and have controlled growth so we can focus on our clients and build the best software for them," Drucker says."

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio