Welcome to our new AFR series featuring professionals who have made a big career leap into the unknown.
Meet venture capitalist Solai Valliappan, aged 37, from Sydney. What did you start out doing? I was an actuarial analyst at an insurance company. It was extremely technical. I worked on two main areas over four years. One was pricing commercial insurance products and the other was reserving and valuations, which is bread and butter for a traditional actuary – you model how much funding should be kept aside for liabilities incurred.
So, how did you end up becoming an investor? I was working on the finance side for the start-up, and we were setting up all the financial reporting and all the board reporting from scratch. I just wanted to understand from an investor perspective what is expected for an early-stage company, so I started going to some angel investor events to talk to investors to find out.