Wassim Salib

I build products that challenge conventional wisdom.

From a small city in Upper Egypt to building products used across three continents — my career has been a series of bets on problems worth solving. The best technology disappears into the solution.

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Tell me about your journey. Where did it start?

My Story

Three chapters. One thread: curiosity earns its way in.

The Bet

It started in Sohag, a small city in Upper Egypt, with a wild dream of studying computer science. I got selected — 54 out of the entire country — for a full scholarship to the American University in Cairo, the top university in Egypt. But it wasn't just about tuition. It was a leadership program — training in leadership, negotiation, and public speaking. We organized and ran our own conferences attended by ministers and high-caliber leaders across the country. Then I got selected again, this time for Portland State University — where we met with officials from the U.S. Department of Education at the White House.

The Range

Then came ABB. Three countries, three completely different worlds. Managing enterprise infrastructure in Egypt. Training as a manager at Zurich HQ, where systems spanned 150+ countries. Then building HMI control screens at Canadian mining sites in Calgary. Every altitude taught me something different — technology at scale is really about people and processes.

The Build

And then I discovered insurance. Not by choice — by accident. But the moment I stepped onto a brokerage floor, I saw what I live for: a massive pain that everyone had accepted as normal, held together by duct tape and workarounds. The gap between what existed and what was possible was staggering. I couldn't walk away.

What principles guide how you build?

How I Think

Five principles I've earned through practice.

The Scientific Method

I treat every product as a hypothesis. Observe first. Then build, measure, learn.

Work Backward

Start with the pain. If you can't articulate the problem in one sentence, you're not ready to build.

Inversion

I ask "what would guarantee failure?" first. Avoiding stupidity is more reliable than seeking brilliance.

Ask Better Questions

Asking the right question matters more than finding the answer. There are no bad questions — only unpracticed ones.

Stay Curious

The day I stop asking "why?" is the day I stop being useful.

What's the Trufla story?

What I Built

Everyone said insurance can't be simplified. We walked the floor and proved them wrong.

Belief

Everyone accepted that selling insurance had to be painful — slow quoting, lost leads, and brokers buried in busywork. Billions flowed through a process that hadn't been rethought in decades. I believed the entire workflow could be rebuilt from first principles.

Observation

I shadowed every role on the brokerage floor — producers, CSRs, account managers. Mapped every handoff, every bottleneck, every workaround. The real insight wasn't that technology was missing. It was that each broken step silently compounded into massive leakage across the entire funnel.

Build

Trufla became an ecosystem of products — lead management, quoting automation, client engagement — each designed to eliminate a specific failure point. Not a single tool bolted on, but an integrated platform that reimagined how insurance is sold and serviced.

Adoption

The hardest part was never the code. It was changing decades of muscle memory. Earning trust one brokerage at a time, proving that simpler didn't mean less powerful. That's the real product lesson — technology ships fast, but behavior change is the actual moat.

What are you curious about right now?

Now

Last updated: March 2026

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Scaling Teams

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How can people reach you?

Say Hello

The best ideas start as conversations. Whether you're rethinking a product, wrestling with a hard problem, or just curious about the insurance-tech rabbit hole — I'd love to hear from you.

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