When starting a catastrophe modeling company, one has to make choices for platform, science, products, and collaborations.  Following the 13 year journey of KatRisk, I will illustrate the development from global flood maps to probabilistic models including the development of our own financial model and SpatialKat platform.  This led to the adoption of our products by more than 100 customers globally and a product offering from flood, storm surge, hurricane models into severe convective storm and wildfire.  Key scientific and technical areas such as best simulation methodology, risk measures, climate variability and change, deployed vs. hosted vs API offerings, and platform performance are being discussed.