Marty Young has a question for a company in trouble: does it deserve to exist? It is an awkward opening, especially if you have arrived expecting a discussion of financing. A balance sheet can at least be amended. A reason for being requires a little more thought.
Young has spent much of his working life around businesses that need an answer. His career has taken him through automotive retail, corporate restructuring and insurance. Along the way, the West Point graduate also became an Army National Guard chaplain. That combination makes for an unusual business biography: someone comfortable discussing both a company's obligations to creditors and its obligations to people.
At Buckle, the insurance business he co-founded with Dustin Walsey, those interests met in the driver's seat. The customer might carry passengers one hour and groceries the next, using a personal car to earn a living. For an insurer, each change of activity raised questions about coverage. For the person paying the bills, it was still Tuesday.
Young wanted to build a financial services company around that working life. His ambitions included insurance, credit and advocacy for gig workers. The story of how he got there begins well before anyone could summon a car by touching a screen.
An education in things that break
Young grew up in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, in a family connected to DuPont. He entered West Point in 1989 and graduated in 1993, receiving a commission as an infantry officer. His subsequent education took him to Georgia Tech for operations research and NYU Stern for an MBA. The subjects fit a career spent examining how organizations function under pressure.
After regular Army service, he worked with the team building AutoNation. He and Walsey later launched collision repair businesses in Atlanta in the late 1990s. It was a practical introduction to insurance, acquired where a policy eventually becomes an estimate, a repair and a payment. Their relationship preceded Buckle by years.
There is a useful distinction between studying a market and waiting for it to pay an invoice. The repair-shop experience put Young near the everyday machinery of claims. It also gave the future founders a shared working history. When Walsey subsequently encountered an insurance problem among rideshare drivers, he had someone to call.
At Georgia Tech, Young found another lasting influence in professor Mark Spearman, co-author of Factory Physics. Young took three of his courses and later credited him with showing how useful operations research could be in ordinary life. In 2019, Young joined the industrial and systems engineering school's advisory board for a four-year term. By then, his working vocabulary included both workshop problems and mathematical ones.
One car, several insurance identities
Walsey described Buckle's beginnings through the arrival of UberX. He had been insuring professional drivers in Georgia; now people could use their own vehicles to carry passengers. The new service made participation easier while creating a difficult boundary between personal motoring and commercial work. He discussed that gap with Young, who was seeing related issues from the claims side.
Buckle's answer included a hybrid policy combining personal and commercial coverage. The proposition was understandable without a diagram: coverage on and off the clock in one policy. Underneath that simplicity sat the more demanding task of coordinating insurance responsibilities across drivers and platforms.
Young took the distinctions seriously. In February 2022, speaking to insurance legislators, he argued that restaurant delivery, grocery delivery, convenience-store delivery and Amazon delivery represented different risks. Grouping them together because they all involved an app could obscure the activity an insurer was actually covering.
That is a revealing habit of mind. A business category can look tidy from a conference stage and become untidy in a claims file. Young's argument asked people to look more closely at the work itself. A passenger, a shopping order and a package may occupy the same back seat, but they do not make identical insurance problems.
A credit score was only part of the person
The other boundary Young wanted to cross was financial. Buckle's hybrid product used rideshare and delivery data in place of credit scores. Its stated aim was to reach workers whom conventional financial products could leave with expensive or inadequate options. Young viewed those customers as an emerging middle class, a description that gave their prospects more room than a credit classification did.
His reference point was USAA, the financial services organization serving the military community. He wanted Buckle to offer a similarly connected approach to insurance, credit and member advocacy. This was an aspiration for the business, rather than an accomplishment that could be declared complete when the first policy sold.
The personnel choices gave that ambition some substance. In early 2021, Buckle recruited Sharon Fernandez, whose background included Farmers and USAA, to lead its insurance division. It also hired Paul Lautenshlager after 23 years at USAA, alongside technology executive Adam Landau from PURE Insurance. Young was assembling experience in the institutions he hoped to learn from.
He also took the argument into public forums. In December 2020, he was scheduled to address the National Council of Insurance Legislators' special committee on race in insurance underwriting. The subject placed pricing choices in a wider discussion about access and disadvantage. For Young, the mechanism of a policy and its social consequences belonged in the same conversation.
Buying the machinery behind the promise
A founder can describe a simpler customer experience in a sentence. Delivering it may require buying an insurance company. In June 2020, Buckle acquired and recapitalized Gateway Insurance Company, including its 47 state insurance licenses. The transaction connected Buckle with Atlas Financial's managing general agency, Anchor Group Management, and expanded its commercial auto possibilities.
Young explained soon afterward that he intended to operate Gateway as a digital front. In that arrangement, issuing policies, distributing insurance, managing claims and taking risk can involve different specialists. His interest was in arranging those pieces so partners could do the work they were equipped to handle. The organizational chart was part of the product.
The distinction matters when reading Buckle's later history. Fronting was already in Young's public explanation of the business in July 2020. It was present alongside direct sales to rideshare drivers and distribution through partners. The company was considering more than one route through the insurance market from an early stage.
The infrastructure extended to software. By April 2021, Buckle was using Guidewire ClaimCenter for claims and SmartCOMM for customer communications. It also selected Sapiens financial and reinsurance tools for Gateway. Accounting, regulatory statements and reinsurance contracts are rarely the entertaining part of a startup story. They are nevertheless rather persuasive evidence that somebody intends to operate an insurer.
In September 2021, Buckle announced a $60 million Series B to expand its commercial auto business. In March 2022, it increased a term loan by $15 million to a total of $35 million. Those were company financings, carrying the responsibilities of expansion. They were also a measure of how far the venture had traveled from two people discussing a coverage gap.
Included in Buckle's June 2020 acquisition of Gateway.
The chaplain and the turnaround executive
Young's public explanations of Buckle could move between moral purpose and operational detail with little ceremony. He connected the company's thinking to his theological studies, while also discussing the allocation of losses and the different roles inside an insurance business. Compassion did not eliminate the need to decide who would pay a claim.
His restructuring outlook could be bracing. “Does this company deserve to exist or not?” he asked when describing the starting point for a turnaround. The question makes his inclusion argument more interesting. He was willing to challenge an institution's continued existence while arguing that customers deserved a more useful financial system.
A similar refusal to romanticize institutions appeared in his May 2021 presentation topic for CB Insights: creating a third-party administrator in a box. Claims administrators do essential work for insurance programs, yet building the organization can be slow and costly. Young's proposed discussion was about making that capability quicker to establish. His appetite for change extended into the back office.
In August 2022, Buckle announced an agreement under which InsureScan would underwrite nonstandard auto policies in Alabama using Gateway as the admitted carrier. It was a concrete example of the partnership model: another business could distribute and underwrite a program using part of the infrastructure Buckle had assembled.
“Does this company deserve to exist or not?”Marty Young, on the starting question in a restructuring
Another institution to repair
Young's tenure as Buckle CEO ended, and co-founder Walsey succeeded him. The change was reported in the insurance trade press in January 2023. That handover belongs in the story alongside the fundraising and product announcements. Buckle's original ambition did not freeze the company, or its founders, in place.
Young now serves as senior managing director at M3 Partners. His current biography describes more than 25 years of financial and operational experience, over 100 special situation investments and more than $40 billion in debt and equity transactions. It also records his work as COO and CFO of Noragh Analytics, including its carve-out from Boeing and eventual acquisition by Ankura.
In 2026, he is running as a Republican for Pennsylvania's sixth congressional district. His campaign places his experience repairing troubled organizations at the center of his case for public office. He lives in West Chester with his wife, Sandy, and their four children. The geography has brought him back to the community where his story began.
The new pursuit puts his old question in another setting. Companies, insurance systems and government all have people depending on them, and all can become very accomplished at preserving their own arrangements. Young's career keeps returning to the point where those arrangements stop working for somebody. At Buckle, that somebody was a driver trying to earn a living. The spreadsheet mattered because the driver did.