life-insurance
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Michael Stocks Is Making Insurance Feel Less Like Paperwork
For more than a decade, Empire Life's marketing chief has worked on one stubborn problem: turning a consequential financial purchase into a process people can actually navigate.
Doyle Williams Spent 40 Years Learning How to Sell Certainty
Four decades in an industry that sells the one thing nobody wants to think about. How Protective Life's marketing chief turned distribution plumbing, digital tools and a stack of professional letters into a career built on quiet certainty.
Shana Sood
By day, Shana Sood turns customer signals into clearer financial choices. By night, she paints the memories and migrations that data cannot hold.
Melbourne O'Banion
Melbourne O'Banion is the co-founder and CEO of Bestow, a Dallas-based digital life insurance platform that shrunk a four-to-six-week underwriting process into a five-minute checkout. After stints founding Presidio Title and co-founding luxury skincare brand Beauty Bioscience with his wife, he teamed up with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 to build the first fully digital life insurance carrier, later pivoting into SaaS infrastructure for incumbent carriers. Bestow closed a $120M Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Smith Point Capital in May 2025.
Jon Cooper
Jon Cooper is the Co-founder and CEO of Overalls, a New York-based insurtech startup that pairs AI-augmented human concierge specialists with employees to handle life's logistics - from childcare coordination to medical billing to passport renewals. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and sold Life.io to Zinnia, Cooper brings 15+ years of insurance and healthcare strategy experience to Overalls, which was named to Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies of 2026. The company has raised $15.8M in funding and serves employers seeking to reduce employee stress and boost productivity through its LifeConcierge product.
Michael Konialian
Michael Konialian is the founder and CEO of Modern Life, an AI-powered life insurance brokerage built for financial advisors. After a winding path from aerospace structures at NASA to nuclear diplomacy at the U.S. State Department to scaling CoverWallet's advisor business into an Aon acquisition, he was floored by how confusing, invasive, and outdated it was to buy life insurance for his own family. Modern Life is his answer: a single dashboard that lets advisors pull instant quotes from 30-plus carriers and compress a process that once took six months into minutes. In November 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Thrive Capital, bringing total funding to $35M.
Patrick Bet-David
Patrick Bet-David is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, author, and media personality who fled Iran as a child refugee, served in the 101st Airborne Division, and built PHP Agency into a 40,000-agent life insurance firm before selling it for roughly $250 million. He founded Valuetainment, one of the most-watched business YouTube channels in the world, and hosts the PBD Podcast - a long-form show spanning politics, culture, and business with millions of listeners. A Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 'Your Next Five Moves' and 'Choose Your Enemies Wisely,' Bet-David is known for blunt straight talk, a relentless work ethic forged in a German refugee camp, and a genuine belief that every refugee or immigrant story can have a second act.
Dustin Yoder
Dustin Yoder is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sureify, a San Jose-based insurtech SaaS company that builds a low-code, cloud-native platform helping life insurance and annuity carriers digitize their sales, service, and engagement operations. With roots in the insurance industry through his family's Silicon Valley brokerage, Yoder entered insurtech in 2012, making him one of the earliest pioneers in the space. Under his leadership, Sureify has grown to serve marquee carriers including State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, and Principal, reaching $38.9M in annual revenue by 2024 after raising $25M+ in total funding including a $15M Series C from Aspen Capital Group in 2021.
Jamie Hale
Jamie Hale is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ladder, the Palo Alto-based digital life insurance company that has issued over $42 billion in coverage and raised $194 million in venture funding. Motivated by losing his father at age 11 and experiencing firsthand the stabilizing power of a life insurance payout, Hale set out to strip the life insurance industry down to its essential truth: a pure, flexible term product that takes minutes to buy online, not weeks of paperwork. Ladder reached a $900 million valuation in its 2021 Series D and has tripled revenue year-over-year, making Hale one of the most prominent voices in insurtech.