Modernizing Life Insurance with Melbourne O’Banion, CEO and Co-Founder of Bestow
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Miguel Armaza is joined by Melbourne O’Banion, CEO and Co-Founder of Bestow, a digital life insurance company leveraging technology to make protection accessible and affordable. Bestow has received over $68 million in equity financing from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, NEA, Morpheus Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, Abstract Ventures, Sammons Financial, 8VC.

Melbourne O’Banion is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bestow, a digital life insurance company leveraging technology to make protection accessible and affordable. Through data-driven technology applications and innovative products, Bestow is changing the way life insurance is perceived and purchased. He is an entrepreneur and investor with expertise in fintech and direct-to-consumer businesses. Among his startups, he was a founding member of Presidio Title, a leading title insurance agency in Texas. He is also co-founder of Beauty Bioscience, a skincare line sold via TV shopping channels and luxury retailers. Melbourne is a member of the National Advisory Council for the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and is on the board of the SMU Tate Lecture Series. He is a graduate of BYU and studied Finance and Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

Bestow is an insurance technology company that builds products and software that make life insurance accessible to millions of families. In addition to its direct-to-consumer arm, Bestow provides industry-first APIs enabling partners to offer bespoke life insurance coverage to their customers with ease. Bestow is reshaping the life industry as the insurance company of the future. The company is headquartered in Texas with offices in Dallas and Austin. Learn more at www.bestow.com

In this episode, Melbourne shares:

• His background as a serial entrepreneur and what drove him to life insurance.
• Why he and his co-founder decided to avoid third party software solutions and, instead, built an insurance product along with its integrated software from scratch. And why this decision has made a huge positive difference.
• Reasoning behind Bestow’s entry market strategy.
• Finding product-market fit and how they decided what customer segment to focus on
• Bestow’s key partnerships, ranging from traditional life insurance companies to Fintechs like Acorns, Chime, Stash, Moneylion, and more.
• The importance of hiring a great team, establishing company principles early on, and leading and hiring by those principles.
• Famous Texas Hospitality. The advantages of launching a startup in Texas and why he thinks there isn’t a better place in the US to start a company.
• How the COVID-19 crisis has awakened a lot of people to a sense of their own mortality and what this has meant for the life insurance business.
• The state of InsurTech and why he thinks new entrants in the insurance space will have to do something radically new and different to differentiate themselves.
• Valuable advice for entrepreneurs and aspiring founders.