Zac Townsend (Meanwhile) on Bitcoin Life Insurance (EP.644)
Episode publishedPodcast: On The Brink with Castle Islan...On The Brink with Castle Island
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Today on the podcast, I sat down with Zach Townsend, the founder of Meanwhile. Meanwhile is building a Bitcoin denominated life insurance company. In this conversation, we discuss the mechanics of the product and how Zach sees the broader Bitcoin capital market sector evolving in the next few years. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Zach Townsend.
Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and those may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought
down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85,000,000,000. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The
federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped £75,000,000,000 more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin Bitcoin. Zach,
thanks for coming on the podcast today. Excited to talk about Bitcoin life insurance. We have never talked about that on this podcast before.
We're the only ones. Thanks for having me, Matt.
Would love to just start with your background and what led you to this idea, which is quite a novel one.
Like anything in life, it's somewhat complicated. On the one hand, I have a background in fintech. So I moved out to San Francisco, worked at Stripe for a bit, went through Y Combinator with a company called Standard Ivory, backed by Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, and the others. And we built banking infrastructure or banking APIs. I am very interested in the business of banking. We thought about starting a bank. So I was thinking a lot about what do you do on the loan side of a bank. It has that all sort of fit together. At the same time, this is, like, twenty thirteen,
That's an incredible story. I think a lot of people probably interact with life insurance maybe from, like, a term life policy. So they just make a payment, and it's probably on auto debit from their account, and they don't think too much about it. There's a whole another type of life insurance, their whole life policies, which not actually sure if those are more popular or less popular than term, but maybe just talk a little bit about how insurance works today and then how you guys are approaching it with Bitcoin being the core asset as opposed to dollars.
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