Cascade #24 - Zac Townsend: Building the World’s First Life Insurance Company Denominated in Bitcoin
Zac Townsend, the co-founder of Meanwhile—a life insurer where everything runs on Bitcoin: premiums, payouts, and reserves.
Zac grew up watching his father work as a postal clerk by day and study for his BA, MA, and PhD by night. That early exposure to discipline, sacrifice, and long-term ambition shaped everything that came next—from studying finance not to join Wall Street, but to understand how the system worked, to working in civic tech under Cory Booker, where he was tasked with figuring out why people in West Newark didn’t have bank accounts.
That question sparked a decade-long journey into financial infrastructure: first at Stripe, then co-founding Standard Treasury—an early banking-as-a-service startup later acquired by SVB.
Now, with Meanwhile, Zac is going even deeper. Backed by Sam Altman and licensed in Bermuda, he’s building a Bitcoin-native life insurer designed to protect families in places where inflation makes traditional savings impossible—like Nigeria, Argentina, and even parts of the U.S.
It’s simple: customers pay in Bitcoin, receive payouts in Bitcoin, and hold policies that grow in value—not lose it.
We talked about his life as a founder and father, why traditional life insurance is broken, what most entrepreneurs get wrong about focus, and how Meanwhile could help lay the foundation for a Bitcoin-based financial system.
Learn more and Zac and his company below: