Ignite Startups: Fixing Insurance for Small Businesses Using AI with Tanner Hackett | Ep268

What if insurance isn’t actually about protection—but about who understands risk better than anyone else?

Tanner Hackett has spent his career at the edge of massive shifts—helping build Lazada into Southeast Asia’s e-commerce backbone, then co-founding Button to ride the mobile commerce wave. Now he’s the founder and CEO of Counterpart, an insurtech company rebuilding small business insurance with AI-driven underwriting, real-time risk insights, and a growing dataset across 35,000+ policies.

In this episode, Tanner breaks down why insurance—one of the largest financial markets in the world—still runs on outdated assumptions, and how Counterpart is quietly rewriting the math.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss

• 00:01– Introduction and Tanner Hackett Background
• 00:33– Early Career: Lazada and Southeast Asia E-commerce
• 01:30– Building Button and Mobile Commerce Insights
• 02:03– Founding Counterpart and Shift to Insurance
• 02:19– Initial Idea: HR Tech to Insurtech Pivot
• 04:11– What’s Broken in Insurance Today
• 06:15– Why Previous Insurtech Startups Failed
• 08:16– Understanding MGA and Insurance Business Model
• 09:16– Why Now Is the Right Time for Counterpart
• 11:49– Rethinking Value in Insurance
• 13:07– Insurance Categories Counterpart Focuses On
• 17:28– Distribution vs Underwriting Bottlenecks
• 19:45– Data Advantage and Underwriting at Scale
• 21:25– Insurance Basics for Startups
• 27:02– Counterpart’s End-to-End Platform Approach
• 29:28– AI, Data Infrastructure, and Pricing Risk
• 33:48– Building a Data Moat in Insurance
• 35:10– Founder Advice: Reducing Risk and Lowering Premiums
• 38:05– Real-World Claims and Insurance Stories
• 39:21– Fintech and HR Tech Companies Tanner Admires
• 40:58– Long-Term Vision for Counterpart
• 42:29– Closing Thoughts and Future of Insurance

“Insurance is a math problem—but most of the industry is still pricing to averages.”

“Every dollar paid out on a bad claim gets passed on to the next customer. That’s the system we’re fixing.”

Tanner’s journey started with marketplaces and marketing tech. Now he’s building a company where the product isn’t just coverage—it’s understanding risk at a level traditional insurers never could. Because in the end, the companies that win in insurance aren’t the ones with the biggest balance sheets. They’re the ones who see the risks others miss.

Follow Tanner Hackett on LinkedIn: inLinkedIn

Follow Tanner Hackett on X: XX