The insurance industry isn't known for colorful founding lore. Growth tends to be measured in acquisitions, headcount, and margin improvement – not in stories about fraternity brothers, long-running friendships, or unconventional leadership paths.
And yet that contrast helps explain what makes ALKEME’s leadership structure interesting (and successful).
For Curtis Barton, CEO of ALKEME Insurance, Troy Chakarun, Chief Commercial Officer, and Josh Benveniste, Chief Corporate Strategy Officer, the company was not the product of a startup fantasy sketched out years earlier. It came together far more gradually. The friendship was established first. The careers came next. Only later did the business case become obvious.
The three first met as fraternity brothers at the University of Arizona. At the time, there was no clear professional overlap. Barton was already leaning toward insurance; Chakarun and Benveniste were not. Their interests diverged early, and their careers followed different paths after graduation.
They stayed in touch, but not in a way that suggested they would eventually run a company together. For years, their connection looked more like what it was – long-standing friendship, occasional conversations, and a shared familiarity built over time.
The shift came later, as those individual paths began to reconnect professionally.
It happened gradually, as those earlier relationships evolved into more formal collaboration. Benveniste initially began working with Barton in a limited capacity, supporting branding, marketing and digital efforts. It was less a formal role and more a practical collaboration. At the same time, Barton and Chakarun, who had spent years informally discussing business ideas, began to take those conversations more seriously.
Each brought something the others did not. Barton had the industry depth. Chakarun understood how to structure and scale within complex organizations. Benveniste brought an entrepreneurial lens and experience building outside the industry entirely.
“If we’re going to do something different with insurance,” Barton says, “we need people who aren’t coming from the traditional retail brokerage side. People who are adjacent to the industry but not shaped by it. That’s how you create a different point of view.”
That thinking guided how the leadership team took shape.
Benveniste admits, “I didn’t know what insurance was other than it not being a sexy industry,” he says. His early path moved from pre-med into technology, where he built and ran companies. It was only later, after seeing Barton’s work more closely, that his view shifted. “That’s when it became real. It’s a strong industry. And if you can work with people you trust, that changes the equation.”
Chakarun’s experience added a different layer. He spent years as a producer in the financial services industry before moving into management, building business units within larger organizations. That background gave him a clear understanding of how to introduce structure without slowing growth.
The more durable advantage may be how the three interact.
“We can challenge each other directly,” Barton says. “There’s no protectionism.” In practice, that means disagreements are addressed quickly. They do not carry the same weight they often do in more hierarchical or newly formed leadership teams.
Benveniste attributes that to history. “When you’ve known each other this long, there’s no need to manage around personalities,” he says. “You can be direct and move forward.”
Chakarun describes the effect in operational terms. It removes unnecessary obstacles. It allows the group to focus on decisions rather than internal dynamics. That approach is difficult to replicate without time. In this case, it existed before the company did.
As ALKEME has grown, culture has become more visible in how decisions are made.
Barton is explicit about the trade-offs. Not every acquisition or partnership is worth pursuing. Alignment matters.
“A lot of firms will do deals just to do deals,” he says. “We look at whether it actually fits what we’re trying to build.”
The reasoning is practical. Misalignment shows up later, often in ways that are harder to correct. It can affect execution, retention and overall cohesion. Chakarun frames the same idea through structure. The business needs enough process to scale effectively, but not so much that it becomes difficult to operate. “You want the right amount of structure with the least amount of bureaucracy,” he says.
The more revealing part of the model is not how the group works when things are straightforward. It is how decisions are made when trade-offs are real.
Barton is clear that culture is preserved through choices – often ones that have a visible economic cost in the short term.
“There are culture killers you can introduce without realizing it,” he says, pointing to decisions like resetting producer compensation or pushing through misaligned partnerships. “You can make those decisions look right on a spreadsheet, but they can damage how people trust the organization.”
Growth creates pressure to standardize, to optimize, to extract efficiency. But those moves can also erode the conditions that made growth possible in the first place. The group’s response is not to avoid structure, but to question how far it should go.
Chakarun describes it as maintaining enough structure to support scale without introducing unnecessary friction. “It’s about the right amount of structure with the least amount of noise,” he says.
Many companies adopt structure by default as they grow, often importing more than they need. ALKEME’s approach appears more selective. Structure is introduced where it enables scale, not where it simply mirrors larger firms.
Underlying the discussion is a broader critique of how insurance firms tend to operate.
Barton is direct. Too many companies repeat the same approach to recruitment, training and growth. The result is consistency, but not necessarily progress.
“If you want to change the business,” he says, “you have to bring in people who haven’t been shaped by all the same assumptions.”
That is the rationale behind pulling from adjacent backgrounds. It’s not about rejecting industry knowledge. It is about avoiding dependence on it.
Benveniste’s perspective reflects that shift. Coming from outside, he is less tied to how things have traditionally been done. “There are a lot of companies doing the same thing every day,” he says. “We’re trying to approach it differently.”
Chakarun connects that to talent. Making the industry more relevant to younger professionals is not a side initiative. It is a requirement if the business is going to sustain itself over time.
For all the discussion of structure, culture and strategy, the group’s stated objective is straightforward.
“We want to change the perception of insurance,” Barton says.
Benveniste frames it in more practical terms. The goal is to build something that operates differently and that people want to be part of. “We took a different approach,” he says. “And we had fun doing it.” It’s an approach rooted in a relationship that began years earlier, long before ALKEME was formed.
This article was produced in partnership with ALKEME Insurance
