The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.
1985
🌱
1985
Founded as a phone-based insurance agency
Agents compare term-life policies by telephone, decades before the Medicare pivot.
Wikipedia
May 2020
📈
May 2020
The peak: IPO pops toward $4.4B$4.4B
Prices at a $3.25B valuation and jumps on debut — unicorn status and the peak in one move — as Medicare Advantage comparison-selling has its moment.
Insurance Journal
2021
2021
The persistency reckoning
A cohort-and-tail accounting adjustment reveals policyholders lapsing faster than modeled; earnings and the stock crater.
Insurance Journal
2021
💔
2021
Slips out of the club
The market cap drops below $1B as the persistency assumptions unravel.
stockanalysis
2022–25
💬
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–25
Glassdoor reviews from the years after the crash centered on the seasonal churn of the agent model — hiring waves before the fall Medicare-enrollment window, post-season culls and steep pay cuts after — plus repeated commission restructures reviewers said shrank take-home pay, and performance metrics that kept shifting.
May 2025
May 2025
DOJ kickback suit
The Justice Department sues major Medicare Advantage brokers, SelectQuote among them, alleging illegal carrier kickbacks.
DOJ
💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.
How it happened
SelectQuote is an online insurance marketplace, best known for selling Medicare Advantage and life-insurance policies through agents and comparison tools, and its May 2020 IPO popped to value it around $4.4B.
Like its peer GoHealth, its model depended on commission and policy-persistency assumptions that deteriorated: a 2021 cohort-and-tail adjustment exposed lower-than-expected policy retention, and the stock cratered, falling about 96% to roughly $150M.
Source: Insurance Journal / Nasdaq / stockanalysis ($3.25B IPO valuation May 2020, jumped to ~$4.4B; policy-persistency 'cohort' adjustment hit shares 2021; ~$157M market cap by 2026, -96%)
Who ran it
Tim Danker
CEO (since 2017)
Still there — Chief Executive Officer · LinkedIn ↗
Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-19. See our methodology.
