Randy Talbot could have taken the money and embarked on an amateur squash career.

Safeco's top managers offered him that, he says -- a sizable golden handshake that would allow him to sail off into the sunset after helping them find a suitable buyer for the life insurance division he'd been running for them.

Instead, he decided to form a new company. He put together an investment group that bought Safeco's life insurance arm for $1.35 billon. He kept together his management team and some 1,300 employees around Puget Sound. He moved the company from Redmond to two gleaming office towers in Bellevue. And he took the company right up to the edge of an initial public offering last fall before pulling back to wait out the Wall Street financial storm.

'He's just a great strategic business thinker and leader,' says Bellevue Chamber of Commerce CEO Betty Nokes. 'He's plugged in and engaged.'

The east side of Lake Washington is filled with sexy high-tech startups promising to change the world -- or at least the way we manage our day books. Amid them, Symetra's an anomaly. It sells life insurance and annuities. It doesn't get much more old-school than that.

Talbot learned all about the difference when he moved here during the height of the first tech boom. 'I was referred to, in social gatherings I went to, as 'old economy.' Running a life insurance company didn't seem to be in step with what was happening on the eastside.'

But don't tell Talbot that insurance isn't a glamorous game.

'I liked it from the first day I was in it. It's such a vital part of the economy. I always thought it was a noble cause, and a great way to make a living,' he says.

But then, you'd almost expect that from a guy who's really only had two jobs in his life. He started out as an insurance broker in his native New Mexico, running the company his dad had founded. When Safeco bought out Talbot Financial Corp. in 1998, he moved up north to Seattle and started climbing the Safeco executive ladder.

Safeco's decision in 2004 to spin off its life insurance unit -- a move it needed to make to raise capital and allow it to focus on its casualty insurance business -- launched Talbot on the biggest adventure of his career.

The day Safeco announced the decision was 'one of the hardest days of my life,' Talbot says. Everyone inside the company's old Redmond office was shell-shocked, he recalls. 'I wasn't emotionally in very good shape.'

Conventional wisdom was that Safeco would sell off the different pieces of the business separately, likely to buyers that would move the separate parts to Iowa, which has a friendly regulatory environment and has become an insurance industry center.

But Talbot turned down the Safeco board's offer of a big payday in return for helping sell off the unit. 'Pretty instantly, it hit me that there were 1,300 people and a 42-year-old company that didn't de- serve not to have a future.'

The problem was, he says, 'I didn't know what to do about that.' He had some experience raising capital to do merger deals, but this would far exceed any of those.

The first step was to steady the rank-and-file. He says he told his people to 'take care of our customers, take care of our agents. Work hard -- it's our only chance to save the place.'

And then he tried to rally his management team around his vision of 'playing through the clouds and hoping there wasn't a mountain inside.'