Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 1: Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, if you check out the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg original series The Future with Hannah Fry, you may
Speaker 1: have come across an episode that looked into how a
Speaker 1: scientific revolution has begun, one that may bring the fantasy
Speaker 1: of immortality a little closer to reality, at least by
Speaker 1: a few decades. Anyway, researchers the world over are closing
Speaker 1: in on discoveries that may help humans live longer, perhaps
Speaker 1: well into their one hundreds. So we have lots of
Speaker 1: conversations and lots of questions about wellness and living longer
Speaker 1: and lifespans in general. In the meantime, investors, including Primetime Partners,
Speaker 1: are finding ways to bet on the world's aging population.
Speaker 1: So with us in our studio is Abby Miller Levy.
Speaker 1: She's co founder marging partner of the early stage venture
Speaker 1: capital firm focused on the trillion dollar global aging sector.
Speaker 1: There's a lot going on. The firm is Primetime Partners,
Speaker 1: co founded, by the way, with longtime venture capitalist Alan
Speaker 1: Patrick ofv Welcome. Thank you so much, coming a little
Speaker 1: bit so we can hear you, because we want to
Speaker 1: make sure it's absolutely talk to us a little bit
Speaker 1: about the aging space and how you guys think about
Speaker 1: it as investors, because there is a lot going on.
Speaker 1: But it could be you know, housing for people aging,
Speaker 1: it could be healthcare, So how do you think about it?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, there are so many parts of how we think
Speaker 2: about the longevity sector. And if you think about it
Speaker 2: this way, if you ask ARP, for example, they do
Speaker 2: surveys all the time of older adults and they say,
Speaker 2: what do you care about? And they care about their health,
Speaker 2: they care about financial independence, and they care about having
Speaker 2: meaningful experiences, and so that means basically, in my mind,
Speaker 2: gravity means all of health care, all of retirement and
Speaker 2: wealth management, all of consumer and media, and as well
Speaker 2: as housing and real estate, and so it's quite a
Speaker 2: broad industry. As investors, we're focused on the early stage
Speaker 2: and we age tech as it's now called, had about
Speaker 2: two point three trillion dollars of investments, sorry, billion dollars
Speaker 2: of invests just in twenty one and twenty two. It's
Speaker 2: really an emerging space. I liken it to where climate
Speaker 2: tech was twenty years ago. Everybody understood that climate change
Speaker 2: was not everyone, there was a widespread there was a
Speaker 2: lot of data. Yes, there was a lot of data
Speaker 2: that said climate change is happening and we need to
Speaker 2: address it as a society. This seismic shift in our age
Speaker 2: demographic that this is not new information. The fact that
Speaker 2: twenty five percent of the US population will be over
Speaker 2: the age of sixty five by twenty fifty thirty percent
Speaker 2: in Japan, this is not new information. The question is
Speaker 2: how do we adapt to it, the same way that
Speaker 2: the climate tech industry and has had to adapt to
Speaker 2: this new reality. So that's how we really think about it.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of opportunity, but we have to in
Speaker 2: some ways prompt and nudge and push on the urgency
Speaker 2: of the topic.
Speaker 3: Well, there are a lot of problems then to be solved, right,
Speaker 3: because especially if people are retiring at sixty five seventy
Speaker 3: and they've on the financial side of it, they're ready
Speaker 3: for maybe another twenty years, possibly thirty, But what the
Speaker 3: data is showing is that they could go for another
Speaker 3: fifty years. Right, So absolutely, I guess there are problems
Speaker 3: that need to be solved in terms of how they
Speaker 3: finance it. The healthcare bill is going to be off
Speaker 3: the charts, right, and then for meaningful experiences where they
Speaker 3: going to.
Speaker 2: Do absolutely well. You know, one of the most pressing
Speaker 2: problems is that fifty percent of Americans don't have retirement savings.
Speaker 1: That's what I think about. How if you're living longer, yay, yes,
Speaker 1: if you don't have the money to support yourself, not
Speaker 1: so great.
Speaker 2: Well, I think there's a few things. One is, you know,
Speaker 2: our individual choices. You know, average retirement age right now
Speaker 2: is sixty two. That hasn't changed much in the past
Speaker 2: few years. We are going to need to work longer,
Speaker 2: but that was incredibly young exactly. Then you have forty
Speaker 2: more years of basically acid dcumulation versus A cumulation, and
Speaker 2: so that is a major choice we have to make.
Speaker 2: And are also given agism in the workplace and things
Speaker 2: like that. We need to really work on workforce longevity,
Speaker 2: but also real changes in forcing retirement savings and so
Speaker 2: really excited that the government do that. Well. A couple
Speaker 2: of things. The Secure Act two point zero was the
Speaker 2: first time that by twenty twenty five, employers who offer
Speaker 2: four to one k's are going to have auto enrollment.
Speaker 2: In other words, instead of saying to someone at twenty, hey,
Speaker 2: would you like to save now, do just do it,
Speaker 2: and there have been studies done by Bank of America
Speaker 2: that show basically that increases participation by five x. And
Speaker 2: so what Oftentimes, in my role as an investor in
Speaker 2: the space, friends and family always ask me, you know, Abby,
Speaker 2: what's the secret to longevity? As if I know some
Speaker 2: secret pill. And by the way, there's a huge biotech
Speaker 2: industry focus on this. I always say, and they're very
Speaker 2: just kind of it's not as sexy an answer, but
Speaker 2: I say, max out your four to one k that's
Speaker 2: the secret to longevity, because if you don't have financial longevity,
Speaker 2: you will not have a lesser chance of having a
Speaker 2: decent health span. And we are starting to see that
Speaker 2: people in their twenty and thirties right now are investing
Speaker 2: at higher rates in their four to one k's than before.
Speaker 2: And in fact, one of our portfolio companies is called Penelope.
Speaker 2: What they do is they allow solopreneurs and micro business
Speaker 2: owners to offer four to one k's at reasonable prices,
Speaker 2: because as a small business owner or even a gig
Speaker 2: economy worker, you should be able to have your own
Speaker 2: four to one k and as a self employed person,
Speaker 2: so we really see that as an opportunity in terms
Speaker 2: of retirement savings to think about that. The other interesting
Speaker 2: part of the industry is really going to be around
Speaker 2: acid dcumulation. Most of our financial services sector is focused
Speaker 2: on accumulation. If you think about decumulation, this is everything
Speaker 2: from now that you have these four to one k's
Speaker 2: most people they're sitting in. First of all, most people
Speaker 2: have an average of seven retirement accounts. If you have
Speaker 2: retirement accounts, because every time you move employers or out
Speaker 2: of work and do a roth IRA or an IRA,
Speaker 2: then you have all these accounts and they are these
Speaker 2: small sums of money sitting typically in passive investment accounts.
Speaker 2: So another business we really like is a business called
Speaker 2: Retireble that basically allows you to put them all together
Speaker 2: and then look at, actually, how do we invest or
Speaker 2: think about even drawing a paycheck our retirement saving so
Speaker 2: you're really thinking about it differently. And also, of course
Speaker 2: home equity. You know, the majority of older adults eighty
Speaker 2: seven percent own their have home equity, and so how
Speaker 2: do you think about that as a bank account, and
Speaker 2: really without the punitive products that may have existed or
Speaker 2: this you know, sense of it is, it has only
Speaker 2: emergency funding. How do you really think about it actively
Speaker 2: as funding.
Speaker 1: You do say early stage that you guys go into,
Speaker 1: where are you seeing the most kind of company creation?
Speaker 1: Is it in the financial products? Is it in how
Speaker 1: we live? Is it how we experience? Is it healthcare?
Speaker 2: It's absolutely in healthcare. Yeah, so two thirds of our
Speaker 2: investing is in healthcare, and healthcare, you know, is still
Speaker 2: the largest, you know, one of the largest contributors of
Speaker 2: our society. And older adults consume two thirds of all
Speaker 2: health care spent. So there's really incentives on everybody side.
Speaker 2: The government that pays for sixty five percent of older
Speaker 2: Americans health care, the health plans, insures, and you know,
Speaker 2: pharmac everybody is incentive to figure out how we take
Speaker 2: better care of older adults.
Speaker 1: So how do you So what do you invest in?
Speaker 1: I'm curious the kind of companies that are come up
Speaker 1: on your radar and you say, okay, this is something
Speaker 1: of interest.
Speaker 2: Absolutely Honestly, you follow the money, and where the money
Speaker 2: is is basically in figuring out how to reduce the
Speaker 2: cost of care and how to make care more accessible.
Speaker 2: If I had to bucket it into two buckets. Again,
Speaker 2: we don't do pharm our biotech, So that's something that's
Speaker 2: not in our purview, but within our purview, it's reducing
Speaker 2: cost of care. So, for example, anything that would prevent
Speaker 2: an older adult from hospitalization. A hospitalization can cost a
Speaker 2: health plan anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. So
Speaker 2: reducing hospitalizations might be nutrition, might be, medication adherents might
Speaker 2: be fall prevention might be even things such as updating
Speaker 2: your home to make sure that there's safety within the home.
Speaker 2: So we've invested in several solutions that sell into health
Speaker 2: plans to say, hey, let's prevent these hospitalizations that have
Speaker 2: clinical results and data to show we can prevent hospitalizations.
Speaker 2: So that's one example on the accessibility front. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm sure most of the listeners here recognize that COVID
Speaker 2: changed everything in terms of telemedicine.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Telemedicine wasn't a was very infrequently a reimbursable experience before COVID,
Speaker 2: but it was basically built into our healthcare system now
Speaker 2: as a way to deliver care. So we've invested in
Speaker 2: many businesses that frankly make telemedicine more accessible from an
Speaker 2: infrastructure layer, a company called open Loop, and then about
Speaker 2: a third of our investments use telemedicine as a delivery
Speaker 2: and accessibility mechanism. And we're looking at other businesses, you know,
Speaker 2: and I know everyone's very focused on AI, you know,
Speaker 2: within healthcare. What's really interesting is you think about the
Speaker 2: word care. Healthcare, particularly for older adults, has always been
Speaker 2: a service business. There's a human involved. And where does
Speaker 2: AI do a wonderful job? It does a wonderful job
Speaker 2: of making human interactions faster, easier, and more personalized.
Speaker 1: We talk about this. I don't know if this is
Speaker 1: where you're going. And forgive me if I'm like off
Speaker 1: in a crazy way, but just this whole idea of
Speaker 1: older people who are who are lonely, this idea of
Speaker 1: creating a robot or something that can I know, Matt,
Speaker 1: you're looking at me like I'm crazy, but I've seen
Speaker 1: it firsthand and it's devastating. And whether there can be
Speaker 1: in interactions. I know you think.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's crazy. I did a story on
Speaker 3: that like twenty years ago. My thing is, I wonder
Speaker 3: how high valuations are right now, because I'm sure a
Speaker 3: lot of people want to get into this space. It's
Speaker 3: an incredible demographic, right.
Speaker 1: Sure, Well, I just got about twenty seconds important.
Speaker 2: So robots we're less excited about. We're excited about technology
Speaker 2: enabling meetups, live, you know, experiences. It's really human to human.
Speaker 2: But on valuations, just like everybody else, valuations have come
Speaker 2: down back to i'd say, you know, twenty nineteen levels
Speaker 2: on many companies. But because we invest early stage, early
Speaker 2: stage has largely been protected from the valuation perspective. I
Speaker 2: think the one thing that has changed is people are
Speaker 2: focused on profitability and making their money last.
Speaker 1: We have to run, come back soon. We'll do all right,
Speaker 1: Abby Miller Levy. She's a co founder managing partner at
Speaker 1: Primetime Partners. Here in Studio