The Startup Ideas Podcast - Why You Should Start a Business For Older Adults

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

There’s a giant opportunity in helping older adults live a more vibrant, empowering life throughout their later years. Today we’re joined by John Zapolski, the founder and CEO of Alive Ventures, to better understand that opportunity. John is dedicated to building products and services that cater to older adults, and has developed a co-design system that allows them to be part of the process. On this episode we cover the future of smart wallets, Bing’s search engine, Greg’s security deposit business idea, and then bring in John to discuss several startup ideas geared towards older adults. Interested in developing these startup ideas further? Join us in the Discord.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comTHIS EPISODEJohn Zapolski: https://twitter.com/jzapolskiSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSThis episode is also brought to you by MarketerHire. MarketerHire provides on-demand access to pre-vetted, top-tier marketers who can freelance as much or as little as needed.They’ve made it easy to hire great marketers. With pre-vetted talent and expert hand-matching, you can add a proven marketer to your team in less than a week.Go to marketerhire.com to learn more.a

You've got this whole population of older adults who are basically in this position of like wanting to get started and they don't know how. And I think that's where a lot of startup opportunities are. Like how do you lower the barrier to entry, make older adults feel comfortable, make them feel like they're not going to be ridiculed for being there. They're not going to get taken advantage of for being there. But like activate some of those behaviors that they've been saving up and they just need like a little nudge to start doing the stuff they always thought they were going to do. What's up, man. Good to see you. How you doing?

I'm good, dude. The sun is shining. The Northeast has finally decided that it's spring. It's like, I think it's 70 out. I've got some trees in the front of our house. And they were pissing me off because they look dead, like dead winter. And now all of a sudden I'm looking at my window and they've got this like amazing, you know, white blooming flowers on them. And so I'm pretty excited.

It feels like, it feels like springtime here. Spring is in the air. Are you in Miami or Montreal right now? I'm in Miami. Okay. So I'm in Miami. I'm looking out on the water. I'm feeling inspired.

What would you want to talk about today? Well, I want to start with a quick recap on how Bitcoin Week was because you just experienced that. I had to miss it. You know, we're on like full baby watch, as you know. And so I couldn't exactly play the political capital of like, hey, sweetheart, I'm going to go, you know, down to Bitcoin Week and party with my friends for a week. while you're 36 weeks pregnant or whatever we're at now. So decided not to play that card.

Go to save it for NFT week in the fall in New York. Well, we missed you. I actually didn't go to the Bitcoin event. I know there was 25,000 people who went to that event, which is wild. I will say that our buddy Bobak had a pass that was one of those. They were called a whale pass. Okay. And they were literally 17,000.

$1,000 for the pass. Only at Bitcoin Week will they charge you $17,000 to get a quote-unquote whale pass to get access to the event. And people are paying for it. Were people paying in Bitcoin? I'm not sure. I mean, I assume so. I just got my tax bill, right? Like it's, so it's tax season. We're filming this on April 13th. And I was just texting you about the pain and ask that is crypto taxes and trying to figure out what used. And there's like all these different software tools that have come out that are trying to solve this problem. My general opinion is that like most of them aren't quite there yet. I've used and tried several of them. I used coin tracker this year. And I thought it was quite good actually on recommendation from Alexis, a prior guest who I think was like a pre-seed or seed investor in it. I thought it was quite good. One of the things that shocked me, which it shouldn't have shocked me, but it did, is like I invested in a company and I invested in Bitcoin. I was making a $10,000 investment in a company. And rather than doing it

in cash, for some reason, I didn't think about it. And I was like, I'm just going to send you Bitcoin because it was a crypto company. And that's a freaking taxable event. And so I didn't invest $10,000. I invested $10,000 plus whatever the taxable gain was on that $10,000 from whenever I'd bought it, which was at a really low cost basis. And so like, I was so annoyed at myself because I literally just didn't think about it. And the company I invested that in is a dud. And so it's probably going to zero. Like, can't write it off yet. And it's just like, I just had never thought about it, that that's a taxable event for all of these things. So people when they're like, oh, I bought this car in Bitcoin or I bought, you know, my pass to this thing in Bitcoin, maybe they're just not declaring that stuff. But the reality

is those are all taxable events right now. Yeah. So my reaction to that is I know people who have a bunch of apes and a bunch of punks and who basically set up individual wallets and who are not paying taxes on it. So they're selling these eight for hundreds of thousand dollars and they're not paying taxes on it. So I mean, I think it's a terrible idea. Like obviously the IRS is going to,

I think they're going to figure this out at some point. And that's scary. I was like, dude, how do you sleep at night? Like, how are you sleeping at night? Today's episode is brought to you by Market or Hire. With marketer hire, you can get expert marketers on demand. It's easy and fast. What's marketer hire?

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Many of my startups in the portfolio are using marketer hire and absolutely love it. If you're a growing business, you will too. Check them out today at marketerhire.com. Again, that's marketerhire.com. And tell them Sahel sent you. Taxes are one of those interesting, it's one of those interesting things, right? because it's sort of a spectrum. Like you have on one end of the spectrum is like perfect compliance.

You pay every single dollar that you could possibly buy the rulebook. The other end of the spectrum is like pure fraud, right? You just don't pay a dollar in taxes and you like wait for them to come for you. And then somewhere in the middle is, you know, what feels like the Pareto optimal solution where you're like, yeah, I'm going to try to find shelters and do intelligent things to like not have to pay every dollar. But I'm also not going to get in trouble because it's all legal, right? And that's like, everyone complained about Donald Trump not paying taxes a few years ago and like his whole thing.

That is like the most common thing in the world, the real estate tax loopholes. I mean, we have friends who are like literally making multiple millions of dollars of cash income a year and paying zero dollars in taxes because they have all this depreciation off their real estate portfolios. It's like a well-known loophole that was created by the U.S. government in order to incentivize people to build and develop property. And so it's just, it's interesting to me. Because I do think that tax is one of those things where you kind of just need to decide where you're going to exist on that spectrum and then have a strategy.

And like clearly you're friends with the NFT thing, I would argue that's closer to the, you know, pure fraud end where you're just like there's clearly taxable events that you're just not going to declare. But it's going to be really hard for the government to figure out and have the resources to police this stuff. I mean, the complexities of understanding wallets and flows for a massive fraud are high enough. Like when they had to go through that big Bitcoin, you know, scam, the thing where that couple stole, you know, $4 billion in Bitcoin, that was so complex for them to do for this massive scam. Now imagine doing that for a random person with like, you know, $10,000 in gains. Like, does the U.S. government really have the resources to go police that? Yeah. So I don't know about that. And but I will say one thing. I will say I'm excited for the day when wallets do a better job at predicting. And basically, basically being like your taxman or tax woman on the shoulder and being like, hey, Sahel, you probably, just so you know, if you invest this, you know, 10 grand in Bitcoin, like, you're going to owe X amount of dollars in taxes. That's actually a brilliant.

It's a brilliant point. There's a brilliant idea there. And I think CoinTracker is trying to do that where, like, it's not integrated though. Like right now, CoinTracker, I think we'll let you do it where you can like put in what you're about to do and it'll tell you what the tax implication would be. but it is a really cool idea to integrate that into the wallet so that it's telling you in real time, here's the likely tax implication of doing this. Yeah, and I think that's where wallets are going.

Like, wallets are going from wallets to smart wallets, and they're going to be building a lot of this predictive technology into it. I hope that's where I'd imagine they're going. Do you think it's a, just like from a startup idea standpoint, Do you think that is going to be a incremental software solution that then sells into all the wallet companies? Like somebody focuses on just building that tax software piece and they sell it into Metamask, sell it into Rainbow, sell it into Phantom, like go to all the wallet companies and sell it in there? Or do you think it's going to be something that the individual companies have to build? So to me a wallet is very similar to how search engines were when the Internet starts.

So in the beginning, when the internet started, I'm sure you remember, there was like excite.com, as G's, Lycos, Yahoo, there were so many, right? And, you know, what do we use today? 90% of people use Google. Some people use Bing because it's the default on Windows. I'm consistently shocked by how many people use Bing, by the way. When you look up the stats on it, it's like sociopaths. I'm convinced it's only sociopaths that use Bing.

Full disclosure, I used Bing today. Proving my point. Only sociopaths use Bing. I'll talk about it. I'll explain why at the end. But my point about wallets being search engines is that eventually Google, you know, I remember the first time I used Google was this like magical experience where if you put like restaurants in New York City, you actually got amazing results.

and you actually got the results you wanted and then that basically built that trust between you and the search engine and then you said goodbye, ask Jeeves and hello Google forever. That is what's going to happen with wallet. So we're in the same experimentation zone, I would say, with wallets. Like people are trying different types of wallets. One wallet is going to win. And I believe that that consumer experience, like Google didn't go in like

license the technology to do the predictive technology for, you know, when you type in New York, it, you know, it predicts city. They built it from scratch. So I think a lot of it is going to be built from scratch and it's going to be these unique consumer applications. But I will say for people listening, it's a massive opportunity right now to be experimenting with wallets. Yeah, it's super interesting. And by the way, I just pulled it up while you were talking about it, Bing, 126 million unique U.S. users. Apparently, like, half of the U.S. still searches on Bing, which says to me that half of the U.S. is sociopaths like you.

Well, that's a good segue. So I'll explain why I use Bing today. So, and, you know, I'm slightly embarrassed to say this, but I got a PC the other day. Is everything okay? No, honestly, I got a PC. and are you going into finance it's weird saying that i got a pc because i run a design agency and like we have a bunch of some of the most amazing designers in the world and like they love mac um and i love mac too but i got a pc to try it out and i will say that windows 11 is almost as good as macOS

i know this is going to be people are going to hate on me but until you try windows 11 it's actually a fantastic product. And Windows, like, machines, like, for what you can buy for, like, $1,500, $2,000, it's, like, so, so amazing and so quick. So I'm loving my Windows experience. And Microsoft Edge, which is their browser, comes pre-installed with Bing, which is why I use Bing today. Ah, okay. So that's got to be the whole driver of these numbers then.

Yes. I wonder how many people opt in to Bing versus, like, just get defaulted into it. Negative. Yeah. Yeah. I do, I mean, I do remember just like, I'm a big fan of funny marketing campaigns and like creative marketing campaigns. And I did think when Bing first came out and they did that like Bing challenge where you would search, you know, six things or five things. And then you would click which search results you liked more. And it would tell you if you liked Bing more than boring than Google. I thought that was like a pretty creative and neat way of doing it. So interesting to know, Zigwin, other people zag on getting the computer, Greg. I'm proud of you. I'm a reformed. you know, private equity guy. So being on a Mac is like the biggest joy in the world now after spending, you know, as many years as I did on a PC working in Excel. Well, so I actually don't

remember that the Bing challenge, but that's actually a really brilliant idea. And I'm a big fan of like, you know, marketing stunts like that that speak to the core of the product. I think that's really smart. It reminds me of, do you remember the Pepsi challenge? Yeah, I was going to say they ripped off the Pepsi challenge. Yeah. What was that? From what I remember, I actually went to a town, you know, I grew up in Montreal, and there's this town across the border called Plattsburgh, New York. And we used to go there to, like, go to, like, Walmart and all these American, and get, like, American food and, like, candy and, like, bad things for us, basically. And I remember going to the shopping mall in Plattsburgh, and there was the Pepsi Challenge. This is, like, in the mid-90s, I would say.

And they basically, you know, they're like, hey, kid, you want to try this, do the challenge? I was like, okay. And they basically gave you a cup of like, I think it was like two. It was a blind taste test. Yeah, it was a blind taste test. Yeah. And it was, you know, it was awesome. It was fun.

It was interactive. And it was an introduction to Pepsi. And it's, and what it was smart is that a lot of people have this brand loyalty to Coke. and it challenged that. Yeah, the classic, though, with it was they missed because what ended up happening was that it showed that people preferred Pepsi and they used it as this big win. It turned out that Pepsi's like a little sweeter. I'm not a big soda guy, but Pepsi's a little bit sweeter.

And so I guess like in the small amount that they were giving you, you were more likely to pick Pepsi, but then people actually preferred Coke for like drinking a full amount that you would actually get. And so it was like they missed on something, but we're sitting here and we're sitting here and we're still talking about it. So clearly they did something right. I mean, they're a massive conglomerate now, and they own a bunch of different things. I do want to talk about before we have our guest on, I know you had an idea that you texted me, business idea that you wanted to jam through.

So we can either talk about it now or we can wait for the guest and we can jam through it with him, whatever you prefer. I don't know if I can wait. I want to get right into it. So I texted, we have a group chat idea of the day. We basically come up with an idea of the day. It's actually a really good forcing function to do with your friends. Like go and create a group chat with your friends.

Call it IOD idea of the day. And just be like, hey, everyone, we're going to come up with an idea. Some days are going to be good. Some days are going to be bad, but just like put it out there and get feedback. So that's what we have. Highly recommend doing this. Yeah. Highly recommend doing this.

One of my idea of the day group chats has now led to a microsas platform that we actually built and are rolling out. And that I think is going to be like a multi-sacept. seven-figure win. So ideas of the day, big hack. So I texted on the weekend. Actually, I talked about it on the pod. So on the pod, I talked about, I think it was, yeah, it should be coming out soon, but I talked about, on the My First Million podcast, I was talking about how I have been having trouble getting my security deposit back from my apartment rental.

and how I wanted a service, I would pay for a service to basically send a lawyer's letter to get my security deposit back. And that got me thinking that there's a business idea here. So here's the idea. The idea is, actually, let me pull up the text thread and I'll read it to you exactly. So idea of the day, a modern day security deposit platform for real estate. the tenant post the security deposit, the landlord sees it. The tenant has the option to put the deposit into alternative assets, equities, or crypto. The tenant is happy because inflation isn't eating away at the deposit. The landlord is happy because the landlord splits the upside with the tenant. For example,

if the security deposit appreciates by 20%, the landlord takes 10%, the tenant takes 10%, minus the fees from the platform. If the security deposit depreciates, the tenant is on the hook to give at least the original security deposit back. This could be a wedge into a much larger real estate platform. So what this idea is basically doing is taking something that's like super old school. I literally had to give a check. I wrote out a check to my landlord and I said, here's this money. Give it back to me later. And he has this money. It's sitting in a separate bank account. he's not happy because he's not making money off that money. Like he could theoretically make money off that money.

And as you know, inflation is at 8.7 or whatever percent. And I'm not happy because when I get it back years later, it's worth so much less. So this is an idea that basically creates this internet platform that we can go on. I can see what's happening. You can put smart contracts into it so I don't have this situation where I can't get my money back. What do you think of this idea? So there's a handful of things I think about it. So first off, it triggered me to go down a rabbit hole a little bit on understanding

security deposits. I haven't rented in a few years. And so I'd kind of forgotten this whole, like, archaic system. And it depends on where you are. But generally speaking, they'll ask for at least one month rent, generally more. You know, I've had friends who have had to pay, like they're doing a multi-year lease. They have to put down a year of rent up front, which is insanity. But in certain markets, sometimes it's like first and last month rent that you put

is a security deposit. The sheer numbers on the dollars that are sitting in security deposits in the U.S. are insane. There's $45 billion tied up in security deposits sitting in stable checking accounts. So there's generally regulations in some states that say that the dollars from security deposits have to sit in, have to sit in checking accounts for the most part. there have been advancements now recently in legislation that have allowed for like more creative insurance products and different kind of takes on this. So I think the arrow of progress in terms of like unlocking these dollars is moving in the right direction. But the like pure just market size is massive. Like at any point in time there being 50 billion dollars, 45 billion dollars that are sitting getting zero

percent. It just strikes me as an opportunity. So that's that's my first reaction is like it definitely seems like there's a large enough size of the prize. I also think there's probably a few ways you could go about it. I think one way would be like, oh, I'm going to try to build this big venture backed platform in the space and like go create the alternative to security deposits. There have been a handful of companies who have tried to do this. Like there's a company called Obligo, I think, that I found that was like starting to try to do, you know, a security deposit alternative, like a completely different type of product. I think effectively most of them what they're trying to do is like they take on the underwriting of the tenant and say like, okay, we'll assess their risk and we'll

stand up for the security deposit, you know, in some, in some manner with, you know, a smaller amount due from the, um, due from the tenant. That's sort of to me is like the exact same thing as a security deposit. Um, and it's just someone else is bearing the risk versus versus the landlord. And so you can go with lower amounts. I think that your idea is more interesting than most of those because it plays to this kind of just like general theme of people wanting more control and more diversification and more access and like gamifying more of these things. And so when I look at it, like just on the surface, I think there's something interesting here. I think it just comes down to like how creatively do you go about building it out and then how do you build it? So I mentioned the venture backed one.

You could do that. I also think if you were like a hustler, you might be able to go to like 10 buildings and just say, hey, I'll partner with you. Let's do like I'll build this software out. You can have a much more creative way of doing this. And it'll be a, it'll be an attractive attraction point for you to drive in tenants as well. Yeah, I think, you know,

one of the things that was sort of initially stopping me from this idea, just to open, source my thinking was in certain states or certain provinces or whatever, like I know that, yet like you said it has to stay in a checkings account the but i don't think that should stop you from like going after this business so for example like Airbnb uber like if you look at a lot of local laws like you can't you know pre pre the app store like you couldn't like rent unless you're playing hotel tax uber like you're getting in a car with a stranger like these people aren't

like don't have licenses i think you know for the reason the reason they do that by way is that they want, they're protecting. So the law is there to protect the tenant from loss of those funds. So they don't want landlords taking all the money, having this like year of float or whatever, however many years of float, and going and doing stupid shit, going bankrupt, and then they're not able to give the tenants back their money. What I think could be interesting would be on that point, you basically go and take like for a year of time or multiple years of time. The landlord will have an average amount that ends up getting used at. of that security deposit and what ends up getting returned. Say you take the amount that on average

gets returned and that goes into a checking account and it is there. And so like on average, your entire pool of funds is going to get fully distributed back to people. And then the remainder is either the landlords or the tenants to play with. And I think it's more interesting if it's the tenants is like here is your kind of like net and you have a dashboard and you can see it and you can kind of like do funny upside things with the remainder of your deposit that's sitting here. And the rest is going to sit in this safe thing so that you know, you'll get it back, like no matter what. That would be the other kind of like flipped model take on how you could do it. Yeah, I like that. And I think that's really creative. And I think these are the sorts of like,

don't be like how I was on Saturday and have an idea that like might sound like it's not possible. Like keep going, you know, like try to be creative. Um, sometimes. also you need to like build the prototype to just like test the boundaries and and see see if it's it's doable. So I really like this idea. If anyone listening likes it. I know you like this idea too. So, you know, maybe. Yeah, I think there's like I think it's super interesting. I mean, it's like it's just like as a mental model on this whole thing or a framework to think about it. It's like this is cash that's literally just sitting around doing nothing. And anytime there's a massive pool of cash sitting around doing nothing, there's an opportunity there. And I don't know whether it's this. specific idea or if it's like doing more creative insurance products around this or if it's, you know, finding a way to gamify the investment around this. Like there's probably a hundred different angles you could take on it, but there's a $45 billion pool of cash annually that is just sitting around doing nothing. And I bet if you went and surveyed a bunch of tenants and a bunch of landlords, you'd learn a lot about what their like willingness would be and what their

risk tolerance would be on doing something more creative with this. Yeah. And I think, you know, the framework for how I think about it is like I'm always trying to try to do a temperature check as to how people are feeling about certain things. And like right now with inflation, people are just like really feeling it. And that's everyone, like every single one. So there's tons of opportunity to create products that speak to that anxiety that people have around inflation. And that could be a really, really good lens to come up with and generate a bunch of cool startup ideas that might actually work. I had never thought about the thing that, like, you get the money back.

Say you get the full deposit back a year from now and it's just worth a lot less because of inflation. Like, I just never thought about that because inflation was generally, you know, 1%. And like now the calculus on that has changed. So it is, uh, it's an interesting point. Yeah, I mean, I got back my, my, uh, you know, my security deposit actually the other day. And I was like, what am I going to do with it? Like, I can't even buy like what I, I can't even buy.

much with this money. Yeah. It is interesting. I haven't thought much about inflation, just personally. Like, I still view cash the same way as I did. Because to me, I think of cash as like a call option on future interesting opportunities. I like having more cash than anyone would say makes sense. And the reason I do that, I think of it as the same as free time, by the way. It's like now when something cool comes up, I'm not like having to reshuffle out of equities or out of crypto or out of different things. I just have cash sitting there that I know that I can draw upon. Like, if we want to go invest and build some business or we want to go do something and hire some devs, like it is a legitimate call option on going and doing any of those things. Free time is the

exact same way. If your calendar is like back to back, I showed you my picture of my calendar from a year ago. If your calendar is like that, what headspace do you have to go pursue the cool idea that comes up? You have none. And so I, I'm kind of funny about cash. Like I probably, any financial advisor you would talk to you'd probably say, like, I have too much cash sitting around and probably too much free time sitting around as well. But it's part of my like general mental model for how I think about being able to go pursue

these opportunities that do come up. I like it. It's contrarian, but I like it. I think it makes a lot of sense. I think in our space also having, there's just, you know, there's opportunities and you can, you know, especially now with the down market, like you can go and like invest heavy and do really well. Yeah.

So I like it. John's in the waiting. John on? Oh, cool. Let's bring him in. Super excited. What's up? John.

Nice to meet you, Sal. Yeah, nice to meet you. Welcome on to the show. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let me set the stage a little bit. So I've known John for a really long time, but why I wanted to bring him on today is he runs a company called the Live Ventures. And what Alive Ventures is is a venture studio that incubates products for older adults.

Did you see what Peter Thiel said about Warren Buffett at the Bitcoin conference? What was the quote? It was so absurd, right? Yeah, I do need to pick it up now. Yeah, pick it up. What's like that quote, Greg? I'm going to pull it up. I mean, you called me a sociopath.

I think he called Warren Buffett. He called him a sociopathic grandpa. Yeah. So I saw that and I hated that to my core because for a few reasons. First reason is that I don't think we as a society respect older adults the way we should. And that was an attack, he was trying to attack Warren Buffett, but what he really was doing was attacking older adults in my opinion. And by the way, that's a Western culture thing. You know, like my mom is from India.

India has a very strong culture of taking care of your parents when they get old. Japan has a very strong culture of taking care of your parents as they get old. The U.S. for some reason doesn't have that culture. Like nursing homes became a thing and we send people off. So it is a cultural thing too, Greg. Absolutely. So that, yeah, I don't like that at all. And then I saw that, and I pinged John.

And John and I actually, they check out and Alive Ventures actually have been sort of incubating some products for older adults. And what I like about Alive Ventures is Alive Ventures is, and John, I'd love you to explain it, but is thinking about how to create products to make the lives of older adults happier and healthier. And what I wanted to use this time for with John is just to like talk through some startup ideas. because I actually think that not only, you know, coming up with startup ideas for older adults is, like, good for the world. It's also, like, a really good business. Like, there's so much opportunity to build. Like, everyone's focusing on, like, Gen Z and millennials. But, like, older adults, like, huge opportunity. By the way, I don't know if you guys know this, but my dad is a professor, is a researcher at Harvard and spent, I would say the vast majority of his career, actually,

actually, he's a demographer, and the vast majority of his career has been spent on population aging, largely in the developing world. And so, like, spent a lot of time on Japan, obviously, with their kind of demographic curve in the aging population. But he writes and talks and researches a lot about aging populations, and he impacted has on economies. So it's, like, very down the fairway, this exact conversation. So he's going to be excited to tune into this one, too. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I think that there's been now a couple of decades, of research by demographers, by economists, by sociologists, that, you know, sort of raise a flag about that challenge, sort of inverted pyramids demographically and sort of the idea that,

you know, older adults are no longer economically productive. And so there's sort of a drain on social resources. And that therefore, when there's more of them and there's fewer, younger people working to pay taxes or to create wealth or grow the GDP, then you know, you're isolating productive economic activities down to a group that's actually smaller than the group that's going to consume them. This is actually exactly my dad's field of research. He called it the demographic dividend. It's like the ratio of working age to dependent age populations.

And when that ratio is very high, you can experience a really robust. growth curve, like sub-Saharan Africa right now, East Africa, etc. When it's very low, like in Japan, where you have tons of old people that are going to be relying on a smaller working-age population, it's a very challenged situation economically. Yeah, yeah. So undoubtedly that's true. And I think people have, you know, at least had some surface-level familiarity with that, if not, you know, sort of deep knowledge like your dad.

I actually think, though, that the way that that problem is, is actually not that helpful for resolving it, right? I mean, maybe from a policy standpoint, it might be, but not from a creative standpoint, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, from an investment standpoint. Because what ends up happening then is we sort of see aging as a problem and older people as a problem that we have to solve.

Rather than like an opportunity to think, here's a vastly underserved population, right? As entrepreneurs, I think, we like to identify opportunities where we like, people want stuff and what they can do to get that stuff is inconvenient, it's too expensive, you know, for whatever reasons they're just like not fulfilling that want or need. And then we make businesses to go, you know, serve that. I think so much of, you know, and this is very understandable, but so much of the way that like the philanthropy that work on aging, the economists that talk about it, they basically are trying to provoke urgency

to say, if we don't deal with this, we're going to be, we're going to have problems. Oh, also, you ought to be more empathetic towards older people. You ought to respect them more. You know, older people are really challenged because they're increasingly sick and frail and alone, and I need you to solve for them being sick. Like, please invent more medical devices. please, you know, encourage more people to take care of them. And that's certainly important work. But I think, like, the untapped resource is all of the creativity and innovation that comes from people that are like, you know what I know how to do?

I know how to find people who want to do things like meet and connect with cool people, who want to do things like have a service that they're excited to go tell their friends about and participate in and capture some of the value there. who want to build brands that people, you know, are excited to participate in. And that, to me, is like where the real opportunity is, where the white space is, because very few people are competing there. So many people are competing for Gen Z and millennial attention, and you've got this, like, really crowded field.

But, like, if I asked you right now, think of, you know, a Soho House for older adults that you can imagine the coolest older people that, you know, wanting to go to, you probably would have a really tough time thinking about that. If I said, think of a cool new app that's launched that recognizes that there's, you know, 30 million older adults in the United States who are reentering the dating field that is going to like serve their needs and help them connect with other interesting people that they can develop romantic relationships with. I doubt you can think of anything there. Yeah, it's super interesting just as like a general framework.

of what you're laying out, this whole idea of like find these large underserved populations. And it's like, it's super unsexy, as you said. Everyone wants to build the new, like, app for Gen Z. You know, Greg, we filmed an episode talking about this party app. And it's like, you know, for teenagers and like college kids basically and parties in these cities. And it's like super sexy to go build that. And you want to go build that.

But the reality is just from a sheer numbers perspective, there are 46 million adults age 65 and older in the U.S., that's supposed to grow to 90 million by 2050. And so, like, if you're just going to play numbers, actually, and you know, you want to like play the rising tide, that's a pretty damn good tide to play from a rise as it's rising over the coming years. Yeah, and two-thirds of the wealth in the country is controlled by older adults, people over 65. Yeah, and when it's not sexy to build there, as you said, the competition is less fierce. It's like, I don't know if you guys have ever seen this. It's one of my favorite investing frameworks. It's a matrix, a two by two that is like complexity of building something.

And then whether it's boring or sexy. And, you know, like everyone wants to build the sexy stuff, but the competition is super fierce. So like the complex, the highly complex and highly sexy things, like SpaceX, crazy, crazy high competition. Everyone wants to build that thing. Then you have the like super complex, but also really boring stuff, like Salesforce. which has built this, you know, enormous, enormous company around it because it exists in this place where it's boring, but pretty complicated to actually go and build. So this is like, I think it's a really good way to think about these kind of ideas. Yeah. And I think we make those things sexy as entrepreneurs by this, by like being bold enough to recognize that opportunity and

then knowing that you can build a cool company around it, right? Like think about strike. Like, what are they solving that sexy? They're solving like one of the most boring problems ever. Totally. But most of us think that's a really cool company. Like we would have loved to have founded Stripe. Or, you know, even Uber is like basically a logistics service, which, you know, people don't think about most people, I think, like, growing up and being like, you know, what I really want to do when I get all. I want to be an entrepreneur. And I want to create a really good logistics management company.

But, you know, we made that cool. So I just think there's a, there's, if we think about it in the right way, you're right. There's all this economic opportunity there, but it could just be like fun work. Yeah. On understanding people. And it's starting. It's starting. Like, I feel like the tides are now shifting a little bit with older adults and building

and entrepreneurs are starting to realize it. Sal, you always say Alexis O'Hanian, who we've had on the pod, always sees the future. But he's been investing the last two or so years in a bunch of startups for older adults. And I think he probably, I mean, We should have a mom to talk about it again, but I think he probably realized it, you know, when his folks started getting older. And also when he moved to Florida, which has just, you know, a lot of infrastructure for older adults and maybe not necessarily the right infrastructure. So, and then the other thing I want to add to this, you know, I agree with you, Sahel, about, you know, how do you build for underserved communities? one of the interesting things is we can actually take a lot of the formats that have worked for Gen Z or Millennials

and add nuances for this particular demographic. So you don't have to, that's why I think there's so much opportunity here is like you can actually, like Tinder, you know, John, you mentioned dating. Like Tinder actually has a, in Hinge and a lot of these platforms have really great interfaces. is the problem is it doesn't speak to that particular audience in the way that they want to be spoken to. So I'm wondering, John, and I know I texted you before this and I was like, hey, could you bring on some ideas or some spaces that you find, that you think there's a lot of opportunity? Can you talk more about some, yeah, just one or two ideas that you have on your mind?

Today's episode is brought to you by market or hire. With market or hire, you can get expert marketers on demand. It's easy and fast. What's market or hire? Simply put, marketer hire is a marketplace for marketing talent. They built a network of expert marketing professionals pre-vetted by top marketers from well-known and high-growth brands. And then they use their proprietary marketer match technology to match clients with the best marketer for every single project. And they match them fast, typically within 48 hours or less. There's zero risk. You don't sign or pay anything unless you choose to work with someone.

Many of my startups in the portfolio are using marketer hire and absolutely love it. If you're a growing business, you will too. Check them out today at marketerhire.com. Again, that's marketerhire.com. And tell them Sahel sent you. Yeah, I've got a lot. So, you know, sort of as a context, setting thing. One of the things that I think a lot of people don't think about that's really

interesting about today's group of older adults is in many ways they're a go first generation. And that makes it a lot like millennials or Gen C. And what I mean by that is these are people who grew up with an idea of what life was going to be like when they were 60 or 65, which they expected to die maybe at 68 or 72. And that's kind of what they internalized in terms of like, what is my life going to be like when I get there? They're also the generation that sort of grew up, they're the last vestige of this social infrastructure that we had with the idea that you take a job and you work there for a long time. And you, you know, form community by going to church or being on the PTA. And like, as all of those things had dissipated, they were the ones who sort of counted on that to know, like, how am I going to get my friends?

Well, I'm going to get my friends and my relationships from my job that I've been at for 30 years. I'm going to have my participation opportunities based on like going to the local BFW hall and, you know, communicating. And as that's disappeared, they're now in this place of thinking, gosh, I still have 20 or 25 years left of my life. The world's been changed. I don't have anybody to ask of like, what does it mean to be doing it right right now? And there's that same level of anxiety that I think millennials felt when the world changed. And you're like, I can't ask my dad, like, how to date well on Tinder. Like, he doesn't know anything about that, you know.

He's not going to have any advice. So we're figuring it out. And we're also constantly worried that we're doing it wrong somehow. We're missing out on opportunities. So that's where older adults are. Yeah, not to mention, sorry to interrupt you, not to mention, like, one of the things I've noticed with my parents, with my wife's parents, like this discomfort with spending what you've saved and built up over your life is a fascinating phenomenon to me. I consider my parents,

I don't know, moderately frugal, I would say, but they have this built up that they've saved for retirement. And now there's this thing of like, oh, we don't want to spend it down. And my whole reaction is like, spend that shit down, man. Like, I don't want it when you die because that's not going to be fun for me. Like, I don't want to get a pool of money when you die. It's just not what I want. And I'd rather you live and have the most fabulous last 25 years of your life that you can possibly have. But there's like, if you've lived a certain way for 50 years and you've lived frugally and that's why you've built up this nest egg, it's very hard to mentally shift into like a consumption mode of spluraging on yourself and doing the fun things and spending the little extra. It's just like a challenging thing. And so I do think to this whole point, like companies, trends, communities, things that start to like unlock the way that older people,

are thinking about spending and living those last years of their life in a, you know, productive, healthy, but also really exciting way are going to be really interesting. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing that's exciting is that same principle, I think, is true not just with money, but with time. So you have this generation that basically deferred a lot of like living to say, I'm going to wait until I retire, right? I can do that now. I'm busy raising a family. I'm busy saving. I'm paying a mortgage. I'm accumulating stuff. I go to work 50 hours a week. And then one day, that's going to go away and then I'll do all of this stuff. But what happens when you get there is then you're like, I don't really know how to

spend my time in a way that I love. Like I haven't really cultivated what value means to me and how I use my time. So I need to get started. So you've got this whole population of older adults who are basically in this position of like wanting to get started and they don't know how. And I think that's where a lot of startup opportunities are. Like how do you lower the barrier to entry, make older adults feel comfortable, make them feel like they're not going to be ridiculed for being there. They're not going to get taken advantage of for being there. But like activate some of those behaviors that they've been saving up and they just need like

a little nudge to start doing the stuff they always thought they were going to do. From a product standpoint, I think what might be helpful for folks is to have a framework around this. So I think when I hear both of you speak, what I'm hearing you say, Sal, you're saying, like, hey, older adults sometimes have issues spending money. And John, what I'm hearing you say is sometimes older folks have challenges spending their time in the ways that they want to spend it. like the format I would use for that is some you know some sort of calculator or budget so like imagine if you had a calculator or or a me a me budget that you have to spend like it hooks up to your credit cards and it's like you have to spend a thousand dollars a week on stuff for you and maybe it's like experiences or maybe it's experiences for your kids or you have to spend a

certain amount of time doing xyz and creating a whole platform around spending money and time specifically for older adults. Like that's, that's an idea. What do you think of that? Have you seen, Greg, the the fat fire Reddit community? Yeah, yeah. Fat fire is like, so fire is like financially independent, retire early or something. I think is what it stands for.

And fat fire is like, so fire was the thing that rose that was like, you know, people who wanted to save just enough money and then basically quit when they were 30 or whatever age and live the rest of their life very, very frugally. That fire, I was originally alerted to by Sam Parr, our friend, who had been a big fan of it. And basically, this was like, you're going to do that, but you're going to do it in like a lavish lifestyle way. So you're going to make enough money that you can, you know, then go live in a, you know, in an more extravagant way. Maybe not like insane yachts, you know, planes, but like a very, very nice lifestyle. And it made me think when you were just talking there about like that idea but for older people because I don't think that

community really exists like fat fire is really like our age it's like mid 30s 40 year olds that are doing this but older people like that same community you could probably build if you could figure out the right way to go find those people of like this core niche community of people who are trying to figure out how to like retire really lavishly and it doesn't even have to be crazy but retire in a way that is, you know, in line with the way that they want to live their last 15, 20 years of their life. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, we've, you know, we've sort of built up a financial planner industry for a really long time. And that's about, you know, calculating down how much money do you need to have in order to meet your

monthly nut. We haven't done anything like that. That's like, you know, you're going to need friends when you get. Yeah, that's my, that's the thing. It's like you need the calculator. The calculator, I think is great, Greg. The challenge with it is like my parents, I could show my parents a calculator and show them, hey, you got to spend this much.

It doesn't change the psyche when you see it. You're just going to be like, okay, my financial planner told me I can spend this much. I know, you know, wealth advisors have been telling you that. It's like the community aspect to go to your thing. It's like, that is what brings people out of their shell a little bit when they start seeing, like, oh, it's not weird for me to spend this. And then you have a community where you can ask about like, well, how are you navigating the discussion about your spending with your kids?

and what they're thinking about with the will or, you know, all of these different considerations. And you can now come in and like, you could be selling affiliate things. You could be selling leads off that community. I mean, if you build a community of like 2,000 high value, older people around something like this, that would be an extremely valuable community because the investable assets of that community would be massive. They'd be highly likely to spend on interesting and like cool experiences, opportunities, whatever.

I bet you could build a seven figure community around older people. that are looking to like understand how to spend and live in a more kind of glamorous way for the remaining years. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I think it absolutely would be an interesting startup if you could layer in some of these, you know, other things like once you have a lot of free time, you're going to have

people to spend it with. Are you good at going out and making friends? Do you know how to do that? You're probably not, right? You're going to have to get intentional about how you go make friends. What the world built to help you do that decades ago was like senior centers that you don't want to go to because you don't like bingo or Zumba. You want to do things that make you feel like modern and alive and an interesting person. So how are you going to do that?

And it's not a switch that you're going to flip. So you got to start practicing it before you get there in order to have those sort of relationship assets to be able to spend into when you get there. So I think there's just like a whole bunch of startup ideas. that are around friendship making for older adults, about romantic relationship making for older adults. There are even things like, if you've been in a 30-year relationship in a marriage, but now all of a sudden, you're an empty nester,

and you're not worried about the kids anymore, and you haven't really made your main priority the relationship, now you want to rekindle the spark, you know, with your partner. Now it's just like the two of you again. like how do you start redating your husband after you've been together for 30 years and like what are some of the ways that you could do that, right? So I think those sorts of things that recognize the time of life, that you have a bunch of people who are generally really wise and super experienced at living, but now they're in this

whole new context and they need some easy ways to start participating in that context that doesn't make them feel like you don't know what the hell you're doing shut down and rather it's it's like open up start talking other people start learning from other people um and uh and in in sharing that back have you have you have you guys seen chief dot com yeah yeah so chief dot com last week just raised $150 million at a 1.1 billion dollar evaluation led by capital it's a it's a community for women in the workforce largely for professional women exactly and there's like an app associated with it where you know there's different groups there's um now there's a physical spaces in new york in l a s f i think um and and at the core of it though you're you're right it's like this community

of like-minded women who have a goal in mind um and that goal you know is making friends and and being supported in their career and personalized. Do you think a chief.com for older adults could be a similar multibillion dollar opportunity? I definitely think that. And I think there's multiple businesses to be built that way. Some like Chief could be sort of professional community by older people for older people. But it also could really be intergenerational. There's Chief as an example of that.

But, you know, there are all these ways we're rebuilding opportunities for mentorship and for learning from one another. And you have semi-retired or retired people who just know so much and are desperate to share that. And then you have a bunch of younger people who are craving more sort of real time in the moment advice that you can't really Google, you know, like things like negotiating a job off. You can read about what the negotiation strategy is. But if you don't have an older mentor in your life, it's hard to just be like, yeah, but I think in the meeting I'm going to be freaked out. Like how do I call myself down and have the right conversation? Some of us are lucky that we can ask our parents that or have other people, but there's so many people who don't, right? So what if like, you know, there's a LinkedIn like service where there's video connection to mentors like that on a part-time basis.

that's disrupted, to this whole huge growing coaching industry, you know, or consulting. Yeah, there's a massive business to be built here, actually. Do you guys know what YPO is? Yeah. Young president's organization.

And then they had, like they had offshoots of it. But I just looked it up. It did $100 million last year. It's a nonprofit, technically, and so you can look up their numbers publicly, like on cause IQ.com.

That's crazy. Like, there's a big business. YPO is so dated and dead. Like the whole concept of it. But literally what it is is like higher performing, you know, people over the course of their life get brought into this community. They do events. They do trips that you have to pay for. They do, you know, different gatherings. There's a network, you know, that you can access, et cetera. But the idea of going and doing this for older people that are kind of transitioning in their life and that are at that point when they're trying to transition is super interesting. And you can do it on such a micro level.

Like if you went and built the chief.com or the YPO for older people, it doesn't have to be that you go national with it out of the gate. Like you could pick a couple of small kind of cities. Honestly, like do it where a bunch of retirees are. It's probably a good idea. Like go to Boka and spring something like this up. And you could probably go get a thousand people pretty quickly. Like go host an event there that is specifically targeted for older people and get

signups through that. And probably pretty cost effectively get a pretty cool. group of signups. But like starting this completely bootstrapped as like a, an interesting cash flow like business to own, I think there's like a pretty big opportunity here because you can charge the people a lot for the membership. And if you host cool events that it's like, yeah, paying for access. We always talk about NFTs as paying for access, but like these people aren't going to do that necessarily. But you can, you know, charge a thousand dollars a year for access to this like really exclusive cool application only community of older

people and you know do these a very cool gated events um you know screenings cultural things like ways where you can come in and meet people it's like what yPO did or what ivy connect was this company that tried to do it with like ivy league college grads yeah similar thing like trying to create that whole vibe i bet you could build a really big business around this yeah well i think you didn't say this, but just in sort of explaining it, I think what really smart entrepreneurs are trying to do, because people have tried to do that before, but they've focused on, I guess what I would say, the supply side, right? It's really easy to recognize, hey, there's tens of millions of older people. They know a bunch of stuff like it's an underutilized asset, right? So let's just gather them up

and then we'll have that asset. The place to focus is really on the demand side, right? So like, who wants that? Who wants that? And, And how do you structure it in a way where you know who the customer is, what they're going to pay for it, why they would buy it, what they would do to participate and make it cool for them? And so that's kind of the way that I would try to build that is to recognize not that we've got something because we've collected all of this wisdom. It's really more, who needs wisdom? How do they need it? How can we give it to them? There's like, you know, we're basically going to arbitrage the wisdom because we can get it cheap from people who have more.

time, but still make it an attractive, exciting participation opportunity for them where they feel well compensated by it. But it's like, you know, way less than hiring a full-time business coach might charge you or something like that. I just think doing it like community first as, like call it the dusk social club or something like that, like dusk of your life, make it really cool and have this cool vibe to it where it's like something that their kids would, you know, have participated in and that they think is cool, but they don't think that exists for them. Like, when you think about what opportunities exist for you when you're a senior, if you have, you know, some financial means, it's like golfing, you know, like an old country club or a stodgy, you know, set of things. And you all of a sudden

make this feel elevated and cool. There's a community built around it, really interesting people, cool events. I bet you could spring something up pretty quickly in a, in a small locale and build out like a really interesting cash flowing business just to own. Like, not maybe it's not. Maybe it's not a billion dollar company that you want to go raise money for and do that. But I bet you could build like a very cool business that you could tack on a bunch of, to your point, John, ancillary revenue streams to from like, you know, affiliate stuff where there's going to be a ton of people that find value in this community that you're building. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Another, I think, really big opportunity, Greg, I know you've done some writing in the past about like unbundling things and how that

creates a lot of startup opportunity. I think the unbundling of, like, like the senior living facility, you know, has so much opportunity. Because mostly that business is like we're going to vertically integrate housing, your social calendar, you know, nutrition, health, you know, all because the idea is if we can get you to live here, then we put those services on top. But they're massively expensive. It surrenders control of a lot of those things to like, yeah, maybe I like, you know, the apartment I would get, but I hate your, you know, Saturday events. That's not interesting to me at all, right? So think about if you could, if you could change it where there's more of a way where you could find access to housing stock that's more individualized,

right? That might even just be sharing rooms together when you want to move to a new city. But then you know that there's some way that's still like digital. or some combination of in-person and digital, there's going to be other people there for me to talk to. There's going to be stuff for me to do, right? It's just unbundled now. First of all, I think that's brilliant. You should write a post on it and get that out there.

I think unbundling happens when a certain medium channel gets just too big. often if it gets too big plus it gets really kind of old like the unbundling of Craigslist where it got too big plus it got really old there's like double opportunity it sounds like the unbundling of senior living is is a bit of both it's gotten really big plus no one's really innovated on in such a long time so I think that oh and the other thing for startup entrepreneurs it's easier to take off a piece than to build like a whole thing. So I also like that piece of it. I mean, definitely like Craigslist,

it's like when you bundle it like that, it just pushes you to lowest common denominator for so much stuff. So that's why those services are like bingo, because you're trying to think like, well, what's something relatively unoffensive that everybody can do? But if you let vertical communities exist within it, then you can, you know, be an older adult who loves watching horror films. and, you know, the community around that or whatever your interest might be.

It could be really cool just as like ancillary idea to this unbundling of the nursing home. Like, what if you built a platform that was like culture or experience as a service for nursing homes? Like if you just play the numbers game, right, there's 45 million Americans over 65. There's going to be 90 by 2050. It's a huge population of people that are going to be in nursing homes. Nursing homes are being built at an insane pace right now to fill that. And for the most part, like when you think about nursing home, like what experiences and culture they're providing, it's like someone comes in and plays the guitar or they do bingo night or whatever.

And I imagine a lot of these nursing homes would love to outsource the entire experience and culture of what they have to some company that will just like create these amazing best in class experiences and culture building. And so I wonder whether you could go and sell that in. Like do a B2B sale. You probably could go to like some of the chains that like are sort of. of regional nursing home chains that have five or ten facilities in a region and say like, hey, we're going to be providing, you know, one to two monthly really cool experience or culture things. You can use it as your marketing, by the way, as a nursing home to acquire new customers on

your end. And it could be a really cool, just like straight cash flow business again, where you're like coordinating it. You're basically an event coordination business, but you're selling it to a population that has, you know, really high willingness to pay and it would create a bunch of value. I think it's a good business idea. And I think there's opportunity there. But I will say right before this, I was on a call with someone from Disney.

And hearing the Disney folks talk about their experiences and how they design experiences, like Disney would never like outsource like programming. You know what I mean? So what I'm excited about with some of the Alive Venture stuff and some of the opportunity in the space, is really like from the ground up, like what is a core user experience that not, and the other, the other problem with older adults is we bucket older adults into this like massive category. It needs to be subdivided. Like, you know, right?

Totally. It has to be granular and it has to be community based to your point. Like go find these little niche communities. I mean, I was talking about what the example of the big community. unity here. That's like high, you know, wealth, high wealth seniors, right? Like it's people who are going to have a bunch of money to spend. They want to go do this vibey cool thing. That's like probably a very small proportion, actually, relative to the larger proportion of people that will be in this 90 million. So I completely agree with you. It needs to be niche down. Yeah. I mean,

certainly we talk about older people as this hugely monolithic population, right? And it's, it's just like 65 and over. And we would never say like all 20 to 50 year olds in the country like the same stuff. You know, like if you're a soccer dad in Iowa who's 47, are you looking for the same kind of experiences as a 23-year-old new professional living in New York City? Unlikely, right? So I think there's just, there's a lot of basic stuff that I think creative entrepreneurs are really good at. I just think that by and large, it haven't been attracted to the space, kind of going back to the earlier point because we've made it unsexy. And because we've also, like, it's so patronizing the way we look at older people that we're like, they just need help with like incontinence or they just need help with, you know, preventing dementia. And those things, you know, are important and necessary too.

but like a lot of it is just trying to do the things that we love to do our whole lives and do it, you know, in better ways. But with people who know how to do that, you know, who know how to make something cool, who know how to create a vibe to it, who know how to focus on a community, not like somebody who just happens to be the marketing director for a senior living facility and like is selling to the children of these people to get them to pay 12 grand a month to move them in the facility and then be like, okay, now make it cool too for like the people that live there. They don't know anything about that. But I bet you guys have done, you know, a lot of really

cool things in your life and had a lot of cool experiences. And if you were working on it and trying to think about what would be something that I could imagine myself being really excited about when I'm 67, I think we'd have just way cooler stuff. Have you guys heard either one of you, Greg, probably right up your alley. Have you heard of this business Silva, S-Y, LVA with Silva.com. Yeah. They're like, it's kind of interesting. They're basically going and acquiring like micro communities.

And then they have like, they'll take over all of the kind of like back end of running and nurturing and building these communities. So they're kind of like rolling up these niche micro communities around things. It's sort of interesting. It's like, Greg, it's sort of like microacquire for communities. So you can go build little micro communities, you know, a five. I have a friend who built a community of like 500 people paying a little bit of money a month and got an acquisition offer for like six figures for the community from Silva. It's sort of interesting.

Like all of a sudden there's actually the liquidity on these micro communities that you can go build. So the idea of going and testing something within a senior world with some micro community that you identify and that you go build something for specifically. there's actually like a liquidity path on the back end of it too to kind of nurture and continue to grow it. Yeah. So I'm curious. I mean, you guys work more in Web 3 than I have. I think we probably all think, you know, this generation of older adults are probably not the ones buying NFTs and they probably don't know what a Dow is. They're not used to it. Maybe they're technology phobic. that's probably true if you compare, you know, attitudes or experiences against, you know, Gen Z people. But like, that's not going to be true seven or eight years from now, right, if you're building a company. So I'm just kind of curious if, you know, if you're thinking about it from a Web 3 angle, like, how do you bring what we're learning about community and about participation and about, you know, distributed ownership models to, like, older adults in a way? Well, I first want to myth bust a second.

There's this myth that older adults don't get crypto, not interested in crypto, not interested in NFTs, and it's the complete opposite. I also want to myth bust something about myself, maybe. I actually spend more time with 82-year-olds than I do 28-year-olds. and, you know, my idea of a good time isn't going to, like, live or Nicky Beach in Miami Beach, but is to go, you know, hang out in a jacuzzi with, you know, an 87-year-old man who's going to tell me amazing stories about his life as a concert promoter living in Brooklyn. And the place I live today is this island in the Miami area, and it is predominantly older adults who are retired. And we have a ton of programming on this island.

I believe today or tomorrow, there is a whole event around crypto. And they brought in this guy, not me, but they brought in this guy. who's coming in talking to people about crypto. And that wasn't like a top-down thing, and there's not that many events. This is like people were like, hey, we're interested in crypto, we're interested in NFTs, like teach us. So when I saw that event, I was like, there's probably, you know, we were talking about wallets before you came on, John. There's probably an opportunity to build like a wallet for older adults or there's probably a set of financial products that could be created for this demographic.

That's genius. That, um, I actually, I'm curious if anyone's doing that because the amount of capital that has flown into that for Gen Z, like for kids, you know, like banking for teens, banking for 10 year olds, there's like crypto for toddlers, you know, raising it to 250 million posts. Like, it's absurd the amount of money that has flown into all those. By the way, those people are so high churn that these. these companies are deploying so much money into customer acquisition because a customer comes on and

it's a freaking 18 year old. They change their mind every day. So they're switching versus like a high loyalty, sticky older customer like this. I think it's really interesting. And it would be like a unique set of tools that you needed to build out for them to, you know, to make the product make sense. I mean, my parents ask me constantly about this stuff. I have to imagine they would appreciate a product that like is built for them integrated into their life where you're kind of abstracting away the complexity of all the all the noise in the background yeah and if you built a really cool interface for that and you showed that you know you have some understanding of when you're in a later life situation how you're thinking about assets and spending down versus buying new and you just did that

even in a way that showed you have some stickiness with the community like could you really not sell that to a fidelity or a prudential or a vanguard, you know, for lots of money and, you know, get out of that business because they're not going to do it themselves. And like, I don't know. I just think if you're, you know, even just opportunistic about what's a two or three year play to build a company that creates massive value for like the financial services industry or the retirement planning industry, like, they're. you go. John, can you talk more about or can you talk about AARP? Like I vaguely know what it is because I've

seen like their magazines and I know they're super big. But can you talk more about like who they are, what their role is, what their business model is and they're, you know, if someone is, is building a business for older adults today, like should they be working with them or how they should, how should they'd be thinking about AARP? Well, I don't work for AARP, so I don't, you know, I'm certainly not the authority on them. I'm happy to talk about it just as a sort of casual observer. So it used to stand for, I believe, American Association of Retired Persons.

And then they recognize that a lot of the audience they wanted to have didn't really, that didn't resonate with them. And people were retiring later or never retiring. And so they just made it AARP, that stands for. nothing anymore. And I think this was a dozen years ago or more. It's just an acronym without any further elaboration. But they actually, I believe, have the nation's largest circulation magazine. It's like 39 million subscribers. And they've got two sides of it. One is a is a not-for-profit that does a lot of like advocacy and policy work. And then they have another side, which I believe

is a for-profit business which contributes to the nonprofit that, you know, sells products to older people, um, advertisers through the magazine, you know, all of that. So they've done this, this really big audience aggregation, but a lot of people, like, they don't look forward to getting the AARP card in them, in the mail, you know. First of all, like, who even like opens their mail anymore? I don't know if they send it to you digitally now or not. Um, but like, that's the, that's the thing with all of this. Like people build for older adults in such a way that they don't want to be associated with the brand. They might want like the discounts that you get from AARP so they join,

but nobody is like going to wear an AARP sweatshirt out to, you know, an event and be, be proud that they like it. And so I think again, like if we thought about older people as being cool in certain ways that younger people aren't. And we built a brand that spoke to that they were excited about. Then you've got people being like, you know, I'm part of chief. People like saying I belong to chief. You know, they don't generally like saying I belong to the senior center. I belong to AARP.

Yeah, it does seem like unbundling AARP is an interesting idea. Like, how do you take the components of it that have done well? I mean, the magazine circulation is fascinating. Like, could you not create a much cooler version of that and circulate paper, you know, physical printed magazines that are like dope, really cool card stock, like high, high quality, but much cooler and not the, like I remember the first time an AARP magazine arrived for my dad. And he was probably like it was, you know, several years before he would have actually

been retired and it was early. And I remember him like kind of. cringing. He was like, oh, shit, you know, now I'm old because this thing showed up. So it definitely wasn't like a point of pride and something cool in the way that it could be, right? And you could like attach and stick to people. That, I mean, it seems like a cool opportunity, actually, to your point on like any business where people, there's tons of people and they made $1.7 billion dollars last year in revenue. And like any time that's the case and no one is proud to say they're affiliated with it, that seems like an opportunity, just as a mental

model. For sure, for sure, right? If you flipped it in a way, like, as we grow up, a lot of our life is looking forward to being older than we are. Like when we're kids, like, I want to be 16 so I can get that driver's license and drive and be independent or I want to go to college or like, I can't wait until I'm fully an adult and I don't have to deal with my parents anymore. And then we stop treating older people like that. But there are things that I think, you know, later life brings uniquely. And so if you could build a brand around that, that's like, oh, no, young dude, you can't be part of this yet. You haven't earned your way in. This is for people who, you know, who've really lived. So look forward to to get into the age rather than having

that kind of cringe experience when it comes that's like signals like, I guess my life's over now. It's just declined from here. You know, that just seems like, again, it's something, build a business that people want to participate in, you know, rather than one that they're ashamed to be a part of. Yeah. Well, I have so many takeaways from this discussion, just like on little frameworks and mental models that I feel like we went through and talked about in the context of a bunch of different ideas. Like one of the biggest ones for me is find, you know, large underserved communities, like these large growing markets where it's just, it's not sexy, it's not the place where everyone wants to participate and go and create something that is uniquely

for them. Go talk to 100 people within that market and you'll immediately know what it is. like what pops out is the common trend that they're all saying they struggle with or that's a pain point, et cetera, and go build something for that little niche. You can test things very quickly by building a little community around it to steal one of Greg's, you know, common themes that he likes to talk about. And there's a huge opportunity to go do that. I think within the senior community as that population grows and as they're looking for things and looking, you know, in that transition and tipping point of their own lives for new communities and new ways to engage with others. So those are the big ones for me, Greg. Biggest thing for me is just because there's a bunch of

people fishing over here doesn't mean you need to fish over here. And in fact, over there might be where all the fish are. Older adults, you probably don't wake up in the morning and think about how do I build a dating app for older adults. But turns out like there's a huge opportunity there. And beyond opportunity, like, you're doing good. You're doing good. So this is, yeah, this is a great reminder. So, yeah, thanks, John. I love that analogy. It, it, it, I'd be careful with it because in my world, it sort of means another thing because there's so many scams targeting older adults that when we think about fishing, right. We want to make sure that, you know, we're not talking about fishing that way. But this was really fun, guys. I really enjoyed, you know, thinking with you both and, um,

and seeing, you know, sort of where your brains go when you start thinking about these audiences. Yeah, there's a bunch of cool opportunities in this space. It'll be interesting to see what our community thinks of these and hopefully jam on a few of them. I mean, I do think there's a bunch of really cool cash flowing businesses that you could spring up pretty quickly around this space. So it doesn't have to be the massive, you know, VC-backed tech crunch article, but there are some really, really big opportunities here and hopefully some bright entrepreneurs that go and pursue them. Where do people learn about Alive Ventures and what you guys do? So AliveVentures.co is our website. We put out a campaign just recently sharing some of the insights that we've gotten, both from a market perspective and from talking to hundreds of older adults that we call

Growing Older Better. So that's just Aliveventures.com slash growing, hyphen older, hyphen better. Free insights. That's where every great startup idea comes from. So we'll take it. I love it. Thanks guys. Thank you so much for joining us, John. This was great.

Really enjoyed it. Cheers, man. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at high at t-R-W-I-H.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon. Join our free community at TRWIH.com.