Equitage Ventures’ Daniel Kaplan Shares His Unique Path and Insights

Transcript:

Do you ever wonder what it takes to revolutionize how we age? In today’s episode of the AgeTech podcast, my guest is Daniel Kaplan from Equitage Ventures. And trust me, this isn’t your typical VC story. Daniel has spent over a decade at the intersection of eldercare and technology, and he’s got some fascinating insights about where the big opportunities are.

So whether you’re a founder, investor, or just curious about the future of aging, you don’t want to miss this one Now, before we dive in, I want to invite you to our free webinar, the 2025 AgeTech Market Outlook webinar happening on January 21st. So if you want to sign up, I will put the link to that one in the description . And if you’re listening to this after. January 21, we will have the recording on our YouTube channel.

Keren Etkin: Danny, welcome to the show.

Daniel Kaplan: Thanks for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.

Keren Etkin: So tell us a little bit about yourself and about the fund.

Daniel Kaplan: Sure. So I’ve been working at this intersection of senior care meets technology meets healthy aging for about 11 years. I also grew up with an older dad who was 58 when I was born. I’m 35 now. So senior care and aging have been a part of my life for my whole life. After I was done with a few years in consulting at Deloitte and had worked at a few startups in San Francisco I found my way to a company that made web based software for home care agencies.

I was employee number 13, grew with them to 120 people did everything from customer support to customer success, account management, business operations. I traveled the country meeting our customers and training them on how to use our software better. Learning about them and their clients and their caregivers after that company was acquired by a private equity firm and later sold to WellSky. I found my way to graduate school. I went to USC, I got an MBA, I got an MS in gerontology. So I went deep on all things senior care and aging. I also had a brief stint as a age tech kind of consulting founder too, cause I needed to make ends meet while while I was in grad school. While I was in grad school I also got introduced to the team generator ventures, which is the, the first and longest established AgeTech venture capital fund. I was fortunate enough to work there throughout my time in grad school. And then after I graduated, I was there in total for about five or so years and left about a year ago as the first close was coming together for Equitage which stands for health equity and age. And Equitage is is a venture capital firm that I co founded with my two partners, Russell Hirsch and Adam Kaplan. Adam is not my brother or my husband, or he’s not in my family. He’s just another guy with the same last, name as me. And he’s a wonderful person. He’s definitely a friend and mentor and business partner. And we we are in market wrapping up a fund raise to raise a venture capital fund to help make the world a better place for older adults and their families at Equitage. You can think of us like healthcare investors with a strong focus in senior care. So the medical side of things and aging the more social and life course side of things.

So there you go.

Keren Etkin: I have so many questions following this introduction. So let’s start by what are you focused on in terms of investment thesis?

Daniel Kaplan: Yeah, absolutely. So I like to say that we don’t. Want to close the door on any opportunities. I think that from the outset, venture capitalists have two customers. We have LPs who put us in business and we have founders who keep us in business without people crazy enough to quit their jobs and start companies. We wouldn’t have a job. So I like to keep my door open to everybody. And I don’t think we really have like revenue thresholds or anything like that. We want to talk to any and all founders who are building important companies to transform the journey of aging at Equitage. We really want to look for opportunities to be more than capital. That is primarily by way of our LP base. So I’d like to say that kind of the granularity, like the level of granularity of care setting that’s represented in our LP base is second to none. We’ve got a lot of owners and operators of senior living and skilled nursing, home health, hospice. In home care you’ve got some folks from the Medicare Advantage world, from the health system world, you’ve got corporates from medical devices and software companies and potentially some international interests too. So we really want to look for opportunities where we can be more than capital meaning that it’s not just a check. It’s not just a board seat or a board observer seat. It’s really connections. Advice and introductions to people and companies that, that could be your next customer, your next advisor your next kind of partnership channel. In terms of like areas that get us excited. Just to pick on a few staffing and workforce management. I think that’s something that probably gets talked a lot about on your show. I think staffing is probably the number one constraint to scale across the healthcare system and particularly across these kinds of home based. care models. Really a big fan of community based care and adult day. When I started working at clear care and we were working with home care agencies in 2013, the bill rates were anywhere from 20 to 25 bucks an hour for non medical in home care. Now it’s 35 to 50 an hour. And I don’t really know with a labor model that’s one to one. I don’t really know how that continues to really scale. So I really am a big fan of adult day. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there and I’d love to see more companies being built in adult day. A common term that I’ve seen thrown around is PACE light. Or PACE like other areas that also get us excited are the integration of kind of the, like the cash pay or private pay portions of the senior care world and the healthcare system.

For example, I think we’re very bullish on companies that are helping to facilitate the integration of healthcare delivery and payment models. And senior living. That’s something that we think is very exciting. Same with in home care. I think also just given our LP base across the post acute care world, that mainly being SNFs and home health, very bullish on any kinds of companies there.

I’m interested in conveners, interested in MSOs interested in telehealth and hybrid care models. And so that’s on the senior care side and on the aging side. I’d like to say that the thesis is built out, but not as built out as the senior care side. That’s mainly because I think the majority of companies that have won in the AgeTech space or are going to win in the next few years, are more focused on care. Then they are on the more social and life course side of things. I do think that is going to change. I think by 2030, when every boomer is aged 65 plus I think that the consumer opportunity and the more aging opportunity is going to be realer and more actionable for founders and investors. I think I think along those lines, like I’m interested in FinTech, I’m interested in the future of work. I’m interested in kind of quality of life and sense of purpose in one’s later years. I’m definitely interested in, in, in partnering with founders who see older adults. As humans, not just as patients.

And I think that plays more to what’s going on in aging versus what’s going on in senior care.

Keren Etkin: I love that. Looking at people as humans, not just patients. And I think that’s one of the ways that I like to explain AgeTech to people who are outsiders to this industry, because oftentimes people view patients as older adults just as patients. And I like to say that this ecosystem really does look at older adults as complete human beings that have other needs and not just health needs.

And I think that’s what sort of makes it complicated, but also really exciting to be at least

Daniel Kaplan: Oh absolutely. And look, I think that’s very easy in this day and age of. A. I. In this day and age of, potentially robots in different forms, right? Entering our care settings. I think it’s easy to look at companies and talk to founders and just look at opportunities where The humanity is being whittled away from kind of the care interaction or just from the interaction. But I think that’s something that that I’m very aware of. Like I have mixed views on some of these. Voice bot AI care management tools, right? Where, I, I heard someone say a couple weeks ago where you can do a care management voice bot Gen Z knows that they’re talking to a chat bot and they love it while the boomers are failing the Turing test at the same time, right?

So there’s there’s a degree of. How far does automation go? How far does artificial go? And I think that we see artificial and automation or A. I. And automation as things that are enhancers and enablers versus replacers of the human experience. And that’s that thesis will probably be challenged. As I just talked about before, these home based care models being one to one more facility and community based being one to many. Preserve the humanity do we have enough people? Do we have enough bodies actually to preserve humanity in kind of interaction? Maybe we do, and maybe we don’t it’ll be interesting to see how that play plays out over the next five to 15 years.

Keren Etkin: it will be for sure. And I, Definitely agree with you and I find myself sometimes when I talk to like customer service, via chat and they’re giving me these.

Dumb answers. I sometimes I find myself asking are you even human? What’s going

Daniel Kaplan: I

saw an interview with someone actually who was one of the developers of like of some of those tools, and they were saying that to help maybe trick you into thinking that you’re actually talking to a human, there’s a delay built into their response times. And maybe there’ll be like a spelling error or, it’ll show like the three dots and you’ll wait, but they’re like, yeah, no, like the answer and everything is, it’s prepared.

Like they, it’s ready to go. If they’re just in the, they might be like, maybe it’s a one second wait, maybe it’s a 10 second wait, but they’re trying to like program in humanity to trick us into thinking that we’re actually talking to a real person.

Keren Etkin: don’t like that at

Daniel Kaplan: Me neither.

Keren Etkin: so Some of the challenges that you mentioned are not necessarily specific to the United States, are you focusing our investments on the United States or are you interested in investing globally?

Daniel Kaplan: Yeah. Look, I think that for a fund one, and I think early on in kind of the, in kind of the life cycle of Equitage, I think that we’re going to be primarily focused on North American opportunities. I think that will primarily be in the United States. With that said, it’s not lost on me that everybody is aging. Every second of every day, all over the world. Turns out that people get old in Asia and in Europe and in Africa and the Middle East too. And so I think that there’s actually A really big opportunity to build the global preeminent venture capital firm focused on transforming the journey of aging.

And that’s what I want to do. We got to start somewhere. So we’re starting with the United States. I hope that in 10 years, I hope in 15 years that we’ve got an Asia fund, I hope we have a Europe fund. I think that with I think it would be very difficult to have. a global fund headquartered out of the United States just because our age tech world here is driven so much by healthcare and regulatory and policy decisions that are made at the state local and federal levels that you really need like a specialized team to run this to ground here. And I know things work differently in Europe. In the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa, like it’s, it’s different in terms of who pays and really what some of the challenges are. I think that part of the reason why we have a staffing shortage here, it’s not just a strong labor market.

It’s not just the nature of the job, but it’s also it’s the culture too. Like it’s the culture of the United States. We don’t we go away to college. Sometimes we stay where we went to college. Sometimes we move back home for a little bit and then we leave. That doesn’t always happen in other countries. And I think that the dynamics of kind of the age tech markets abroad are something that necessitate a venture fund. But also things that necessitate intimate. understanding of the landscape there.

Keren Etkin: I completely agree. I always like to say that while the challenges of aging are pretty much universal, they manifest differently in different countries as a result of. The geography, the culture, and yes the regulatory landscape which is in the United States is incredibly complicated because it’s different in every state.

So I think that sort of brings me back to, I want to talk about a little bit about your experience in clear care. I feel like home care management software is seen as the less exciting part of the ecosystem but it handles a critical aspect of it. And when we look at these startups, ClearCare was an example of a successful one that got acquired.

I always wonder, like, when you look at a team that is building something that is going to have to tackle regulations across all 50 States. How do you view that as an investor? How do you know if that solution is going to be able to successfully roll out across the country in a timely manner for a venture capital fund and whether or not it is even needed in all 50 states?

Daniel Kaplan: Good question. So I think it clear care. I think that the number one thing that kind of drew me to work there was one, I needed a job to, I remember going on the CDC’s website and I before my interview and just reading that 10, 000 people turned 65 every day. And I was like, that is the most enduring stat I’ve ever read in my life. This company is onto something really cool. So that, so with that, I went into my interview and I was very fortunate to work there. It was an incredible experience. I was there when we signed our biggest customer. I was there when we signed our next biggest customer. I was there when, when almost everything went down and I joined right after our series a, which some founders might be thinking, God wouldn’t that stuff go down before your series a no, because our series a back then in 2013 is looks more like a seed round today, I think it was like a 4 million series a but what’s interesting about clear care is that software is very robust. Of course I had some holes, but it was an all in one tool for home care agencies. It’s billing, it’s payroll, it’s reporting, custom reporting, integrated with QuickBooks, integrated with ADP integrated with Paychex and Pay Plus. We built a franchisor kind of God, like view portal and dashboard for the franchisors. Of course there’s scheduling there’s telephony for clocking in and clocking out. There’s care planning, there’s applicant tracking. It was like a whole, it was a whole just back office suite of tools. And I think that what made it, not that it was easy to scale but I think the thing that made it relatively easier is that home care is a relatively unregulated industry compared to even like its counterpart home health or skilled nursing or any of these other ones.

So I’d say it probably like 95 percent of clear care customers. did private pay, private duty in home care. So that’s personal care and companionship. No one’s running an IV. No one’s doing a PICC line. No one’s administering meds. They could be managing that. It’s like we have a list of meds, but the degree to which, there was skilled care.

And I hate that term because I feel like what they’re doing is it’s still skilled. It’s not easy to do personal care and companionship to someone of the opposite gender who could be, in their nineties with dementia, right? That’s takes a certain level of skill. It takes a certain level of patience. But because they’re, but because the regulations. There were state and local regulations that we really put that kind of in the hands of the home care agency owner. Most of it. Was around the payroll and overtime and like daily OT and weekly and monthly and just how that all worked. And that took us a while to figure out. But after we did the only other like regulatory stuff that we really interacted with was for anyone who is, who was working with Medicaid waiver client. These would be it’s part self directed care, part LTSS. And the Medicaid waiver essentially allows you to tap into the Medicaid dollars that pay for long term care. Most of our clients didn’t bill Medicaid because they didn’t have the tools to generate the actual claims, which we ultimately built for them, but that was a standardized claim. It was that, and it was much more of a volume game. For the agencies that work with Medicaid waiver, the majority of them only do Medicaid waiver, or it’s 90 percent Medicaid, 10 percent private pay and Medicaid is volume.

It’s a lot of patients. It’s not a ton of hours. And it’s just requires like a different, not business model, but just a different kind of like flow than your typical like private duty and home care. So with all that said I do think that we scaled to basically almost all 50 states. But it wasn’t like it was like, Hey, we just signed our first customer in Nebraska, right? It wasn’t like, We need to do this big research project into Nebraska state Medicaid and the local laws there and make sure that our product meets that. So with that, like that’s interesting actually, that kind of insight, right?

If you’re building software tools or even like wraparound care services for more private pay senior care businesses as your customer type or as your go to market channel, like a regulatory, it’s always something that you should be aware of. You should always have a good attorney to help you evaluate that, but really it the regulatory landscape that you will face will be a lot less dynamic than if you were like building like EVV tools for home health. Agencies or something like that. And so that brings me to the second part of your question about how to think about the regulatory landscape and what we look for as investors. I’ve recently become of the view that particularly when it comes to services or technology enabled services that it doesn’t scale, right?

Like it’s it doesn’t necessarily scale to all 50 States. But fortunately, or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, the problem or the opportunity is so darn big in the Pacific Northwest or in the West or the Midwest or the Southeast or the Southwest or the mid. Atlantic or New England that you can build really big, impactful businesses serve servicing a region. If you look at like HCA hospital corporation of America, that they’re probably the largest for profit hospital chain in the country. Of course, we’re talking about acute care now, not in home care, but they don’t have hospitals in all 50 states. Of course the hospital is a little different to open up than a home care agency, right?

But Kaiser isn’t in all 50 states. Amedisys which was doing some personal care, but mainly home health and hospice. They aren’t in all 50. Brookdale, the largest kind of operator of senior living in the country. They’re enormous. They have more, I think they have almost twice as many beds as the next biggest chain. They’re not in all 50, but their performance as a public company isn’t necessarily enviable. And I think that part of that is that I don’t know if you can successfully scale healthcare services across all 50 states. It just seems it just seems like a very tall order.

And I think that as a lot of the payers and a lot of the acquirers are building out kind of centers of excellence or focus areas in certain markets. I feel like if you as a technology enabled services company, or. Even as a software company selling to very regulated businesses, if you can build out a core set, like if you can own the Pacific Northwest and the West coast, like you’re building out almost like a network, you’re building out a really kind of big muscle in a certain market in a certain region that if a plan, if an incumbent, if a tech company wants to enter that market, the clearest thing to do is just to buy you it’s not necessarily to go in and compete. Now, if you’ve got a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit there, a little bit there, right?

Like your resources are spread pretty thin. You might be difficult to to drive quality. It might be difficult to drive consistency. And so for that, I think that that It’s difficult, right? Some of these businesses just don’t scale in a national sense. And they also don’t have to, the numbers are big.

Keren Etkin: That is a very interesting viewpoint. Thank you for sharing that. Speaking of Brookdale, in the early days of Generator Ventures, your office was in one of Brookdale’s senior living communities in the Bay Area. And I wonder, first of all, what was your key takeaway from coming into the office in a senior living community every day, and would you recommend up and coming startups?

To try and rent an office in a senior living community to gain some insights.

Daniel Kaplan: Yeah. Look going to work every day at Brookdale was a privilege. I would say I think it’s funny. It’s actually not something that I’ve thought about much since COVID because I remember when I first went and interviewed at generator while I was in graduate school, I remember I showed up there and I was like these people are serious.

Like their office is in a Brookdale. And so it really set the tone for our meeting. And when we met founders there, it really set the tone for our meetings with them too. And I think up until COVID, it was like the coolest thing to have our office there. And then after we weren’t going into the office, then it became very clear that it would be a very long time before we would go back. And so we abandoned that that office. Look, I think that anytime you can co locate with your customers and with your users, I think it’s important. I think that especially for investors, people will lose sight of the fact that there’s a lot of times that these AgeTech businesses, particularly in services, there, there’s two parties here.

There’s the customer, somebody pays for something and there’s the user, someone who actually uses it or almost benefits from it. And so I think that disconnect. Can be highlighted a lot in senior living. And I think it’s very easy for investors to make a generalization. As I have done multiple times. In this podcast, just in the last half an hour, um, about like how certain businesses work about how certain care models work about how residents are, how patients are, how staff are. And I think that until you actually go in and spend time in, in these buildings or in someone’s home or in a doctor’s office or in a hospital, like you’re not really going to know they’re also. All totally different. And so my experience at Brookdale in Redwood city could have been different than my experience at Brookdale. If I had gone to a location. In Los Angeles or in San Diego or right outside their headquarters in Brentwood, Tennessee. So I think that it, it also has someone who had just graduated with a degree in gerontology, just the ability to go downstairs and sit down and just have lunch with some of the residents was really cool.

Everybody has a story. Everybody has a lot of stories. They’re like walking history books. And it was very cool to, go on your lunch break and go downstairs. And there’s not a lot of young people in Brookdale’s. lot of young people in senior living. Facilities. And so when you walk into the room, like people, their eyes light up. And if you just approach, a table with an empty seat, you’re like, can I sit here? They’re like, yeah, of course. Like who’s grandson are you? And I’m like, and I’m like, I work here, like we’re in unit 201, in the far West wing, and that, that was like very unique and very cool.

I think that I’ve talked with a few more. More founders now who have there’s one a founder, Jesse Lucci who’s the seat, who’s the CEO of alley health. She’s got an MBA, I think, from Kellogg. She, she worked at Lime, Uber, right?

Like she’s got this great background. She kept hearing about staffing issues and senior living and staffing issues and senior living, staffing issues and senior living. She kept hearing about it. And when she was looking for like her next thing she decided to go explore what are these issues? And she went and got a job as, as, as essentially like a CNA in a senior living facility in Texas, I think she worked their job for four or five months. And she really understood how the building operated and where the disconnects were in terms of the technology that the staff had what they needed and what they wanted to actually do their job better. And potentially like hit hit turn turnover or kind of help to address it and help to empower staff also. And so out of that, she built her company alley health. It’s one that we’re following, but like her experience just meeting her was, it was so cool, right? It’s she’s, she heard about a problem, then she went and experienced it herself. And again, I think that like, when I talked to a lot of investors, They’ll be like this is what’s going on with nursing homes and this is what’s going on here. And it’s have you ever actually been to a nursing home? And most of them actually have it. The closest that they’ve been to a nursing home is going to a hospital themselves and being sent home afterwards.

And so I think that like actually going to one of these places and like immersing yourself in the day to day and interacting with like staff and EDs and residents. Is going to just give you a whole new perspective as someone who’s building or investing in AgeTech.

Keren Etkin: I completely agree. And I wish I could rent office space in a senior living community,

Daniel Kaplan: Me too. I would love it one day. I think maybe in fund II, we’ll have a big enough budget where I can move out of my home office, which I do love. And maybe just have an office in. Like at St. Paul’s like right down the road here in San Diego.

I’d love that.

Keren Etkin: Hopefully. So before we wrap up is there anything else that we didn’t talk about that you would like to discuss?

Daniel Kaplan: Oh, I have a, I can talk about this for days and days. I don’t have anything else specific, but I did, I did want to thank you just for everything that you’ve done for age tech I feel like by creating your market map, you’re helping to put age tech on the map. And I think that is admirable. I know it takes, I know it takes a lot of time. I know it takes a lot of energy. I know that for the most part when you’re doing it, it’s pretty thankless. So I’m thanking you now. So your listeners can hear someone thank you because someone does need to publicly thank you. And look, you need to come to the U S more often because we need more of you in our lives. So please come.

Keren Etkin: Thank you for your kind words. And I do expect to visit. Yeah. Probably next year. And I did get to go to on aging in March this year. So that was excellent.

Daniel Kaplan: I love that. I love that. There’s so many good conferences and on aging is definitely a good one. I’m going to more of like the backwater ones. Like I’m going to these senior living ones, these home health ones, these skilled nursing ones. I’m going like really deep. So let me know when you’re next in town because I can help point you in the right direction for some of these backwaters ones.

They’re good.

Keren Etkin: I sure will. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. It was a pleasure having you.

Daniel Kaplan: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Keren Etkin: Thank you.