Mary Furlong on the Future of AgeTech: Insights, Innovation, and Investment Opportunities

Keren Etkin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the AgeTech Podcast. I’m Keren Etkin . And my guest today is someone that I personally look up to. A woman who is a force of nature. And one of the veterans of the age tech industry. I’d like to give a very warm welcome to the one and only Mary Furlong, Mary. Welcome to the show.

Mary Furlong: Nice to be here with you, Karen. So, tell us a little bit about Mary Furlong and Associates. You host a number of conferences each and every year, and you’ve got an upcoming one this December. Tell us about that.

Well, MFA is a omni media company where we have many channels to reach the market. So when we do two premier events, one is the longevity venture summit, which we do every June, second week of June, and we give away a $10,000 prize. We’ve been doing that. This will be our 22nd year. So some of those companies now are a hundred million dollar companies.

Some have come back as. Judges and investors. So it’s a very exciting conference. And then in December at the National Press Club, we always think entrepreneurs should know how to navigate the media. We do the Washington Innovation Summit that focuses on caregiving and this we do for Nancy Lamont at AARP.

And of course, the caregiving market is a huge market, six over 600 billion market. And it’s an issue that crosses both sides of the aisle so you can get bipartisan support, but it’s an issue that touches state governments. national governments care agencies, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and investors.

And we have, that’s the magic in the mix. So we only have 200 people in the room at that conference. We have room for a few more, but you’re not going to find better access to deal flow than you can at the Longevity Innovation Summit.

Keren Etkin: So, wow. I didn’t realize that the conferences were 20 something years old. That is quite remarkable. What got you started?

Mary Furlong: Well, first of all, I’ve been in the age check market 35 years. So we started SeniorNet back in 1986 and I ran that for 10 years. And then I started third age media, sold that to Ancestry. And then I started a newsletter which I still have, which is, you a great way to share news about the industry and then out of that, I, a friend of mine told me from Johnson and Johnson ventures said, we just funded three companies that came out of the Stanford business plan competition.

And that’s where I got the idea that I should create a business plan competition. So I went to Sand Hill road in Silicon Valley. And I asked the members of the venture community would they be interested in technology related to aging? And they said, well, no, we really just fund in healthcare. We don’t fund in aging, but then they looked at their portfolio of investments and more than half of the portfolio of healthcare investments.

Related to older people because older people use more of the health care costs. So we’ve had the support of that community, I’d say for 21 years. And it just grows because there’s more deal flow. There’s, this, there’s more investors. They’re more corporate investors. They’re more angel investors.

And once people. Discover the H tech industry and the great people that are in it. They don’t want to leave. So even if they leave a job or the company is sold, they want to stay. A lot of my mail comes from people saying, I finished with this company. I now want to go into this company.

Keren Etkin: Yes. And you probably have the biggest network in this space out of anyone. So I wonder from your perspective, how has the venture landscape change? And how has the ecosystem changed besides just. Getting bigger year over year. What’s different today than 10 or 20 years ago?

Mary Furlong: 10 or 20 years ago, people were not talking about ecosystems. I can share that. And they were looking at mostly through the lens of. Health tech. So no one really saw age tech as a market. Now I think people like at every event, I share an ecosystem chart and saying, here are the players in the caregiving ecosystem.

So you could niche it out by category. Here are the players in the housing ecosystem. And for every client we have, and we have a private client, Where we learn so much from our clients. And literally yesterday I was at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, having lunch with an entrepreneur who had NIA funding, Olga from Voice Love.

And I was so inspired by her solution and the difference it made in the lives of older people. I always wanted to dedicate my career to working with older people. Channel that has been the rapid fast impact channel for me has been investors and entrepreneurs. And so when I started my. Summit, it was hard to find five judges that would care enough about the market.

Now I have seed panels angel panels, corporate panels, social impact panels, global panels, family offices, foundations. In fact, recently I heard a statistic that I thought was really interesting on the foundation side, that there’s. Over 135 million for caregiving funding from foundations that are also social impact.

So you can see that’s not just nonprofits that can get funded, some for profits can get funded. And I, as a child, I love putting puzzles together. I think H Tech is one big puzzle that we’re constantly moving the pieces on. But how it’s changed is now you could have an ecosystem chart and look at the players in home care, in housing, in retail, in government, in state government, in global, and not get bored by looking at the different categories.

So, and then I’m always surprised when an entrepreneur finds a job. partner and gets to market and together they iterate the solution and come up with a better solution.

Keren Etkin: I love when that happens. I think that is like the power of having a design partner and. An existing user base that is willing to provide you with constant ongoing feedback, honest feedback. I wonder from your client base and from the investors you interact with, what are buyers currently looking for that startups should build for them?

And is that the same thing, or are those the same things that investors are looking to invest in?

Mary Furlong: Well, investors like people who have real solutions that make a difference in people’s lives. So take staffing, for example, and investors would tell you they would like to support growth in workforce and staffing. And entrepreneurs that can meet the staffing needs. Go to the top of the chart. So technology solutions.

I’m very excited about carrier when I see what they’re doing in terms of inspiring medical students, O. T. P. T. Students to become caregivers. They’re also change agents. They’re more willing to adopt to technology. They became one of linked ins. Fastest growing companies in the top 20. Clairvoyant Networks, which has the solution, the aura care.

I judged the competition in the UK, but it was a global competition. That’s the only US based company that in dementia care that was awarded additional funding. So paying attention to issues like wanderment, if you were a senior housing provider and someone could solve that problem for you, you’re going to be very interested in that.

And then my whole career has looked at social isolation and loneliness. As an issue, management of chronic conditions as an issue I’m 76 now most of the people I know have one or more chronic conditions and now they’re learning how to navigate and manage those conditions. And so anything in the vitality, wellness, strength, training.

Strength building, learning space travel and adventure. They’re not going to stop traveling. And in our June conference, we’re going to program around memory, mobility, money, and music again. And I’m very interested in those themes and how they work together.

Keren Etkin: I would love to see the June conference take shape, but those are themes I’m super interested in as well. You mentioned that there are a number of startups around the workforce and staffing that are doing really well. And I think that is like probably the number one challenges when you speak to any care provider across the care continuum and healthcare providers in general.

They will say that is. Like their number one challenge, hiring retention of care workers or healthcare workers. We know from research that there are millions of care workers that will be needed in the upcoming years. And that the turnover rate in the industry, especially in home care is really challenging for providers.

So, do you see, we have multiple startups trying to tackle these challenges from different angles. Do you see any gaps still existing in the market that, I mean, if an entrepreneur will reach out to you and say, Hey, I want to tackle the care shortage, but I’m not sure which angle to go at, what would you tell them to do?

Mary Furlong: Well, I perfect companion in Scottsdale, Arizona. We introduced Perfect Companion to an entrepreneur in Nashville, Tennessee, who was going to start a business in home care. They decided to work together and I think it’s done extremely well. So it’s not rocket science to Realize that the boomers that want to age in their home, and even if they age inside senior living, are going to need additional services because families live so far apart.

So I think taking the home care combined with technology approach where your home care agency has the best solution for mobility. For home safety, for engagement, for companionship and, that’s, you can take any zip code in the country and do pretty well creating a home care agency if you paid attention to the needs of the customer, you figured out how to price it, and you kept your group engaged.

And, then I think another key category is pay attention to the disease states. So the boomers are going to be 80 in 2026 at the top end. So what are the diseases that happen if 100 million people have osteoarthritis? And I have a client right now, Good Boost in the UK. They have a set of lessons that they offer during swimming and water aerobics that can help you quantify and build muscle strength.

So anything you can do to build muscle strength is critical. We had Dr. Royzen on our podcast this morning. He was talking about this need for muscle strength building, especially if you’re taking your vaccines. So if you get the flu and you lose it. muscle strength or you fall and you have to rehab and you don’t come back and work hard to get yourself walking again, you’re going to have trouble.

So, I love when entrepreneurs like the ones at the Thrive Center go to look at the Rehab Hospital. In fact, I think the Thrive Center is moving closer to our Rehab Hospital and you see those. Clinicians that are working with rehab patients take strokes, take heart attacks, take heart, take obesity.

I mean, look at what’s happening with the the rise in and the use of anti Drugs that will help you lose weight. So I think we’re going to see a healthier, older adult population. I mean, just this morning, Biden called for Medicare to reimburse for the G1C drugs, I think that’s what they’re called.

Keren Etkin: Oh, I did not hear that. That’s fantastic news.

Mary Furlong: Well. Who knows whether it will all go through but the notion that obesity is not good for you, a sedentary lifestyle is not good for you, if you’re a caregiver, you may be home more than you want to be. Caregiver respite is a great category. I often thought the Marriott should be offering Wednesdays to people to have caregiver respite day.

So it’s a day where there’s not a lot of occupancy. The caregiver gets to take the day off, is home before dinner, and can take care of their loved one.

Keren Etkin: that’s a fantastic idea.

Mary Furlong: I wish they, I wish a hotel owner would take up on it. It was not my idea. Another person told, who ran an aging organization, mentioned it to me one day. But I often thought it was a great we need to find ways for caregivers to get respite.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. We definitely need that.

Mary Furlong: Take cancer as a category. Cancer patients have to have infusions. They need rides. You can’t just call Uber and get a ride. You need someone that is going to listen to what happens. So you have all these solo agers and then you see What happens when you go to a doctor’s appointment? All the things that you’re telling you’re trying to absorb.

We really need friends that are there to do that with us. We have a wonderful client called Friendy that is was started by a personal trainer. Just so many good ideas that I’d love to see get more nurtured. That’s why we need more money to come into the market to nurture some of these ideas.

Keren Etkin: Well, speaking of funding, we do have more funds that specialize in HTEC and we do see more funding go into the space from generalized funds and certainly from digital health funds. Where do you see the gap in funding? Is it seed funding or is it later stage growth funding that startups are struggling to raise?

Mary Furlong: Well, so right now the H Tech collaborative is working with H Tech Capital to create a fund Where for some of the H tech collaborative companies, but where I see the gap is you get it started, but you can’t scale it. And so you have a lot of companies caught between the moon and New York city. So I’m always trying to cultivate angel investors and early stage companies that will take a look at that kind of funding.

Sometimes they’re better off. in matter in one of the incubators where they can get support and help them go to market. And I hear there’s some regional clusters forming where you’ve got some local investors, because a lot of times people want to get engaged in what they’re investing in. That can be good and that can be bad, but I think it’s that growth stage funding that we need.

Get proof of concept, maybe get to 500, 000 in revenue, but they don’t know how to cross the chasm and move, make it to the next level.

Keren Etkin: And in your opinion, from your experience, why aren’t they achieving these funding? Why aren’t startups raising this funding from generalist funds who will take the call from any startup in any vertical?

Mary Furlong: Well, at the end of the day, the investor has to have a good return on their investment. I’m on the cabbie investment fund. And I’m an advisor to the Ziegler Linkage Funds. But, people are going to ask, what was the return? Now, we’re lucky that they’ve had very good returns. And we’ve watched those companies grow.

And they get a lot of mentoring and guidance. So do the H Tech collaborative companies. They get a lot of mentoring. And that’s what’s different. In the last four or five years, it’s There’s a lot of people who’ve come into I mean, from NIA. I mean, four years ago, we had NIA at our conference in Washington, and now I think they funded over a third of our clients or over a third of our clients are also funded by the NIA, which is great because they get that research support so that non dilutive funding is a really important place to play.

I’ve also seen innovations in Europe. Where, like in Norway and the Netherlands, where counties, county governments will invest in age tech because they have so many older people and they know if they can invest in innovation that prevents falls or helps with PT, these are these are all areas where that are ripe for investment. But if you just studied every chronic condition that older people are going to have, and you in, you innovated around one of those chronic conditions, you probably would have a win.

Keren Etkin: That is a very interesting approach, looking at chronic conditions and innovating around those. So if I understand to rephrase your answer and if you want more generalist funds to really write those growth checks for startups who already have significant revenue, we simply need to have, it’s a chicken and egg thing.

We need more wins in the industry. We need more HTEC Unicorns. We need more HTEC IPOs.

Mary Furlong: Yeah. What’s different about this community of H tech entrepreneurs? Is that they help each other. They don’t compete as much as they help each other. But if one person, I mean, look at the state of New York and Greg Olson, he has done 22 deals with startup companies that he’s spread out to the different counties so that those innovations are spread all through the state of New York.

Then you see other states wanting to do that. I’m very excited about the California master plan on aging. I went up to Sacramento to learn about it and. To see where they’re going to be focusing. And next year at our June conference, we’ll be outlining how that master plan on aging will have resources to deploy, to help support entrepreneurs in the field, but you have to really have your eye on who is funding in and be open to all the categories of funding.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. So do you see other states following in the footsteps of New York and California and really subsidizing or basically procuring agentech solutions for people who live in those states in other states?

Mary Furlong: Yeah, I think a seminal book is Steve Case’s The Rise of the Rest about entrepreneurship. I haven’t read Joe Coughlin’s new book yet on longevity hubs, but I see a a fusion of the entrepreneur market in general. The gig economy, entrepreneur market and the H tech market. So even though I produce these conferences at a national, if not global level, I’m very interested in bringing the H tech entrepreneurs in my own community together once a month to have a breakfast meeting and to share what we’re doing locally because entrepreneurs just think different.

When I live in my town, I’m more concerned about how is the bakery? How are their numbers? When I go to the UPS store, are they getting a lot of orders for the products that they have? I always err on the side of relating more to entrepreneurs, so it excites me when I see corporations like Panasonic Samsung.

UNUM Best Buy, Motley Fool’s begin to come into this space because we need those corporate players in addition. And I always look then what are the corporate funds that can step up? So we have human good as a client. And they have an investing arm. That’s very exciting to us because you get validation from the senior housing group, plus there’s the smart investment.

So I guess what I would say is the whole industry has been fun to watch. It’s been like watching someone go off to college. You had them as a baby, you watched it mature. Teenage years were hard, but now there’s more and more people. In the space who are brighter, we have some of the best and brightest people married to or working with the top research institutions, and we have much many more investors in the market.

Now, does that mean that if I went to Sand Hill Road, they would all have a longevity thesis. We’re not there yet, but one day we will be. And who knows whether the investments in Indonesia and China and Japan and Korea. In Germany and the Netherlands, these will be coming to the market, too. I think that UK government may send a delegation to our June conference because they’ve just done a new report on longevity.

So we see entrepreneurs from around the world, like Nick Palmarini out of the UK. And so they can help people break into those European markets, because you’re based in Israel, but you and I are like colleagues in the same university. We’re that close. So, yeah. I’m very proud of you, Karen.

Keren Etkin: Thank you. It means a lot coming from you, Mary. It really does. So at this point in our conversation, I would like to ask you to take out your crystal ball and try to imagine in the best case scenario, what the HDAC ecosystem could look like five, 10, or 20 years from today.

Mary Furlong: Okay, so I will be 95, 20, 96. I’ll be 96, 20 years from today. Well, what would be great is that we’d all stay on the dance floor a bit longer, there would be a generation of people contributing collaborating, mentoring healthy, longer, this healthspan. Up into those years, we would have fun infused into our world.

We would have companionship with us going to our doctor’s appointments or planning our adventures. There’d be all sorts of housing options from the golden girls to communes of the sixties. We would, have driverless cars or a driver. We wouldn’t have to worry about how we were get going to get from here to there.

We’d feel very empowered and stakeholders. We’d be still volunteering and communicating with young people. And in some ways, what I’d like to see is that the H tech tools. would help us stay relevant and excited. I have a stealth project I’m working on about looking at that next phase because when I was 17, I would get 17 magazine, and I would want to wear what was on the cover.

Well, when I’m 76, I’m not going to give up wanting to be On the cover, I’m not going to give up wanting to have someone say, I want to be a little bit like her, we who doesn’t want to be like Helen Mirren, who doesn’t want to be contributing and writing, I’m a big fan of Catherine Hepburn.

She had many movies. There’s a great documentary about her called Call Me Kate. And she won one of her Oscars. When she was young, like in her twenties or thirties, she won two others when she was in her sixties and seventies. And so the only line that got a standing ovation that I remember at one of the White House conferences on aging I think it was the one under Clinton, but I’ve been to them all, I think.

It was older people need a vision of the future, not just a memory of the past. I want these technology tools to be there to help our own individual and then our collaborative views of the future. So, the other day we were talking about the day we lost Kennedy and President Kennedy and how, what a moment that was.

Well, what if we could call up these moments and we would have our collaborative history of where we were and what we did, or what if we could. Help each other. So one stroke victim is not alone and helping another stroke victim. So if we could eradicate loneliness, we could shorten the cycle of unhealthy aging to vital aging and we could feel like we made a difference.

That’s what our generation’s promise is.

Keren Etkin: I am definitely ready for this vision of yours too. through and if podcasts are still a thing 20 years from now, we can revisit this conversation publicly.

Mary Furlong: Yeah, but then I’ll have a better microphone. Actually, I do have a good microphone. I don’t always get it. Thank you, Carol.

Keren Etkin: well, thank you so much, Mary for joining me on the podcast today. It was an absolute pleasure chatting with you as always. And anyone watching or listening to this podcast prior to December 9th. 2024, go to the Washington summit’s website and see if tickets are still available.

Mary Furlong: Well, they are available and my discount code is FOM, Friend of Mary, 24 for the year. I think it’s the Washington Innovation Summit.

Keren Etkin: I will put all the links as well as the promo code in the show notes. So you don’t miss out on any discounts. Thank you so much, Mary. It was an absolute pleasure.

Mary Furlong: Thank you. Bye bye now.

Go to https://washingtoninnovationsummit.com/ and use promo code FOM to sign up for the What’s Next Longevity Innovation Summit happening in Washington on December 9-10, 2024.