Who Gets to Solve Death?

Hey! Today I’ve got something for you that’s not the usual Divinations fare, but I think you’ll love it :) It’s an essay that identifies two types of “death tech” businesses, and asks why one type is taken more seriously than the other by capital allocators. The author is Taylor Majewski, a talented entrepreneur and writer, who also happens to be a fellow member of the Product Hunt alumni mafia with me. Enjoy!

—Nathan

“When I was fundraising for the first time, I had not one but multiple venture capitalists ask me what’s going to happen to my business when death isn’t a problem anymore,” Liz Eddy, the founder and CEO of the end of life planning website Lantern, told me on the phone. I had to laugh. 

“There is no signal or sign that there’s going to be any massive or even accessible change to the end of life,” Eddy explained. “Maybe there will be an opportunity for the one percent of the one percent in the future, but if there will ever be an opportunity for the masses is a very different story.” 

Eddy was referring to the subset of Silicon Valley elites who moonlight as immortalists. In a piece for The New Yorker, Tad Friend divided these folks into two camps: the “Meat Puppets,” who believe we can hack our biology and stay in our bodies; and the “RoboCops,” who believe we’ll merge with technology in order to live forever. These folks find common ground in pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-aging research, claiming that the purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality, and even creating companies with lofty missions that orbit around the same sentiment: “solve death.”