TrulySignificant.com honors Lily Vittayarukskul for her significant accomplishments in the fields of healthcare and insurance positively impacting the world. And we don't think fellow human beings can properly measure the ripple effect of Water Lily. Not yet.
Hear Lily's story of starting college at 12, interning with NASA at 14, and pivoting to help her dying Aunt. This personal situation provided the framework around the financial devastation from the U.S. healthcare system.
Lily's company began to challenge the traditional insurance industry and built algorithms predicting the cost of living longer.
Hear the rest of the story with Lily Vittayarukskul. Visit waterlily.com today for more information.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
Hear Lily's story of starting college at 12, interning with NASA at 14, and pivoting to help her dying Aunt. This personal situation provided the framework around the financial devastation from the U.S. healthcare system.
Lily's company began to challenge the traditional insurance industry and built algorithms predicting the cost of living longer.
Hear the rest of the story with Lily Vittayarukskul. Visit waterlily.com today for more information.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome back to our wonderful program, truly significant dot com presents.
I'm Rick Tokeeny, and we appreciate you all joining us again.
Our very special guest today is Lily Vita, you school
the beautiful name. She is here to talk about her
personal journey, her innovation in healthcare and insurance, and the
(00:34):
social impact that she is making. Lily Welcome to truly Significant.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
You have got to tell us your backstory because I
understand you started college at the ripe old age of
fourteen and started doing an internship at NASA, and then
you had to pivot toward healthcare. So tell us more.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, actually it started when I was twelve. I was
actually scouted by NASA at that time, and I was
blown away by aerospace. I wanted to become one of
the youngest aerospace engineers, and so I ended up, you know,
winning a nationwide competition, being flown over to the Kennedy
Space Center and they gave me baby steps essentially to
(01:27):
start my internship on the robotic side of NASA at JPL.
I went to college early at fourteen Fords and was
almost ready to let my career take off there. But
when I was sixteen, my aunt was diagnosed with terminal
stage calon cancer, and what came with that was two
and a half years of navigating not only chemotherapy, but
(01:48):
just the daily long term care needs. I came with
that stuff that were used to with our grandparents or
our aging parents, such as bathing, dressing, eating, toilet and
continents and whatnot. And it was financially devastating for us.
When we realized health insurance wouldn't step in to help
take care of that, nearly bankrupt us, but it more
importantly bankrupt our relationships in our families. So there's an
(02:11):
entire extended side of my family that we haven't spoken
to in over a decade. So that made me pivot
my career. I pivoted my college background into genetics and AI.
I've let product and engineering at multiple medtech startups and
ultimately founded water Lily. When I realized that families weren't
(02:32):
understanding what long term care was, how expensive it was,
and I find a way to get ahead of those
devastating outcomes that we experienced.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Sure, and part of the family is still not speaking
to each other after ten years.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Oh yeah, but it's not unique to me. I've interviewed
hundreds of families. It's so common amongst those households as well, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So see, Lily, this is about more than just solving
a problem. You've gotten into a very human situation and
has greater implications. And this is why we wanted you
on the show today, because we think that you are
of all the things that you could do as a genius,
(03:24):
and I know that you've got a high IQ. You
chose this field and we think that you are in
the zone of significance because you're doing something for social impact.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I am incredibly grateful that you've recognized our work and
on this platform. We've also been really grateful to be
recognized by the World Economic Forum, and we actually ended
up getting invited to those annual meetings in Davos and
in China to speak on the global issue around aging,
this very human problem that's not going away anytime soon.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
That's right. And based on your personal experience with your
aunt's illness and then what you've also experienced, let's say,
in the in the last two or three years, how
has that shaped your own personal definition of success versus significance.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yes, absolutely, So I love that question around. You know,
that distinguishment between significance and success, because when I first
started this company, I thought it would I thought that
the definition of success was just being able to help
out families in the US that are going through some
form of devastation with aging and just understanding the problem
(04:49):
better and figure out some form of solution felt like success.
But then that's when I started to really hone in
on what was significant for these families. A lot of
family wanted me to help them reactively navigate those care
needs that their loved ones had around long term care
at the point in which they're navigating it. But something
(05:09):
that I decided to do was take a step back
and actually build out an AI algorithm that predicted that
devastation decades in advance for young and family members that
could actually build out a plan before it was too late.
Because that created larger significance, and by definition, by creating
deeper significance either having significantly more money to work with
(05:31):
or having significantly better relationships and alignment within the family.
Then that's when I redefined what success looked like for
this space, and we're actively still redefining it, not only
in the us, but the same problems that we see
globally as well.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
So this prediction and this algorithm, which I bet you
personally wrote, is almost parallel to predicting a hurricane or
a tsunami coming within a family.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
That is correct. We built the first ever morbidity algorithms
in this space that even life insurance has never seen before,
or even the healthcare industry has never seen before, which
is when we mean by morbidity, we're actually not predicting
when are you going to pass and make assumptions on
how you make it sick or what not, which is
what is normally done in this space. But actually what
(06:28):
we did is we predicted the incidents itself, how long
it was going to before, how family members might step
in for that, and how much it's all all of
it was going to cost. So these are the first
ever algorithms that were designed that helped families really understand
what it's event meant and also to a level of
accuracy that was personalized to the to this individual or
(06:51):
the faund the family sitting in front of these algorithms
as well.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Since you developed that originally, what changes or nuances have
you made based on just learning and experiencing different cases.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
I think that's an incredibly fascinating question, just because we
decided to commercialize a little over a year and a
half ago. Because what was really important is I couldn't
I had half a billion data points. If I had
all the time in the world, I'd love to ask
you so many questions, you get to know you so
much more. But we recognize that we live in a
real world and that means that there's only so much
(07:34):
time that each individual has. And so what we spent
two years doing is not only building out those algorithms,
but how do you commercialize it? What we're really the
highest predictive questions that we could be asking, And so
that's where we refined those hundreds of questions that we
could be asking into just a short few dozens dozens
of questions that revolve around socio demographic information, financial information,
(07:58):
and medical information.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I only imagine you securing funding for this from venture
capitalists and private investors and you telling them about what
you've created and the problem that you're solving. How did
you get investors to understand the deeper why behind your work?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
You continue to ask really fantastic questions because what was
really hard about the space is that there is a
graveyard of age tech companies unfortunately that try to solve
for it in some way. A lot of them focus
on the logistics of if you need care right now,
how do we help solve for it, And honestly, you
(08:48):
don't see really good margins when you build out that
sort of business model. That is also something I understood
when I interviewed family members is that not only was
it a band aid solution, but there's actually not that
much margin as well because you not creating as much
kind of compounding impact as if you were to take
a step back. And so what I helped these investors
(09:08):
understand for first principles was something that no one else
has done before, which is if it's fundamentally possible to
do a little bit of a moonshot here of building
out these versa for morbidity algorithms and we can motivate
families decades and events, there's compounding financial effects for that
as well as care outcome effects. And so from first principles,
(09:28):
what we knew is that there is that every single
household was going to age and on statistically speaking, every
single household was going to navigate a really serious form
of aging that was going to cost quarter of a
million dollars out of pocket today, half a million dollars
for those that need care in ten years now, and
three quarters of a million dollars in twenty years now.
(09:49):
A lot of the US population cannot afford that, and
more importantly, Medicaid, which is the social safety net here
when people run out of money, also didn't have the
means to take care of that. So that's where I
essentially convinced them that from first principles, aging is not
going to stop. This problem is only going to get worse,
and someone needs to come in with the innovation stack
(10:12):
such that it is economically feasible for not only our
government but for the families to actually navigate aging moving
forward in the future. And it's a massive market.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
You are in a different league. Did you know that
completely different league you are thinking about. You are flying
and orbiting over an extremely big issue that we are facing,
not only as a nation. I got to ask you,
(10:44):
having just visited Japan and some of their blue zones,
how did you capture the idea that there's blue zones
emerging around the world and that that could impact your model?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Oh? My goodness, it is. It's not only the blue
zones in terms of folks are living longer. Even in
the US, if you look in the past decade or so,
we are on a trajectory to live far longer than
our you know, parents did or our grandparents did, because
of the advancements and healthcare, because of the advancements in
industries such as self driving vehicles, where just in five
(11:21):
or ten years from now, we will no longer have
as many car crashes or if any car crashes, which
drastically affects folks that you know normally would pass early.
And if people are not passing early, you're going to age.
And if you're going to age or you're going to
end up being sick for longer. And a lot of
the medicine that's developed today is focused on keeping you
alive longer rather than in kind of injecting the highest
(11:45):
quality of life that you could have. It's just it's
just more profitable that way, and so as a result,
the aging problem is only going to get worse if
folks are living five years longer or ten years longer.
It's like I mentioned, inflation today for quarter a million
dollars for care today is going to be half a
million dollars and ten years from now, So if you're
living ten years longer, all of a sudden, you're going
(12:06):
to have to have, you know, a quarter of a
million dollars more than expected. And if you're going to
live twenty years longer from now, then all of a sudden,
you're gonna need half a million dollars. Again, it's in
today's dollars, so it's only going to compound into even
higher leagues of numbers if we need to think about this.
So I would say that Japan, and I would say,
(12:27):
like Japan, in certain parts of Europe where there's these
lou zones, hopefully they still have a multi generational household
where they could still take care of that individual. But
we are living in a drastically different world now where
where folks are trying to find economically better situations from theirself,
they're traveling to other countries to find better jobs, and
(12:49):
we're getting like that multi generation house is getting rid
of and so it's just getting worse. We're not going
to have the family caregiving we thought we did. Financially,
it's going to cost a lot a lot more out
of pocket to not have those family members. And for
a lot of the aging countries such as Japan and Korea,
there's not that many kids that are being born, and
(13:11):
so who's going to even be that working, you know
class that's going to help take care of our aging population.
They may not be there, and so it is just
so multifaceted, so hairy in terms of quality of care
and cost of care. And that's why we need to
get ahead of it. And that's why we may may
(13:32):
not have had much pressure to do planning before because
the stakes are lower, but the stakes are higher, which
is why planning software like what we build is just
necessary at this point.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
That's exactly right, Lily. We're going to take a quick
commercial break. You take the first part tell us about
water Lily and how people can find out about your
company and start to follow you.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Absolutely so, if you want to learn what your future
long term care needs are going to look like and
the associated cost, just go to waterlily dot com and
sign up for our waitlists. I actually personally take on
one out of every time consumers that join on to
our waitlist and I help serve them. Otherwise, if you
ask for a professional, you could reach out to them,
but we also have a blog with a lot of
(14:19):
free content as well on this topic, a lot of
in depth materials that you can go ahead and navigate,
whether it's related to caregiving or government programs or whatnot.
And of course you can learn more about us through
our socials. We are very active on LinkedIn, we are
soon to be very active on other other socials. That's
just Instagram and Facebook and Twitter as well.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
That is wonderful. We will be right back with Lily
after this special message.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
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Speaker 1 (16:32):
And we are back with Lily from Water Lily, and
what a fascinating person. I love talking to futurist. Somebody
influenced you along the way to think about the future
and to think about the bigger world. Who were your
mentors growing up?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I look to my parents as my mentors for the
way that the world works and the core people who
helped me understand the economics of the world world as well.
So my parents are first generation immigrants, and they started
their own family business and a factory, and I started
(17:17):
working at that factory when I was five. And so
those of us I grew up in farming families like
I very much understood just you know, blue collar work,
getting that labor in and you always have to. You
can't just log out after or kind of like stop
work at five pm. You stop when the job like
you know, when when the job is done, essentially when
(17:38):
you have like all the packages I needed to be packed.
And so they helped you understand that no one's giving
you money. You have to create enough economic value that
others realize and are willing to pay for. And that's
how you're able to sustain yourself, you know, as a
human being, as well as taking care of your household
and so, and they taught me how to be a
(17:59):
good person. I think that there is various homeless individuals
that kind of came up to our small business all
the time, and they recognize that, you know, these folks
don't have resources. How can we give them resources if
we have more resources than them. So I think through
those values, we were able to pull ourselves out from
a low kind of like low social economic background to
(18:22):
them being middle class just through sheare hard work. There's
no shortcut for hard work and understanding the way the
world works.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
That's powerful. Thank you for that. On every show, I
typically will do a gut shot and that means that
I'm just merely reacting to my wonderful guest of significance
that we have. I would vote for you for president.
What is there any notion in your mind about being
(18:54):
a leader beyond your company.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I'm an insanely focused person. I like to make sure
that whatever I'm working on right now, I do it
to the best of my ability. In the US, we
sit on a half a half a trillion dollar problem
in aging. I think that there are a lot that
(19:22):
there's a lot for me to do here, a lot
that's going to probably take a couple of decades, so
I could see myself being the space, you know, for
a while. I don't have larger ambitions on how do
I affect the larger population. I think that by being
so good and being so focused and expert in one area,
I think that's where you're going to make the most
and focus at you, that's where you're going to make
(19:42):
the most outsized impact to each household possible. And I
think that there are plenty of folks that I lean
on in government and in policy making that are expert
in what they do and what they understand about their
localization strategies across states across their particular zip codes, and
(20:04):
so I do lean on them every day today to
help me understand what is the aging problem that you
know they're experiencing, and how can I, from my innovation mindset,
how can I help them out and understand their restrictions
rather than trying to enforce what I think the world
should look like. I think a lot of it is
just being really really good at what you do and
(20:25):
continuing to listen to other perspisives around you, including the
policy makings.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
I just love what you just said. Anyway, You've got
my vote if you ever run for president, and I
know your highly focused and you should be where you
are right now. Moving on past the gut shot, I
think families often face you said, bankruptcy up front, bankruptcy
(20:54):
of the heart burn, brain cells, financial devastation around long
term care. I don't think America is ready for what's
going to happen in the next ten or fifteen years.
And if you fast forward twenty years, what in the
world would success with significance looklock in terms of how
(21:18):
water lily will have changed the way society plans for longevity.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Oh my goodness, I think that you're continuing to give
me questions that like ends up making it my kind
of favorite question you know in your episode, but this one,
I love it because the key thing, the key issue
we have in this space is mainly we don't understand
(21:44):
the risk of aging. I think it's really hard for
us to predict for each individual, and we're learning all
the time, and we're iterating all the time, just how
much is a person going to cost, when are they
going to need care? How would their family members step in?
Like being able to predict all the logistics around aging
in the complexity has a dollar amount associated with it,
and if you get really good at predicting that, then
(22:05):
that's when you could actually build out various financial vehicles
in this space that are well balanced for our economy.
That you could create different types of products for those
that can't afford to take it for it out of
pocket day, like there's no way they would essentially go
on Medicaid, and there are those that could maybe go
on Medicaid. You build a different type of financial vehicle.
(22:26):
And so I think in twenty years on, my goal
would be to help be not be at the forefront,
but help be the infrastructure for existing financial players to
understand what that risk looks like and help them build
out better financial products that is accessible by every single
person at every wealth band level. I think to make
(22:47):
that possible, it's not just actually using regular machine learning
algorithms and historical data. I think what we need to do,
to your point is to put on a futurists Actually
is that we you can't just look in, you know,
our rear view mirror and say, oh, I think I
know what aging is going to look like ten or
twenty years from now, especially with how fast technology is advancing,
(23:10):
especially with these large language models that are changing the
game across industries, not only the labor market, but also
changing are people going to pass you know, sooner or later?
Because there's self driving vehicles, We're not having car accidents anymore.
So I think what we need to do to build
into understanding risk better is to put on a futurist
(23:33):
hat of well, what is the future going to look
like and being able to put in our assumptions about
what are the advancements that are going to happen across
industries that affect our mortality and morbidity that we haven't
seen yet. And I think that'll have us that help
us have a better handle on risk and as a
result build better, more financially affordable products for everyone.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
H you're so wright. I worry about those assumptions though,
because I don't think that even policy makers today or
the common citizen have a sense of the alignment of
reality where they are today, where they're going in that
(24:12):
cost and so how can you unify scalvanize us around
the truth.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah. I again another great question because on one side
I just talked about the underlying innovation, but then the
second half of commercializing something is how do you make
it so simple and easy to understand that you can
act on it. The best form of education is a
form of edutainment. Like another one of my investors coined
(24:46):
that and I loved it, which is you need to
entertain and educate in order to educate at the same
time that invokes action in this space. So I just
talked about what we needed to do sort of their
But it is my job, you know, as I would
say an innovator, as an entrepreneur, to be able to
tell you, Rick, hey, I think you have a risk
(25:08):
of aging in the future, and it might affect your nesting,
your retirement Inche that you're saving up pretty substantial and
you might not have the quality of life that you're
looking for unless we get a handle on that risk.
So can you please fill out this three minute INTIKE
survey where we understand a bit more about your situation,
about who you are in your household, and we're going
(25:31):
to make a prediction on what that risk is going
to look like. We're going to tell you how that
risk is going to unfold, like what kind of care
needs are you going to have? What is that likely
going to cost? And from there, it is not trying
to sell you on something, It is trying to tell
you if you have a future one point two million
dollars of cost, it is, well, we think we could
(25:52):
solve for that at a fraction of that. What if
we could solve that with one hundred thousand dollars. What
if we could solve that for fifty thousand dollars? How
is that costible? That's where we open up either a
marketplace of financial products and resources that you didn't know
that existed, and we help you understand it's as simple
as if you were to buy this product, we model
(26:12):
out how this product works for you. Oh, if you
put in fifty thousand dollars, it's going to cover six
hundred thousand dollars for example, and here's how it would
do that. Or if you say, well, I don't want
to do anything, you should always model, Well, if you
don't want to protect this risk with any specialized financial solution,
then let's look into you paying out of pocket. What
(26:32):
are your assumptions around paying out of pocket? Oh, I
have these assumptions great, well, based on those assumptions, you
know you're going to be putting in one hundred thousand
dollars and it's going to cover three hundred thousand dollars
and we have a gap there? Are you okay with
that gap? And so it's just being able to educate
someone what are your needs going to look like of
that risk? What it and how can we best help
(26:56):
you with that? Like? What are your preferences? So I
think I think that the platform itself will still stay
incredibly simple about predicting your future care needs, the future
cost what you want to do about it. For the
underlying technology of how accurate we get at predicting your
costs in that care is just going to get better
and better with just the right, futurist high.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
I believe that's exactly right. That is a beautiful way
to wrap up today's conversation. I've got to have you
back on again. Absolutely. I want you on at least
twice a year to give us a state of the
industry report from your perspective and to talk about what
(27:40):
you've learned from the last six months, so you can
opine on that and then continue to shine light on
what I think is one of the central challenges that
our country is going to face. And so will you
come back and visit with us again?
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Absolutely, happy to happy to share my learnings.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
That would be fantastic. Okay, Lily, so tell us one
more time where we can find out information on your
company and possibly be one of those ten people that
you get to talk with.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah. Absolutely, So you can find us. It's super simple.
It's like water Lily, like the flower the weight. It's
spelled Waterlily dot com. W A T E R l
I l y dot com. Go ahead and sign up
for our wait list and so I can essentially help you.
Someone else can help you, or once we launch that
(28:37):
consumer only version, then you would be one of the
first people to know about it.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
That is great. Thanks again, Lily. Every once in a while,
we are blessed to have a genius, a futurist on
the show, and we found one in you today, and
I really really really appreciate you you being on. We're
gonna get a lot of noise from this show. We'll
try to get this one into President Trump so he
can listen to it and go, hey, maybe he needs
(29:06):
to have a conversation with Lilly about some of the
things going on. Much less the governor of Texas, much
less the governor of Maine. So we really appreciate what
you've stated today, and folks, we hope that you've enjoyed
this as well. Did you get the message about being
significant versus successful? We hope that you did. Thank you,
(29:28):
folks for joining us. We wish you well and especially
on your way to a significant life. Have great week.
Welcome back to our wonderful program, truly significant dot com presents.
I'm Rick Tokeeny, and we appreciate you all joining us again.
Our very special guest today is Lily Vita, you school
the beautiful name. She is here to talk about her
personal journey, her innovation in healthcare and insurance, and the
(00:34):
social impact that she is making. Lily Welcome to truly Significant.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
You have got to tell us your backstory because I
understand you started college at the ripe old age of
fourteen and started doing an internship at NASA, and then
you had to pivot toward healthcare. So tell us more.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, actually it started when I was twelve. I was
actually scouted by NASA at that time, and I was
blown away by aerospace. I wanted to become one of
the youngest aerospace engineers, and so I ended up, you know,
winning a nationwide competition, being flown over to the Kennedy
Space Center and they gave me baby steps essentially to
(01:27):
start my internship on the robotic side of NASA at JPL.
I went to college early at fourteen Fords and was
almost ready to let my career take off there. But
when I was sixteen, my aunt was diagnosed with terminal
stage calon cancer, and what came with that was two
and a half years of navigating not only chemotherapy, but
(01:48):
just the daily long term care needs. I came with
that stuff that were used to with our grandparents or
our aging parents, such as bathing, dressing, eating, toilet and
continents and whatnot. And it was financially devastating for us.
When we realized health insurance wouldn't step in to help
take care of that, nearly bankrupt us, but it more
importantly bankrupt our relationships in our families. So there's an
(02:11):
entire extended side of my family that we haven't spoken
to in over a decade. So that made me pivot
my career. I pivoted my college background into genetics and AI.
I've let product and engineering at multiple medtech startups and
ultimately founded water Lily. When I realized that families weren't
(02:32):
understanding what long term care was, how expensive it was,
and I find a way to get ahead of those
devastating outcomes that we experienced.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Sure, and part of the family is still not speaking
to each other after ten years.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Oh yeah, but it's not unique to me. I've interviewed
hundreds of families. It's so common amongst those households as well, unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So see, Lily, this is about more than just solving
a problem. You've gotten into a very human situation and
has greater implications. And this is why we wanted you
on the show today, because we think that you are
of all the things that you could do as a genius,
(03:24):
and I know that you've got a high IQ. You
chose this field and we think that you are in
the zone of significance because you're doing something for social impact.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I am incredibly grateful that you've recognized our work and
on this platform. We've also been really grateful to be
recognized by the World Economic Forum, and we actually ended
up getting invited to those annual meetings in Davos and
in China to speak on the global issue around aging,
this very human problem that's not going away anytime soon.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
That's right. And based on your personal experience with your
aunt's illness and then what you've also experienced, let's say,
in the in the last two or three years, how
has that shaped your own personal definition of success versus significance.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yes, absolutely, So I love that question around. You know,
that distinguishment between significance and success, because when I first
started this company, I thought it would I thought that
the definition of success was just being able to help
out families in the US that are going through some
form of devastation with aging and just understanding the problem
(04:49):
better and figure out some form of solution felt like success.
But then that's when I started to really hone in
on what was significant for these families. A lot of
family wanted me to help them reactively navigate those care
needs that their loved ones had around long term care
at the point in which they're navigating it. But something
(05:09):
that I decided to do was take a step back
and actually build out an AI algorithm that predicted that
devastation decades in advance for young and family members that
could actually build out a plan before it was too late.
Because that created larger significance, and by definition, by creating
deeper significance either having significantly more money to work with
(05:31):
or having significantly better relationships and alignment within the family.
Then that's when I redefined what success looked like for
this space, and we're actively still redefining it, not only
in the us, but the same problems that we see
globally as well.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
So this prediction and this algorithm, which I bet you
personally wrote, is almost parallel to predicting a hurricane or
a tsunami coming within a family.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
That is correct. We built the first ever morbidity algorithms
in this space that even life insurance has never seen before,
or even the healthcare industry has never seen before, which
is when we mean by morbidity, we're actually not predicting
when are you going to pass and make assumptions on
how you make it sick or what not, which is
what is normally done in this space. But actually what
(06:28):
we did is we predicted the incidents itself, how long
it was going to before, how family members might step
in for that, and how much it's all all of
it was going to cost. So these are the first
ever algorithms that were designed that helped families really understand
what it's event meant and also to a level of
accuracy that was personalized to the to this individual or
(06:51):
the faund the family sitting in front of these algorithms
as well.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Since you developed that originally, what changes or nuances have
you made based on just learning and experiencing different cases.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
I think that's an incredibly fascinating question, just because we
decided to commercialize a little over a year and a
half ago. Because what was really important is I couldn't
I had half a billion data points. If I had
all the time in the world, I'd love to ask
you so many questions, you get to know you so
much more. But we recognize that we live in a
real world and that means that there's only so much
(07:34):
time that each individual has. And so what we spent
two years doing is not only building out those algorithms,
but how do you commercialize it? What we're really the
highest predictive questions that we could be asking, And so
that's where we refined those hundreds of questions that we
could be asking into just a short few dozens dozens
of questions that revolve around socio demographic information, financial information,
(07:58):
and medical information.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I only imagine you securing funding for this from venture
capitalists and private investors and you telling them about what
you've created and the problem that you're solving. How did
you get investors to understand the deeper why behind your work?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
You continue to ask really fantastic questions because what was
really hard about the space is that there is a
graveyard of age tech companies unfortunately that try to solve
for it in some way. A lot of them focus
on the logistics of if you need care right now,
how do we help solve for it, And honestly, you
(08:48):
don't see really good margins when you build out that
sort of business model. That is also something I understood
when I interviewed family members is that not only was
it a band aid solution, but there's actually not that
much margin as well because you not creating as much
kind of compounding impact as if you were to take
a step back. And so what I helped these investors
(09:08):
understand for first principles was something that no one else
has done before, which is if it's fundamentally possible to
do a little bit of a moonshot here of building
out these versa for morbidity algorithms and we can motivate
families decades and events, there's compounding financial effects for that
as well as care outcome effects. And so from first principles,
(09:28):
what we knew is that there is that every single
household was going to age and on statistically speaking, every
single household was going to navigate a really serious form
of aging that was going to cost quarter of a
million dollars out of pocket today, half a million dollars
for those that need care in ten years now, and
three quarters of a million dollars in twenty years now.
(09:49):
A lot of the US population cannot afford that, and
more importantly, Medicaid, which is the social safety net here
when people run out of money, also didn't have the
means to take care of that. So that's where I
essentially convinced them that from first principles, aging is not
going to stop. This problem is only going to get worse,
and someone needs to come in with the innovation stack
(10:12):
such that it is economically feasible for not only our
government but for the families to actually navigate aging moving
forward in the future. And it's a massive market.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
You are in a different league. Did you know that
completely different league you are thinking about. You are flying
and orbiting over an extremely big issue that we are facing,
not only as a nation. I got to ask you,
(10:44):
having just visited Japan and some of their blue zones,
how did you capture the idea that there's blue zones
emerging around the world and that that could impact your model?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Oh? My goodness, it is. It's not only the blue
zones in terms of folks are living longer. Even in
the US, if you look in the past decade or so,
we are on a trajectory to live far longer than
our you know, parents did or our grandparents did, because
of the advancements and healthcare, because of the advancements in
industries such as self driving vehicles, where just in five
(11:21):
or ten years from now, we will no longer have
as many car crashes or if any car crashes, which
drastically affects folks that you know normally would pass early.
And if people are not passing early, you're going to age.
And if you're going to age or you're going to
end up being sick for longer. And a lot of
the medicine that's developed today is focused on keeping you
alive longer rather than in kind of injecting the highest
(11:45):
quality of life that you could have. It's just it's
just more profitable that way, and so as a result,
the aging problem is only going to get worse if
folks are living five years longer or ten years longer.
It's like I mentioned, inflation today for quarter a million
dollars for care today is going to be half a
million dollars and ten years from now, So if you're
living ten years longer, all of a sudden, you're going
(12:06):
to have to have, you know, a quarter of a
million dollars more than expected. And if you're going to
live twenty years longer from now, then all of a sudden,
you're gonna need half a million dollars. Again, it's in
today's dollars, so it's only going to compound into even
higher leagues of numbers if we need to think about this.
So I would say that Japan, and I would say,
(12:27):
like Japan, in certain parts of Europe where there's these
lou zones, hopefully they still have a multi generational household
where they could still take care of that individual. But
we are living in a drastically different world now where
where folks are trying to find economically better situations from theirself,
they're traveling to other countries to find better jobs, and
(12:49):
we're getting like that multi generation house is getting rid
of and so it's just getting worse. We're not going
to have the family caregiving we thought we did. Financially,
it's going to cost a lot a lot more out
of pocket to not have those family members. And for
a lot of the aging countries such as Japan and Korea,
there's not that many kids that are being born, and
(13:11):
so who's going to even be that working, you know
class that's going to help take care of our aging population.
They may not be there, and so it is just
so multifaceted, so hairy in terms of quality of care
and cost of care. And that's why we need to
get ahead of it. And that's why we may may
(13:32):
not have had much pressure to do planning before because
the stakes are lower, but the stakes are higher, which
is why planning software like what we build is just
necessary at this point.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
That's exactly right, Lily. We're going to take a quick
commercial break. You take the first part tell us about
water Lily and how people can find out about your
company and start to follow you.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Absolutely so, if you want to learn what your future
long term care needs are going to look like and
the associated cost, just go to waterlily dot com and
sign up for our waitlists. I actually personally take on
one out of every time consumers that join on to
our waitlist and I help serve them. Otherwise, if you
ask for a professional, you could reach out to them,
but we also have a blog with a lot of
(14:19):
free content as well on this topic, a lot of
in depth materials that you can go ahead and navigate,
whether it's related to caregiving or government programs or whatnot.
And of course you can learn more about us through
our socials. We are very active on LinkedIn, we are
soon to be very active on other other socials. That's
just Instagram and Facebook and Twitter as well.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
That is wonderful. We will be right back with Lily
after this special message.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
This is Marcus Aurelius reappearing to proclaim that truly significant
conversations with big hearted people is a rare piece of literature.
This book reminds me of one of my more stirring quotes,
waste no more time arguing what a good man should.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Be be one.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
If you're stepping into your next life chapter of your
career and questioning what lies beyond success, this book is
for you. Dive into forty soul stirring stories from luminaries
like doctor Jane Goodall, Ed Asner, and Emily Chang, stories
(15:33):
that urge you to pursue purpose, serve others, and build
a legacy that outlasts you. Authored by Rick TOLKINI Truly
Significant will challenge your view of success and ignite a
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(15:55):
truly significant and begin living intentionally. Maybe your epitaph will.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Read she gave outrageously extended grace unceasingly and lived to
help others so that death found her empty.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Visit truly significant dot com and celebrate the most truly
significant people in your life with the truly Significant community.
How bold of you to make your next chapter matter
and be truly significant.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
And we are back with Lily from Water Lily, and
what a fascinating person. I love talking to futurist. Somebody
influenced you along the way to think about the future
and to think about the bigger world. Who were your
mentors growing up?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I look to my parents as my mentors for the
way that the world works and the core people who
helped me understand the economics of the world world as well.
So my parents are first generation immigrants, and they started
their own family business and a factory, and I started
(17:17):
working at that factory when I was five. And so
those of us I grew up in farming families like
I very much understood just you know, blue collar work,
getting that labor in and you always have to. You
can't just log out after or kind of like stop
work at five pm. You stop when the job like
you know, when when the job is done, essentially when
(17:38):
you have like all the packages I needed to be packed.
And so they helped you understand that no one's giving
you money. You have to create enough economic value that
others realize and are willing to pay for. And that's
how you're able to sustain yourself, you know, as a
human being, as well as taking care of your household
and so, and they taught me how to be a
(17:59):
good person. I think that there is various homeless individuals
that kind of came up to our small business all
the time, and they recognize that, you know, these folks
don't have resources. How can we give them resources if
we have more resources than them. So I think through
those values, we were able to pull ourselves out from
a low kind of like low social economic background to
(18:22):
them being middle class just through sheare hard work. There's
no shortcut for hard work and understanding the way the
world works.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
That's powerful. Thank you for that. On every show, I
typically will do a gut shot and that means that
I'm just merely reacting to my wonderful guest of significance
that we have. I would vote for you for president.
What is there any notion in your mind about being
(18:54):
a leader beyond your company.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I'm an insanely focused person. I like to make sure
that whatever I'm working on right now, I do it
to the best of my ability. In the US, we
sit on a half a half a trillion dollar problem
in aging. I think that there are a lot that
(19:22):
there's a lot for me to do here, a lot
that's going to probably take a couple of decades, so
I could see myself being the space, you know, for
a while. I don't have larger ambitions on how do
I affect the larger population. I think that by being
so good and being so focused and expert in one area,
I think that's where you're going to make the most
and focus at you, that's where you're going to make
(19:42):
the most outsized impact to each household possible. And I
think that there are plenty of folks that I lean
on in government and in policy making that are expert
in what they do and what they understand about their
localization strategies across states across their particular zip codes, and
(20:04):
so I do lean on them every day today to
help me understand what is the aging problem that you
know they're experiencing, and how can I, from my innovation mindset,
how can I help them out and understand their restrictions
rather than trying to enforce what I think the world
should look like. I think a lot of it is
just being really really good at what you do and
(20:25):
continuing to listen to other perspisives around you, including the
policy makings.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
I just love what you just said. Anyway, You've got
my vote if you ever run for president, and I
know your highly focused and you should be where you
are right now. Moving on past the gut shot, I
think families often face you said, bankruptcy up front, bankruptcy
(20:54):
of the heart burn, brain cells, financial devastation around long
term care. I don't think America is ready for what's
going to happen in the next ten or fifteen years.
And if you fast forward twenty years, what in the
world would success with significance looklock in terms of how
(21:18):
water lily will have changed the way society plans for longevity.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Oh my goodness, I think that you're continuing to give
me questions that like ends up making it my kind
of favorite question you know in your episode, but this one,
I love it because the key thing, the key issue
we have in this space is mainly we don't understand
(21:44):
the risk of aging. I think it's really hard for
us to predict for each individual, and we're learning all
the time, and we're iterating all the time, just how
much is a person going to cost, when are they
going to need care? How would their family members step in?
Like being able to predict all the logistics around aging
in the complexity has a dollar amount associated with it,
and if you get really good at predicting that, then
(22:05):
that's when you could actually build out various financial vehicles
in this space that are well balanced for our economy.
That you could create different types of products for those
that can't afford to take it for it out of
pocket day, like there's no way they would essentially go
on Medicaid, and there are those that could maybe go
on Medicaid. You build a different type of financial vehicle.
(22:26):
And so I think in twenty years on, my goal
would be to help be not be at the forefront,
but help be the infrastructure for existing financial players to
understand what that risk looks like and help them build
out better financial products that is accessible by every single
person at every wealth band level. I think to make
(22:47):
that possible, it's not just actually using regular machine learning
algorithms and historical data. I think what we need to do,
to your point is to put on a futurists Actually
is that we you can't just look in, you know,
our rear view mirror and say, oh, I think I
know what aging is going to look like ten or
twenty years from now, especially with how fast technology is advancing,
(23:10):
especially with these large language models that are changing the
game across industries, not only the labor market, but also
changing are people going to pass you know, sooner or later?
Because there's self driving vehicles, We're not having car accidents anymore.
So I think what we need to do to build
into understanding risk better is to put on a futurist
(23:33):
hat of well, what is the future going to look
like and being able to put in our assumptions about
what are the advancements that are going to happen across
industries that affect our mortality and morbidity that we haven't
seen yet. And I think that'll have us that help
us have a better handle on risk and as a
result build better, more financially affordable products for everyone.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
H you're so wright. I worry about those assumptions though,
because I don't think that even policy makers today or
the common citizen have a sense of the alignment of
reality where they are today, where they're going in that
(24:12):
cost and so how can you unify scalvanize us around
the truth.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah. I again another great question because on one side
I just talked about the underlying innovation, but then the
second half of commercializing something is how do you make
it so simple and easy to understand that you can
act on it. The best form of education is a
form of edutainment. Like another one of my investors coined
(24:46):
that and I loved it, which is you need to
entertain and educate in order to educate at the same
time that invokes action in this space. So I just
talked about what we needed to do sort of their
But it is my job, you know, as I would
say an innovator, as an entrepreneur, to be able to
tell you, Rick, hey, I think you have a risk
(25:08):
of aging in the future, and it might affect your nesting,
your retirement Inche that you're saving up pretty substantial and
you might not have the quality of life that you're
looking for unless we get a handle on that risk.
So can you please fill out this three minute INTIKE
survey where we understand a bit more about your situation,
about who you are in your household, and we're going
(25:31):
to make a prediction on what that risk is going
to look like. We're going to tell you how that
risk is going to unfold, like what kind of care
needs are you going to have? What is that likely
going to cost? And from there, it is not trying
to sell you on something, It is trying to tell
you if you have a future one point two million
dollars of cost, it is, well, we think we could
(25:52):
solve for that at a fraction of that. What if
we could solve that with one hundred thousand dollars. What
if we could solve that for fifty thousand dollars? How
is that costible? That's where we open up either a
marketplace of financial products and resources that you didn't know
that existed, and we help you understand it's as simple
as if you were to buy this product, we model
(26:12):
out how this product works for you. Oh, if you
put in fifty thousand dollars, it's going to cover six
hundred thousand dollars for example, and here's how it would
do that. Or if you say, well, I don't want
to do anything, you should always model, Well, if you
don't want to protect this risk with any specialized financial solution,
then let's look into you paying out of pocket. What
(26:32):
are your assumptions around paying out of pocket? Oh, I
have these assumptions great, well, based on those assumptions, you
know you're going to be putting in one hundred thousand
dollars and it's going to cover three hundred thousand dollars
and we have a gap there? Are you okay with
that gap? And so it's just being able to educate
someone what are your needs going to look like of
that risk? What it and how can we best help
(26:56):
you with that? Like? What are your preferences? So I
think I think that the platform itself will still stay
incredibly simple about predicting your future care needs, the future
cost what you want to do about it. For the
underlying technology of how accurate we get at predicting your
costs in that care is just going to get better
and better with just the right, futurist high.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
I believe that's exactly right. That is a beautiful way
to wrap up today's conversation. I've got to have you
back on again. Absolutely. I want you on at least
twice a year to give us a state of the
industry report from your perspective and to talk about what
(27:40):
you've learned from the last six months, so you can
opine on that and then continue to shine light on
what I think is one of the central challenges that
our country is going to face. And so will you
come back and visit with us again?
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Absolutely, happy to happy to share my learnings.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
That would be fantastic. Okay, Lily, so tell us one
more time where we can find out information on your
company and possibly be one of those ten people that
you get to talk with.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah. Absolutely, So you can find us. It's super simple.
It's like water Lily, like the flower the weight. It's
spelled Waterlily dot com. W A T E R l
I l y dot com. Go ahead and sign up
for our wait list and so I can essentially help you.
Someone else can help you, or once we launch that
(28:37):
consumer only version, then you would be one of the
first people to know about it.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
That is great. Thanks again, Lily. Every once in a while,
we are blessed to have a genius, a futurist on
the show, and we found one in you today, and
I really really really appreciate you you being on. We're
gonna get a lot of noise from this show. We'll
try to get this one into President Trump so he
can listen to it and go, hey, maybe he needs
(29:06):
to have a conversation with Lilly about some of the
things going on. Much less the governor of Texas, much
less the governor of Maine. So we really appreciate what
you've stated today, and folks, we hope that you've enjoyed
this as well. Did you get the message about being
significant versus successful? We hope that you did. Thank you,
(29:28):
folks for joining us. We wish you well and especially
on your way to a significant life. Have great week.
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