SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
983 200 People Have Paid Him $2k To Live Forever
03 Apr 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Steven Klausnitzer.
He's the CEO of Forever Labs, a Y Combinator company. Prior to Forever Labs, he spent 15 years mentoring and developing top talented Fortune 500 companies, including American Express and others. He has extensive experience in strategic growth, commercialization, and team leadership. Steven, are you ready to take us to the top?
I'm ready.
All right. Forever Labs. What does this thing do? Tell me it's tell me it's the water of life or whatever they call that thing in the mystical books.
Sure. So in short, Forever Labs will store your stem cells now so that you can live healthier longer. So I suppose it is a bit like what you suggested. So what a lot of people don't realize is that as you age, you have less stem cells and the ones that remain become damaged and less effective. And there are over 500 clinical trials that are using the cells we store to treat age-related diseases.
But when you get those diseases, you tend to be quite a bit older. And the stem cells that you still have are no longer as effective as they would have been if you had stored them when you were younger. Our company is for proactive people that are storing their young biology now so that they can access it later in life.
Steven, you're pitching the fountain of youth. Why aren't you a trillionaire? Why isn't Kim Kardashian Snapchatting about the forever youth? I mean, seriously, how do you not become filthy rich from this?
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Chapter 2: How does Forever Labs aim to extend human life?
Yes. Yep. So you pick a doctor. And by the way, you have no bad choices in Northern California or with any of our doctors. But I know those two gentlemen quite well and they're fantastic.
But Dr. Babak Samimi.
Yeah. So yeah. In LA. Yeah. Uh, Dr. Samimi is great. He has a procedure today.
I bet he kills us. I feel like everyone I see at brunching in Beverly Hills, they'd be all over this thing.
Yeah. It's a great market for us. No doubt. Um, so, uh, LA is phenomenal. Uh, San Francisco is really, we started in Michigan, but then what happened is we had people flying out from San Francisco to Michigan to have the procedure done. Um, and we realized very quickly that we needed to expand is our second market was San Francisco.
So I'm on step two now. I've picked my doctor. Annual storage plan is twenty five hundred bucks initial cost and two fifty, which is an annual storage fee. So kind of like a SAS model there almost. And then a lifetime storage plan. I guess it's one time seven grand.
Yeah. And that's like I think if I master an 18 year break even on that. So, you know, if you plan on living longer than 18 years, it makes sense to do that if you have the resources. So you would sign up on the site, Nathan, and then you would be reached out to by one of our physicians. If you're in L.A., like you mentioned, it might be if you sign up with Dr. Samimi, it would be Dr. Samimi.
Or perhaps there we also have Dr. Banfi. One of those doctors would reach out to you, schedule a time that's convenient for you and for them for you to come in and have this procedure. It's a 15 minute procedure. outpatient procedure. When you go in there, the doctor will apply a little bit of lidocaine to your, what's called your posterior iliac crest, which is a fancy way of saying your hip.
I was going to say, what the hell is that?
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Chapter 3: How does the company acquire and utilize physicians for procedures?
So what you have, you just made yourself sound very cool. By the way, you're like the health version of Elon Musk.
Oh, well, hey, I'll welcome that compliment. I'm a fan. So what we do, though, is we store your bone marrow niche. And your bone marrow is extremely important. In your bone marrow, you've got hematopoietic stem cells, which build your blood. You've got mesenchymal stem cells, which build your bone, your vasculature, your connective tissue. So your soft muscle. So Nathan, you're a young man.
How old are you? 28. So you're 28 years old. So you would have access to your 28-year-old bone, blood, immune system, connective tissue, almost in perpetuity, really. We store them in nine different, we call them
aliquots you'll have access to your own 28 year old cells at nine different points in the future you can grow these stem cells to great numbers so really from just one of those aliquots i should say our my co-founder dr katakowski has grown more of his own stem cells outside of his body than he has in his body right now with how fast tech is advancing is there a day where i can produce baby nathans without having to get married using these stem cells somehow
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that is, I'm honestly, I'm, I'm sure that it's coming.
In fact, um, I mean, I'm being a little facetious here because like what you're actually selling is the person like buys this because they want to be able to go tell their friends they're storing their stem cells in some polar mountains somewhere and make them sound really cool. Like that's, well, that might be some of it.
I mean, like there's, that's why I would, that's what would sell me by the way.
Yeah. So Nathan, there's, there's definitely some early adopters that I think like just the signaling that you've done this is like really cool. Right.
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Chapter 4: What is the process of storing stem cells at Forever Labs?
But The reality is the reality of what you've done is way cooler than that. So how does it help me, actually, in the future? So I mentioned briefly there's over 500 clinical trials using these cells. These trials are not for some fringe diseases. We're talking about cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer's. And some of these are in phase three.
Cardiovascular disease and stroke are in phase three. That's the number one and the number three killer of our species, respectively. So what they're finding is you can, for example,
At Johns Hopkins, they took these bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells, the same ones we store for you, and they grew them and introduced them into the damaged area of a person's heart after they had a heart attack. And they were able to grow healthy tissue, replace damaged, scarred tissue with healthy tissue.
But it was healthy tissue taken, let's say it's an 80-year-old man. They had to take that from somewhere healthy on the 80-year-old man to put itā¦
But here, check it out. Here's what sucks. There's a number of people that wanted to participate in that trial but couldn't because when they isolated their cells and they looked at them, there weren't enough of them there. And the ones that were there wouldn't grow because that 80-year-old man was too old. Had he stored his 28-year-old stem cells, that's not a problem.
So part of what we're doing here, Nathan, is very pragmatic, very practical. You'll have the best possible treatments in the future using these cells.
Now, the moonshot and what we're most excited about and, frankly, why we started the company is because what we want to do, and we're already doing it in animals at Forever Labs, we're taking cells from young mice and we're putting them in genetically matched older mice because I should really start at the beginning here. We started the company because I was on the phone
And you'll find this a year, by the way, this is two years ago. I'm on the phone with 20 and 15.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the costs associated with stem cell storage?
and had shown that the mice lived about 16% to 20% longer with just one reintroduction.
Does there have to be a match rate, like when someone gets a kidney transplant, or can any young mice go into any older mice relative of lineage?
That's a really good question. So these are syngenic mice, so they might as well be genetically matched, right?
Because they were genetically produced.
Yes, exactly. So Mark's telling me this, and he's like, I'm not mad that I didn't get the grant or that someone else perhaps is getting credit for... you know, hypothesis I had before they did. I'm mad because I'm turning 40 years old and I can't find anyone that will store my stem cells. And I'm like, what am, what are we doing? Like, why are we working in this space?
Like, this is your expertise. My expertise is in business development and leading teams. Why don't we marry those two expertise together and create this company? And so we did. And so that's how we came with forever lab. So now our goal as a company.
And like I was saying before our moonshot, wait, before you tell me the moonshot, that's a good cliffhanger. Um, what, what do you, I mean, what do you, are people buying this thing? Are you pre-revenue on the current offering or what?
Yeah. Yeah. So we're in like, we're in nine States. We have over 200 or no, we're just about at our 200th client. Okay.
That's good. So almost 200 people have gone through this and they're, they've bought, they've paid you something. These aren't like free giveaways.
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