Latest / StartUp Health NOW Podcast / From Personal Journey to Global Mission: Richard Lui on Love, Labor, and Why He Is Leading StartUp Health’s Caregiving Moonshot

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From Personal Journey to Global Mission: Richard Lui on Love, Labor, and Why He Is Leading StartUp Health’s Caregiving Moonshot · StartUp Health NOW Podcast

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. All right.
• 0:15
  My name is Unity Stoakes, co-founder at StartUp Health, and it is my great honor to be here with Richard Lui, who is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker, and also is really an inspiring leader pushing forward our caregiving moon shot, and we're gonna be talking all about that.
• 0:32
  We are at the Health Conference in Las Vegas. How are you? It's good to see you, Unity, and, uh, we're sitting in a booth amidst 1,000 booths, and I can feel the energy pouring over the walls. I can kinda hear the buzz.
• 0:45
  Maybe you can hear it in the background. Yeah. And it really is a palpable energy. There's thousands of innovators running around, lots of healthcare companies, lots of CEOs. What's your take on the show so far?
• 0:55
  You know, I just got here. The energy feels great. I'm looking forward to the next 24 hours to soak it all in. Last time you and I were here was for CES. Right.
• 1:06
  And that was also really great to see the B2C space in the space that we're about to talk about. Right.
• 1:12
  Well, let's get into that because the caregiving moon shot, this is a new moon shot that we're working on together at StartUp Health, and really, in a lot of ways, I see this as an umbrella moon shot because caregiving and caregivers really touch all aspects of all of our moon shots in one way or another.
• 1:30
  Let's just start, what inspired you to really focus on this issue? And then we'll talk about why it matters. First of all, glad you're doing this, and thanks for doing this at StartUp Health.
• 1:41
  I was so excited to hear that you and Steve are saying, "We gotta do this. This is an important space, the care economy." It started with me when my dad got Alzheimer's 10 years ago.
• 1:52
  I was working in New York City at 30 Rock, and m-my dad called me and said, "I was diagnosed," and early on, right? And so I immediately, in my brain, started...
• 2:04
  the gears started turning, and I was like, "Well, I'm working eight days a week right now, 25 hours a day," is what we like to say in, in news, and I knew that couldn't be anymore.
• 2:15
  So that was the realization that most likely they'd be the end of my journalism career, which I had fought for so long. All caregivers go through that. You know that. Steve knows that.
• 2:27
  And all of the founders that you have know that, whether it's in the caregiving moon shot or not. Right.
• 2:32
  I know I've heard a lot of the stories and a lot of the interviews and sit downs you've had, and they're really saying things that are so personal.
• 2:39
  But there's the other side of that equation, which is the joy, despite the difficulty, that I think powers all of the moon shot community founders in many ways, and that's what happened to me. Mm. I took the pill. Yeah.
• 2:55
  Well, I'm glad you did because there's such a need. Yeah.
• 2:58
  And this is a huge issue throughout the United States, but it's also a global issue in so many ways, and it's a universal issue in that it just impacts every family, unfortunately- Yeah... at some point.
• 3:09
  I mean, the numbers are gargantuan, and you've seen it across other of your moon shot communities. And there, there are overlaps, for sure, in all of these spaces.
• 3:17
  So if you just look at this particular circle in the Venn diagram of what the moon shot communities are at StartUp Health, this one says, "I'm $10 to $20 trillion globally." That...
• 3:29
  It's saying, "I am 10 to 20% of all, uh, of all countries' GDPs, 100 trillion total globally." It's also saying, "I'm 100 million people in America." It's saying, "I'm 25% to 30% of your population."
• 3:44
  And that's just one of the circles in the global economy Venn diagram. You could look at brain health, for instance, and say that's also a big circle- Sure... and a big opportunity. And I...
• 3:55
  And when you and I spoke two years ago, I think? Yeah, two years ago. You were right in on it and saying, "I totally see the horizontal- Yeah... across all the disease paths."
• 4:04
  And so I think the one thing that I've been talking to you and Steve about recently is how to understand and describe the care economy and the caregiving moon shot. One way is it is your best friend. Hmm.
• 4:18
  If you are in Alzheimer's or any of the other moon shots, the second beat is always going to be caregiving in that economy. Mm-hmm. It may not be the first beat, right? Mm. So that's really...
• 4:31
  And it's really more of a thematic consideration. Can you lead on caregiving if you're a founder? Hmm. Maybe you need to really lead on four or five disease paths- Hmm... that are in your back pocket. Hmm.
• 4:45
  Then the next step is, you know what? I'm that gargantuan, huge second page or third chapter or second chapter- Mm-hmm... of that journey for that particular sector, that disease path sector. You're right.
• 4:58
  Yeah, it's, it seems like in some ways all businesses should be thinking about this at some point in what they're building because it has such a profound... It touches e-everyone in some ways. Take us into the future.
• 5:12
  We like to think about these moon shots in long-term frames so that we can solve them in big ways.
• 5:21
  What do you think we can or should be doing as a world to really solve some of these needs that are out there as it relates to caregivers and caregiving and the care economy?
• 5:32
  You know, the first thing I'd say is community, as huggy, squishy as that might sound. As I've done roundtables across the country and as well as in, uh, on other continents, bringing together business,
• 5:45
  community, academia, media, and politicos, basically, policymakers. They don't know each other even if they've been in the same town, a small town or a big town.
• 5:57
  And in this business, this space, in the, that area of BCAMP I just described, business, community, academia, media, policy, politicsAnd that is what is consistent across just about every...
• 6:10
  So I think in the next five to 10 years is we're gonna see connective tissue being built. Mm.
• 6:17
  And that connective tissue, as you know, as you've created ecosystems over the decades with your moonshot communities, is what many of the members and founders are saying, "Hey, that's important to me." Yeah.
• 6:27
  "I didn't think I'd need that-" Right... "necessarily." Yeah. So I think that's definitely one, one thing that will ha- be happening and growing in the next five to 10 years.
• 6:36
  So almost an infrastructure, if you will, that, that, that creative, uh, community connectivity across that... For example, we have an Alzheimer's moonshot, we have a diabetes moonshot. That's right.
• 6:47
  They all need this theme as a core pillar to what we're trying to solve there. Inter-community, even within your communities- Right... and in the caregiving community, is that importance.
• 7:00
  'Cause it's sharing best practices, it's sharing networks, it's understanding where I can't hold up the stool 'cause I'm only on one leg, you can hold up the other corner- Mm-hmm... and you can hold up the other corner.
• 7:13
  And I think the second thing related to that connective tissue is the beginning, uh, I hope, of a healthy B2B space in the care economy. Mm. Which we don't see.
• 7:24
  So for instance, if you were looking to understand basically payer codes that would help all of the caregiving founders, well, it'd be great if in the B2B space there was basically a consultancy that'd say, "Hey, by the way, you know, Unity, come to us.
• 7:42
  We'll figure it out for your product service." 'Cause I know that's a whole other, you know, ball of wax when you think about payer codes. Right. But you need it. Right. Exactly.
• 7:51
  What's been surprising to you as you've kind of, you started your journey, it touched you personally- Yeah... and then you've must have, you've learned so much through the journey. What have you come to learn?
• 8:04
  What have you come to understand about what the needs are? Yeah. I, I didn't think I'd be sitting, saying, and thinking, and actually working with you on this. It was just a burrito of experiences. I love burritos.
• 8:19
  [laughs] And I like to stuff them. Yeah. But it's a burrito of an experience, and I just keep on adding things. You know, I started in the startup space, in different technologies, pneumatic and data, and then FinTech.
• 8:32
  And then I moved over to becoming a journalist, and you can see this burrito's getting pretty full. Yep. You take the large tortilla. Yeah. And then I became a journalist after working at Citibank, and blah, blah, blah.
• 8:43
  And then the journalism really opened my eyes to a part of how to express the most difficult stories. And then I'm...
• 8:51
  They kinda came together as I realized, you know, there's a narrative and cultural gap in caregiving that led to two, two movies, feature movies, on caregiving itself.
• 9:02
  W- and by the way, I still say this, who wakes up and says, "I'm gonna, I wanna do two caregiving movies"? Right. Nobody wants to do those. Yeah. Like, who's gonna watch that? But this touches people's lives. Yeah.
• 9:13
  And that's what drove me. Like, I, I might be running into a wall, but I was like, "I gotta run into this wall."
• 9:19
  That then brought me back around to, okay, if you're closing the cultural gap, the next gap to really fuel a change is business. And we have an economic gap. Right.
• 9:31
  And so you have to have those two really working nicely together. Mm-hmm.
• 9:35
  With Bradley Cooper's movie now out, there's a whole series of movies, both narrative and documentary, and mixes in between, that are trying to close that cultural gap.
• 9:46
  You know, when the S- when Seth Rogen and Lauren Rogen come out with a- Right...
• 9:49
  a, a H- HFC, this great movement of you can be young and you can be funny, and this could be still something that is important in soci- So I think the cultural gap is starting to close, and th- th- that's happening.
• 10:02
  The economic gap, which you know really well, is where we have to concentrate now more on, and work together with the cultural movement. Is this part education that needs to happen?
• 10:13
  And w- one of the things that I think is important that you're doing, and we're trying to do it with the moonshot here, is inspire more entrepreneurs, innovators, builders to focus on this issue because, first of all, there is a business opportunity to solve- Gargantuan...
• 10:30
  something that is- Yeah... really important for people. Th- there's an aging population globally. There's such an, a need, but there really is a business opportunity, and we need more builders focusing on this.
• 10:43
  So we're experiencing it and understanding it as family members, as caregivers ourselves, but now we need the builders to step up and see the opportunity.
• 10:53
  I think o- one of the things, yes, and when you meet Unity, you'll s- And you know him through a- all of the content and meeting and hosting this podcast. Nice guy, you know.
• 11:04
  I can totally see why he's the, the right person to understand our narrative here at, you know, StartUp Health. He gets the long narrative, he understands the points we need to hit.
• 11:14
  But off when, uh, uh, off-camera, if you, when you and I first spoke, I said, "He really understands this is a hard business." It is, yeah. And w- we can be really good at tough, h- old school, hard business.
• 11:27
  Now I'm meaning, like, you know, rust belt- Right... kinda work stuff. That's right, yeah. We can be rust belt entrepreneurs- Yeah...
• 11:34
  and still do something that is really great for impact, really great for both the B2C and the B2B spaces. We can really have it all, and you know, when impact investing started, what, 20 years ago? Yeah.
• 11:48
  We were desperate for models, weren't we? Yeah, that's right. And if we can go to space, I think the hard problems are the most exciting, and- Yeah...
• 11:57
  in many times, a, end up attracting the most extraordinary creators, the most extraordinary builders and entrepreneurs. So this really is a call to action to people everywhere. If you want a challenge, come focus here.
• 12:12
  It's an opportunity, of course.But it's inspi- it's an inspiring opportunity Yeah, and you've met the entrepreneurs over the years very successful in their spaces, right?
• 12:23
  And they've decided to jump out for a moment 'cause of something that happened in their life and they decided I'm gonna take my success and expertise in this sector or corner and I'm gonna create this model, and I got funders and I've got the right people.
• 12:39
  I've got some co-founders that I've worked with in my last two or three businesses and we're gonna try to solve something in the care space
• 12:47
  and then after two years there's no infrastructure to help them make it past the two years. Mm. The first angel funding, early stage funding.
• 12:58
  You're two to three million if you're lucky to t- and you spent it and that is why I think as you're investing in this, and he's not paying me to say this by the way, but as you're investing in creating a community the goal really is to get them past the two years.
• 13:13
  Yeah. That's right. It's such a long journey and then but once you break through certain stages you start to become sustainable, you start to realize, hey, I can do this. Yeah.
• 13:24
  And you get to those new levels and we need more of that. It takes time and- It's not i- g- 'cause, 'cause it's just not here. Right. Like, and this is why the community part is so important. Yeah.
• 13:34
  Like, that is the big... That's the, that's one of the major legs of that stool to get to step up past the two years.
• 13:40
  'Cause the good intentions, the love of the space, the co-founders you may have brought with you, the money that you may have raised both bootstrapping and, you know, outside funders goes away.
• 13:51
  When we first started StartUp Health there was Y Combinator was around and this is going back 15 years, Techstars- Yeah...
• 13:59
  and they had these wonderful 12-week accelerator programs, which are tremendous, great, especially in the technology world, and when we launched StartUp Health around that time it was a three-year initial program,
• 14:14
  uh, ig- precisely for the reason you described, which is it takes longer. Things take longer. You gotta get through a year, two years- Scars... or, yeah. You need the scars. You gotta go through the journey. Yeah.
• 14:24
  You travel all over the world, you go to a lot of events, you talk to a lot of people. Are you starting to see progress? Are you starting to meet more founders in this area? Are we just at the nascent stage?
• 14:38
  How would you describe where we really are? Yeah... and then where we need to go? When it comes to the care economy, I think that we're at least better off than we were five years ago talking about it.
• 14:49
  W- when I was in Mena as well as asean and in Northern Europe, I've been asking the question of how do we size the care economy? Now, based on that answer I would see two things.
• 15:03
  One, oh, of course we know the numbers and these are the sub-sectors, and this is the way we're looking at investments, flows, and that says that in that particular geography they're at a certain stage, right? Mm.
• 15:15
  The other ones will say, what is the care economy? The other potential answer, the third potential answer is, yeah, we would really like to understand the size. And so by asking that very simple question,
• 15:29
  that is the way I've been able to get a sense of... And why am I doing that? I'm very interested, 'cause I'm a North American, where we're at. Right.
• 15:37
  And we're right in m- amongst ev- all the other continents in terms of our... We're not like way ahead and we're not way behind. There is...
• 15:46
  The only country, and you've heard the examples before, there's a couple, you know, like UAE and Singapore clearly have started to integrate without being as... It's almost just like, "We're gonna do it."
• 15:59
  They've made it a priority. Hey, are you... Yeah, I was gonna ask, y- are there models to look to yet? And if so, where? You started to get into that. Yeah.
• 16:08
  You know, I think one of the things we also like to do is look to our other moonshots as well as other startups within those. Hey, are there things we can learn over here that we can bring over there?
• 16:20
  We're looking for ideas by the way. We're looking for r- [laughs]... recommendations. More. We're looking for innovators. What do investors need to know or that you wish the investor world needed to know?
• 16:30
  'Cause oftentimes it starts with grants, philanthropy, things like that, but then hopefully it makes its way where investors start to see the opportunity to then start to fund these types of things.
• 16:42
  Is it just literally as, as clear as the scope and size of the need? Yeah. It, I think for investors, they're gonna come in on a disease path. Coming in on...
• 16:54
  And then you have the rarity that understands the care economy. But the important point to make is for the good outcomes in the disease path sector is going to be the, the care infrastructure around that.
• 17:09
  You have better outcomes, you have better ROI because that product and service will survive and be, have a higher utility, hi- have a higher traction, higher adoption rates because you have the right care infrastructure around it.
• 17:25
  Pharma and their investments in various, for instance, and Phyllis Ferrell will be the expert on this, so I borrow her and, and invoke her name, who you know very well.
• 17:35
  And she's our chief impact officer for the Alzheimer's Moonshot. Yeah. That's right. And she will tell you pharma evolved in the last 10 to 15 years
• 17:44
  in the dementia Alzheimer's space not only because of the developments that were forthcoming,
• 17:50
  uh, but because they knew that it was a 360 ecosystem, the way they were gonna derive the most value based on the investments they were making i- in their products and therefore became services that would surround it.
• 18:02
  So I think the more holistic opportunity to view an investment is to, yeah, you're gonna look at the disease path because there's a product and service- Mm...
• 18:10
  that you can directly most likely at this point pin your, pin, pin the tail on that donkey, but y- y- it's tougher to do on the caregiving space that is the killer app, right? Mm-hmm. Right.
• 18:21
  So I think the, for an investor is to see the broader, better outcomes. It's, the way I describe it, it's a lot like, and it goes back a couple days, when eBay first launched-It was doing okay, right? Yeah.
• 18:36
  But how are we gonna pay for this stuff? Right. Right. And so what did they do? Mm, they bought PayPal. Yeah. Yeah.
• 18:43
  Now, the, the-- it's the famous business case when you go to business school and sitting there in class as an MBA or a BBA, that if it weren't for PayPal,
• 18:53
  eBay would not have been this rising meteor-meteororic star at the time. Caregiving is similar to all of the other disease path journeys in the care economy.
• 19:05
  That's a great exam- It's more of a full stack solution, thinking about- Yes... the full flywheel, if you will, in business terms of how you really solve something. Really fascinating.
• 19:16
  I-- Something I've been thinking about is how we expand kind of the opportunity.
• 19:24
  I, I think about, for example, a new generation of tools that not just healthcare companies could be focusing on, but consumer companies, retail companies, em-employers across all business could be focusing on this issue in different ways.
• 19:42
  I'll just give an example. There's a lot of robotics companies now. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of exoskeleton companies. And I think about,
• 19:49
  wow, imagine a consumer focused set of exoskeletons that help people lift their loved ones- Mm-hmm...
• 19:57
  out of bed or carry the, you know, out of the bathroom, things like that, that you might just think about in a different way. And imagine if you could buy that at Walmart- Yeah...
• 20:06
  and not have to go through the healthcare system- Right... to have these types of tools and to make it affordable and- Yes... accessible and all these things.
• 20:14
  Those are exciting things, and I know with all of the-- An-and I'm sure y-you love your TikTok too. All the videos you get to see that are coming out around what you just discussed are really amazing.
• 20:25
  You know, how fast are the steps compared to what a real human could do? Is it faster or slower? Is it right, you know, s-syncopation and blah, blah, blah. And I love all of that.
• 20:34
  I think that when we are trying to understand the next big thing that will make that happen, and some might argue that robotics will be the intake, I don't know if that's necessarily gonna be the intake of what I believe is the big thing.
• 20:47
  I'm involved in a project at the University of Michigan
• 20:51
  called Care Genome across the business school, the medical school, and the engineering school, and it's to look at the large scale primary data set that's out there on the last three feet of care. Wow.
• 21:04
  Now, you could argue robotics will be there, and they'll be able to gather the last three feet of the data on the last three feet of care, 'cause that's where we're gonna get the payer system to really acknowledge that which is really it.
• 21:16
  'Cause you, if you give it to the analyst and then bring it back up to the decision maker, the analyst will say, "I don't have the data to justify that product or service." Right. "I just don't have it." Yeah.
• 21:25
  And but not making a decision. They just say, "I don't have the data," 'cause-- And then the, the decision maker will go, "I don't have the data. That code, it's not gonna...
• 21:32
  That-- This service or product doesn't work in that code, or we're not gonna create a code for this." And I do believe that if we can put it on the map, basically,
• 21:41
  that, you know, when Unity sleeps four hours, he's able to eat six hundred calories versus four hundred. Right. That he can stand up three point two seconds faster. Mm-hmm. That his gait is ten percent longer. Mm-hmm.
• 21:57
  All of these things that once we can prove that out and show it to products and services within the care economy and then to the p- In, in that space, the payers and then the providers can all of a sudden be singing from the same sheet of music.
• 22:10
  They don't have that same sheet of music. I love it. You mentioned at the beginning the films that you worked on. Mm-hmm. Would you talk about those just briefly and where people might be able to- Yeah... find them?
• 22:21
  Thanks for bringing them up. So I-- The first one was Sky Blossom, and it was about five children taking care of-- as caregivers aged nine to twenty-six, Midwest, South, East, West, Pacific Islands,
• 22:35
  and they were all care-- And we filmed over three years. We'd come into their house and whatever they're doing, cheerleading, and it was this really amazing unity. Wow. Wow.
• 22:45
  And we didn't have the title, and then we did the title at the end, and it was a five-year project. You can just check it out, skyblossom.com.
• 22:54
  Is they-- We called it Sky Blossom, and that's a longer explanation, but I love the story. Diaries of the Next Greatest Generation.
• 23:02
  I concentrate on the subtitle because after spending time and, like, uh, uh, editing for, like, a year and a half and I just really got to know who these folks were, I was like, "This is the next greatest generation."
• 23:13
  That's great. Those who are caregivers at that age are the ones to-- So look for them, hire them, hug them, give them a high five. The second one was Unconditional about mental health and caregiving.
• 23:26
  These have military families in them. We just got green lit for a third movie on caregiving 'cause you have to have a trilogy, right? You knew that. And yes. Uh, three keeps coming up. Three keeps coming up.
• 23:36
  There you go. Three years. Three years on your, on your film and third film.
• 23:38
  Well, Richard, thank you from the bottom of our hearts at Startup Health and for all that you're doing to really make this possible and really push this forward. We're so incredibly grateful. You're educating the world.
• 23:51
  You're helping us. You're helping the ecosystem and community. We're eternally grateful. Thank you. It's an honor. All right. Yeah. Good to see you. Thank you. See you soon.
• 23:59
  [gentle music] And finally, an invitation to all of the extraordinary health transformers, whether you are a startup, someone building the future of health, or whether you are an investor, funder, or buyer of the solutions out there in the marketplace, this is an invitation to you to join the Startup Health member community.
• 24:23
  Learn more at startuphealth.com. Look forward to hopefully seeing you soon.