#99 - Laura Deming

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Laura Deming. Laura is a partner at The Longevity Fund. They invest in companies that will allow us to live longer and healthier lives. You can learn more about them at Longevity.VC.
And Laura's on Twitter at Laura Deming. All right, here we go.
So Laura, why now in terms of longevity? What's happened to make you raise a fund and start investing in research and companies?

**Laura Deming** (0:30)
Yeah, so we think this is an insanely important part of the story because if you were Aristotle and you were trying to start Longevity Fund, you would have a terrible time. It would be like the worst idea. And so timing is super important. Why now for the first time in 2000, 3000 years is it the correct time to work on longevity?
To us, a lot of that comes back to tooling and what's available for us to use.
Prior to the 1900s, if you wanted to impact biology, maybe you should have been a physicist. You know, worked on optics, helped make the first microscope, and like Robert Hooke, a physicist, discovers the cell. So there's so much that comes from physics and other disciplines into biology to push it forward. But then I think in the 1900s, something kind of fascinating happens, which is that for the first time, there's kind of this acceleration of tooling, right? X-rays, NMR, all these things, you know, the cathode ray tube discovered, mass spectrometry, but by this guy trying to find the mass of the electron, which is so cool. And so all these physics tools are coming online, but also more biology-driven tools. And so really, I think, you know, and we can get into this more specifically maybe later in time, but kind of what's excited us is just seeing the tools available to characterize, like life, become available for the first time ever. Right, you know, for all millennia, you had Darwin and Mendel talk about genetics, and there was no knowledge of what was actually going on at the ground truth level. And in 1953, for the first time, you have the link between molecular biology and what we're looking at with microscopes and genetics and this sort of concept of freddy, which is just super exciting.

**Craig Cannon** (2:11)
And what caused you to jump in?

**Laura Deming** (2:14)
Well, A, I think I was born in a very lucky time, which I think you always have to be sort of cautious or a little bit concerned if you believe that about yourself. Why now? Should it really be the lucky time? But then I think also as a kid, A just had a lot of relatives that were sort of aging and that was very striking, but also really wanted to solve cancer. I remember talking to my dad about this and I was like, oh, I want to solve cancer. He was like, well, cancer is a subset of aging. So if you want to solve cancer, you just solve aging and it takes care of all these other things as well.
And that just, you know, that coupled with kind of like hanging off my grandma, she was like, that just kind of made sense to me as a kid. I was like, okay, well, I guess I'll go solve aging then.
That's the biggest problem.

**Craig Cannon** (2:52)
Because cancer is not the number one cause of death in the US right? It's heart disease, something like that.

**Laura Deming** (2:57)
Right, well, you know, if you look at all the HLA diseases, you know, passage during point are driving kind of like the majority of sort of natural deaths, so to speak. So, you know, once we got rid of infectious disease, like it really became the case like aging, which wasn't previously like necessarily the biggest issue, sort of like rose to the forefront.
And so that kind of, I mean, it sort of just, I think made sense to like a small trials that that was important.

**Craig Cannon** (3:18)
Huh, and so why raise a fund rather than, you know, just go for curing cancer?

**Laura Deming** (3:24)
So the thinking at the time was, you know, possibly in a good way, like emperor has no clothes, like extremely simplistic, like you have to understand, so I was at MIT and I was like a sophomore.
And I was also 16 and I had like maybe $1,000 in my bank account. And so like, you know, knowledge about like the financial industry, like relatively low, my dad had been a public investor, so I kind of knew a lot about like the idea of investing in things like that. That was a generally good thing to do. And I'd worked in like aging labs for maybe four years. And I think the striking thing was just like there was just like no money to like make drugs. And it's kind of hard, you know, like when you're in a lab, you just have like no idea what's going on in the outside world. And so I would like ask venture capitalists, like I would, you know, call up a few in the phone book and like, you know, a few responded and so like have these like random conversations. And just be like, you know, I'm just curious, I'm a student. Can you like tell me more about like how this industry works? Like, you know, are you funding aging therapeutics? And like none of them had heard of like aging therapeutics. They were kind of like Asian therapeutics. Like what did you say?