E10: Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz on Building Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy, a $1.5B company redefining retirement

Around 11,000 Americans are retiring every single day, ~60m people in the US are retired. Medicare is one of the biggest problems among this community, there are 100s of providers and choosing the wrong one could either mean losing thousands of dollars or your life (I think Cobi quoted a report citing ~20% fatality on choosing the wrong provider). If your parents are not in that age group yet, you probably haven’t started thinking about this but it is one of the biggest and most underserved markets in the US.

The opportunity is not to just help senior citizens with Medicare, the opportunity is to redefine what retirement means for people over the age of 65. My maternal grandfather retired at the age of 82 and was one of the healthiest and fittest people up until then. Your health cannot be wholly defined by your diet and exercise routine, purpose in life plays an equal if not one might argue a bigger role. In my day job I work with Tim Draper, his dad Bill Draper who I met a couple of years ago was going to office twice a week at 95 years of age. Charlie Munger did the Berkshire Annual Shareholder meeting with Warren Buffett at 99.

If you can figure out a way to give purpose to people over 65 and activate them that is ~23% of the US population by 2050. What impact could that have on the GDP? I will leave that for you to imagine. You probably have an uncle, grandparents or parents where you can see the difference between the ones who hang up their boots and the ones who never retire. There is something about the keeping your brain active which is more meaningful in many ways then even your diet or gym routine. In our last episode we had Colin Greenspon on the show who started Narya Capital with Vice President JD Vance. Narya is an early investor in Chapter, cofounded by Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz and Vivek Ramaswamy. JD Vance and Peter Thiel were on the board of the company and maybe that is why the company is widely misunderstood or MAGA labelled, hear from the CEO Cobi on the masterplan of Chapter to redefine what retirement means in the long term. My conversation with Cobi is his first ever long form podcast and it is one of the best ones I have recorded so far. He was incredibly candid and insightful as we got to dive into his time at Palantir where he spent 5 years, why he chose to go after the ~60m seniors (aged above 65) in the US to make Medicare easier for them, utility of AI in its current state, recruiting and some common myths in business.

Hope you enjoy!

In case you missed my conversation with Colin, you can catch up below. It was a pure masterclass on thesis driven investing and was Colin’s first ever long form podcast.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro02:38 – Why Chapter is Misunderstood?5:48 - What Chapter is doing?8:14– Why founder market fit is a joke09:13 - What does Palantir actually do?12:31 - Building Conviction 16:50 - What are tech enabled service businesses21:08 - Recruiting without bias 27:12 - AI in Chapter and Building a lean team32:33 - Allocating time as a CEO37:53 - Building Culture and interviewing50:29 - Choices that compound 57:55 - Casting at Palantir & Alternate career choices1:03:41 - China vs US1:13:12 - Has innovation stagnated?1:15:52 - Chapter’s business model innovation1:23:41 - Zero To One-isms1:31:05 - Helpful mentors in life1:36:37 - What does a business plan mean for early stage companies?1:39:54 - Other problems to solve1:46:27 - Rapid fire and signing off

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