Understanding Market Opportunity in the Longevity Economy with Susan Golden, Author of Stage (Not Age)

On this week's Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Susan Golden, Author of the new book Stage (Not Age). Susan and I talk about the $22 trillion market opportunity in the emerging longevity economy from education to workforce to healthcare and housing. Let's get started. 

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Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Susan Golden, author of Stage (Not Age): How to Understand and Serve People Over 60, The Fastest Growing, Most Dynamic Market in the World. Welcome to the show, Susan. 

Susan Golden: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Ardinger: To give a little background. You've got a lot of experience in this particular space. You teach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You're a Mentor at Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator. And a thought partner with Pivotal Ventures on their Caregiving Innovation Initiatives. I think the first question I'd like to ask is what drew you to this topic and exploring this $22 trillion market opportunity called the longevity economy.

Susan Golden: Great question. I have a background in public health and then went into venture capital in life sciences and health services. And I actually took a career break, which is part of what the book is about. That many people are going be taking career breaks if they're living 100 year lives. 

And went back to school. And Stanford had just started a new program called the Distinguished Careers Institute, for people anywhere from their fifties to their eighties, come back and rethink what they want to do with the next chapters of their life. Because they're living much longer. And nobody should be thinking about retirement in their sixties because they have another 30 or 40 years to go.

And I learned about longevity at Stanford. There's a wonderful center on longevity that is thinking about how do you plan for the 100 year life. And it's very dynamic and it's not just about the typical impression that most people have, that all older adults are elderly, declining, frail need a whole variety of services.

Some will, and most of us will need something at some point in the end of our lives. But most people are going to be living very vibrant lives well into their eighties. And this has created a whole new economy that most people just don't know about. And particularly investors and innovators don't know about it.

Traditionally, if I asked my venture capital friends, why aren't you investing in this? They would say, oh, this is about senior housing and fall prevention and medication management. And that's a piece of it, but there is now, as you said, a $22 trillion worldwide market right here in the United States.

Right now, it's estimated to be about $8.6 trillion. As over 10,000 people are turning 65 every day and they're going to be living long lives. And over a third to a half of children being born today can expect to live to their 100s. And this longevity economy now includes all their spending, the stimulating new jobs that are being created for their products and services.

And companies are beginning to rethink their longevity strategy. Not just for products and services, and how could they have a multi-generational. But also, how to have a workforce that's multi-generational. And how to take advantage of that. 

And most people don't realize that people over 50 have most of the wealth. They're responsible for 56% of consumer spending and 83% of wealth in the United States. So this is a gigantic market opportunity, gigantic innovation opportunity, and a great need to support healthy aging as our population is going to grow in this category. 

Brian Ardinger: So, with the fact that it is growing and there's this massive opportunity, what are the biggest misconceptions out there? Why do you think more people aren't exploring this at this point?

Susan Golden: I don't think they fully understand the vibrancy that most older adults are in. And that they're in multiple stages. And they tend to lump all older adults in one category. All people 65 and older, or whatever demarcation one takes 70, 75 when there's great diversity in aging. 

And I think we should be thinking about ageless people. But more and what I argue for in the book about stage, some companies have done this well. They recognize what stage of life somebody is in. So, they may be in a re-purposing stage or transitioning out of one career to another. They may want continuous learning and educational opportunities as I, and all my colleagues who've done the DCI program at Stanford were in. To refocus what we want to do next and what are our life priorities. 

But there's other traditional consumer facing industries that people haven't thought how to reinvent them for people with longer lives and how to support their health span. And this includes housing alternatives and home modifications, fashion and accessories, education as we mentioned, entertainment, travel, you can think of that just virtually every consumer opportunity that is going to have a burgeoning longevity customer that needs to be understood. 

And so, understanding what stage somebody is in, will give you a much broader perspective about their needs. There may be a caregiving stage even. 

Brian Ardinger: In the book you talk about, you have five kinds of key stages. Can you walk through what those stages are? And what's important about them. 

Susan Golden: So, I came up with the concept of 18 life stages that could be divided into five quarters of life. And I know that's funky math. But people traditionally think about life in three stages, which is your education, your working stage, and then your retirement stage. And now I think we have to think much more broadly.

So, I think about the first stage of life as sort of your growth stage. And when you're launching and you're first and beginning to experiment. And in your second quarter, you have different stages where you're doing continuous learning. You're developing some financial security. You might be caregiving, parenting, optimizing health. 

And then the third and fourth stages I think are what might be considered new. Which is, I call them the Renaissance Stage where you're reinventing what you're doing. You're repurposing, you're relaunching. You may be transitioning, may have a portfolio of things that you're doing as I do. You might be an entrepreneur or an “olderpreneur” as people often say. 

And then the later stages are maybe where some people think about more about their legacy planning for end of life. But people are living to 100. So, I put in a fifth quarter because we just don't know what that whole new paradigm is going to look like. And how people are going to be using those extra years. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, a lot of it has been driven by other parts of th...