John Zapolski, CEO & Founder, Alive Ventures
What does vitality care look like? Entrepreneur John Zapolski, CEO and founder of Alive Ventures, expands the vision of health beyond physical to include social, mental and emotional well-being and shares the value of relationships in defining a life well-lived.
John Zapolski is a humanitarian, serial entrepreneur and designer. His mission in life is to create beautiful solutions for the most vulnerable among us.
John served on the graduate faculty at the School of Visual Arts where he taught strategic innovation in interaction design. He was the visionary co-founder of Fonderie 47, a fine jewelry and timepiece company that removed assault weapons from conflict zones, and upcycled them into meaningful, elegant accessories.
Alive Ventures is his newest company that he is the CEO and founder of. Alive Ventures is a startup studio dedicated to building brands and products that help older adults love, work, and live better. John Zapolski is the poster child for businesses that put compassion at the center of their enterprise.
Show Notes
John Zapolski shares the roadblocks he encountered in seeking venture capital for Fonderie 47, a company that upcycled assault weapons into elegant accessories. [02:41]
The creative solution to receiving funding for Fonderie 47. [05:03]
The story behind his latest endeavor, Alive Ventures, and the simple question that seemed radical. [08:51]
A vision for health and wellness in 2049. [12:39]
What does the concept of vitality care look like? [13:15]
A real-life example of how vitality care could work for a person. [14:36]
What are the trends that show we are moving into a more holistic healthcare system? [17:39]
How do we deal with the resistance to changing the system? [20:49]
What’s a product or business idea that could support a preventative vitality care system? [24:16]
Switching the mindset from longevity to vitality. [27:47]
A view on longevity for longevity's sake. [28:51]
What holds us back from designing a preventative vitality care system? [31:24]
Transcript
Bisi Williams: I’m Bisi Williams. You're listening to Health2049.
John Zapolski: More and more as we come to care about things like mental well-being and the state of our emotions with one another, I can see that expanding into the coming decades to really be about us keeping track of how much vitality did we experience in our lives.
Bisi Williams: My guest today is a humanitarian, a serial entrepreneur, and a designer. Like the Bauhaus, his mission in life is to create stunningly beautiful solutions for the most vulnerable among us. Whether it's removing landlines and then creating jewelry from the wreckage or with his newest company, Alive Ventures, making businesses that help older adults love, live and work better, John Zapolski is the poster child for businesses that put compassion at the center of their enterprise. I'm honored to have John on the show today. Welcome to the show, John.
John Zapolski: [02:21] Thanks Bisi, it's a pleasure to be with you.
Bisi Williams: [02:23] Glad to have you. So as an entrepreneur, you work at the intersection of philanthropy, venture capital and culture. Please share with our listeners how you turned a well-designed killing machine like an AK-47 into a fine jewelry company to improve the lives of the community.
John Zapolski: [02:41] You're asking about a previous company of mine that was called Fonderie 47, in English, as some people know it. And the mission of that company was to create stability and prosperity in Sub-Saharan Africa. I started that company after spending some time in Sub-Saharan Africa looking for entrepreneurs to help further their businesses and to raise venture capital for them and came away feeling incredibly inspired by the quality of ideas and the quality of people that I met in a scouting trip.
This was maybe 15 years ago, and when I got back to the Bay Area where I lived, I was really discouraged by how difficult it was to generate the enthusiasm that I thought would be there for investing in some of these companies. And I just sort of wondered why that was. And I started kind of asking that question to the Silicon Valley investors that I knew, and I heard stated in different ways, kind of a common theme, which was that they felt there was too much instability in Africa so that you'd have all of the normal risks and challenges of starting the company, but whenever it might be politically convenient, some local dictator or warlord might come along and start conflict, and that would kind of ruin the business prospects. And I thought that was really unfair. I was teaching in the business school at UC Berkeley at the time and remembered how many fairly mundane or even silly ideas a lot of my MBA students had that I knew that they would go on to easily raise capital for because we were in Silicon Valley. And that just didn't seem fair to me.
And so I found myself over time kind of waking up in the middle of the night thinking about that. And about a year or two later, after selling the company that I had at the time, I just decided to go and see if there was anything that I might be able to do to reduce that feeling of instability and make it easier to invest in some of these companies that I felt were so promising.
Bisi Williams: [04:57] That's amazing. What did you do? How did you actually figure out the instability question?
John Zapolski: [05:03] Well, what I learned is that there was a proliferation of assault weapons throughout most of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and those were by and large, AK-47, which I think, as an aside, we could have a conversation about as designers as maybe being the most successful design object of all time. Unfortunately, it's this incredibly visually iconic object invested with all of this, meaning whether it's revolution or terrorism or all sorts of different things, but also incredibly functionally durable. And you can bury it in the dirt for ten years and dig it up and throw it in a Lake and shake it off, and it'll still shoot 600 bullets a minute.
So all of these weapons were there, maybe around 15 to 20 million. And for the most part, they just sat unused in people's houses. And indeed, were kind of there to be taken out in populations rapidly armed, if there was some reason for conflict. And what I thought about is if you look at that as not just a source of instability, but really as an unused asset that represented about $5 billion in value, I wondered, could we somehow subvert that and turn it from a source of destruction into a source of value.
And so I set about trying to figure out how could we get people to surrender their weapons. Could we do that in a way that wouldn't result in just more weapons flowing in? And then could we transform that material into something of value that we could sell and then use the money from selling it to create programs that would help local communities develop and grow and prosper. So that's what we did. I worked with a nonprofit group called Minds Advisory Group based in the UK, which had won a Nobel Peace Prize in their disarmament work.
And we created programs that incentivize people to turn in their weapons. They get an individual incentive, plus a community incentive that might be things like cell phone minutes or a bicycle or agricultural tools, and then for their communities, a water project or a health clinic, whatever the community decided they would need and then sort of figured out how to get those weapons destroyed and then try to convert them into what I thought of as the opposite of blood diamonds. That was a pretty complicated process, using some ancient craft techniques, like from Japanese sword making and transforming material, also some high tech Nanoscience.
And then we ultimately used that transformed material the way that other luxury brands would use precious materials. Usually, those precious materials were mined from Africa, leaving destruction in their wake. And we tried to take this destructive material, turn it into a really beautiful object, and then sell it to people in the US and Europe. If you bought a piece from us, you would get the serial numbers of all of the guns that you destroyed as a result of your purchase. Generally, that was between ten and 1,000 guns, depending on what kind of piece. And then we would use the revenue from selling those to go and pay for these projects that we were doing in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Bisi Williams: [08:31] John, that's just so clever and ingenious on so many levels. I love that project, and I know our listeners don't know this, but, John, you're a young man and your latest endeavor, Alive Ventures designs goods and services for an aging population. How and why did you conceive of this business?
John Zapolski: [08:51] Well, somewhat by happenstance or my good fortune. I came into contact with the board of directors from a medium-sized foundation based in Southern California called the Scan Foundation. The Scan Foundation is about twelve years old, and their mission is to advocate for and invest in improving quality of life for older adults in America. And they've mostly worked in policy to date, and also in the healthcare delivery system. So they work on things like enacting better legislation to get Medicare to cover things that older adults really want and need.
But the board realized that so much of what shapes the experience of being an older person today isn't just what happens in the policy world, but it's the products and services and experiences that are available to us. And wanting to be very proactive in thinking about how to improve their impact, they connected with me as an entrepreneur who's tried to use venture to work on important social issues and ask what I would do. And that intrigued me. Even though I hadn't really spent a lot of time before that, thinking deeply about the lives of older people, I did recognize that in the public imagination, older people are usually conceived of as frail or sick or alone, and generally a population to be pitied, rather than a population to be respected and looked up to and treated in a really three dimensional, fully human way.
And so we just started with the question of what is it that older people want for themselves? And that actually turned out to be somewhat of a radical question.
Bisi Williams: [10:33] Why is that radical?
John Zapolski: [10:35] Well, most of what ends up getting made for older people, unfortunately, is somebody else's idea of what an older person should want or something that they feel like, if I could just get mom or Granddad to use this thing, it would make my life so much easier and make them less of a burden. But not a lot of time is spent really thinking about it through an entrepreneurial lens, which I think any good entrepreneur starts with the notion that I want to build something that people want.
I just spent time through most of 2019 traveling around the country and going to cities and suburbs and some rural towns and getting groups of older people together and coming up with creative ideas to get them to talk about their lives, talk about what they want, talk about their aspirations. And that was so enlivening for me, and so inspiring. The really basic thing that I learned that sometimes I kick myself looking back at how obvious this should have been, but I'll admit that I didn't realize it at the time, is that what older people want is by and large the same thing that all of us have wanted throughout most of our lives, which is to know interesting people and be connected to them, to feel like there's an opportunity to make a contribution to their families and their communities and society, to find ways to discover and nurture love and intimacy in their lives, to find ways to feel empowered in managing their own lives, staying healthy, staying vital, and all of that seemed like such beautiful opportunities to design well.
I felt like it was really a shame that most entrepreneurs and designers and creative people don't have that on their radar screens as something that would be incredibly fun and incredibly fulfilling to create experiences or services for. So that's kind of what I set out to do and ultimately launching Alive Ventures.
Bisi Williams: [12:30] I think that's amazing and so that is a perfect segue for you to tell us about your vision for health and wellness in 2049.
John Zapolski: [12:39] So my vision for 2049 is that our notion of health and wellness has expanded to include thinking about what it means to live vital lives, not just healthy lives.
Bisi Williams: [12:52] I love that. So I think the idea of vitality care is intriguing, and I just want to go back to a discussion we had earlier. The other day you suggested that we could invest in our aliveness. And so if you could expand on the concepts of vitality and vitality care and aliveness, what would that look like?
John Zapolski: [13:15] Well, I think that most of us have experience with the feeling that comes from having a day where you just feel really alive. And that goes beyond, I think for most of us, feeling healthy, feeling like our body is working. But it also includes feeling emotionally engaged. It includes feeling connected to people that we love. It feels like caring about ourselves and being good to ourselves.
I think that more and more as we come to care about things like mental wellbeing and the state of our emotions with one another, I can see that expanding into the coming decades to really be about us keeping track of, how much vitality did we experience in our lives, going beyond did my knee hurt today, or am I having some chest pains. And thinking more about, do I feel really fully engaged in my life? Do I feel like I'm able to show up for myself and for the people that I care about with openness, with a healthy way of participating in conversations with being the kind of person that I want to be towards them?
Bisi Williams: [14:36] Yeah, that sounds like a great way to live. And I want to expand on the concept of vitality care and aliveness. I have a scenario for your vision. Let's assume it's the new normal. Let's imagine for our audience that there is a 78 years young man named Kevin who works in middle management at Acme Company. So one day he suffers an unexpected heart attack at work. And until that moment, our Kevin was the picture of health. Can you describe how he or this system might use this idea of vitality care and this aliveness investment to manage his wellbeing post trauma?
John Zapolski: [15:20] Sure. Well, I think that most of the listeners will relate to the idea that today our healthcare system primarily focuses on helping people manage illness or managing catastrophic events that have happened to them. So certainly in this scenario, Kevin has experienced something that is very threatening to his physical wellbeing. Hopefully, Kevin has gotten the kind of medical care that he's needed to come through that and is on the road to recovering physically. But I think we can also very easily all imagine that that event triggers for Kevin a number of feelings that come along with it, too.
Any one of us who've had a traumatic incident like that probably goes through a period of questioning. How am I spending my time right now? Am I focused on the things that are important? How is my family feeling about this? Am I spending enough time with them? Am I close enough to living the kind of life that I want to live? And I think that collectively there are opportunities for us to help Kevin ask and answer those questions in ways that feel very positive. I think that it's not just about his recovery in the hospital, getting his heart fully into shape again, but reminding Kevin that there's space and time to think about all of the surrounding context that might have led to that situation for him, being able to provide support for the kind of daily things that he may not be able to attend to as he's coming back.
But even after he's back to think about, how do we keep you cognizant of all of those thoughts that occurred to you about how you want to be spending your time, how you want to be taking care of yourself mentally and emotionally and not just physically and helping be supportive as he tries to put more of those into practice in his life.
Bisi Williams: [17:20] I think I love the way that you frame that about not only his physical health, but his social emotional health as well. And I'm just curious, why are you confident that your idea of people designing a more holistic approach to their wellness is plausible in 30 years?
John Zapolski: [17:39] Well, I think that's a great question. I think there are some trends that we can look at that are suggestive of that. Years back, when our healthcare system was developing into what it is today, we didn't think so much around what we now call social determinants of health. These are things like our ability to stay connected to community in our lives. And now these are things that our healthcare providers do think about. Most insurance plans or many hopefully do cover things like mental health and wellbeing as part of the services that are offered. So we're starting to see things more holistically when it comes to the factors that affect our physical health, and I expect that will continue.
Also in the commercial realm, we see more and more services that are being created and offered to people in increasingly affordable ways, supporting our ability to connect with people to talk to, if we need to talk. Or take time and meditation and reflection for ourselves so that we can lower the stress that we're experiencing on a daily basis. We're getting more and more information and data about the positive consequences that putting those kinds of things into practice have on the overall state of our health, how they reduce inflammation, how they help us have better nutrition, all sorts of ways in which they help us be more healthy and be more active.
So I suspect that will continue. I suspect more people will continue to innovate around these types of services I think will be available to more people. They'll move out of the province of what used to be exclusively for wealthy people who could maybe go away to an all-inclusive spa and had the luxury of a vacation time to do that, and the dollars to be able to afford it, into services that are delivered digitally on demand for lower and lower prices. And hopefully the health insurance services that we have will continue to pay for more and more of those knowing that those kinds of investments are much less expensive and afford much more impact to our positive health than the emergency room services on the other side of it.
Bisi Williams: [19:59] It's interesting, John that you mentioned investments. And I think what we're discussing today may sound somewhat boujee or out of touch for some of our listeners. Let's discuss the darker reality of change. Even though we know this show is about optimism and possibility, change is hard, and as you alluded to previously, there are some difficult problems that we need to address in order to scale the notion in 30 years of people living their best lives by investing in their own aliveness. Can you talk about that conundrum and how we could solve for those problems to get to a world where we're healthy, emotionally and physically?
John Zapolski: [20:49] Change always has a dark side. And I think in the way that we collectively tend to tell stories about innovation, we often hear a wise entrepreneur's or a lone individual who had a great idea and suffered through whatever he or she needed to suffer through in order to bring this great revolution about. But I think all of us also know that there's resistance to change. There's embedded institutions that stand to lose from things becoming more affordable, from things becoming more accessible to more and more people.
People have political opinions about who should be able to access things and what qualifies you to do that. And I think all of that obviously creates a lot of strife, not just at societal levels, but often even within our own families. So I think we need to be willing to tolerate that. And we need to have an optimistic patience that we can, maybe not solve everything.
I don't think it's going to change overnight that all of a sudden we go from a place where lots of people's daily reality is that they're working multiple jobs. They're struggling to have enough money just to pay for basic services like electricity or food, to all of a sudden having the time and the wherewithal and the attention span and the dollars to be able to put into managing their own vitality. But that doesn't mean I don't think that we can't, as a society collectively invest in helping people understand the benefits of that more, creating more services that make it easy, integrating simple apps or other kinds of services into our daily routine that just check in that help us connect to those kinds of services more easily and affordable.
I don't think it means that employers can't care about that and start to promote an understanding and even an expectation in their workforce that, just like we don't want you to come to work sick if you have the flu and spread that to the workforce, we also don't want you to come to work if you're so stressed out about something that you need to deal with in yourself, and you just need the time to do that because that energy also has an impact on the morale of the people that you work around. It shows up in the quality of the work that you do.
And so I think there are changes like that that hopefully can build momentum towards a society that in a few decades time is just much more aware of and supportive and even expecting of one another, that these are part of what it means to be a good citizen, part of what it means to be a good colleague, part of what it means to be a good father, mother or brother or sister, friend or spouse.
Bisi Williams: [23:41] You know, I love this discussion about relationships and actually moving the discussion from health and wellness from a transactional affair to really one about relationships that you want the people who you work with in your family to be well cared for, and it doesn't necessarily mean medically, right, social, emotionally as well. So I have a question for you. If you were to design a preventative vitality care system, describe a business or product that would exist in 2049 to support this venture or system.
John Zapolski: [24:16] I think there could be so many different products and services and, in fact, a whole ecosystem of things that work in concert with one another to help us manage our vitality. But, for example, I think that lots of people already today have experienced the benefits that they get in the quality of their day if they just get a five minute phone call with their mom.
Bisi Williams: [24:41] That's so nice, John.
John Zapolski: [24:45] Well, that's one of many things I learned the hard way, starting businesses from a framework that mythologized the life of the entrepreneur as somebody who works 16 hours a day, seven days a week and sacrifices everything in order to make their business work is that it became really easy in buying into that myth to just get pretty far out on the limb myself. And I love my mom. I have a great relationship with her, but weeks would go by and I wouldn't talk to her, and I noticed that the longer that that happens, the more it's kind of like you've got stuff saved up.
And so now, instead of being able to call for a few minutes, I've got to carve out an hour, which I can't find in order to really catch up on things. And it works so much better when there's an attitude that I have space every day to make that call, even if it's just did you have dinner last night, what did you have, how are you doing, what are you going to do for your day today, okay, I love you, I'll talk to you tomorrow.
I think that so many of us are so overscheduled and so stressed out and we beat ourselves up about that like we're bad people. And I think that if we kind of take a more loving and caring approach to ourselves and to one another, we can see that little nudges that help remind us, hey, take time to do that can be really helpful. I don't mean that to sound naive or overly simplistic. It may indeed sound like that, but I do think that that's part of for me, what makes me feel alive and feel vital and feel connected to people is just remembering to take that time. Similarly, like taking ten minutes sometime throughout the day to meditate or to take a walk is so important. What's that saying about meditation? That if you don't have ten minutes to meditate, then you really need to take an hour.
Bisi Williams: [26:46] Seriously, I've never heard. Tell me more.
John Zapolski: [26:49] I think I heard that from Russell Simmons one time, the hip hop mogul. And I thought that was so true. So if you're so overscheduled that you can't find ten minutes in your day, then you really need to find an hour. So I think there are ways that simple services like that can remind us that it's in our benefit and our responsibility to take time out to care for ourselves. And that by doing that, we're going to be much more effective at caring for the other people in our lives, too.
Bisi Williams: [27:21] Wow, that's really phenomenal. I mean, I love that loving, caring, supporting system that you're imagining for our future. And I'm going to ask you another question. Given all the resources and advances in science and in technology that we have today, what advancements would you recommend we not pursue to make the world a better place in 30 years?
John Zapolski: [27:47] That's a great question. You know what comes to mind for me is now that I work in developing products and services for older people, there's kind of an industry that some people call the aging industry, and some people call the longevity industry. And I don't particularly like the notion of longevity. I don't know if I'm someone that wants to do a lot of life extension. I don't think for myself I want to live to be 150, but I am really interested in improving the quality of life for however long we have. And so I'm not so much of a fan of things that are just trying to stave off life and keep us around for the sake of staying around.
Bisi Williams: [28:34] John, that's fascinating. Tell me more about your view on longevity for longevity's sake, if you will, share with me a little bit more about that for a number of people who may not even thought of extension of life as an option.
John Zapolski: [28:51] Yeah, well, we probably all have some dystopic vision that comes from science fiction or somewhere of like people being cryogenically frozen.
Bisi Williams: [29:03] That's what came to mind for me. I'm not going to lie.
John Zapolski: [29:06] Yeah, and I don't know, that just sounds kind of miserable to me, like the sake of preserving my body, kind of at the cost of the relationships with the people and the activities that I love right now. I don't know if I was frozen and then revived, would my fiance still be around? Would I get to kiss her in the morning? Would my sister be there to call and laugh about stuff, I don't know.
Those things I think are much more valuable to me in thinking about what is going to define a life well lived, also having an opportunity to engage with the books and the stories and the music that I love and the places that I love to visit once we're able to visit places again. So yeah, those are the things that I think makes me excited and the things that I hope to help other people more fully experience and stay connected to versus just preventing kidney disease from ultimately showing up or them passing away at 80 if they could have lived to be 95.
Bisi Williams: [30:20] You raised an interesting point, so the picture that you paint is of a humane, loving, compassionate world. And I wonder what's stopping us from building this world, this system, and these useful products and prompts today. What's the barrier?
John Zapolski: [30:41] I think the really good news about that is that there isn't a lot stopping us except for our own imagination. I think there's never been more venture capital available. There's never been more recognition that there are hundreds of thousands or millions of talented, creative people who want to put their energy and attention into building things that not only are great and beautiful, but that positively contribute to our own lives and to other people's lives. I think there's a lot of opportunity to get started on those.
I think there's all of the typical things that hold back innovation in general that are present in the status quo. There's institutional resistance to things that might cannibalize existing business models. There may be health services companies that feel like if people take better care of themselves, then they'll be less money spent on incredible expenses that come up at the end of life to try to keep prolonging people's last few months. But I think those are always going to be true.
I think that more of what holds us back is that we don't take the time to think about our own lives or think about other people's lives in these ways. By and large, we're very youth obsessed as a culture, that's nothing new to say. I think that we don't spend a lot of time thinking about ways we might look forward to getting older and to be more in our lives as we age. I think oftentimes we think that life maybe peaks sometime around 40, and then you're over the hill and you're on the decline, so life is going to get progressively worse instead of thinking of it as something that could progressively get better.
Even if our bodies inevitably decline, our wisdom increases, our knowledge of what we care about, who we like to spend time with, what we really like for our own sake, instead of because somebody told us we were supposed to like that thing or it's popular. All of those things, I think improve with age. And there are lots of ways for us to build services or apps or products or places to live that help us get the most out of those, and we just need to turn our attention towards them.
Bisi Williams: [33:05] That's an awesome answer. Okay, I love your vision for the future and the present. That wraps our show with our guest, John Zapolski. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe or share with a friend. And until next time, I'm Bisi Williams.
