Abby Miller Levy Transcript

Clint Betts

Abby, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's an honor to meet you and to have you as a guest here. Let's start with who you are, how you came to found Primetime Partners, and how you got to where you are today. Maybe that's a good place to start.

Abby Miller Levy

It's always a good place to start. Clint, thank you for having me. I wish I had something witty and novel to say about how I got where I am today, but as a 49-year-old woman sitting across from you on the video, I can say that for most people, it's a long story. But where I am today is I run a venture fund called Primetime Partners. We are a venture fund that is focused on the topic of aging and longevity. I got to this place not because I was born with a fascination with older adults or ageism but because I actually grew into this through a series of experiences. And the series of experiences includes being the youngest in my generation and very close to my grandparents. I grew up outside New York City as the youngest of three girls. My dad was a small business owner, and so I kind of grew up with business in and around the kitchen table as I would say.

So when I graduated college, I wanted to be in business, so I joined McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, as kind of a great launching experience to get started in the profession. I went and got a business degree at Harvard Business School and then spent the next 20 years working in a variety of operating roles, always in small businesses, always in growth roles, including running products at a company called Oxo, which makes kitchen tools and gadgets. Running digital at SoulCycle, another great brand, starting a business as a co-founder with Arianna Huffington called Thrive Global in the employee wellness space, and a lot of other experiences in between. So it gave me a lot of data points, if you will, always kind of in this growth new business role that when I saw an opportunity, white space around the topic of aging, I knew as an entrepreneur and as a person who likes to build, that there was something to build in the space of aging. And that's why I built a venture firm that I launched in 2020 with my partner Alan Patricof.

Clint Betts

So can I just say you have already had a Hall of Fame career, my word. It's incredible what you've done, who you've worked with, and the various companies that you've worked with. I want to ask a couple of questions on the background, and then we'll get to the longevity stuff. Tell me about McKinsey. Anytime I have anybody on this show who worked at McKinsey or was at McKinsey, I've got to ask this question: What is it like there, and what did you learn there?

Abby Miller Levy

Unfortunately, McKinsey has come upon a bit of negative PR recently, which is a whole book about it. I also have to say that I think it is one of the most amazing business institutions in the world. And so when I joined McKinsey at age 21, right? So very young, that what working at McKinsey is like is it's the best business training. You've got a group of dedicated consultants who've spent their careers learning, connecting the dots, helping companies grow, figuring out their problems, et cetera. So I think it is actually a wonderful place to build a career and to start your career because you learn so much. Specifically, I learned how to access information, how to analyze it, how to draw conclusions, how to present, how to work in a bunch of different industries, and a lot of different executive situations.

In fact, I'll pass along one of the best pieces of advice I got very young from my manager at the time, someone named Vik Malhotra, who had literally just run the New York office. He was amazing. He pulled me into his office after six months of working with me, and he said, "Listen, I think you're great. I think you're smart, but you've got one thing you got to fight." And I was like, oh gosh, what is this thing? He looked at me, and he said, "You have no poker face." He says, "If you think someone's a moron, it's written across your forehead. So you got to figure out your poker face." And just think about what kind of work environment at age 21 or 22 are you have a manager who cares enough about you and your career to really give you that kind of interpersonal feedback? And I use that as one of many data points because, for me, it was very foundational. And so I had a great experience. I went back to the firm at a later stage to co-run the innovation practice, and I have the utmost respect for the people there. And I think it's a challenge, like any business, to grow as fast as they've grown. And there have been some, I guess, casualties along the way, but I think the fundamental business model is amazing.

Clint Betts

So, how are you at poker now?

Abby Miller Levy

Well, still pretty poor at the actual poker part of poker because I don't like to lose money. And as you know, with poker, you win and you lose. But in terms of the question of style, one of the interesting things I've learned through my career is that we have an innate style, and mine is one of transparency and intimacy, but it doesn't mean you can't evolve it and grow from it. So I can still be my authentic self but have a bit thicker of a filter, which is what Vik was telling me.

Clint Betts

Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's actually really sound great advice actually. More people need to understand who you're being in a meeting or how you're coming across actually has an effect outside of you. It's not just how you personally feel, but when you're in a room, people can feel how you are feeling, which is really interesting.

Abby Miller Levy

It is. And that's part of the point of 360 feedback and all of those things that, especially again as a young person and in today's environment where young people feel even more empowered than I did in 1996, to have a real sense of how you're showing up and getting that feedback.

Clint Betts

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, the other one I wanted to ask you about in your background is SoulCycle. Now, this thing has taken off and is just an enormous brand, and when you were there, it seems like that's probably when it was even at its peak. Tell me about that.

Abby Miller Levy

Yeah, I mean, listen, I was there just before COVID, and COVID dramatically changed the in-person fitness industry, as did my business school classmate who founded Peloton, which also changed the boutique fitness business. But SoulCycle is one of the most amazing brands. And to be, just like OXO, to be kind of in and around a brand that is an experiential brand teaches you so much about the connection between the consumer and the product, the consumer and the service. And I think that's always been a sensitivity I've had around what the consumer journey is. And it sounds kind of hokey when companies talk about it, but at the end of the day, especially now as an investor, that is the core of anything, which is what journey are you taking the consumer on that is delightful, that is supportive, that is all the adjectives you want for that brand to mean has to start with the product.

And so when you walk in, for those of you who are listening and who've never been to SoulCycle or any boutique fitness spin class, it's like you walk into a small room, and already you should be transformed by the lighting, the music, the energy, the talent. It is meant to be transformative, frankly, to make sure that you're not working out to make you want to stay there. But I think I learned a lot about the experience, which is point one. Point two is talent. I mean, SoulCycle, like Peloton and other fitness classes, relies upon the talent of the leader of the group. And I think you can define talent and business in a lot of different ways. SoulCycle has a talent that's consumer-facing, but there's talent internally as well, and how you help recruit that talent and involve them in the brand, it's something, whether it's internal or external, is really important.

And then I think the third thing that I learned, which people might be surprised about, is just data. SoulCycle is incredibly data-driven. And in this world of data and AI, I think a lot of executives toss around that word loosely, but you're looking at a daily report of the sales from the day before. I mean, you have to be data-driven; you have to understand everything that's going on, all of those metrics. And I think sometimes we forget that in a lot of businesses, at the end of the day, performance is based on knowing your numbers.

Clint Betts

Yeah, that's interesting too. Okay. Now, what made you decide? I want to go into venture capital, I want to be an investor, and the specific space that you're in, why do you see that as such a, there's so much green grass there?

Abby Miller Levy

So, the topic of aging is something that we don't really talk about as a society. And just to kind of level set, I mean, we're dealing right now with a huge population shift that it's like climate change with the data has always been there, which is to say that by 2060, there'll be more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 18. We're basically going through a population that used to look like a pyramid with older adults at the top in the narrow part, which is now going to be an inverted pyramid. And just think about all the implications that it has for every area of our economy, from our healthcare to our financial services and retirement program and wealth and housing and workplace and consumer media technology, travel. Literally, every industry is impacted.

And so for me, I got interested in this because my father was retired, forcefully retired in his sixties, and I started to look around and say, what happens in this country in our sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and it's no longer this kind of rosy perfect retire, hold hands on the sunset and walk off because it's really expensive and most people can't afford their retirement. So I kind of got interested in my dad's experience and then started. Basically, McKinsey eyed the problem. I whiteboarded and thought about all the products, services, and new things we need in order to accommodate this aging population. And it was only then, Clint, that I said, and actually, I wish, it's actually someone else said it to me, I forget who it was, I really wish I remember, but someone said, "Well, Abby, instead of starting one business to be a node or a point in this large map you've created, what if you started a venture fund to back dozens and dozens of entrepreneurs?" So I guess in some ways I'm an entrepreneur where the entrepreneurial venture was a venture fund as opposed to someone who's grown up saying, Hey, I want to be an investor. That's the vocation that I have. Then I set about saying, well, how am I going to be the best venture fund ever?

And I'm very lucky that my business partner, Alan Patricof, who's known as the grandfather of venture capital, founded Apax, a large private equity firm that actually stands for his name, Alan Patricof and Associates, and then Greycroft Partners, another multi-billion dollar venture fund that he, at the same time that I was thinking about these issues, he was thinking about them as well, so that when I told my friend John Patricof, one of Alan's sons, "Hey, I'm going to start a venture fund focused on aging." He was like, "No way. That's what my dad wants to do." And so I guess what I'm saying is the answer to your question: I'm an accidental venture capitalist who had a business idea and paired up with a very experienced venture capitalist, and in 2020, we launched Primetime Partners.

Clint Betts

It is one of the problems of aging that we are aging better than we ever have before. I'm not sure what the situation is with your dad in his sixties, but it seems like people who are 60 today are now super active and want to work and want to be engaged. And there's even all this talk of like we're going to be living over a hundred consistently soon. And so that could be like your dad's, only he has 40, 45, and 50 more years. Who knows? Right? And so, is that part of the challenge, and what are you trying to figure out there?

Abby Miller Levy

So there are two challenges. Some people age better than before, but if we look at the past hundred years, our lifespan has increased by 50 years. But our health span, in other words, how long we live in a healthy, independent way, has only increased by 25 years. So we have actually, well, increased lifespan, and we have more years that we're living in poor health. And those more years that we're living in poor health is an incredible drain on the system. Medicare, which is the healthcare system for those over age 65, costs a trillion dollars a year, and it's growing at 8.4%. So normally, if it was a business with a trillion dollars in revenue growing 8.4% a year, you say, that's amazing. Not when it's coming out of the federal budget. Healthcare costs in our country are going to be 50% of every taxpayer dollar by 2060.

So this increase in our time span of being sick, which has actually been enhanced by modern medicine and procedures and devices and all the wonderful parts of medical care, what it's doing is creating a huge cost. So, part of what we need to do is, of course, figure out how we increase our health span to match our lifespan, which is a lot more of the preventative side of longevity. At the same time, we need more capacity in our care system, in our healthcare system, in our retirement savings, and all of these things to accommodate these longer lives that frankly have not been budgeted for.

Clint Betts

Who are some of the companies that you've invested in or even haven't invested in but admirers who are tackling this problem?

Abby Miller Levy

So, to set the level, we do seed to series A investing, so it's very early. So some of these-

Clint Betts

That's where it's fun, right? Isn't it cool when you're meeting them at the early stage, these early founders, but be super exciting?

Abby Miller Levy

Absolutely. We've met 2000 companies in the past four years, and what I mean me, we're a team of five, and so we've met hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, and I think you'll find this interesting, Clint, the one unifying theme we invest, we're a horizontal fund. We invest across health tech, FinTech, consumer; we do prop tech, and any area that disproportionately impacts the audience age 50 plus or what we deem as older adults. It's funny. When we started the fund, it was thinking about seniors like those who are 70 or 80, and what we realized was that there just weren't enough founders designing for midlife as well as older life. But what I was going to say on that note is that the one unifying theme across all the founders we've met is that it's personal for them. They're starting a business where they have some point of relevancy.

It's a loved one; it's their mom who was a caregiver. They suffered from a disease when they were younger; they were on Medicaid and saw the challenges of our healthcare system. They're all fixers that want to fix some of these big problems. And so that part of investing has been amazing, among other things. But you asked the question of what some of the things that we're seeing are, and I think some of the things that we get really excited about or on two levels, one are just basic infrastructure. These are things that just need to happen to accommodate an aging society. So, for example, one of our investments is a business called Safe Ride Health, and what Safe Ride does is it takes older adults, sorry, it is the technology, logistics technology behind Uber Health and Lyft Health and a bunch of hospital systems own fleets that take older adults to their doctor, to the pharmacy. It's a logistics business; it's tech-enabled.

And you think about it, you're like, well, yeah, of course. How would an older person who has some disability, can't drive anymore, or doesn't own a car, how are they going to get to the doctor? There are basic businesses of blocking and tackling how we handle an aging population that can and should be enabled by technology leapfrogging what exists, and Safe Ride is now over a hundred million dollars in ARR because they just plug that hole of what we need as the basic fabric of how we live. That also exists in the wealth management space. A business we invested in called Penelope is a 401k provider for small businesses. Small businesses, they're getting regulated. They need to provide their employees with 401k, which is wonderful. We need that for retirement savings. Well, who's going to do that? We need a plan that does that.

So, I get really excited about some of these very scalable businesses that are brought about by this aging population. I wouldn't say they are basic, but they are necessary businesses. So that's one area I get excited about. Then the other area, I hate to use the word AI because it's like, it's almost like the butt of every joke now, or you could do a drinking game every time someone mentions it, but I think that the pace of scientific and data innovation enabled by AI, we are just in this proliferation of data and information, and one area that's really interesting is diagnostics. And so, if you think about preventative care, how are we going to live longer? Well, we need to make some fundamental behavior changes. How can we increase our health span? Most of it's behavioral. Yes, there's a genetics piece, and there's been a lot of studies on it, but that's only a small portion.

We all know that most of it's going to be what we eat, what we drink, how we sleep, stress, environment, all of those pieces in addition to genetics. So, how can we actually change that trajectory? We're going to need to have information on ourselves and our body, and so by now, because of the advances in science and microscopes, we've got gut health, we've got down to the molecular level, the genomics, there's all the blood testing and hormones, and there's all this information we have now or can have about ourselves and how we make that go from the high net worth. I'm sure you've read stories about the guy in California who's spending millions of dollars extending his own life and how we take that information into real diagnostics that are actionable. We really like that space. And so I know I'm geeking out a little bit, but I think that I kind of interplay between foundational and cutting edge. This is what we need as a society. This is how we start to change the slope of our health span.

Clint Betts

I'm just fascinated by what a typical day looks like for you.

Abby Miller Levy

I mean, honestly, it's not that exciting. But on a typical day, I have pretty decent habits. It's interesting to start a business like this at 45; it's just how much more aware you are of that. As well as for about two to three years, I spent time as a founder with Arianna Huffington. And Arianna, who wrote the book Sleep Revolution Thrive. We built a business around individual habits and behavior change that can then be as an employee and in the employer setting. So I guess what I'm saying is I have all the knowledge to have good habits of how I spend my day. Whether I do them is another question. But I usually I wake up naturally around, again, this might be too granular, but I wake up naturally around 05:00.

I desperately try not to check my phone for a little bit. When I do, I check my email and text. I do not go on social media till later in the day. I think curbing social media is critical. It is. I'm sorry, it is so bad for you. And so I really do not have that as a habit. I usually exercise in the morning, but I need to be back and around for my kids. I have three teenagers and, so back and around in the morning at 07:00 AM. and then I usually on my way to work, try to connect with a friend. I am very busy, and so if I don't have a way to send a text or a quick call to a friend or a family member, I personally feel disconnected.

My day is usually Zoom calls, meetings, and working with my team. We are all here in the New York office, which is fantastic. Or I'm traveling. I travel probably four days a month, five days a month. So that's kind of what the day looks like, usually done around 18:00 or 19:00 and either home with my kids or social plans and do more emails and rinse and repeat. Does that sound similar or different to other folks you talk to?

Clint Betts

It sounds great. Yeah, it sounds like I think you have to build habits and various routines as a leader in order to do anything successful. If it's kind of just flying by the seat of the pants, you don't really do the same routine every day. I've never actually, this is interesting for you. You meet a lot of founders. Have you ever met a founder who's successful and doesn't at least have some sort of routine and habit?

Abby Miller Levy

No, I haven't. But then again, some of their habits aren't super healthy. When you meet the founder, who's the tech guy, the tech person who stays up till 04:00 AM every morning, but that's their cadence, that's their rhythm. The same way that I wake up at 05:00 AM. I've stopped, and everyone has their own time clock. The key thing is the amount of sleep you need to get good sleep. But I think the piece that I will say I have met founders is that, and maybe it's just because of my own experience, to make sure you keep learning new things and new habits and just new ways of thinking about it because change is really hard, but we kind of all have to keep evolving. And you'll definitely sometimes meet people who don't have that growth mindset. It's kind of wishy-washy to talk about a growth mindset, but when you meet someone who doesn't have one, you know it. And so I think that's a piece that we're trying to get a lot better at, and we won't back founders who don't have a growth mindset.

Clint Betts

How is artificial intelligence affecting your job? Meaning from a VC and investor perspective. And two, also, your space that you're investing in?

Abby Miller Levy

Yeah, we have not deployed AI in terms of screening deals or in that sense. Some funds do that, and particularly public equity investors do that. We have chosen not to do that because of where we are in our category. This space of aging and longevity is quite a new space for investing. There are only a couple of funds focused on it like we are. And so I've always taken the mentality of take the call, take the meeting. I don't want to be screened out of things because we're in a learning and a kind of collaboration mode of where we are in our sector. So, we haven't deployed AI against the screening. Where we are using AI is because we were one of the first funds to focus on this topic, we believe really strongly that we need a megaphone, and we should be out there speaking and writing and connecting people and really in the thought leadership role.

In fact, as a small firm, we have a PR firm on retainer. It's probably why I'm talking to you. Part of that investment, which is pretty atypical for a fund our size, is because we don't think enough people are thinking about these issues. And so I think AI, from a content generation standpoint, makes it just a lot faster for us to have those fact points, data points, and examples. And so, from a content generation perspective, it has been fantastic. Then, in terms of our portfolio, I mean, most of our companies use AI, and I'm not belittling its impact, but it's kind of asking as a company to use Excel or are using Salesforce for your sales process like AI is just a layer or not even a layer, it's just integrated into the technology stack and how you do things.

However, the specific examples where it's been working very well for our companies are things like workflow automation. That's an obvious point. The diagnostic piece I already spoke to. We have a company called Isaac Health in the dementia care space, and they're able to take data from health plans and basically use AI to find basically, based on the criteria to identify which health plan members should be getting a dementia diagnostic because of their past health history. And so there can be interventions or diagnostics based on AI, so that's an interesting space as well. Another area that we really like is care planning. So, one of the challenges for an older adult is that they're on average ten medications. They have a lot of specific needs they need to do during the day. How can you use AI to take all the different things they should be doing during the day and put them into a calendar, a schedule, prompts, and this and that? So, AI can play a data assimilation role as well.

So we're seeing it across the board. I will kind of share that we have a bit of a joke right now because there have just been so many AI startups, and the reason why there are AI is it's a wonderful technology. It's available to everyone. So if you're a founder or an entrepreneur saying, I want to build a business, it's like an API, like you can just build faster. And so the number of businesses we're seeing, so we kind of have an internal joke of whether we're going to try to discount because people who come in and talk about the AI and their products expect an evaluation increase. We are trying to figure out how we can design them to use AI the other way.

Clint Betts

That's awesome. Yeah, everybody's an AI startup now. You have to be, you've got to have AI somewhere in your pitch it seems like.

Abby Miller Levy

Yeah.

Clint Betts

Otherwise, that really is kind of table stakes, probably like an API or cloud in the past or internet even, right? It's kind of just table stakes at this point.

Abby Miller Levy

It's table stakes.

Clint Betts

You got to have some sort. Hey, what did you learn from Arianna Huffington about helping and running Thrive Global with her?

Abby Miller Levy

She's amazing. She's an amazing founder, leader, author, woman, and mother. She's fantastic. I think I learned a few things. One is, and maybe it's a Ray Dalio thing as well, that she was a believer in this kind of radical transparency. And I think it's interesting having started my career at McKinsey where, as a consultant, you want to make sure you have the data and the right way of saying things and making your pitch in your case. I think Arianna is very much about being direct in a way that was very helpful for me to see that modeled. I think the second thing is just generosity. She has built a career, and I think I'm naturally oriented that way, but I also have the sense of being generous with your connections, being generous with your insights, and spending your time. I think that generosity, particularly because most businesses are about relationships, is really critical.

And then I think the last piece, I mean, I've learned so much from her, but she's, as an author and as a media personality, when we started Thrive, she had very clear language on what the business was, and you would be rare to find her not using that same language, those four sentences again and again to build awareness and to hammer in the point. And I think that's really important as a marketer. And so at Primetime, we've just really stuck to the script in the way of what we're trying to get the world to understand about why they need to be prepared for, invest in, and care about an aging population. So I think that thought leadership piece, I literally just learned so much from her about.

Clint Betts

What do you read? What reading recommendations would you have for us?

Abby Miller Levy

I knew you were going to ask me that. And so I was thinking about how I sound really smart, but I'm going to be really realistic, which is I'm a full-time working mom with three kids. I run my own business. I read books when I go on vacation. When I'm on vacation, I will go to my friend Zibby Owens, who runs Read with Zibby and find something light to read. But what I do every day is ask Alexa for the news. She's my best friend. We talk in the morning when I'm in the shower and out of the shower. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, usually at the fringe of what I do for work. So, business newsletters or newsletters of other venture investors that are adjacent to what I do. And then my secret little hack is if you follow any, as I said, venture funds, nonprofits, anything kind of in and around my space, they'll usually have in their newsletter what we're reading.

And so I like to read the primary reports. If it's a report by the Kaiser Foundation on family caregiving or by the West Health or CMS or government reports, I kind of like to read the primary source data. So it's a long-winded way of saying I read a lot of work stuff, but I try for the work information to either be new data and insights or other people's opinions that are adjacent or a little bit further away from me. The last thing I would say is that I do read; I don't know if reading is the right way because right now, it's about watching. I don't go on social media a lot, but what is on my social media channel is comedians and laughter, which are so important. And so if I have a little bit of downtime, it's like comedy all the way.

Clint Betts

I love that answer. I'm actually the exact same way on that last point. Who are some of your favorite comedians?

Abby Miller Levy

I mean, right now, I'm going to get his name wrong, Nate Bargatze.

Clint Betts

Yeah, he's great.

Abby Miller Levy

He's great. And then there's, again, because Instagram is scary and it knows me, I'm putting in air quotes, but there's basically a lot of female mom comedians who just, it's like the Tina Fey and that whole group, Ali, I forgot her last name, but where there's just kind of this reality of how hard it is to be a woman in the workplace, how hard it is to be a mom, and it's just relatable humor.

Clint Betts

Yeah. What is your thoughts on DEI and kind of the overall, I don't know the best way to say. It's becoming a controversial topic. It's being attacked; maybe that is the best way to say that. What do you think about that? How do you think about and how do you advise your early-stage founders and companies to think about it?

Abby Miller Levy

That's a great question, and it's a very sensitive one, I think, but it needs to be discussed from a leadership perspective. Just to level-set all of the data, I believe that a diverse workforce and diverse experience are the right business decisions. I also believe it's the right societal decision. So, in favor, I mean, I think it'd be really hard if someone came on the show and said they're not in favor of diversity inclusion. So, it is an obvious point, but I am a proponent of diversity inclusion. The issue when you say DEI, though, is that it has become institutionalized in a way that I think has become so defensive that we've forgotten the point of it, which is actually for people to feel included. And that means everybody feels included.

And now we've basically ended up with a DEI where it's really diversity and exclusion, not diversity and inclusion. And so I think that's where we need to get back to basics around what inclusion means. And I can even take the population that we care most about, which is older adults. They're not part of DEI, and they're not included in anything. And so, a lot of populations are excluded from DEI. So what do I think about it? I think if we can get back to the intent and deliver on it in ways that are not exclusionary, that would be wonderful. In terms of how we're working on it. I mean, we have a super diverse team of our investments. Half the women are founders, and 40% are people of color. So we are in a space and in a headspace where it's important to what we do. And I think the last thing I'll say is, like anything, it comes down to individual actions and choices. And that's the other thing that kind of bums me out about DEI is it kind of feels like it was like, oh, that's someone else's responsibility. That's somebody else's. Someone else will handle this for me. No, it's like ageism, which is one of the things we're really worried about. It has to be every person needs to be aware of their bias and manage it accordingly.

Clint Betts

That's the best answer I've heard to that question. Well done. That was great. What about ESG? Obviously, this is kind of more for public companies and private equity groups. What do you think about that? I mean, it's along the same lines, so maybe it's redundant to ask it, but what do you think about that particular issue?

Abby Miller Levy

It's interesting because we are literally reviewing proposals right now to bring in an advisor to help us put in place our ESG practices for our portfolio companies and ourselves. Most of the time, it's really viewed around climate and environment, which is less relevant for most of our tech businesses. And so for us, it's a lot more around aging and older adults, is our lens on ESG. What do I think about it? I think that it's not going to happen without regulatory pressure. I think if you think about any change that's happened in our economy or our business environment, it has happened because the government has said you have to do it. It's not out of the; there are B Corps, and there are companies that like to do it because they think it's the right thing to do, but the way a capitalist economy works is because you have no choice but to do it because ESG is expensive. So until there's a lot more regulatory support and focus on it, and if you just think about anything around climate, it's happened because of the regulatory environment, not because of good citizens wanting to do the right thing. So what do I think? I think it's, again, the right thing to do from where our society needs to go, but it's not going to happen without more regulation. Again, I'm sure you can tell my political beliefs just based on the sentence alone.

Clint Betts

Yeah, that's incredible. I won't go deeper into your politics; we're not a political show, but yeah, that's incredible. I hear what you're saying. What are your thoughts? Now, I'm going to ask you probably a blatantly political question. We've got this current macroeconomic environment. We've got inflation where it is; you've got kind of the consumer feeling pinched. They go to the grocery store; prices are super high. Add to that just the civil unrest or maybe political unrest, given that we're in an election year. What are your thoughts on where we're at right now as a society and as a culture? I mean, the United States is not the only country that's about to have an election. There's a bunch of countries that are about to do this. Where do you think we're right now, and how do you advise your companies and your founders on that?

Abby Miller Levy

So I'm an optimist. I'm a glass half full. It's great. One of my colleagues on the team, he's glass half empty. So we actually make a really great investor together. So, where do I see things? I still believe in individuals and people's desires to succeed, to be happy, and to protect themselves and their loved ones. And so I think that that ultimately is the undercurrent. Whenever there is distress, political change, or economic uncertainty, I do believe individuals will take action to move forward because we all are self-interested, and with that self-interest collectively, we will make sure we're okay. That's a very nebulous answer, but I think that's kind of how I'm wired. Having said that, what we do tell our founders is that there is so much uncertainty that you cannot rely on one customer for one way of doing things. One, you need option value, and part of that option value is getting to profitability faster.

So coming out of the investment cycle, if 2020 and 2021 were these crazy valuations and people raising a lot of money, you saw in '23 particularly companies really pulling back, cutting their workforce, making steps so they could stretch their funding longer. And so I think we continue to talk to our founders about pushing towards profitability sooner than you normally would from the dot-com boom, where no one was profitable ever. As well as having a lot more overlapping, redundant products, redundant sales channels, and really reducing that probability of success because as great as your product or service is, if your customer, particularly your enterprise customer, your consumer is feeling nervous or skittish, it's just you can't rely on that.

So I think we're talking to our founders about being more conservative, even though I know, and this is the great thing about being with my partner, Alan, who's been an investor for 50 years. He's seen every cycle. Everything works in a cycle. I mean, you don't have to be a historian to look back and say there's a cycle to everything. And so you just got to get to the other side of the cycle.

Clint Betts

Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. I wonder when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?

Abby Miller Levy

So I was 18. No, I was 20. I was interviewing at McKinsey, and I showed up for my interview in the New York City office I started; they do something called a case study where they ask you a case question on business, and Zubin Taraporevala, who recently retired, was asking me the question and about six minutes in, I knew I was messing it up. I was flailing, and I was circling, and my math wasn't adding up, and I was flustered. I mean, I was young, but I was flustered. And he looked at me and said, "All right, we're going to forget the past 10 minutes happened." Which to me felt like three hours of pain and sweating. He's like, "We're going to start again." And I know it's a really small thing, but that sense of, first of all, the empathy he had, plus the second chance you get. And I wouldn't say that that was the rest of my career, and everything was set, and there have been setbacks since then. But for me, if he hadn't given me another chance, I think it just was so foundational. And there's been a lot of times where I've gotten a of chances both personally and professionally, but I think being able to recognize that you make a mistake, you pick yourself up, and you keep going, that's something that a founder needs to have and to know. And thank you, Zubin, for picking me back up and letting me start again.

Clint Betts

Abby, thank you so much for coming on. Seriously, what an honor. I'm so impressed with what you're doing. You've had an incredible career, and it seems like you're just getting started with Primetime Partners. We'll continue to follow you and best of luck with everything.

Abby Miller Levy

Thanks so much. Great to see you, Clint.

Edited for readability.