Do Delight Tech Startups Achieve Greater Success?
Five Years of Science-Based Health and Happiness Investment Strategy
Analysis of the global picture of human change is essential to our funds. In 2017, we launched a fund with the specific goal of investing in companies that create Delightful Moments, which we defined as “emerging technologies that can help individuals feel happier, healthier, calmer, more confident, less anxious or subject to pain.” With this focus, Joyance was the first venture fund centered on individual, personal experience, rather than today’s one-size-fits-all medical industrial complex.
To help our audience understand our unique and unconventional thesis, we started publishing a blog series titled “Where We Are Investing Now.” At this five-year mark, we are reflecting on our past theories to see how they measure up to the reality of today.
We spent 2017–2019 experimenting and refining what we deemed were the core focus areas for scientific Delightful Moments: bioscience, microbiome, neuroscience, virtual and augmented reality, next-generation food, and community. Three years in, the Covid-19 crisis of 2020 made it quite clear that we were on the right track. The importance of staying healthy and happy in the midst of such extreme turbulence and tragedy made the concepts and companies we invested in leap to the forefront of the startup scene.
We saw remarkable advancements in digital health, in areas such as practitioner-patient matching, chronic disease management, longevity/healthspan, sport/fitness, women’s health, and mental health / mindfulness / neuroscience.
While the world desperately searched for everyday infusions of delight simply to sustain the hope to persevere, we doubled down on our investments into emotional brands, specifically affordable luxury and high-emotion consumer products such as clothing, furniture, skincare, and sexual wellness products. We saw more and more innovative ways of connecting friends and family, as well as connecting people with similar medical conditions, mental illnesses, or impactful life situations like divorce or death. As our living spaces suddenly had to also double as our working spaces, “Physical Surroundings” became its own category. Our “Food and Beverage” focus expanded to encompass self-sustainability, food waste prevention, and food connectivity, and our “Water” focus actually narrowed to decentralized water businesses for consumers.
As we write this today, we are not only still struggling to heal the deep and enduring wounds of the pandemic; we’re also emerging from a long, hot, turbulent summer, with global heating and weather destabilization projected to continue and worsen in the months and years ahead. We felt that the next generation of science would replace the health industry’s syndrome-centric approach with something more personal, more preventative, more predictive, and dramatically more powerful. And, indeed, people are now urgently embracing the idea that we should make the best of our one precious life, in whatever way is most meaningful to our individual issues, desires, and interpretations of delight. As investors, we’ll do all we can to support that endeavor by continuing to invest in health, happiness, and delight — now, for the next five years, and forever.
By Marketing Director Nicole Staudinger
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