Longevity rewarded at Edge Esmeralda
LongX wins 2nd prize in final hackathon, pushing forward longevity education and opportunities
Denisa, LongX co-founder & core team member, was an Edge City Fellow at Edge Esmeralda, having spent the month of June there.
(Edge Esmeralda is a pop-up city comprising a community of 1200+ people gathered in Healdsburg, CA, aiming to make for “the healthiest and most productive month of their lives”. A collaboration between Edge City and Esmeralda, Devon Zuegel’s organization, it is a yearly-occurring month-long event.)
To mark the end of that special month, the Edge Esmeralda team put together a Hackathon with the theme of Tools for Flourishing. At the Demo Day, builders and residents presented the projects they made meaningful progress on during the month – from hard tech, health/bio/longevity, AI, and human organization to real-world crypto. Exciting projects that matched the theme covered tokenized card games, innovative therapy techniques, and ML tools for biological modelling.
Denisa presented the only (!) longevity project in the hackathon, on our work at LongX around longevity education and opportunities, winning the 2nd prize.
Judges of the Hackathon included:
Ivan Zhao (founder & CEO of Notion),
Omri Amirav Drory (GP of NFX),
Nick White (COO of Celestia),
Yasmin Razavi (Investor & Anthropic board member),
Justin Mares (partner at Long Journey Ventures),
And others.
How did this happen?
More precisely, how do you pitch longevity – and a longevity project – in 2 to 5 minutes, in front of an audience (almost entirely) unaware of the space? Think:
Why do people care about longevity in the first place?
The other presentations were amazing; so fun to see crazy dreams come to life. Bold visions of the future. A week prior, residents of Edge Esmeralda journeyed to Camp Navarro, journey whose theme revolved around how the year 2074 will look like for everyone present.
50 years from now.
And people had so many inspiring ideas! Speed dating with trees, connecting with ourselves, with aliens, what not.
Realistically speaking, in 2074, how will we all look like? Feel like? Behave like? No one addressed that problem… and if things look like the present day, the answer is, ”not great”. The way for all of us to make it to that bright future we dream about, unharmed by the limits of our biology is… longevity.
Longevity, the science of becoming free of all aging diseases, pushing our peak health until the moment we die. If we choose to die.
We all want that, right?
How does what you do benefit the people in your audience?
Denisa entered the longevity space almost 5 years ago. One thing she didn’t see changing was the high entry barriers into the space for young students like her. What if youth could be empowered to do more?
This is where LongX comes in. The aim is to educate people about aging biology and the longevity biotech industry and empower people who want to contribute to this problem in any way they can. Particularly the young. We need to lower the entry barriers: access to education and opportunities should be available to anyone regardless of age, location, background, and ideology.
It speaks volumes that, after a month of futuristic talks and projects, this was the only longevity presentation at the Edge Esmeralda hackathon.
Pitch your project briefly & concisely.
There are many ways to present LongX. In its shortest form, it takes 15 seconds. Going into details, it can be hours of discussion. (We have a full-on document comprising every detail about the past and current endeavors of the LongX team, plus future prospects and plans.)
To tailor such pitches for a general hackathon, knowing the audience, their background and level of exposure to longevity, and general philosophy was enough to find the balance for the LongX pitch.
Knowing who you speak to, and how to speak to them, is possibly the most crucial piece of information when presenting your information.
