What do you do when your company’s about to die?
If you’re Brent Franson, you create an app that tells you when you might expect your own expiration date. The app, called Death Clock, was a Hail Mary pivot after his previous product, a health tracking app for which he raised $10 million, had failed.
“It’s probably a really, really stupid idea to actually name it Death Clock,” Franson said on an episode of The Spoon Podcast. “But if it’s a good idea, it’s a really good idea. It’s an 80 percent chance it’s a terrible idea. But there’s a 20 percent chance that it’s a really good idea.”
It turned out the app beat the odds and became a viral sensation, in no small measure due to its provocative name. But behind the provocation was a deeper thesis shaped by Franson’s own entrepreneurial journey and his experience with his company’s near-death moment building apps for a broken health system.
“What I became pretty convinced of in my life is that our healthcare system is just not very good at helping people change behavior,” he said. “It’s not good at preventative health. And that’s really obvious in addiction.”
Like most ideas coming out of Silicon Valley these days, Death Clock has AI at its core, trained on longevity studies in a way that forces people to confront mortality directly.
“We trained an AI on 1,200 longevity studies to make a few predictions,” Franson said. “One, it predicts the day you’re going to die. And two, it predicts how much longer it thinks you can live if you manage your health.”
The reception to Death Clock surprised the company. The app quickly climbed app store charts across multiple countries, tapping into what Franson sees as pent-up demand for preventative health tools that operate outside the traditional medical system.
That vision expanded this week with the company’s announcement of Life Lab, a new AI-powered health concierge embedded inside the Death Clock app. Life Lab integrates nationwide blood testing, biomarker tracking, and uploaded physician records to create what Franson calls a “private doctor quality roadmap” for everyday consumers.
“The number one factor that determines how long you’re going to live is how much money you have,” he said. “Basically, the more money you have, the more you can opt out of the healthcare system and cash pay for good preventative health.”
Life Lab, he says, can help collapse that gap using software rather than elite access.
Perched squarely inside Silicon Valley’s fast-growing longevity movement, I asked Franson what he thinks of the live-forever crowd and the surge of investor interest in longevity. He told me that while he believes the underlying demand is real, he’s sharply critical of what he sees as excess and dishonesty at the fringes.
“Selling immortality is one of the oldest frauds in the book,” Franson said. “If you’re insinuating that if you buy my stuff, you might not die, I think that’s reckless. And I think it gives everybody in the space a bad name.”
Instead, Franson has focused Death Clock on a much more reasonable goal: helping 100 million people live 10 years longer. “That’s not live forever. That’s just being healthier for longer.”
In a longevity landscape increasingly crowded with extreme biohacking and hucksters, Franson and Death Clock are betting that a more realistic goal, and a little dark humor, might prove to be a more durable strategy.
You can listen to my full conversation with Brent below or download on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
