Inside the Invite-Only Health Conference Where Billionaires Learn ‘Truth in Medicine’
On the first morning of Doc, an exclusive health and longevity event that convened its inaugural meeting this past October, scoring a caffeine hit required navigating a human obstacle course that had sprung up in the overflow tent. A shifting group of 20 to 30 attendees eagerly chatted by the coffee bar and make-your-own-trail-mix station, while a separate gaggle formed around Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, as if he were a celebrity—which, in this crowd, he was. At about noon, a directive appeared on a message board politely asking those who’d congregated to move their conversations outside; their voices were carrying into the main room. The small cliques did as they were instructed, migrating into the mild Napa Valley sun, where they continued their animated dialogues.
These side gatherings didn’t indicate a lack of interest in the programming, which ranged from a talk about brain implants by UCSF neurosurgeon Eddie Chang to a provocative discussion with billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, about A.I.’s role in health care; there was rarely an empty seat in the airy, contemporary barn that housed most of the weekend’s sessions. Instead, many attendees seemed to have caught a bad case of FOMO and were determined to grab every single opportunity to exchange ideas—and schmooze—with fellow participants.
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“The amount of people here that are intertwined and interconnected within science, investing, content—and actually wanting to help—it’s something I’ve never experienced before,” said Bruno Balen, cofounder and “chief genius” of the longevity-oriented start-up Ani Biome. “I really feel like I belong [for the] first time in my life,” he added, sounding a bit like an eager freshman newly arrived at M.I.T.
Billed as a medicine-focused reincarnation of the early days of TED, Doc brought about 200 scientists, physicians, biotech founders, venture capitalists, and other interested parties—all by invitation only—to the Estate Yountville, a stylish lodging and event complex down the street from the acclaimed French Laundry restaurant. For $5,000 to $7,500 (depending on when they booked), plus at least $1,000 for a weekend’s stay at one of the property’s two hotels, attendees were treated to hours of talks from esteemed thinkers, the chance to rub shoulders with a meticulously curated community of boundary- pushing science geeks, and a blood test for an inflammation biomarker that has not yet been approved for clinical use in the United States (the samples were analyzed in Europe, where the test has had the green light since 2007). And Robb Report was the only publication there to cover it.
The weekend wasn’t free from typical Silicon Valley health hype: Green juice flowed, smart watches and Oura Rings were seemingly requisite accessories (devices from Ultrahuman, an Oura competitor, were also gifted to all in attendance), and one day I ate lunch next to a woman who follows a meat-only diet. But though some measure of bright-eyed enthusiasm was central to Doc’s character, so was a commitment to evidence. None of the speakers—most of whom were researchers from top-tier institutions—promoted the next new superfood or promised they knew the secret to living to 150; rather, their job was to communicate legitimate science to an intelligent and sophisticated audience. The health and longevity advice, when it was offered, was of the unsexy and well-grounded variety: Keep a consistent sleep schedule, exercise regularly (but not too much), build social relationships, and, if at all possible, move to Sausalito—where, as Verdin pointed out, the average life expectancy is 92.
They all had to pass the ‘would you want to be on a transcontinental flight with this person?’ test.
That’s not to say that Doc was dry or fuddy-duddy. Two of the presenters study psychedelics, and several others spoke about their work at the cutting edge of precision medicine. Many are trying to take their research out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. Add to that mix of experts a swarm of biotech founders and investors, and the talk got pretty enterprising. For Adam Gazzaley—a professor of neuroscience at UCSF, Doc speaker, and friend of the event’s impresario, Jordan Shlain, M.D.—that forward-looking energy was a breath of fresh air. “There’re a million evidence-based deep-science things, but they’re stuck in many ways in a lack of willingness to reach into the future,” he says. “But this was really unique. It was really new.”
Doc is the brainchild of Shlain and John Battelle, a tech journalist and entrepreneur who cofounded Wired. The two have been friends since they started jamming together in 2009. “We would always play music and then have idea sessions of what we could do to make the world a better place,” says Shlain, a guitarist. (Battelle plays the drums.)
Shlain is the founder and chairman of Private Medical, a concierge medical service with offices on both coasts, where membership costs $45,000 per year for an adult and $28,500 for a child under 18. Anyone who can afford that fee can also afford plenty of snake oil, and Shlain has watched clients fall victim to various wellness-industry scams. A few tried fraudulent stem-cell therapies outside the U.S. that landed them in the hospital, and another wanted to inject a substance labeled L-carnitine, a chemical naturally produced by the body that helps turn fat into energy, that they’d bought online. Shlain insisted on having it tested—the lab report did indeed identify L-carnitine, but also MDMA derivatives and an herbicide. Doc was partly conceived as an antidote to the podcasters and multilevel marketing schemes that have come to dominate the public discourse about health: Its tagline is “Truth in medicine.”
But Battelle and Shlain had grander ambitions than merely protecting a small cohort of wealthy people from health misinformation. By getting the right combination of reputable scientists and powerful moguls into the same room, they hoped to help disseminate ambitious, well-grounded ideas into the world. “If TED was where tech started,” Shlain says, “this is where health starts.” They were a natural team for the job. Battelle, now Doc’s CEO, has programmed onstage events for over 30 years, and though Shlain’s career is medicine, his true vocation appears to be collecting people—a pastime that no doubt benefits Private Medical’s members, who can access pre-eminent specialists thanks to his extensive network. Many of the Doc participants I spoke with considered Shlain a personal friend, and most of the rest were recruited by him to attend.
“He’s apparently a rock star,” said attendee Wahid Tadros, president of California Engineering Contractors, who learned about Doc as a patient of Private Medical, though he hadn’t previously met Shlain. “He knows everyone here. He knew who I was.”
Tadros was one of the only conference-goers who didn’t work in health or finance, and his outsider status apparently appealed to Shlain. “He said that he approved me [to attend Doc] because he thought it would be interesting for someone like me to come here,” said Tadros, who did not disappoint: On the first night, he raised his hand after the event’s Oxford-style opening debate about whether aging is a process or a disease. With the disclaimer that he was an engineer and not a medical expert, he objected that the discussion had been bogged down by semantics and failed to touch on the core problem; the comment was met with applause.
Part of the trick of making Doc work, according to Battelle, is achieving the precise mix of experts, investors, founders, and wild cards such as Tadros. Each attendee was personally vetted by Shlain and Battelle: Though anyone could request an invitation via the event’s website, only those who met with the organizers’ approval were given the chance to attend. Often, Battelle says, the rejections weren’t personal—the quota of VCs or entrepreneurs already might have been reached by the time someone signed up, for example. But to achieve the right mood in such a small group, the organizers had to take personality into account. “They all had to pass the ‘Would you want to be on a transcontinental flight with this person?’ [test],” Battelle says. “Is this somebody who you can vibe with, who you can go to a long dinner party with and enjoy being seated next to?”
To that end, some conversations did dig deeper than the science or the business models. Siranush Babakhanova had plenty of practical reasons to be at Doc: She is general partner at Fundomo, which invests in life-sciences tools that can be used to further longevity research. (Battelle’s son Ian, who was involved in producing Doc, is also an investor in Fundomo.) She came to the conference partly to help build new relationships for the companies she capitalizes—her founders, she said, gave her lists of the attendees whom they hoped she could connect with—and, in that regard, the event was a success. “Almost every single person here is either a customer, or a customer of a customer, of one of our portfolio companies,” she noted.
But what stuck with Babakhanova most wasn’t Doc’s financial rewards. She recounted staying up until the wee hours one night, bonding with a woman she had met by chance and who shared Babakhanova’s painful experience of leaving behind her home country due to a lack of opportunities. That encounter, Babakhanova says, was like “finding a soulmate.”
The list of Doc speakers—or faculty, as the organizers renamed them—would make any medical-school dean starry-eyed. “You can attend a lot of health or longevity conferences where you might get a lot of B-team- or even C-team-level people,” said one institutional investor who was at the event. “You don’t often get so many experts put together, attempting so many novel approaches, who are really masters in their fields.”
Shlain and Battelle’s overriding criterion for selecting faculty was simple: “No influencers and no gurus,” they pledged. In other words, no to podcasters with millions of followers, but yes to several Stanford and Harvard professors you’ve probably never heard of—but could be heading to Stockholm one year. Despite that prohibition, the faculty who did make the cut were, by and large, effective communicators of their science—some remarkably so. At the very least, they kept their audience interested enough that phones mostly remained tucked away.
Friday morning’s programming included a presentation from Leonard Zon, director of the stem-cell program at Boston Children’s Hospital; a panel on money in health care that featured Lois Quam, president of Blue Shield of California; and a set of talks on health-promoting behaviors. During this last session, Harvard scientist Rebecca Robbins shared her research indicating a link between quality sleep and longevity; Emeran Mayer of UCLA discussed the gut microbiome; and Meagan Wasfy, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who studies athletes, told the crowd that too much high-intensity exercise can be just as detrimental to longevity as too little—a revelation that cheered some and dismayed others. (“Big thumbs-down,” groaned Hans David Rearick, founder of Yofima, which provides in-home yoga, fitness, and massage sessions.)
In fact, the speakers might have been a bit too engaging: Attendees had so many questions that lunch started almost a half hour late, and an afternoon break came and went with no pause in the programming. The delay even affected a scheduled performance by singer Aloe Blacc, one of the few public figures in attendance. (He does the vocals on Avicii’s “Wake Me Up.”) The Grammy-nominated Blacc also happens to be a biotech founder, so in inviting him the organizers scored a two-for-one deal: someone who could both talk science and offer the sort of exclusive show that has become an expectation at high-end events.
Unperturbed by the late start, Blacc sang a set with only piano accompaniment, managing to sound spectacular on a stage that had been optimized for slide presentations and panel discussions. Between songs, he talked about his unconventional career and his drug-discovery company—deftly steering clear of the “no selling” admonition by keeping everything grounded in his personal journey—and spoke warmly, and mournfully, of his friendship with the late Avicii, the Swedish DJ and record producer who died by suicide in 2018. Battelle later told me he’d seen audience members crying.
Jordan Shlain called me and kept calling me until I agreed to come. He is a very persuasive and compelling person.
It’s surely no coincidence that many Doc faculty are, like Blacc, entrepreneurs, though in the modern tech era, it seems impossible to be a tenured science professor in the Bay Area and not start a company. For those faculty, there were obvious financial advantages to being in a room with such a high concentration of biotech investors, but the composition of the group came with intangible advantages, too. “It was a meeting where I had some interest in all aspects of what I do, which is pretty unique,” said Zon, who has started several pharmaceutical businesses.
For the Silicon Valley denizens, well-known for their obsession with life-extending interventions, the blend of bleeding-edge science and the opportunity to discover the next unicorn was irresistible. Gigi Danziger, founder of Eutopia Holdings, and her husband, Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures, were among many financiers on the hunt. “We always look for investments,” said Wenger, noting he was particularly interested in companies at Doc with unique proprietary-data sets. He referenced Balen’s Ani Biome, which collects images of users’ tongues to track their metabolic health.
Battelle claimed that Doc had generated “tens of millions” of dollars of transactions, though he was not at liberty to disclose any specifics. But for his part, Zon didn’t come just for the networking. He also hoped to dissuade deep-pocketed participants from spending their extensive resources on “a clinic in Colombia that’s going to open up and offer you stem-cell therapy for your hair loss and Alzheimer’s at the same time,” as he put it. When it was his turn on stage, he devoted the last third of his time to railing, eloquently, against such clinics. In the weeks since the conference, Zon said, he has advised six Doc attendees on stem-cell treatments for issues as disparate as spinal-cord problems and leukemia and has even referred one to a Parkinson’s stem-cell trial.
Laura Esserman, director of the UCSF Breast Care Center, needed a bit more convincing than Zon to make the drive up to Napa. “Jordan Shlain called me and kept calling me until I agreed to come,” she said. “He is a very persuasive and compelling person.”
On Saturday afternoon, Esserman took the stage in a richly patterned kimono to bemoan the state of breast-cancer detection and treatment. Because screening isn’t personalized, she explained, some women undergo radical surgeries to remove slow-growing tumors that never would have harmed them, while others don’t discover fatal cancers until it’s far too late. Her solution is a gargantuan study of individualized breast-cancer-screening approaches—her aim is to recruit 50,000 women—and, although she has received millions in funding from the NIH, it’s not enough to conduct genetic testing on all her participants. Doc, for her, was one avenue to raising that money.
As of this writing, no direct pledges from Doc had materialized for Esserman, but another faculty member had fared better: Behfar Ehdaie, a urologic surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who presented on his prostate-cancer research, told me he’d been promised $25,000 by an attendee.
Battelle and Shlain make a clear distinction between philanthropy and investing, even when a guest speaker is both an academic and an entrepreneur. “There is a huge difference between presenting research innovations that have changed science and medicine, and selling, pitching, bullshitting, etc.,” Battelle told me. “This group knows that difference innately—you can smell the sell.” Philanthropy has always been part of the plan for Doc, both noted, but they had intended to wait until the event showed some staying power before introducing it into the mix. “We’re accelerating preparations for that,” Battelle said. “Doc created a set of permissions that we want to continue to encourage.”
Friday was a late night. After dinner, the group migrated to a loftlike building on the property—equipped, of course, with a bar—where Battelle interviewed Westworld cocreator Lisa Joy in front of a packed room. As the evening wore on, Battelle and Shlain got the band back together—literally—adding Zon on trumpet and careening between covers of rock classics like “House of the Rising Sun” and bluesy, improvised jazz. (For the performance, Shlain traded the Doc-branded baseball cap he’d been wearing since morning for a top hat.) Around midnight, at least a few dozen people were still deep in discussion by the bar.
On the final morning, the last couple of sessions included a hard-hitting panel discussion on misinformation. When Shlain then took the stage, he was glowing despite the previous night’s revels. “Should we do it again?” he asked. From the audience, someone shouted, “Twice a year!”
Doc is now set to return October 12 to 14. Many of the attendees were eager to join in round two. Zon said he has already agreed to an encore and has recommended Doc to several acquaintances, though he realizes that Shlain and Battelle will have a mighty task ahead of them as word spreads. Of the growing interest, he said, “I don’t know how they’ll manage,” adding, “One of the charms was that it wasn’t that big of a meeting.”
Shlain and Battelle do plan to keep the event relatively small, though they’re considering other tweaks. For all the talk of positive health behaviors and their role in longevity, most attendees spent a good deal of the weekend sitting—and drinking. Future iterations might include a hike through Napa’s rolling mountains or a yoga class. But Shlain and Battelle seem optimistic that they’ll have plenty of opportunity to perfect their formula. And enough people seemed enamored with the nascent Doc culture to keep the event going for years to come. But even if that breathless, hyper-extroverted vibe were to dim as the conference finds its long-term footing, Battelle and Shlain would still be on safe ground: Access to exclusive, well-vetted information about the cutting edge of health and longevity science has a way of selling itself.
And they certainly know their audience. Danziger and Wenger, for two, were planning to try some of the tests they learned about at Doc, such as a noninvasive scan from the start-up Cleerly that purports to detect plaque buildup in the coronary arteries to predict the risk of a heart attack. Meeting the many clinicians in attendance also got them thinking about making more radical changes to their personal health protocols: “The doctors that we have in our own life—we need to think about upgrading,” Danziger said with a laugh.
According to Rearick, the Yofima founder, Doc had that rare ability to capture the zeitgeist. “This event is about what’s happening right now that’s going to be available to the masses,” he said. “We get to know first.”
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