初创公司Lantern希望引发一场关于如何良好死亡的对话

美国是文书工作的大国，这在生命尽头时体现得极为明显。我们必须向医疗保健提供者仔细传达高级护理指示并严格遵守。在符合相关房地产法的前提下，必须对财产进行分割和转让。当然，葬礼，火葬或其他选择的后勤工作也有其自身的复杂性，成本和选择。

研究这一切最糟糕的时间是您去世时。弄清楚这一点的最佳时间就是您还不需要时。

对于总部位于纽约市的Lantern以尽早启动这些对话为目的，希望其用户有更好的心态，尤其在艰难的现在。

该公司事实上提供了一个“操作方法”平台，让人们开始为死亡做准备，并提供清单和监控以确保绝大多数细节。初创公司在一些领域自己处理基础细节，而在房地产规划等其他领域中，它则与Trust＆Will等合作伙伴合作，我们在TechCrunch上已对此进行了多次介绍。

目前，该公司有两个计划：一个简单的免费计划和一个每年27美元的计划，该计划可跟踪您的寿命终止计划，并让您与家人，朋友或其他相关的人进行协作，制造。该公司正在增加其他选项，需要支付额外费用。

上个月，该公司在由Draper Associates牵头的种子轮融资中筹集了140万美元，它的融资中还涉及一些其他的公司。早些时候，该公司从2048 Ventures，Amplify等公司筹集了890,000美元的种子前融资，迄今已筹集的总资金达到230万美元。该公司是一家公益组织，成立于2018年9月，一年后首次正式成立。

对于创始人Liz Eddy和Alyssa Ruderman而言，Lantern以富有同理心而善解人意的方式解决迫在眉睫的问题。 “我15岁时就创办了第一家公司，”首席执行官埃迪（Eddy）说。该公司专注于针对高中生及以后的大学生进行约会虐待和家庭暴力教育。她说：“我真的爱上开始新事物的步伐和变化，也喜欢围绕人们真的不想谈论的话题进行对话，并使对话变得更加舒适。”

后来，她加入了当地的预防自杀的非营利组织“危机热线”，该热线有一个基于SMS的危机咨询员网络，经过培训的咨询员们可以使人们平静下来并开始康复过程。她在该组织工作了六年以上。

至于Lantern的首席运营官Ruderman，她最近在全球公民组织（Global Citizen）工作了两年，该组织致力于消除极端贫困。两者在启动加速器Grand Central Tech上连接并孵化了Lantern。

计划的想法来自个人经验。 “我上小学时就失去了父亲，”埃迪说，“亲眼目睹了失丧和悲伤如何在经济，情感，后勤，法律等各个方面影响家庭。”

如今，这些流程中有许多部分都处于脱机状态，而如今最常用的在线产品都集中在计划的各个要素上，例如遗产规划或选择和购买棺材。埃迪（Eddy）和鲁德曼（Ruderman）看到了一个机会，可以用更好的产品提供更全面的体验，同时也可以提早进行这些对话。

该产品的预先计划部分是在去年大流行发生时启动的，Eddy说：“我们进行了一次非常有趣的发布，人们开始以自己的方式来应对自己的死亡。很久没见到了。”到目前为止，典型的用户年龄在25到35岁之间，许多人在遇到重大生活事件时就开始进行规划。埃迪说，家庭成员的死亡是一个明显的诱因，但是生孩子或创办公司也是如此。

Eddy反复强调的一个方面是，拥有意愿和为寿命终止做预先计划并不等同。她说：“即使您去世后名字上没有一元钱，您的亲人，家庭成员，还有很多其他事情，无论谁负责，都必须考虑。”

从产品的角度来看，与您更典型的SaaS初创公司有一些细微的差别。首先，公司需要定期与您互动，但不太频繁。例如，与一次婚礼结束之后的婚礼不同，您的文档和指令需要随用户生活条件的变化而偶尔进行编辑和更新。

除此之外，谈论死亡的产品面临的最大挑战之一就是与一个看起来并不冷漠的用户建立联系，而且这种联系很像硅谷。 “即使是完全虚拟的产品，也要有所保障。

埃迪说：“您真的感觉到整个人类之间的联系是当务之急。” “我们使用了许多善解人意的语言，而我们的图像中，所有插图都是由失去过某人的插画家完成的。”

长寿的创业公司可能仍然是某些风投投资者的命题，但是处理结局（无论何时）是每个人都面临的一项活动。 灯笼可能会照亮更多的东西，否则人们将感到衰弱和令人恐惧。

Lantern is a startup looking to ignite a conversation about how to die well

America is a land of paperwork, and nowhere is that more obvious than at the end of someone’s life. Advanced care directives have to be carefully disseminated to healthcare providers and strictly followed. Property has to be divided and transferred while meeting relevant estate laws. And of course, there are the logistics of a funeral, cremation or other option that has its own serious complexities, costs and choices.

The worst time to figure out how to die is when you die. The best time to figure it out is precisely when you don’t have to.

For New York City-headquartered Lantern, the goal is to initiate those conversations early and give its users significantly better peace-of-mind, particularly in these dolorous times.

The company offers essentially a “how-to” platform for beginning to prepare for end-of-life, offering checklists and monitoring to ensure that the vast majority of details are figured out in advance. In some cases, the startup will handle the underlying details itself, while in other areas like estate planning, it works with partners such as Trust & Will, which we have profiled a number of times on TechCrunch.

Right now, the company has two plans: a simple free one and a $27 / year plan that tracks your progress on end-of-life planning and allows you to collaborate with family, friends or whoever else needs to be part of your decision-making. The company is in the process of adding other à la carte options for additional fees.

Last month, the company raised $1.4 million in a seed round led by Draper Associates  with a few other firms involved. Earlier, the company raised a pre-seed round of $890,000 from the likes of 2048 Ventures, Amplify and others, bringing its total fundraised to date to $2.3 million. The company is organized as a public-benefit corporation and was founded in September 2018 and first launched a year later.

For founders Liz Eddy and Alyssa Ruderman, Lantern  was an opportunity to tackle a looming problem in a compassionate and empathetic way. “I started my first company when I was 15,” Eddy, who is CEO, said. That company focused on dating abuse and domestic violence education for high school and later college students. “I really fell in love with the pace and variety of starting something new, but also in creating conversations around topics that people really don’t want to talk about and making it more palatable and comfortable,“ she said.

Later, she joined local suicide prevention non-profit Crisis Text Line, which has an SMS-based network of crisis counselors who are trained to calm people and begin their process of recovery. She spent more than six years at the organization.

As for Ruderman, who is COO of Lantern, she most recently spent two years at Global Citizen, a non-profit organization focused on ending extreme poverty. The two connected and incubated Lantern at startup accelerator Grand Central Tech.

The idea for better end-of-life planning came from personal experience. “I lost my dad when I was in elementary school,” Eddy said, “and saw firsthand how loss and grief impacts a family financially, emotionally, logistically, legally — every aspect.”

Today, many of these processes are offline, and the online products mostly available today are focused on individual elements of end-of-life planning, such as estate planning or selecting and purchasing a casket. Eddy and Ruderman saw an opportunity to provide a more holistic experience with a better product while also initiating these conversations earlier.

That pre-planning part of the product was launched just as the pandemic was getting underway last year, and Eddy said that “we had a sort of a really interesting launch where people were starting to come to terms with their own mortality in a way we hadn’t seen in a very long time.” Typical users so far have been between 25 and 35 years old, and many people start planning when they have a major life event. Eddy says that the death of a family member is an obvious trigger, but so is having a baby or starting a company.

One aspect that Eddy emphasized repeatedly was that having a will and pre-planning for end-of-life are not equivalent. “Even if you don’t have a dollar to your name after you pass away, there are a ton of other things that your loved ones, family members, whoever’s responsible has to consider,” she said.

From a product perspective, there are some nuances compared to your more typical SaaS startup. For one, the company needs to engage you regularly, but not too frequently. Unlike, say, a wedding which is a single event that then is over, your documents and directives need to be occasionally edited and updated as a user’s life circumstances change.

Beyond that, one of the largest challenges with a product that talks about death is building a connection with a user that doesn’t seem cold, and, well, Silicon Valley-like. “Even as a product that is entirely virtual, making sure that you really feel that human connection throughout” is a high priority, Eddy said. “We use a lot of empathetic language, and our imagery, all of the illustrations are done by illustrators who have lost someone in memory of the person who’s lost.”

Longevity startups may remain a thesis for some VC investors, but handling the end — no matter when — is an activity every person faces. Lantern might shine just a bit more light on what is otherwise a debilitating and scary prospect.