Last week, Lantern, part of the Grand Central Tech class of 2020 at Company Ventures, had a huge milestone: the end-of-life planning platform was acquired by Wellthy, a platform helping families balance work and care responsibilities through human expertise and precision technology. Together, the companies “will introduce the most comprehensive platform on the market for care and end-of-life,” Liz Eddy, Lantern’s CEO and co-founder said.
We caught up with Eddy last week to chat about the acquisition, the role that values-based leadership played in Lantern’s exit, and how she’s thought about GCT’s North Star programming while building Lantern.
Company Ventures: How are you feeling now, post-acquisition announcement?
Liz Eddy, Lantern: It’s been a journey. And it’s interesting: from end to end, it only took about six months, which in the scheme of an acquisition is pretty short. But when you’re in it, there are so many unknowns and things beyond your control that can change — it’s the same thing as raising venture capital. Until everything is signed and done, anything can happen.
But we’re excited — we found a company that’s very mission and values-aligned, and sees the potential value of Lantern for what it is and how we built it. I think it can be really hard for founders, especially when they get acquired and the acquiring company has different ideas of how the business should grow and what it should be used for, so we're really lucky that Lindsay [Jurist-Rosner, CEO of Wellthy] and the whole Wellthy team see the power and potential not just for their users, but for the larger population.
What most excited you about the Wellthy team? How did you get introduced?
I actually met Lindsay when we were starting Lantern in 2018. I was introduced to her by a VC — they said, “Lindsay is a couple years ahead of you, and she’s building something in a different category, but with a similar mentality — a combination of expert human support and technology.” I always felt very aligned with her, and how we thought about care, how it should be made accessible to all. I looked up to her, so it felt very full circle. We’ve always felt as though Lantern and Wellthy were sister companies—we’re in compatible but different industries, and we’re both doing things with a similar mindset and vision.
How did your sense of values-driven leadership at Lantern play a role in the Wellthy acquisition?
Values were a big factor in how we looked at potential acquirers. We had quite a few companies that were interested in Lantern for various reasons, but one of the most important things for us was to continue having Lantern serve people. At scale, what we didn’t want to have happen was for the product to become exclusively for people with one kind of life insurance policy, or who use one specific healthcare system — essentially making it a more exclusive service.
We really want end-of-life support to be accessible to all — we didn’t want to see our product become a high-end, white-glove-only service. That was a decision we made early on with Lantern. When we first started, there was a big push from VC to say “why not make the Tesla of end-of-life services?”—meaning a super-high-end, expensive, white glove. But in reality, everybody needs help with end-of-life services. Our idea was: Even if you didn’t have a dollar to your name, you could find resources and services to help you through this process.
How did your team’s commitment to inclusion play a role in getting Lantern to where it is now?
One thing that we were really adamant about during the acquisition process was transparency. As a company, sometimes you face a crossroads about where you’re at as a business, and you get a lot of mixed advice about how to communicate the situation you’re in — in our case, an acquisition. You get a lot of advice about not talking to your team about it, and to keep it close to the vest until it’s nearly a done deal.
With most acquisitions, the acquiring company doesn’t take your whole team — they're not necessarily looking to hire your entire company. We made the decision to ignore the advice many people have said: “Don’t talk about it because you don’t want people getting distracted, you don’t want them to leave early.” We wanted our team to be aware of all the possibilities that could happen in this scenario, and we wanted them to be prepared for it. And so we told them about two months before any major change happened. We were open with them about all the possibilities, and we told them there are no guarantees.We gave the team time to ask questions, to assess their options, and explore other opportunities if they wanted—we’d share their resumes with our networks and be references. Two of our employees ended up working at another startup that we worked very closely with. We wanted to make sure that everybody was in a good situation and taken care of, and I think that was the best decision we could have possibly made.
What role did your time in Grand Central Tech and the North Star programming play in shaping Lantern?
We've always been mission-driven, values-driven people. So when we started the North Star Program, we were sort of like, “we already got this—this is how we operate.” But there was a lot of prompting that encouraged additional exploration and ultimately a much more robust, and actionable, set of values.
One of the things I really loved from the North Star program was thinking about how mission and values apply to every aspect of the business, not just the obvious factors, and holding ourselves accountable to that. It has really helped us — it’s come up when we've been fundraising, and it came up again when we were selling. Those are situations where oftentimes mission and values get pushed to the side. A lot of times, you don't have multiple options, and you have to make that judgment call of whether you continue on or don't. But even just being able to acknowledge, “Okay, I'm going against this particular bullet point on my values list, but the benefit is that my team will be able to stay on and we'll be able to grow the mission,” and being able to weigh that out and decide, “is it worth it?” It's really valuable.