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Founded in 2015, AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant LifeSite offers a secure digital vault for safely storing important information and documents, from passwords and family photos to wills and deeds. Leveraging cutting-edge technology, LifeSite helps keep families on the same page while bringing peace of mind. 

Chris Wong, founder and CEO, explained how LifeSite works and helps multiple generations of a family. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

 
Can you describe LifeSite for us? 

We wanted to solve the problems that individuals, their families and their trusted advisors face when they’re trying to manage, maintain and share all their personal data and sensitive life information. You can think of it as categories of health, wealth, legal and personal information. We’re security experts, so we’ve built an ultra-secure, cloud-based digital safe deposit box where you can organize, manage and share all that information. 

So, for example, someone could upload their will to LifeSite. 

That’s one of the best examples, especially from an AgeTech perspective. But you can also upload passwords, medical records, deeds and financial information. 

One of the biggest struggles that we all face is to determine what’s “important” information; most people don’t know what kind of information is truly important. So as part of our system, we guide people to help them understand what kind of information is important as it relates to your estate, or medical information, or even a car accident. 

What’s your inspiration behind founding the company? 

What inspired me was trying to solve my own problems! I’m part of the sandwich generation, who are people that have their own children and also have aging parents — so I have to be prepared to manage my own family and our documents, as well as my parents' documents. I’m an engineer by trade, and I’ve built my career in Silicon Valley, so I thought, “There must be an app for this.” There wasn’t, so I started LifeSite as a solution. 

You have the engineering side of LifeSite covered, but what about the business side of founding a startup? 

What has always helped me is having a product background, which has helped me understand the technology and the process of building products — but it’s also helped me be a good listener. Because you have to listen to customers and be able to bridge the gap between the product and what the customers are telling you they want. I think being able to do that is one of my superpowers. But you also have to be able to prioritize, because company-building is a journey; you can’t build everything all at one time. 

What has it been like working with AARP and being part of the AgeTech Collaborative™? 

When people think about AARP, they usually think about people who are maybe in their 80s; they don’t realize that you can be as young as in your 50s and still be associated with AARP. Working with AARP really helped us narrow down which sub-segment of the AARP population would derive the most value from LifeSite, which is the sandwich generation. 

Here’s a use case. I have four brothers, and we are constantly having conversations about our parents. For example, my mom bought a long-term care policy, and neither I nor my brothers knew anything about accessing it. So we put the policy in LifeSite, and now everybody can see it and know how to find it. We’re doing it to help our parents, but we’re also doing it to help ourselves. 

What kind of speed bumps have you encountered while building LifeSite? 

Adoption is always a challenge. How do you drive adoption by communicating value? When we first started, that was certainly a barrier, and COVID put a three-year hiatus on a lot of companies that started before the pandemic. We were able to pivot into the health space to allow us to survive, and now we’re getting back to what we started the company on. In particular, we’re taking advantage of blockchain to create authentications for wills, documents and deeds out of our digital vault. We’re creating a digital stamp, which can be published on the blockchain, which guarantees that the document is immutable and has verification publicly. So we’re almost like a Web3 for e-signatures. You can use it for deeds, titles, real estate deals, and you can even tie your health information to it. 

You don’t set yourself small challenges! 

No, we don’t, and the reason why is because we get a lot of help. Nobody builds a startup company by themselves, and in 30–40 years in the industry, I’ve accumulated a lot of business partners. You need a team of people helping you along the way, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of people doing that. 

Vist LifeSite’s website to learn more.