CO-FOUNDER & CEO // ELYSIUM HEALTH
He read one case study about cellular aging in business school and decided the fountain of youth was an engineering problem. Then he quit one of the best jobs in venture capital to go build it.
Eric Marcotulli runs his entire life out of an inbox. Email lands, he answers it, the to-do list shrinks by one. No system, no app, no inbox-zero ritual to brag about - just a reflex to never be the bottleneck. It is a small habit that explains a large career. The job of a CEO, in his telling, is to remove yourself from the critical path so the people you hired can move faster than you.
Today that company is Elysium Health, the New York firm he co-founded in 2014 to do something the rest of the industry had decided was impossible: take the aging research happening in university labs and put it on a shelf, in a bottle, with the scientists' names attached. He sells directly to consumers. He recruited Nobel laureates as advisors. And he did it after leaving a partnership at Sequoia Capital, the kind of seat most people spend a career trying to reach.
The conversion happened in a classroom. Marcotulli was at Harvard Business School, reading a case study about Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and the work of two scientists - Leonard Guarente and David Sinclair - on the machinery of cellular aging. By the time the afternoon was over, something had flipped.
"Aging was no longer some amorphous and unstoppable force," he later put it, "but something we can break down into identifiable processes." That is a strange sentence for a finance student to walk out of class believing. It is also the whole company, stated in a single line, years before the company existed.
He went to Silicon Valley anyway, joining Sequoia Capital as one of its youngest partners, leading growth investments in mobile technology. But the thing he had read about would not let go. From the inside of venture capital, he kept noticing the same gap: technology was transforming what we understood about health, and almost none of it was reaching the people who could actually buy something.
So he left. In 2014 he co-founded Elysium Health with Dan Alminana, who brought a finance and venture pedigree from Deloitte, Citi and JP Morgan, and with Leonard Guarente - one of the scientists from that original case study - as the scientific anchor.
The early days were not romantic. "Like many startups, we struggled to raise financing," Marcotulli admitted. "Longevity was not a topic of interest to Silicon Valley." He was selling a category the smartest money in the world had not yet decided to believe in. The funding came eventually - more than $70 million across several rounds, the most recent a Series C - but the conviction came first.
Longevity was not a topic of interest to Silicon Valley.// ERIC MARCOTULLI, ON RAISING THE FIRST DOLLARS
Before Elysium had a product, he cold-approached Nobel Prize-winning scientists to pressure-test the idea of connecting researchers straight to consumers. Many said yes. "Reach out to anybody and everybody," he says. "Don't be afraid to ask for what you want."
His staffing philosophy isn't headcount, it's leverage. Find the outsized individual contributor who replaces an entire team, then refuse to become the thing that slows them down.
His advice to founders is almost suspiciously plain: "Make a product that you yourself need and want. Use it. Take it." He starts most mornings with the company's own product, then heads to the gym at night.
"Everything takes longer than you think, even when you account for the fact that everything takes longer."
He owns a copy of the Voyager Golden Record - the gold-plated disc NASA bolted to two spacecraft in 1977 as a message to whoever finds them. A fitting trophy for a man obsessed with the long arc of time.
He competed on the mat in college, and the sport stuck. His takeaway: a team's outcome rests on every individual showing up at their best. It reads like a coaching note and a hiring memo at once.
No fancy productivity stack. He answers email the moment it arrives and treats the inbox as his master to-do list - a way of guaranteeing he never becomes the holdup for his own team.
In 2017 he launched the Elysium Scholars program: $10,000 annual, renewable college scholarships for New York City high school seniors heading into the sciences. Built quietly, no press tour.
For all the science and the venture pedigree, the thing Marcotulli keeps returning to is people. Ask him what gets him through the grind and the answer isn't a metric. "I'm thankful for the fact that we are working on an incredibly meaningful problem," he says, "and, as a result, we have a team of people who genuinely care."
The mission is the same one that walked out of that business-school classroom more than a decade ago: take the rigorous, slow, careful work happening in research labs and translate it into something a real person can actually use. He spends his vacations with his family - a deliberate choice for someone whose entire career orbits the question of time and how we spend it.