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Show Overview:
The senior healthcare space is ripe for innovation. In this episode, the hosts meet with Jay Newton-Small, founder of MemoryWell to discuss how her family inspired her move from journalism to founding a startup that helps to preserve the stories and integrity of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
About GFGF:
The Get Found Get Funded podcast is at the intersection of entrepreneurship and social justice where we focus on entrepreneurship as a possible path to wealth creation — specifically for Black and Latinx communities.
Featured Guest: Jay Newton-Small
Jay Newton-Small is founder of MemoryWell, a national network of more than 700 writers who tell the life stories of seniors to help improve their care.
Previously, Jay was Washington correspondent for TIME Magazine, where she remains a contributor. At TIME she covered politics as well as stories on five continents and interviewed numerous heads of state, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
Jay also authored a best-selling book in 2016 titled Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works.
Jay received an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and undergraduate degrees in International Relations and Art History from Tufts University. She’s been a fellow at a few respected institutions including theHarvard Institute of Politics in 2015.
She also won the prestigious Dirksen Award for congressional reporting and the Deadline Club award for community service reporting in 2016.
Jay’s Social Media:
- Instagram: @jnewtonsmall,
Follow Memorywell:
- Instagram: @thememorywell
Key Takeaways:
- Going from a project to a business is heavily influenced by investing and marketing.
- Weighing the options and finding the right way to fund your project.
- Sometimes having a third party able to focus on just writing can be cathartic and create a more vulnerable environment.
Timestamps:
0:58 – Intro
3:34 – How Jay got the idea for Memorywell.
8:12 – The project became a business.
11:01 – How can listeners get involved with Memorywell?
12:45 – When did Jay start looking for outside investors and funding?
17:54 – What made Memorywell’s Kickstarter successful.
22:08 – Difficulties of being a female founder looking for funding.
27:20 – Choosing the right investors.
32:12 – Recruiting journalists to work with Memorywell.
39:36 – With Memorywell’s great success, what are the biggest challenges right now?
41:22 – What can listeners do to help?
48:03 – Outro
Items Mentioned in the Show:
Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works.
Quotes from the Show:
- “These seniors, we think they are like babies and you want to be like ooo boo boo boo but... you’re like no, treat them with dignity… I had a lot of frustrations with that too, with my dad, because... he was a diplomat with the United Nations for 40 years... don’t baby talk him.”
- “To some degree the goal of these stories is for people to realize all of these amazing stories that are out there. Everybody has a great story right?”
- “If you say that you’ve closed around but you never really close… if somebody called us up today and said ‘hey we’d like to invest in you’ I’d be like, okay let’s talk.”
