April 16, 2025

Episode 289: Predicting, Planning, & Protecting Your Family for a Long-Term Care Event with Lily Vittayarukskul, Founder & CEO of Waterlily; San Francisco, CA, USA

31 minutes

What if you could look into a crystal ball and see exactly what your family’s long-term care needs will be in the future?

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Lily Vittayarukskul, the brilliant CEO and co-founder of Waterlily, an AI-powered platform that uses over 500 million data points to help families plan for the financial and emotional realities of aging. Lily is a World Economic Forum Top Innovator, a patented inventor, and someone who turned a heartbreaking personal experience into a mission-driven company that is disrupting the way we think about long-term care.

As someone with two parents in their 80s, this topic hits close to home for me—and I know it will for many of you too. We talked about everything from how she built Waterlily and earned the trust of major investors to the importance of planning so families aren’t torn apart in times of crisis.

These are the highlights of our conversation:

- Waterlily Predicts Long-Term Care Needs with AI: Waterlily uses over 500 million data points to help families predict their future long-term care needs based on lookalike families. It’s like looking into a data-driven future mirror.

-A Personal Family Crisis Sparked the Mission: Lily was only 16 when a long-term care event involving her aunt devastated her family emotionally and financially. That experience inspired her to shift from a career in aerospace to founding a company focused on preventing that same pain for others.

- Bold Pivot from B2C: Originally aimed at consumers, Waterlily pivoted to serve the financial services industry, empowering advisors to have better long-term care conversations with clients. This B2B strategy became the core of their scalable, subscription-based model.

- Built for Impact, Not Just Speed: Instead of rushing a product to market, Lily spent two years building a strong technical and data foundation before launching. That decision paid off with major partnerships, including Prudential and several Fortune 100 companies.

- Culture of Trust and Smart Scaling: Despite impressive growth, Lily keeps her team intentionally lean, leveraging large language models and automation to scale efficiently. She emphasizes trust and alignment with all at her company as the foundation for sustainable success.

About the guest:

Lily Vittayarukskul, Waterlily’s CEO and Co-Founder, started college at 14, and by 16, she was venturing into a career in aerospace engineering as an intern at NASA. However, that same year, her life took a dramatic turn when her Aunt, who raised her and was a cornerstone in her first-generation immigrant family, was diagnosed with terminal stage colon cancer. The ensuing financial and emotional devastation, exacerbated by their family's lack of preparedness, tore permanent rifts in her family, and compelled her to pivot her career from aerospace to a lifelong dedication to building solutions in healthcare.

Fueled by personal tragedy and a resolve to forge change, Lily graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in Genetics and Data Science and led product and engineering at multiple startups before founding Waterlily.

Connect with Lily:

Website: https://www.waterlily.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lily-vittayarukskul/

Connect with Allison:

Feedspot has named Disruptive CEO Nation as one of the Top 25 CEO Podcasts on the web, and it is ranked the number 6 CEO podcast to listen to in 2025! https://podcasts.feedspot.com/ceo_podcasts/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonsummerschicago/

Website: https://www.disruptiveceonation.com/

#CEO #leadership #startup #founder #business #businesspodcast

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By Allison Summers

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