Marc Bernegger started an internet company before the average person was online. He bought Bitcoin at $7. And he walked towards a little-known longevity expert at a conference after the man had said something so radical it caused members of the audience to walk out. That expert was the now-pioneering gerontologist Aubrey de Grey.

The Swiss-based entrepreneur is, in short, not someone who needs external validation before exploring a commercial opportunity. Being early, and being right, has built him a portfolio that spans three of the most contested frontiers of the last twenty-five years: the internet, crypto and longevity.

He started by founding the party platform usgang.ch right after college, later acquired by Axel Springer. He co-founded the ticketing platform amiando, bought by Xing and named a “Global Technology Pioneer” by the World Economic Forum. He explored Bitcoin in 2012 and became a founding shareholder and board member of Crypto Finance Group, acquired by Deutsche Börse in 2021. He launched the fund AltAlpha Digital and sits on the boards of CfC St. Moritz and GenTwo. And in longevity he co-founded the company-builder Maximon and the Longevity Investors Conference.

We spoke to him about what it takes to see things before everyone else, whether his friend and Enhanced Games co-founder Christian Angermayer can overcome media hostility to build a successful business, and where he thinks the first trillion-dollar biotech company might come from.

You go into industries early. What do you see that allows you to do that?

Even before I got into Bitcoin in 2012, I already built and sold two internet companies. I started my first internet company back in ’99, right after high school. So I had a career before crypto and longevity. And naturally, starting a company, I was 19 back then, in the internet in ’99 was also a little bit earlier than most others.

I personally, as an individual but also as an entrepreneur, like to do things which might not be visible to many others, because I’m far more interested in how the future looks than how the past, and the daily situation as we are in right now, looks. So I somehow was always intrigued to, to a certain extent, anticipate the future. And based on that, naturally, because I was always an entrepreneur, to then also find ways to profit from these exciting developments. The robotics space, I invested in SpaceX back in 2017, all these topics which are completely unrelated.

They are unrelated but does anything connect them? 

The underlying connection about all these, in my view, extremely positive developments for humans have a tech-driven, scalable, exponential element. And naturally, as soon as you can consume it as an end customer, you realise what’s happening.

When we started my first internet company in ’99, it was a nightlife platform for young people. Our biggest bottleneck back then was that nobody was on the internet. So even by doing something which made a lot of sense a few years later, if people are not able to join or go to your website because you don’t have internet, then you’re maybe a little bit too early. And maybe similar to Bitcoin back in 2012. Naturally I also made some money, but I was not really buying Bitcoin because I wanted the full financial upside. I really wanted to understand how it works and how it makes sense to use something like a digital currency in a world which becomes more and more digital.

And with longevity, just to give you the third example: I met Aubrey de Grey back in 2009, at a conference where we were both speaking. Back then he was referring to the person who is already born living for a thousand years. So the same as today, but back then many people were so shocked they left the room. And for me, that was the first time I got into this concept of living longer, and maybe extending the human lifespan in a more extreme way. 

If 90% say something is not going to work and you have to change everything to have a market for that, that’s exactly what you hear when you start an internet company

I was just fascinated, and approached him after his talk in the speakers’ area. And literally out of this encounter, and following his work, we’re now close friends by now, I somehow got more and more into this topic. And at a certain stage, I then, as an entrepreneur, thought now is the right moment to not just intellectually look into how the future will look, but also build businesses around emerging new trends.

And on the other side, maybe I always at a certain stage get bored when something becomes more tangible. So that’s why many people already tell me that as soon as I don’t do longevity anymore, they want to know what is my next topic. Because at least so far, this was a certain indicator which topics might become more relevant in the future.

Do you pay more attention to where the current offering isn’t doing a good enough job? Or are you more motivated by, “if we can make this possible, humans will love it”?

I would go for the second one, because the first is maybe when you join a development or new technological advancement when there is already a certain demand and you can then optimise it. But at least in my case, all these emerging exciting businesses were literally not demanded by too many people in these days. As you can imagine, Bitcoin in 2012, that’s a good example, because supply, demand ultimately defines the price. And back then I bought my first Bitcoin at seven dollars. It was not even easy to get this Bitcoin because there was literally no market and no exchanges. 

So sometimes, if you’re really, really early, you can’t even dream about optimising something because there’s literally no market. That’s then maybe more at the later stage, maybe also the stage where you then think about businesses and doing revenue. Because again, if there’s no big demand, there’s normally also no big business. So the business approach, the ones who join a development, maybe as a consultant or lawyer, they need a certain size, that the stakeholders are literally able to pay the bills.

So for me, that’s why it’s less about optimising something, but rather to, in the first stage, create something which is maybe not even existing at this moment.

Do you think that’s harder?

Nobody talks about all the entrepreneurs and pioneers and visionaries who are maybe, and many of them are, far too early. I would even say in longevity, when we started back in 2020, and as I told you, I was then already following the space since more than 10 years, I thought maybe we are now a little bit too late. And the feedback from everybody was, “well, hey, cool that some serial tech entrepreneurs are now also moving into this exciting topic.” And when I look back, I would rather say we were a little bit too early. Because if you just ask anybody what is the biggest listed longevity company, or biggest funded one, it’s by far not at the same level like in AI and other exciting fields.

Does timing ultimately come down more to luck or skill in the judgment?

It’s definitely always a combination. Luck, most people are naturally not saying that luck was the main driver of their success, but I think especially when you’re in early phases, it’s always about luck.

I think even more important than luck, because to a certain extent you can positively influence luck, is that you have enough passion to somehow stick to a topic. Because often you’re too early, and you’re still so convinced that maybe even if it takes longer and it’s much harder and you need more money and it’s less rewarding, you still are believing in what you’re doing. So this stamina, persistence and passion is ultimately, I think, one of the drivers behind the luck.

Because with timing, which is naturally also extremely important, everything comes a little bit together. So ideally you’re passionate and persistent enough as a foundation, and then naturally the timing and luck comes together.

Then the question is always why you have certain entrepreneurs who have a once-in-a-lifetime big-hit success and then you never hear from them anymore. Like a little bit in the music industry, these one-hit wonders. And on the other side you have others, Elon Musk as an extreme example, who were somehow able to build very, very big and successful companies in completely different industries, and not become just too lazy or not passionate about anything anymore once you have a certain level of financial freedom. So that’s why I think part of it is maybe also the character: that you just stay hungry and passionate about building one company in an exciting industry after the other.

You mentioned your friend Christian Angermayer before we started recording. What’s your view on what they’re building at Enhanced?

It’s a little bit sad that I missed it [the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas in May], because I also wanted to attend. Finally two days ago, I was in Berlin at the dinner with quite a few big investors of Enhanced Games. So I think I was literally the only one at the whole dinner who was not in Las Vegas recently. So it’s, on the one side, an interesting group of people who come together, on the financing side but also on the whole ecosystem side.

And again, just by maybe questioning the actual state of how you track and measure performance, and what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, and what’s ethical — if you look at the Olympics, how they started a thousand years ago and how the Olympics are now evolving today, I think it’s a very interesting approach. Naturally very controversial, and I think nobody is surprised that you have a lot of negative coverage. 

But again, similar to many other interesting fields and developments, I always say, if 90% say something is not going to work and you have to change everything to have a market for that, that’s exactly what you hear when you start an internet company.

In ’99, as an example, I sold two of my companies to listed publishing houses. All of them were laughing at these internet guys, “the internet is something which will disappear, and there’s no value in it.” And that’s why, after now doing a few things before others and having all these naysayers, that doesn’t automatically mean that everything will be successful just because you do everything completely differently.

Have the media underestimated the team behind it and the ecosystem they have?

Maybe because Christian Angermayer is a very successful contrarian. And maybe not everybody knows how the whole project evolved, there was also some change in the founding team and everything. So that’s why maybe that’s something the company deliberately didn’t want to put too much into the spotlight. They decided, let’s put the games and athletes in the spotlight, and not the backing, the IPO and the people behind. But naturally there’s an extremely interesting group of people on the other side. 

I can also understand that if you have Trump-affiliated backers, in these times where normally nobody but Trump ultimately makes money, that sometimes also doesn’t help. So that can go on both sides. On the one side, you could say a very powerful network; on the other side, with maybe so far not the very positive track record. So even the shareholding and the investors are controversial for a very controversial topic. So I could imagine maybe that’s just a little bit too much for many market participants.

It felt like the reaction in the early days was personal, because of Aron D’Souza and the work he’d done with Peter Thiel [who sued and closed Gawker]. An industry reacting to the person.

It’s also understandable. And I can tell you, I’m lucky to be also an early investor of SpaceX. I don’t know Elon Musk in person, unfortunately, but I know his whole surrounding and network, and they’re really extremely hard-working and all very passionate. And now everybody becomes extremely rich, and some of them billionaires. And this is now again the coverage, that you have all these people becoming extremely rich. 

But this is for me always just a side effect of a bunch of people who will change how humans will develop. So a little bit the Columbus moment today. But naturally it’s more exciting to write about these niche topics, because this is always something many people are more interested in than the original entrepreneur story. And that’s just, to a certain extent, how it is.

Do you think the future for individuals with any level of resource is a personalised, preventative, and potentially even performance-led approach to health and medicine?

Ultimately, and I in general always see the democratisation and the upside of all these new possibilities, that’s a little bit also what drives me to be in these fields. Naturally with our conference we target ultra-high-net-worth, but that’s why we then also can get more money for startups and research. So that’s a little bit by design, that it’s not open for everybody. But ultimately I think all these developments will, at a certain stage, go for the good of the broader population.

And that’s why, if you can also somehow have a certain role-model approach, and that doesn’t mean that everybody should do illegal substances, but you can just show, hey, you can positively influence and optimise peak performance, quality of life, healthspan, by giving access to these new drugs, supplements, lifestyle interventions, therapies, and you can somehow make it appealing. 

Because many people already should know what’s healthy and not, but it’s maybe not sexy enough. And yet everybody follows Brian Johnson. But if you maybe see an athlete beating world records, you then maybe have a better way to make it tangible. So I think a lot of these implementations are also about the narrative and the visualization, the storytelling.

And honestly, I think this is still something where the longevity industry in general has some limitations. Because if you see these very well-respected and relevant professors on stage, but you can’t really follow them, or you have, on the other extreme, some snake-oil-ish Instagram influencers telling you what you have to do, ideally don’t have any fun in your life anymore by just focusing on supplements, sleep, and no alcohol and whatever. I think that doesn’t really help bring this whole idea to life.

What sounds like science fiction now that you think will be a reality in a decade?

Many things which sound like science fiction will become reality quite soon. We could talk about humanoid robotics and all kinds of other things, but I guess you’re focusing on health and longevity. 

When you look into drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA analysis combined with AI, I think we will make so many leapfrogs, also for the broader population. Just because, if you look through the development in medicine, many of the things we do today, and we had astonishing breakthroughs in the last decades, that’s why we also live far longer and better than just 100 years ago, but it’s still quite general, and not individual, and not really taking advantage of all the possibilities we would have nowadays.

I see it, for example, in our clinic. We have a fully regulated longevity clinic in Zurich since two years. And every patient is completely different. So just by having a real personalised proper test, and then based on that defining very personal, very individualised interventions — and no fancy stem cell therapies, just all the things which are available today, from supplements, exercise, sleep, the boring ones, which everybody to a certain extent already should know — you can have such a tremendous impact. And still most people never ever, for example, did the genome analysis, or just a real checkup. So I think this will all become the foundation of our healthcare system.

And by having that as a base, everything will become so personalised that the whole treatment, ideally before you become sick, but then also the treatment of disease and sicknesses, will be changing completely. 

Unrelated to all the extremely exciting developments which will come, I guess rather sooner than later, out of these labs. I guess you saw the newest developments with, I don’t know, Retro Bio or NewLimit. And these are now funding rounds of real companies, real money, real research. And I would say already three or four years ago this would have been maybe science fiction. So it’s definitely accelerating. 

I think AI took so much attention and money and talent, which is great because it helps all kinds of industries. But to a certain extent, maybe people forgot that AI won’t solve all the problems of humans. And maybe especially medicine, health, biology is still a physical process, where you can’t just say, now let’s solve all diseases on the computer. And one of the reasons why maybe longevity is still not at the relevancy which it should have, is you had other fields and topics which were just absorbing much more, especially money.

But I think this will change. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next months, but I think we don’t need 20 different AI models, like we don’t need 20 different search engines. So I think we will see a similar development, and after this consolidation, actually you don’t need to put trillions of dollars into these competing models anymore. And I think this money will then evolve into, again, a little bit more, let’s call it, tangible industries. And among others I think health, slash healthspan extension, slash longevity is, that’s why it’s still far from any relevancy we will see in the coming years.

When will we see our first trillion-dollar biotech company, and what do you think they’ll do?

That’s a challenging one. To reach a level of a trillion-dollar company, you will need a product or service which literally helps everybody on a scale which then also creates a business behind a trillion-dollar company. And ultimately this will be a company, I don’t think it’s one of the existing ones, who is really able to, and this is still a little bit this ultimate dream, but to put measurable additional healthy years to human lives.

This is, to a certain extent, a combination of all the things many companies are working on. Because on the one side it has to be somehow accessible, so not the South American private clinic which is only for the ultra-rich, even by some of these treatments really working, and then on the other side it also has to be somehow proven. 

So it can’t be something which just pops up in two years from now, because at least in our normal regulatory framework these breakthroughs won’t be available for broader masses, because you have this regulatory process.

But in the maybe coming 15 years we definitely have a potential, I don’t know if it will be a trillion-dollar company, but that we will have companies from scratch who will become massively bigger than the incumbents. Just because, also very simplified, most of the incumbents are still making their money in this traditional sick-care business. And I think this will be transformed.

I guess there are smart people who did these calculations, but the preventive healthcare business is far bigger than the sick-care business, because to a certain extent it will absorb it, similar to how the internet absorbed many of the paper newspapers. It will absorb many of the business cases and the revenues and the customers being now a little bit trapped in the sick-care industry.

Photography Natalia Blauth