Matt Levine, Columnist

This Startup Will Kill You. Really.

Nectome guarantees that you will die. But it will preserve your brain for future use.

March 15, 2018 at 6:00 AM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

Here is the story of Nectome, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that will hook its customers up to a machine "in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks" until they are dead. Honestly ... it has ... a certain ... appeal. Like if you could interact with only one tech company's products, and your choices were Twitter or Nectome, it wouldn't be insane to choose Nectome. (Incidentally I hope the etymology is "neck" + "tomb.") Co-founder Robert McIntyre points out that Nectome's procedure is "100 percent fatal": "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies." It's a great marketing pitch! Sure lots of hot startups will probably kill you, but with Nectome death is certain (and anesthetized!). Who else can promise that?