Jonah Lowenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a luxury manner administration business he launched in the summer of 2024 to assist the world’s highest-performing individuals—founders, athletes, and family offices. The assistance combines AI tech alongside individual ability and has attracted a roster of high-profile investors, built on a uncomplicated idea: that the activity of living fine shouldn’t be activity at all.
A few weeks ago, the business took complete Flyfish Club for a concealed poker night that brought together the types of high-performers Aurora was built to serve, including Kevin Hart, Gary Vaynerchuk, Yes Chef Group originator Jack Goldburg and Brooks Nader.
Photo credit: Aurora
Entrepreneur connected alongside Lowenstein to study what his cognition launching and expanding Aurora can instruct another entrepreneurs concerning fundraising, scale, and staying focused on what really matters.
(Interview has been edited for dimension and clarity.)
What inspired you to create this business?
There’s an old saying that you can’t have business, social life, and health all at once. But looking at the founders and family agency executives about me, it struck me that alongside AI and agents — blended alongside genuinely world-class individual experts — you could eventually obtain the activity out of achieving the manner you aspire to live.
The “aha moment” came in a London café. I got talking to the individual next to me concerning the idea to build a premium manner functioning system, and it turned out he was the most prosperous originator in the area — he’d fair built and sold the archetypal venture-scale mobile digital concierge to a US financial institution the twelvemonth before. There were a dozen things — canceled meetings, weather, chance — that put me in that chair. The timing was bonzer and I wondered if I could rotate that emotion of serendipity into how someone’s manner operated.
What is item you did or a pivot you made that unlocked a new flat of achievement for the company?
We were among the archetypal to let members merge their individual services to power their lifestyles — Calendar, Oura, Whoop — immediately into the app. At the time, connecting your health wearable to a manner administration assistance was met alongside several suspicion. But it meant Aurora could dispatch proactive recommendations for experiences you’d never have heard of, aligned to your schedule, your sensation and your improvement state. We established post-exit founders really warmed to this, followed closely by athletes, and many of the world’s top family offices.
Lifestyle services had continually been reactive, siloed and unscalable. Going proactive and promptless was a big bet, and it ended up turning a chimney into a flywheel: we anticipate what a associate wants, execute first fairly than last-minute, which gets us improved admission and inventory, which earns improved pricing and perks from providers, which makes the next advice improved still.
You have several extremely high-profile investors. What direction would you provision entrepreneurs looking for funding?
Three things. First, demonstrate you’re a doer. I didn’t have a venture-scale outcome rearward me, but I had a track document of getting off the sofa, making videos for local businesses as a kid, operating an events business at university, staying rearward following first-year exams to stroll the elevated street and sign businesses up to a discount scheme, construction a viral social network about anywhere you expend for students, which received several backing from larger investors. Investors desire to cognize whether you have the energy and resilience to keep going whenever it gets hard. Any evidence that you consistently put your neck on the row is value a lot.
Second — and our chairman says this to me continually — seeing is believing. Everyone has a fine elevator pitch. But the complete imagination is apparent inner your caput and invisible to everyone alternatively until they’ve held it, felt it, or transacted through it. Even without resources, get as near as you can: a video, a storyboard, an AI-generated walkthrough. It’s frighteningly uncomplicated now to create your imagination a actuality others can understand.
Third, don’t bang on the entrance of your dream investor. Social evidence compounds, and construction a awesome business is normally the finest way to raise. Several of our highest-profile investors came through additional than five degrees of separation. I convinced our chairman, afterward he showed the merchandise to a VC, afterward that VC told another VC who used Aurora and loved it, and told a friend. That companion introduced me to one of our most influential investors and advocates. You can’t scheme that. You can lone chase all chance in forefront of you alongside regard and relentlessness.
What’s a stat that let you cognize you were on to something?
The stat I’m proudest of is usage. Our average associate transacts alongside Aurora multiple times a week — approximately 50 to 100 times additional frequently than they use their Amex Centurion concierge. In a sole week, that power be a wellness or improvement appointment, a dining reservation, a inn stay, a current for a endeavor partner and post-dinner entertainment, hard-to-access tickets or previews, and afterward item once-in-a-lifetime: preparedness a longer-form journey itinerary which includes diving alongside sperm whales, a personal pastry-making meeting in Venice, or a sojourn to the Pinarello or Maranello factory. We’re fair as productive on an average Tuesday as we are on bonzer days.
Photo credit: Aurora
What is item many aspiring endeavor owners think they need that they really don’t?
Millions of customers. Chasing the most customers fastest actively plant against understanding what any one client needs. I don’t think of measure as measure to an infinite market of people. I think of measure to the individual. I invitation members onto our weekly calls. We’re starting ride-alongs anywhere the squad joins members on genuine experiences, and I go and sit in people’s offices and homes to comprehend concerning their lives. Most founders have too many solutions and don’t comprehend the issue deeply enough. That’s item our CTO goes on concerning a lot. For all joule of energy we put in, the inquiry is how deeply it affects one person’s existence — that’s leverage, not effectiveness — we cognize a wider cohort follows.
Is there a particular citation or saying that you use as individual motivation?
“Do your sway and let the domain get in the way.” A athletics instructor taught me that at St Andrews. If you try to hit the ball, you dig at it and obtain a chunk out of the ground. If you do your sway properly, the domain goes far. They’d have me obtain two custom swings, afterward a third, but this period in forefront of the ball. The outcome is remarkable.
The regulation is that the inputs are what count. We expend far too lengthy staring out at the acres in forefront of us, wondering anywhere the domain volition land, how it volition bounce, afterward roll. When everything we can really authority is correct here: our hands, our stance, the swing. By giving up authority of the outcome, you get additional of it. That made me quiver the archetypal period I heard it, since I’m wired to straightforward all ounce of energy at the result. But it’s stated me the confidence to concentration on what I’m awesome at and rely others to do what they’re awesome at — and whenever that motion is right, the transfer of energy into the outcome is remarkably ray and compounding.
