00:00:07 · Matt, Sachin
[00:00:07] S0: No one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses. Like, no. You couldn't pay me enough to not wear my glasses, and I had to beg them to put on their on their on their hearing aids. And then I went through all the stages of grief. I was I was shocked. I was angry. This is what people have to live with. [00:00:22] S1: What is it about you that made you actually go after this problem and dedicate, you know, five years of your life, and I'm sure many more in the future to solving this problem. [00:00:30] S0: My own grandparents watching them drift away, seeing them present but not really present because I realized that building a better hearing aid for my grandparents was, it seemed like too hard of a problem. The the more I learned about the space, the more intimidated I got. I gave up. I just put it on the shelf. It dawned on me one day in a meeting, I was watching my colleague type, and I couldn't hear him. And I had this kind of moment. It was like, woah, Zoom and others like it. They're differentiating between sounds on the basis of what they are, not what frequencies comprise them. [00:01:11] S1: What do you think Josh, from Thrive saw in you so early? Because I know that there's a story where, you know, you guys were thinking about studying a hospital and then you kind of focus more on the hearing aid.
00:01:11 · Sachin, Matt, Adam Miller
[00:01:11] S1: What do you think Josh, from Thrive saw in you so early? Because I know that there's a story where, you know, you guys were thinking about studying a hospital and then you kind of focus more on the hearing aid. [00:01:21] S0: Cole and I ultimately decided that, you know, we were worried we were the wrong founders for this hospital business. We handled it, which was something along the lines of, Thank you so much for telling me. Thank you so much for your candor. Let me know what you guys do next. I would really like to support you. And we were like, you know, I got emotional. And then, you know, two weeks later, we we pitched him on a better hearing aid. [00:01:46] S2: What's actually stopping Fortell from becoming that, you know, multi tens of billions of dollars of company in the next few years because I can't quite grok what's actually in the way. [00:01:57] S0: My nightmare is going too fast and then blowing the trust.
00:01:57 · Matt, Adam Miller
[00:01:57] S0: My nightmare is going too fast and then blowing the trust. [00:02:11] S2: That was honestly the most impressive technology demo I've ever done in my life. A lot of the tech that we use takes a little bit of time to see the end to end product or see the outcome. I just put on one of your hearing aids after doing a hearing test. I stepped outside and the first setting you put on was a conventional hearing aid setting. And it was, was picking up noise from everywhere across the road. If someone clicks their fingers, someone coughing over there. Then we put it on your settings and all of that background noise just dissipated and I could just hear clearly. There's very few experiences I've had where I can genuinely say your product is 10X better from the conventional hearing aid product. And, you know, it was a bit of a mind blown experience.
00:02:56 · Matt
[00:02:56] S0: Well, I'm touched that you were willing to come here and let us put our fingers in your ears. And the experience you just went through parallels my early experiences with hearing aids when my grandparents were struggling with state of the art hearing aids, I couldn't understand why I had to beg them to put on their hearing aids. No one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses. Like, no. You couldn't pay me enough to not wear my glasses, and I had to beg them to put on their hearing aids. And I never understood why they didn't want to wear them until I started experimenting with high end hearing aids myself. And then I went through all the stages of grief. I was shocked. I was angry. I was like, we, this is what people have to live with. And over the last five years, my colleagues, you know, have have have been very passionately at work to try to improve the state of the art. And I'm so glad that the distinction was as clear as it was for you, and it's the experience that a lot of our patients have, and it's the reason we do this, it's the reason we're so excited to finally be in market.
00:04:19 · Sachin
[00:04:19] S1: I think the, maybe the most compelling kind of problem to solve is one of dementia, right? And we know that hearing loss is one of the big causes of dementia. Initially, my granddad passed away about six months ago and there was a steady decline from when his hearing started to get bad. The example you shared, he never wanted to put it on. It almost alienated him more when he was in loud spaces. When we were out for dinner as a family, just couldn't hear at all and he'd just be quiet in the corner. Like, you know, my grandma always said that's kind of when his decline started. So I think everyone listening to this will will have, know, someone that they love in their lives that would have been impacted by this to a certain degree. But Matt, I know that you found this problem a long time ago, but there was a gap between when you found it and really emotionally felt it, then when you decided to really go after it. What were you doing in that gap?
00:05:13 · Matt
[00:05:13] S0: Yeah, so I unfortunately had a similar experience with my own grandparents watching them drift away, seeing them present but not really present. That got me very interested in this space. And so I think it was around 2014 I was working at Bridgewater, which is this very large hedge fund. And my nights and weekends, I was reading audiology textbooks. And I was lucky to have my best friend. His mother is a professor of audiology and a really prominent influential professor of audiology. And she was just very encouraging of my interest. And after a few months, I got very discouraged because I realized that building a better hearing aid for my grandparents was, it seemed like too hard of a problem. The more I learned about the space, the more intimidated I got. And just to give you a primer, age related hearing loss is sensorineural. So it's not just a problem in the ears. It's as much a problem of the brain as it is of the ears. And so when I came to appreciate that it's not enough just to make sounds louder, You have to differentiate between sounds that are important and unimportant. This in 2014 was very mis... Misaligned with the capabilities of digital signal processing techniques that powered hearing aids. So when I appreciated just how intractable the problem was, I gave up. I just put it on the shelf, and I didn't want to work on hearing aids unless I really thought I had something to contribute. But that process of learning about hearing aids twelve years ago got me very excited about spending my career on medical devices. And so I was very fortunate to find a job at an early startup company called Butterfly Network founded by this guy named Jonathan Rothberg, who was a pioneer of genome sequencing on a semiconductor platform. This is a big deal innovation. If you've ever known anybody who had cancer and beat it, it has a lot to do with this innovation of sequencing the genome on a semiconductor platform. It's called next generation genome sequencing, and it changed the world. This guy had this playbook for taking a conventional industry and disrupting it with custom chips. And he had done this very successfully in sequencing, and he wanted to do it in medical imaging. And I heard about this. I was like, this is what I got to spend my time on. And so it took me about a year. I just begged, begged for a job.