00:27:49 · Matt
[00:27:49] S0: -Well, Josh worked very closely with my co founder, Cole, at Oscar. So I can't take credit for... I can't take all the credit for Josh's confidence. A lot of it is Cole. The two of them worked very closely in preparation for Oscar's IPO. But there was this sort of funny accident of history. Butterfly, the device my colleagues and I built previously, our target market for this visual stethoscope was emergency medicine physicians. And Josh's wife Carly, her father is an emergency medicine doctor. And so his father-in-law had become acquainted with Butterfly. And so Josh and Carly had intimate firsthand experience with the first product that we built. And so then when I got to meet Josh, he was already kind of a fan because he had followed the journey at Butterfly through his father-in-law, through his job as an emergency medicine physician and the use of Butterfly. And so that, I would say, set the groundwork for a positive relationship. But then while we were evaluating this hospital concept, and just the concept was that let's build a better hospital with technology as a major enabler. We spent many months together on it, and we had just a really good simpatico as we were going back and forth on the trade offs. And when Cole and I ultimately decided that we were worried we were the wrong founders for this hospital business, I thought that Josh was going to be mad. I thought he was gonna tell me, like, you're never gonna work again in this town, and were so, Cole and I were so nervous telling him and so relieved and impressed with the way he 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. We were like, you know, I got emotional. And then, two weeks later, we pitched him on a better hearing aid.
00:30:13 · Adam Miller
[00:30:13] S2: Over today and learning about the company, I've learned about a few things. So I've tried the product firsthand, and I've seen how brilliant it is. We've read about the customers, and there's real customer love there. You have a bunch of capital from leading investors around the world, and there's this huge demand for a product like this. You've got the waitlist, and, you know, people already want a product like this. 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 yet. It seems like you've got all the things that you need to get there.
00:30:47 · Matt
[00:30:47] S0: I I think that the most precious thing we're building right now is trust. It takes a long time to build trust with your customer base, in our case, our patient base, trust is very quickly lost and very slowly earned, and so with respect to our expansion, I wanna make sure that any time you see Fortell Audiology on the outside of a door, I want you to know that when you walk through that door, you're getting an unbelievable combination of the best clinical care and the best hearing aid technology that money can buy, such that it is just a screaming no brainer to come and to send your friends who need hearing aids. My nightmare is going too fast and then blowing the trust, and so I would rather go too slow, being very protective of the quality of the experience we deliver, the quality of the hardware, the quality of the care, the quality of the post purchase support. I would much rather accidentally go a little too slow while being very precious about quality then go too fast and blow that trust. We're here... Our intention is to work on this problem until, you know, we're old and gray. This is a, this is, this is what we wanna be when we grow up. We're not doing this to do something else, right? This is the most interesting and fulfilling thing we can imagine doing, and so we're very long term oriented, we're very careful, and we're growing at the pace we think we can grow without ever compromising on quality.
00:32:42 · Sachin
[00:32:42] S1: Is there a part of your heart that it wishes that you could get this technology to people quick more quickly, right? Because as you said, it's one of the biggest problems. How do you rectify that? Because, you know, maybe playing devil's devil's advocate here that an incrementally worse experience when you step into an audiology clinic versus millions of people around the world whose hearing aid frankly right now doesn't serve them much at all. How kind do of balance those things in your mind?
00:33:12 · Matt
[00:33:12] S0: The way I think about it is there's five major hearing aid companies. It's something like $50,000,000,000 of market cap, and these five companies have been at it since like the seventies. And then you got your consumer electronics companies who make headphones and are adding kind of amplification features. So you have a pretty healthy, or I should say, somewhat crowded ecosystem of people trying to build products to help people hear better. The role that I want Fortell to play is advancing the state of the art, bringing and realizing more ambition for what a hearing aid can and should do for its wearer. So I care deeply about access and scale and touching as many people's lives as possible, but the role that I want our company to play in this ecosystem is taking the best in the world and making it better, so year after year after year, we will be advancing the state of the art, and so massive increases in access, massive increases in affordability, these are important goals. We need to pick our zone, and our zone is building the best possible medicine, the best possible solution, the best possible technology for people who have a hearing loss, and that I think is the only way we can be successful. If we try to do too much, we won't be able to do any of it well. What we want to be is an ultra small company focusing obsessively on one thing and just taking it all the way to the limits of what science and technology can achieve. Right now what that means is we have a premium product that's available in New York City, but very soon will be available in other cities and other parts of the world, and we're very excited about that expansion.
00:35:24 · Adam Miller
[00:35:24] S2: Yeah. I wish everybody could have the experience that I had standing out the front, us in the rain, trying the product and comparing it to the other one, But for those that can't have that experience, they'll care about the results and the data. So I'm keen to hear from you what have been the results you've seen from tests of this and then also the results you're getting from actual customers.