00:44:01 · Sachin, Matt
[00:44:01] S1: You started this company because of this real problem that you felt with your own grandparents. If you allow yourself to kind of be unconstrained by the challenges in scaling quality around the world, where do you think Fortell could go in the next ten years? And what's that kind of vision you want to go towards? [00:44:17] S0: So, you know, without revealing details about future products, I will say that we're committed to helping people hear better. At the end of the day, what we have done with our our first hearing aid is we have squeezed a very large AI into a very small package, and we have trained it to operate fast enough that your perceptual system does not notice the delay. The term augmented reality has fallen out of favor, but that is what a hearing aid is doing. And so this idea that particularly as we enter phases of life where we lose certain acuities, hearing, visual acuities, dexterity, memory. We believe that AI in small elegant packages that works fast enough that you don't even notice it's between you and the world, we think that that formula can do a lot of good for people, and so that's what we're gonna work on, and I think that we're just at the very early innings of AI for good.
00:44:17 · Matt, Adam Miller
[00:44:17] S0: So, you know, without revealing details about future products, I will say that we're committed to helping people hear better. At the end of the day, what we have done with our our first hearing aid is we have squeezed a very large AI into a very small package, and we have trained it to operate fast enough that your perceptual system does not notice the delay. The term augmented reality has fallen out of favor, but that is what a hearing aid is doing. And so this idea that particularly as we enter phases of life where we lose certain acuities, hearing, visual acuities, dexterity, memory. We believe that AI in small elegant packages that works fast enough that you don't even notice it's between you and the world, we think that that formula can do a lot of good for people, and so that's what we're gonna work on, and I think that we're just at the very early innings of AI for good. [00:45:38] S2: Do you think there's also an aspect where a company like this, because of the improvements you're making in the technology, opens up the potential market and the people that might want to use this, where in the future, it's not just the most hearing impaired people, but it's a lot of people that might just benefit even a little bit start using this sort of technology.
00:45:59 · Matt, Sachin
[00:45:59] S0: I mean, as you can imagine, this is a question we get from investors. Like what about the consumer use case? Is sort of a basic, a very basic economic calculus. It's like the number of people out in the world with hearing loss is smaller than the number of people who don't have hearing loss, and if we could, I will say this, it all comes back to focus for us. I think that the reason we come to work every day is to help people with disabilities, and I think that's the impact we want to have in the world. That's what Fortell is about. If in the process we can build things that are useful to people without disabilities and we can give people superhuman processing. That's exciting, but it's not the reason we started the company. And I think that there are companies out there that are better positioned to build amazing consumer products and have the right brands and the right distribution and the right scale in terms of their technology teams. Our job is to stay focused on people with high acuity, high stakes needs, and we think that's also the right business opportunity to make sure that we can give the right returns to our investors that allow us to keep chasing the state of the art as aggressively as we can imagine. [00:47:20] S1: -Matt, I'm always curious about the personal. When I think about you, you're building this great business that's obviously working and it's going to scale to many cities across the world. But if the audience were to go inside your inner monologue for maybe ten minutes, what do you think would surprise them at what they'd hear?
00:47:36 · Matt
[00:47:36] S0: -: I think that maybe what's surprising is that sometimes you have to make noneconomic decisions first order in order to preserve optionality and to preserve your ability to access the really big opportunities. So I think that particularly if there's aspiring entrepreneurs who are watching, what I have found, my internal monologue reminds me that you don't have to tell the investors what you think they wanna hear, right? It's okay. You can tell them that the right way to build this business is to build a four wall, build a shop on Park Avenue. Of course, part of you knows that the investors would be much happier if you just told them it's going to be $4.99 and it's going to be available on the internet, and we're going to sell a billion of them. Your inner monologue needs to pull you back to the integrity of what you believe is the right thing for the customer and for the business. And It's a little scary, but at least in our case, the lesson has been that's okay. The investors trust the honesty and the integrity as long as your team is sufficiently credible to pull it off. I'd say the other thing that you might hear in my inner monologue is that a huge amount of my time is spent thinking about how do I make sure that this continues to be the best career opportunity for the smartest people I know? Like getting... Particularly when you're doing hard tech, right, when you're trying to advance the state of the art in a field that's crowded, it only works when the most brilliant people you've ever met want to work on this. And so a huge amount of the hours and time and perseveration that happens in my mind, it's not just about hearing aid features or next generation products or the furniture in this room. It's a lot to do with how do we make sure that this is a utopia for the most ambitious, brilliant engineers that we've ever met so that they work here instead of the metaverse.
00:50:14 · Adam Miller, Matt, Sachin
[00:50:14] S2: That's a good way to put it. And I think we can make that a wrap as well. Thank you so much for the interview and for also taking us, I guess, into your world and being able to see this. It's a beautiful place and it's having a lot of impact on people. [00:50:29] S0: It's such a pleasure to have you. Thank you Thank so you. [00:50:32] S1: Appreciate it.