00:07:59 · Matt
I became sort of an expert in medical imaging technologies, eventually joined as a product manager at that job. And for six years, my colleagues and I, many of whom are my colleagues again, my co founders again, devoted ourselves to this mission of building a better medical imaging system. We thought of it as a visual stethoscope. And so it's a handheld medical imaging system that itself is a custom chip, and it connects to an iPhone, and it's about 100 times less expensive than a conventional medical imaging system. And we're very lucky that it became the best selling medical imaging system of all time, and we were able to take the company public a few years ago. After that experience, my colleagues and I had developed a bit of a playbook ourselves for how to do stuff like this. And it was after that experience and the confidence it gave us, but also the network of engineers, window into what was possible with AI, that encouraged us, me and my co founders, to take another look at hearing aids. And this time, we already had experience as a startup company disrupting a major industry, building a radically new kind of custom chip. Deep learning had emerged. The world was quite different. And so I felt, and I will say, sadly, the next generation in my family now was struggling with conventional hearing aids, and I was shocked again to see that the technology had barely progressed. So this was the call to action and we felt like, all right, if we don't do this, who's going to do it?
00:09:46 · Adam Miller
[00:09:46] S2: When you consider hearing aids, they do an incredible thing for the world. They help people hear better. But the reality is, is that traditional hearing aids aren't that great. They got to experience it in this episode. And what Fortell are doing is that they're putting incredibly powerful AI into hearing aids to make them 10x better. And they've meant that people can hear so much clearer and just have a better overall living experience. Now, when you relate that to Notion, Notion's always been a great tool. We've used it to run literally everything in our business. But quite recently, they came out with Notion AI. It's AI that sits on top of all of Notion, allowing you to search for any docs, allowing it to do work for you. You can spin up little agents in your Notion. And so they've gotten a product that has been great and made it even better by adding AI on top. And the really sweet thing is, is that we're putting everything into Notion. We're giving it more data points about us over time. And what that means is that Notion AI gets even better over time as well. It learns more about us, it has better context, and it can make better decisions for us. For anyone out there that's not already using Notion, we've got a special offer for you, three months of Notion business for free. If you head to ntn.sosachinandatom, you can get it there. So the call to action and the problem with conventional hearing aids sounds very obvious and explicit there. But it seems like for your company, AI was the big unlock. Can you sort of run me through how you got this insight that AI might be the unlock that's needed for hearing aids and how you developed the conviction to get to the point where you're like, wow, I can develop a whole company based off this.
00:11:25 · Matt
[00:11:25] S0: Yeah, so it actually goes back to COVID. So the context here is I was primed from my previous passion investigation, maybe you could call it obsession for making better hearing aids. I was primed. I understood the problem, which is that people with a hearing loss don't just need loudness. They need selective loudness on the important stuff, And otherwise, they need quiet. If you could take grandpa to a really quiet room and put in his conventional hearing aids, that's going give him the best possible chance of staying connected to conversation and the people he loves. So I knew that this was the issue. It had been on the shelf. I'm doing this company with... As an early employee called Butterfly, where we're doing our own custom chips, our own AI, our own manufacturing, full stack medical device project, and COVID hits. And all of a sudden, we're thrust behind our laptop screens at home. And I don't know if you guys remember that early COVID, background noise in video chats was a major problem. You could hear when people were typing, peep... You know, people were always kind of shushing their kids. You have to turn off your air conditioning units, telling people to mute. It was a nuisance. And then gradually, the background noise just got quieter and quieter. And 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 are doing what was impossible. Right? They're they're differentiating between sounds on the basis of what they are, not what frequencies comprise them. And so I had this like kind of realization that this technology that had been deployed into telephony and video conferencing could be a major, major game changer for hearing aids. The question was, could could it work? There was a proof of principle in video chats, but in in a video chat, the problem is way easier in kind of every dimension. You have much easier input signal to noise ratios because in video chats, you talk directly at a microphone that's positioned to pick up your voice. You're very close to that microphone. So you have very easy incoming signal to noise ratio. You have this very large computer. Even if it's your phone, your iPhone is a very large computer relative to a hearing aid. Hearing aids are tiny, and they need to last all day, right?
00:14:02 · Matt
So in terms of your ability to access compute and power, you are super constrained as a hearing aid. You have more challenging signal to noise ratios, and maybe the most challenging and most pernicious of all these constraints is the most subtle, it's latency. A hearing aid has to do its job outrageously fast in just a few milliseconds, or else the wearer will notice the delay and the world will just be out of sync. You'll see lips moving and it's like a badly dubbed movie. You can't live like that. In telephony and in video chat, you can buffer, you can delay one hundred, two hundred, three hundred milliseconds and just resynchronize the video with that audio, so you have a lot more time for your AI system to select out what's important. It's the reason in film editing and video editing, you can do a pretty good job denoising in any major editor. A hearing aid is the most challenging quadrant of this multidimensional problem. And so when we started the company, the big bet was that if we if we worked on it very aggressively, systematically, and we're open to inventing new tools, like building new chips, then perhaps we could take this proof of principle and squeeze it into a form factor that could benefit people with hearing loss every day.
00:15:25 · Sachin
[00:15:25] S1: Matt, we're going to go into the future of Fortell, and there's so many interesting things we want to dive into there. But before we go there, I'm really curious about an aspect about your personality because a lot of people will see problems around us. I'm sure everyone watching this has seen problems they want to solve in their own lives. What is it about you that made you actually go after this problem and dedicate five years of your life and I'm sure many more in the future to solving this problem? Are there any clues on maybe how you were brought up or in your early life that you'd go out and solve such an impactful problem?
00:15:56 · Matt
[00:15:56] S0: I that there was something my grandparents were, I had a grandfather who was an engineer who made a really big impact on me, Harry, Harry Hartsband. And I actually named my son Harry. And on my other side, I had a great grandfather who was an inventor, who was illiterate, dyslexia so severe he couldn't read, but was a prolific inventor. And so I grew up with a great admiration for these, figures in my family that I felt had contributed to society in ways that made me very proud. And so from a young age, I was very interested in being an inventor. In eighth grade, I attempted... I I thought I had invented a perpetual motion machine. We know now, based on, like, just basic thermodynamic concepts that I did not invent a a perpetual motion machine. But, you know, it it just something that I I have always been interested in. I I felt after... So I studied mechanical engineering in college and then went into finance, mostly because I didn't know what else to do and because I was ambitious. I started to feel guilty working in finance because fortunate growing up in New York City. Went to great schools, and it was all paid for because my mother worked in finance. And to me, I started to feel... It it felt somewhat dystopian to me that my mother had had worked her butt off, sent me to great schools so that then I could go work in finance and just repeat the cycle and just try to turn money into more money. Like, what was it all for? And so when I was at Bridgewater and watching my grandparents drift away, I just kind of felt this very exciting connection to hearing to medical devices. Something clicked in me. Was like, okay, this is a vehicle to express my ambition in a way that I can be proud of. And I would say that the most gratifying dimension of the last twelve years or so since I left finance has been pulling all the smartest people that I know out of these careers where maybe they're not having the same level of social impact, pulling them into these vehicles, whether it was Butterfly or other companies or now Fortell, I am most gratifying when I am convincing brilliant people to work on medical devices or something with similar social benefits.