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.
00:19:21 · Adam Miller, Matt
[00:19:21] S2: I hope more people end up sharing that vision that you have, that we can pull more people away from finance [00:19:27] S0: The viewers, yeah. Do something important. In my mind, there's absolutely no shame. Nobody should feel any shame in putting food on the table or for being ambitious, but if you're in the position where you can work on something that really matters, you will not regret it. Anything you try to do is gonna be challenging, and when you know that there's a social impact on the other side, when you know you can help people in high stakes ways, it makes those those challenging moments way more fun. [00:20:07] S2: Matt, I think one of the things I found most interesting from getting to know you and the team at Fortell today has been some of the potentially contrarian bets that you've made as a company. And the two biggest ones that come to mind are one, the way you've built your brand, and two, the way that you're building this as an end to end process. You're not just developing these as a tool that then gets shipped off to someone else to give to someone, you're taking care of the full stack, and that is a really hard way to run a business. So can you run me through how you've thought about building the business with these sort of two lenses and why you've done it?
00:20:46 · Matt
[00:20:46] S0: Yeah. Well, so, you know, all comes back to the way in which we are trying to make the world better. We are very dissatisfied with conventional hearing aid technologies, and we see firsthand the consequences in families, in every family, as people lose their hearing and become disengaged. So the first part of the company was just we wanted to solve this science problem. Could you help people hear better? Could you make a major dent at this problem is called the cocktail party problem. It's a scary thing to bet your career on solving a named problem in computer science. There's only a few named problems in computer science, and they name them when they're hard and unsolvable. So we started the company just focused on, can we advance the state of the art in signal processing? And then over the last few years, we have added layers on top of this core. First, it was the engineering problem, associated, okay, we solved this problem, how do we squeeze it into the constraints of the hearing aid? And then as we got more mature on the technology side, we were asking ourselves, you know, how do we bring this to people? Perhaps we could have licensed the technology to a major hearing aid company or sold the business, and there have been opportunities for that. But at the end of the day, what we kept coming back to is what is the experience that I wish my grandparents had been able to access when they needed it? And when we looked out in the world, that experience did not exist, and it certainly didn't exist at scale. And so we decided that we were going to tackle the whole problem. Right? The whole problem for someone with a hearing loss is like, I need to treat my hearing. I'm struggling. I'm not able to stay connected. I'm not able to enjoy restaurants. You solve that whole problem with a major improvement in the capabilities of the device behind your ear, but also with great clinicians who are setting up this device properly and supporting you along your journey. And so we felt like if we didn't bite off the whole problem, then we weren't doing justice to the potential here, and we weren't going to help users at the level that is required.