A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:00 · Wardah Inam, Pablo Srugo
[00:00:00] S0: For me, what I learned over time was that speed is probably the most important thing in a startup. [00:00:07] S1: Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I’m Pablo. I’m a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. Wardah, welcome to the show. [00:00:24] S0: Hey, Pablo, thank you for having me. [00:00:25] S1: I’m looking up Overjet online, and it’s like building the future of dentistry. It’s like dental AI, which if you just come at it from today’s landscape, you’d think, oh, it’s just jumping on that AI bandwagon. But you’ve been doing this for over six years now. You started in 2018. Frankly, as a VC, I don’t see a lot of plays in dentistry, so I’m really curious to hear how this started and how you ended up here in the first place.
00:00:25 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:00:25] S1: I’m looking up Overjet online, and it’s like building the future of dentistry. It’s like dental AI, which if you just come at it from today’s landscape, you’d think, oh, it’s just jumping on that AI bandwagon. But you’ve been doing this for over six years now. You started in 2018. Frankly, as a VC, I don’t see a lot of plays in dentistry, so I’m really curious to hear how this started and how you ended up here in the first place. [00:00:51] S0: Going back a little, I did my PhD in clean energy. I was very interested in making the world better. Then I started to realize that in clean energy, a lot had to do with policy and less about the technology. I think we had a lot of good technology, but what was stopping us was the policy, and that’s something that I felt that I could not provide the most value in. I basically moved towards healthcare and started making conscious effort to – so I did a postdoctoral fellowship working on biomedical sensing using machine learning. That was a conscious effort that I made, and that got me more towards this space. After that, I was working on a startup doing biomedical imaging. At that time, I changed my dentist and got a treatment plan, which was very different than I had received before. That’s how I started getting into dentistry. It’s a fascinating field. [00:01:57] S1: What were you doing? Just tell me a bit more about the last startup. You’re doing biomedical imaging. Just tell me more about what that is.
00:01:57 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:01:57] S1: What were you doing? Just tell me a bit more about the last startup. You’re doing biomedical imaging. Just tell me more about what that is. [00:02:02] S0: We’re working on MRI data, making that faster to acquire, more quantitative, so that we can get focused on more preventive care and being able to catch disease faster so you don’t have to suffer from the disease. That was the thesis behind it, and we were building out MRI technology for that. [00:02:21] S1: Were you at the time thinking, I’m doing this to learn about startups so one day I can start my own? Or was that not really a thought in your mind? [00:02:29] S0: All through my PhD, I was building startups where some of them worked. Some of them did not work. I was commercializing anything I built. I think that was very inherent in what I was doing. Even in my postdoc, the project I was on was also a startup that was being built. I did join Q bio because it had a founder who was a successful founder. His last company was a firm, a successful company as well. It was about learning as well, but it was also I fell in love with the mission of the company. I didn’t want to join the company. I got introduced to the founder and he convinced me that it was an amazing opportunity and to really have an impact. That’s why I joined. [00:03:12] S1: You had this itch to maybe start something. You’d already started a few things in the past. Then you have this experience with a few dentists. Can you expand on that? You were sharing that story with me earlier.
00:03:12 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:03:12] S1: You had this itch to maybe start something. You’d already started a few things in the past. Then you have this experience with a few dentists. Can you expand on that? You were sharing that story with me earlier. [00:03:22] S0: My personal experience was that I moved locations, so I changed my dentist when I went from one neighborhood to another neighborhood. When I changed my dentist, the new dentist gave me a treatment plan, which was very different than I had received before. I was surprised at the fact that why there was this much discrepancy. At that time, I asked the dentist to provide me with the x-rays. I started reading more about dental x-rays, dental one-on-one. [00:03:46] S1: You’re chasing what at this point? You’re literally trying to understand your treatment plan, or you’re already thinking maybe there’s some sort of – because you know about imaging? [00:03:55] S0: I’m just trying to understand my treatment plan and it just didn’t make sense to me. There was something off. For me, it’s one of those things. I was just trying to understand how important was it, why was there this discrepancy, the fact that I didn’t know anything, what was important to me as well. I started just reading up online, et cetera. Then I shared my x-rays with other dentists as well and I got different opinions. That what didn’t sit well with me, where it felt more of an art rather than a science. There has to be one truth. What is it?
00:03:55 · Wardah Inam, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:55] S0: I’m just trying to understand my treatment plan and it just didn’t make sense to me. There was something off. For me, it’s one of those things. I was just trying to understand how important was it, why was there this discrepancy, the fact that I didn’t know anything, what was important to me as well. I started just reading up online, et cetera. Then I shared my x-rays with other dentists as well and I got different opinions. That what didn’t sit well with me, where it felt more of an art rather than a science. There has to be one truth. What is it? [00:04:27] S1: This is on your free time. You’re working full-time. You’re doing what you’re doing. Then in evenings and weekends, this is your passion project? [00:04:35] S0: Yeah, and it didn’t start as a project as well. I started getting more into it, and then it got to a point where I said, okay, I’m spending more time on this than I’m spending on my day job. Anything I do, I do it fully in. [00:04:47] S1: Maybe let’s tangent on that a little bit because work-life balance gets a lot of attention, let’s say these days, but it doesn’t really fit, does it, with the zero to one? You talk about obsession and it’s a trait you see I think in a lot of successful founders. You think that’s a must have, you need to be obsessed to make things happen in those early days?
00:05:05 · Wardah Inam
[00:05:05] S0: I think one is about my personality as well, where I’ve found that for me, I will not be happy if I force myself to do the 9 to 5. That’s not just me. It’s one of those things that is believe that’s better, but the person I am, I really enjoy the things I do. Telling me not to do that is you’re taking that joy away from me. It’s not the positive. For me, that balance is different as well, and be having the freedom to work on things that are exciting, et cetera, that I want to work on and solve difficult problems. That’s what gets me excited. To your point of whether it’s necessary, I think everybody is different just in general, but I don’t think there is any shortcut to hard work. I think hard work is real and it actually gives you an edge. All my life, it’s something that I’ve believed in very heavily, and it’s something that it might – again, there might be people. The people I know who’ve been successful, whether they were professors doing their thing, these were some of the smartest people. I don’t think they needed to work the way they were working, but there were some of the hardest people at the highest level of their career that they could be. Nobody was telling them to work this hard, but that’s I think was a need to them. I think similarly in startups as well, I don’t know and there might be. I don’t know any founder that I admire that is not putting in their all. It is hard. It’s not other easy things to do. But if you’re solving a very hard problem, there might be that you got very lucky and there’s PMF from the beginning, and it could work out. I’m not saying it has to be always true, but I think you do absolutely increase your chances of success if you are putting in everything.