A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:14:08 · Wardah Inam
[00:14:08] S0: Yeah. From the beginning, we were looking at extras, and extracting or analyzing disease on extras. The interesting thing about dentistry is that if you went to a dental practice and you wanted to query how many patients have cavities, you won’t be able to query that because disease is not recorded in dental practices. Treatments are recorded, but disease is not recorded. The disease actually sits in x-rays, sets in notes, et cetera. That’s what we started doing was like, okay, let’s start to analyze disease. But what was really unique about us was that we started to quantify disease. Rather than saying, hey, there’s a cavity, we started saying, hey, here’s a cavity which is 25% of your crown area of the tooth. That means you need this treatment. That is surpassing dentist capabilities as well, but also making very objective. Now, you can actually communicate, going back to my original problem, where two dentists are disagreeing with each other. Now, you can actually say, oh, I’m disagreeing because of this, and this person is saying because of Y, because now you can start to quantify disease and start to say, okay, it’s X percent in enamel, it’s indent, and this is what it looks like. I think that helps in much more objective decision-making, but also then extracting that data so you can actually do many interesting things with that information and try to solve this more societal problem as well.
00:15:35 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:15:35] S1: The other part of the storyline that we’re not talking about here is at this point, you’re a solo founder, you’re a first time founder, and you need to build a pretty sophisticated system. Do you go out and fundraise? What’s your move as the idea starts to form? How do you think about actually executing against it? [00:15:52] S0: First thing was, okay, I need a co-founder dentist. I tried to find somebody who would be my co-founder in starting the company. With that, I started reaching out to many different dentists or talking to them, trying to figure out who would that person be. There was a dentist that I found who was doing his residency at Harvard, common connection we had that who used to be at MIT before and was interested in entrepreneurship. He was there in different entrepreneurship events, so I reached out to him. His name was Alex, and we started working on this project, but he was still in school at that time. The idea was that he would quit school, this was his residency, and work on this full-time, or at least take a leave of absence. But Harvard did not give him a leave of absence to work on the project, so he was with us part-time and helping us provide the dental knowledge that was needed. [00:16:48] S1: Got it. Then what do you do about fundraising? Do you apply to some accelerators? Do you start pitching angel investors?
00:16:48 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:16:48] S1: Got it. Then what do you do about fundraising? Do you apply to some accelerators? Do you start pitching angel investors? [00:16:54] S0: I had worked for a year. That means I had some savings. At that time, I thought that was a lot of money because that was my first job. I basically start utilizing the savings I had. That’s when we hire Deepak as well, who worked with me at Q bio. Before, he was at Amazon. Also, my parents had given me – when I had graduated and married, they had given me a check for putting down payment on our house. We used that. That was our seed money there. Then I started talking to dentist there, and then there was another dentist who provided the person who gave us the initial data. He provided the second check, and that lasted us for about a year. [00:17:37] S1: Okay. In that year, where did you think about where you had to get the company to in order to raise that next round? [00:17:46] S0: If I go back, now I can – I think sometimes you tell the story better, looking back. But I think at that time, we knew that we needed some customer to get the funding. We started pitching to investors as well. It wasn’t the easiest thing to get funding. I did not have a network of investors. Now, I know a lot of investors. At that time, I knew nobody. [00:18:09] S1: What were some of the responses that you were getting from the ones that did take the meeting and, let’s say passed? What was some of the feedback you got back then?
00:18:09 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:18:09] S1: What were some of the responses that you were getting from the ones that did take the meeting and, let’s say passed? What was some of the feedback you got back then? [00:18:17] S0: I think right now, people think AI is the hottest topic, but I don’t think it was at that time. From my side, it was very obvious that this is what we should be working on. However, I think there was, because inference has a cost, the way software traditionally has not had a cost – [00:18:37] S1: There’s no unit cost. The marginal cost is zero for software. That’s right, yeah.
00:18:40 · Wardah Inam
[00:18:40] S0: That that aspect of it I think we just did not like, basically in terms of what margins could be, et cetera. That was one piece of it. It didn’t have major successes that people could point to. There were some companies like WIZ.AI. I think the first generation of companies which could not – and especially healthcare could not make it work at a larger scale. They did solve a very good problem. However, adoption of that technology was not really happening at the scale that visas would like it to work. There was actually a market problem as also there was an AI problem. The adoption was happening at that time. I would say third, this is something that I didn’t want it to be true. I still avoided it to be true, but I do think there was a bias in terms of for me to be a woman starting this company as well. Even if I was hearing it, I was not trying to internalize it, which was where an investor – this was an angel investor. They have a fund, a pre-seed fund, who basically told me that, hey, I really like you. However, the chances of you getting funded next are so low that I don’t want to put money in because I think the statistics they shared with me was only 2% of female founders get funded. If you get a male co-founder, I’ll fund the company, or male CEO. It wasn’t about a co-founder had a male co-founder, but it was getting the male CEO in. I don’t think they were doing it from bad intentions or anything. They actually believed it. That’s one where I think there was a little bit of this pattern recognition that VCs do. I think that that’s one where it was hurting us a little as well. The amount of traction they wanted us to have at that time was much higher than normally I would expect a startup to get funded.
00:20:45 · Pablo Srugo
[00:20:45] S1: Pattern recognition is a funny thing because on one hand, it’s the tool that both species need to rely on in order to understand what things might work, but it’s almost baked into pattern recognition that what you end up forming are biases. Some of them are helpful because you’re like, this thing tends to work, but some of them are actually, they create these crazy blind spots. Obviously in your case when it comes to female founders, there’s so many other examples of spaces, areas where people say, oh, nothing in this area could be big because there’s been nothing that’s big, and all of a sudden, you miss the next one. That’s a pretty wild story and black and white bias there, and going through that. That’s hard to imagine. Take me through then, because at one point you do overcome this. You over time raised over $100 million and just looking here like your seed round in 2020 was pretty big. It was almost $8 million. What happened between the time where you raised from that that you had your savings, you had the angel, you had a few, let’s say $100,000 or so to that $8 million round? What did you accomplish in that time? Because that’s a big seed round.