Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:41:05 · Max Hodak, S1
It can be very, very useful. [00:41:07] S1: What changes should we expect in the world as BCIs start to work and get widely adopted? Do intelligence differences no longer matter?
00:41:14 · Max Hodak
[00:41:14] S0: So there's this meme that BCI is an artificial intelligence adjacent story, and there's some of that. Eventually, if AI is building superintelligent machines and the BCI labs are building conscious machines and we're building brain to brain connections so that the boundaries between those things become less meaningful, at some point, you want a superintelligent conscious machine that we participate in, but that actually feels further away to me. I think in the near term, BCI is really a longevity story, and I view longevity as really just health care. I mean, just biotech. It's just that it hasn't I think it is not right to say that the pharma companies or any of these past health care companies are not interested in cures. I think that that is what all of them want. It's just that that's been beyond our capabilities. And in neural engineering and the people here at BCI think they think of motor decoding. Like, I put some electrodes in motor cortex, and now they can control it like a video game. I think neural engineering is much broader than that. We include our retinal prosthesis in that. We include cochlear implants in that. And this, I think, is a contrarian take on all of health care. It gives you these effect sizes that you just don't really see in medicine. If you have a patient on a dopaminergic drug for Parkinson's that works for some period of time, but it's a relatively small effect after a little while you turn on a deep brain stimulator, a patient goes from not being able to hold a cup of water to being able to write cursive in ten seconds. If you want to talk about strong patient testimonials, you should see a newborn having their cochlear implant turned on. When you deal directly with the brain as a computer, not only do you not have to solve some of these really hard biology problems that are just beyond humanity's capabilities, But you get these results pretty readily that, again, are just you can get an engineering gradient. You can get them more reliably, and there are just large effects. And so I see this as a way to extend and improve the life of everybody. The brain is the thing that makes you you. It's the only thing that, in principle, you can't transplant. You can get a new heart or a new liver. You cannot even, in principle, get a new brain. And the brain is usually not the thing that fails.
00:43:27 · Max Hodak, S1
And so if you can deal with the brain directly, I think this is more of radical longevity story than it is an AI one for the moment, although all of these things will come together over some period of time. [00:43:38] S1: For your eigen review performance system, how do you prevent employees from colluding on their votes or downvoting somebody on purpose? [00:43:46] S0: So as I mentioned, there are some tricks. So for example, applying Markov chain Monte Carlo dropout allows us to detect things like voting clicks because now instead of seeing one peak, you'll see two peaks. That is a clue to look into that. It's designed to be tolerant of these things. I think it is really fairly transparent. It's also not our only signal. It's one of several. If anybody is interested in this, send me an email, and I will share a document with the specific tricks. But I wanna understand a little more about how you were gonna deploy it first. Some of this is tradecraft. [00:44:19] S1: When you're building something as long horizon as neurotech, how do you figure out how much runway you actually need to keep the company alive, and how do get investors to fund that much?
00:44:30 · Max Hodak
[00:44:30] S0: So sometimes, I mean, you often see founders, especially more experienced ones, pitching VCs for what they think is reasonable to ask for rather than what they need to run the experiment. You're raising some amount of money to go find out some answer. The answer to that might be no. The investors understand this, depending on what business you're in. But you have to actually run the experiment. And one of the things there are definitely some ideas that are worth funding with $50,000,000 or $0 but not $5,000,000 You won't run the experiment. It'll be a really frustrating experience. You'll get an ambiguous outcome. And so my first piece of advice is you should figure out what you think it's going to take to actually run the experiment, which is not the whole company. That is, what is your next value inflection point? No matter how ambitious and open ended of your plan is, you should have some sense of what is your next key value inflection point, what are the experiments that need to go into that, price that out, and then raise twice the money. So there's some amount of waste. I think if you can get waste down to 20% or 30%, that's pretty good. And anyway, the advice is figure out what it costs to actually run the experiment, raise twice that, and raise that or not. Beyond that, the you'll always discover new things. There's usually some path through the mess. But you're also when you start the company, you're not going to get a guarantee that you won't be on a bridge to nowhere or that it will work on the funding that you have. You're going to have to get in there and figure it out halfway through. I think that people should push for profitability sooner than they often think that they need to. For us, even though we are seen as this, I think, very open ended deep tech company with a very long road map, which is true, we are also relentlessly focused on revenue at this point. We are trying to get to sustainability. It feels like the company is constantly dying slowly of this money cancer that we can beat into remission every couple years with the fundraising, but then it eventually comes back. And I want that feeling to be over.
00:46:32 · Max Hodak, S1
And so no matter how big of a problem or big of a vision it feels, you do need to think about how do you get to revenue so that not just you can do it forever, but then you'll be valued on your long term roadmap, not valued on your probability of dying. And it really opens up another set of investors that wouldn't be relevant otherwise. [00:46:51] S1: What is the best piece of advice you've received?
00:46:53 · Max Hodak
[00:46:53] S0: I don't know. I've acquired way too much brain damage over the last twenty years to have a memory capable of picking that out. Mean, I think other than speed being the basis of success and infrastructure determines your speed, it is important to appreciate that there are no general principles. I think people are looking for shortcuts. People are looking for a pithy set of instructions that are like, oh, I figured it out. And that doesn't exist. Every one of these things is different. When you get to that moment in history, you're doing something new. And we reflect for a second on how crazy it is that this is possible. For the vast majority of human history, if you were a smart 20 year old that had an idea to make your society better and you raised this to the people with capital, the reaction was, you should pay attention to a harvest. The fact that... Like, it is not widely available. It's not universally available, but it's not, like, widely available that if you're a really smart 20 year old, you can come to San Francisco and make the case. And if it's an interesting idea, you'll get millions of dollars to find out. This is not the case for most of the world today, and it's certainly not the case for most of history anywhere. But that shouldn't feel normal. This is given to push the frontier out. And when you're on the frontier, you're figuring it out as you go. That is the job. And so I would try to rely less on things that feel like startup advice and more on how good is your judgment, how well is that refined in your domain, and remembering that you have to think for yourself.