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.
00:23:37 · Sachin
[00:23:37] S1: I feel like this is easy to say when we're sitting in this beautiful clinic in the Upper East Side Of New York and you guys on the track to become a very successful and impactful company, but that idea you just outlined is very, very different to like Central Silicon Valley casting in the way we're told to build businesses, you know, focus on a narrow problem, solve a very small bit of it, validate it, then go up straight into the rest of the problem, don't go after services based businesses, actually two, three years ago now everyone's talking about services based businesses, and then three is like, you know, sure that you can scale, you know, blitz scale, right, and you know, for you guys to scale you have to open so many clinics. What gave you the kind of belief that you could build a business this way whilst also taking on venture capital?
00:24:22 · Matt
[00:24:22] S0: I think that the venture capitalists, at the end of the day, their job is to turn money into more money for their limited partners, right? That's their mandate. Think part of what helped us realize this mission is that the total addressable market is so big. Building a better hearing aid, the pearl is worth the dive, because this is such a prevalent condition, and when it hits you, it robs so much from you. And so just the basic 10,000 foot macroeconomic calculus is how valuable will it be to meaningfully improve the journey of life, you know, this last, you know, let's call it thirty years of your life, forty years hopefully, where you're struggling with hearing, there's tremendous consumer surplus to unlock, and thus there is a very big business opportunity. And so that basic stance combined with over time the increasing credibility of our innovation, right? When we started the company, we were a few guys with an idea, but over the years and through different rounds of fundraising, were able to pull off tremendous amount of risk from this whole proposition. This idea of vertically integrating through distribution has required the right relationships with our investors, and we're so fortunate to work with Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, and a long list of others, they have a real values alignment with us and an incredible position of trust with their own LPs that allow them to take big swings very patiently. Candidly, I've had calls with my investors when we've had these exit moments where we could have gone a different direction, and the constant encouragement from our investors is we're not looking for a quick buck. We're in this for the long haul. Going vertical is time consuming and really hard, but it is also probably the bigger economic opportunity because you get these massive benefits associated with vertical integration, costs, the technology you can bring to bear on the end to end customer experience, the way you can elevate service. It has required a lot of patience and faith from our investors, but ultimately we think it's the right way to build this business.
00:27:32 · Sachin
[00:27:32] S1: Building on that, what do you think Josh from Thrive saw in you so early? Because I know there's a story where you guys are thinking about studying a hospital and then you kind of focus more on the hearing aid, But it seems like he was going to support the mission you're on. What do you think he saw in you and the founding team?
00:27:49 · Matt
[00:27:49] S0: -Well, Josh worked very closely with my co founder, Cole, at Oscar. So I can't take credit for... I can't take all the credit for Josh's confidence. A lot of it is Cole. The two of them worked very closely in preparation for Oscar's IPO. But there was this sort of funny accident of history. Butterfly, the device my colleagues and I built previously, our target market for this visual stethoscope was emergency medicine physicians. And Josh's wife Carly, her father is an emergency medicine doctor. And so his father-in-law had become acquainted with Butterfly. And so Josh and Carly had intimate firsthand experience with the first product that we built. And so then when I got to meet Josh, he was already kind of a fan because he had followed the journey at Butterfly through his father-in-law, through his job as an emergency medicine physician and the use of Butterfly. And so that, I would say, set the groundwork for a positive relationship. But then while we were evaluating this hospital concept, and just the concept was that let's build a better hospital with technology as a major enabler. We spent many months together on it, and we had just a really good simpatico as we were going back and forth on the trade offs. And when Cole and I ultimately decided that we were worried we were the wrong founders for this hospital business, I thought that Josh was going to be mad. I thought he was gonna tell me, like, you're never gonna work again in this town, and were so, Cole and I were so nervous telling him and so relieved and impressed with the way he handled it, which was something along the lines of, thank you so much for telling me. Thank you so much for your candor. Let me know what you guys do next. I would really like to support you. We were like, you know, I got emotional. And then, two weeks later, we pitched him on a better hearing aid.
00:30:13 · Adam Miller
[00:30:13] S2: Over today and learning about the company, I've learned about a few things. So I've tried the product firsthand, and I've seen how brilliant it is. We've read about the customers, and there's real customer love there. You have a bunch of capital from leading investors around the world, and there's this huge demand for a product like this. You've got the waitlist, and, you know, people already want a product like this. What's actually stopping Fortell from becoming that, you know, multi tens of billions of dollars of company in the next few years? Because I can't quite grok what's actually in the way yet. It seems like you've got all the things that you need to get there.