00:39:55 · Matt
[00:39:55] S0: Yeah, so at the core, the thing that's special about our hearing aid is we've been able to squeeze a very, very large AI into the signal path and then train that AI to separate sound into distinct channels on the basis of whether or not it's important or not. That means that we can give you much more loudness on the things that the AI thinks are important than the things that the AI has deemed unimportant. This has required development and innovation across the AI science side and also the compute side, because a hearing aid is such a tiny constrained device, and it needs to run all day on a tiny little battery. So the core to our differentiation and our success is this concept called co design, And, you know, I... I'm borrowing this word from from Jensen Huang at NVIDIA. It's remarkable what you can do when you lock in the same room the AI chip designers and the AI scientists. That allows them to work together and solve problems in an integrated fashion so that you can optimize the numerical system that your chip supports based on a knowledge of what works for this AI in this domain, and so on and so forth. So there's there's this incredible value of co design between the AI science and the AI custom chips that run the workload that the designers design. So I would say that's the big secret. That's the big... I guess not a secret anymore. That's the big unlock to our approach and it differentiates us from every hearing aid company in the world, big or small, is that we bid off the AI chip design and the AI science together and it helps that both teams are just full of the most brilliant people I know, including my co founders Andy and Igor, who you'll meet.
00:42:04 · Adam Miller
[00:42:04] S2: And you're currently launching the product out of a single clinic here in the Upper East Side. It's a beautiful clinic, but it is just one clinic. So what's the plan to be able to scale this, Fortell, to the masses?
00:42:16 · Matt
[00:42:16] S0: Right now, with one clinic, we're not allowing ourselves to think about masses. Masses, that does sound great. One day I hope we will be available to masses. Right now our focus is how do we make sure that in any major city around the world, if you're struggling with your hearing, we can help. And we're starting with another few cities in 2026, and then I think we can increase our rate of expansion. But again, we're we're titrating the expansion based on, you know, a deep commitment to quality. And so it's gonna start with, one or two more cities and then three or four. I would say that we belong in any major city where there's a density of older people who are struggling with their hearing. These businesses end up being really good businesses. And I would say for the first time ever, this is an audiology practice that's differentiated from other audiology practices. There's a lot of audiology practices out there. They all sell products from the same five companies, and those products are all kind of the same. So I think that there's a real opportunity for the company as we expand to grow, to grow quickly, to quickly get traction in every new city we enter. But the biggest folly would be to go so fast that we squander the trust with that community. We're going to go too slow. It hurts us to not be able to go faster, but it's all about this long term position of trust.
00:44:01 · Sachin, Matt
[00:44:01] S1: You started this company because of this real problem that you felt with your own grandparents. If you allow yourself to kind of be unconstrained by the challenges in scaling quality around the world, where do you think Fortell could go in the next ten years? And what's that kind of vision you want to go towards? [00:44:17] S0: So, you know, without revealing details about future products, I will say that we're committed to helping people hear better. At the end of the day, what we have done with our our first hearing aid is we have squeezed a very large AI into a very small package, and we have trained it to operate fast enough that your perceptual system does not notice the delay. The term augmented reality has fallen out of favor, but that is what a hearing aid is doing. And so this idea that particularly as we enter phases of life where we lose certain acuities, hearing, visual acuities, dexterity, memory. We believe that AI in small elegant packages that works fast enough that you don't even notice it's between you and the world, we think that that formula can do a lot of good for people, and so that's what we're gonna work on, and I think that we're just at the very early innings of AI for good.
00:44:17 · Matt, Adam Miller
[00:44:17] S0: So, you know, without revealing details about future products, I will say that we're committed to helping people hear better. At the end of the day, what we have done with our our first hearing aid is we have squeezed a very large AI into a very small package, and we have trained it to operate fast enough that your perceptual system does not notice the delay. The term augmented reality has fallen out of favor, but that is what a hearing aid is doing. And so this idea that particularly as we enter phases of life where we lose certain acuities, hearing, visual acuities, dexterity, memory. We believe that AI in small elegant packages that works fast enough that you don't even notice it's between you and the world, we think that that formula can do a lot of good for people, and so that's what we're gonna work on, and I think that we're just at the very early innings of AI for good. [00:45:38] S2: Do you think there's also an aspect where a company like this, because of the improvements you're making in the technology, opens up the potential market and the people that might want to use this, where in the future, it's not just the most hearing impaired people, but it's a lot of people that might just benefit even a little bit start using this sort of technology.
00:45:59 · Matt, Sachin
[00:45:59] S0: I mean, as you can imagine, this is a question we get from investors. Like what about the consumer use case? Is sort of a basic, a very basic economic calculus. It's like the number of people out in the world with hearing loss is smaller than the number of people who don't have hearing loss, and if we could, I will say this, it all comes back to focus for us. I think that the reason we come to work every day is to help people with disabilities, and I think that's the impact we want to have in the world. That's what Fortell is about. If in the process we can build things that are useful to people without disabilities and we can give people superhuman processing. That's exciting, but it's not the reason we started the company. And I think that there are companies out there that are better positioned to build amazing consumer products and have the right brands and the right distribution and the right scale in terms of their technology teams. Our job is to stay focused on people with high acuity, high stakes needs, and we think that's also the right business opportunity to make sure that we can give the right returns to our investors that allow us to keep chasing the state of the art as aggressively as we can imagine. [00:47:20] S1: -Matt, I'm always curious about the personal. When I think about you, you're building this great business that's obviously working and it's going to scale to many cities across the world. But if the audience were to go inside your inner monologue for maybe ten minutes, what do you think would surprise them at what they'd hear?