Comfortable with the Unknown

Ulf Mattson

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

6/15/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

ou know you need to get comfortable with the unknown hmm because when you are doing things like this innovating pushing the envelope leading-edge type of approaches you may lose some sleep over that now and then hmm but each time you can see the proof that it really worked and paid off have you sleep much better everybody this is Devin Miller here with another episode of the inventive journey for those of you that are new to the podcast or first-time Watchers or listeners I'm Devin Miller your host I am the founder of Miller IP law where we for patent attorney patent and trademark attorneys that help startups and small businesses protect and grow their business I'm also a serial entrepreneur and love to explore the the journeys of others so today we have a great guest on that's gonna tell a little bit about his journey he is you live want to make sure I say it right and he is worked for quite a while at IBM and did some data security work or has some big customers that he'll mention about and kind of will talk to you a little bit about his journey but welcome on to the podcast thank you thank you I'm glad to be here thank you for coming on so tell us a little bit about your journey about how you got started all the way back when and IBM and and what brought you up till today with working with the security yeah thank you so I I worked at IBM in 20 years in software development and in the IBM research organization and my focus was IT architecture and security so I developed the databases applications and focusing more and more on security I security data security became more and more my focus area and I've been head of innovation at the token axe a payment the security company and I've been chief technology officer at a couple of companies like Atlantic vici compliance engineering and protag rity and that fraternity I invented a new way of doing data protection called both less tokenization and I was very excited about taking that innovative step into securing payment information and all kind of different PII identifiable information so I I've been in research as I mentioned and I can't we have 73 issued US patents and they are in the area of encryption threat protection data you should control intrusion prevention and and so and during my time at these companies I worked with IBM Microsoft HP Oracle RSA and other companies so it I left the big company IBM to start up protag rity where we had joined integration projects at IBM Microsoft HP and Oracle so IBM it became reseller put our security product on the IBM price list Microsoft became a close partner so my team had an office on the Microsoft campus outside Seattle and we developed the even ecommerce security product for Microsoft and Microsoft distributed our software on the Microsoft software distribution so we're gonna all pause you right there for just a second so you jumped over a bit of a I'm sure an interesting point which is hey you were at IBM I think you mentioned first 19 or 20 years worked with them for quite a while and you know and especially back in the heyday and I be I'm still a huge company and does a lot but you know 19 20 years you know but a bit ago they were a big company they were you know well-known renamed recognized had a lot of you know stability and brand power and everything else and then he decided to you know jump over and do more of a startup on data security and IBM became one of your you know one of your customers in that but how did he decide okay I'm at IBM I've been there for a while you know 19 20 years is a good it's a good chunk of time at a given company how did you decide that now we're going to strike out on her own or do a start-up or go over to data security and leave what would be IBM and for people they know some people would think would be you know dream job or a great company okay I I try to convince IBM to focus more on database encryption database security and it was too early I think that innovation was ahead of its time so I decided to be by VM because I always follow my passion I get a vision an ID and I just want to pursue it so IV it was too early for IBM so I left it to a startup and if I talked to Oracle at that time and Oracle said hmm this is interesting and we have a one of the two major soda beverage manufacturers and they need encryption of the Oracle database and that was something or he couldn't do so Oracle told this company to contact me and our startup company and we developed our first product and that was used by the beverage company to secure a a lot of sensitive data a IP data eh or data and shortly thereafter Microsoft came to me and said well you did this for Oracle could you do it for Microsoft hmm and and we started an integration with Microsoft very tight integration deep integration with Microsoft and then a couple of other companies came up Sybase for the financial industry and they we developed deeply integrated product with Sybase that they used for the financial industry a big data a company teradata it then came and became a reseller so we started to protect them encrypted very large databases and a couple of other companies like RSA security came and said they they needed more data protection data encryption and we help them with that including the key management and it was a fun journey so there's a whole bunch of great names that you drop there as far as first customers or clients he brought on I think you mentioned before you had you know Pepsi and Coke and Microsoft and Visa and American Express and Goldman Sachs and so you know everybody robe asically everybody's heard of those companies so how was it you know how did you go about if you're you're starting your business you know you start up in data security where they were you know you get all these big companies were they approaching you or you going out with them was it just such a need in the market they're knocking down your door kind of how did you go about landing some of those big you know what would be big companies or big accounts as a start-up okay that was interesting we did not approach these companies Visa MasterCard Goldman Sachs American Express and and and a more we did not approach it was actually IBM Microsoft and Oracle and teradata that he told us that they had customers that urgently needed this type of security solution so they brought us in they helped us in in a I would say in a very supportive way yes oh it come because we were inventive we didn't we didn't have to use the normal a development and support channels partners channels if it instead became a very tight team developed joint development teams that first integrated the products brought their customers in helped us to succeed and then eventually helped us to go to market so I think we were lucky by having something that was leading-edge innovative and they these companies big companies couldn't deliver what the customers asked for in in a timely manner so you it was almost really you had you put out a good product or product you use a bit a bit of your initial network or people you knew you they became a Banja LeSueur it was kind of when spread the word and your own getting referrals from them because they liked your product so much yeah you know I that's correct I've been in in that industry for for some time so if people in my network me up and said hmm I heard you were working on this new inventive technology could we do something here and we did then over the years I wanted to go a little bit broader beyond database encryption so I went into companies that developed data discovery surfaces and software a cloud application security brokers that are encrypting data before it goes to the public cloud in and web application firewalls web products yeah and I I also worked in in companies that provided some security operations center hey so I saw a couple of different angles a how you could skin the cat and make he and security better okay now so that's very interesting so now almost shifting slightly shifting gears you can obviously tell by your accent that you were foreign-born and then you moved into the u.s. kind of is it was it in the midst of your of your career or doing these kind of businesses how did you know when was that happen and what made you decide to leave Sweden which is a great country and come to the u.s. was a opportunity whether the businesses you're working with was it just wanting to see a different part of the world what made you kind of move you know move as you're doing all this move from one country to another yes so this development started in Sweden Europe and more and more of the development and engagement with IBM Microsoft HP Oracle it became very us centric so I ended up spending more time in in u.s. than in Europe and we decided to move to us move the company to to us and that that was great the customer base initial customer base was basically a in u.s. hmm okay so as a matter of decided if most of your company business and clients are all located or located within one given their geographic location or one area that you might air you'll want to be close to the cut our customers in order to better service them yeah and I mentioned a 73 issued US patents so the story is basically when engaging with these customers and these partners they were coming up with new requirements they were discussing direction in the industry and what what they needed so it became a wonderful platform to do more innovation hmm so it came for free by being early in in you know one security aspect so then we jumped forward a little bit and just tell us a little bit about today you're now working so you went through you've done IBM then you went to do data security you worked on cloud technology for a while and did some research development on that and now you're almost moving into kind of a payment platform right is that kind of your payment and do all of that yeah I and yes I am helping different companies advising them in the areas of payment applications for example startups in that area that are innovating payment systems I'm advising organizations on solutions for data privacy and security and in particular in in the mix of environments where they need to consider on-premises combined with hybrid cloud solutions and the mobile environment hmm so then and so you're doing that doing it as a kind of a consulting you're helping people to better secure better protect our money in our transactions which is always a positive so how did you see you kind of make these and they're all kind of within the data security and you know technology rail excuse me that's you um so you do all of that so how did you decide kind of when you got to you when you decided to make the jump between each of them so you go from IBM you go to the data security go to cloud technology started working and consulting in that and doing a payment platforms and I get that there's kind of a common thread but how did you decide okay I'm kind of done or I'm wrapping up with this next one I'm ready for my next adventure my next journey or my next opportunity what kind of triggered it that each time I I think I was treated by my network so people that I work with or used to work with in the industry be they had a dialogue with me about what is the next front what do we need and what are the problems that are not sold so for example country I'm working on it innovation in an area that is helping secure sharing of data secure exchange of data in a highly distributed environment he highly cloud focused and mobile focused environment yeah I cannot talk much about the details but it's basically taking the next step in securing data being compliant but making data usable when you share that with partners when you share it internally when you address threats from criminals and different type of attacks and that's very exciting no I I can see that and that's a pretty exciting place to be and to work in and to be working on developing so what so then well as we're kind of looking at that and you've jumped through you've done all those projects which one's been your favorite or if you're the bureau just have unlimited funds unlimited ability to go and do whatever project you have you know money wasn't money and time weren't any issues what would you jump into either next or what would you continue to do I view as the cornerstones are based on data the applications that are using that data and the user that is accessing that data so those are the constants and the core of what I view as security and privacy issues and data application and user is then applied to different environments a mobile cloud and hybrid environments so solving better way is to secure securely operate and share data in those environments is whether I want to go next so for example you you have more and more untrusted parties that you need to work with they need to do computing for you they need to you need to share information with them and you still need to run a business so whatever you do need to be highly transparent to the business processes it need to be compliant of course to many of the new coming the regulations you have the GDP are you have the California CCPA and you have a more and more privacy regulations coming honest so finding that balance between operational requirements to run your business processes and at the same time providing the how to say adequate security for security and privacy for compliance reasons for addressing emerging attacks on on on your data and and your systems so that's where I want to be I want to continue to be there and and it is a changing landscape so it's it's very very encouraging I don't think that data security is going anywhere anytime soon or payment platforms or cloud technology so you're certainly positioned well and a lot of those areas because they're certainly continued to be growing areas well hey we are reaching tight towards the end the episode and I always have two questions I always want to make sure that we hit on and so I'll go ahead and ask those now so the first question I always ask is so what is the worst business decision you ever made I think that looking back I stayed too long in that big company I I learned a lot at IBM I had a lot of fun a lot of friends but staying there for almost 20 years that was too long I wish looking back I think I should have started if a new company before that yeah and also moving from a small company to United States I should have done that earlier in my career all right so biggest mistakes words you didn't jump in soon enough and you waited too long but it still sounds like it worked out well ok second question is if you were to get someone that was trying to get into maybe the technology industry your payment platforms or cloud technology of data security and kind of all that realm look you're someone that's either just wanting to get into it or just have a startup that just began in this industry what's the number one piece of advice you'd give them you know you need to get comfortable with the unknown hmm because when you are doing things like this innovating pushing the envelope leading-edge type of approaches you may lose some sleep over that now and then but each time you can see the proof that it really worked and paid off have you sleep much better and for example if you look at a protag rity the first startup I worked in they are more than 300 people now many years after so so I'm looking back and and I conclude that okay we didn't know in the beginning if this actually would be feasible or sellable and eventually it proved out we start a little bit early but eventually proved out to be a great solution oh cool well that is that is great so I think that's some great advice for people to the followers or trying to do their startups again into this industry well thank you for coming on to the podcast it's been it's a fun it's been fun to hear your journey and it always never enough time and always more journey than they want to talk about but it's always fun to hear how people get going and it was fun to hear how you started with a big company and it weaved your way to a few different businesses and made the transition a movie moving to a different country and all of that so thank you again for coming on it Thank You Debian it was a pleasure to have this conversation with you and stay safe now I will certainly do so so thank you so and for all those all the listeners for if you enjoyed this journey and you have a journey of yourself the of your own to tell feel free to go on to inventive Journey calm and apply to be a guest on the podcast and for those of you that are looking there starting a start start up for small business and wanting to protect and grow it certainly feel to reach out and Miller I feel all we want to make sure to help you ever take and grow your business with patents and trademarks so always let us know and we're happy to help you along your journey so thank you again for coming on and it's been a pleasure and we hope to hope your journey continues to go well thank you very much and most importantly stay safe now in these tell her [Music] English (auto-generated) All Recently uploaded

The Business of People

Dr. Jacqueline Darna
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey

6/11/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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business is the business of people not products or services so what I mean by that is get out there find your tribe and make sure that you are well known and well seen that you are synergistic that you are your brand for the first five I'd even argue ten years really fun this is Devon Miller here with another episode of the inventive journey for those of you new to the news of the episode are new to the podcast I'm Devon Miller your host and we I'm the patent trademark attorney at Miller IP law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks we also on the inventive journey talk though about the different journeys that startups and founders and small businesses take along their path to success so today on the the show we have dr. Jacqueline dharna I will let her introduce yourself because she'll do a much better job of that that I will so welcome the first and only three-in-one patented way to stop your worst symptoms in just 30 seconds utilizing my essential oil infuse acupressure device all right well that was a great intro as I said you did a better job of introducing you that I would so so with that let's jump a little bit back farther in your journey so your doctor obviously you started out in the medical profession so maybe tell us a little about that how did you start out in the medical profession and then how did you make the transition over to what you're doing now so I used to be a drug dealer by day and a naturalist by night oh I did practice anesthesia and again I actually went back and got my nmd as well so I am also a naturopathic medical doctor so it was really interesting to kind of have that Eastern it's the Western world and as cuddly everybody in our society especially here in the u.s. is so accustomed to medications but what's the problem with medicine they have horrible side effects and not only just horrible side effects but it takes a while for them to work sometimes 45 minutes for your body to digest them and then again other complications that could cause you have to take more medications so I came out on my mission because I was a patient and upon doing so nothing else in the medical realm of medication that's important for me so I had to think outside the pillbox and not-so gave me my idea all right so if you take that in a dissected a little bit so I think it wasn't you said yet yeah or having some headaches or that you were having a bit of well yeah I actually had my emergency c-section so my first pregnancy went beautiful perfect delivery no issues no complications now my second one she's a beautiful baby girl and that's probably why so what ended up happening is I got sick for three days straight so imagine this is kind of like family in the hospital everyone you know this is like one of our own and we can't stop her from vomiting after her emergency c-section so we tried everything every medication that was actually listed and then not left listed we tried crazy things and finally somebody walked in and said we're gonna put you into a medically induced coma and I was shocked and like that's the best thing we have here and they're like Jackie we've tried everything else so I remembered one slide in anesthesia school about acupressure acupressure at what's called the p6 point of the wrist and at the very same time my stepmom came walking in with a peppermint plant that she had bought from Home Depot and she said here smell this I read it on Google so I was very intrigued again I was smelling leaves and I had a piece of napkin that was literally taped to my wrist and at the same time I kept dropping believes because every time I would smell the peppermint it really worked so I asked my nurse for a piece of tape and I made a wristband combining the two things that was the only thing that ended up working for me and believe it or not nobody else in the world had ever patented it so I did and here we are now five years later and now in hospitals and twelve countries of the world and in thirty thousand retailers that's a big jump for big circle we're gonna have to we're gonna have to jump a little bit farther into that so the best part when you actually when you grow the company it blows up if you do great and fold up jump in just so you're in the hospital you're sick you kind of come up with the idea of the wristband helper helps out with the nausea you use both acupressure after you pay a skew pressure if I could say the word as well as some you know what would be peppermint or you know otherwise essential oils or something that has that smell to to create it and so but at the same time you're you're still a doctor you have you've gone through all of medical school you've gone through all of your training and I assume that you didn't just one day just up and leave the medical field it's probably a bit of a progression so how did that from the day that you had the idea how did it progress you hey I'm going to leave being the you know doctor at the at a hospital or doctors or with clients and certain you know and and jump over to this business full-time I have to say I think it was actually a lack of sleep and hence why I created a sleep product but that's later and I was like every other mom and I now have two children I was up all the time breastfeeding and my mind was racing because this was the only thing that worked so I remember scouring the internet for a product that was like this of some sort and there wasn't any and so for me again I used to do what I called I worked my 7:00 to 5:00 in the operating room in the hospital and then I worked my five to seven and so I was naturally kind of not sleeping as is and that actually gave me the confidence to try to write my provisional patent like I literally love fifteen pages of everything that I can think of all my ideas I used to be an artist not an artist like professionally but drawing for me helps to relieve stress and so upon drawing I was like coming up with all these amazing incredible ideas like how can I incorporate acupressure into a Disney or into a back brace or for other product lines not just the recipe and idea that I didn't have initially so I kind of put it all out there and and then believe it or not I met the perfect people so my medical and my medical plastics manufacturer was actually the guy who invented the ketchup top and then he had invented other products that are actually utilized in the medical lastic space so he knew manufacturers and he kind of his name is Frank he took me up under his wing and he's like come on kid I'm gonna help you out and so we have a really interesting story I guess you could say because it was an instantaneous sense of almost like family and upon doing so he helps me tremendously he helped me get started I had product in six months and then I was literally pedaling out of a bag going to different doctors offices saying here this is a really great product for the moms with morning sickness once I started getting a little traction I had my very first I guess you could say big customer which was stellar an enterprising seller airports so I ended up getting into about 19 different airports I still give them the lowest possible price and then that showed me that it's not just good in the medical industry for you know for labor and delivery for surgery for post-operative nausea and vomiting and cancer it did translate into that retail space so about two years ago I went into that retail space and about the exact same time I ended up quitting my job full-time and the reason why is because my intern she looked at me and said you're amazing with her patients one to one but you can help one to a million with your products what are you waiting for so I jumped but I did I also kind of snuck it in there that I had a what's called my 3x rule as long as I was making three times what I was making in cost though I said that I would jump and then of course I built an incredible team so we're 21 strong and it's been really fun I'm really an incredible journey okay so you blew past a lot that I'm sure people are going to want to know a bit more about which is okay yeah I mean no secret and people say same thing about lawyer so I I guess I get the same thing but you know doctors making good about about here you make a good living typically and you know and so you know a lot of people are gonna say hey first of all you went through what is it ten years of school plus residency or long journey to get a medical degree and you're making in you know and which is most people are gonna say K that's a good thing you know first of all it's a great living you're gonna have probably get them a good amount of job security and so and then you say and you've invested you know a lot of time of your life and law school dodgy but medical schools even boards and so you do all that and then you get to a point you're saying okay I've get you know get a not put it on hold or put it on pause because you still use some of that you know a lot of that with what your product is now but it's a you know certainly different arrangement than what is a doctor and meeting one-on-one and proof you know prescribe medicine kind of as a shift right so I would assume that you eat at least whether is you or the family or people or push back or how was that to say okay I get the 3x role you're saying hey okay I have some runway if things go worse I could probably so I could still go back and be a doctor and I have you know a bit of a fallback if things crashed down but it still seems like it was a big jump or you know so how did you or the family or how did that bill or how did you finally decide to make that leap and did you get any pushback or did anybody think you're crazy oh my gosh I still get pushback I still I always say that the hardest sales are my friends and family they're like you cannot possibly invented something that helps me like but from the very beginning and I must also say I was the sole breadwinner of the family for the first ten years I was married for example and so if you can only imagine my kids had to eat I was the sole breadwinner so I had to make it work and more food on the tables that was a real big driving factor for me and again I'm what they call a hustler you know the dream is free but the hustle is sold separately so that was my push and drive is these two beautiful children that I have to make sure that I really made this into something and actually my do an article importance their favorite line was my my husband actually told me he goes you don't want to do what just graduated you have tons of tons of you know debt and now you want to invest in making these wristbands for a living he's like you know what whatever you could you know you're making the money so I guess I can't say anything about it but there's no way that you're ever gonna make this happen and I was like wait just wait I'm gonna show you and six months later he was my first hire so if that said anything man there's nothing like a woman scorned right so when you get the pushback from your spouse now he's extremely supportive and he's just my number one fan my personal I can't go to because he had more business experience I have zero I never taking a business class never took a marketing class so for me everything was kind of learning on the fly I got what's called the NBA in the trenches and I didn't really know I was an entrepreneur until I became one and then now that I am money man it's like the cycle just goes hard and I can't stop coming up with different ideas and I can't stop him adamian my team is about what what I call the doers I'm the dreamer so they say to me pin that amazing idea though later all right so so was it so you made the job you said okay I've hit my 3x rule I decide you know and I know it still you know it you probably still have a fallback ladder you know and I must say you you want a little bit I always look at kind of the old story of Cortez me you know they land in America and they burn the ships and so there's no no path that so you know that's a little bit of always my mantra Z you know burn the ships you have to be all in in order to make sure or make something work you're always looking you know halfway looking back you're never gonna be successful but was there ever a point after you jumped over as you're getting things going is you know things are starting to take off you're saying man maybe I should go back and be doctor maybe I should maybe I made the wrong decision or maybe I shouldn't have done this was there or wasn't just great you never had any second thoughts and you just took off I wish I could say it was all you know rose petals and everything was amazing but I do have to say there was imparting to me actually what I call or consider my lowest point I never knew that in getting into retail what you sell it to them for in large mass quantities number one you don't receive an actual check for a hundred and eighty days sometimes even longer even though they have you know they have net 45 yeah that's hilarious that never nothing so they you know there's a lot of rules and implications there's a 5% for Murphy's 5% of it there was a point in time where I ran my company based off credit and I'm lucky that I have a really really really good credit score and that's just because the fact that I did my due diligence paying off my students at my student loans but um that's the reality of it I mean it hit so hard at one point in time that I was actually I would sometimes pick up call shifts and I we work on weekends and I would pop in here and there because I was like we are really tight like just to make payroll and that an amazing big break ended up happening it's kind of like every time I'd go to to fall like I'm running running running all the time and I go to fall yeah I get some mud on my face but it never breaks my nose or fractures my face if that makes any sense so it wasn't perfect yeah exactly it wasn't a permanent and structure realignment but I really feel as though no I I am Catholic so for me I know that I feel like this was my purpose this was my mission and I felt like I was being caught by the Lord and he kind of just said listen pick yourself back up and this is what I want to happen and literally like the day after I was considering going back something incredible happened and the US government actually ended up taking my my bid for making a sleep product for PTSD soldiers and so here we go I now have a third manufacturing plant all the debt but I having caught inquired in making new wines was completely wiped away and not just happened literally in an instant so I picked up my family and moved know everybody know be Florida and upon doing so I was the best decision I ever did I spent one year developing for them underneath my pattern for normal sleepless nights and now it's available for retail consumption and online and helps people to sleep better yeah don't we all need that I don't know sometimes you don't want to sleep so you can say up and get things done without that skin so now I'm gonna jump back just because I enjoy it because you always get the highlights right you always get it here kind of how everything was a success and nothing ever happened so when you were in the middle because I and you described what as probably what a lot of people end up going through is you know if your business is going is going is struggling or you're having to figure out how to make payroll you're having to figure out how to make you know pay for the next run of production or that any often times we'll go and look at whether it's dead or a loan or you go to friends and family or you try and hustle and you know get in some side income or that but you know in a mix of all of that how do you deal with it I mean cuz that's not an easy thing right it's gonna be very stressful you're gonna worry if you're you know okay I'm now I'm gonna you know go mortgaging the house so to speak and not saying you wouldn't got it on the house but you have to go and you're saying okay now it's it's no longer fun or it's exciting in the sense that I'm not just making a fist and so how do you how do you deal with that angst or fear or how do you keep moving forward so I've always been a planner and everyone who knows me knows that I have plans a through z literally I'd go after a B and C usually it's somewhere in the realm of F and G where you find me and kind of finding a sweet spot but I you know have things that thought over over in Inferno bridge and I have to say it's very beginning I mean I didn't know how quickly we were going to scale and how fast we were scaling because that was something - when I started networking in with a lot of people who were in the capital realm on different VCS and you'll actually find on one of my old you know and old decks or whatnot like I'm sure somewhere on the internet from doing accomplished here there because I was inquiring money and one of my really good friends he you know he went that route for fun you know funding and he may you know he was raising he raised 1.2 million at the same time that I need 1 3 2 million so I always tell people you know you're going time flies by and you're going to either work on your company or you're going to work at getting what you want or at getting something monetary that you feel as though it's good and it's two different ways I mean me personally hey if you give me five thousand dollars to go gamble on you bet your buttons I'll go you know because it's not my own money I just felt it know that it makes me work harder and you know juggling everything especially from a financial standpoint I did I looked at a lot of different ways and we're very lucky every time we were about to sign a document or we were about you and and I must say network in with the people who are be seized and networking with the people who are angels because I have a bunch of friends that are inside of gosh food realm that can give me money and a heartbeat and it's always better because I tell him they're like what would you do with the money I'm like oh I have this purchase order for example from CVS I you know I have another six thousand stores and I'm fulfilling and they're like you need money to make more money that never happened so it's always important that you kind of go after the people that you could potentially want to pair with before you're in trouble and so I've always I've always done that I've always surrounded myself with really smart people I never want to be the smartest person in the room and so that was my might be the smartest person in the room is like there's a whole lot of other smart people the smartest I just want to make sure everybody else is smart too because I have to say and maybe a medicine whenever I'm you know speaking at a medical conference or something I kind of feel like in my phone but you put me in front one of my really good friends I'll leave his name out of it but he was one of the first round investors for Facebook for uber for Twitter and you know we I taught him how to salsa dance for example we were you know we grab drinks and we laugh all the time because he he just is this huge cattle investor and he's gotten me and introduced me to people that I couldn't have even imagined and so again didn't be a mentor my fairy godmother she got me meetings that I couldn't have ever done and so it's been really fun so did you when you were going through so are you wholly-owned did you ever take investor dollar or take anything or are you oh not you and your husband owned it 100% or how does that work 100% we are a woman owned Latina company that's me a hundred percent still from the very jump all the way up through now and the beauty of it is is that we do have very good margins I have to say I respect margins now more than ever because of the fact that with you know what the coronavirus happening we already sell to different hospitals and I just happen to know the insight on whenever they're getting large PvP PvE orders from outside because I think about so right now it's kind of a very interesting endeavor because my company is also selling other products that aren't ours that have no margin so I must say that our merchants are nice and thick and that it that was that meant that I was doing the right thing and able to keep myself bootstrapped because I invest everything into the business and then from there I'm able to grow it you know twelve hundred percent for example and then I do the same thing over and over again so for a small amount of money that I have to invest I'm able to get a much larger return than these very large borders so it's a it's definitely a means of respect and but also it's the excitement of being able to I don't have to listen to a board I don't have to be told what to do and by the way I don't know if you know any lemon but it doesn't go over very well when people tell that one what we're better at getting orders then receiving numbers they're not so and so if you were to Dan jumpin somebody's looking at trying to side hey do I bootstrap this do I try and figure out how to sell fun or you know go take a side hustle to fund it or I've got an investor there you know they'll they'll give me you know million dollars or five mil whatever the number is but a large amount that will carry our company for a while what's welcome advice would you give them or how do you make that decision I'm sure it's different for everybody but you know what advice would you give them as far as whether or not to sell fun and bootstrap and side hustle or take it cuz sometimes you know you take the investor dollars and it blows you up and you can make it big and where is he died your company might die in the vine because you nephew known if it goes under because you don't have the money vice versa you give money out you go in and take investor dollar it comes with a hand copic you know it can be different if it's a good investor bad and you know certain great investors but it still comes with you're not a fully in control anymore yeah I think there's like two things because pun at time is our most precious commodity so the first thing I would say is look at your books and determine the amount of money over time and I know that sounds kind of weird but most people don't really do that as a time equation but I do though and again this has to do with it whether or not in bootstrap whether or not you know your different clients tell whether or not it's VC capital fund a so you try to figure out how much money you can gross or make off of that money over a certain period of time so some people for example they want you know they want to strike a pan nice and hot because it's like a time function so let's say you were a gown or a mask creating company for example right now is the time to take VC money and to blow it because you basically have another couple weeks of really high intensity versus someone like me you know the 1980 sweatband of acupressure band which was never changed for years that was something they actually developed the first acupressure band the year I was born so it's not old and by any means but you know if almost like 40 years old at this point in time so I have to say that you know you have to describe and determine what that time factor and then the second thing is is just like dating dating getting engaged and getting married you're gonna be in bed with that person or the you know whoever it is that you choose and so I would hope if we all remember back to our dating years that you don't just jump into bed with every single person that comes along your path you analyze them right like you figure out what's in it for you what's in it for me and then that's how I know that I analyze everything I did it over a time back here so amount of money I can make over time and then secondarily the podcast but the point is yeah I mean it is a lot like you know sometimes if you're even with that person more than you are your spouse and especially in the early stage and the startups and that yeah a lot of times you see the people work and you know that more than you do your spouse is you try to get a business up and running so it's very much like dating or even sometimes more so just because of the amount of time and effort it takes to do a business well we are hitting up against towards kind of the end of the podcast and I think it's every podcast I do I always feel like there are about 20 more things it would be fun to talk and discuss and jump into it never quite have all the time why we're not going anywhere from our house we still have the ordinance for about two more weeks so I'm here just in case alright maybe we'll have to do a follow-up episode it will dive into a few more of the few more of the aspects that we didn't have time to but as a wrap-up I always ask two questions at the end of the podcast so we'll do that and so the first question is what was the worst business decision you made alright so I will say that 97x is a local radio station in Tampa and they have a huge the next the next big thing is what it's called it's kind of like an alternative rock concert I mean thousands upon thousands of people go I think that you is like a record year we like eight nine thousand maybe even ten thousand people that were there everyone partying it's myself no mo Naja its Budweiser and it's taco bus so there are it's like you know you get heartburn perfect we can help your upset stomach you get drunk we can help with the hangover so I'm thinking this is like a sealed deal I dumped in about I don't know twenty five thirty thousand dollars is one of like the key three sponsors and guess how much money we made at that concert I by the way you set it up I guess he got very but seventy dollars like seven bands alright after spending so much money so I always tell people that was my biggest most epic marketing failure and you know why because that's not my target demographic know your target know who it is that buys the product my number one pregnant women my number two travelers cruisers people who love to take trains that take planes or business class people for example and then the third is going to be chemotherapy and cancer so that they may have a better well-being so I know that it's outside of those three realms it's just not my bag alright so of course LD baths drug taco-eating that's just not my demographic all right well we've crossed that one off the list so okay second question I always ask so if you're to have someone that's looking to get into either just starting out as a startup or wanting you know always have that desire and wanting to get into it and just just starting out what would be your number one piece of advice to him business is the business of people not products or services so what I mean by that is get out there find your try and make sure that you are well known and well seen that you are synergistic that you are your brand for the first five I'd even argue ten years really there's not a thing that I go on that I don't have at least one person that's like hey no law or what's up no Manasa I mean people as long as they say no Naja I'm fine with it but again I'm always as you can see I'm constantly branded I even have swimsuits I know that sounds crazy buy sell more in a bikini than any any other wardrobe I feel like that I always be selling right you know and pitch they have a pulse and by that I mean you never know who's sitting next to you from the plane you know just your local neighbor my neighbor across from me is the CEO of one of the major hospitals that I sell to and I had absolutely no idea until one day you just started talking so again you don't know who you're sitting next to and you don't know who they know either and so again if you can display your mission I tell everyone I want to invent products that help give people a better sense of health and wellness naturally and they become part of my mission and so it's a weave they always say I remember when you were the first I remember your first pitch I remember and they always feel like they're a part of the journey and so they're the ones who tell everyone hey you're sick on a boat go grab Nomo Naja if you are at home and have a horrible migraine pick up Nomo migraine I mean they are my true know mom almost won like they are my diamond well that that's great it's always great to have the Evangelist it'll go preach to how great your product is so that's awesome well so we're wrapping up and I want to make sure if people wanted to either find out more about you connect up with you or your product what's the best way to reach out to yes absolutely go on our website no mo Naja calm there's tons of different blogs and also hit us up on social at Nomo Naja that's n o mo na USDA on any social media platform so literally you can follow me and what's actually really fun in that tick-tock the new thing because that's actually me my kids crazy things that I end up doing so people get to know who I am and what's really fun is that they've been calling and the office is actually directed into a secondary phone that I have so I'm talking to all of people that are trying to get me testimonials and they're like you tell that nice young lady that I said thank you I'm like you're talking to her so it's so much fun to get back to basics and to get back to the core and not some of the people that I'm helping well awesome well I will definitely tell everybody who has that's not except for the which I don't really know any drug or drug partiers so I I'm in Utah we don't typically drink or we don't smoke we don't party all that often so I don't know anyway but otherwise I'll share it oh here's especially everything's that I opened back up because it's no mo altitude sickness that's something that I'm is actually a pretty big market share for us as well so you can you can share it being that Salt Lake is my actual Park cities my favorite place to ski and I think we talked about that all right well there you go I'll share with all the people that I just like to hit the slopes so thank you again for coming on it's been a pleasure and I appreciate you sharing your journey for everybody else it's joining if you have if you'd like to tell your story your journey you can always go on and apply to be on the show for those of you that are meeting helpful on your journey of patents or trademarks certainly always feel free to reach out to us we're miller IP were always looking to help startups and small businesses to grow their business and protect it along the way so thank you again I appreciate you coming on and it was a great episode thank you so much you you English (auto-generated) All Sales From Miller IP Law Recently uploaded

Better Than Any Other Time In History

David Borish

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

6/9/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

this time in history is better than any other time in history want to be an entrepreneur you can you can have you can learn about any industry you want to learn about you I mean even if you talk about schooling you know people say well I don't have the right schooling I mean you don't need schooling you could go online and get download courses from MIT for free you could do the same thing with other public universities and and other than that you could just research and study any business you really want to study everybody this is Devon Miller welcome to another episode of the inventive journey I'm your host Patman trademark attorney and Miller IP law that loves to help startups and small businesses as well as well as being a serial entrepreneur today we have on an another great guest David boorish I will rather he'll do a much better job of introducing himself than I ever could so I'll let him introduce himself but he should be a great guest and we're excited to have you on our welcome to the the podcast David yes thank you Devon thanks for having me appreciate it our pleasure so tell everybody a little bit about your journey about your story of what you're up to where you're at and what's going on sure so I I guess I'll start you know as early as I can remember of being an entrepreneur you know I hear stories of you know kids selling baseball cards and I'm in school elementary school and that that was I was definitely that kid the name really sell baseball cards during school then I actually did not only did I sell the baseball cards but I had 12 years old my grandmother tells the story all the time at 12 years old she used to drive me to baseball card conventions really and we load up her car and this was in Queens New York load up her car she dropped me off at eight o'clock in the morning pick me up at four o'clock in the afternoon and I'd have a stack of money from the cards that I sold from the day and she's always talked about it for years of like you know this 12 year old kid was making more money than and you know the parents at the time hey this is not a battery now it now you just have to I was I always joked whenever my kids go out to like Halloween or get some like Easter that then they have lots of candy I always so and they have to pay dad tax which is give me a piece of candy so now your parents should have applied the same concept of now they're taxing you in order to be part of the household but like they were apparently a much kinder kinder parents that I have so let's fun again oh yeah yeah I was sure I had read a book your humor is Mark Cuban is one of them that did a lot of the same thing and they would they would go to the car training they wouldn't they would just go with like a tiny bit of money they would buy the cards and sell them at the same show and then they wouldn't they wouldn't even have to come with the cards they just stayed out that was another that was another hustle yeah I had a bunch of those same game hustles back then yeah you go to the to the guy who had the exclusive cards and if it wasn't you someone else buy the new packs you buy them out early in the show everybody's looking for them and then you're able to resell them throughout the show so yeah I did that as well all right well you're I don't remember which one I know I read in a book I don't remember which famous curses so you guys have here you stand in good company so that's awesome so so you started and I didn't mean to interrupt so go ahead and keep telling your story no no I did - by night I love I always loved talking about those times because it shows you know the the early starts of you know being an entrepreneur and everybody has those similar types of stories in especially you know people that have been entrepreneurs their whole life so I won't worry with every you know business up until you know my early twenties where I was when eBay was first becoming you know mainstream I used to go and buy like collectibles and things from garage sales and resell them and then I got a Dubai wholesale and then on the west coast they started opening up these stores called Eve a drop-off stores there wasn't really any in New York and I was living in upstate New York with my then girlfriend now wife at the time she was attending college and opened up a store her story did true well right early on it was just the right time right place and we ended up doing a number of stores and in franchising that so give me the first like retail real business experience in my early twenties from there we then for a number of years helped other businesses franchise so we used to partner with lawyers and other people in the ecosystem and find concepts and help grant Huffman franchise and then in 2008 we had the downturn you know nobody was lending money nobody was making money nobody was lending money or moving money around so I came up with a concept of aggregating multiple securities loans meaning having multiple customers and these were actually just started out being you know my own clients that needed help and we pitched a number of banks including Wachovia which you know now Wells Fargo under Wells Fargo but we told them listen we know you give higher net worth individuals better long-term rates what if we would aggregate you know let's say 5 1 million dollar loans which would give us my million-dollar you know high net worth loan and of course at the time they like well bring five customers over sure and we quickly you know took that model around to every single broker engine bank that would listen and almost all signed on but what ended up happening was we figured out that the model we created was was more along the lines of what mortgage brokers do but for the loan industry for the securities loan industry where you go to a mortgage broker and they have a number of different loans and they sort of figure out the best loan for the customer we pioneered that in the securities lending industry so we eventually became the first securities based loan origination company built the company out we had loan brokers around the country and then we required by rack Rockwood Capital Group a couple years later so that was sort of my first you know larger company venture exit I would say oh go ahead it's Gemma quad and side oh that's interesting so in because the I can almost see the banks going one of two ways one they could say is you know I'd rather have an a higher net worth individual it has five million dollars because he's more likely to pay on it or you can do the opposite of saying hey 1 million dollars so a high net worth individual I'd rather spread it over five people because more likely most of them are gonna pay her they're not gonna default so or the boat which way did the base view did they say hey we'd rather have the really rich people that will be able to secure it or with rather diversify well you got to think about at the time you know nobody was moving money around so if you want to call up let's say you were in JPMorgan and you went to call up Wells Fargo Wells Fargo would say are you a customer and it's they know well moving money over and then we'll tell you about our loan product and so we sort of put it inside to that we knew all the loan products we knew what we can get what's costing like what they didn't like so we use that like a proprietary model to our advantage but from the bank's perspective they were just happy to get into client they didn't really you know it was didn't really care or think about the loan I mean obviously these were asset-based loan so it's not like it was a high-risk loan to the bank so to them it was like well they don't pay we just you know take their securities yeah it was security it was secured so yeah so it from from adventure you know I was always you know int attack and had a couple of side ventures attack nothing I really ever took off you know between that time but from there I started looking at a number of you know different technique vestments and ventures that I wanted to start and we ended up starting the first if you think of like when you go to create a business plan there's like a business plan Pro and they teach you they take you step by step we created that software called business plan who is BP Wiz for the publishing industry and it was funny how the idea happened I was at a conference learning about the books and all he kept saying was your business play your proposal and your business plan and I went up to the guy at the end do you have an idea of a software I can use to write the book proposal when I'm ready no but that's a great idea and of course I couldn't go to sleep that night notes on the computer like this has to exist and they didn't and we ended up creating it so so that was a venture was around for a while we ended up buying something not a huge ethical they carried the site on for quite a bit actually just recently I think shut it down but but they had a quite some time so from there was involved with a couple of other ventures on the tech side one and crowdfunding and then I was on the train in New York this was you know from 2012 and then right around the time when beats headphones were sort of gaining popularity hmm and people were wearing these $300 red headphones and if you're anyone that knows about sound you know you know for the same quality by $120 pair of Sony's and so that would just just boggle my mind and I realize it was mainly because they had the it's not it's not only that it's the the quality but it's hey I've got the cool headphones type of a thing yeah exactly it was all it was a branding play but my idea was let's do that for mobile accessories and we're talking I phone for at the time you know pretty early on and we had some pretty cool a couple of cool products and yeah and it wasn't we didn't want to just pay a celebrity to endorse it we wanted to partner we wanted to co-found or like three brands actual companies and so we went down the line we ended up getting front of Nick Cannon into dog and you know we the closest deal we had was with Nick Cannon prior to what we launched we just didn't give up and eventually we signed a deal with Jonathan chairman who's now best known as through God he's like the Kardashians and Kanye West he's tied in with with that show and with them not to stop there because you dropped it up big babe so how did you you got the idea okay we're gonna get into the mobile you know mobile tech or the mobile accessories Chris can go find people that partner with us you know whether it's a Nick Cannon or whoever it might be big enough names you know or go to FUBU or go to whoever how do you start to even approach them so I'd say most people at least maybe you don't you know you grew up and do all these people but for me I would have no idea even how to go out and start to reach out to them or find them so how did you start to make those connections you know I I wish I had a secret sauce but the reality was I was pitching the idea to investors and I ended up getting an investor who later became my partner and good good friend to this day and without me expressing my you know full idea you repeat it to me I think you're onto something we should get celebrities involved and so again I think it's it's it's it's about having the passion and drive of wanting to do something and then just being able to you know get in front of enough people to help you execute that idea so I you know he and they're having the relationships one of the companies he was partners in worked with celebrities they ended up knowing a number of celebrities and people in the agency business so that's how we got in front of a lot of them and then Daymond John was one of the first celebrities we pitched and you know Damon's also from Queens as I am born and raised we had a little bit of connection there but we pitched in he said well you know I like the idea but I'm gonna pass for now you know let's you know basically come and let me know how it goes hmm but what happened was in the meantime we didn't get that brand started with Jonathan Trevin Jonathan was being managed by one of a man's companies and they saw that we scaled this brand really quickly and we got it on major we got a lot of press on what we were doing and the Kardashians took pictures and everything was just we did a lot in a little bit of time and then Damian was impressed by that and came back to us and said look you proved out what you're capable of so I got some ideas on a brand I want to create so we ended up our name from Daymond John from shark tank and that you know took us on you know four year journey of you know doing some really cool stuff we ended up getting involved in not only with mobile accessories but like virtual reality was really new at the time you had the first virtual reality headset ever sold on television on Home Shopping Network came and went on air and what's funny about that story is we had to convince we first of all we had to explain to them what it was Home Shopping Network it isn't they had never seen or heard of a virtual reality headset there was only one way you put the phone in and you could look around but it was still hard knew at the time was the first time anybody had seen it and they eventually you know got on board with us and put it on air we sold that out really quickly and you know I I always I don't like to only say highlight so I gotta be honest about that story what happened was when you sold out in 15 minutes and our customer service experience following that the sale of those 15,000 units was a nightmare and the reason is those 15 values were sold mainly to older people who didn't realize you needed a smartphone or most of our calls came in is like can I use a flip phone and well I don't have a smartphone I got to return it so you know we home shopping that was a success for them and its terms of selling but we they begged us to come back we went on with other but not like that one so we have the claim to fame of the first virtual reality headset ever sold on television but probably the most returns diverse on a Home Shopping Network as well so it's kind of you got both of them you got the best to the worst that's I mean I wouldn't even thought of that but that's a good point if you know you take it a little bit for granted but especially if you're talking to any bit of an older audience or once it's still that time we're using flip phones or anything it's gonna be well no you have this doesn't come and they'll add that is funny oh you know another thing was they thought it came with the phone they know the phone came with it I'm like for 50 bucks let's go buy that to get a new phone exactly yeah yeah so yeah so you know I so diving into that and I want to get into a little bit more of what you're doing now because it's you know relevant with covin 19 and some of the diagnosing diagnosis than that but jumping into that how did you so you have you know you go on QVC going home shopping netwerk go on you know all make all these sales and you sell to you know what would've been older audiences or at least audiences that didn't understand it came at the owner they needed it and then you have all this sudden a huge customer service problem how did you deal with that problem or how did you correct it or dis you correct it or what was it you know because that would be if I was in all of a sudden I'm saying yeah we got all these sales it's gonna be great and then the next day I turn around and everybody wants to return it or it's getting mad at me it's kind of a highest of the high and then right down to the lowest of the low so how was that well you know we since we were the first there was no market so we were creating a market so we had a really high margin on the product so even with the sales he was still profitable so it wasn't really with the returns I mean it wasn't really that bad in terms of that we did have a higher number of returns but the margins were really high so we were profitable at the end but yeah I mean every business I've been involved in throughout my career you know anyone that will tell you they start something and it goes exactly as planned from the beginning they're just lying I mean it's no that's not real that's not the way it works it's not reality of any business you're always going to take the and have to figure out something new a new way to do something a new way to sell something a new way to you know pivot the entire business the entire model I mean you know to this day one of so I'll bring it into the next business venture from the moguls and the brands of mobile accessories we decided after the market became saturated and you know all mobile accessories ended up becoming commodities meaning hmm you and you'll appreciate this being from the planet Trademark Office iPhone would come out in September you wouldn't know the specs until they announced it in September to this day they still do it this way and then they would ship in October so you had one month there was no way to create any real proprietary IP around any of the phones and this happens every year because iphone and android everybody comes out with a new phone every year so yeah even more IP on it it's like you don't even have time you'd be able to even get it the patent through the Patent Office theory onto the next product and so you're never gonna have a long oh yeah I can tell you we had people pinch us products all the time with patents but they would pitch us a knife or phone patent when iPhone 6 was out so thanks you know it yeah yeah there's a market it doesn't line up does not make sense to go for patent some of them and I'll be an evangelist and I'm biased makes great sense but you're right absolutely right I almost look at that as kind of like the Snuggie like Snuggie was an awesome one it took out and they made a lot of money off of it and yet it was kind of a flash in the pan you and out for a couple years everybody bought him and then Snuggie went away so where the patents really valuable and that no not really be friend was friend was a great one but if your patent wouldn't him would not have made sense I'm sure that's a lot the same with the iPhone experience essary market yeah exactly so we had a tough decision we were either going to raise a lot of money to compete with the public companies who were dominating the space with the commoditized business or we were gonna you know just just shut the brand so we had a great run we did a lot of amazing things and decidedly move on so from the experience with VR was I was really getting into virtual reality and looking at it as like you know of futuristic any time I showed someone just a VR headset they were blown away and so I was looking around what could be creating around the next venture our next idea was how do you control a video in a VR headset so you set out to do that and what ended up happening was we figured out a technology not only for VR but for mobile phones as well any touchscreen devices over the last four years neo 360 is a company that I've been building and we and just to go back to my point of hitting a wall and trying new things we initially thought this touchscreen control technology which allows you to control video just by swiping and touching the screen we were going to integrate with apps and all the apps we're gonna love us and we were on development plans for HBO Showtime all these big networks that never came to fruition for one reason or another and we ended up having to pivot 18 months later to go to broadcast where we finally hit a you know a stride where we like you know a license and a couple of leads and teams along the way but you know you just never know now with 5g coming out the mobile product actually is more viable because you could do longer live video and longer form video with using our technology so if we would have called it quits after the first run you wouldn't have saw the second one and then the second model we're building it's kind of a slow model cuz it's broadcast and it's not like there's millions of broadcasters you know there's thousands so it's a slow business but we we hung on there and now 5g comes along and now we could go back and have a much bigger way so you know one of the things that I did well there we did well was we didn't raise too much money too early and the reason is we did we would have had to be forced to scale to grow and imagine growing and scaling and then miss what just happened with Cogan 19 in the sports industry I mean we probably would have had default but because we we don't have that pressure we're you know we're able to ride the storm and you know get through this so just a couple of quick lessons you know along the way but we so 360 but I'm gonna hit out and I think that's a good point in because often times you're always too often and sometimes it makes sense but a lot of starts saying hey I'm gonna take in as much money or get as big investment dollars as I can without ever ever thinking through what are the kind of the handcuffs that come along with that and there are few and you hit on one another one that I see all the time is hey if we go in and get a huge evaluation lots of money it's hard to do another round of that so you have to keep growing the business bigger and bigger and bigger each time now if I go in and I get my evaluation my company's worth 100 million well I don't want to have a down round where you now take a lower valuation because investors don't like that they want to see their company be more valuable so now you have to make it worth 2 million or 200 million and 500 million and then a billion and if you're not ready to scale or you don't have the plan of scale or you're still working things out you can have a whole bunch of money and Yetta can be harmful to the company because you took so many so much money and earlier absolutely and and and by the way we could have taken money early more and we decided not to it was you know in hindsight a good decision especially that we didn't have product market fit and you know it was it was still some time till we did so yeah so neon 3:16 you know your audience can go to 360 neo calm and check out what we're doing there and then sometime last year you know I started thinking you know I wanted to be involved in in something a little more a little more you know meeting behind it and so I was looking at a couple of different opportunities was it looking to create a new company myself since I'm you know still active with neo 360 but I did have some time that were sort of licensing the model now and you know gave me a little bit of time to work on it so I worked on something else put some time in something else so a friend of mine had created a company out of Stanford University they were doing breath Diagnostics for cancer and I went and visited them last year in San Francisco and loved what they were doing and so we started talking this was you know late last year they you know wanted me to come on board as a strategy advisor so I took on that role and from the point that that happened to now the whole world turned upside down is everybody listening knows so the team has been working for last two years on his breath based Diagnostics they identify biomarkers and breath that could determine different cancers and they also further a future starting to be done with neurological diseases and also infectious diseases so when this happened one of the co-founders is one of the major hospitalists at Stanford he was on the front lines of this phone call with nineteen and one of the major problems he recognized was that patients would come in and just based on oxygen levels and x-rays it was still hard to determine how far or how much lung damage the patient had and therefore they didn't know whether they keep them or let them go and there's a lot of mistakes for me not necessarily by our team but around the world because doctors just didn't have that that right you know enough information to know how severe like for example if you have a 23 year old who seems like they're very sick and you have a 73 year old who seems like they're okay but they seem oxygen levels and this thing limb strains that the same what do you do right 23 year-old who I have one I have one you know breathing machine left who I put on so these decisions were were you know these tough decisions were made you know day in and day out at this hospital so the team went back and remembered some some of the research they were doing and there was a amino acid biomarker that that they they looked into and they quickly realized that this biomarker in breath could help determine how much cell damage the lungs have had so just just show you an audience understand what happens with codeine 19 is your it attacks the lungs and the cells die and if your immune system is not strong and your your stem cell system you know not reproducing then the cells die and it gets filled with collagen so collagen think of it as like cement so now you're gonna be holding your lungs and you've got little cemented pieces the more cement is in your lungs the less you can grieve and eventually you get among and you die so it's a it's a major major breakthrough to be able to figure out which one of those cells you know how much damage your insta mom's therefore you know who he keep who to let go and how long to keep them right because that's another problem the hospital keeps somebody on a breathing machine for ten days when they only needed to be there for five but they didn't know they're just basing it on just oxygen so oxygen levels so so they had this major breakthrough and so we've been all in on helping the company get this out there and get these studies fast-tracked and get this product in the market in your hands of the physicians as soon as possible so we just launched a crowdfunding equity crowdfunding campaign on fundable comm the company is called diagnosed early so you can just google fundable and you'll learn in one of the columns that's new and noteworthy but you can also just google diagnosed early we're gonna have that on the website as well diagnosed early calm and any credit anybody can see the information if you're an accredited investor you can actually request it give all the investment box and the further investment information and where we're giving the opportunity for you know outside investors to come in and take part in this groundbreaking technology that are being produced so we can get this to market as soon as possible all right and I definitely will share that with our audience under the angel investors or venture capital or others that are looking to partner up certainly a a needed field as well as something that sounds pretty exciting and promising so that's awesome so we are we're hitting up towards the end of the episode and I every ember so and I say the same thing of basically every episode so I guess I could just stop saying I always there's always so many more things and I want it that we want I want to talk about and dive into in details that we never get one or two questions one before I always have my last two questions but I'll ask you one more question before my last two questions and so we have everything almost by definition of a serial launcher I you went from eBay drops to franchising to bundling loans to helping book proposals to you know mobile phone and they're in doing that all that industry to mobile phone accessories you're doing you know touch screen and all of that now with the NFL and now you're in the co vid so it seems like you know one is you're all over which is the bad thing you sound very successful but you're kind of weaving in and out of all these different industries and that so how do you how do you pick your decide one where are your next ventures or whatever you know what you're gonna do and where are you gonna put your passion and time and effort on yeah it's a great question so yeah I like to answer that question first by saying you know Kay it does seem like like it's all over with yeah I just want everyone to understand these ventures were all super focused right like two to three years sometimes more where that's all I'm focused on so it all though the industries are multiple different industries I get a you know satisfaction on going into going into an industry that I don't have any preconceived idea about or maybe learn anything prior to what I want to learn or how I want to dive in and what I do is I like to take things that I've learned from one industry and bring them to another right so I've done this multiple times we didn't talk about some patents that I own but I you're not taking the idea and put that into a voice technology patent and I'm part of and I've done you know I've taken the concepts that I've learned and built and I brought them into different industries so for example with medical and what I did now I have the crowdfunding background the team I'm I've joined the strategy they had no idea about crowdfunding they had no idea what it was they didn't see it as an opportunity then I came in and realized that not only is an opportunity but we in this time of quarantine when you can't get out and meet the best here it's the way you could it's actually one of the best ways to do it right because you can get in front of it you know many people as possible without having to go face-to-face and and you know you could you could still navigate the capital raising so I it's just my personality is I like to dive into something new and fresh and learn as if I'm a new you know learning from from the ground up and then to end my you know sort of knowledge and twist what I'm doing and try to bring something innovative to whatever it is I'm working on no that's that's a good good point and so take the skillsets and knowledge and that you have and applying it to new and interesting something it an industry that you find here a project you're fine to be exciting you're fun or new and then imply that as there's a great way to choose or choose where the next path takes you so exactly yeah now we're hitting to the end of the podcast I am gonna ask for last twice two questions I always ask that the end of the podcast so one is what is the worst business is the Earth's our business decision you've made so yeah I made a lot of bad business decisions I think the worst one is is taking on the wrong partners for the wrong reason you know sometimes I think before you take on a partner you really need to get to know them know their skill set and know what they're willing to put in because a lot of time you and if you don't do that you end up putting in a different level of work effort skill you give up more you know then then Aparna so it's always good to make sure that it's really clear from the beginning and you know I've been lucky and did that successfully a few times but a few times I didn't so you know it's hard to have a team when it's when it's not all in by everyone right so I would say that's that's definitely you know has to be up there with the decisions okay so that's the one question worst decision is bringing on bad partners and I always flip the question say now if you're getting someone that was a serial entrepreneur wants to be a serial entrepreneur and hasn't quite broken into the industry anything yet what would be the one piece of advice that you give someone that was wanting to start to start on their entrepreneur journey or either jump into a new startup stop making excuses so we live in a time now where you know let me just give you the you know juxtapose these two times if you wanted to start a business in 1980 right and you went ahead you know 40 years ago and you said I want to start a business do you know how much harder it would have been to start a business in 1980 how little marketing you have maybe the yellow pages if you were lucky you know some local newspapers to get in to meet the right people to get educated to I mean it was so challenging this time in history is better than any other time in history to want to be an entrepreneur you can you can have you can learn about any industry you want to learn about you I mean even if you talk about schooling you know people say well I don't have the right schooling I mean you don't need schooling you could go online and get download courses from MIT for free you could do the same thing with other public universities and and other than that you could just research and study any business you really want to study and it's not you know you could start websites really cheaply wix.com $15 a month will give you a really professional website template you can plug it in with information you could find products or you come up with a product of social media channels that you can reach out to family and friends to buy your products I mean the list goes on so my advice is don't stop making excuses take the first step take one step at a time right we have if you look at how much time we spend on our mobile devices just going on Instagram and this and that in like wasting time everybody can go on there and figure out how much time you're actually wasting I don't know how many people really do it but if you want you can do that take 20 minutes a day save 20 minutes of that time a day right and news that 20 minutes towards your goal of starting a business doing 20 minutes of research a day that'll get you in a month you'll have more information and more you know ways to get started than than ever so there's no excuse I think just stop making excuses and just get started just do it I like that I think that that's probably what keeps people a lot of times that otherwise I don't have the education I don't have the money I don't have the experience on the background don't have the connections whatever your Excuse is just start doing it even if it's you don't know what you're doing figure it out along the way but get started I think it's great advice well thank you for coming on I it's been a really fun discussion it hit on a whole bunch of different topics always wish I had more time but that will wrap it up for today for this episode so thank you again for coming on for those of you that are meeting or want to hear journey started happy to help any way I can I do bands and trademarks with Miller IP law if you want to reach out to us there we're happy to help there if we can connect you up with anybody we're here to help and connect and any way we can we're really just here for the for the startups and small businesses that are wanting it going thank you again David blasting and we want to get you mentioned at the beginning I'll give you your time and then we'll wrap it up people want to get it or contact with you they want to reach out to one of your projects or they want to support your your company with doing the Copa diagnosed so that what's the best way to reach out to you so David Morris that's vor is H at David Morris on Facebook Twitter Linkedin I have a my website is Davie Porsche com so it's really easy to reach out to me I'm always willing to help with questions if anyone has any questions or advice they need diagnosed early comm is our website and we're on fundable as i mentioned earlier and on baby board shock comm you'll find all links to the other ventures and everything mentioned awesome well we will certainly make sure to direct everybody there and hope everybody comes out and support you with all the different things you're doing thank you again for coming on it was great to hear your journey and it was a pleasure to have you on thanks Ted appreciate it English (auto-generated) All Sales Recently uploaded

Take Responsibility

Chris Murphy
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey

6/4/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPTION

take responsibility for everything in the end it's yours you're responsible yep if you do that no matter how bad things go there's a path I'm still standing 14 years later because I did [Music] everybody this is Devon Miller here with another episode of the inventive journey for those of you new to the podcast I'm Devon Miller the host I am a patent and trademark attorney founded my own law firm Miller IP law as well as a serial entrepreneur that focuses on helping startups and small businesses however I can including protecting their businesses patents and trademarks today on the podcast we have Chris Murphy chris is a cybersecurity person that does a lot of in that work and that in that realm of coming up with the great and breakthrough technologies that will hopefully change the world so welcome Chris hi how are you I do it well so tell everybody a little about yourself as far as you started out doing cybersecurity well I started out joining the army to be a mapmaker I was a part of graphic draftsman I've did a little bit of everything you're not in the army and in 81 in computers were just coming so I learned how to build my first computer with my uncle out of Popular Mechanics that's how I came to computers I've been doing it ever since but I've also had to hold the job along the way to survive as I got to where I am so I've been through the journey of the internet watching it evolve and grow as I've been through the journey of watching what were $4000 computers that you can buy for about 30 cents today in a cheap throwaway calculator you know the world has evolved I remember when we first were thinking about the internet we were a BBS's I had two modems one came in and one went out and I leaked to other PBS's so I've been through the road so along the way the internet evolved hmm something was missing and that's kind of where I fit in in that evolution process we skipped a step and that step that we skipped keeps coming back to hurt us so before we dive into jumping back so you went into the army and we didn't even talk about that beforehand so that's an interesting one you went into view mapmaking how did you then make the transition from map making or doing maps over to computers and getting involved with that when I get out of the army after my three years in Fort Belvoir in Fort Bragg there wasn't a whole lot of work in the early 80s it was a factory I left for the army to leave a factory hmm when you come from a factory town those are your options so I went back to the factory but I had up friends that I met through the military started teaching me about computers so one thing led to another a couple of Popular Mechanics went my way and then we start talking about how to assemble them and it turned into a conversation that's still going on at this point in my life oh cool so all from all from going back to the factory having a few people that were interested in sharing that with you to now leading you down the path to doing cybersecurity and in the whole world of how to protect everybody's data yeah the army was critical in learning what security protocols meant if nothing else the army does know how to do secure new security protocols or at least put a good emphasis on that so you get into computers and you start down that path and then so tell us a little bit more about that so you know you started working at a factory started as a hobby and how did that lead to kind of where you're at today I left the factory for RadioShack so I could manage a RadioShack and learn about play with their computers because their computers were better than the ones that I could build it build an expensive habit and I was living in a Radio Shack buying parts anyway remember RadioShack they don't exist anymore I do remember RadioShack so I got that young so it is my home so I went in there and you know as I was learning more about or more about computers these 10 and 12 and 14 year olds would come in and do things with these computers that just blew my mind I was like wow you can do that and it just kept being okay if you can do that I can do this with it and it just was a continual learning process you know it's the nature of everyone's life if you're not always learning I can guarantee you one thing you're slowly decayed because the world is not gonna stop so no that's a very true statement you always got to be adapting evolving and learning otherwise you're gonna get left behind because the world's not gonna stop and wait for you to catch up so that I completely agree with so get it you're shakin with the travelers they did insurance and then I went to I did manufacturing programming basically bringing the first computers to lines for the Japanese in America with the Tochi stealing I'm a moto fine blinking and then evolved into this idea which then consumed the last decade and a half of my life all right so let's talk a little bit about that that's a long time to consider every single idea to consume your life it's not a bad thing it just a long time so you got into and how did you originally kind of come up with the idea I mean you've been obviously working with computers for a while and I've been in that atmosphere but how did you kind what got you to kind of start on that idea down that path my subconscious assembled a bunch of information I had in a way I never considered and beat me to death in one night in a dream literally and this is not a joke I get up in the morning and at that point in time my computer desk was literally right next to my bed because I rolled out of my chair to sleep I rolled over started typing and my my wife kept saying what are you doing tonight oh just leave me alone I got to type this I typed for five days hit a button and they didn't know what I created I swear to god that's the truth hmm that's I got here teach myself the rest of the way what the hell it was and as I learned it blew my mind how profound a your mental knowledge that you bring in all day from all these sources can be reassembled even when you're not paying attention well that is interesting there is certainly an aspect of life where you learn a lot along the way and you don't always know how you will apply it or how it will be applicable and then a lot sometimes it just all comes together and that the perfect storm so to speak or the perfect fashion and that's interesting that it done it all started with a dream so you have the dream you sat down write it all wrote it all out spend some day or a few days on it and then he had to figure out how to implement it so then how did you take that dream and start to make it a reality first I had to show it to some people to explain to me what I created I'm not joking I really didn't understand I somehow applied physical world security protocols to Internet activity okay and that still hasn't been done by anyone else so if you're to have the audience that's you know let's say they're not as computer or tech savvy or don't know as loan lingo as much what would be your very high level or explanations for people as to what you worked on and creative okay if I can ask you three questions I can answer your question with them okay oh it's always always interesting to answer a question or what the questions I go ahead the premises I'm gonna give you a monster box with 500 gold coins in it okay and you can't put it in the bank mm-hmm you can't tell anyone what are you gonna do I'm gonna go spend it as quick as I can oh let's preface that one more wherever you put it you have to put it on a scale and every month you can take ten coins out so for the next fifty months you can have ten ounces of gold that whatever market value is at any point if you ever take more than ten out it all gets taken back now what are you gonna do with it I'm gonna take my ten and then go hot air go bury it or hide it as quick as I can so nobody else finds it until I need it for the next month okay so you're gonna restrict access sir okay now who are you gonna tell about it um probably my wife I'll probably be about it or unless I unless uh unless I maybe my parents maybe my wife maybe my kids maybe not a few so your get dressed so after you restrict access you're gonna choose who you're gonna authorize to have that information sir okay those two questions are what's missing in the Internet okay you'll have to expound a little bit on it so go ahead my bank holds all the treasure of every customer mm-hmm sure they put a website portal so anyone in the world can log on mm-hmm but they know who all their customers are sure okay why do you let's just say you're a small local bank 5,000 local customers really you're the heart of what the banking system should be hmm but you've got a website that introduces 17 billion people actually it's closer to 20 billion devices to your website portal where your customers are so you start your cyber security with 20 billion potential attackers so that you can let 5,000 people get on mm-hmm our security fails yeah so if I were to almost push back or ask the question but I mean the reason usually online that you're doing it is because you're trying to balance not making it too arduous to get access to your money right meaning if I if I put enough barriers and make you know 20 factor authentication you'll make it very hard for accent you know how to get in but nobody will ever want to use the bank because it's gonna take me an hour and a half to log into my account user so how do you make that balance let me agree more that's always the pushback so another question gives you the answer when you go to Walmart and get to the cashier does the cashier reach in your pocket take out your wallet extract the money and put the wallet back in your pocket where do you reach in your pocket pay them and put your take your debit card put it back in your pocket and walk away I certainly hope it's the latter okay but if you're online and easy any entity on the Internet can send data to the bank and the bank assumes you approved it hmm why would it be so difficult for you to open your wallet plug your you plug your debit card into your USB C hit one button and say hey Bank I'm present right now you can approve the charge and then unplug it and put it back in your wallet and when you're not plugged in the bank knows you're not present so you can't you're running a charge no you could certainly do that I mean that with the exception if if somebody sold your card and they did it on your behalf then you they could does still do fraud but it would at least there's no way to eliminate fraud but if you eliminate the guess sure we'll eliminate over three million dollars an hour an online credit card fraud I get that that's certainly that's the security protocol so the question is if you take that number and extrapolate it and then you take all the charge backs and everything else is sucking 190 billion dollars a year out of the economy in fact worth ignoring two basic protocols you restrict access and you actually identify someone rather than assuming if data arrives it came from the person that has the right so let me give you the I'll play devil that and you're getting an attorney that likes it devil's advocate so I'll play devil's advocate for a minute so if your to do that and then you were so let's say you take this an area where you have basically a card reader if you're at home you want to log you know you don't have a card reader don't need a card reader okay okay you're you're taking the concept that we're talking about and applying it to the way you look at it why is it debit card shaped the way it is or credit card shaped the way it is it's shaped that way so it can go through a card reader in an almost entirely digital world where you're doing literally almost everything through a USBC port mm-hmm or our USB port so why keep the form factor of a card when you can change it to a USBC type of device that you just put on your keychain and plug in when you want to be present at the bank one token at the bank eliminates public access provides existence as a factor because if you have to plug it in so what we're verifying is that the card that the bank issued you exists that's a factor a non-data factor and then anything I input at the endpoint is data two factors today literally every single every single company that claims multi or two factor is using endpoint data alone which is one factor that is a scientific fact and that's why cybersecurity fails and it's not anybody's fault but if anybody admits the mistake they're afraid they're gonna end up taking the blame and soda hair realization keeps us right where we are driving off a cliff hopefully we don't we don't fully drive off the cliff yet because I still want to live for at least now so we finally broke through so alright so we take that you have what's a great idea for cybersecurity how to make it true tooth or two-factor authentication to prove that the individual is actually present as opposed to Ella beat all doing it digitally which has its flaws and you take that and then how do you turn that into a business or how do you start to actually take something that's the idea stage get it or have somebody explain it to you come over or come up with our way to implement it then how do you turn that into a business well I don't know how other people did it but I invested literally everything I own and then begged every family member and friend I knew and I continued to do that for 14 years I brought in and that led me to a venture group hmm that led me to concept government contracts GHS recommendations and then they decided that the plan that we were following to build the business turned into we can roll this thing fast for money and two people went in two different directions in the company failed I understood what we owned and they understood how much money they can make and it was to give you an example was the Bezos conversation Bezos did a conversation with a bunch of Harvard Business students in the early days of Amazon and after the proof after the conversation was done the first question was asked so are you going to sell it to one of these big companies are one of these big companies not how are you going to build it [Music] okay if the thing about being an inventor is if you've got a vision that's three years or five years or ten years down the road you have to fight an environment that's trying to shove you into the mistakes that you're pressing five years down the road that they don't see sure no and I completely get that and I mean it is it was interesting you bring up azo so I was listening to another podcast and on my own but it was talking just about how when he was introducing Amazon Prime oh you know it's gonna be two days shipping and everybody said that can't be done it's too expensive and everything else and how you're gonna lose money and it was with the knowledge but yeah we're going to lose money on the front end when we're looking to change this up and to get it to where people are get used to and we can have a system for two days shipping and it took a period of time and then it's certainly been one of their very successful products so completely get that and yeah if I were to take the the counter to Amazon which is not everybody has millions or billions of dollars to burn or to wait until the market catches up and they don't oftentimes have those that much either dollars to you know coming in or cash flow or investors there is almost a tugging tugging a pull right in the one sense you're saying I have the vision I want to build this I can see where this is going in five or ten years and yet if I don't take some money or I don't figure out and monetize it or build it into business it's gonna die in the buying right so we'll never make it to the world because it business runs out of steam runs out of money so how do you balance that I mean you can only go to friends and family or investor so long before they start to get fatigued and before you know they'll do so where is that line or how do you figure out when is when is the point to start taking and then they're figuring out a way to monetize something I always know how to monetize it I never knew when to monetize it hmm okay part of I can't help people with that decision that's a personal thing okay sir I believed in my technology and I was open to many conversations with companies that could have literally made me rich today but it would have required a compromise in the technic technology which would have in the end required a compromise in my integrity and I chose my integrity over money and every time I did that someone would say well why are you doing that I said you know I don't want to be the Oppenheimer who says don't blame me for the bomb I just did the science well right now my patents control the science if I let them turn to a bomb that I'm responsible now other people may not look at it that way but I did okay and so so then let's say you have you know the yeah the keys to the kingdom so to speak or you have the way to do it do you is it better to and this hypothetical questions are better to keep it you know for yourself or no not not let it out into the world so to speak because there's a fear that I may be used in adverse or ways right so a lot of times with technology you can introduce it and it can be used for a lot of good and it can be used for a lot of bad right so you take the internet in as example there is a lot of good is connected people right now people can connect with zoom they can try and keep doing with their business they can have email they can have access to more information than we have you know at any point previous and in history any on the other hand you can also do criminal activities you can do everything else and yet if you never existed if you never introduced the internet for fear that it would be used for bad you would also never have to good so what you know and this is for you but how do you make that balance is to hey hold it hold on to this too long it's never going to do all the good that it could out of fear of the bad I've never not been introducing it I have explained it in such detail that someone can literally pick it up and duplicate every line of code and make it work hey teaching and showing is not what it is it wasn't held back for anything other than okay everybody tracks for every move in the internet sure but they still are making an assumption they're assuming the person they're tracking is you they may track five or six people and they might intermingle five or six people and so you're really not positive about someone but you have a really good idea okay now I provide a method where I can provide absolute assurance that you are you and I could track every move you make that changes everything substantially sure and our technology provides an ability by creating a secure class in a secure environment to track literally every move you make with a little degree of assurance that takes out the assumption there's one of-a-kind device assigned to one of a kind person that has a one-of-a-kind password for your pin for it you were to first to be present that one person's device and pin has to be present if you tell someone then you're liable you know why you don't get charged for fraudulent credit card charges because the bank can't defend their process in court hey someone sends me data I assumed it was you you're responsible for it they can't defend the process of court that facilitates crime but if the bank knew every time that date arrived it was absolutely you then they'd know when not to approve it sure no I get all that no those are good point I'll still people wanted to put it into into browsing type of things and they wanted to use it to accurately content mine about an individual's activity and every time a partner came to the table that was where they wanted to go and that was someplace I we created a secure class we didn't put a spying tool with absolute assurance in the marketplace there are different things they can be used different ways in a secure environment you don't browse cuz you know you wouldn't want someone browsing through the yard where you hid your gold would you you only want the people in the yard where the people are the people you told to go in the yard sure that's the fair assumption there's over it's for a bank to say I want you to be able to browse my website when really when I'm a customer when I want to go to the bank I should plug in my tart card and go to the bank the bank doesn't need to have a website open 24 hours a day 7 days a week 220 billion people so that I can plug in a debit card to prove that I'm there they already gave me a debtor Kirk sure no that's a fair point then so jumping court so we we could go down that rabbit hole for a very long time and it'd be fun conversation but then we'd go we'd spend way too long for anybody else want to listen so we're to jump to that and say oK we've got all that in mind we've kind of gone through the pluses and minuses kind of how they're you know maintaining control for so it doesn't use isn't used for bad purposes you know booster are coming up the original idea going out friends families you know having helped to invest so what's the plan to roll it out now or what's there you know how's that how's the business going to evolve so that you can still introduce sake technology do good in the world keep the control and keep moving it forward ten months ago I went to a financial fiduciary mmm explained everything I had everything all the technology the patents the research the reports from the Department of Homeland Security all of the stuff that was like he looked at it and said holy I can't believe anybody has this much information I said what can you do I need to raise some money hmm I don't know the first thing about business and this is where a scientist always gets screwed because we think we're saying one thing business people are saying another thing and we keep talking past each other and nothing seems to work Tim Harper my financial manager guy who is now my culture person and operating company we don't talk past each other so when we go in conversations and everybody's talking past me because the scientist is hearing one thing and the business person is saying something different tim has been able to bridge that communication gap since the end we've assembled our material put our marketing plan together they've got all the published material ready to go we're probably 30 40 days from complete funding the problem was coronavirus so we would have been there already but you know is what it is just slowed things down but for me the only path to see I mean someone who was committed by law because they're fiduciaries and assigned a fiduciary agreement to act in my best interest to help me learn the things I don't know because we all have enough knowledge in areas to be dangerous most of us are ashamed to admit that we don't have enough to be knowledgeable I know where I know enough to be dangerous and don't have enough knowledge to be functional and so I had to find that piece and I found that in Tim and he found Lance and we've now started assembling and you know the only thing that I requires from everybody should deal with me in every way and everyone we deal with with integrity if you don't there's a door I don't want your loyalty me loyalty to be to me I wanted to integrity they beat me up regularly because I don't understand things and they teach me and I'm not always an easy person to teach but I also do the same thing to them and that is what I believe will bring us to the success part of this having a team that has the same clear vision and they deal with each other with integrity summarize that'd be then with the idea that basically you know the week you know what you know and you know what you don't know in the sense you know your weaknesses you know where your strengths are and then technology and the science and for the business side and that you find someone that you can trust that maybe you know can speak the language and maybe you can tour the year that's you're not focused on and then you bring them into the business to help run that part of the business that isn't your expertise your talent set so that you can have a well-rounded team is that a fair summary yes and the hardest thing for inventors to do is admit they don't know something because they know everything about what they invented yeah literally they know everything about what they invented they invented it they have to know everything well no they're miners for a lot of fun to do is they can't admit they don't know beyond what they already know so that's the hardest I was feeling did you get into the trap that you think that hey if I can come up with the world's best widget you know the best product the by definition people be pounding down my doors to do that and there's always never the case there was a business overlay to that and have the error how to navigate both sides of it and yet we think that you know we know the product and we've know everything we need to so I think that's a good point but we are bumping up Swartz a walk through that cooperative yeah the key is a cooperative relationship and what my experience until I found a fiduciary was that he's always starting to have comfort our cooperative and then turn confrontational when one part party wanted to go one way and another party wanted to go another trial they treated beginning hey it's a very good point so hey well we're jump or bumping up against towards the end of the podcast it's always always get to the end of every episode and I always want to talk a whole lot more and there's always a lot more rabbit holes to go down and a lot more fun conversations to have but as we wrap it up I always ask two questions at the end of the podcast and so I'll ask you the same as the other guests that have been on and the first one is so what's the worst business decision you made and give you the context I always ask that in the sense we always get to hear the highlights of the business how I made the right decisions or I took the right path and now you know everything worked out type of thing but we often time to learn as much or more from the mistakes that we or others that may so with that what's what would be the worst business is this business decision you've made not to time to focus early on learning what the business side with I was too focused on the technology and that's where I watched the first company fall apart is without that without someone bringing the two pieces together they just kept moving in different directions if I could go back and do anything differently I would have worked harder with the business people to keep us with the same vision okay no that's a very good good thought so I think that recognizing that early on and oftentimes you know save a business or otherwise keep you from making it you know things not working out or not having the plan is how to move forward so I think that's a very good very good point and something to learn from okay second question is if you're having someone that was wanting getting a start up maybe in cybersecurity or in the computers or technology they're just getting into it what would be the piece of advice that you would give them take responsibility for everything in the end it's yours you're responsible it doesn't matter who screwed up where it's still your fault yep if you do that no matter how bad things go there's a path I'm still standing 14 years later because I did that there's path if you know that you contributed no that's very good if you don't pass a buck and you know at the end of the day you're the one responsible for what your company and what your business does and you can make sure you know then you'll take a much different perspective of making decision so I think that's that's a great piece of advice well well with that we're gonna wrap up this episode I greatly appreciate you coming on it has been an absolute pleasure always wish we had more time but that's how life is you always wish you had more time for everything so thank you very much for coming on for those of the viewers that are those listeners and viewers if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast feel free to apply for the podcast you can just go to our website inventive journey.com and apply for those of you that are looking or along your inventive journey and need help with patents or trademarks we're a hair mill RFP we're here to help and for everybody else we wish you the best journey and good luck on taking your path thank you again Chris and it's been a pleasure to have you on thank you you English (auto-generated) All Recently uploaded Watched

Don't Talk to Friends and Family

Bill Lear

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

6/2/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPTION

yeah like you might think it's a good idea but the markets gonna tell you whether it's a good idea and so you know like you had mentioned earlier don't talk to friends and family talk to talk to people you don't know [Music] hey everybody this is Devin miller here at the inventive journey welcome back to another great episode for those who are new to the podcast I'm a patent and trademark attorney here at Miller I peel off out of my own law firm as well as the perpetual serial entrepreneur here to help the startups and small businesses with their inventive journey and so today on on the episode we have bill on here bill will introduce himself a bit more he's a physician that also came up with a great new way to to do sutures and so an interesting conversation I'm looking forward to it so welcome bill yeah thanks Devon thanks for having me Sam I always really jump in is there a difference between physicians and doctors I said physicians and I thought well maybe is a doctor and I don't know if there's a difference so well you know I mean a doctor I guess like you could have a doctor of medicine or Doctor of Philosophy but yeah that's the same question I have for you is there a difference in a lawyer and an attorney there's absolutely zero difference between a lawyer you can say a lawyer attorney I don't know I'm sure there are other words that are less they're less flattering to people that know the exact same yeah so yeah so I'm happy to be on Devon thanks for for having me on the door off there just talking I had that that was a question go ahead with the introduction say I'm an I'm a dermatologist I've been in private practice now for about 12 years and but I also do something called Mohs surgery which is skin cancer surgery so if you had a skin cancer on your face we would remove it and within 20 to 30 minutes we would take that piece we process it in the lab to make sure it's clear of cancer but after that process is done you've got a whole leg or your arm or wherever that cancer happens and so I do a lot of reconstruction work as well those blooms and so the products you know that that we came up with that I came up with the suture Garrett products they're they're all born out of problems that I had as a surgeon closing my own wounds okay and you can for those that may not know as well what a dermatologist is because there's a whole bunch of ologists out there that I always get confused where there's the people to work out feet or the people who work that skid or the people that work out things I don't even know so what's the dermatologist or give that a quick explanation a dermatologist is an expert in the hair the skin and the nails okay so if you have a problem with your hair your skin or your nails a dermatologist is is who you would see and so for me I've I've specialized in in skin cancer and so most skin cancers dealt with in America by by most surgeons MOH s it's named after a guy it's not an acronym his name is Frederick Mohs and there's there's also the Mohs hardness scale and in geology but that's that's a different thing and so it's a guy's name Frederick Mohs em OHS okay and so in jumping to the the the quick rabbit hole so you are along with a lot of people and I guess skin cancer skin cancer surgery is a not as an elective surgery or a dot essential surgery is that right right and so yeah in most states would be considered non urgent and so there's there's there's large organizations expert organizations that look at cancer and the big one is the NCCN and so the NCCN came out with kovat recommendations for many cancers and for skin cancer for most skin cancers including most melanomas you can delay treatment by up to three months so I haven't been doing any skin cancer surgery for the past six six weeks the plan is that we would like to have some testing so that we test people point-of-care before we do their surgery but you know it's it's difficult to buy toilet paper let alone cope with testing equipment right now but anyway that's that's our plan for the plant board is that we we want to get back to doing skin cancer surgery but we want to do it in a way that's safe for the patient and also for our staff okay this is an interesting point everybody's having a little bit with different issues with kovetz so just one that I'm like I see oh I see you always hear the word cancer and you're like well that seems like it's kind of a do or die or more critical thing so this is one that was interesting that that kind of gets in the state a lot of the other categories of ones that holding off for now until they can figure out how to adequately deal with that and make sure it's safe so and a lot of our patients are in the risk are in the risk category a lot of our patients are elderly and have comorbidities and so we really need to be mindful and a lot of skin cancer is not acutely lethal it's not like you're gonna get a basal cell cancer and die of it in a month time a lot of these things are more it's not that you don't want to deal with it but you've got weeks to months to deal with it okay I was always just hear the word cancer and if a doctor ever told me I had cancer no matter what the cancer is I'm sure I'd be freaking out a little right yeah there is that so all that is the rabbit hole which is fun to go down but we'll get to the a bit of more of your journey as far as so you obviously are continuing to be in a practicing surgeon and be a dermatologist and but you also got going on a startup that's more on the medical device side so maybe tell a little bit about that how you got into it how you kind of these way maybe to jump from just being a surgeon to also wanting to be part of a startup or a business yeah you know I've always been kind of like a tinkerer at heart and like even when I was in high school I got into I got myself into the Ottawa Heart Institute doing molecular biology and I continued that all the way through Medical School and and I really enjoyed tinkering with that and and even though I'm not an academic direct Paulo gist I still enjoy publishing and read book chapters and so I've always kind of had a tinkerer remind and then when I was a fellow in most surgery at University Washington I worked with or worked with somebody who had come up with a medical device and I thought oh you know it's really cool to publish things in journal articles and the text books but I thought wow like to come up with something in my mind and have a tangible product that people are buying and it's helping people hmm I thought that'd be a real kind of like cool legacy almost if that's the right word and and so that was kind of always a fascination for me if you will and so I had just written a book chapter in which I had learned a lot and learned a lot about things we know about wound closure and don't things that you think we know but larger we don't really know the and kind of like unveiled some of the dogma that I no longer necessarily believe it and after writing this chapter I was holding my three-month-old daughter I have two daughters and so she was three months at the time and all this was like her plating in my mind like some of the things that I thought I knew but wound closure and some of the problems I have and kind of this fascination I had had from this mentor and I was sketching a night table at the time and I start instead sketching out some designs that would help me solve some of the problems I had in closing wounds that I put on people every day and so this was in the middle of the day so I go down and tell my wife like oh you know I think I have some ideas and that's how and that was 2815 that was May of 2015 so pretty much five years ago and it's that's how my inventive journey started so another aside so what happened to the Knights dead did you ever do anything with it the sketch is still not completed I have the sketch book that I was getting that in and it kind of trailed off and I didn't stay to have all these diary luminite dad you said hey I could do a nightstand or I could do a suture I'll go to this instead yeah well you'll probably enjoy that your kids maybe not quite so much cool so you came up with the idea to do it there you know kind of started to sketch or said hey maybe a suture I think that maybe you I'm on to something can do this a little bit better or different than what others are out there so then what was the next step so you kind of have what is a rough sketch or an idea and then where did you take it well you know I had watched enough shirt thing to know like patents or a thing and that's about all I really knew at the time but so I painted myself with a local patent firm and you know we started with a patent with a prior art search I didn't I didn't do any customer discovery I kind of thought well I'm the customer so I started with patent prior art search which which looked pretty clean and I submitted a provisional patent and the next thing I did in order to kind of Dearest the idea is I found a physician pitch competition in it was in Arizona and it was a couple of really great guys that had a company called synapse at the time and so they would work with physician inventors and they ran this like weekend course if you will like a boot camp almost in an IP and manufacturing and fundraising and regulatory and everything kind of like everything you need in med tech albeit out of the deep level but no to kind of get the landscape and so I went to this and at the end of this thing was a pitch competition and there were eight teams that were presenting and I was my team and at a loved one all right and I and I and I won and and and that was kind of a little bit of a validation for me so I won $5,000 but more importantly I want to validation that you know I pitched to like I don't know maybe 80 or 100 people and maybe something to this so that was kind of that was in that was kind of a reassurance if you will and then from there I decided to go deeper and so we did a the next the next step I did is I thought you know so my device is a class 1 device so the FDA has three classes class one is a band-aid something that's more risk to the patient class 2 would be something like a traditional surgical suture which goes into the patient because mine is not a suture so it's a class its class 1 class 3 would be a pacemaker or something that's life-sustaining and if it fails or has any problems the patient would be at great risk so class 1 devices are low barrier to entry and also mine doesn't need what's called a 510 K 510 K exam and so basically a class 1 5 10 Kings and medical devices the way you want to start in many ways because the average cost to market of a class 2 device is about twenty to thirty million dollars of a class three device is about a hundred million dollars the average costs to market for a class one device in about a million dollars and so which is still time to change but that but you know for a solo physician it's a nice way to start is if you can think of a class one device I didn't necessarily start out thinking of a classroom device but it just was lucky for me that what I had thought of was a class one device and so early on I kind of acted after this competition I connected with the regulatory person who's still my regulatory person and I connected with a designer an engineer who still does all my CAD work and design work I connected with an IP law firm which is no longer my advocate law firm but but I I can't be oh god you'll see the bright side and you'll come over to Miller IQ for another day and so you know it helped me network and the network is the network is important it was really important in in this so after I had set up a network and realized yeah I'm class 1 and I've got some IP going then I had to set up some manufacturing because I wanted to do an animal study because even though this is a classroom device I wanted to make sure that it did something and that it was safe I don't need animal studies it's just I kind of guess I have a high ethical bar and I want to know that what I was I wanted to put it not on an animal before I put it on stir construction and by the way everything I'm describing his bootstraps right now so this was me in my life right in text and so so we did an animal study or in-state and we were really happy with that and then after the animal study that would have that would have finished and kind of like early 2016 my my wife Jen she got involved in an accelerator and an accelerator incubator kind of thing and for for listeners who don't know what that is that's basically like you'll have mentors who work with you in your business and regardless of what business you're in there are certain good practices that that you should take on and what we really learned in the accelerator program is lean methodology so lean methodology is something that was developed by a Steve Blank down in in Stanford and it's a really great method to quickly figure out if your idea has merit before burning a whole ton of cash on it and the gist of it is that you get out of the building the number one phrase that Steve Blank would be used would be get out of the building you get out of the building and you start talking to people about your idea and so for us that's getting out of the building getting out of her own head and saying this is what I think is important a D&C and going out and and actually not even pitching your product just going out and saying hey you know tell me about wound closure tell me of our problems that you have with Clojure and then only at the end of the process maybe not even necessarily saying well hey I've got this what are you kind of think about and so Jen did an incredibly useful thing that I would have actually done sooner if I had known more about it where she went out and interviewed about fifty or hundred surgeons and in the process of doing that and we did what you might call a our first pivot if everything is a good thing you know pivoting is you're going in one direction and then you pivot and go in another direction and we did a bit of a pivot on the product we 30 feet without getting too much in the weeds we thought the product would be useful for for one application the initial iteration of the search regard device which is which is this device had a locking mechanism so it locked the suture so you didn't even need to tie a knot the problem of doing that is it made manufacturing or difficult and having a secure knot was difficult and as we talk to surgeons most surgeons said well we don't care that it ties the knot we can tie the knot but we want it to be softer and so that diving it because that's always an interest because a lot of time to get through pivot but you always have the problem of sometimes you get so invested in the idea you've been so far along the or hey I don't want to switch gears I I think this is a grand you almost kind of you know talked yourself into it even though it may be a good idea so was it an easy to pivot or did it take you a little while to kind of come to an acceptance if that's what you should do or have you know what was that idea a process of hey we need to adjust things yeah I guess I'm like I'm a little bit lucky cuz I was never married to the I I was never married to my original ideas and I thought you know I I always had the vision that I want to success I want a successful product I don't want my product to be successful and I do think there's a difference there and so I was very open and I wanted I wanted her critical feedback early and often and I and that's why I wish I had discovered lean method sooner because that's what you get is you know when you're going at especially it's a doctor's into the surgeons they're gonna give you a harsh critical feedback and that's what you want you want the harsh critical feedback early you know rather than later like you know you want it to be ready aim fire not fire aim aim aim aim aim at potential markets and so yeah when surgeons said hey we don't like this original design and we wanted to be softer did it uh immediately I thought well okay I'm getting great feedback here they're not saying they don't like the idea they're just saying like they're saying they're validating the problem which is very it's just that they're questioning the solution so that was fantastic they're validating the problem I just need to come up with a solution that meets their needs and so I did I worked with her does not with the designer and I would come up with ideas and basically it was it was advantageous in many ways because the the prior art didn't really have the solution that people wanted and the solution basically without getting too much going on here what people wanted was they want to the suture bridge and this is what and there was the receipt reviews in the past that they were very rigid what we did is we took it and made it very flexible so it's much softer on the skin but if Jen had never done the customer discovery we would have never gotten to a better suture bridge I know it's very interesting you add it so almost kind of a couple points and there's one is to get out and to and it's usually better when you do and sure you already know that you do the customer's discovery to not go to all your friends and family and say what do you think is they're all gonna be too nice you're gonna tell you that's a great idea even if they would never buy it be with these horrible idea or a great idea they'll never tell you that and so you never get that good feedback but just go away that hit the streets or hit people that are indifferent or impartial that it'll tell you they I would buy that or no I would never buy that but at least you get that feedback so that's interesting so then jumping on just a little bit ahead and kind of based on when we talked so made the first pivot which was to go over to more of the flexible suture and then do the bridge that address that need and then he got to a point you know you've been as you already mentioned been self funding for a bit or for the whole process up until that point and then decided you maybe needed to do it a bit of a race and maybe needed to restructuring things a little bit bring out maybe a CEO move the CTO all that so how did that kind of go or what what brought about that and how did you make that transition yeah so we did a lot of we had a lot of customer discovery and then after the customer discovery there was getting the product to the point where we felt that it was ready for human use so so we in the summer of 2017 we're now in 2017 and we had we had prototypes or we felt we wanted to do some biomechanical testing and so we were still self funding everything but what we because we had worked with Oregon State for our animal study and also for the accelerator we were able Jan was able to get some grant money to get a couple of engineering summer students and so we took the prototypes and we did some biomechanical testing with the prototypes because we really wanted to be risk everything before we put it in a human and so that summer we worked with them and so we got a little grant money from them and then Jen and I reached at the OSU for a small amount of seed money just to say hey let's not keep burning all of our own money on this let's get other people involved and not only because we want to not use our own money but because those people have a network and so there's you know there's concept of like smart money these are bringing out money from OSU is those a number of things number one it cuts my own personal burn rate that we have to put into the company but number two it makes it invested in it and number three they're an investor in the company that has benefit you know you can put that on your website and say you know whether OSU is now investing in us and that that's a that's a mark of something that we thought was valuable so we had we reached up to OSU they gave us small amount of money but enough that we could do our first manufacturing run in biocompatible materials that we could make a bridge for human use and so the first the first human use was in 2017 in December and it was under investigation use only and it went well but again we had to pivot because initially we hoped that we could retain the bridge for up to a couple of weeks but it quickly became apparent that there was fluid that would happen under the bridge so we pivoted then to say hey this is not a device that lets you close wounds and leave the device in rather you stretch the wound and so skin has an amazing ability to stretch and a wrap in a period of time so this bridge like you take a suture put it under a very large amounts of strain or stress I should say and stretch the wound closed and so that helps you avoid flaps and grass but again it was a pivot we didn't pivot in the actual product we pivoted and how it worked so by now we're into 2018 and we've been Gemini basically the two of us not basically the two of us had been churning on this for a long time and we still didn't have any patents when we had some publications we knew it worked we knew there was a market but we needed we needed some help so we had an advisor Dan Lana's in skiing who's plastic surgeon and he was retiring from plastic surgery he's relatively young because he's retiring still and so we said to him you know we're getting real tired here you know about full time surgeon gentle full-time mom you know we need some help and so he said well you know I've always wanted to be the CEO of a company and he really believed in it so we said okay you're CEO so we gave him a chunk of equity and which was the best thing we ever did real and so he came on he was very good with the patents he helped you work the patent attorneys and was really good helping us get our first path we now have five patents back there but but you know the plaques that they sell you after you get and so and so so he was very instrumental in that and then we realized too like you know we don't want to keep churning our own money into this and so Jen managed to get us like another hundred K of not other money but we knew we needed more money than that for regulatory and manufacturing and IP and everything else so so so anyway Dan came on and then he did a raise and yeah so that was in 2018 to be a soft sale like we did the soft sales launch in in gosh when was that November what do we do our soft sales launch November 2018 okay so one or one more question to the dropper to dive into just a bit deeper so you bring the CEO on did you bed em did you know him before did you just get a nice how did you know how did you make the decision hey this is the guy that won we want to give more control over to and give equity to and we think this is the person that would make a good you know good team member he had been an advisor with us for a few months we didn't know him deeply it was basically a leap of faith hmm you know like he again he had been an advisor with us for maybe six to nine months and he was I guess the thing is is he was passionate about the idea you know number one is I want people who are into it and he has a lot of credibility and we just had a feeling that we could work well with him and and we have cool we're reaching up kind of towards the end of the the time of the podcast always always feel like whenever I get to the end of these and there's about 20 more things I'd loved talk about and never have all the time to talk about it so it's always a good sign that it's a fun conversation but so I always end the podcast with a couple couple questions and so I'll throw match first question is always so if you - what do you think is the biggest business mistake that you made you know this is kind of with the idea that you know really you're you're looking at it is you always gonna hear the highlight reels right so you get to hear how everybody they worked really hard they stayed up nice and weekends and it was an overnight success type of a thing but that a very very rarely the case and there's always things that you wish you could go back and change your mistakes you made so what would you be your biggest business mistake oh it would have been nice to start lean methods earlier I think and you know pivoting pivoting sooner like I mean this this bridge while it's still you know a good product for us the the newer product that we have which is the hammy guard which is an adhesive kind of urgent you know it has a lot broader applicability and I think if at an early stage we have started with customer discovery because we didn't launch the heavy guard until January of this year and I think if we had started more aggressively doing customer discovery and really listening even more customers we would have come because I had this idea years ago we would have come to this idea earlier so again customers gotra need methods is where that all right so iterate quickly pivot when you need to and discover talk with the customers earlier yeah okay yeah second question that I always throw out is so let's say you had somebody who wanted to get into maybe the MIT was maybe a doctor or wanted to get into the medical device I Brown had maybe an idea they sketched as they were sketch of the nightstand or whatever they were sketching on but they wanted to get into that kind of a realm in that industry what advice would you give to him yeah duly Methos yeah like you might think it's a good idea but the market is going to tell you whether it's a good idea and so you know like you had mentioned earlier don't talk to friends and family talk to talk to people you don't know talk to harsh critics like you might think it's one of the best the money comes to know I was we applied for SBIR and so you know and I mention the SBIR and they Tommy got some pretty people you devoted all talk to her heard feedback from the NIH people who reviewed the application and we didn't have chose to go and apply for an SBIR again but actually some of the feedback we got in that SBIR was really helpful you know they told us to do a finite element analysis and finite element analysis now one of our key pictures that we had on our website for the handi yard because we started doing finite element analysis we started doing more biomechanics and they were the ones that told us to do that so you know I almost feel like writing a thank-you letter to the NIH Harris Piro is the best customers go with it and so that kind of harsh early criticism is what helps lead to you know what will be you know kind of the the success and getting to that as soon as you can you'll burn less money getting there alright so lean methods make sure to be here you're an evangelist of that and yeah ready or promoter of that so that's cool well those are you said both I think great things both to learn with as far as mistakes made as well as the advice given so well thank you for coming on it's been a fun time and I always enjoy hearing everybody's inventive journey before we are kind of wrap things up what is a way that if people are interested whether they're a doctor and want to use your product or they want to get involved or they're looking for someone to give them feedback on their idea what's a way to to get there get in touch with you oh yes intercom su tu r e and then G ard calm and then I'm bill at sutured are calm perfect we will also put those on the show notes so anybody that's interested or wants to reach out to you can do that as well well thanks again for coming on and been a pleasure for those of the listening audience if you're having an inventive journey that you want to share you can always go to the inventive journey or just inventive journey and apply to be a guest and if you if you're in need of any help along your journey with patents and trademarks certainly feel free to reach out and we're happy to help with any patents or trademark needs and otherwise good luck with your journey and may your journey be smooth so thanks again for coming on and hope to hear from you and your about your journey again in the future thanks dad Thanks you English (auto-generated) All Recently uploaded Watched

Emotional Security in the 

Face of Rejection 

Laura Gardner

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

5/28/2020

Or listen using the plugin below:

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPTION

you have to be emotionally secure enough to face what feels like a lot of rejection from the market everybody this is Devin Miller here with another episode of the inventive journey as a reminder to all the new listeners I'm Devin Miller I am a serial entrepreneur as well as the founder and managing partner Miller IP law where we help startups and small businesses with patents trademarks and copyrights so the inventive journey takes us through different journeys of inventors and businesspeople and CEOs and founders and all everybody else has involved with business and their journey and what they're doing and we gonna hear a little bit about their past so we have a great guest on today Laura and excited to have her on tell a little bit about her journey and where she's at so with that Laura rather than me give the introduce induction I'll let you do that yourself because I'm sure you'll do a much better job than I would so maybe introduce yourself a little bit and what you're doing okay well my name is Laura Gardner I have been out on my own either consulting or for a brief period of time working at a startup now I have my own startup and my journey has been a very interesting one I started out in life wanting to be a doctor I did actually become an MD I practiced women's health for a while general practice and that I decided I wanted to have a bigger impact and I was having one patient at a time so I went into public health and from there I got persuaded by the head of the department to stay on and get doctorate in health economics and since then I've been doing a lot of healthcare analytics and building health care suite of products that I've invented okay so yeah so let's dive into it so you were kind of a lot of good things in there so you started out with the the healthcare industry and a lot of doing that and becoming a doctor and what you know needs to mention a little bit about you know I can either make that impact on you know one person at a time and doing that or I can shift gears a little bit and have a much broader reach or help out more people at for any given time what made you decide to make that jump or make that switch how did you decide hey I want to jump over from a doctor being you know women's health and and helping those people out to doing more of the business side and entrepreneur and making more and helping out more people well it really was a function of timing because at the time the healthcare industry was just getting used to the introduction of a new what was then a new type of payment system called er G's in the hospital and everybody was very concerned about dr DS and what impact they would have and there was a lot of money flowing for research looking at the impact dr G's and for that for the listening audience what's a Dr Dee year that's just so they know that nomenclature so it was a new way of payment hospital paying hospitals based on the diagnosis related groups so that's what DRG stands for diagnosis related group okay and it involved instead of paying every bill every six hundred dollar aspirin the hospital payments for inpatients this is would be lumped into one one flat fee payment depending on how complex and and intensive the DRG was okay no but that's that's a good explanation so kind of with all of that and he's jumped into that and there was a matter of timing I know one thing we talked a little bit of previously is me also you got into machine learning before machine learning was cooler before it was kind of the bad word or either or the fat you know as far as everybody always likes this now say machine learning your AI or anything about but you know maybe are touched a little bit on that so as you're kind of going more into the consulting role and getting or moving on or looking to more of helping people out on a larger scale how did that all mix in with mission machine learning well when I transitioned from general practice into public health and I studied at this School of Public Health at UC Berkeley part of the curriculum was learning this relatively new field of data exploration and analysis and at the time it was just called statistical analysis and what we did was we built models looked at an existing data set to see what it would tell us what it would teach us about what to expect in an untested dataset and the methods that we used were all statistical analysis options including linear regression logistic regression forecasting and you know various other statistical procedures that were not called anything special they were not called machine learning at the time but over the years people began to see the potential for these models which were built and run on data and they began to see that the me putting the data in hands of the machine to extract information was turning out to be far more effective and efficient than trying to extrapolate from hand analysis what might be going on so that's when it started to become machine learning and what what I was doing was definitely a part of machine learning but it wasn't the whole thing there's a whole side of machine learning that looks at learning from each new record that comes through and that would be more like what we would call a neural network where each new piece that comes through resets the parameters and that that's not what I was doing but I was learning about that and so I feel like I've been in the field since before it was a thing oh that's the a you were very forward-thinking maybe to give and I think you know we touched on it a bit you know one of the applications are kind of as you're doing what I would call it you know what we call today at least the aspect of machine learning I think you mentioned one was kind of looking at employee injury or if somebody got injured and whether or not you know what that might cost or how quickly they'd get back to work or some of those things maybe give a bit of an idea or background a little bit more on what was one of the applications when so you jumped over from women's health started doing some machine learning and then you jump you know as you applied this give it maybe a bit of background on that well so I I did some consulting shortly after I left school and then I was offered a very exciting project in the workers comp field so I transitioned from the general health care sphere that I had been focusing on in grad school and I started building up some expertise in workers compensation which is the field health care that takes care of injured workers and also not just delivers the health care but also delivers the wage replacement that they need when they're out of work for an extended period of time so I found that a very rewarding area to be in and I the first project I had was to build an outcomes-based provider network and by that we meant looking at the injured worker their course of injury their ultimate outcome how much was paid to them and how well they did and building a predictive model that could help us decide when the doctor was performing well and when they weren't that was one project and it gave me the skills to do that kind of work but the Bell didn't ring for several years I found myself do doing that project as well as the one you mentioned where I forecasted how expensive and injured workers claim was going to be and both of those things were in pretty high demand low that workers comp clients that I was meeting and I was getting a lot of work to do those projects but I was finding myself dissatisfied with how my work was being utilized in that I would do the project it would take a month or two months or whatever and then I would hand the clan a report with some graphics that showed some combinations of doctors and specialties and injury types and crosstab tables basically that gave information about the data and the results and I found myself very dissatisfied with what happened to my reports which is that the client that had requested the project would read the report maybe circulated to their team and then we'd get put on the shelf and nothing would it be would ever be done with it because mainly they didn't have the tools to change practice at their at their place of employment so while they found my report on my findings very interesting they didn't know how to put them into practice and I realized very early on that I was going to have to find a partner who could help develop these standalone projects into standalone software products that the clients could then use over and over again to find the high cost claims or find the efficient doctors or whatever they were looking for find a doctor with the specialty of orthopedics in the Reading area you know that's how fine-tuned the my micro analyses on my projects could get with a computerized version that's what I set out to do was to find a partner who could help me do that oh yeah so you made then you made a product or project or product based on that if I remember our kind of our previous conversation that you then licensed out and then you started to generate income and otherwise have a bit more control is that right that's right so and tell me so in the Wynn self bias or that I introduced at the beginning I'm patent and trademark attorneys so what did you license out because that's you know a lot of times you have companies or businesses and wanting to get a licensing or sometimes they really dislike the innovation part or the part that you get to create stuff they don't always want to take it all the way to market or have to be the business site of it so how did you get into licensing or how did that work or give me a bit more of a give us a bit more idea of how that played out okay well I so I found myself doing these two projects over and over again for different customers and I was trying to think of a way that I could automate the part of developing the data that was similar across all clients rather than me doing all of that analytic work over and over again when it was essentially the same model the same analysis just different data so really what came to mind was something a friend said to me which was I would I really wish I could be helping people in my sleep you know build something that yeah would continue even when I wasn't involved with it anymore and that really stuck with me and I started thinking how can I turn these consulting projects into software that would be available to people whether I was there or not whether I was updating their product or not so I I luckily hooked up with a colleague of mine who was very interested in helping me and had skills to build a rudimentary but functioning software as a service product for each of my two products and so I had help building them into SAS products but once I had done that I was then able to license the use of the algorithms and what the machine had learned so with Mussina had learned became knowledge that fed back into the customers database and that's why it's called machine learning is because there's a feedback loop and so I built these two products and I quickly found customers that were very interested in licensing them including one of the customers that had done it with me as a consulting project and now was he was very excited to get it as a software product so these two products lived on as rudimentary software products for about five years and then I made the acquaintance of a gentleman who was working for a startup that was focused on the hospital sector and they were finding themselves very busy with that but interested in branching out and [Music] building some products for the workers compensation market and he found me through a LinkedIn search and asked me if I would like to be involved in that and when I told him what I was doing and the two products that I had invented and that I had already started licensing them and he got he actually got anxious about that and he said you know it looks like what you're doing is exactly what we want to do and so we're gonna end up being competitors so maybe we shouldn't talk anymore and I thought about that for a day or two and then I called him back and I said look if what I'm doing is so close to what you want to be doing and you folks have a software development team that can do what I need to have done we should just team up and it was my reaching out and proposing that that really changed my life because he liked the idea he made me a job offer on the spot to come on board as vice president products and help them build out my two software products and so that's what I did I joined their team I worked on my two products as VP of products for a while a couple of years and then his team got spun off from that original company and it became its own company and I continued to work for them and I got promoted to chief scientist and I was in charge of the data science team that was working on my two products and it was just very exciting because I felt like I had given birth to these two babies and they were being well taken care of by this company and I was very happy to be there and be part of it and that's that's a good way it almost seems like you know that's almost a commented analogy is hey it's almost like birthing and raising a child and going through the full process of seeing it from birth all the way to growing up sometimes old Asia sometimes it doesn't quite make it there but it's always a lot of analogies with that so maybe jumping now because I think that's it pretty interesting so now you did that you did that for a while with that company and then correct me if I'm wrong then you jumped over to what is your current project or your current so now when it sounds like you made an exit or you know you decided that you that one kind of wrapped up and you decided to go on to your next project of what you're doing now so maybe give me an idea of how you made that transition or made that that switch to where you're at now well after couple of years of working with that company I felt that I again began to feel that there were other horizons I wanted to see and encounter and one of those things that was really calling to me was the desire to start my own company specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence analytics and I I also had a very strong interest in doing something that would improve the pharmaceutical sector because I felt that in health care one of the areas that was just not working well for people was the pharmaceutical sector there were many layers of middlemen many layers of added cost many ways that patients were being blocked from getting the medicine their doctors had prescribed so I wanted to do something in the pharmaceutical sector and I wasn't exactly sure what so the first thing I did when I started my own second company was I hosted an internship for three young people with expertise in market research and it was a paid internship last ten weeks I had three interns and it turned out to be a very good experience for all of us I had a speaker every week I had reading assignments I had weekly goals and they put together a survey they they did all their assignments the internship itself went extremely well but at the end of it we were all in agreement that the pharmaceutical sector was somewhat impenetrable for a small start-up and so we wanted to carve out a small piece of it that we could manage that wouldn't be taking on more than we could chew and so the idea that we came up with myself and one of the three interns who stayed around after the internship was over he and I came up with the idea of developing resources for people who are new to this country who are looking for the medicines that they are accustomed to taking back home in their home country but they can't find them because they're called different names here and I'm talking in particular about over-the-counter medications so I don't know if you know this but what we know of as Tylenol which is the chemical name is acetaminophen it's not called that in Europe or in India but the name of the chemical is called paracetamol and people who come here and want to find something in the drugstore for headache they're looking and looking looking for paracetamol and they can't find it because it's not what things are called here so we decided to come up with a mobile app that would allow people to either put in the name that they were looking for from their home country or choose from a set of 10 or 12 common conditions like headache joint pain insomnia diarrhea skin rash all kinds of things that people would treat with over-the-counter medication and so they could put in either the chemical name or the condition that they're trying to treat and this product will bring up all the choices and what they're called in the US and a qualification of how similar the US product is to the one that they had in test oh that is really cool I mean that I can definitely see what the need would be there hey I'm coming from you know I and I spent a couple years in Taiwan and you know language is completely different you don't even have a similar alphabet you don't even have similar expelling or anything if you coming into the country saying hey all all I want is and ask for their Thailand ilex I have a headache and you don't even know what you're supposed to find at the you know the drugstore and compound the interest if your language abilities or you certainly silly learning English or don't know English or that makes it all of them work so I can definitely see for those that are coming into the country from you know even foreign countries whether it's english-speaking or others why that would make sense I do think is also interesting so you paid interns or you create a basically an internship saying hey I want to help out in this area of the market or we want to maybe jump into this and I'd love to come up with some ideas and have some or have some ways enter into it so why don't we go and hire a few interns to see what they can come up with they'll do some market research and they'll and they'll see kind of what ideas they can come up with and then based on that you know we can move forward and if I remember when we talked to you know kind of a before the interview originally you actually talked about house you'd pace on the interns and they hadn't come up with any good ideas and it was until a little bit after that they you know they kept thinking on it but the one internship you're working with now it was came back and said here's a one idea that I think might work or that you know Lisa pain point and that was that this kind of just it's an interesting idea a way of going about figuring out new or new ideas and new come businesses for a given market yes yes I was very helpful because I was tapping into the best and the brightest that I could find who had just completed a course of study and market research which I have never studied on that one of the few things I've never studied and it was it was unfortunate that the trio of interns did not come up with an idea that we could have immediately started working on but the one who did come back to me a few months later he had this very solid idea so it was not a waste well that's cool that's interesting both that you hired them and originally you thought oh man I put all that you know hired the best best and the brightest type of a thing and Bob for sure they've come up with a good idea then when they didn't this guy I'm sure is a little bit of a letdown they're at least thinking okay that you know now what do I do but then even more fortuitous is that they later came back with an idea one of them did that later Jen are created or Caton became one it's now your company today so fairly are a very interesting journey so we're kind of hitting up against um the end of the episode but I want I always end the episode with a couple you know couple of questions that I want to ask each at each guest and so one of them is what is the worst business decision you made and the reason is is you always get to here being all the highlight reel so recently I was reading a book it was you know that will never work and it was by marc randolph which is one of the cofounders of netflix and it did a good job and it went through and you got to hear all kind of the i did you know how he came up the idea how they actually you know brought up and uh you know and brought netflix sure what you hear today everybody always just sees netflix it's all over the place and great success but that book kind of walked you through you know one of the other co-founders which is hastings which is you know the first you know he's here for netflix told him that you know that idea will never work when he originally pitched it off of him so is it you know it's always interesting to hear not only the highlight reels and how everything always works out but some of the decisions that we wish we had made or that we could change so with that what is one decision or what's the worst business decision you ever made well that's not a hard choice because it's really the one thing that i regret in my whole professional life and that is when I saw the IP to my two product ideas to this company that I was very excited about having them build out the products as full-fledged software software as a service I made a deal with them that was you know mutually favorable but generally hit the and hit the high spots on my checklist in terms of a job with the company of decent salary some equity and I really thought that was a good enough deal and what happened was the company that I sold to originally that built a division 2 to build my products about a year and a half later they spun off that division and I had in my ago she ations with them I had totally neglected to take that into account as a possibility of something that might happen and so when the division was spun off they put a corporate governance structure into place that did not include me and my bit my worst business decision was not to not do something about that right away and ensure that I got on as chief analytics officer or at least on the board so here was this company's new company Mis spin-off that was running to market with my products and I had no real control over and I would do that differently if I had to do that again No so lesson learned is is to make sure that when you're forming a partnership or a joint bench or anything of the like make sure that that you get be able to make in control or to be part of it and I think of that you know that's a lesson I think that a lot of people that you don't you always going into a new adventure and you always excited if they go there will be a great experience and we're all in pulling it together but you never know which way will things will turn whether somebody will leave whether the business will be spun off whether things will change and so it's you know and this is probably the attorney coming out maybe always want to kind of anticipate what was the worst case scenario and if I can live with that or if I'm okay with that than anything about that is great so I think that's certainly a good thing for people to hear and understand is that you want to make sure that the worst-case scenario is hey I'll still be a part of the company or can there continue to be controlling it or have input into it and so that you're not if as things maybe change down the road that doesn't become an issue so second class question if you're having somebody that's wanting to get into a startup wanting to start a small business and maybe it's in the medical industry or maybe it's in machine learning or something of that nature what's one piece of advice you would give them take a deep breath it's quite a roller coaster ride it's feast and famine you you're up when you have your idea you're down when you learn how complicated it's going to be to develop it then you make some progress you develop something you get a client you're off then you lose to clients who think you're your software is not the right fit for them and it's just something that you have to be first of all financially secure enough to do to face a period of time with no income coming in and you have to be emotionally secure enough to face what feels like a lot of rejection from the market until your product actually hits and so you have to go through some hard times financially and emotionally before things start to click and clients start to spread the word of mouth about your product and if you have a good product and you have confidence in it then it's worth going for for sure but just be prepared for the ups and downs I like that simple and easy take a beat deep breath because it's gonna be a good journey so well awesome well with that kind of coming to the end of the episode and it's been a pleasure I always every episode I get on there's about 20 more things I want to talk through and a whole bunch more interesting points that we never quite have time for but thank you for coming on and it's been a great great to hear your journey has been it's certainly an interesting one for those that want to get involved whether it's you know venture capitalist angel investors whether it's somebody that's a partnership or just wants to reach out and hear your experience a bit more what's the best way to get in contact with your get a hold of you or to find out more about your current business so I'm on LinkedIn I use all the letters that come after my name so there are other Laura gardeners but they don't have the MD MPH PhD FAC PN that comes after my name so if you look for Laura garden with all those letters you'll find me and I accept direct messages I accept connection requests I'm happy to mentor people who have questions and you feel free to contact me through there and also every LinkedIn message I think it's a setting I have put on my account gets sent to me by email as well so if we are going to be in a long conversation I'll switch us to email by telling you how to reach me perfect so anybody's looking out they'll connect up with the on LinkedIn we'll put that at the in the show notes as well so they can find where your Linkedin is and connect up with any any for anything that they any advice they may need any mentorship they need or if they want to get involved otherwise well again Laura thank you for coming on it's been fun to hear your journey it's always an interesting journey and yours is by far no exception and I look forward to seeing your product out of the market and helping all those that are coming into the country and looking for how they can find the medications they need for those of you that are new the episode you're always welcome to come on be a guess on the the podcast you can just go to the inventive journey and you'll get some details as to how to apply to be a guest on the podcast or for those that are needing a help with your patents trademarks or copyrights you're welcome to go to our website which is Miller IPL so Miller is an intellectual opium property Ellison law calm and we're here to help any business any way we can so thank you again Laura been a pleasure to have or have yann and hope to talk with you soon thank you very much you English (auto-generated) All Recently uploaded Watched

Take Every Opportunity That You Can

Anita Gardyne

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

5/26/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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for me again being a certified minority owned or certified women-owned certified that own certified whatever you can do if you have that opportunity to do it I'd grab it all right hey everybody this is Devin Miller here and welcome to another episode of the inventive journey I'm your host Devin Miller I am a patent and trademark attorney that focuses on helping startups and small businesses also a serial entrepreneur so we we had the been tough journey to create a great community for everybody that listens and wants to be here is in startups and small businesses today we have a fun guest on today Anita Meena has a great story to tell so high in people she is everything from went to Berkeley to AT&T to getting undergraduates to work the ability now working with their start at their husband for the the third startup which is that that's the accomplishment of myself I think if I were to tell my wife she wants to be part of my startup she would say you're on I'll support you but you're on your own I don't want to do a start so that's quite the accomplishment of yourself so welcome to the podcast Thank You Devin thank you for hosting me but I gotta tell you you know Bob and I have been married 33 years we met at UC Berkeley at students in the 1980s we were both interning at Bank of America and their telecommunications department I was coding he was working on home banking and installing ATM machines back then so 33 years three companies two kids come on that's a pretty good track record that is a great track record so isolations to you I didn't know myself 33 years of marriage is awesome to kids is awesome multiple start ups is great so it'll make for a great journey so why don't you take us back a little bit you kind of introduced you and your husband met you know back when you were working there working at the same employer but maybe take us back to your journey of kind of wente startup absolutely well I guess a for me I had the privilege I'm here in the San Francisco Bay area I had the privilege of attending UC Berkeley starting at age 15 way back in 1978 for those of you who are looking at your you know calendars and turn the fear at how old I am 57 so I had the privilege of going to Berkeley back then and I'm already jumping in because that's an accomplishment so 15 it was last I checked or I remember I didn't graduate till 18 and that was just because I was lucky to graduate I did buy it but so how did you get into Berkeley at 15 where you did you apply early are you a genius or how did that happen I am none of those things programs that targeted folks like me men women of all ages colors genders we had an opportunity to start taking classes initially over the summers then on weekends and then eventually concurrently while we were still in high school it's a program that no longer exists and I'm excited that it exposed me into economics and an early age it exposed me to boolean algebra and every age and got me really excited about technology I ended up on a path because again being privileged to be at Berkeley and also being able to work I ended up starting at AT&T in their engineering department at age 17 when I did get that high school diploma and worked there in the summers until I transitioned the Bank of America so I've always been fortunate to be able to take advantage of just awesome opportunities and organizations finding me honestly to expose me to technology early on but again I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley so what else would we expect an accomplished athlete to come out and find folks like me and say hey we want you to be an engineer let's start exposing you what you need to do to be successful in that regard and I loved it I embraced it I ran out and spent the next six decades working in technology space because it's my passion and it's how we can change the world so I'm excited in this moment to be able to start it at Berkeley to be able to finish my majors and economics and economics in the black community I finished my MBA I've finished working through school as a telecom engineer and went right into AT&T executive training program so I did not work for Bell Labs Devon what I did do is I was working with the systems infrastructure so they could provision broadband for those of us older folks back in the late 80s one phone and one number I worked with Bill abs to build the infrastructure so the phone companies around our nation could track multiple devices introduced data at the first implementations of ISDN with what we would call broadband into places like city of Fresno and JPL apps down in Southern California so having built that large infrastructure AT&T transitioned me eventually into large strategic and financial roles so the privilege of defending the first markets in which they faced competition and my response to that was hey let's optimize and then let's exit the business as a cash cow said the company I worked for was actually called Pacific Bell and we sold it to a company called SBC now known as AT&T so I started in a technical excuse me technical field in the strategy and Finance left AT&T and went to companies like Levi Strauss was at UC Berkeley I was in an aeg company and i was finally at a company called quantum many of you may know it as CJ it is a it is a hardware manufacturer of memory I was a director there overseeing the three and a half billion dollar business in the year 2000 when my engineering husband's company was acquired for three and a quarter billion dollars so I quit my job and the reason I did I wouldn't do that to you if I ever got close to that kind of an exit I'd be quit my job only I wouldn't have got into another startup others said hey I'm taking a break for a year or two years go and see the world there's something enjoyable I didn't break okay I took a nice break that happened in the year 2000 I found it in 14th but here he is what if that company had a program like an EVA in which they offered FBI background check trusty care available to me maybe they would have had a professional woman stay in the organization absolutely I was the most senior african-american in that company similarly in places like levi-strauss where I was in a particular role as a woman as a person of color but let's ignore those things and focus on the I was an excellent contributor and leader and made their business better and that's why my career grew so one of the reasons we introduced only become searched care is just that had they made that available I may have kept that job I love my job I love contributing I love being a parent of you not familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area I'm sitting here in Oakland in the town in which I live where my bin son and now two children and my mother are live near here or in the city we work in Silicon Valley forget distance time with traffic it's a two-hour commute so when you worry as a parent and now as a child with an 85 year old blind mom but I also care for her that ability to make sure that trusted care is there if it's not me I'm always first but I have to be able to work and I have to be able to take care of my family and until I can have those needs met I simply couldn't be my best most authentic self and be my most productive self so that's why we built on Eva comes here to care because I'm not the only person forget that I'm a woman they're men who provide care as well but we all know 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every single day we all know that because of the wonderful accomplishments of medical technology we're seeing people who are able to live years longer than they may have hope we're able to see the most amazing people survive and thrive I have two adult autistic niece and nephews 44 and 46 years old um one is extremely autistic and needs care even for simple functions such as going to the bathroom yep I function that we have them here at home now because their facilities are closed all day we are still excited that we have access to care because we work with essential service providers who meet the needs of the requirements of the state of California that's how we're able to work we are regulated by the Department of Social Services and we ensure we comply with all those regulations we're excited and and pleased that those folks can continue to be in the home that's how I'm able to be here with you right now somebody's with my blind 85 year old mom so that I can be in the office and take the time to talk that's a great service and I think that's a great great thing to focus on so that's awesome that you win from husbands or husbands company got acquired had a good exit now to looking to how to serve and to help others I'm gonna back up just low because we almost jumped to the end and we missed part of the middle which is always the interesting part so that was your was out now that were you because you said he worked with your husband for three startups so this one I'm assuming the third startup is the one you guys are at now is that right this is number three number three so what were the other two startups II worked with your husband and then we'll jump to the end which is also good to talk about or the other two startups you work with your husband oh we're going way back for you Devin the first one in 1988 we finished we did a PC fax cart business plan so we actually contemplated going into the hardware market some of you may not know what a fax is FAS but if you work with the government and you any earn an IP attorney you're working with the government you got one of those old machines you don't really that's the only time I've ever used the fax in my career so called it an examiner I'll say okay I can either email us to here which like it backs and if there's the older examiner said oh can you please fax it to me I'm like I gotta go figure out how to use a fax again but I have used the fax well can you and I said we had a PC that would work directly from that device back in 1988 we actually chose not to execute that one and shocked a few folks but we didn't Bob Bluth the startup route and I went to 18 t the big company row second company we started back in 1999 was called what's next and I love that name and should have sold it because it mate would have made more money from it than from the company I learned some really great lessons with that failure and I shouldn't even call it a failure because I learned such a great lesson it was meant to be a site kind of like career builder a place you can go and you can find out about jobs and salaries or a glass door you know as we entered the year 2000 again folks of my age may remember that we had an Internet bus yep dot-com bubble but not only did we have a dot-com bubble imagine Anita and Bob started business working with people to help them initially writing their resumes and get them into a monster kind of thing didn't jobs they didn't have money they loved our work products but they didn't pay so one of the biggest lessons I learned is that the third business we started we have customers who could afford to pay it that is always an important thing as much as that you can have the best company but if you don't have paid clients it doesn't it doesn't tend to matter hey I'm just saying you know forget the ten years at Berkeley forget the NBA out of Haase it took starting a business to realize hey I got great customers who love what I do you know we all learn things you know even here at our third company on Eva we've pivoted several times great I mean so and again I describe what's next is a failure absolutely not we learned so much and it helps informed us for this third opportunity that we have and we never would have made it here not for that so in this moment you know again learnings along the way you know we started out with a consumer platform offering this care you know FBI background track trusted care by compliant workers consumer space we were growing it was great but then we had we won a competition called best start Silicon Valley and 15 and we had companies like thin limit Japan and a company called Intel come to us and say build an enterprise-grade GDP are compliant version of that platform or privacy secure platform and will award you a contract we thought that was exciting and we stopped providing services to consumers so because we almost jumped so boniva you guys started out as basically kind of and correct me where I'm wrong be able to help people in home care so if you have either kids or elderly people somebody that has needs and you want to take care of while the you know the parents or other people are out working and doing it doing an income initially I think you said started as a can consumer-facing thing to where people could come to you directly and look for hiring on care hiring on helpers or hiring on you know whether who had whatever their need of and then he's talking about then you pivoted more to almost a B to B to C or an enterprise version for companies to provide that to their employees is that about right it is absolutely about right you should be on this side of the camera absolutely got it that was a huge pivot and the reason that's a huge pivot is because those consumers were paying revenue and once you say we're going to make a decision to pivot that means you walk away from that week over week revenue growth I hope you win that competition called best startup Silicon Valley because there's no way you say hey I'm going to grow and build a 100 thousand a million consumers and then smooth them all over we know that's not how technology works if you want to deliver an exceptional service the other thing that we learned is because again we comply with all laws and regulation including background check in California is a living background check it's a 1987 regulation called trust line and can you imagine my shock in 2013 to learn that no other marketplaces chose to comply with that 1987 requirement and it's living FBI background check that means if the caregiver commits a crime DUI elder abuse check fraud they're off my platform and not in your home we chose to comply with that requirement when no other marketplace hat and that sort of struck us is a little bit odd we also have laws here in California that center around their workers and what's a gig worker and how we comply and I'm Eeva because we are so focused on ensuring our workers comply so that we take on that risk of a technology around needing to know if a caregiver needs to have a massage insurance to give you a massage I don't want you to have oh that's gonna come up here in your smartphone you know I didn't even know there was such a thing as massage insurance so that's I learned stuff to do right there so but that's just it it's our job to make sure you only are treated by folks who meet the laws and state in your region in your community so hard to do that so did you was that part of the original platform when you're doing it to consumer-facing or is that what part of the pivot when you went to be more of the concierge is that that's what they required or that's what took to get in just wasn't quite clear on that timing and that's what we were doing what we needed to do was to get to enterprise great security standards gdpr but absolutely it's what we were doing and it was realizing our friends at Microsoft who we've been working with since December 10 2014 specifically fret till the general manager benefits you know having him come in and weigh in and say you've got something pretty awesome here then having the head of benefits Intel saying I want you to build an enterprise great version then handiness requirements to build a system and then taking them back to Fred at Microsoft to say okay let's build it and then let's pilot it on three thousand Microsoft employees in 2017 and get their feedback which gave us and we learned so much we spent 2018 in early 2019 rebuilding all the technology because things like native apps certain didn't exist as they had in 2014 and technology had evolved GPR other security requirements that come along so it was the right thing to do again at the end of 2018 after we worked with those three thousand Microsoft employees to shut down and build the right set of tech that meets the needs of the consumers whether that's you the employee customer Devon giver who would use the oliva Pro app or the a charger we're like Fred tail at Microsoft who would use the his laptop to see which services are being used anonymized employee data reporting data he'd be able to send us his eligibility file so we would know which Microsoft employees when they do so get subsidy for example if you are a director or you receive stock options at some companies at Microsoft you don't get subsidized care or subsidized medical but others will you know Microsoft frit to share with me Microsoft owns a company called LinkedIn but some of us have heard of that many of us know my voice a few people a few but did you please get 2,000 a year to spend on care and gym membership I did not know that so as Fred til thinks about his 130,000 Microsoft employees as well as his new LinkedIn employees hmm think about how to bring some parity so what better way to do that then with an enterprise-grade GDP are compliant certified minority-owned technology platform that he helped Bill since 2014 so we're pretty excited to be able to go back to you know Fred who's with us always our team at Microsoft their team at Oracle we were the only company who's completed Oracle's Protege program as a minority supplier because we are certified as minority owned by the western region minority supplier diversity Council that's what that's about for right there wrm SDC that's how we gain access into awesome companies like Microsoft and it's because of that Fernando Hernandez who is their director of diversity supplier diversity at Microsoft he oversees about 4 billion in spending with minority women owned that own LG pqt own companies like own IVA senior advisor and own even has been since 2015 so as you say no go ahead go ahead yep he made all of our sales introductions into awesome company so we got a great pipeline deferring to you sir oh no I just so it sounds like the pivot it was obviously a good good new bid successful was a great idea but how did you cuz I mean so I'll set it up I was so I like to read books and particularly usually if I have I like to read books I wish I had a lot more time to read books but what I do have time to read books I usually end up in my wife voice makes noise like you always like to do business and that anyone you read books you read business books and I'm like well it's just what I enjoy so but I like to read business books one of the recent books I read was that will never work and it's kind of about Netflix and how they started up and how they got in and one of the the founders mark Randolph was one guy that originally a CEO and you always hear Hastings which is now the guy that's always in the news and that Randolph was the one that regionally the idea and he you know his Hastings told him hey that will never work as he was pitching ideas back off but they started out if you know I'll know I'll date myself not quite as far back but they started out much more in DVDs right so the original company was all in DVDs and sending DVDs in the mail and then they ended up making a pivot to where most people know Netflix today is streaming but they almost had to make that to say and they're part of it was as they saw Amazon was going to eventually quote it wrote into what was the DVD and mailing whether they could probably keep a better market in reoccurring revenue with with streaming as opposed to DVDs but they almost shut down they there most of their income was all from the DVDs at the time they basically made the decision hey we're going to go all-in on the streaming the damn didn't shut it all the way down but they really move their focus to the what would be the streaming and it was a big jump so how did you kind of move on those lines when you're going from consumer based or its consumer directly going to be to be what was that transition or how did you make that decision boy there's a lot not man there's so many factors that come into a decision of that magnitude and say something that may be a little controversial may get me a little bit of trouble here okay but I'm gonna speak as an expert who has a patent for creating trust and safety in the in home care market right and and being a CEO for six years in chairman of the board I am so grateful not only that I had the privilege of the academic experience which taught me things like my four peas in my three C's product price promotion in a placement or my channel distribution customer cost competition I had this great academic start then I had the privilege of learning operational infrastructure from a company like AT&T BM a Wells Fargo I spent time in as an engineer seeing how they operate and how they leverage systems in the decision making to evolve from that into a strategy and financial rule again and some of the you know biggest brands that we may have heard all across industries like Levi's etc where I was leading planning and finance across up to eight companies you know in different places I just feel really blessed to have a lot of skills and a lot of exposure to a lot of different things you really have to see how they all touch right there everything exists together your operations and your technology and your marketing and your everything comes together and touches and I know just a little bit of enough about all those to be dangerous the other thing I have that's really helpful in these moments as you ask I have an amazing team of advisors who each have to bring more than money to be an advisor and an investor in my company so I've talked about Fernando as an example he his responsibility he helped me build my enterprise sales pipeline and he has since 2015 helped me to fundraise and he so if you go out and you were to Google me you'd see Fernando and I doing investor interviews we have folks like Christie a author of blitzscaling along with a guy by the name of Reed Hoffman co-founder of LinkedIn who's a repeat investor and my go-to guy he you know blitzscaling so we had the father of how do you grow really quickly and rapidly while we were making these tough decisions and building so wait were they on the board or your advisors when you were still doing the b2c or direct to customers or did you go to them or do they join after I just tried to get the ideas I mean that's great Nate or you know a lot of great advisors and descrying to think if I could go ask them hey what should I do that would be so great advice so did they help you to make the decision and were they on did they come on after they came on as the decision were being made they loved it and especially when the decision comes to you again head of Intel at the time Ogden says hey go build this for me and your certification and then they have the Fred teal who general manager benefits at Microsoft who had left Intel as their head of benefits to go to Microsoft you got some pretty important players in the market who understand the benefits face who are elevating your idea I fiction that we also had representatives from universities in Finland as well as representatives from Japan Germany and a number of other countries at that point approached us so at that point we had a significant amount of what I would call external push to make the pivot what was challenging about it again you turn off revenue you walk into the long deadly desert no money and you generally don't attract a lot of investors usually investors like companies that make buddy it's crazy there you go so imagine we finish a pilot with Microsoft in 2017 when we're making money they spent $700 per month on average with no subsidy they requested 40% requested three or more services and 3% signed up on day one you know so we thought about gee those 70,000 employees in Seattle if three percent sign up on day one you know we have to look at our technology and we had to admit I mean let's face it we had other folks to look at like lyft and uber who never make money you know make money and we make money we go cashflow positive with 500 or so customers in a region I mean we can drop right now whether I'm in Dublin Ireland or Seattle or Salt Lake City and we have one customer in Salt Lake City who'd love to see us there when potential so you know we can make our technology available anywhere within about 90 days and in part because we have an amazing relationship with the Church of Latter day Saints and they help us find awesome amazing care givers through their existing infrastructure so we feel pretty blessed since 2014 to work with amazing partners whether it's the enterprises with Microsoft or Intel or Oracle or a fruit company in Cupertino with some amazing folks in the caregiving space in the LDS community as well as community colleges here in California are awesome places we have about a hundred community colleges here that are focused on creating home health aid workers so we have always targeted and built relationships with those entities because we want to serve their needs and we want to help them succeed and be successful so we're excited whether it's the customer and Microsoft employee customer the caregiver or the enterprise we've been out in market with them listening to them and that's in part what took us so long because those are three different sets of technologies that had to be built and then we integrated and as startup founders many of us are given the bad advice we'll just get a crappy enough product out into the market I think that depending on your product on your market that you work but when your customer is a Microsoft employee will arguably one of the best technologists in the world it's not my best interest to go and with a crappy product that's yo you'll hit on that night I always always look at it always drives best because I hear it all the time and I did an MBA school as well you'll hear minimal Viable Product and that term always is like it's kind of like that I always feel like we'll put out the crappiest product do you think somebody will buy I always liked it more why don't we go the maximal viable product look at what we can do within our resources and constraints and put out the best product we can rather than the worst so I I completely agree on that one absolutely absolutely and based on what people are willing to pay even though I say we shut down you know we opened back up in 2019 on a very small scale and started taking in customers every iteration of our platform that's out there I have paid customers on it and small number because I got to make sure that its meeting somebody's needs the best way to get real feedback is to check my account at the end of the month and that's how we determine if we're doing something right out there in the market and now that we're in a place where we're just growing we've on board it three companies we did companies two and three today since March we're excited to be able to grow and we're excited that that growth comes in part through a relationship with a company called Accra sure the ninth largest insurance provider here in the US we saw their contract with them in February while they have over 1,300 brokers who go out and sell their services to their different their benefits to different enterprises nationally we started here with about a hundred and two sales reps in the San Francisco Bay Area the largest footprint you can imagine nine Bay area counties plus two for more all the way into the Sacramento foothills the reason being that's where Oracle is and when the head of benefits at Oracle says I need to see you with a presence in my region that's that's our footprint right Microsoft Oracle fruit companies we managed to meet at leads of a footprint of some awesome folks we've been collaborating with for some time that we're excited to expose to the tech so is Ida right it's been crazy we've had successes we've had failures there's not been a period where we haven't gone oh no this thing's gonna die we've resuscitated this company more times I mean for those of you and if you're a space jams fan do you remember when the team was all banged up on the sideline and even Tweety pie you know that's the classic that's a great movie well that's our experience and for every founder you know I think you're right I think for almost every founder everybody always feels like a failure are usually multiple times and no matter how many highs you you always think okay now we're on an upward trajectory it over here and then you'll hit step on but you're like oh no we failed again so I could get that we could dive in and talk further I'm sure an hour it's boring I always get to the ends of the podcast I wish I had tens more time there's always so many things more to talk about but with that I'm going to start to wrap it up but I always like to ask two questions and at the end of the podcast so we'll end with those and then maybe sit another time we'll have to have you on and dive into a whole bunch more of the mud things but the first question is what was the worst business decision you ever made well I fear one already was to start a business with books and didn't pay me right as I started a business left my job invested a lot of money to build you know a business to help people connect to employers at a horrible time I couldn't control the dot-com explosion but I probably could have given a little bit more thought about ability to pay yeah that moment just you know but what I learned to do with business to from that failure I tested before I put up a lot of money you know when we started on Eva we just had a screen face we didn't have any back-end we launched an apart here in Oakland on us Saturday with a guy doing tricks from East Bay Regional Parks and he brought out some animals and things but I had a woman spend two hours with me explaining to me why she was willing to pay for care why it was so important and why she needed it in what her budget was two hours one woman I am idiot validation around pricing and ability to pay that holds to this day that woman and her passion is something I certainly didn't see from those folks who loved the resumes we were ready but not anus for so you know we took it and we adapted it and learned to test for revenue before we put out a lot of cash and before we got too far in the pipeline so you've seen us do that repeatedly over and over again you heard me talk about generating the six figures in revenue development I always got to get that rule or market feedback because I cannot afford to make that mistake know that I've raised 2.7 million dollars and I'm scaling you know across the state of California and hopefully other places now's not the time to introduce that kind of risk so I took that horrible horrible lesson and applied it I hope you can hear in many different ways not just where I build my business who do I lose my customer where I look for from my revenue but also what are the things that I think about in some of those early steps I put into place so that I can ensure success before an extensive cash outlay so there are lots of different things to learn from that kind of less oh yes so if I were to summarize all that the biggest mistake was don't try and sell product to customers that campaign is that a fair summary I'm gonna jump to my second question or my last question which is now if you're looking for people to want to get in startups one again small businesses or just starting out what would be your number one piece of advice you'd give up oh my gosh for me again being a certified minority-owned or certified women-owned certified that own certified whatever you can do if you have that opportunity to do it I'd grab it I'd love to tell you that I was able to begin to have these awesome relationships with some great brands you can imagine launching with a brand called Microsoft as a customer is a great position to start from and they haven't had bill that you know fortunately everybody doesn't have access to that but a lot of folks sure do inclusivity these days covers lots of different people what it gives you it gives you access they got me access to Microsoft and Microsoft took me into and group called tech underscore scale underscores that line on the bottom of you know the page it was chaired by nino campos at oracle and Alex Alvarez at Apple and its members are the 32 largest companies in the US so by virtue of being certified it gave me access since 2015 to start selling into some pretty awesome brands and brand names so for those of you who have that opportunity to get that I say go out and get it and you would be amazed at how that might help you grow your business on a go-forward basis in terms of access to potential customers in our case we're also a Microsoft fast track startup company I get I think I got one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in free assure credits as we scale Microsoft engineers to tackle and tap my technology platform and verify it works as build all those benefits can come to companies if you're certified you don't have to be certified to be a Microsoft startup company and reach out to me and happy to tell you more about all right well I will let them if people want to know more about that that's a great weight reason for them to reach out so great great or great lessons learned from the failure great advice for those that are going to do startups and small businesses so both are both good answers to the questions I always ask so now with that I always want to end with how do people reach out to you so if they want to whether they're a business and wanting to connect up with you and use your service or they're wanting to get involved or they're wanting to be a caregiver whatever what's the best way to reach out to you I am Anita and own even calm a and ITA IDO neva o in ev8 comm please find me you can find our website own Eva calm there's a telephone on it you can always dial you can find me by directory 897 one three oh five three we are always looking for all that you described always looking for new investors in this moment particularly as we contemplate that scale always looking for new enterprises who want to be a part of a Niva concierge care especially in the moment of coronavirus as we think about we need to work for our employees and what level of trust and safety they need I can tell you we are talking to some large companies who are looking at things like having employees returning shifts some companies having employees return Monday Wednesday Friday Tuesday Thursday Saturday you know schedules different eight-hour shifts so we're excited that we are flexible enough in our technology design and workers who have been decimated because by coronavirus are increasingly available some of the most talented teachers bus drivers and others who had otherwise been working in different roles right now are unable to do so are now available to help bring care to employees at customers where those employees live and that's what excites me creating living wage job opportunities in those communities where your employees live and to do that in collaboration with the church the Church of Latter day Saints and will as others and to be able to bring such amazing communities together we connect people to bring care together make sure they get a living wage make a tiny bit of profit for us and go forward so thank you for the opportunity Devin to be here today I am excited to be an inventor if you let me come back I'll share my second patent I'm a iRobot video director all those beautiful care giver videos have to get made and without human intervention as mentioned we are not your grandfather's Oldsmobile we are not lyft we are not over we're focused on cash flow profitability and ease and customer uses scaling quickly thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today and share my story and to share my product I hope I get to see you in person and Utah when we take on customers and think well thank you I appreciate that and I look forward to with you guys establish the headquarters out in Utah that then we'll have to meet up them there at least live meet up then so that would be great so thank you sir and your you're an Eagle Scout so you you have to be honest I should be honest no I always try to be anyways that's awesome well thank you for coming on for those of you that are in the podcast if you're interested in being a guest on the podcast feel free to check us out of the inventive journey comm we'd love to hear your story in your journey and for those of you that are needing help as you're getting going with your startups and small businesses feel free to go to Miller IPL comm for any patents or trademarks needs so thank you great call him thanks for the great day thanks for coming on it was fun to have you and we'll have to check back in in the future and see how the journey is going you got it so you will have a great day thank you be blessed bye everybody thank you you English (auto-generated) All Recently uploaded Watched

DECISION MAKING DURING FEAR

Justin Evans

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

5/21/2020

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPTION

there's something I think most most entrepreneurs need to really understand and that's how you your most important decisions are made at the moments that you are experiencing the most fear [Music] everybody welcome to another episode of the inventive journey I'm your host Devin Miller for those of you new to the podcast I am a serial entrepreneur as well as the founder and managing partner by intellectual property firm Miller IP law where we help startups and small businesses with patents trademarks and copyrights so today we have another great guest on the podcast that is going to talk about his and journey and currently he's working on some UV lighting to help to combat some of the köppen 19 or stuff that's going on but also what has a lot of experience and worked in the movie industry so quite an interesting journey so excited to have you on so this is Justin excited to have you on Justin good to meet you sir so maybe you know I'll let you introduce yourself because you'll do a much better job than I ever could but why don't you go ahead and just to introduce yourself and tell a little about your journey well my name is Justin Evans and I'm the founder and inventor at and from one incorporated for about the past year we've had a product at market called anthem one which is an LED lighting system that has interchangeable LED light cards and but as the pandemic as it became clear that the the pandemic was going to hit us shores and that we had a very serious problem on our hands our company did a very quick pivot and came up with this this guy here this is our first UVC light card so this is a light source that's that's how thin it is and this this light card outputs more UVC energy than any other device on the planet yeah and that's what our current focus is so maybe give and that's a great intro so maybe maybe now we jump back is that Jets cuts to the chase and gives everybody where you're at today but maybe give our back up so you did you've done it you started out in the movie industry I didn't and help to and I think has produced some of the movies including the one on the poster behind you and then he kind of decided to pivot and get more into the lighting so maybe rewinding almost to when you were in the movie industry what how did you or what that journey was and then how you got into lighting um so I went to NYU film school and dropped out halfway through my senior here they're still very disappointed about that and is looking forward to the day I go back and finish my degree someday right someday so and I bounced around Hollywood and and bounced from job to job working as art director and video game companies or as a cinematographer a camera operator and I got the opportunity to direct and be the cinematographer for my first feature film and about 2008 and spent the better part of a year prepping the movie and putting it together and finished it in in mid 2010 and it did great it was in 46 film festivals at one Best Picture 18 times it had a very small theatrical release but in the making of the movie we we found a massive bottleneck in in the making of media itself and it's all about the lights we were about three days no no no sorry let me back up about a week before we started shooting we realized that Terminator Salvation had blown a power transformer and it affected one third of the power grid for all of New Mexico the New Mexico's a big state most people don't realize it's the third largest state in the United States so it's not that it's just a lot of people affected yeah I mean this is this huge and and so it was causing rolling brownouts everywhere and we planned this movie for a location at an abandoned prison just outside Santa Fe that had a veil our and we were thrilled because every single circuit because this was used to be in former prison was 40 amperes 60 amp powered so we knew we could plug really really big lights into everything hole is prepped for this and now we've got rolling bound ran out to no power at all of our locations so we're scrambling to get our hands on you know a crystal sync generator about 60 60 kilowatt generator and determine your salvation is snapping them faster than my little team can get them so end up driving about 75 miles away to a little town called las Lomas pick up a generator is the only one that that's left we get it we managed to get it where we're shooting the movie every day I can feel my schedules slipping through my fingers and by day 10 we were three days behind schedule and for a little movie like that it's death you you could very well be in a position where you just can't finish the film and um and I'm not proud of this but I'm gonna be very honest person here I kicked a door off its hinges in front of one of my things let's let's look pretty good they're pretty hard kick yeah I I was I was pissed and and I turned to my investor and I said I don't want to be a filmmaker anymore talking about they said I don't want to do this these lights don't make any sense if Charlie Chaplin to walk walk onto this film set he wouldn't understand the red one digital camera that were using and he wouldn't understand a 50 inch television and the ability to edit in real time on a macbook all that would blow his mind but he'd look at the lights and he'd know how to use them and all his knowledge would still apply and that doesn't make any sense to me so when we finished the movie and it was on the festival circuit that that investor who also happened to be my attorney he said i'll give you a little bit of money let's get this out of your system mess around with whatever you want to mess around with and let's get back to making movies and the prototype that i came up with blew his mind he left his partnership at his law firm cashed out took a second mortgage on his house and gave me the capital to start the business so that we could invent what is and from one well he he was all in then he was a must have really believed in yet he was all in and and he's still our second and that's our second largest owner and when when our payday comes he deserves every bit of it because his kind of passion and belief is very very rare in investors and sobriety about understanding how money really works and how quickly he can burn through it he is also rare amongst investors and so if it weren't for him I wouldn't be here so thanks Angela Hey he deserves a lease of things if not nothing more that's Interrail investor I mean a lot of times when you get investors and I've worked with some great investors and ones that have absolutely been the ones that are in it for the long haul and over there with yet you got others that are going to say if this doesn't make me it's you know a return on investment within six months or a year they start to get mad and you lawsuits and get people angry and everything else you can get on both sides it's always much better to find those investors that are there with you for the long haul we have those investors too we had some tideland toxic investors that made this journey much more difficult and significantly less enjoyable but luckily there was a handful of really good ones that really understood what we were trying to invent and and we we ended up doing more than we intended to and so along the way the the critical change to our technology we were just trying to make a modern LED basely relight that was our original ambition of course we wanted to be best in class so that meant I had to sort of rescale myself as an engineer because of one of the things I found and I think a lot of entrepreneurs should know if they get into doing a hardware startup is that the engineers that will work for you as a freelancer are not the best they're the people that couldn't get a job at a real company and so there are they both so the time there's the rare diamond did the rough but yeah no I completely agree yeah maybe there's a seminar FIU I was not lucky enough to find any lot of things a lot of going through the sad to find that what diamond yes and and so in particular my experience has been American engineers tend to be extremely arrogant so we did much better with electrical engineers from from Eastern Europe and chemical engineers from anywhere in the world other than the United States ask freelancers if I can afford someone who works at Apple we wouldn't been to startup so and and but where most people get stuck is they expect the engineers to do all the work and engineers are not inventors and they're not supposed to be job is really to make sure that the invention is sound but it's not their job to invent the invention so so for me to be able to really pull this off a Tory skill myself and so that meant buying dozens of books on Amazon reading books on on Electrical Engineering watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos doing everything I could to get myself to a point where I could communicate effectively with mechanical electrical and firmware engineers and and that was a good part of the journey and and along through that process one question kept coming up question I kept asking which is why are LEDs permanently soldered and lights hmm the answer was always because that's how it's done and and what no one could quite articulate but it took me a while but I figured it out is that engineers have a tendency to do when they were taught in school which is what their instructors were taught which is what their instructors were taught and LEDs are still from from a conceptual standpoint seen as a component that goes on to a printed circuit board yep printed circuit boards don't come in and out of system so the permanent you screw them in or solder them in they stay permanently in so in a system so it's thought that that's what they taught me when I went to engineering school okay so so this bias means that someone is looking at an LED and thinking of it as as the equivalent is a resistor or a transformer right and and it's just a component that goes on the to a PCB but we were looking at the LED in a very different way we were seeing the LED is more like a ramp or a hard drive and we kept saying why on earth would we build a device that had obsolescence of 12 months we know the LEDs are improving on Annelle Moore's laws like a curve it's not quite as exponential as Moore's law but it's similar to it and we don't want our customer to buy a system in say January 2019 and then regret that they bought that in January 2020 because now all of our LEDs are 15 percent brighter and we thought were they having new wave lanes so they have different dyes and all of that that goes and I work I work with one of the startups I work with does a lot with LEDs on more of the upper spectrometer type thing for medical measurements so we could talk way longer than we need to auto all the LEDs and intricacies of it but that's solely what we focused on was then a way to make the LEDs come in and out of system and that's what this is all about so it turned out that the bias this this at its core is based on what's known as an LED co key and an LED Co B is is used in light bulbs across the world all sorts of instruments you're the company you just referred to might even use a small version of an LED COV we wanted to turn that LEDs he'll be though into an actual end-user product something that was sleek and sophisticated had an apple like feel to it and could come in and out of the system and so we're now patent-pending on the technology that makes that possible it meant moving the the positive and negative Junction from the front side of the LED shield e to the back changing the alert internal electronics and coming up with a method that would have this under both compression and conduction at the same time but that could D couple so that you could pull it in and out like a video card and once we have to interrupt just because you said my favorite word which is patent pending your patent so given that I have a patent attorney that's always what the perks made what is just the 30 second aside and I don't want to interrupt your story when you're at what's been your experience or how have you liked or disliked doing the patent process because I get inventors or on both sides and people that sometimes it's been a great process other time they've absolutely hated it um I think it's a fine process I think there are some flaws with his patent system I not thrilled that we've moved to a first-to-file methodology but i also understand the logic behind it I think that most inventors who are probably complaining about it need to see this like the equivalent of the SATs it's not a measurement of your actual intelligence but it is a measurement of your ability to it to explain what you can do so someone else can understand it and if you're not willing to play that game then maybe there's a problem with your communication strategy I don't have a problem with it I like as an example the first patent we did was a design pad and it was rejected on our initial application and it was my fault I was stupid I was insisting that certain lines on the illustration didn't mean what the patent office was interpreting it to me and they were being thick-headed they had every right to reject our design patterns and when I went to a phenomenal patent illustrator he was able to take the art that I had come up with clean it up do it right explain to me the symbolism of it and get us to reapply and get us approved within a couple weeks and and and I think that that humbling moment really opened my eyes to what it meant to apply for a utility patent and and to apply the same sort of humility to the system and and it doesn't I'm thrilled with the system but on the other hand if I don't think is that bad a system meter so well you're in the middle you're not hating it not quite loving it so someday when I actually would I work on your patents that's good then they'll get you over to love it yet but no that's that's a I just was curious because I said in most of the time it's not the attorney is I like how you almost put it it kind of to your point I want to say once of sometimes inventors take it as if I my patent gets rejected they almost take it as an affront to their invention right they reject they're saying my inventions not good enough and if they only understood how great my invention was they would make sure it certainly get his patent well it's really not the examiner's that doesn't dislike your like your invention most of time he could care less what you how you it's more of are you doing convincing him that what you're doing is different than what's there and if you can do that in the way that they want or they're used to then it goes to the process goes well and if you play it kind of you said they play by their rules they're you know put it in the format they like it will go much better if you don't then it's a it feels like you're kicking against a break so I like how you said that absolutely and and I think a lot of a lot of inventors they think the invention is make sense in their head they're done there's nothing else to be done there's so much that's the beginning of a journey and for me a lot of it was becoming comfortable with the kind of language that is associated with patenting intellectual property and getting to a point that I understood the difference between something that was clever and something that was novel and that I could come up with many a clever thing but that doesn't mean that any of those are patentable it needed to be novel and an understanding on it on a gut level the difference between something that's clever a novel and and how to specify what novel is because novel might might mean okay I'm trying to patent something and I'm patenting this iteration of it within this specific application only yeah and then I think the last thing is any inventor should know is even if you get your patents who the hell cares if you don't have the finances to defend it in court yep so all of this at the end of the day is just one one small step on a very lengthy journey no and I completely see I did too often the I did and we've got away off the tip I'd like to get back to original story but it's just what that I always a joy hence why I'm a patent attorney right that you know you get too many adventures oh I just get a patent that everybody's gonna be knocking down my door to get up to buy it or get a license and you know why why that I'm very rare occasion one out of a million type of thing does happen most of the time it's a part that goes in your business plan or part of the whole business it's important part just like having marketing and financing and everything else but you have to say that as a part of the business you don't build a path or a business around the patent rather a part as a part of it now that we've jumped way down into a tangent that I thoroughly enjoyed so now so one question I don't think we hit on is so give the maybe give an eye insight of how long were you working on this before you kind of got your first product you were you're getting pre Kovan we're getting ready to launch uh we I started the business in 2012 and we have a viable products until 2019 so it was a venire journey and and this gets to another part of what I think a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs particularly hard-wearing bettors don't understand you can have an invention but that is not yet a final product you can have a final product but that product hasn't been designed for mass manufacturing and you never product this design for mass manufacturing but you don't have the supply chain behind it to actually scale and so we had to do all of that so we not only did we invent the technology but then I Mandarin and I spent a tremendous amount of time I'm here to that's interesting sorry bullseye Beijing Lee on the end mean by mean by and by all right so we won't we won't too much Chinese because that nobody else will probably get what we're saying but yes I served a mission for my church in Taiwan for a couple years so I didn't go fight to China but I was in Taiwan which is both mandarins okay so so I built a global supply chain with factories in five countries yeah and so that meant about every three to four months I was going to Shenzhen or Taipei for you know two to three weeks at a time and and we had to do all of that to be able to build the technology and I think perhaps the most interesting part of the journey was that oftentimes the most joyful for me because what I would find is that what an American engineer who had never worked in a factory because they saw themselves as a white-collar worker and liked that they worked in an office but they work behind a desk behind a computer they never gotten their hands dirty and actually worked and say a CNC shop or a PCB manufacturer or they never stepped foot into an anodized and and so because of that their idea of what tolerances were were not based in reality yeah so we would go in there and we would find it went both ways what they would think would be easy was hard and what they thought was hard would be easy and so I spent a lot of time at our factories working as a day laborer and I would show up in tourgee torn jeans and a t-shirt and I say I'm here just to work and in fact I'll show you how I think I am most proud of so this is a sample piece of aluminum billet that I hand polished at a mold baking facility in Shenzhen I was apprentice encoder and she's an amazing person she makes maybe 850 dollars a month and absolutely loves her job and she taught me you know how to do wet sanding starting at 50 grit going all the way to that 2,000 grit sandpaper rotating directions to the point that we could get a mirror polish so that the insides of our molds were capable of ejecting polycarbonate lenses and if it were not for her education I would not understand molds one-tenth as well as I do it's it's her that that really got me to get the process how many days it takes how many humans does it take what can be robota sized what can be what parts just in art and you really do need to give an artist who really understands this stuff and and it was all of that kind of knowledge that I found was generally lacking amongst the engineers that I was working for aren't working with and as the part of the journey that I absolutely loved let's go so now jumping fork I think that's all very interesting conversation I love to see the the show-and-tell so to speak it's always fun to see what the things he worked on as you went through your thing so now jumping for so you went through all that work left the movie industry after producing your movie which I still have yet to see but I promise I'll see you to air help see it soon you can see the lights so alright I'll have to watch it it's a mark from a walking dead James Cromwell from God knows how many movies and chase more from The Punisher so that's a pretty good people are a lot of our hosts of people that went onto from your movie went on to make a lot of a lot of other cool little 1970 spy thriller about a KGB agent that's defecting to the United States but but once we once we realized within am from one that we had come up with a really easy way to get LEDs in and out of the system we realized we invented more than we'd intended the original goal was just so that you could pop it in and out like a video card or a ram and when the next set of LEDs would be 15% brighter you could pop it in and you're 200 watt system would still be 200 Watts 4.5 amps but instead of outputting say 20 mm woman's that would put out 25,000 we realized we could have a relationship with every led company on the world and that we started experimenting with what other kind of LEDs can we do and we came out with a light heart that's military-grade 940 nanometer infrared an agriculture card and theoretically we worked it out on paper medical grade sterilizing card and the only reason we didn't do the medical grade sterilizing card at first as if the LEDs were ridiculously expensive but this is a context a single little tiny LED you know one of these little guys and this this sucker has about 160 approximately on the surface for our daylight card our white card that looks just like daylight those LEDs are maybe five cents these are 15 dollars each and so so it was so expensive none of our investors believed in this every single one of them said it's a pipe dream I don't know why you're obsessed with this medical sterilization it's a very small industry we don't want you to pursue it and and when kovat hit I decided that I pay for it out of my own pocket my wife was my greatest supporter and we quickly put one of these into production thanks to our American Express card and thank you American Express for being an investor and thanking for my wife for believing in me and and to put this in the context are our nearest competitor is a mercury-vapor system that's about three and a half feet tall and it outputs 90 millijoules per square centimeter or a percent or square and I should say per minute want to repeat that 90 millijoules per centimeter squared per minute okay this outputs 2850 millijoules per second and so what what this does when you get that kind of potency this is the world's first mass volume sterilizer we can sterilize not a little tiny surface but an entire hospital theater movie theaters airplanes shopping malls restaurants everything in our world that were currently afraid to go back into we can now sterilize at a very short period of time with nothing more than a blast of nearly invisible light and and we're conducting additional studies as we speak we wouldn't make claims that they weren't backed up by tremendous and every research but we've been very lucky to partner with Temple University Mayo Clinic and George Mason University temple has already come out with their initial results and they found that from a 16 inch distance anthem one deactivated Zika virus in 15 seconds to a 3 log setting that means 99.9% of all the viruses were erratic created in 15 seconds and so it could be a tremendous game-changer and how we re sterilize PPE or EMT vehicles or elder care facilities the list goes on and on that's that's almost kind of the idea you could have kind of like metal detectors that you walk through in the airport you can almost have sterilization that you just if you're gonna go into the you know the elderly care facilities or the nursing homes or anything or into a shopping mall or that you just walk through that it kills at least everything on the surface doesn't kill it it you know inside of you if you're still sick but at least sterilizes everything that you bring in and out so that's really cool one thing I do want to jump back in on is just the we glossed over but I think that we talked a little bit before the for the podcast on was you had you know a pretty good amount of clients built up and you had some you know fairly named or you know named big names and everything else within the movie industry or at least lighting industry for filming on that and then you had kovetz come along that basically everybody started dropping out wiped it out and everything so how did you how did you react or how did you decide to pivot or how do you know what how did you deal with that it's devastating uh as of January of 2020 we our clients were so prestigious and they're their budgets for so that they wanted to buy from us that had we been able to collect on all those invoices we would have had nine months of operating expenses in the bank yeah within three weeks we went from having you know these invoices that would have had nine months of burn rate to having zero it was it was it was a cliff I'd never seen anything like it we had the Olympics we had the Final Four we had a fee Marburg we have ongoing clients like the Canadian military Ferrari Walt Disney World and every single one of these customers one by one said unfortunately because of co vat19 we're canceling our live events for this year you know it's we were just the point that Steven Soderbergh's gaffer was testing our lights to roll out on a your filling was gonna shame Detroit and then the movie was cancelled doesn't need the lights anymore and Ferrari wanted to light an entire fairway in Pebble Beach with a display of 50 Ferraris and we were working through the whole process of how we were going to do this on on battery power so there'd be no cables anywhere and suddenly the events canceled and the same with the Final Four and the same fee Olympics and so our our business was devastated overnight I don't know why I wasn't really focused on that what I was more focused on was the promise of what UVC could do because as everyone kept talking about kovat 19 kovat 19 Kovach 19 I knew that we'd always had this design sitting on the shelf that our investors did not believe in and that could I just dust it off we'd have something that could really be a weapon against Koated 19 and and I'm gonna be honest it's it's my wife that made it possible and there's something I think most most entrepreneurs need to really understand and that's how you your most important decisions are made at the moments that you were experiencing the most fear I'm facing bankruptcy we have no clients I still have to pay rent I still have to pay utilities and and my brain is is fixated on how all of our bank account has been drained hmm and it's my wife who says if we're gonna go bankrupt let's run at that wall as fast as we possibly can you need to dust off you VC and I quickly spoke with a couple of my engineers in Taiwan and the sticker shock was astounding and and my wife and I suddenly knew that we were gonna go from having zero debt to a tremendous amount of debt to get the first five of these made and she didn't even blink and that's that's the reason our business got saved her rationality is what saved us but that's an important partner to have on your team then yes so absurd thank you first of all goes to your lawyer that was here and thank you went to American Express and third one to your wife although the wife is the most important so we'll put that one first this is books and I think every entrepreneur needs to know it you're your first and foremost business partner is your family lay behind you on this journey because this is it's not a fun journey it's pain you're really saying to yourself how can I go on a to bed on a bed of nails every night if your family's not willing to go on that journey with you you're never gonna make it and Adam that I completely agree with I just got really lucky that I married very very well I was 22 I I'm right there with you I admit I married at 22 as well so we both married at the same age and we both got lucky with great wife so I have all I have a whole bunch of businesses I'm part of including my law firm and my wife has been number one cheerleader and been great and so I completely couldn't agree with you more they're the number one team member that you need on your team and you don't have it you're gonna you're setting yourself up for failure and if you have a great spouse on board it can make them complete difference so but we have run into to the end of the podcast there's way more things that I would love to talk about that we ever have type 2 which is always how I feel there's always so many interesting things we could dive into and you kind of already gave what would be the the number of advice you'd give for startup so we'll give that as the advice that startups are take but the other question I always do and we'll kind of end with is what was the number one or the biggest mistake your business mistake you made along your journey and the reason is is you always hear all the highlights right you get to hear the best things that people did I always made the right decision I pivoted and everything went perfectly and you're never going to hear the mistakes so what's the biggest mistake business mistake you made god I need so many the list the biggest business just the biggest business mistake I made we had a particularly wealthy and aggressive investor then we won get to market as fast as we possibly could mmm I allowed him to pressure me when the product was not quite ready yet and and he read some of the same books that everybody reads and he would paraphrase stuff that really applies to software companies like hey you know just get your Minimum Viable Product out the door I hate that term I hate it so much because it doesn't apply to hardware oh and even even in software and I because I worked with some software it's like minimally viable why not take the product the best product within the constraints that you have right so if you only have so much funding you only have so much time let's see the best product we have rather it always to me or more sounds like let's put out the crappiest product as quick as we can rather than the best yes and that whole attitude of you know run fast and and dunfin twice and we'll fix it as we go if anyone's familiar with the Wallace and Gromit short where Wallace is on top of the Train putting the train track down as the training is going over it that's what it ends up feeling like yeah if had slowed down for three months we would have saved ourselves a year of heartache because they tried to come out with the product of beginning at 2018 and while it technically worked there was so much more additional real-world testing we needed to do before the technology was really mature and we could have done that in a three-month time window and instead we spent a year chasing our own tail because I listed the bad advice from an investor who just wanted to make a quick buck that was probably the worst decision I made and when we when we corrected that and I could look I could look back at the choices I've made I knew that number one it was not in my character I like I am a perfectionist by nature and I like things to be well made and and number two I'm a scientist by Nature and I knew that we had not done enough testing and I had conned myself into thinking that he was right to come out with a premature that's that's the biggest mistake I made the second I think we pointed out days when we had raised money I paid and I didn't understand how much how quickly you're gonna burn through capital and I would hear from people one of the dumbest things I've ever heard is you know you're the CEO you should be making more than your engineers and I believed that the first days the company now once we got to about year two I realized my job is to make that capital last as long as it possibly can because capital is precious it's hard to raise and every single time you do you don't get the capital for free it comes with a personality attached and you may not get along with that personality and the more of these that you pile on the more people that you would never have hired to be an employee suddenly have an influence over the way that you're running your business and so your own best interest to pay yourself as little as possible so the capital is so your burn rate will be as long as possible and you can do your best job those are those be the two those are the two great mistakes but it sounds like you learned a ton a ton from them and it's ones that I've heard before and I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that so appreciate you sharing those well we have run out of time but I want to make sure before we end that you get that for whether it's people that want to buy your product want to get involved reach out to you investors angel about the right type of investors if you be whoever it is what is the best way to get involved with you to reach out to you or find out more about your company in your product customers who would like to purchase an amp the one can go to and from one calm and that's auntie HTM o ne calm and but we should specify that right now we are strictly focused on medical sterilization sales so we are current not taking any media cuts we are only working with hospitals and in governments to get this out to as many hospitals as we possibly can so that hospitals can restore lies their PPE in record time so so if there's any hospitals any doctors that are listening please reach out was the one calm and and we'd love to help you out perfect well I appreciate that I'll make sure to include that in the show notes as well hope that you can get the products and start to help to you sterilize and to use that to become combat what a lot of people are dealing with so that I very much appreciate sharing it's been a great time to have you on the show always get to the end of these and I wish I had more time because there's always so many bored but things that we could talk about but I appreciate you coming on for those of you that are listeners make sure to support him to support an anthem one and to go to there and share with those that are in need of the product if you're an inventor or working with a start-up or small business if you need help feel free to reach out to me I'm happy to help with patent your patents and trademarks or copyrights and want to be there along your inventive journey to make sure that we can support you in any way you can thanks for everybody for joining the episode until next time you English (auto-generated) Chat Replay is disabled for this Premi

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The Inventive Journey

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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Spencer Barkley

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

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Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

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Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

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The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.