The Hardware/Software Blend: Visionary Innovations in Health Tech with Eyebot's Jack Moldave

0:00 Eyebots: But if you're a good engineer,

0:02 like you're probably doing this anyway.

0:20 Brad: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.

0:24 My name is Brad Hefta-Gaub,

0:25 and this is my trusty co-host.

0:26 Eyebots: Scott Conrad.

0:27 Brad,

0:28 how are you doing today?

0:28 Brad: I'm doing fantastic.

0:31 We have a guest with us, Jack Muldave from iBot.

0:36 Super excited to talk to you.

0:38 Jack,

0:39 why don't you introduce yourself and maybe give our listeners a little bit of an intro to yourself and to iBot, and we'll get you started from there.

0:46 Eyebots: First,

0:47 thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Very exciting.

0:49 Glad to talk to you both.

0:51 Yeah,

0:52 so Ibot.

0:53 Ibot is a company that we started almost six years ago,

0:56 me and our co-founder Mathias.

0:58 Mathias came to me one day, basically.

1:01 We had worked together previously,

1:02 and he wanted to fix this issue where people have a lot of trouble getting glasses,

1:07 getting the vision care that they need.

1:08 And we wanted to essentially make purchasing glasses as easy as purchasing shoes.

1:13 use that's the way I like to think about it where you can walk into a store you don't need anything you don't need to have a doctor's appointment or anything like that you can go to the store you can if you don't know your eye prescription or whatever there's a tool that you can use it will give you the numbers you need it will be validated by a doctor and then you can continue on your journey to purchase the corrective lenses glasses whatever you need and basically it unlocks

1:38 Glasses, optical retail,

1:39 anywhere.

1:40 And it also gives so much accessibility where people,

1:43 you know,

1:43 it costs money, it costs time and all sorts of other inconveniences that prevent people from getting eye tests,

1:49 eye exams and glasses when they need them.

1:52 And so our goal is to solve that and make it really accessible and easy to get access to vision care.

1:58 Brad: Love

1:58 Scott: That

1:58 Brad: it.

1:58 Scott: sounds interesting.

2:00 How I have a very, very basic question.

2:04 Yeah. Did either you or your partner know anything about eyes?

2:09 Yeah, such a good question.

2:12 Matthias is obsessed with

2:14 Eyebots: ice. Thank

2:14 Scott: He'd been in the eye care business for a very long time. I actually met Matthias at Formlabs, which is a 3D printing company that kind of ballooned as we were starting there.

2:25 And so we were building electromechanical optical devices. But prior to that, Matthias had actually worked at a company called iNetra. And that was doing, it's called smartphone-based refraction.

2:35 production and so it was using like a phone essentially and something attached to it where you could put it to your face and you could actually do the refraction and get your essentially eyeglass vision numbers by using it and super cool really one of a kind but it wasn't quite the mass market kind of adoption that that and that was like really just cranking in his mind he was I think one of like maybe the first hire in that company something like that.

3:01 and then all through form labs i think you know we were having a blast building 3d printers and that was super fun but i think in the back of his mind he was like this is an unsolved thing and if you've ever met matthias unsolved things don't go away he's

3:13 Yeah.

3:13 always thinking about them i believe the man has a whiteboard in his shower which in and of itself is a great invention you know but um but he had been kind of marinating on that for a while and it's actually kind of funny because you see i'm actually not wearing

3:27 not wearing glasses and both of you are wearing glasses which is great so you know probably experienced it I do have a slight astigmatism but I didn't know for years and years and actually the way that I found out was when Matthias called me he goes hey

3:40 I'm doing this thing. I was a consultant at the time. I was like basically doing my own consulting.

3:44 He's like, can you come take a look at this? I need someone to help me build a prototype.

3:47 And I was like, yes,

3:48 of course. Like, you know, known you for years. I would love to see what you're doing.

3:52 Yeah. So he has me put my face in an 80-20 box essentially.

3:58 And he pushes some buttons and he goes, oh yeah, yeah, you,

4:01 do you have 2020 vision?

4:03 I'm like, of course I have 2020 vision. Like, you know,

4:05 I.

4:05 every night and he basically does some stuff and puts some lenses on my face and i'm like oh my god he's like you see better right i'm like yeah i can this is crazy i like the leaves and all the details are so sharp and i don't know i'd gone all my life just not doing that i can still operate in the world without glasses you know i have shoddy 2020 vision where it's not 2020 in each eye but collectively it kind of

4:30 I know the brain's pretty, pretty cool about that.

4:33 But yeah,

4:33 now whenever I go out and do like soldering or I have prescription safety glasses and,

4:39 you know, it's amazing. I was like, oh my God, the world is so clear.

4:42 Is this what it's like?

4:43 And then of course I am like,

4:44 you know, not someone in dire need necessarily of care,

4:48 but people like go for years.

4:49 I remember my girlfriend's, one of her parents had a massive prescription and he just never got glasses and we.

4:57 when we put him through our tests,

4:59 we're like,

4:59 oh my God, you have like a significant astigmatism. It's like, it's driving at night hard.

5:04 He goes,

5:04 oh yeah.

5:05 And like all these people, they don't have access,

5:08 you know, to care because he lives in rural Vermont.

5:11 And so to actually go get an eye prescription is, it's a journey, right?

5:15 You know, and it's not going to do it every year.

5:17 Brad: And you end up having to drive at night on your way home after getting I your eyes checked.

5:20 Scott: know.

5:22 There's so many things that like when we see people that we

5:24 We have our kiosks out in a bunch of different places. One of the really exciting things is we're in Walmarts and Sam's Clubs and a bunch of different spots.

5:32 But if you're in rural Pennsylvania and you see like people,

5:35 they drive hours sometimes to go get the eye care they need.

5:39 And I think, you know, good and bad is like, you know, they show up and you're like,

5:43 wow,

5:44 you drove here without glasses and like you let's get your glasses.

5:50 It's really good.

5:51 It's fun.

5:52 Brad: This is super interesting.

5:53 My brain is just running on all kinds of different questions for you from a tech perspective,

5:59 but also from a business perspective.

6:01 One of the things that I'm super curious about, Scott and I actually worked together a couple of years back at a health tech company doing virtual care. And so we both dabbled a little bit in health tech. And so I am super curious to hear.

6:16 about the you know the regulatory barriers that you must have been confronted with i almost feel like that the the tech might be the easier part of this business

6:28 Scott: Hey, Brad,

6:28 I just want to compliment you on getting our listeners off to the most exciting topic in the whole thing.

6:33 Brad: come on well

6:34 Scott: Everybody loves regulatory.

6:36 Brad: i mean okay i'll let me let me frame it this way and i hope i don't i mean jack i don't want to get you in any kind of trouble

6:43 trouble with this but I think that this is a classic example of you know you were talking about your co-founder just having this itch in the back of his brain about solving a problem and I think as technologists a lot of times we see problems and we think man we could solve that problem and there are certain spaces where

7:06 even if you have the great solution it might be really hard to bring it to market and so anyway i that's the part about it i don't necessarily want to get into

7:13 Scott: Yeah,

7:13 Brad: the nerdy

7:13 Scott: well

7:13 Brad: regulatory thing but i'm super curious how you how you've navigated this or

7:17 Scott: Well, actually I do I want to know like the basics of like what does one have to do to bring a medical device to market?

7:23 Brad: and do you and or have you somehow managed to avoid being classified as a medical device that's the other question

7:28 Scott: we are we are a medical device um i think it's

7:31 we thought about that uh and and as it turns out very much a medical device uh it was a pretty quick conversation um at the high level um basically what we are is we're a class one medical device um and that is the i would say the least dangerous if that makes sense the most safe the and so um the fda they're pretty reasonable i think um you know it's is compliance the the sexiest thing is the quality engineering you know what i mean is that like

7:56 the you know oh my god like you know I think it's really important right but yeah it might not it's sort of like okay we really got to focus and do this um I will say it's it's just something you got to do it's actually not that different from any other regulated industry um and so for example like um my work experience is kind of there's some fun ones in there so one of the first things that I did in or actually the last things I did in college was I worked for a company called

8:22 they got four moms which is like the number four then moms um they made like car seats and so or they were working on car seats at the time so i was working on like adapters for car seats and we did a ton of testing because you know if you're putting your child in it like obviously you need full fmeas you need full documented traceability testing and we had experience with that and then i worked a place about you know a place called in situ which is a subsidiary of boeing and you know we're building you know basically these aircraft

8:46 and that was super regulated and to be honest for a class one medical device it's not that much different um you need to do your dfmeas you need to have a quality management system which is a qms you need to have your requirements but if you're a good engineer like you're probably doing this anyway and so to me the requirements are actually pretty reasonable you have to do them to be clear and like you have to be pretty rigid about them and like you know you do the thing where like they're checked in you either

9:12 is some sort of software that is like you know a documented signature at some point so it's like yeah i checked it in and like it's official and we're not going back and doing this but as long as you follow the procedures and there's consultants that will help you although we're we're largely bringing that in-house at this point um the consultants helped us learn very quickly because we come from a consumer electronics background which is less regulated but we have people who worked in nuclear and other and so we kind of just cobbled together like oh

9:37 oh yeah this is like this part of nuclear and this is this part of consumer and you need this and so it's actually not as bad as you might think it's very scary when you approach you're like oh my god the fda is gonna audit me what do i do but it's pretty similar to like a somewhat regulated product development now if we were to do a class two or class three i haven't done one matias actually worked on basically i think it was like uh this cancer detection device where you

10:03 you pump fluids and you check if the fluids are radioactive or they react to cancer cells which is like crazy and so like that's going in the body that's a lot more intense you know what I mean have to be obviously of course right but for a class one medical device the requirements are fairly reasonable and I would encourage people like if you're thinking about it like it's not so bad it's pretty pretty straightforward you just have to do the things that they tell you to do essentially

10:29 So.

10:29 You mentioned one thing that I don't know about it, FDMA or what was that acronym that you used?

10:35 Oh, FMEA.

10:36 FMEA.

10:38 failure ooh this is embarrassing fmea i should know it's failure mode and effects analysis exactly and

10:45 I see.

10:46 so um what that means is let's say like you build a product or something you're like okay like how could this hurt someone or fail or whatever and you have like all these columns they probably do it in like software at some level for reference i'm like a hardware guy i've done a bunch of software but mostly a hardware guy

11:03 you like list out like oh for example like what happens if the device tip over and falls on someone you know what i mean you go okay like what's the risk of that like oh that's like bad you know if that

11:14 Eyebots: happens Mm

11:14 Scott: that could-hmm. be serious injury maybe death so you have a number that associates with that how likely is it it's like oh is it one in 100 is it one in 1000 it's a logarithmic scale basically is it one in 10 000 you assign that number and then you go okay like is it um

11:28 um you can do a bunch of things but like is it announced is the wrong word but is it like visible you know any or is it a hidden failure you know you mark that and then what you do is you actually like multiply all those things together and then you get a score and if the score is greater than this number it needs to be remediated by

11:45 a sticker or bolted to the ground or things like that and so you do that for all your different failures and then you have basically a risk-based assessment of your product and then because like you can't it's unrealistic to remediate every single possible risk like someone can bump into your kiosk and bump their head it's like you know like that's okay

12:05 Brad: They could have just as easily bumped into the refrigerator that was sitting right next to it at the Sam's Club.

12:09 Scott: well that's like

12:10 it's like kind of unlikely it's like not that bad so it's like there's no action for that you know what i mean but if there's things like okay like what could happen for example like in an airplane right like you know is this bolts able to hold this sheer force and it's like okay what's the factor of safety what about this what about that how do you test it you test it thermally do you test it in um like you know fatigue all those sorts of things and you can if you if you get what i'm saying it's kind of scattered but like you build this this matrix

12:36 and there's like generally agreed upon rules and numbers that are like okay based on this severity and this you know occurrence you multiply that out and you can kind of deterministically assess your risk if that makes sense and so in a medical device you have to do that we have software in our medical device so we do it for hardware you do it for software you do it for cyber security all sorts of things and then from that you go okay here's my risk-based assessment here's i'm going to make sure it's not going to hurt anyone here's all the things that we control to make sure

13:03 sure that this is that and that's just required by basically

13:06 Mm-hmm. So

13:07 good practice yeah

13:07 the FDA asks you to do a risk assessment,

13:10 which is the FDA, FDA,

13:13 FDA, we call

13:14 there's fmea and then there's something yeah

13:16 And then you mentioned a quality management system,

13:20 which to a software engineer sounds like a bug ticketing system,

13:24 but I think it's something different.

13:26 Maybe,

13:26 I don't know.

13:27 Yeah,

13:28 so the way that the FDA does things, and I'm not an expert at this, I've done my best to learn this, so disclaimer of that.

13:36 Basically what they say is you have to have some form of quality management system.

13:39 There's some requirements of like it needs to have like signatures and dates and things like that.

13:45 But the FDA is like kind of, I would say, high level,

13:47 reasonably loose about what exactly that means.

13:51 Like, for example, you could define that as whatever,

13:53 you could make your own.

13:54 and you could use this or that but the common practices dictate that like there's a bunch of iso standards and like you kind of just follow those and that's easier and everyone's agreed on them you go to inner tech and they're like hey did you follow 60601 we go yeah we did 60601 they go okay great we know how to test that that's what most people do especially for a class one it's like you don't need to reinvent the wheel of this so qms basically it holds all your documents and it provides traceability for everything so for example if we're building a kiosk or we'll

14:21 we're updating software and something happens we're like why did that happen and so like you know maybe in like other startups you know you're like I don't know like you know like it's bad and

14:32 it just happened in medical device you have to know why it happened you know what i mean you go okay is this batch of stuff bad was it that you know um commit and you know push was it this merge and so you have full traceability of all that sort of stuff which allows you to be a lot more responsible essentially yeah

14:49 Brad: SOC2 on steroids.

14:50 Scott: yeah i was like yeah yeah i was exact took my words

14:56 So this is interesting. So Brad,

14:58 do you have any other regulatory questions to ask here?

15:01 Brad: No,

15:01 I love it. I was going to say one of the things I think I'm hearing you say,

15:04 Jack,

15:04 is that, you know, kind of as you started before you started into the deep dive of different aspects of this,

15:09 you're kind of saying, look,

15:10 if you are an entrepreneur,

15:12 if you've got a technical idea and it happens to be that you're going to be a class one medical device,

15:17 then Jack Muldaive's advice is like,

15:20 don't let that stop you. If you've got a great answer.

15:22 an answer that's going to help solve a problem a real problem that people have it's okay just do the work there's consultants out there that can help you it's it's it's a straightforward process and it's the kind of stuff you'd want to be doing as a good good engineering practice anyway especially when people's health is you know involved

15:42 Scott: Exactly.

15:42 Yeah.

15:43 I think like.

15:44 This is kind of interesting because I think there's like a big thing on like LinkedIn or other sites and stuff about like being bootstrapped versus VC,

15:51 right?

15:52 And I think the one thing that at least for us was interesting is I don't know if we could do this business without venture capital.

15:59 I think being hardware and regulated and going up against an industry that is pretty established,

16:05 I think that would be the one thing.

16:08 It's like this, it would be hard.

16:09 to bootstrap a medical device because you kind of can't sell it until you finish it you know

16:14 Brad: Yeah

16:15 Scott: whereas like a lot of other things you can ship half-baked things you know what i mean and it doesn't have to be like that and so that that would be the only addendum that i would add but you know we've had fantastic investors who totally understand our vision and are supportive of all this sort of stuff um and so that has helped us a lot having that

16:36 got capital available to do that kind of front load that R&D has been really good.

16:40 Brad: I understand our vision.

16:41 I'm sorry.

16:41 I'm just such a dad nerd.

16:43 I can't help but laugh at that.

16:45 Scott: There's a lot of them.

16:48 So I feel,

16:49 Brad,

16:49 like we kind of started at the end with regulations. I want to kind of go to the beginning. Could you just describe the.

16:55 customer or the user experience of using an iBot like so I walk into a Walmart and like it's like the gumball machine I put in 25 cents and get like how does it how does it work

17:04 Yeah, no quarters.

17:05 But so basically,

17:08 yeah,

17:08 I'll describe the Walmart model,

17:09 which is one of my favorites.

17:11 So you walk into a Walmart Vision Center,

17:13 and some of them have doctors,

17:15 some of them don't, you know, we're in both of those types.

17:18 And so basically be like,

17:20 okay, I'm in the Walmart Center.

17:21 I'd like to buy these glasses. That's why I'm here.

17:24 And the optician goes,

17:27 okay, do you have a prescription?

17:28 You're like, no.

17:31 Previously, you would have gotten like,

17:33 okay,

17:34 well, we have this doctor, she's booked out for a couple weeks,

17:38 why don't you make an appointment and come back?

17:40 Or you can use this iBot kiosk and it takes 15 minutes, you've got a prescription in 15 minutes.

17:45 And so people go and do that. And so what you do is you walk up to the kiosk, you accept the terms and conditions,

17:50 you do basically a few different things. You start with doing an intake for a form which is really similar to what a doctor.

17:57 when a doctor would ask you like okay do you are you wearing progressives do you why are you here do you want do you like your glasses or do you like have stuff is stuff blurry at night all that sort of stuff then you move on to a visual acuity test which is essentially reading the letters that get smaller and smaller and smaller we display them inside of our kiosk's viewing window and we use some fancy optics to make them appear at a distance that's further than they actually are

18:22 And then we do the next two things at the same time, which is we scan a person's glasses and their eyes. And so we do refraction on their eyes. We send infrared light that's safe that goes into their eyes and bounces back.

18:31 And then we capture what comes back.

18:32 And we use an imaging system basically to extract the glasses settings,

18:36 which are just the numbers,

18:37 the prescription numbers and the glasses.

18:38 We take all of that information,

18:40 we bundle that up and we send that to our doctor portal.

18:43 And so this is the thing that is pretty important is we have.

18:46 We have real doctors review every single session.

18:49 We're not like an AI robot doctor or anything like that.

18:53 And so we hire optometrists and ophthalmologists to actually review these sessions.

18:57 They review it.

18:58 There's still there's art to this.

18:59 You know what I mean? Just the numbers that you get from the devices don't complete the entire history of the person.

19:06 And so they'll tune those settings and then they'll send the prescription back and that entire thing happens in under 15 minutes.

19:12 minutes the test takes about three ish minutes and then the review process is under 15 minutes and so this is the funny part in walmart's they actually get a fax um and so it goes into their fax machine um and that's how they get it they also get an email but uh yeah the fax is pretty funny they're like yeah we use a fax machine to do this it's compliant and we don't want to change that can you do that we go

19:35 Yes.

19:38 It's

19:38 Brad: Yeah.

19:39 Scott: funny, some of our new hires have never used a fax machine.

19:44 So I get two just very functional questions.

19:47 Eyebots: Yeah.

19:47 Scott: The format, you talked about the kiosk. If I'm the customer, am I sitting in a chair with like a screen in front of me like I'm in a phone booth?

19:55 Am I standing like in front of like the clear machine like at the airport?

19:59 Eyebots: Yeah.

19:59 Brad: What's it actually like?

20:01 Eyebots: I would say a clear machine is pretty, pretty good.

20:05 It's pretty apt description.

20:06 Brad: So you're standing up.

20:07 Eyebots: So this is the kiosk.

20:09 Brad: Okay,

20:09 so yeah, it's like a clear,

20:10 it's like a clear, it's almost like a kind of like a clear machine, basically. It's the same form factor.

20:15 Yeah.

20:16 Eyebots: um yeah and so basically um you walk up to it you it's about my height which is five foot seven inches maybe a coincidence i don't know um and so we had two things um when we first uh me and matias are coming up with ideas matias has spent a lot of time a lot of time like really thinking about this um the company i believe started we had met up in 2020 in october

20:41 And so that was a very COVID time.

20:44 And so no one was touching things. No one was putting their face into things. And traditionally,

20:48 you have to put your face into an autorefractor. And that's a lot of touching.

20:53 And people were not about that.

20:55 And so this needed to be a touch-free experience was one of our first axioms, I guess.

21:00 And the second was it cannot have any sort of, it has to be on demand.

21:06 demand um so a person has to be able to complete this on demand it can you can have like oh you need to be trained you need all this sort of stuff um

21:14 Brad: Yeah.

21:14 Eyebots: and so those are the things and so we developed technology to make this as touch-free as possible there is a touch screen so that is the only touching that basically you need to do you need to tap on the screen to type in all these sorts of things but you don't need to put your face in something and that was like

21:29 Could you imagine like this in a public place

21:31 Brad: Yeah,

21:31 Eyebots: and like

21:31 Brad: totally.

21:31 Eyebots: put your bass in there and it's like 2020 people like no chance,

21:35 you know, never.

21:37 And so we came up with basically touchless refraction.

21:40 And to give credit,

21:41 like this has been around for a while.

21:43 It's like any good technology. We are not the genius inventors, I would say, that came up with this crazy thing.

21:50 But we are people that found this cool technology that we think was underutilized. And so we took that and brought that into the 21st century. It was actually developed,

21:58 I believe,

21:59 in the 80s, I think, which is incredible.

22:00 People are so smart.

22:02 Brad: Yeah.

22:03 Eyebots: And so people developed it. It was used as screening for kids.

22:08 And then we took that technology and we made a few changes. Compute is a lot better now. Cameras are a lot better.

22:16 LEDs are now surface mounted.

22:18 And so all sorts of things changed.

22:21 And we brought that into the 21st century. We went through a ton of iterations and built this great refractor.

22:26 And so it works great.

22:28 And then we did a very similar thing with OLED.

22:30 So LIDAR, we use, you know, again,

22:33 more compute, more cameras, all that sort of stuff. And we're able to build this system that is essentially touch free. It's really easy to use.

22:40 Brad: Yeah.

22:41 I have to imagine that part of not just the COVID anxiety of putting your face on something, but I imagine that there's it's also more approachable for people that might feel claustrophobic or things like that like this.

22:52 Eyebots: Oh,

22:52 Brad: And

22:52 Eyebots: yeah.

22:53 Brad: it feels like that that kiosk looks a lot less imposing than the idea of like,

22:59 yeah, I'm going to the doctor and there's this person that's walking around in a lab coat and they're putting me in a dark room and they're dilating my eyes and.

23:07 Scott: You know, I'm sure there's a lot of people that have not just the access difficulty, but they might have, you know, anxiety about that kind of experience where, you know, Ibot would address that.

23:23 Eyebots: To take it all the way, we had a nonverbal person use it in one of the Walmarts person just

23:29 wouldn't get through a normal eye exam they didn't want to you know it just it wasn't it wasn't going to happen and they used the kiosk and got glasses and

23:36 Brad: Yeah.

23:36 Eyebots: it was such a joyful experience for them which is just really incredible you know that it felt that was such a win we're just like wow we were able to help this person that otherwise would not have been helped

23:48 Scott: Yeah.

23:48 Brad: That's pretty cool.

23:49 Scott: Yeah.

23:49 Brad: So my second question there,

23:51 Jack,

23:51 the doctors,

23:52 the eye doctors,

23:53 Scott: Yeah.

23:53 Brad: where in the world are they?

23:55 Eyebots: Wherever they want to be.

23:56 Brad: They work from home.

23:58 Eyebots: It worked for him, yeah.

23:59 Scott: Are you yeah, when Scott and I were at this health tech company a couple of years back together,

24:04 there were a handful of these different like doctor marketplaces that were spinning up that were essentially like doctors could choose to sign up and like take shifts whenever they wanted to. It was like gig economy for doctors or something like that. And I know that a lot of the, you know, like a lot of the sort of.

24:23 of virtual tech, virtual healthcare tech companies out there like, you know,

24:28 the big like him and hers and row and stuff like that. Those people are out there where they have to prescribe. They're basically using these types of platforms to essentially get their doctors in the marketplace. I would assume that if iBots not using it, I would assume that that would be the type of service you'd be using, but you'd obviously be select.

24:49 selecting for specific doctors of ophthalmologists and stuff like that.

24:53 Is that the same basic model you're using or have you built your own sort of like sign-in portal for the doctors?

25:03 Eyebots: it's the latter for sure yeah i was trying to understand where this is going yeah we built our own doctor portal basically um so we have it

25:12 I think like we've made tons of strides in telemedicine, no doubt about that.

25:16 I think for optometry,

25:18 it's just not quite the same as a little behind.

25:21 And there's some great companies out there that do this, you know, like digital optometrics is fantastic.

25:28 They do essentially a telehealth optometry model and they're having success.

25:34 It's great.

25:34 And we do a very similar thing.

25:37 um but yeah we build our own doctor network and doctor portal and so some of them we hire full-time some are contract you know like part-time or whatever um

25:46 and they just monitor and like get prescriptions they review them and then they send them to the people and we have a customer support team as well and they work really close together and we provide our own training because this is kind of a new thing right there's a new device that we built and there's you know very easy to use for the user and also we've gotten great feedback from the doctors but there's always things to learn you know what I mean this is new where people they show up with like

26:12 like the most users will always surprise you which is so great i've seen people show up show up with glasses that are duct taped together which makes me like you know a little bit worried you know i'm like oh man this is like really urgent but also happy that like this is they were unable to get the care that they needed and we could provide that i'm like that's

26:30 Brad: Mm

26:30 Eyebots: a great feeling

26:30 Brad: -hmm.

26:30 Eyebots: that they you know the urgency is there you know what we made that uh yeah um so that's really cool we see people that have

26:37 have popped out their old like lenses from a set of glasses into another set of glasses because

26:43 Brad: Oh,

26:43 Eyebots: they're

26:43 Brad: interesting.

26:44 Eyebots: broke i'm just like people are creative they're like i'm like i don't know i wouldn't have thought of that and you're like why do those glasses have like air gaps you know it's like oh because that

26:52 Scott: They

26:52 Eyebots: was they put

26:52 Scott: put their lenses in their other frames.

26:54 Yeah.

26:54 Eyebots: and so that usually requires like a phone call you know we'll call the store and be like hey we saw something like kind of interesting you know like what's going on or we'll see a person with a

27:03 with a wild prescription,

27:05 you know what I mean?

27:05 And what we try and do is, first of all, there's limits that we can do in our model.

27:09 So we'll always refer to comprehensive care.

27:11 We do not provide a comprehensive eye exam.

27:14 We do a vision test that allows you to get a prescription,

27:17 which is regulated and good and legal and everything,

27:20 but it's not a replacement for a comprehensive eye exam.

27:22 And so you still need to get your fundus imaging and, you know, we don't detect disease or diagnose anything like that. But what we do do is we refer people.

27:30 they'll be like hey that's a wild prescription that you got there we are not comfortable renewing that or giving you a new prescription you need to seek comprehensive care and we've referred people and it's great because then they get the care that they need where they didn't know you know they're like oh i just this was how it is it's like no no no like there's things we can do for this yeah

27:48 Scott: So, Scott,

27:49 did your question get answered? You were sort of asking about the doctor's side of this.

27:54 Brad: Yeah,

27:55 I was just curious.

27:55 It sounds like you've got a team of doctors there.

27:56 Of course, they're looking at it and they're sitting waiting for stuff to come in.

27:59 And

28:00 Scott: Yeah

28:00 Brad: that's pretty interesting.

28:01 Like that's an interesting,

28:03 that pattern,

28:05 a sort of, I'm just going to call it the minotaur pattern. I just invented that phrase.

28:10 Half technology,

28:12 half.

28:14 human like

28:15 Eyebots: Totally.

28:15 Brad: that's like that's what you're doing here that's what brad and i were doing at health care co i know another person who was working on a robotic solution and like they couldn't get it cracked um so they kind of had people wearing vr headsets with xbox controllers kind of driving the robots um but they were in a remote location and so it's an it's an it seems like it's given where we are with like the ability to automate

28:41 automate a lot of these things we're not totally space age yet.

28:45 It's a good pattern. It's very cool.

28:47 It's very, very cool.

28:47 Eyebots: Our goal is not to replace doctors.

28:49 I think the core issue here,

28:51 which is, you know, at a high level is there's just not enough doctors.

28:55 In fact, the number of doctors that are and people that are becoming doctors is not going up. It's actually going down, which is concerning,

29:02 especially because obviously the population is going up. So there's just an increasing gap that people will just not have access to care. And so our goal is to.

29:11 to empower a doctor instead of being able to see.

29:15 15 patients is a very intense day of you know of doctor time they can see 30 40 50 with us because they don't have to you know be there they can work remotely a lot of the time people just need a prescription updated and so we can actually serve the people that need all of their care whereas Mm that's

29:35 Brad: -hmm.

29:35 Eyebots: that's kind of like the fundamental thing one of the main things why I care is so frustrating because there's just a doctor shortage and I am sure we have this

29:42 this various parts of other healthcare but I know well about the eye doctors and and that's that's that's what we're trying to do we're not we need eye doctors you know that's a huge thing we're just trying to give them tools to better serve the population yeah

29:54 Scott: One of the things that I'm kind of curious about, too, and I don't know, Jack, you might not actually be able to tell me much about this. I don't know if like talking about your roadmap is more or less regulated in what's here in FDA,

30:06 but it strikes me that.

30:07 I think what I understand you'd be saying is that 90% case of the,

30:13 hey, I need a prescription or I need to renew my prescription for the 90% case, that's what your machine is able to do. There are some conditions of the eye or diseases of the eye or things that your machine is not yet set up to detect.

30:32 uh like i'm assuming i don't know if you guys are doing like checking for glaucoma or checking for you

30:37 Brad: Yeah.

30:38 Scott: know uh um eye eyeball pressure or something like that like all these other more um sophisticated tests that they'll do when you actually go to the optometrist but those aren't those are in the 10 not in the 90 percent um first of all do i have that

30:55 Do I have that is my mental model correct about that?

30:58 And second of all, what's your roadmap?

31:01 Do you envision iBot kind of doing all of these things?

31:05 Eyebots: In terms of the numbers,

31:07 off the top of my head, I don't know exactly those numbers.

31:09 What I do know is we can serve the vast majority of people that need glasses.

31:14 So if you need glasses or renewal or that sort of stuff, we're really good at that.

31:20 We also recommend that even if you don't have any.

31:22 health indications like you should go and get comprehensive care that falls for everybody but most people you know they don't have

31:30 conditions that you know at this time like we're perfect for them that all being said um of course we want to expand the capabilities like um in order to do that we move from a class one to a class two um and so if you become a diagnostic device which is what that is like if we say hey um you have like an amblyopia or strabismus or glaucoma or any of these diseases that is absolutely class two and we can't do that right now

31:55 I think for us.

31:57 We would love to screen for that,

31:59 right?

31:59 I think diabetic retinopathy is one of the leading causes of blindness.

32:03 And it's also one of the most preventable causes of blindness,

32:06 you just need to find it.

32:07 And by people not getting eye exams or screens,

32:10 they're missing it. And then oftentimes,

32:12 it's late,

32:13 you know what I mean? And maybe there's something you can do, maybe you can't, but we would love to do that. That's a bit far out, you know, and we're not doing that right now. And we don't have any like concrete plans of that.

32:22 But what I will say is

32:24 We have built a device that is kind of a new modality of doing vision care and traditionally you kind of only measure the prescription.

32:31 We can see all sorts of stuff.

32:32 And

32:33 Scott: Yeah.

32:33 Eyebots: so we're not acting on it. There's nothing that we can do really at this point, but you can see it. And as an engineer, of course, things are spinning in the back of our mind being like,

32:41 oh, one day, like, yes.

32:43 Scott: Yeah. So it's the fact that you basically have set up the device the way that you have.

32:49 If you've got, you know, I'll say like the naive version of it,

32:53 the quality of the cameras you have,

32:55 the quality of the ability for you to record what the person is, you know, what is in their eyes, basically the quality that you have there allows you to essentially capture the data.

33:07 Now the question between type one and type two device is really about how you act on that data.

33:14 Yeah.

33:14 Eyebots: that requires clinical trials and studies and all that sort of stuff and more tightly regulated

33:18 Brad: Can

33:19 Eyebots: and we'd love to get there one day but i think for right now we our mission is and you know we're just starting out is get people glasses essentially um and maybe contacts they might be coming soon we would love

33:30 Scott: to Yeah.

33:30 Eyebots: be able to do yeah

33:31 Scott: Yeah. Very,

33:31 Eyebots: i

33:31 Scott: very cool.

33:32 Eyebots: guess the engineers riled up for sure when we're like oh my god like this camera can do so much

33:38 Brad: I ask about something I've never...

33:41 really participate then maybe you have Brad which is you're effectively building a hardware device which so it's this intersection between industrial engineering and maybe there's some mechanical engineering in there and then software

33:54 development software

33:55 Scott: Yep.

33:55 Brad: I'm actually mostly just curious about how that process works like I see this like two lanes having to merge together just perfectly and with you know low tolerances for error and it's you know as you may have heard if you've listened or other people have heard on this podcast you know I've always worked on online systems right where you can kind of just ship it all the time and you have a lot of control over what you're doing

34:21 thing and you're really only shipping one thing I mean you might be shipping multiple systems at the same time that have to be coordinated but you're not actually trying in the same kind of way as I imagine trying to ship us a hardware device with software that have to kind of just blend like that what's what's that like

34:40 Eyebots: I mean, at high level, it's very difficult.

34:43 Brad: okay good all right cool that's interesting

34:47 Eyebots: um when people ask us what our moat is it's uh it's extremely hard to do this um and like between you have hardware software um you have regulated industry and you have you know medical device it's just like wow that's that's an that's a mouthful um to do um we have lucky for us um matias and i worked at form labs and i think you'll probably hear this there's a i think you'll probably hear this there's a i think

35:12 Scott: you'll probably hear this

35:12 Eyebots: I think called like the Formlabs Mafia, which

35:14 Scott: Mm-hmm.

35:14 Eyebots: is, have you guys heard of Formlabs or no?

35:16 Brad: No, I haven't.

35:17 Scott: No,

35:17 Eyebots: Okay.

35:18 Scott: yeah, tell us more about that.

35:18 Eyebots: Amazing.

35:19 It's basically a 3D printing company started by three different people, three people. But the CEO is Max Lebowski.

35:27 Fantastic,

35:28 really smart guy.

35:30 And he started this, oh wow, it must be like almost 20 years ago.

35:34 Probably not quite that. It was a Netflix documentary. It was like when MakerBot and Formlabs and all these people out with all these sorts of things.

35:40 They basically took a thing that

35:44 took up the size it was like about the size of maybe not a room but you know i mean fit in like a large room it was a a couple tons of a machine it was huge and costing you 50 to 100 000 and they created a desktop version that i believe the form one form two is probably like three or four thousand dollars um and it worked basically just as well and now and that was not their first product now arguably they work really really well um and so they took all the stuff that was

36:10 a really expensive hardware and they made it a lot cheaper but they maintain the quality by writing great software to account for all the tolerances and all the sort of stuff and so we kind of took that playbook when making our kiosk it's used and I both worked at Formlabs we saw the great success in this and I think a lot of people have done this where technology has moved in a way that the hardware it's an it's it's difficult it makes it hard because there's lead times and physical things and tolerances

36:35 But once you get that together,

36:37 the software is really what unlocks a lot of the accuracy and the quality of the system.

36:44 And so like you could download the Formlabs printer,

36:48 you know, the CAD and go find a factory in China and build them, you know, exact.

36:53 But if you didn't know how to calibrate it, you didn't know how to write the software and you didn't know all these process things,

36:58 it just won't work.

36:59 And that that's really the secret sauce,

37:01 I would say.

37:02 and so for us like we build a good hardware product it is very good and we've put a lot of like future thought into it but reality like in reality like if someone were to copy it

37:12 it wouldn't really matter that much because they don't have all the software um and so what we do is we ship it and we also from most of this too and we learn this from them we do over their air updates and so we can update the kiosk in the field and so if we say like oh like we've done this study and for this set of data like we understand like oh to make we can actually make it more accurate you know what i mean because we discovered this thing we will ship that feature and it goes through the compliance and it goes through the testing you

37:37 and then it lands on the kiosk and it goes okay i'm updated and now i am better and formulas would do that all the time with all of their printers it was actually kind of amazing that the first printers shipped were like fine good and then they just get better and better over time which is kind of the opposite of what you think about most hardware

37:55 Scott: Yeah,

37:55 Eyebots: products that's

37:55 Scott: it's the opposite.

37:56 Eyebots: kind of cool

37:57 Scott: It's the opposite of inshittification. It's like it actually it gets better over time instead of getting worse over time.

38:02 Brad: Over time.

38:02 Scott: Yeah, and I imagine that there's a little bit of like,

38:04 it's funny,

38:05 I'm a, I'm a, I have an early,

38:09 early 2012 Tesla Model S. And it's interesting because it doesn't get a lot of the software updates because it doesn't have the hardware that the newer models have.

38:20 And so I have to imagine that, that,

38:22 you know, the value of the over the air updates is awesome. And then you also have generations of your hardware.

38:28 where you you realize like oh to do this next thing we actually would like to improve the hardware in the following ways and sometimes you might not be able to ship all the features to all of the all of the hardware devices is that something that you've run into is that something that you already have begun to plan for and I guess somewhat related to that question I'm curious are the kiosks purchased purchased are they leased or do you continue to own them and you just

38:55 put them in the facilities.

38:57 Eyebots: So we lease them.

38:58 And so that probably has a downstream effect,

39:01 right? So we lease them, we own them, and we lease them out to the people.

39:04 And they pay us money for the kiosk, and then they also pay us for the prescriptions, generally speaking.

39:10 and so right now we're not super concerned we don't have a ton of models on the market right we just make the s1 plus kiosk and we put it out there and it works and it's great and we're going to update that yeah at some point there'll probably be like an s2 kiosk that will have a better camera or better this or whatever and then that's a that's probably a more tough decision of like okay do we sunset one of them eventually do we keep it going but knowing that it's not as good it's at least so maybe we just swap it out

39:37 you know maybe we give an upgrade program to be honest we haven't thought that far ahead these things are designed to last quite a while so that's kind of where we're at like let's let's get them out there but yeah it does beg to answer the question what we what we have done is we've tried to put the best components available at the time we try not to cheap out on things that will be dead with

39:59 a couple years you know what i mean like we put a camera in there that we know one day it will be able to we will be ready to do this and the camera can do that but we don't use those capabilities right now and so that's i think kind of what we're we're planning for yeah

40:10 Brad: You started in 2020. When did you ship your first device?

40:13 When did you when the first device land in the market?

40:16 Eyebots: the first really like commercial um thing that we've done was in november um yeah so it's pretty recent we've done like little trials before you know where it's like a couple units here and there and you know

40:26 and you'll see some like splashes about those but really like i would say our first like big boy splash it's crazy it was with a walmart that's like the nuts thing um where

40:35 Brad: Yeah, that's fantastic.

40:36 Eyebots: we

40:37 Brad: Great

40:37 Eyebots: you know like

40:37 Brad: cop.

40:38 Eyebots: it's a yeah right like it was whale hunting at its finest right um and so it was kind of the funny part is like matthias when he originally pitched this to me which was you know six years ago i guess it's like yeah like we'll be in grocery and big box and retail you know i was like yeah it makes sense and then like six years later it's like yeah we ended up kind of there it's usually you expect like so many pivots you know what i mean you're like oh like this and we sure surely we did that

41:03 we did that you know we're like oh we went to this and we tried this we tried like the smart glasses thing is really cool and this and pop-ups and but we kind of just ended up it's like

41:12 it's hard to there's so much new stuff happening right like this is a new modality it's a kiosk that's doing your thing we already have to be like hey no no no there's an actual doctor in here it's actually kind of the same thing it's just more to go all the way people just aren't really ready for that and you'll see that in all sorts of stuff like i remember when i was in college someone was like hey dude like

41:33 check out this thing like you shoot a text message and someone picks you up in their car like oh hell no like you know what i mean and

41:41 Brad: Do you feel

41:42 Eyebots: of course

41:42 Brad: like you're in the early days of ride sharing is what you're saying?

41:46 Eyebots: yeah right they're like yeah and like it's not quite you know people be like oh like check out the robot kiosk and you're like oh god no it's not that but like that's kind of people don't know you know what i mean we're doing our best to spread that

41:59 and similar it's like yeah get in the stranger's car and like they'll drive you and you kind of pay with cash or maybe a credit card i don't know i don't remember it was young you

42:07 Brad: Right

42:07 Eyebots: know what i mean

42:08 um

42:08 Scott: Now,

42:08 Eyebots: we

42:08 Scott: if you had made that kiosk just a little bit bigger,

42:11 you could have just told people the doctor was inside the box.

42:15 Eyebots: have jokes yeah well given the kiosk is five seven i i have gone inside of a kiosk

42:24 Scott: Can I ask one more question about the hardware software development process?

42:28 It sounds like the hardware is a little bit of a platform upon which the software gets built.

42:33 Eyebots: Yeah, yeah.

42:33 Scott: And then in my mind, there's like two phases. There's sort of an initial phase when you're just inventing this thing, you kind of have to develop them in parallel.

42:42 Eyebots: Yeah.

42:42 Scott: But then.

42:44 I'm imagining maybe they start to go on their own tracks like the hardware development is independent like are they do they remain tightly coupled or do they actually get decoupled as time goes on because

42:53 Brad: Yeah.

42:53 Scott: in the example of Tesla the hardware and software is totally decoupled

42:58 Eyebots: that's such a good question the honest i think the honest truth is it's um it's messy you know like i'd love to say that like it would be one or the other it just when you're building something new like it's you kind of just go for it right and so there was times we're like yeah yeah so like we'll sprint on the hardware to build a platform right and then we give it to the software team the software team does all their stuff and then they go

43:24 yeah so there's like this fundamental problem and then

43:28 Scott: Mm

43:28 Eyebots: we've got

43:28 Scott: -hmm.

43:28 Eyebots: like a reflection and it's just like oh god and then it goes back to the hardware team and the software team still working on the one with the reflection and then they have software that goes around the reflection to mitigate it and then the hardware six months later goes hey guys we fixed the reflection we got this cool new like coding and this and that software check it out and stuff is like

43:47 oh sick i forgot about that and then i'll have to like redo their code you know what i mean and then they start a mess and then there's like a fundamental thing we're like ah there's this new thing and so it's kind of like that and so i think like for us to be totally honest and i think this happens with other small teams we built most of the r&d with like an eight person team um that that's including everybody but most of us were engineers um and so it was just

44:11 five six days in the office just

44:12 Brad: everybody was just in there making it work together kind of thing yeah

44:15 Eyebots: making it work yeah if we were to do it again and like as we do it again like I'd like to think that you know we'll have a lot more thought process or use like a framework or something like that but I'm honestly not sure right like I think you certainly probably as you grow you you start to have like more of a process where you have gating items and your requirements and all that sort of stuff but in the beginning it was kind of like what does the customer want we're like we're not sure like

44:37 sure like how accurate does this have to be like we're not sure how what's the range that it can serve like we're not sure and then a customer will be like well if it can't do this i don't want it we're like oh no no it can do that like

44:49 Brad: Right.

44:49 Eyebots: we'll figure it out yeah

44:51 Scott: We definitely do that by the end of the month.

44:53 So I think you're bringing up a really interesting point,

44:57 which is, regardless of the fact that it's hardware or software,

45:01 when you're in the early R&D innovation stages.

45:04 you just need people in the mud together or

45:08 Brad: It's really

45:09 Scott: just

45:09 Brad: good.

45:09 Scott: you use the word messy before like you just need people in it together it's actually a little bit of an argument for some one of the benefits of in person versus remote and as we went through the pandemic right which is sometimes you just need to be there in the room around the whiteboard

45:26 Eyebots: totally i remember like it was kind of funny we hired brilliant software engineer um she had just graduated and so this was like her first like real job and the first thing that we had her do we're like we need to assemble these kiosks like they and so she's just turning screws with us and like no software whatsoever was about two weeks sprint of just like building kiosks and then afterwards we're like i'm so sorry you can start your like

45:52 like your real job now but she understood so fundamentally how this kiosk worked and she's like no it's great like I learned so much I had no idea I'd never touched hardware before and

46:02 Brad: Yeah.

46:02 Eyebots: then

46:03 kind of later it's like oh we're gonna actually make every software engineer build a kiosk

46:08 Scott: Mm

46:08 Eyebots: so that they

46:08 Scott: -hmm.

46:08 Eyebots: understand how this works

46:09 Brad: Yep.

46:09 Eyebots: and so that was kind of a cool thing and yeah you just like you just show up I think like one of the things that I say is like people like oh there's all sorts of secrets or whatever everyone has their own way of going about things mine is kind of like you just got to show up like every single day and do your best and like you don't even their best can even be an 80 or a b-minus but you just got to show up

46:28 show up and i think like if you just keep showing up and putting in the work like it will probably work out you have to be smart you have to have a good idea blah blah blah but i think by and large like a lot of fail failures that happen are just like it just becomes a grind after a while you know you're like oh this you get kicked while you're down like this happened this happened this happened this will never work but you just keep showing up in the mud you know with your teammates like eventually people will figure it out and that's kind of what happened with us i would say

46:54 Brad: I think that the other thing that I'm hearing from that story,

46:58 and I don't think it's just because you were a small team of, you know, early on only eight of you,

47:02 but the fact that you didn't put a wall between hardware and software, you didn't say like there's a team, there's the hardware team and there's the software team.

47:11 If you if you instead said like we're all on one team, we're all building this kiosk, then it's going to just kind of create greater ownership around that.

47:19 You know, I and your reflection story is a good example. I heard I recently heard a story about one of the teams that worked on the, you know, on the Oculus headset.

47:31 I worked in VR for a while and it's interesting how like.

47:37 You know, like if you have too much isolation between the software and the hardware team and next thing you know, like, you know, like the early one of the early versions of the reduced size Oculus headsets was, you know, they were like.

47:51 they took out one of the cameras because it was too heavy and it was just not going to work in the form factor and then the software engineers were like wait a second if we don't have that other camera we literally cannot fix the space like we can't figure out where the person's head is in space and so this like conflict where like could have been easily prevented if like they were one team collaborating instead the hardware guys like i

48:16 We can't fit this camera in this frame,

48:18 we're going to just get rid of it.

48:19 And it's like.

48:20 no and it like

48:21 Scott: Mm

48:21 Brad: that caused

48:22 Scott: -hmm.

48:22 Brad: this massive like rebuild and like it was it was it was after the it was after kind of they'd frozen the build spec and so it was like you know total disaster right

48:32 Eyebots: you just got to lock everyone in a room you know like they'll figure it out and i think like one of the cool things that we did as well is we started engaging with our suppliers really early on so we actually had them make our prototype kiosks and our supplies were in shanghai um and so we we

48:47 I had worked in China for a while not lived there but like you know done business there back and forth and a bunch of other people on our team had so we're very familiar with kind of that workflow and we found a fantastic factory early on that came to us recommended we knew one of the founders who had done business there and so we flew out met with their their owners and we kind of I wouldn't say necessarily developed the product with them but like we every prototype went through them and so we were seeing and then when we

49:14 and when we were like oh we need to scale this it was so much less painful it was just the standard things of like oh no no this screw goes here this goes here this goes here we have to switch this part out as opposed to like you know you'll go to a contract manufacturer and you'll give them the cm packet and they'll be like no like this this isn't going to work and it spawns the whole redesign we fortunately did not have to do that um because we had started early on i think that was one of the the awesome things we actually ended up doing looking

49:39 Brad: Because

49:39 Eyebots: back on it

49:39 Brad: you had your part you had your build

49:40 Build partner early,

49:41 so definitionally you did design for build,

49:44 basically.

49:45 Eyebots: Right what I'm saying.

49:46 Scott: Jack,

49:47 this has been super fascinating today.

49:49 Eyebots: Yeah, I appreciate

49:50 Scott: Appreciate

49:50 Eyebots: it, guys.

49:51 It's a great

49:51 Scott: your

49:51 Eyebots: talk.

49:51 Scott: time.

49:51 I think one of the things I really just to end on this thought,

49:55 Eyebots: Yeah.

49:55 Scott: culture is really important.

49:58 And the hardware software divide,

50:01 Brad brought this up, you could create a really toxic culture by separating those things out and you guys did something really smart.

50:08 maybe by intention maybe by luck i don't know you didn't create that divide you put everyone together and it created that collaborative culture which is so necessary and important we talked at least in just the software world about people throwing stuff over the walls right product managers throw a spec over the wall to engineering engineering throws code over the wall to qa whatever and somehow you managed to not have those walls when it was so

50:31 So it would have been so easy and natural to say,

50:34 here's where we're going to put up a wall.

50:36 And

50:36 Brad: Yeah.

50:37 Scott: I think that's pretty admirable.

50:38 Eyebots: Yeah, thank you.

50:39 Brad: Yeah.

50:41 Well, it looks like it's a super cool product.

50:43 I'm super glad you came and talked to us about it. Like Scott said, super interesting.

50:48 I feel like I'm not quite inspired to go off and build a medical device,

50:53 but I love the idea,

50:56 the call out.

50:56 That if folks if folks do feel like they have a medical device that they want to build that will solve real problems, then then they shouldn't be afraid of it.

51:07 They should they should just show up and do the work every day and create a team culture and of, you know, kind of collaboration and make it happen and make eye care more accessible.

51:20 I

51:20 Eyebots: yeah

51:20 Brad: love it.

51:21 Eyebots: i think one of the things is like you look back on this and you realize like yeah the nights were kind of long the classic thing but like damn we had so much fun like that's like an awesome thing like we love doing all these things the people that we hired were just fundamentally builders and they just love tinkering and building this and so like it was it's just been such a blast to do this and i think that helps get through the tough times you know

51:45 Scott: That's awesome.

51:46 Brad: Awesome.

51:47 Well, thanks.

51:47 Well, thanks for coming by Jack. It was great talking to you and yeah,

51:50 Eyebots: It's so nice to meet you guys.

51:51 Brad: awesome.

51:52 And so Scott,

51:53 we'll see you next week. And what

51:55 Scott: Yes,

51:55 Brad: do we say

51:55 Scott: sir.

51:55 Brad: to our, what do we say to our hundreds of listeners at this point?

52:00 Scott: Smash that.

52:01 What is it? Smash that subscribe button, rate and review.

52:04 Brad: And tell your mom and your friends.

52:05 Scott: And tell your friends and your mom.

52:08 Brad: All right.

52:08 Scott: See

52:09 Brad: Thanks

52:09 Scott: you guys.

52:09 Brad: for talking to you. Thanks.

52:12 Scott: Bye.

52:12 Brad: This episode of the HowManyCTOsDoesItTake podcast was produced and edited by Saffron Heptacow. Our theme song was AI-generated by Brad.

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