Transcript: 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 Eyebots 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 Brad My name is Brad Hefta-Gaub,
0:25 Brad and this is my trusty co-host.
0:26 Eyebots Scott Conrad.
0:27 Eyebots Brad,
0:28 Eyebots how are you doing today?
0:28 Brad I'm doing fantastic.
0:31 Brad We have a guest with us, Jack Muldave from iBot.
0:36 Brad Super excited to talk to you.
0:38 Brad Jack,
0:39 Brad 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 Eyebots thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Very exciting.
0:49 Eyebots Glad to talk to you both.
0:51 Eyebots Yeah,
0:52 Eyebots so Ibot.
0:53 Eyebots Ibot is a company that we started almost six years ago,
0:56 Eyebots me and our co-founder Mathias.
0:58 Eyebots Mathias came to me one day, basically.
1:01 Eyebots We had worked together previously,
1:02 Eyebots and he wanted to fix this issue where people have a lot of trouble getting glasses,
1:07 Eyebots getting the vision care that they need.
1:08 Eyebots And we wanted to essentially make purchasing glasses as easy as purchasing shoes.
1:13 Eyebots 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 Eyebots Glasses, optical retail,
1:39 Eyebots anywhere.
1:40 Eyebots And it also gives so much accessibility where people,
1:43 Eyebots you know,
1:43 Eyebots it costs money, it costs time and all sorts of other inconveniences that prevent people from getting eye tests,
1:49 Eyebots eye exams and glasses when they need them.
1:52 Eyebots 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 Scott How I have a very, very basic question.
2:04 Scott Yeah. Did either you or your partner know anything about eyes?
2:09 Scott Yeah, such a good question.
2:12 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott Yeah.
3:13 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott I'm doing this thing. I was a consultant at the time. I was like basically doing my own consulting.
3:44 Scott He's like, can you come take a look at this? I need someone to help me build a prototype.
3:47 Scott And I was like, yes,
3:48 Scott of course. Like, you know, known you for years. I would love to see what you're doing.
3:52 Scott Yeah. So he has me put my face in an 80-20 box essentially.
3:58 Scott And he pushes some buttons and he goes, oh yeah, yeah, you,
4:01 Scott do you have 2020 vision?
4:03 Scott I'm like, of course I have 2020 vision. Like, you know,
4:05 Scott I.
4:05 Scott 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 Scott I know the brain's pretty, pretty cool about that.
4:33 Scott But yeah,
4:33 Scott now whenever I go out and do like soldering or I have prescription safety glasses and,
4:39 Scott you know, it's amazing. I was like, oh my God, the world is so clear.
4:42 Scott Is this what it's like?
4:43 Scott And then of course I am like,
4:44 Scott you know, not someone in dire need necessarily of care,
4:48 Scott but people like go for years.
4:49 Scott I remember my girlfriend's, one of her parents had a massive prescription and he just never got glasses and we.
4:57 Scott when we put him through our tests,
4:59 Scott we're like,
4:59 Scott oh my God, you have like a significant astigmatism. It's like, it's driving at night hard.
5:04 Scott He goes,
5:04 Scott oh yeah.
5:05 Scott And like all these people, they don't have access,
5:08 Scott you know, to care because he lives in rural Vermont.
5:11 Scott And so to actually go get an eye prescription is, it's a journey, right?
5:15 Scott 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 Scott There's so many things that like when we see people that we
5:24 Scott 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 Scott But if you're in rural Pennsylvania and you see like people,
5:35 Scott they drive hours sometimes to go get the eye care they need.
5:39 Scott And I think, you know, good and bad is like, you know, they show up and you're like,
5:43 Scott wow,
5:44 Scott you drove here without glasses and like you let's get your glasses.
5:50 Scott It's really good.
5:51 Scott It's fun.
5:52 Brad This is super interesting.
5:53 Brad My brain is just running on all kinds of different questions for you from a tech perspective,
5:59 Brad but also from a business perspective.
6:01 Brad 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 Brad 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 Scott 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott So.
10:29 Scott You mentioned one thing that I don't know about it, FDMA or what was that acronym that you used?
10:35 Scott Oh, FMEA.
10:36 Scott FMEA.
10:38 Scott failure ooh this is embarrassing fmea i should know it's failure mode and effects analysis exactly and
10:45 Scott I see.
10:46 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott sure that this is that and that's just required by basically
13:06 Scott Mm-hmm. So
13:07 Scott good practice yeah
13:07 Scott the FDA asks you to do a risk assessment,
13:10 Scott which is the FDA, FDA,
13:13 Scott FDA, we call
13:14 Scott there's fmea and then there's something yeah
13:16 Scott And then you mentioned a quality management system,
13:20 Scott which to a software engineer sounds like a bug ticketing system,
13:24 Scott but I think it's something different.
13:26 Scott Maybe,
13:26 Scott I don't know.
13:27 Scott Yeah,
13:28 Scott 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 Scott Basically what they say is you have to have some form of quality management system.
13:39 Scott There's some requirements of like it needs to have like signatures and dates and things like that.
13:45 Scott But the FDA is like kind of, I would say, high level,
13:47 Scott reasonably loose about what exactly that means.
13:51 Scott Like, for example, you could define that as whatever,
13:53 Scott you could make your own.
13:54 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott So this is interesting. So Brad,
14:58 Scott do you have any other regulatory questions to ask here?
15:01 Brad No,
15:01 Brad I love it. I was going to say one of the things I think I'm hearing you say,
15:04 Brad Jack,
15:04 Brad is that, you know, kind of as you started before you started into the deep dive of different aspects of this,
15:09 Brad you're kind of saying, look,
15:10 Brad if you are an entrepreneur,
15:12 Brad 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 Brad then Jack Muldaive's advice is like,
15:20 Brad don't let that stop you. If you've got a great answer.
15:22 Brad 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 Scott Yeah.
15:43 Scott I think like.
15:44 Scott 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 Scott right?
15:52 Scott 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 Scott I think being hardware and regulated and going up against an industry that is pretty established,
16:05 Scott I think that would be the one thing.
16:08 Scott It's like this, it would be hard.
16:09 Scott 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 Scott 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 Brad I'm sorry.
16:41 Brad I'm just such a dad nerd.
16:43 Brad I can't help but laugh at that.
16:45 Scott There's a lot of them.
16:48 Scott So I feel,
16:49 Scott Brad,
16:49 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott Yeah, no quarters.
17:05 Scott But so basically,
17:08 Scott yeah,
17:08 Scott I'll describe the Walmart model,
17:09 Scott which is one of my favorites.
17:11 Scott So you walk into a Walmart Vision Center,
17:13 Scott and some of them have doctors,
17:15 Scott some of them don't, you know, we're in both of those types.
17:18 Scott And so basically be like,
17:20 Scott okay, I'm in the Walmart Center.
17:21 Scott I'd like to buy these glasses. That's why I'm here.
17:24 Scott And the optician goes,
17:27 Scott okay, do you have a prescription?
17:28 Scott You're like, no.
17:31 Scott Previously, you would have gotten like,
17:33 Scott okay,
17:34 Scott well, we have this doctor, she's booked out for a couple weeks,
17:38 Scott why don't you make an appointment and come back?
17:40 Scott Or you can use this iBot kiosk and it takes 15 minutes, you've got a prescription in 15 minutes.
17:45 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott And then we capture what comes back.
18:32 Scott And we use an imaging system basically to extract the glasses settings,
18:36 Scott which are just the numbers,
18:37 Scott the prescription numbers and the glasses.
18:38 Scott We take all of that information,
18:40 Scott we bundle that up and we send that to our doctor portal.
18:43 Scott And so this is the thing that is pretty important is we have.
18:46 Scott We have real doctors review every single session.
18:49 Scott We're not like an AI robot doctor or anything like that.
18:53 Scott And so we hire optometrists and ophthalmologists to actually review these sessions.
18:57 Scott They review it.
18:58 Scott There's still there's art to this.
18:59 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott Yes.
19:38 Scott It's
19:38 Brad Yeah.
19:39 Scott funny, some of our new hires have never used a fax machine.
19:44 Scott 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 Scott 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 Eyebots 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 Brad so yeah, it's like a clear,
20:10 Brad 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 Brad 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 Eyebots And so that was a very COVID time.
20:44 Eyebots And so no one was touching things. No one was putting their face into things. And traditionally,
20:48 Eyebots you have to put your face into an autorefractor. And that's a lot of touching.
20:53 Eyebots And people were not about that.
20:55 Eyebots And so this needed to be a touch-free experience was one of our first axioms, I guess.
21:00 Eyebots And the second was it cannot have any sort of, it has to be on demand.
21:06 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots you know, never.
21:37 Eyebots And so we came up with basically touchless refraction.
21:40 Eyebots And to give credit,
21:41 Eyebots like this has been around for a while.
21:43 Eyebots It's like any good technology. We are not the genius inventors, I would say, that came up with this crazy thing.
21:50 Eyebots 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 Eyebots I believe,
21:59 Eyebots in the 80s, I think, which is incredible.
22:00 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots LEDs are now surface mounted.
22:18 Eyebots And so all sorts of things changed.
22:21 Eyebots And we brought that into the 21st century. We went through a ton of iterations and built this great refractor.
22:26 Eyebots And so it works great.
22:28 Eyebots And then we did a very similar thing with OLED.
22:30 Eyebots So LIDAR, we use, you know, again,
22:33 Eyebots 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Eyebots 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 Brad Jack,
23:51 Brad the doctors,
23:52 Brad 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 Scott 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 Scott of virtual tech, virtual healthcare tech companies out there like, you know,
24:28 Scott 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 Scott selecting for specific doctors of ophthalmologists and stuff like that.
24:53 Scott 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 Eyebots I think like we've made tons of strides in telemedicine, no doubt about that.
25:16 Eyebots I think for optometry,
25:18 Eyebots it's just not quite the same as a little behind.
25:21 Eyebots And there's some great companies out there that do this, you know, like digital optometrics is fantastic.
25:28 Eyebots They do essentially a telehealth optometry model and they're having success.
25:34 Eyebots It's great.
25:34 Eyebots And we do a very similar thing.
25:37 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott 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 Eyebots with a wild prescription,
27:05 Eyebots you know what I mean?
27:05 Eyebots And what we try and do is, first of all, there's limits that we can do in our model.
27:09 Eyebots So we'll always refer to comprehensive care.
27:11 Eyebots We do not provide a comprehensive eye exam.
27:14 Eyebots We do a vision test that allows you to get a prescription,
27:17 Eyebots which is regulated and good and legal and everything,
27:20 Eyebots but it's not a replacement for a comprehensive eye exam.
27:22 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott did your question get answered? You were sort of asking about the doctor's side of this.
27:54 Brad Yeah,
27:55 Brad I was just curious.
27:55 Brad It sounds like you've got a team of doctors there.
27:56 Brad Of course, they're looking at it and they're sitting waiting for stuff to come in.
27:59 Brad And
28:00 Scott Yeah
28:00 Brad that's pretty interesting.
28:01 Brad Like that's an interesting,
28:03 Brad that pattern,
28:05 Brad a sort of, I'm just going to call it the minotaur pattern. I just invented that phrase.
28:10 Brad Half technology,
28:12 Brad half.
28:14 Brad 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 Brad automate a lot of these things we're not totally space age yet.
28:45 Brad It's a good pattern. It's very cool.
28:47 Brad It's very, very cool.
28:47 Eyebots Our goal is not to replace doctors.
28:49 Eyebots I think the core issue here,
28:51 Eyebots which is, you know, at a high level is there's just not enough doctors.
28:55 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots to empower a doctor instead of being able to see.
29:15 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott but it strikes me that.
30:07 Scott I think what I understand you'd be saying is that 90% case of the,
30:13 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott Do I have that is my mental model correct about that?
30:58 Scott And second of all, what's your roadmap?
31:01 Scott Do you envision iBot kind of doing all of these things?
31:05 Eyebots In terms of the numbers,
31:07 Eyebots off the top of my head, I don't know exactly those numbers.
31:09 Eyebots What I do know is we can serve the vast majority of people that need glasses.
31:14 Eyebots So if you need glasses or renewal or that sort of stuff, we're really good at that.
31:20 Eyebots We also recommend that even if you don't have any.
31:22 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots I think for us.
31:57 Eyebots We would love to screen for that,
31:59 Eyebots right?
31:59 Eyebots I think diabetic retinopathy is one of the leading causes of blindness.
32:03 Eyebots And it's also one of the most preventable causes of blindness,
32:06 Eyebots you just need to find it.
32:07 Eyebots And by people not getting eye exams or screens,
32:10 Eyebots they're missing it. And then oftentimes,
32:12 Eyebots it's late,
32:13 Eyebots 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 Eyebots But what I will say is
32:24 Eyebots 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 Eyebots We can see all sorts of stuff.
32:32 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott If you've got, you know, I'll say like the naive version of it,
32:53 Scott the quality of the cameras you have,
32:55 Scott 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 Scott Now the question between type one and type two device is really about how you act on that data.
33:14 Scott 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Eyebots It's basically a 3D printing company started by three different people, three people. But the CEO is Max Lebowski.
35:27 Eyebots Fantastic,
35:28 Eyebots really smart guy.
35:30 Eyebots And he started this, oh wow, it must be like almost 20 years ago.
35:34 Eyebots 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 Eyebots They basically took a thing that
35:44 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots But once you get that together,
36:37 Eyebots the software is really what unlocks a lot of the accuracy and the quality of the system.
36:44 Eyebots And so like you could download the Formlabs printer,
36:48 Eyebots you know, the CAD and go find a factory in China and build them, you know, exact.
36:53 Eyebots 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 Eyebots it just won't work.
36:59 Eyebots And that that's really the secret sauce,
37:01 Eyebots I would say.
37:02 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott it's funny,
38:05 Scott I'm a, I'm a, I have an early,
38:09 Scott 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 Scott And so I have to imagine that, that,
38:22 Scott you know, the value of the over the air updates is awesome. And then you also have generations of your hardware.
38:28 Scott 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 Scott put them in the facilities.
38:57 Eyebots So we lease them.
38:58 Eyebots And so that probably has a downstream effect,
39:01 Eyebots right? So we lease them, we own them, and we lease them out to the people.
39:04 Eyebots And they pay us money for the kiosk, and then they also pay us for the prescriptions, generally speaking.
39:10 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Brad 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Scott So I think you're bringing up a really interesting point,
44:57 Scott which is, regardless of the fact that it's hardware or software,
45:01 Scott when you're in the early R&D innovation stages.
45:04 Scott 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad I worked in VR for a while and it's interesting how like.
47:37 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad We can't fit this camera in this frame,
48:18 Brad we're going to just get rid of it.
48:19 Brad And it's like.
48:20 Brad 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 Eyebots 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 Eyebots 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 Brad Build partner early,
49:41 Brad so definitionally you did design for build,
49:44 Brad basically.
49:45 Eyebots Right what I'm saying.
49:46 Scott Jack,
49:47 Scott this has been super fascinating today.
49:49 Eyebots Yeah, I appreciate
49:50 Scott Appreciate
49:50 Eyebots it, guys.
49:51 Eyebots It's a great
49:51 Scott your
49:51 Eyebots talk.
49:51 Scott time.
49:51 Scott 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 Scott And the hardware software divide,
50:01 Scott 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 Scott 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 Scott So it would have been so easy and natural to say,
50:34 Scott here's where we're going to put up a wall.
50:36 Scott 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 Brad Well, it looks like it's a super cool product.
50:43 Brad I'm super glad you came and talked to us about it. Like Scott said, super interesting.
50:48 Brad I feel like I'm not quite inspired to go off and build a medical device,
50:53 Brad but I love the idea,
50:56 Brad the call out.
50:56 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad 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 Brad Well, thanks.
51:47 Brad 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 Brad And so Scott,
51:53 Brad 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 Scott 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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