Lessons from the Intersection of Media and Healthcare Tech | Daniel Goldberg | TBCY

Hey Daniel, thank you for coming in, you have a really a tremendous sort of very broad and deep background in media production into healthcare now, and just quite remarkable all the things that you're doing. So thank you for coming in and sharing your insights with my audience. Thanks. It's a thrill to be speaking with you.

So Daniel, you know, what were the sort of the magic moments in your life that created this wonderful career you have and your continued contributions. And it could have been something when you're three and five years old, it could be inside or outside the family could it be in school could be mentors, career inflection, points, what are what would be those top three defining areas that made you who you are to? I think something I've always lived with, and something which drove me to be not only in this charity, and in talking with you, but into what the big chapters that to delineate parts of my life has always been an interest or a really a passion to touch people's lives, you know, to uplift people, I went to film school, I was a film artist and a musician. So and my mother was a tremendous musician, entertainer, my father is an incredibly creative guy, but through business.

And I think I learned a lot from both of them. But really, it was, this was just the thing that keeps you up at night, you know, often drives your life and your career and I wanted to be a part of, you know, helping those who suffer and uplifting people and touching people's lives. And so I initially took a track, which was, you know, going to film school and studying cinema and studying, you know, movie writing and working in that arena, you know, who would have known that there was so much tech there that was so rapidly and radically innovative, that they needed a ton of help. And along the way, it's, it's I grew up with, you know, computer in the house, right to my little LC two ad and my, my, my Apple TV, you know, I was fortunate to have as a kid, and then I translated, I think a lot of my life, as I see now is translating that same interest to help people to touch people's lives, translating that into what I'm doing now, which I never thought, you know, 30 years ago, I'd be doing which is, you know, in healthcare tech, I thought I was going to be writing movies and making movies and in sharing what I can give to this world, and uplifting people through that, you know, we're writing music, you know, as a drummer and pianist. So, to me, I don't think the focus has changed. The chair I'm sitting in is different. But I've been very fortunate, I mean, now being

crazily involved in health care, doing some really, really need things. I go to bed each night, when I when I get to go to bed. Feeling like I'm still pursuing that same path. So let's let's kind of mine your your film and music, sort of interest early on? Where were you able to really leverage all of that early on into Did you produce documentaries? Or did you did you get into movie or TV kinds of things? Or, or maybe in the ad tech, the ad space? And then on the music side? Was that a hobby or were you part of a band or something like that, so just want to flesh that part of music I played. I never played really professionally, I played with a band called Modern English I played with, with a revival of that. In New York City plays called Arlene's Grocery, which is a fun club downtown. No, I never pursued it professionally. I just, I didn't I didn't I would love to. But I

felt like wow, you know, can I make a living doing that, right? And filmmaking after NYU, and during NYU, like I was interning for producers because they have a great program that facilitates all that but it's funny. I'm in the south of France right now. And I took one of my kids to, to con in a fancy hotel there yesterday. And I remember being calm Film Festival. I had a short film.

This is 30 years ago. And it was part of a codec group. They took a few short films. I had won some awards at the NYU film festival, a nice short film that played in France and big keys to Houston Chicago Film Festival, a bunch of film festivals in different countries. And they took a couple groups took a bunch of short films. Mine was one of them to the con Film Festival and I came to that 93 That was that was really exciting. But I'm here now and Uh, I had basically at that point was a filmmaker, I was an editor, which is an interesting situation because I love film editing is an art and a craft. But when I was finishing film,

school editing went entirely digital, digital and rapid, right? Because the medium tamarind industry recognized that if we can leverage these digital tools, we're going to work faster, we're going to work smarter, we're going to cut our budgets, right, and who wouldn't love to cut an $80 million theatrical release down or 10 or 15 million or whoever knows what the scales were. But everyone figured and rightfully so that if we can adapt this nonlinear editing this file based workflow approach where we weren't having to film strips and tapes and things, you know, we're going to work a lot faster, maybe even creatively will have new kinds of outcomes. Right. So, as an editor, I was, you know, making creative choices, you know, cutting up film, for TV commercials and TV music videos, I worked on a bunch of corporate films for Warner Brothers, Time Warner and American Express, like in New York City, really high end corporate stuff. And I worked on actually a half a dozen social documentaries as well in New York City, that PBS stuff, you know, wounds on HBO. And I also assisted at the time for a lot of releases, like my dream was to work for Marty Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg as a filmmaker, I never did, but I was in all of their cutting rooms, helping their producers or their editors, or essentially helping their projects finish. But mainly on the technical side, which was an early thing for me my early 20s, I was like, wow, and I'm kind of, sort of resonating with or connecting with what I thought it'd be doing, but in a totally different way, right. Because

again, the, the cutting rooms were becoming digital. And we were leveraging, you know, really, you know, cutting edge, you know, Big Mac Cuadras and really expensive board sets. And as a as an NYU intern, I got to work for a company, Robert De Niro had an editing company. And they were editing, they were renting systems. And really, nobody knew how to use them. Nobody was everybody was just learning how to implement. So you have this classic scenario of new technology really impactful if you can use it, right? Who really knows how to implement it, right. And as a young person, you know, me and

that folks I've worked with, we'd be at the studio at the shop there 234 In the morning, taking these things apart, fixing them, putting them back together, and really aggressively learning how these things worked. And nobody really knew how to use them. So there's a company called Avid, which was a pioneer, which is still around now you could buy avid for 20 bucks a month back then, a system that we would deploy was a quarter million dollars. And basically, for Avid, I became a certified instructor, I was number six in the world, I was a certified trainer or certified instructor, and ACSR certified support support rep. And that particular platform leaned on,

you had to know a bit about obviously, Mac hardware, video signal path, workflows in post production facilities. How to Edit. And there's probably been more I mean, storage, because we had these big, giant nine gig drives, they were really a beauty or not good drivers, 3000 bucks, and we'd have stacks of them. And you only had so many scuzzy address IDs, right? So you can only have so many of these giant nine gig drives, you know, you can have maybe, you know, like 54 gigs on your movie was a great, great big thing right now, I got down on jumps, right? For 10 bucks. But at any rate, that particular technology embraced so many different aspects of computing, of again, video signal workflow, media coding. And then as I spent more and more time as an avid

certified guiding, there were very few of us, like I trained in London, I worked in New York, I worked in LA, but there were very few of us that can really knew what we're doing. And along the way, logically, the storage started to become, you know, logically networked, right? And then the systems themselves became network which spun out of a workflow need, which was really, you know, obvious, which was like Hollywood film, like I worked for a company, a big giant production company, post production company, they had offices in London, Irving, New York, and Chicago. So I was a director of technology in Chicago. And these guys made Superbowl commercials among other things, but like the really pricey stuff, and they would shoot in Burbank and maybe cut in London and then had to move this data really quickly because again, everything moves really fast. And so my first project there was data transport

acceleration, how do you securely to meet MPAA regulations, which is like what we do not for HIPAA, you know, governance and what have you in compliance. But how do you move stuff really fast? And there were a few technologies some were doing with hardware. One was doing it with software. They eventually got bought by IBM, the one they was doing with hardware I think is still around.

But it anyway, we were trialing different technologies. See how we move You know, dozens of gigs per hour from Burbank to cut in London, or maybe they're editing in Italy for the weekend. But in Hollywood is the same application where you have composer in the Hamptons on I remember we did men and black. So the component that somebody was in the Hamptons, the producer, the composer, I think was in Miami or somewhere, you know, they're shooting, obviously, in Burbank, or, or, or Hollywood and who knows on on location. But this data had to be moved around securely, and it was big chunks. And then they had to cut on it. And they would cut maybe three or four, they'd

have two or three habits, you know, in a facility. So they're networking those together so they can move faster. So it was really a fascinating like trial by fire, like, how do you manage media like this? How do you move data in special ways? And, and that's where I cut my teeth? And I'm not sure if I'm answering which party question answering but am I getting there? Well, you know that my audience is technical. Right? So I'm trying to mind sort of the technical sort of background, because the audience would then find that relevant to their understanding, right. So you had an early interest in tech and school you, you've taken some tech type courses when you're in film school. You worked as director, technology and production. So

there's tech involved? And because my audience are engineers and scientists, but they're very tech is right, right. And I think I think what's really fascinating what I've got captured from the three decades in tech is the universality of technological applications. And what drives us to innovate in what drives us to is on the other side to consume or use this up, why do we use it? How do we use it? But my specifically, my background was to weasel out of a bunch of calculus classes I took, you know, well, first off in high school, I took AP comm site. So I was learning Pascal in high school. I knew basic and I was learning a little bit of I wasn't good at it, but hex, right? Because I was working in those old school ways, right. But Pascal was a foundation for me. Then in college, I learned

Fortran, right. And then I took a class on data structures to weasel out of calculus. And so I realized like, Wow, I love this stuff. And then on my own, I was you know, a plus certified in

network plus, and then I was MC, Microsoft, MC s. A, I forget, I have a few of those are a few of the Cisco CCNA. And Mac, I just joked with Apple server about this, the Mac used to have a thing called AC DHS, which is Apple certified desktop help.

A young guy got you work, you know, but the fact is, if you can get your hands on stuff, and be in a real environment, it's leveraging especially an aggressive environment like in Hollywood, nobody goofs her out more with Technic than I think Hollywood or the military, right? There's a lot of money. And they have a big interest. Like if they identify that this particular resource or tool is going to help us they'll invest quickly, there'll be early adopters, and they'll play with it. So being in those environments was massive for me.

And again, what I do now in healthcare tech, I never thought about that. And I never know you could do it that. But, you know, along the road, all what I really did was just map what I was doing in media entertainment, into a sector that badly needed, which was healthcare. So are you still in the film industry or the TV production? You know, sort of the media industry are still doing that as well in parallel, or have you completely segwayed into this sort of healthcare tech area. I completely switch and the story is a good one. To me. I was working for a startup company.

I didn't know what a start up was when I when I saw them on and I was I was so I started with a company that needed somebody to help integrate their damn system, their digital asset management system that was built by a bunch of Media Lab, MIT Media Lab engineers, incredibly well funded the board were all crammed into cram like, media entertainment, folks, right? So they knew like wow, we can build this web 2.0 digital asset management system, which is perfect. A perfect fit for anyone that whose bread and butter is media, which is Hollywood, right? If we can just sell it there. That's a great fit. So there was a one ad or whatever I'm line ad for someone who knew avid notes and digital post production workflows specifically because some of the stuff is complicated. The platforms are very specific. I mean, nobody leveraged storage,

volume and networked. You know, really, you know, it was you had to have a qualified really high end HP Sr. There were like only a couple that were qualified by avid for certain use. Obviously,

there was a Mac Quadra that became other other, you know, Mac's later on down the road, but they were looking for somebody who knew these pleth these were flows worked in digital post knew how to talk to those people, but to take their web to Oh, right, it was the first web based digital asset management system, and implemented inside of that architecture, those workflows, and I met these guys, and I fell in love with them. And I flew down, I moved to LA. And I was working for them. And basically, they were so well connected, that we can go in and out of Warner's or universal or, you know, Paramount, and all those places, again, as a kid is where I want to be right I, I never do have to bring that out of a tech person. But, you know, here I was in Francis Ford Coppola is cutting room or, you know, all these people in New York. And now I'm in, you know,

walking out a studio set lots and meeting with media and engineering folks, or I think, our biggest game like a four month project at Warner's that was really just kind of a proof of concept and meeting with them on and off for a few months. And they wanted to manage assets better, because it wasn't just for the movies, like how do we get? How do we share this stuff? How do we lock it down and share it as privacy in in in Hollywood is a major financial issue. Or, you know, piracy and privacy. So anyway, I'm working for this company. And I have a front row seat in what was called, you know, to me, the new this new thing of a startup, somebody who's innovating something pretty radical and new with a small agile team, with a great idea. And they knew a problem, and they're trying to solve and these were really bright guys, Media Lab guys. And, you know,

nobody, like, we'd go into a studio lot and say, Oh, we have a web base, you're going to access your media with a browser, and they were scared to use a web browser for things, you know, what browsers for, for YouTube, or whatever it was, you know, we're searching for the news. So but anyway, what I learned firsthand was, how do you meet the market with a new technology that truly has usability, but you have all those other layers that you have to navigate, which is sales and marketing, pre sales pilots, you know, all of that stuff. And we had a brilliant team, Britain green product. But, you know, I slowly saw it fail. And the reasons why it failed, were really interesting to me. And

again, I was on the engineering and the sales engineering side. So I was with the customer. So I was seeing this play out. And you know, two things I learned which I would later apply to my own life, and startup was number one, listening to the customer. Number two is carefully sharing new technology in a way that, like, you have to approach it in a docile fashion, because people don't know what it is and may be afraid of it, they're going to want to trial it. Of course, they're not gonna pay for a pilot, like I think our pilots were, I don't know all the story, but we're often like, they had to be paid pilots, I think we lost a few pilots, because they weren't paid for nobody, the owner when let us do a free pilot. Here I am. Now I've been doing seven years of

this, we did all three pilots, they all converted. And you know, what I learned, though, was if you can't, regardless of how great your tech is, if you can't, if you can bring that customer in, let them understand what you're doing and let them know how it's going to solve their problem be valuable to them, especially you literally in a way of like letting them try it, you know, a new thing. Like we're how we're innovating and healthcare as a startup with just you know, very small investment yet, you know, our customers are huge companies and for to do what we've done conventionally would have been, I think, on a scale of 10 to 15 times investment, what you know, the cost to develop and deploy, and sell what we're doing. So, again, it's like, we do all unpaid pilots, right. So I learned that I learned a lot,

but and I learned a lot about communications between teams. So no matter if intrinsically, each team is so brilliant. If your your group can't isn't working is one piece, like you said a while back to me said, you know, a startup is I love this. You

said, you know, a startup is like you're fighting for your life every day. Right? Is that how you said it? Like a star you have to be you have to be resilient. Right? It's very volatile.

Yeah, you know, it's it's a roller coaster like nobody can imagine. You know, like you see Elon Musk on the TV and you think, what a superhero and he's smiling and laughing I'm sure that guy's been through so much, right? I mean, I don't even know anybody who just the sheer number of zeros behind a number who's put so much on the line personally, to make to the next step, right. So at any rate, there is such an adventure to do the startup thing with tech that I was lucky to be in that particular experience to learn a lot before I had more of my own skin in the game. But so that was an important part of it.

At we're talking about the transition from media entertainment to health care. So I didn't know anything about health care, really. And the owner was really, really visionary guy and really well connected, brought us to the University of California Medical Center said, you know, we just go wherever he sent us right to the next Tuesday, you're gonna even talk to the head of neuroradiology, the head of nursing the head of the medical school at this university, California Medical Center. And we will just show up, right, and we don't know why we're there. We know a little bit, obviously, we're trying to implement our technology, we figure Okay, so there's a use for media asset management and within the confines of that healthcare facility. Of course. I didn't know what exactly so we go in this darkened conference room, and we look at some like radiological saw slides, and we're there for ended up being for hours and talking with everybody. And the basic story was, we got to 64, slice CT

scan, chunk of media, right? We've got a user use case that's unique and critical, right? So if the Chief Chief of neuro radiology or a key player on that surgical team needs to do a reading of a brain scan for an eight year old that came in with a traumatic injury. And I'm not a neurosurgeon, so I can't represent the a lot of the details. Well, but the point was, they have like, I don't know what he said, like nine minutes to do a good read on this for the life of the patient, right. And if he's in

Singapore to conference, we need to make sure he can see this quick. How do we do that? Said, so you got a chunk of media, you're governed by, you know, you've seen clients issues or, you know, regulatory concerns you have to meet. But there's a you don't know, this is 64, slice CT. This is huge stuff.

And we have other stuff, too, you know, with surgical videos. And I said, Well, I just spent four months in Warner's, you know, down the street, you know, in California, all your stock studios down the street are doing this every day. You don't do this. It's no we don't know how to do.

And I said, Okay, so you don't know how to do this. Do all hospitals and so yeah, none of us know. And that was the end of being in media entertainment, I that light bulb went off, I said, I'm going to healthcare, because if nobody's really doing this well, or aggressively or economically, well, I'd love to be there. And I knew that deep down, it was a great synergy, you know, to, to work, you know, if we talk about touching people's lives, you know, with film you're doing that with movies and music, you're doing that it's it's a long journey, it's, you know, pretty chaotic and enigmatic, but with providing a new tool to surgical teams that are using it in real time with patients. Bang, and you're really, you're really making a mark and you see it happening you can feel it you know, I've been in or as in Italy, Spain, France, I mean, a bunch of places, the US, the UK, and it's one thing to talk you and I talk about health care it but when you are in the venues in the spaces where it's being applied, like when you're in and or at 7am and the beeps and sounds and it's 64 degrees. And as a surgical team and you can't touch this, you can't you know, I was bumped the table without there a sterile tables are not sterile tables. If you bump a

table, even though you're wearing this stuff, and you're not in you know Sterling, they have to rip the table out replay, you know, really everything that was on the table just because you bumped into the little cloth on top of it. So but the point is, in those particular environments, where your technology is being used, there is a whole consciousness, there's a whole, contextual, there's like a sensitivity to the how things get used, and what has to happen, right? It's not like I'm making something for a general user and under, you know, in their kitchen, this is like healthcare environment. So I learned a lot. But that wake up call for me was that meeting at that you see Medical Center, where they said, we got a ton of this data, we don't know how to leverage it, we don't know how to move it. We don't lock it down. So so let's let's kind of go through this

journey that, you know, you have this interest in media, you get you go to college, and you're studying media, but you're also taking you know, some IT related courses, you get certifications and different kinds of it. So you end up working with production companies. And by you're the director of technology because you've always had this interest in technology. And in even though you don't have a comp sci degree, because you had this interest abiding interest in your strong passion for technology, and you've been self learning and taking courses and getting certification, you're you're the Anointed One, because you can talk. You can talk the production side in the

media side, but you also have enough understanding of the technical side to marry the two. So he ended up heading up these kinds of programs and then you work for a startup of MIT Media Labs, sort of A spin out of MIT Media Labs. And they're thinking, hey, why don't we apply all of our capabilities, and to sort of, to the digital aspect of production, in a big way, and they can do it in a way that perhaps nobody could do before. But and you are part of that, because you understood the technology side. But you also

understood the entertainment side, that means the kind of the media entertainment side, and again, you were bridging that gap. So was it because you're a part of that startup, that you get introduced to this medical kind of application. And ultimately, you indicated that that startup just wasn't able to scale. And it's because a startup is not just tech, it's not how good you are, in translating research into tech, there's all of these commercial aspects and understanding the customer, the social aspects, and being able to communicate the value proposition in a way that makes sense to the target customer. And you're talking about running pilots and learning from that process of how that business side works.

And if you don't get that business side, you'll never have a successful company, no matter how good your tech is. And a good example, is Nikola Tesla, right? I mean, he's, you know, decades, maybe a century ahead of other people, but he just was not able to translate all of that brilliance into a commercial commercialization, whereas Edison and Westinghouse, were able to do that, because they understood the technical side, but also the commercial side. So you're saying, then the wake up call, when you were introduced to this UC medical application is you're thinking, I understand what the barrier is, I know, what they're doing. I'm doing in other areas, and I just have to apply that capability to the medical space. So that that then leads you to forming epic car? Or was there another intermediate steps or? Or that was, then you know, what, I'm going to apply all of my capabilities, and realizing there's a gap in the medical and the medical ID area? And I'm going to apply that to medical or pet? Or was that a direct leap into that area? Or was there other interim intermediate steps? There were some intermediate things, but I mean, the eyes were always on working on media and health care, and solving some key problems with this. And it's crazy set of unstructured data that every country has problem. But you

made some great points, but but in my story about my story, and I think that, you know, there is I've learned firsthand that no matter how great your tech is, no matter how exhausted you make yourself, building it, if it's not going to get used, if you can't communicate a message it sell it, right, if you can't prove its value. And then, you know, sustain a market, you know, a smart, marketable approach and marketing approach. It doesn't matter, right. And so there's a huge people aspect, right of everything we do, I think with technical with technology implementation, or a tech innovation, I mean, I think being being with that startup in LA was, I was with the people using it. And I think what I learned in a really, what was really significant from that experience was being close to the people who are going to use the tech. Because I think that the three things that we applied at a car are number one, you're going to be successful, if number one, you have a valuable, you know, a valuable product that you can prove its value, right? Number two, it's easy to use or pleasurable needs, right.

So the experience is meaningful. And if you're breaking up an existing workflow, they don't mind or you're marrying, you're not complicated existing workflow, so that it can be readily, you know, implemented easily. The third thing is you have to care. So much, I mean, it the cornerstone of everything is, is caring, and having a dedication to that the users or your customers success. And some of that's tech and some of

that's people and someone's just your heart, right. But what I definitely saw is like it NBC, they would say, We'll buy like 50 of this new cool thing. I mean, I don't know if veg budgets are the same. Now, there's a few years ago, or the

outlook is the same, but we'll buy 50 of these new you know, media encoders, or whatever it is, if we don't like them, if nobody likes using them, we'll throw them away and buy a different, right. So in other words, if people can't use your stuff happily, no matter how valuable you can try to prove it later on down the road. It doesn't matter and I learned that firsthand, but transitioning into Healthcare did, you know truly leverage everything I ever learned in tech, especially on the digital media side, because we're working with media now in healthcare, but everything other like I even though I didn't have a company degree, like, I would read books on the TCP stack writing to me, like I tell this to my kids who won't listen about it, but I think to know, the TCP stack, is, is like, it's like, if you're retaining a lion, you know, how that lion thinks, you know, maybe I'm goofy this way. I think the OSI model, the TCP stack, I mean,

our biggest issues ever are, you know, networking concerns, right? Why is it the media coming through with, you know, at this bit rate, you know, without loss or drops or latency, and, you know, looking at those issues, because we're moving media, so we're all about, on the troubleshooting side, how does a packet get from here to there, and what can be an obstacle for it? So, to me, if you're gonna work in tech and media, knowing those core pieces is so great. You know, there's like a 700 book, I'm a red bullet on the TCP, which is, like, crazy book that I just read on my own. And, yeah, I mean, whether you're, you never talk in terms of frames and headers so much and, you know, with customers, or even when we're building stuff, but I feel like everything I learned along the way, whether it was Cisco, you know, routing, or Cisco, iOS, or ins and outs of Microsoft glass, right, which, because every healthcare computer is a Windows machine, right, nobody's on anything. We work on Chrome and edge and everywhere, they're gonna use that it's right on their Windows machines. So all that stuff came into play. And then like a goofy thing I did, I was I was working, you talked about like, the along the way, like I said, you know, what, if I'm going to really work heavily in tech, I should, I should learn some more. So I worked for

a company that did break fix at the corporate level, but a lot of networking, troubleshooting, and then a lot of we will, you know, break fix stuff. And something that I learned in Hollywood, as I got to healthcare was, you know, besides continuity of technologies, right, whether it's regulatory conformance, and clients, or Kathy working with big chunks of media, there was also a continuity of environments. I mean, and in Hollywood, you have difficult personalities, typically, right. And I on availability can only get somebody's attention very rarely. And then in healthcare, you've got surgeons who are, to me the most profoundly unavailable people, but available, meaning they're really busy, they have tight, tight schedules, like you do. And you know, but these are people that it's hard to get their attention. And when you have it, you've got to tell your

story quickly, and everything has to work really well. So the point is, I felt like I transitioned from media entertainment to healthcare, and there were a lot of similarities. Because of the personality types, and because of the critical needs, nobody's dying, if there's a problem in a cutting room at Warner Brothers, like a patient, you know, nobody's getting hurt on a in an operating theatre. But on the other hand, you know, people in Hollywood don't sleep, like if you're on a theatrical, you're going to start your film, in digital coasts on, you know, June 1 and 2024. And you're not going to really sleep well until the international theatrical release, you know, maybe 18 months later, or whatever. So these people have critical timetables to and it may be $100 million picture and you've got a lot riding on you. So there's a

similar set of pressures and a similar set of complicated personalities, and or just profoundly unavailable, people that are just really busy. And I enjoyed those parallels or those, those that continuity. But again, working at like, a classic rake fix environment where I was just being sent up to fix the network issue, or, you know, I was young, I was doing, you know, corrupted OS or, you know, little things that are broken, you know, whatever it is in the office place, but the point was at that company one day, they said, you know, we're gonna have you go learn void. And I love New Tech. So sure, you know, but I'm learning this. So they I flew to Orlando took off five day class on Cisco voice, which was a big deal back then in the 90s. Right? And

we're talking about if you can ping it, you can read it and how voice packets move and codecs and compression. I said, you know, this kind of cool stuff, but you know, I'm happy to learn but I'm never going to need this. Well, I now work in WebRTC, which is an outgrowth of all of them. If I hadn't learned that, I wouldn't have been able to do what I do now. So I think

one thing I've really embraced or really kind of been fortunate to find fortunate for myself is anything I learned tech wise along the way, in this place I'm at now with this company I've been at for seven years and in doing healthcare, tech, everything's everything's been bailing. I mean, invaluable. I know what he started with because I don't I can't afford all people. Okay, so let's, let's, what what was the decision point and so you're saying you've been doing In this or seven years, but you don't necessarily have relationships within all of the entire medical system. So if you do a startup in the media space, right entertainment space, you've got relationships, you met all of these different studio executives, you have a relationship, and then you're hopping into an area where you don't have relationships. So what was that thinking like to say, you know, there's a problem in the healthcare space, you know, that you can bridge that problem with some solution, because of the experience you have came into a startup where you could see real time what the need was, but it's a pretty big leap to go into that space, if you don't have those relationships. So let's get into that company formation and why and, you know, what was that decision process? Like? What was that due diligence process? Like? Because that's a big commitment. And and how did you

finance that initially? You know, did you have independent wealth, and you could finance this as on the early stages, when you're creating your MVP package? How this is gonna work? How do you scale that? What's your go to market strategy? What was that thinking? Like, at the very beginning to even say, I'm going to enter this space? Yeah, no, it that's a great point. Because in a way, it's going from TCP, UDP, networking to social networking, right? Because you can't sell anything if you don't know anybody, you know, and no matter how great the product is, right? And today, people don't even return emails, right? Maybe they'll return WhatsApps. Right. So yes, the for us to be for me to be successful. What I did, I couldn't have done it, just knowing the tech. And what I did first, transitioning out of healthcare was actually I was on a plane trip with a couple guy young guys from Aon. And they

were talking about how it construction work sites that they insure. They have theft of, of products that are sitting around like cabling, 1000s of hours of cable on spools and stuff. And they need insights into in real time into what's happening on the worksite. And said, Well, why don't you

capture that in real time and put it in a DDS digital asset management system and make that shareable among stakeholders. And this can have a lot of value and probably cut a lot of you or loss, enhance productivity, and just give new business insights. And they love this idea. And that Skirda what I did first, which was like kind of no budget, no product, I OEM, a digital asset managed system, which was a also cutting edge. It was flash based. They were on the West Coast. And I sorry, I built a company, I built a website and

said, Let's innovate in the AEC space architecture, engineering and construction. And I became a member of AGC, which is the biggest union or biggest trade group in the country in the US, which is the Association general contractors, they're all over the place. And they're huge. And, you know, the head, the main groups are all the big contractors that built America, right? So I can go to the meetings and say, and they give me chant, as a newcomer. It says, I paid for the dues, you know, hundreds of hours, they give me 30 minutes to talk about what I'm doing. And I learned, maybe not so successfully.

First, I learned that you had to meet these players. And in fact, the players in the space, you had to be the right ones at the companies. Otherwise, you're wasting their time and your time talking to them. But we were introducing new technology to them. The thing fizzled, was a great idea. Got me, you know, it was a great failure to learn from. But the point was, I knew

nobody there. But I went to go visit the software manufacturer on the West Coast. And I stayed on the couch of an old friend from high school. And her husband is a surgeon. I said, you know, my dream is to work in healthcare. One day, I learned all this stuff. And he says, You can help me so much he says you're building like YouTube's for, in. Which for

better? No way. No better way to put it. We say you build YouTube's in MySpace or whatever for for a company. And so yeah, that's kind of what we're doing is I work with video every day. And I said what he means is I I said, you know, you have you have your tools, you cut somebody open and that's it. He says no, no, you have no idea and he owned is a brilliant surgeon. He owned his own surgery center. And he took me there. And I watched cases, and I realized that all his work was

video assisted. So then I realized oh, it's not just a 64 site 64 size CT scans that have to get managed in healthcare. It's all this video and I said what do you do with the videos and when we really don't know what to do with the video, you know, we put it on jump drives to get lost or DVDs is a company that makes a DVD burner for like it was 30 grand you could buy DVD burner by the leading manufacturer. They were recording MPEG ones while MPEG two was already out and really inefficient not only terms of media encoding, but in terms of like, what do you do with a drawer full of DVDs when you need to see something and you're an highly or highly unavailable surgeon, we started a company together. And it was about managing content for surgeons, but doing in a way that sort of brought in the medical device customer or medical device company, they would kind of sponsor everything. It was a great idea.

We raised money, we had I think, 12 investors, a few surgeons, a few other investor types. We had a great go. And basically, we weren't doing the live surgery piece. But we're trying to build this proprietary platform where we built it. But we had trouble getting enough customers on board. And then as a fluke

thing. Olympus came to us and said, you know, we're we'd love to do and actually it was Ethicon j&j. You know, can you help us train surgeons or market to surgeons in the nighttime? You know, these guys have no time during the day. Can we do

like a kind of meeting online, on their web cameras? And can we show video with the video has to look really good? We said, Okay, well, we looked each other I we had a head of sales, really smart guy who's from Gen J. And we said, Okay, we'll do these webinars. We started doing webinars, we now built up like, half a dozen customers during their webinars. And it was keeping the lights on. So here

we were week after week trying to sell, you know, the media platform, the storage platform, then the surgeons said to us, you know, if you were to live, if you're a medical Congress and international meeting, the biggest hit right now is live surgery. Everybody wants to see live surgery because you can see the surgery, you can see the device being used the device, you know, the it's often a key opinion leader, a top surgeon, you can interact with them over audio or chat. It's the coolest thing. And we basically went into the light surgery space

from there we did in a very bulky fashion. But we started that. And then we realized that live surgery was going to be the big future. But the point I'm making is with this first

company, I met Gen j, we met intuitive so we did 10 years of work for intuitive 10 years and work for Ethicon Gen & j, some work for gyrates Olympus, and then a bunch of other little companies. And there we would do webinars put on by the marketing teams, in the professional education teams, and as for some of these companies profit, the training, the clinical training side came under sales are under market. And basically, we have this tiny team and we would manage these webinars. This is before COVID. Right. So webinar, like what you and I are doing now is a big deal back then, right. And basically, we do the webinars. And I would meet with a surgeon

at midnight, because I love this so much right. But I'll meet anytime, any hour of the day. So I was a perfect fit for healthcare, because whenever they can meet me I would write and the webinars were all in the evening. So like my evenings were shot for like several to three years doing webinars. But

I learned by virtue through both the content that we were sharing and talking with surgeons and the surgeon we meet with me at midnight, in his house in Scarsdale, New York. And we talked about what videos he's going to show and he said, check this out. And he bring over a box of junk drives, where you have a drawer of DVDs and I said, that's your videos is this my these are great videos, people can learn so much from this stuff. And now intuitive needs to see this one now. And I can't find them. And I realized, well, this guy needs some kind of media asset management for this video, but not one where he would dump all that stuff into a system, one that would capture it in real time in the operating theatre. So the light went off,

right, I recognize that problem. The Med device companies leverage the same videos to train. So for them to have access to this content was critical for sales, marketing, training, you know, optimal product use surgeon performance, all of that. So that little surgical video that was like

getting lost. And we know America hospitals, American hospitals alone, capture or use about 50 million make about 50 million videos a year and we'd get lost, right? So through that experience of doing these webinars, which is nothing we set out to do, but which had profound value for the customer. And I learned a ton and I got very close with profit sales and marketing colleagues if with all the companies I've worked with and you know I love these guys and I got very close and they would help me understand problems they had. And it was through the years of doing the webinars that I a met the companies in be learned more about what problems existed that we can solve these problems were everywhere. They're in Asia hospitals, they're in South American hospitals, Europe, US, you name it. So that was really a big transitional piece for me

to learn to work closely with surgeons who nobody gets time to work with and, and build relationships. So we started the live project with this previous company. And it was a brilliant idea. And we raised some money but we needed a lot and the reason we need a lot I was, as I see it, you know, like, innovation begets innovation. I think technology facilitates everything you know I do is we do as a startup company, right? If it weren't for, that's a later part of story. But right now, I was traveling, putting in Cisco security appliances at Equinix data center. So we buy a $4,000 rack mount, you know, Cisco 5505, which you could get on eBay now for 60 bucks, right.

$4,000 router appliance. I traveled to a data center, put it in there, right. And you have to update it right. To make a private, a global private IPTV network, right. So we needed so much money to do that. We approached a medium coding company, and they re engineered that needed medical grade, they put it through T V 661. process for us. It was this

dude, well, relatively huge thing that we cost about 10 grand or let me grand to buy. So next thing, you know, we sell the product, which did kind of what we both did what we wanted, but it was very complicated, big real estate. And just to maintain, it was so expensive, right. And we it's a long story, but we never raised the money we needed to survive. We had the webinars, but we really didn't want the webinars and it was great for that the customers, and they kept the lights up. And we're still weren't really doing what

we wanted to do. And it wasn't it didn't seem to be a future. So eventually, we shelled we closed down that business, we had a great opportunity to clean the clinic it fell through and we're just we had DC lined up and they said, If you close this thing, and Cleveland Clinic, will will back you. And it never happened in the clinic clinic thing. We made it after two

years of meetings and it didn't come together. Again, I learned a lot. But unfortunately, you know, it just didn't become what we wanted. And it was just too hard to maintain. So I stopped that we shelved the company. And it was not a happy time. But I then took a trip to visit a friend figure out what I was going to do next. And I'm on a plane flight back from Italy. And I'm sitting next to this young developer from Romania and his girlfriend.

And you know, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine. So a lot of great dev work that's always been going on, right. And he's telling me what he does. And he's building real time chat. portals for customers, right? It's building real time chat. And I said,

Well, how do you manage, you know, how does it get delivered? How is it secure? What's the quality? I said, it seems like flimsy and a joke. He says no, this is called Web RTC. And it's taking over. Right now here. I'm the guy that used to install security appliances at data centers that we pay, you know, we paid 4k for the appliance, I think 3500 a month to Limelight or somebody to pay for the service, right? And this guy is saying, Well, this WebRTC you don't need all that any. And in fact, by design,

it's, it has to run over TLS 443. So it's going to run, you know, AES 256 No matter what, or fails, or just shuts down, right. So I said, Wow, so there's a new way to move live video, you can manage the quality, because it's multiplayer. And it's also offered, it's, you know, we're trying to raise money for a hardware based product. So that's happening and you know, AWS is evolving. And basically, it's only I'm only sitting here now, I only have at the car because of number one WebRTC. Number two,

AWS and culture shift where everybody's embracing it. So when I first went to a UK hospital in 2017, they were scared. I said this was on AWS, I could put it on AWS London. And they were a National Health Service hospital. They said, we're really I don't know if we're ready for that. I don't think the NHS is ready for that they weren't. You know, we're up

in now four hospitals in the UK. And they themselves have data in AWS London and all our contracts that you'd have to put in AWS London, but you know, the cultural change, right? So things like that smart things like Airbnb, Google translates Uber allowed me to go to other countries travel, not have to know the language, you get an Uber, you don't have to tell a driver where to go. And you can get a place to stay with good internet to run demos. So it's all these pieces and everything else I ever learned. And especially this shift in the availability of these new protocols allows me to do what we do that we couldn't even do two years.

So we're we only have about two minutes left. So we're gonna have to kind of truncate the answers right. So you created eppicard. So can you tell in a very concise way what episode does So what we're doing is taking that moment, that precious moment of a live surgery, and sharing that content in real time to outside parties and an authorized regulatory compliant fashion, and recording it in a very high resolutions. What that does is it takes what used to be unattainable, unstructured video content makes it actionable. So

by building an archive with rich context, we can enable hospitals, medical device companies, and other stakeholders to get that stuff in their hands and leverage it. And by leveraging it, we mean not only a surgeon showing, let's say, their team, like go tomorrow, we have a case it's a CPT or ICD 10 code 5545. It's just like what you had two weeks ago, go watch that, because we'll be that much more efficient tomorrow, if you watch video number 27. Or here's the link to right, that's a great plus, right, we're helping surgeons and surgical teams perform better. We're improving patient outcomes. We're helping med device companies who have like a new gadget like this, we're helping more searches learn about it. We're helping surgeons like we're working with

a group in Ethiopia and Ethiopia who just learned laparoscopic new techniques in Luxembourg. And they can't fly to travel. So they're going to have remote parties, watch them work and teach them and be over their shoulder. So we're, we're enabling new ways to train and learn in real time, where there are no physical boundaries, we're doing it on a system that is utterly simple to use, the whole thing goes in this, this little bag, right. And the whole thing uses commodity hardware we get on Amazon. So at that we're like half the price of our competitors, but really easy to use, well support because again, to me, the heart of it is isn't it's not really your technologies, that you care that people are going to be happy and successful using it. And these people are surgeons with a lot on the table, right with a lot of risk. And a lot of other

concerns is not the tools you're getting. So you have to have something profoundly simple to use, and that will have impact. Right, so what you've done is you've leveraged all of your media, digital expertise to take that into the or with a, a complete sort of studio in a kit form that uses commodity products, such really inexpensive and yet produces high quality video, then you can share that globally, in a compliant way. And therefore improve healthcare quality of hospital insights, surgical performance, and so on. And then because you've got all of this content captured, then you could apply AI for it. So that could be a way of accelerating on the

kind of the diagnostic sort of, or improvements that because you're seeing you got this sort of unlimited amount of data coming out. And because you commoditize everything in because you put this video kid into a bag that can be deployed easily, then it's consumed by by anybody in the world, right? So. So that's your value proposition is cheaper, and you're applying all of your background to do this. And so there's only time for one more question then. And then what would your recommendation be to the audience or a question, you want to leave the audience? I think, learn the TCP stack. So I thought, but I think for a technical audience, I think, understand that what you're doing is going to be in somebody's hands. And they're

obviously not technical. And make sure that obviously, it solves a problem that they have, and it has value, they can see they can proceed and feel quickly. But also, I think a lot of what we do is it's you know, it's so much tech, it's so much tech and tech facilitates tech, but it's about people. And you're, you're ultimately it's a people thing. But loving tech in

having a great way to implement stuff that works really well is incredibly fulfilling. I should I can see all those sort of narratives, the mini narratives that lead to the big narrative, and that is a card and what you're doing with that epic card and you've got clients around the world, right? Yep. Yeah, we're, I mean, for our little tiny, agile team we're in. We've been in nine countries, but right now, I mean, we have some parts of that we're just kind of one offs, but we're across Europe. And you know, we're in Germany, Italy,

France, Spain, UK, different parts of the US for a tiny little company that, you know, is doing something that is really disruptive in really, you know, really just a sort of simple way of doing things that I think because we care. I think that's what's impacting the most. I mean, it sounds kind of silly, I guess. But I mean, it to me, it's still a people thing. It's a technology that it's in the hands of people. So thank you for coming in and sharing your

insights with the audience and A just a marvelous background and again continues your journey of contribution. Thanks. Great to speak with you, Stephen. Thank you for listening to The Brand Called You videocast and podcast platform that brings your knowledge, experience and wisdom of hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. Do visit our website www.tbcy.in to watch and listen to the story

but many more individuals. You can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just search for The Brand Called You

2024-08-25 06:45

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