Ariel Garten - Creating MUSE, The Brain Sensing Headband

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What is going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Ariel Garten here with us, the co founder of Muse. Muse is a tool designed to help you meditate. This simple wearable headband takes the ancient, tried and true practice of sitting with our thoughts and makes it novel again. Using brain sensors, Muse gives you real time feedback on your brain's activity during meditation and actually letting you hear the sound of your own mind. On this podcast, Ariel and I talked about not only the journey of starting Muse, but how she went from not having any business background to raising millions of dollars for her startup. And it is quite the story. So please, before we get into the episode, share this episode with a friend, leave a rating and review on itunes. And if you are new here, make sure you check out my Instagram ac. And with that being said, enjoy today's podcast with Ariel Garten. All right, what is going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have Ariel Garten here with us, the co founder of Muse. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Ariel.

My pleasure. It's a joy to be here today.

Well, first off, congratulations on all of the success with Muse. And for those that may not know what Muse is, I'd love for you to give a background on what you've created.

Sure. So Muse, as crazy as it seems, is a brain sensing headband that helps you meditate and sleep. So what it is, it's a slim little device that tracks your brain activity and gives you real time feedback to let you, you know when you're meditating and when your mind is wandering. So in the same way that a Fitbit will track your steps and Just sit comfortably on your wrist. Muse will actually track your brain during meditation. And it's you real time feedback to know when you're in the meditation zone and when you're not doing it right and to really keep you there in focused attention. In addition, it has sensors to track your heart, your. Your breath and your body, as well as amazing content to help you fall asleep and stay asleep.

I love that. Where did this idea come from? And how did the journey of Muse begin?

So the journey was pretty crazy. I started in the early 2000s, working in the lab of Dr. Steve Mann. Steve is the inventor of the wearable computer. He's the guy that like, literally made Google Glass before Google did.

Wow.

And he had this early brain. Yeah, amazing. And he had this early brain computer interface device. So it was a single electrode that you would slip on the back of your head. And by shifting your brain state, focusing or relaxing, we could translate that shift in your brain into sound. So himself and his master student, Chris Amony, and my friend Trevor Coleman and I, the three of us and a few more people in Steve's lab, began to create these concerts where people were literally making music with their mind. Like by focusing, relaxing, by shifting their brain, we could shift the sounds in the room. And from there we went on to say, okay, this is incredible. Like, what can we do with this? And we thought it was really going to be about controlling technology with your brain. We thought it was really going to be about, you know, you could turn on your stereo, you could turn on your lights, you could do all these things. And we actually did this crazy installation at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, where people could literally control the lights on big buildings with their brain from across the country.

Wow.

And we. Yeah, and we made all sorts of silly things like thought controlled toys and slot car machines. But the whole time we were really unsatisfied because we're like, this is so cool. But how is it going to be practical? How is it really going to change people's lives? And then we had the penny drop. One day we were actually on the Google campus with the guy who started Google's meditation program, Search Inside Yourself. And we realized that the biggest thing that we could do with this technology was, as strange as it sounds, was to help people meditate. And that really, while we were teaching people to focus and relax, we thought we were teaching them to control technology. What we were really doing was teaching them to control their own technology. And every time they would focus and then be able to hear the sound change and know that they were doing it. We were actually teaching them to reinforce their own brain activity associated, associated with focus or associated with relaxation and giving them insights. And that if we could give people insights into their brain, we could help people with the, you know, one of the weird, hard things that you do in your brain, which is meditate. And that if we got only could get more people in the world to meditate, we would be doing a good thing for humanity. And that's how Muse was born.

I love that. When did mindfulness become such an important aspect of your life? And how long have you been meditating?

So mindfulness has been, you know, important. Let me start that again. So, you know, meditation is something that has been around for literally thousands of years and has gone through peaks and troughs of popularity in our popular culture. Mindfulness became relevant in probably the late 90s. There's a guy called Jon Kabat Zinn who really started to formalize mindfulness practices and bring them to the West. The movement started in the 70s, but it was gaining popularity in the 90s. And then by the, I'd say 2010, 2011, 2012, you were starting to hear about meditation in all of these places. And they're starting to be studies about meditation. And then in 2013, meditation was on the COVID of Time magazine. And I always consider that to be the moment when there was this huge cultural shift. And all of a sudden you're hearing like, athletes that meditate to help their performance and celebrities that meditate and CEOs that meditate. And from that moment forward, it started to just become this feed forward where people were beginning to recognize that just like we take care of our bodies with exercise and going to the gym, we need to take care of our minds with something, and that is mindfulness. And we also need to take care of our emotional relationships and, you know, our emotional understanding of ourself. And mindfulness is also the tool for that.

I love that I heard something that moving into Muse, you had no business background, but you were able to go out and raise $18 million from Silicon Valley investors. How did this happen? And what was that journey like when it comes to raising capital?

Okay, so I knew that this was going to be a big, big thing. You know, I knew we were creating something amazing. We were creating a tool that could interact with the world and that was going to help you meditate, that it was going to change lives, that it was going to be huge. The next problem was building the thing and then raising the capital for it. So I knew that this is going to be something that was going to be really big. You know, we were building this tool that was going to be able to track your brain activity, that was going to be able to help you meditate, that was going to help the world. And from there, there were two big challenges. One was to actually build the thing, which was really hard, and the other was to raise money for it. In terms of building the thing, I was really lucky. Chris Amony, who is my technical co founder, is just absolutely brilliant and he was able to bring together a team of, we're now about 50 people. But over time, you know, it grew. Bring together a team to build the hardware, the software, the algorithms, the feedback on the design side, which I was responsible for a part of, you know, creating the experiences. Trevor Coleman, who's my other co founder, just knew how to create experiences that people loved. And we were able to figure out how to give people feedback on their brain in a way that felt natural and that felt intuitive, and that was beautiful. And then we needed to go and raise money for it while we were trying to build the thing. And so I set out to begin pitching. We were really lucky that we had some capital that bootstrapped us, because early on we could do events with this technology and show it to people and they'd be like, great, we'll hire you for this event. And as we started to really hone in our product vision, the first thing we did was an Indiegogo campaign. And we raised what at the time was a big indiegogo. This is 2012. We raised $300,000, which today is nothing on like a Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And. And then I went out to pitch folks in Silicon Valley, and I had absolutely no business background. You know, I had. I was the CEO of this company. I was figuring out how we were going to go to market and get the manufacturing done and get all these things done. But I'd never raised capital and I didn't have a finance background. So one of our local incubators, Mars, and they really taught me how to pitch and how to craft my deck. And I had a throwaway pitch that I did to someone in Toronto, Omers, because I was like, oh, this big VC will never invest in me. I'll just do a throwaway practice pitch to them. I went down to Boston because I was invited to speak at mit and I'm like, okay, you know, gotta start somewhere. There's lots of healthcare and medical investors in Boston. Let's just, let's go pitch There. And I did my first few pitches. I sent out an email to probably 100 VCs in Boston. Just cold emails. I got maybe three or four responses back, mainly from Canadians who felt bad for me and was like, yep, we'll give, you know, we'll give you a leg in.

Okay.

And from there just. And from there, just started the process. And it was. It was long. Very, very long. You know, each pitch I learned, each pitch I began to understand what it was that was happening in these pitch meetings. You know, what the dynamic was, what the relationship was, how to answer the questions, who I needed to be for them. Because I'm also like, that time I was a young girl from Toronto with long hippie hair. It's like asking for millions of dollars from Silicon Valley investors. And I always had this incredible confidence knowing that whatever happened, I could figure it out. Like, whatever happened, I would figure out what I needed to do. I deserve to stand here. I could absolutely do this. And I just did it. And pitch after pitch after pitch. Finally somebody said, this is incredible. You know, if your technology does what I think it should do, show up in New York next week and give us our pitch. So we went down to New York, Trevor and myself, we gave our pitch, and he started to draw. He had a wall that he could draw on, which we thought was the coolest thing in the world. He started to draw two boxes, and he's like, you know, when we do this, this is interaxon Canada, and we do this. This is interaction us. Triv and I sort of looked at each other like we. And that was the moment that we knew that as soon as an investor starts talking, the royal we, he wants in. And so we got the first investor. And then from there, you know, the dominoes just fell. From there, investor after investor was willing to put their money in. And it was all from initially just having the chutzpah, having the gumption, and the belief that I could do this. From working with our local incubator to teach us how to pitch, to finalize our business models, to make sure that the company looked investable because not all companies are investible. And then really going and learning and getting feedback each and every pitch and not giving up. I could have so easily given up at pitch number 37 and not gotten to pitch number 49 or 52 or whatever it was that finally gave us the money. That was the first thing. And then from there, folks like Ashton Kutcher came on board. So you never know what's going to happen when you put yourself out there and believe that you can do it and then back it up with the actual hard work and detail required to meet the bar.

I love that. When you guys launched and went to the market, what were the most challenging parts of that?

There were so many challenging parts. I mean, in 2014, we launched with a brain sensing headband that helps you meditate, that you could buy in Best Buy. This is, like, way early from a market perspective. This is like, you know, the very early infancy of wearables. And like, here we are with the brain sensing headbands can help you meditate. You know, when we went into VCs, they'd be like, your technology is incredible. But what's the killer app? Would be like meditation. They'd be like, no, come on, really? Like, what's the killer app? Turns out all these years later that Meditation truly was the killer app. And some VCs could see that and give us money, and some VCs are kicking themselves that they didn't. But going to market, there were a lot of challenges. You know, the main. The first challenge was we were building an entirely new category. There weren't other brain sensing headbands that help you meditate that people even knew about. So there was a lot of category education. There was the technology challenges. You know, building something that was really going to reliably work across hundreds of thousands of people. You know, we now have over half a million users. There was the design problems. So prior to this, you know, if you wanted to have an EEG device reach your head, you needed to be in a laboratory, connected with wires and sensors, with somebody in another room reading your brain data. And here we were saying, nope, like, just anybody can slip an EEG on their head, get perfect signal, and actually, you know, do something meaningful in three minutes. And so the design challenges there were immense, and Chris is just brilliant in overcoming them. And then there's all the manufacturing challenges. We're making a piece of hardware and all of those deadlines need to be met. And then you need a customer care team. Early on, the first product we put out was not perfect, but shockingly, it worked. And I meet people who still have devices they bought in 2014 that still work. And I'm honestly shocked that that could still happen. And then there's the hiring challenge. There's putting together a great team, but if you have a clear vision, if you have determination, if you have the wherewithal to be able to bring people together for something that really matters, you can overcome each and every one of these challenges, because we certainly did totally.

When you guys went to market and up to this point, where have you spent your time as you've scaled?

So you mean my own personal time?

Yep.

Okay. So initially I was the CEO until 2015. Initially, there was just three of us, then there were five of us, then there were eight of us. And so, you know, your time is spent doing absolutely everything. I was, you know, all of the departments until people get hired. You know, Chris would take care of all the technical, Trevor would take care of all of the legal, because I absolutely suck at legal and accounting and anything that requires details and specificity like that, you know, I'd be like, oh, yeah, we'll do this thing. And he. Trevor would be like, where's the contract? And I'm like, oh, right, yeah, think about that. So you definitely need people who think not in the same way that you do, to make sure that all of the bases are covered. We would always describe Chris as the engine because he's technical, me as the gas pedal because I'm like, we can do that. We'll go. And Trevor is the brake. And he was always like, can we really do that? Is that legal? And then as we scaled, we had more and more hires. And so you have people who are responsible for each department. So somebody can be responsible for customer care, somebody can be responsible for marketing, somebody can be responsible for legal. And the key thing when you hire somebody is to trust that them fully, to understand their job so much better than you ever could, that you never have to tell them what to do or how to do it. And your job is just there to move barriers out of their way and to ensure that they can succeed and to make them successful. And so, you know, when you ask me what I was spending the most time on, some of spending time was learning how to be a leader and learning how to support a team, because I never led a team before, and here I am, the CEO, and then as a startup, unfortunately, a big part of your time is spent fundraising. And so a lot of my time was spent on the road in Silicon Valley, talking to investors, pitching them, planning our next fundraise, making connections, and in the networking. So making sure that I was out there meeting people and bringing opportunities back to the company and then knowing how to feed and foster those opportunities to be able to be, you know, the huge successes for us that they were.

I love that. I want to talk about overcoming what your brain tells you and the neuroscience behind the device, anxiety, fear, and how to overcome that, because that's what you guys have created this product for?

Sure. I love that topic. Okay, so first we have to take a moment to kind of understand the brain for a minute. So in our brain we have this thing called the amygdala. It's in your forehead, it's. It's in your head, right in the middle, kind of behind your ears. And it is the part of your brain that's responsible for fight or flight. When it sees something that is scary, it is going to inform you of it, and it is going to continue informing you of it until it feels like it no longer needs to, which is sometimes way longer than it has to. You know, you see a fire or a tiger and your amygdala goes. And it gives you this constellation of activity in your body. Cortisol flooding you, your heartbeat rate speeds up, your blood vessels constrict. You are, you know, your blood sugar spikes, you're ready. And then it gives you all the thoughts around fear, like, oh, no, there's a tire. Tiger. Oh, geez, what am I supposed to do? Is this thing going to kill me? What's it like after I die, etc. Etc. And so, so this organ in our brain is incredibly useful to keep us safe, but it often works on hyperdrive and it spends a lot of time paying attention to the things that it perceives as dangers. And sometimes these are real dangers, like fires and tigers and pandemics. And some things these are perceived dangers, like what the people over there might be thinking about me, or if my hair looks okay today, or the wrinkle in my pants before the meeting, or, you know, did I use too many exclamation points in that email? You know, the things that we can obsess over that aren't necessarily threatening to us, but we somehow perceive that they will be. And so what we learn in a meditation practice is to quiet the activity of the amygdala. And one of the ways that we do that is by using the rational part of our brain called, called the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain in the front here, right underneath your forehead. And it's a part of your brain associated with planning, attention, inhibition, organization, all the higher order processes that separate us from other animals. We have the most developed prefrontal cortices. It's what makes us human. And in a meditation practice, what you're actually doing is you're learning to strengthen your prefrontal cortex. You're learning to strengthen what you pay attention to. And to be able to make better judgments about how you should be reacting. And in a long term meditation practice, you actually see people with increased prefrontal thickness, so increased activity in their prefrontal cortex, decreased activity in their amygdala, and increased relationship between their prefrontal cortex and their amygdala. It's almost like the prefrontal cortex is the parent. It's the thing that's able to, like, see what's going on and be wise. And the amygdala is the child who's easily freaked out by everything and, you know, is upset about the shadow on the wall and the prefrontal cortex. The parent can come in and say, hey, it's just a shadow on the wall. Amygdala, shh, calm down. And so a meditation practice teaches us to do that. It teaches us to observe our own thoughts, to be able to rise above our reactions, to be able to calm our mind and body when we're faced with something that could be, you know, arousing for us or fearful for us, and to be able to calm our reactions to them. And so in these days, when there's a lot of reactivity going on, people are afraid of a lot of things. You know, our amygdalas are on hyperdrive right now. Recognizing that we are being driven by our brains and biology and that we have the opportunity to come in and make rational decision and calm. It is really key.

I love that. What about mindfulness for leadership development? How can leaders use mindfulness to become better on a daily basis?

Sure, it was certainly a skill that I had to learn and apply to my mindfulness for leadership. So there are a lot of ways that mindfulness and meditation help in leadership. So in entrepreneurship, overall, you are asked to focus on a lot of things. You know, you have a plate of opportunities and dangers in front of you, and it's your job as leader to figure out which ones to actually put your attention on and which ones to let fall away and to not create confusion and distraction by bringing too many to the foreground into your team. And so what mindfulness allows you to do is to manage your attention. And probably most people have not heard meditation and mindfulness described that way. But really, in a basic meditation practice, a basic focus attention practice, what you're doing is training your focused attention and your ability to keep your attention on one thing. So with Muse, for example, we teach you a basic focused attention practice where, where you put your attention on your breath. When your mind wanders away from your breath, you're Cued by a change in the audio. And that's your cue to be like, oh, right, that's a wandering thought. I don't need to go there. Put my attention back on my breath. And you're reinforced for maintaining your attention on your breath. And so this translates to leadership in some very important ways. One, it teaches you to very quickly identify when you're wandering off into distraction and say, nope, not important. Don't need to go there. Back to the task at hand, back to the thing that matters. And so that allows you to become much more efficient both in your workday as you're writing documents and doing tasks, to be like that. One, doesn't matter. Back to my task. Mindful to Facebook, don't care. Back to my task. So you can now start to identify when your mind is being distracted and your attention is distracted. And very quickly have a tool that you've learned to let go of the distraction and come back. And it also lets you do that on the macro to look at all of the distractions and to be able to become much better at filtering through the noise and choosing where to focus. And then of course, there's the interpersonal piece. So meditation teaches you to understand your own emotions and your own emotional reactivity and manage that. So when you're in a difficult situation and emotions start to rise in you, you can start to observe that, to say, hey, I know what's going on like I've been before. I don't need to react in the old way that I used to react. I can actually choose how I want to act to this. And that makes employee relationships so much better because people aren't being pulled by your moods moment to moment. And likewise, when you can listen to your employees moods and look at and listen to them and be there for them, it significantly improves their relationships. So those are just some of the big ways that mindfulness helps in leadership. But there are dozens more, literally.

This is incredible. I'm taking a lot from this conversation. How do you and your team implement these strategies within your organization to build community and stay aligned with your team?

Oh, awesome. So we have a lot of different things that we do. One is everybody uses me news regularly. So, you know, we're all building the thing. We're dog fooding, we're eating the thing, we're using the thing. And then every all team meetings, we have weekly all team meetings on Tuesdays at 10am and we begin with a 15 minute meditation session that we all do together. So even these days in zoom, we'll be doing a group meditation, all of us simultaneously. We'll choose which meditation we're doing. Everybody slips on their headband, and we all do it together. And then before meetings, we often will have a check in where we take a deep breath and we all settle in to be on the same page. Because it's so easy to jump from meeting to meeting and carry what was with you in the last meeting and not be fully present in the next meeting. And then we also use our sleep tool. So Muse actually can help you meditate. And the new device, Muse S helps you sleep. And so we've been running actually a big challenge in our company, using Muse S to help you fall asleep and track your sleep. So we're also seeing tremendous benefits and gains there as people are improving their sleep and then improving their mood and cognitive function and ability to be present. So those are just a few ways. And then another great way that we love doing is a gratitude practice. So it's another way to easily bring mindfulness into your company, where we will have people call out and say thank you to somebody on the team that helped them. And we'll even do this in a large group meeting. We'll just have a round of gratitude. And so you'll be hearing like, hey, you know, so and so for customer care. Thanks so much for helping me on that case the other day, or thank you for getting those units shipped, or thank you for the chat that we had when I didn't realize I needed a break. And so it becomes this wonderful way to recognize each other and recognize your connections to one another.

Very cool. That's amazing that you guys are so involved with the product and with each other. What are you and the team looking forward to in 2021? Moving forward?

So, you know, from a global perspective, we're looking forward to people having been able to spend this time during the pandemic and identify what really matters to them. So identifying what it is that people want to spend their own personal time on. We've seen a lot of people build better habits during this time because you don't have to rush to work. You have more time. You can reassess how your day is organized. So, you know, we've seen lots of people doing things like building in a mindfulness practice, because now they have the time to do it. They can take the time at home. They can take the time in the morning or the evening. We've seen people actually say, I'm finally working on my sleep because I can get up a little bit later. And I can take the time and space to do that. So, you know, personally, I'm excited for the personal transformations from a company perspective. For us, we are really diving deep on sleep. So right now we have this amazing experience that helps you fall asleep. It's called a go to sleep journey, and it gives you guided meditation that brings you into a hypnagogic state, which is the state that you enter into as you sleep, plus a soundtrack that's built from your body. So as you're falling asleep, you hear your heartbeat, your breath, you hear actually your body, but you hear it as a soundscape, like a naturescape, like the lapping of waves and the chirping of crickets. And it's designed to entrain you to fall asleep faster. And it's amazing. And so we now just launched overnight tracking, so you get, like, the most detailed overnight tracking of any tracker. It's as detailed, basically, as a sleep lab. And so we can now identify when you're falling asleep. We can build really cool dream tools once you are asleep, because, you know, the device knows when you're in rem, so it can give you, like, really precisely timed experiences. So we're incredibly jazzed with all of the sleep kind of cool experiences and insights that we are building over the next year. And that's where our enthusiasm is. And there's this really tight relationship between being able to meditate during the day, calm your mind, calm your body, be able to then sleep more easily at night, then be more well rested, cognitively prepared, alert, do better at your day, do better at your meditation, sleep better at night, and it really feeds forward.

In this awesome way that is amazing. I'm looking forward to testing that out as I get more involved with Muse. But I just want to say thank you so much, Ariel, for coming on the show today. Where is the best place for people to follow you and Muse?

So you can find me at choosemuse.com welcome. C-H-O-O-S-E-M-U-S E.com welcome. And then you can also follow me on Instagram at Ariel's Musings. Or choose Muse. And yeah, please give a shout out. Happy to chat.

Thank you so much, Ariel.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple original series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything, I promise.

Oh, my God. Go, go, go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV. Plus.