Endiatx Founder Torrey Smith LIVE on Global Startup Report (29 July 2022)

What's up, everybody? How we doing? Happy Friday, July 29th. Friday, July 29th, 2022. I'm your host, Martin. Welcome to the show. As you can clearly see, I'm in my new studio office. I just moved over the last couple weeks, officially done after this week. Um, as you can tell, I've neglected my own appearance, so I apologize in advance for all of you in FI land having to watch my ugly mug for this weekend. Uh, we got a great show, final episode of season 2. Founder X next week, we'll talk more about that towards the end of the program. We got a lot going on. Special guest Tori Smith, founder, CEO of Endyotix. We're going to talk about all the fun things, some stuff we probably did there in the spring that we'll mention. Tori was in town in Austin for a little, little shindig over at the Tesla Gigafactory. But before we get on that, we're going to learn more about Endyotix, what he's doing, revolutionizing medical robotics. So let's dive into the news. We got some cool articles. Tori's also uh, in the, in the news as well. So let's bring up Dustin, our producer. How you doing, buddy?

Doing great, Martin. How are you doing?

Oh man, I get— I'm getting there.

I'm digging the new backdrop.

It's, uh, I got the new backdrop again, and y'all are getting— y'all are getting a preview of what y'all are going to see at Founder X. I promise it's going to look nicer. There'll be better things. I'm still working on that, but the leaf, that's the important thing. I'll just keep it easy with the logo.

Weekend interior decorating, it's gonna be—

yeah, I'll show you. I'll show you for y'all in FI land next week. We got a big Got a big conference with Founder X. Been a lot of work. Been doing, been working on it for almost basically all year. So credit to everybody at HQ for supporting us on this great thing. Really excited for bringing this back to the community. We haven't done it since 2017 in person, and that was actually in Europe. We did an Eastern Europe Founder X. So really excited about that. Lots of great announcements, fantastic keynotes. We'll talk about that a little later as we wrap up.

Show.

Let's dive into the news. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, uh, 3 quick stories before you get to your, your interview with Tori. Uh, the first, uh, network news story is coming from, uh, FI Jordan. Uh, so there was a— this article has 20 MENA innovators to watch. That's Middle East and North Africa. And it's featuring the founder of Bloom. Her name is Hana Shaheen, as I said, an FI Jordan alumni. And Bloom is basically try-before-you-buy software for, uh, e-commerce. So So it's for returns and it integrates with local logistics and couriers and payments gateways, but it's like the ability to try on outfits before you buy them or send them back. And the company's called Bloom. And yeah, it's cool to see them featured in 2020 Maina Innovators to Watch.

That's awesome. Congrats. Yeah, let's keep moving. So Military Influencer Conference, it's relaunching. And there's a whole scene for military influencers, apparently, in October. It's coming back.

Powered by USAA.

I'm from San Antonio. USAA is a big, big insurance, banking, financial services brand down there. And but it's being powered by Instant Teams. This is fantastic. At a DCFI, Instant Teams has been just crushing it. I believe even our guest knows the founders over there. You know, this annual conference now in year 5, celebrating that intersection, military-connected community, economic opportunities, mental health initiatives— obviously a big, big deal in, in the service space— as well as, you know, talking about tech advances, social impact. So really awesome to see Instant Teams branding the whole thing out. I'm sure they're going to get some really great visibility in that space, but they've been doing great stuff so far. They've raised a lot of money. Just speaking of, you know, the founder, uh, Liza Rodewald, she raised a $13 million Series A back in March. Um, and, you know, basically what, uh, Instant Teams is working on, you know, they help promote customer success teams and startups. Um, you know, they're powering this global workforce for military spouses right now. So really exciting stuff. Congrats, Instant Teams. Go, go and get that brandy. Hopefully they get some really great speaking slots as well.

Yeah, yeah, so cool to see, you know, Instant Teams after raising this big Series A, you know, going on and powering big conference events and stuff like that. So, um, yeah, very exciting. Uh, third and final, uh, network news story to share here before your featured guest is actually featuring today's guest, uh, Endiotix co-founder Tori Smith. He is, uh, profiled in VentureBeat, and the article headline is Medicine and the Metaverse: New Tech Allows Doctors to Travel Inside Your Body. So we'll drop that link in the LinkedIn comments as well. But without further ado, that's just kind of preferencing who you're about to tee up here for the interview, Martin.

All right, yeah, our special guest today, I have had the chance to meet him, I think about a year ago actually. I first met him in person over, um, in Silicon Valley over at a mutual friend's place. Also, uh, Ryan Micheletti, our head of global operations, lives in the area too. So we all got to meet, um, with, along with a few other founders. Um, but you know, since then we got to hang out a couple more times. He came into Austin, then he's— yeah, since the day I met him, since even before I met him Been hearing a lot about what he's doing. Tiny pill-sized robots reducing the amount of invasiveness that occurs when you have to just inspect the body, surgery or otherwise. It's inspiring to see what he's doing. It's revolutionizing the game altogether. Hope he's not blushing, but let's bring him out. Tori Smith, founder, CEO of Endyotix.

Tori, how we doing? Hey, Martin, man, it's good to be here. I'd like to think that if we're creating a new era for telemedicine, when I walked into Founder Institute, that was kind of a new era for Tori. Super grateful to be a part of this community because honestly, I walked in with a notebook sketch as like a depressed aging engineer, and you guys helped me learn how to stand on my two feet and basically go out and become a founder. So super glad to be here, hoping that anyone who's listening can pick up a little bit of, uh, you know, maybe something that could help them take that plunge themselves.

I love it, I love it, man. Again, thank you for joining us, and what a better person— not a better person to help us wrap up season 2 as we're heading into the big show next week with Founder X. Um, but yeah, if you're watching in FI land, please tell us where you're coming from. Don't be shy. You know, we broadcast this show all across our channels, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, we see a lot of activity on LinkedIn. So if you're watching us on any of those channels, make sure you're subscribing for all the updates, all the YouTube influencer phrases, smash that like button, etc. But drop some stuff in the chat, we can see it. You know, if you have questions for Tori, if you just want to tell us where you're, where you're showing up from, you know, we've had people all around the world watch this. And this is going to be no different. But let's, let's start with you, Tori. Again, you, again, that was very powerful just right off the bat, you know, how it's, how FI has been able to shape your entrepreneurial journey. But let's tell us what happened beforehand. What were you working on? What were you doing? You know, what was, what was the impetus that brought you, brought you here and to, to start with Ideada?

Sure. You know, I, I spent, uh, something like 14 years designing med devices, uh, catheters to cut plaque out of arteries, devices to close the hole in your leg after we put a catheter inside you. Therapeutic hypothermia to take your body into deep hypothermia in just minutes to sort of put a human in sort of a stasis if you wanted to sort of keep them alive for a long period of time. Even worked in endometrial ablation, helping people with endometriosis, you know, not have to have those terrible pains with fibroid tumors. But my educational background was aerospace engineering. I actually grew up as a sort of like a hippie kid. My dad was a hang glider pilot. He'd take us to a lot of air shows. Gave me a lot of science fiction, and I always dreamed about going to space and robot surgeons in the body. And I figured if I could become an aerospace engineer, then I could start to speak that language. And I guess after long enough, I started asking myself why I wasn't seeing more science fiction style tech in our everyday lives. And that's where I started to dream about this concept of, hey, if you can swallow a pill camera, why not have that thing move around? Why not use that as a basis to put tools and do microsurgery from, right? And it was actually clicking on an ad for Founder Institute where I finally realized this doesn't necessarily have to be a dream, right? You can actually ask for help and people can show you the process and you just have to go and execute on it.

Interesting. So, so I mean, was there any, like, any given moment during that journey, you know, having a ton of experience in this space that led you to think, you know, tiny robots. Again, you've told me this before, you know, you're just like, yeah, I just got a new carrier in your pocket all the time.

So like, yeah, here's the latest one right here. It's basically kind of size of your pinky fingertip. But the key was, you know, we started pretty humbly, right? For me, this idea is not an idea that I would claim as my invention. I read about this as a kid, you know, when I saw the movie Inner Space, you know, they injected a little robotic capsule into someone's bloodstream. Fantastic Voyage did the same thing decades earlier.

I remember that ride at what, Disney World, Disneyland, you know, like that was just something. 'Cause again, when I was reading about this, you know, when I was just learning about your journey, you know, as you, you know, when you were graduating, I was starting to really, we were starting to build this stuff here in Texas and you were one of those just like, oh my God, this is, truly changing the game, revolutionizing the space, right? Challenging people to think. It's like, wow, this is stuff from science fiction. It truly is.

It's kind of, it's kind of crazy. I mean, you can do a lot of things with, uh, you know, for example, magnetic fields, right? Like, I could put you in a machine similar to an MRI and I could induce motion using magnetic fields at microscopic levels. And there's amazing work being done all over the world with technology based on that. But with Endiotics, we take a slightly different tack and basically we ask ourselves, you know, what if, you know, just picture a hospital, right? Picture it in your mind. It's like this big building. There's diesel generators in the back in case the power goes out. There's people going in, patients going in the front, doctors going in the front, support personnel, there's ambulances, there's all this stuff associated with a hospital. There's your drive to the hospital, there's you getting on the phone trying to get admitted, and then there's the funny thing is you might be going there many different times, you know, for one of our patients, you know, if they want to look around in your belly, you know, unfortunately it's like 5, 6 trips sometimes to actually get to an upper endoscopy and let a doctor look around inside you just because, hey, it's non-trivial to slide tubes into the human body. Right? It takes a fair amount of gatekeeping before we finally decide that's the thing that now makes sense. So my question is, if you could take everything I just described for a typical patient and draw a circle around that whole adventure, that whole hospital, the footprint, all those trips to the hospital, and if you could turn that into a 15-minute Zoom call from home, we might be on to something. And that's kind of what we see our minimum viable product PillBot is doing. It's just, it's a humble little moving eyeball in the stomach. It's inexpensive. And we just see it as maybe like a mass market screening tool. You know, if you have a bellyache, maybe we could just go have a look real quick. You know, if we find something scary, then let's send you to the hospital for real. But 80 to 90% of the time they don't find anything, right? So let's just make it easy to go in there and look around. And then who knows where we can go from there, right?

Right, yeah. So, and like, just the typical experiences you were just explaining of where people are that are dealing with the digestive tract issues, um, you know, from the upper or low— lower levels, you know, there's a lot of work that goes into it. There's a lot of different specialists, and then when you get to that point, you're going under, you know, they're putting you under, right, for the most part. Um, so you don't, you don't need any of this, you don't need any of that. You can do this from the comfort of your own home.

We're looking at maybe in the US, maybe 6 to 8 million patients per year get an upper endoscopy. And most of those upper endoscopies yield nothing. They yield a negative finding. And that is one component in their healthcare journey. But most of those patients report back that, you know, it took a long time just to get to that moment. And we see this tremendous opportunity with telemedicine to just lower the burden, lower the barrier to entry. I like to say I'd like to make it for a patient or their healthcare provider, their insurance company. I want to make this 10 times cheaper to get to those minutes where you're just looking around inside a stomach. I want to make it 10 times more accessible to the patient population so that if you feel like you need to have a doctor look around inside you, that's easy. You don't have to fight with your insurance company to qualify you just because I think we can make it cheap enough and safe enough and just accessible enough that many, many more patients will be able to, you know, get that sort of closure on whatever is going on. But, you know, I'll be honest with you, I'm here for the sci-fi, right? Like, Founder Institute helped me understand that it's okay to have a big dream But then what's your first step? My dream is nuclear-powered, rice-grain-sized brain surgery robots, right? Like, I want you to go to Disneyland while you're getting brain surgery from a swarm of little tiny robots that, you know, are doing a job that normally would have to have your head split open, right, in some kind of surgical suite. I think we can use this platform in the future to go everywhere in the human body. I think we can get interventional and not just diagnostic, but thank goodness for the human stomach, because if you're willing to drink a bunch of water and skip your breakfast, we think our simple, humble little MVP might actually have a place in the market, and it might actually be able to do some good out there.

Oh well, now, you know, just speaking of that, and you, you kind of just laid out the vision for the future of where this could all go. Some people might think, oh, this is the conspiracy, you know, all the stuff going on in my bloodstream and everything. But no, it's not. It's not like— this is all— this is benign, this is helpful, but it can get there. So I mean, just— you were speaking about this a lot in the— in just the recent VentureBeat article that just came out too. Um, you did mention Fantastic Voyage. You did mention, you know, getting these things down almost to the platelet of size, you know? How feasible do you really think that is? How long do you think something like that would actually take?

Sure, so, you know, I think I held up some of the robots. I can show you our progress here. You know, it started with Arduino, Raspberry Pi-style hardware, and that was just a way to convince our first friends and family investors that we were serious, that we were going to build something real. You can see the propellers in there.

Yeah.

From there, we went to, you know, custom electronics, and I didn't raise anything with this thing. This is like Red Bull can, That wasn't all that exciting, but we get to thumb size and angel money really started flowing in. Like, we had early angels before that, but, you know, we raised a quarter million dollars in just a few weeks with this guy. From there, it was, you know, getting down into sizes where you could actually float and move in 3 dimensions. Like, our current prototype is, you know, is actually fully functional now. We can move in X and Y and Z. We can spin around. We make certain concessions from time to time, but the latest iteration of this is something you can swallow, something that can move. So the question is, you just saw a trend line, right? And that trend line starts, you know, what, March 8th, 2019, we incorporate while we're in Founder Institute, um, to today. That's, you know, we're coming up on like 3, 3 and a half years, um, and maybe $2 million raised and burned to get to that this moment in time, where do we go from here, right? I mean, we're on the verge of— it looks like we're getting flown to Dubai in October. I'm getting my acid-washed jeans and my black turtleneck ready because I've always dreamed about getting on a big stage in front of the world and swallowing one of these robots and having, you know, a famous powerful doctor control it remotely. And Vivek Kumbhari, MD, PhD, is the chair of gastroenterology at Mayo Clinic. He's an investor in our company, he's on our board of directors, you know, it's a, it's, it's pretty big deal. The goal is to have him do a live endoscopy of my stomach from the other side of the planet in October, and the goal here is to go make friends with people who see the vision, understand that we're trying to create something tangible for the real market in, in the short term, But then more importantly, understand where we can go with this, right? Because in my long-winded answer to your question, the goal is not to stop with a minimum viable product. The goal is to blow by that at high speed. How small can I get it with this team that we're building right now? Honestly, I think we could go to rice grain size. There's a company, NDB, or Nano Diamond Battery, in Europe. They are making nuclear-powered batteries that are microscopic that can surface-mount on a PCB. They just take some control rod from a, you know, the pencil lead, the graphite from a nuclear reactor. It's been soaking up neutrons for decades. It's hot. You take a little flake of that, you put it on a special solar cell, you wrap that in a crystal matrix, and now you have a nuclear-powered solar cell that could go for 10 years. And they say that their goal is actually to to make high-current versions that, that could do like lithium power drains but for months. That kind of technology is how we go rice grain size. That kind of technology is how we put surgical tools, how we chew our way through layers of tissue leaving just like the track that a needle might, might poke, right? This is how we firmly cut the cord on the catheter, right? Like this is If there was minimally invasive surgery with catheters put into holes in the body, what do we call it when there's no tube itself? It's just a tiny working tip, right? So I would love to have the privilege of being with Endiotix on this adventure beyond a minimum viable product. I foresee trying to go to rice grain size, um, but the goal here is to just show the world that this is not only possible but that it's happening. And hopefully for the kids out there, for college students, for young founders, for people that are thinking about founding companies, I want Endyotics to sort of become two things. One, I want people to think of us like the SpaceX of med device for a couple of years. Man, that would be such an honor, right? But then I want them to think of us like dinosaurs that need to be kicked to the curb. Right? I want, I want to make this normal so that someone else can come in later and just be like, listen, old man, invest in me or get out of the way. Right? And that is going to be a beautiful day. Right? I tell all of our interns and our new hires at Endyotix that my goal is to invest in your company. Right? One day. Like, like, thank you for joining the team. Thank you for pushing on this. But eventually you're going to want to start your own company with your own vision, and that's what I want to invest in, right?

I love that. That's inspiring, man. And yeah, and you're going to do your best Steve Jobs impression here in October, or instead of 1,000 songs in your pocket, though, it's going to be 1,000 tiny robots healing your body every day. I like it. I love it, man. Steal that. You can steal that. But yeah, we've got some people coming in from the audience too, asking, like, it ties in with some of the questions I was going to kind of lead into Cindy. Good to see you again, Cindy. Cindy, long time watcher already. I'm starting— I'm remembering names. I see y'all. I see y'all. Keep interacting. What kind of— so, you know, not that— not to dive into the IP journey, obviously, but for many people, medical, medical or otherwise, it's just building hardware. You know the phrase, hardware's hard, um, unless you're well capitalized and just, you know, and especially if you're doing something that's completely out there, completely new. Which is rare. It's tough, right? It's very tough to get that buy-in. Definitely tough to secure that. But what was that journey like more on the technical side? Just get understanding the hardware piece and then working through all of not just the IP stuff, but also all the regulatory stuff.

Right. So here's the deal. Like I'm in Founder Institute class, I don't know if it's 8 or something, but one of the Founder Institute classes is like legal and IP. And Founder Institute brings in mentors, right? And these two guys came in from Perkins Coie. One was Jordan Becker, a famous IP attorney, and the other is Jim Brenner, who does corporate law. And they both work at Perkins Coie. And what I loved about what Jim had to say is that he said, look, there is an established status quo. There's a right-down-the-middle ethical way we can start this company fundraise for this company, build you out a corporate foundation to stand on. And I really loved that the very first words that came out of Jim Brenner's mouth were about ethical growth and ethically engaging the community. I thought that was really cool. And then Jordan Becker came out and said, look, if you have a crazy idea, I want you to just come into my office with all your pictures and notes, even if it's in crayon, put it on my desk, and we're going to find a way to come up with some form of story here where we can patent some version of this to allow you to pursue this dream. And so that was enough for me. So we decided to work directly with Jordan and with Jim, and Perkins Coie represents us in all matters corporate and IP. And the thing that really meant a lot to me was that about 12 months into working with Perkins Coie, both of our lawyers there, Jim and Jordan, decided they wanted to become personal angel investors in the company. And that's where I really like to be able to say that, you know, when I hear people ripping on lawyers and saying, oh man, the lawyers are gonna, you know, eat us all. Honestly, that is a toxic attitude that is both kind of naive and also sort of one-dimensional. Right. I would say that we have just as much innovation in our intellectual property as we do in the actual technology in our device. For example, you know, when we went to a 3-motor configuration and started getting like direct XYZ control, I was a little concerned about taking it to Digestive Disease Week and, you know, basically opening the kimono and showing the whole world our tech stack. I sent an email to Jordan Becker with, with a description and he said, send me a package. I recorded a video of me walking through SolidWorks. He wrote a provisional patent overnight and he had it submitted the next day. And so we were able to go show doctors and get commitments now from all the top doctors in the world. The top GI clinics all over the world are asking us to do our first clinical trials there because our IP lawyer was so passionate and knew us so well and personally that he was willing to, you know, take his personal time and basically get IP started so that we could go build this business. And then on the corporate law side, like, Jim Brenner has found ways during COVID and found ways in between rounds to allow me to take money and keep building the company when I, as a first-time founder, had made all of the classic mistakes. And Jim is always there to sort of coach me and guide me, you know, keep it ethical, keep it, you know, up and up. And because of that, you know, Enbiotics is not just some people playing with robots. You know, we're actually an ecosystem of stakeholders who deeply care about doing this right. So I would just say that that you want to lean as heavily into the legal side as you possibly can because it represents a huge opportunity to build a company that can actually last and have an impact on the world.

Yeah, again, I love this, man. It's going to be a joy watching you keep building this out. And it's just, again, it's just fun watching you and knowing you on top of it. You have personally swallowed how many of these?

So I've swallowed 15 of these, and I'm not sure the audience wants to hear about where the other 3 went.

Oh, well, goop freeze. Why am I— I should go freeze. You know, it's like, where does it go? I'm like, I think it goes to the normal, normal channel.

Yes. You know what the funny thing here is? We kind of just look at the world of pill cameras, the passive devices, and we want to say, look, those are, those are maybe entering their 25th, you know, year or so. They actually got FDA approval in 2001, but they first swallowed them in 1997. Pill cameras are now seen widely as relatively safe as long as you follow the appropriate protocols for who should and should not swallow one. Um, and they're effective in certain places, like when you're going through the small bowel, the small intestine. Um, you know, pill cameras are probably the gold standard for having a look around there. But our goal is just to show that if you can flush a pill camera and still have that be okay from a holistic global perspective, then maybe you could probably do the same with one of our robots. Like, I don't want a patient to have to dig around in the toilet after we've inspected their stomach. Like, if you're having robots driven around inside your GI tract, you're already probably feeling a little funky, you know. I'd like to look at the the emotional experience that patients are having, right? Like I want to give them dignity and I want to give them agency. I want them to feel like they're in control of their healthcare experience. So instead of waking up groggy from sedation to read a report that your doctor wrote about what they found inside you, instead of that, I want you fully lucid on a Zoom call in your living room. Face-to-face with your doctor while you see what PillBot sees as they drive it around your stomach. So in real time, you get to know what's up and your doctor can just speak to you in plain English, right? With that bedside manner. We're very excited about that. But then, you know, when we say, oh my goodness, we're flushing robots down the toilet, this is kind of scary for the environment, right? What we want to do is say, look, If we can replace months of physical trips to a hospital, if we, if we can replace a garbage can full of medical devices and sedation equipment and all that other funky stuff and turn that into, you know, 2.7 grams of waste plastic, maybe it's okay. But we never want to shy away from that question. We want to lean into these hard questions because honestly, med device and medicine is literally balancing the power of life and death. Right. So this is not the kind of place where you lean away from a hard question. You wanna lean into it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, perfect. That's awesome. And it's a great way to kind of compare on that. You know, actually you're thinking about all the ways that, you know, hospitals regularly or—

Absolutely. Right.

The cost benefit out there actually makes a lot of sense in the long run, which is, again, it's just continually blows my mind. I'm learning, I learn stuff from you every single time. I get that from all our founders, but you specifically, Well, you told me so much on this. So this also leads in, 'cause I mean, you speak to telehealth, you know, this is a telehealth product because of just the capabilities and the distances you can do this, less invasiveness. You don't need the trips out there. Obviously this grand social experiment of the last couple years of pandemic, you know, and you graduated before all of that happened. Now, were you facing any challenges heading pre-pandemic into it that maybe the pandemic helped a lot? Because obviously there's been some vast advances forward in just telemedicine in general.

Right.

Did you get any benefits out of that? And now that we're transitioning out of it, I've been reading a lot, I've been hearing a lot about telehealth might be getting pulled back on the regulatory side. Are you seeing any of that on the horizon?

Sure. COVID was kind of a critical wake-up call. And while we lost a lot of good people, which is a tragedy, It also allowed us to kind of focus on what's most important to ourselves, right? You see certain types of jobs, you know, sort of opening up to remote. You also see a little bit of a backlash with maybe, you know, sometimes people take remote a bit further than others might. But for us, we really got a few important things out of it. One was COVID flattened the world. It gave a founder a license to fly. Fundraise anywhere on the planet, right? Because now you're just a Zoom call away from anyone. So, so COVID was, was an opportunity for founders to think outside of their region. In our particular wing of the industry, most gastroenterological procedures, like a, like an upper endoscopy for us, is usually a non-emergency procedure. I mean, many of them are just kind of screenings. And so during COVID a lot of them just got delayed or sort of canceled indefinitely. The value of what we like to think of as kind of like hardcore telemedicine really started to raise in a sort of the level of importance we would give it. I like to tell people that our platform is a hardcore form of telemedicine that you could even deploy in a hospital if you really wanted to. But I guess the last thing I would just say with COVID was we were just raising our first money and starting to approach pill size when the pandemic struck. And I remember making a judgment call, you know, do I get on this flight or not? But because of a Founder Institute online pitch, I think in like October of 2019, maybe November, this amazing gentleman, Ariel Gomez-Ortigosa, from Lantana Biosoft, based in León, in Guanajuato, he called me up and he said, "I saw your pitch, you know, on the demo day, and I'm intrigued." And we had lunch in Berkeley while he was around, but then he said, "I want you to fly down to León and pitch my LPs." And so I went down on a Volaris flight right as the pandemic was starting to get into lockdown, like just a few days before. And that was a fateful trip because I felt really overexposed and overleveraged, but I was acting on my instincts and I pitched a room full of prospective LPs in my best Spanish, which is no bueno, but I did my best. And that actually turned into our first full-blown VC commitment. and we closed just under half a million dollars, you know, after a little bit of a journey with that crew. And so all I would say is, you know, if you're a founder and you have this dream, be prepared to turn over any stone, even a stone that makes you look like a weirdo for turning over, because you never know who might be around that corner and who might actually believe in you. Before we got people on sort of like traditional Sand Hill Road style investors to start looking at us, it was a Mexican biotech fund, Lantana Biosoft. It was Loyal VC in Canada, right, who has a presence in the Founder Institute network. It was, you know, Israeli investors who were familiar with pill cameras. You know, it was very, a lot of non-standard archetypes came in to support us before we started to have some kind of appeal to a more general VC audience.

That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Um, and I've been seeing this a lot too with other kind of the hardware and technical devices in the med space, is that you are going to outside of those general spheres because they avoid it. They tend to avoid it. Sand Hill Road folks, you know, they're, they're SaaS people. They don't get any of this. It's It's not giving them immediate returns overnight. They don't— it's not about changing lives. They're not going to change lives, you know, until they're missing the boat and now they want to.

Okay. Yeah, we're looking forward to that. Like, I watched when Sequoia finally invested in SpaceX, and it's interesting how late that investment came, right? There was a fair amount of institutional inertia before they finally pulled that trigger. And like, as an aerospace engineer, it was abundantly clear to me like, oh my goodness, get on this train, right? Like, if you— like, for people that were sort of hemming and hawing while Boeing was trying to compete with SpaceX, it was like, this is sad, right? Like, you have no idea how monstrously disruptive that company is, right? Or where they're going. Like, this, this next century is going to be their century, right? This, this new world we're entering. And we see, you know, we see people about to leave the planet in droves, you know, tens of thousands. And we're saying, hey, you know, you're not gonna be able to put every one of them in a hospital. Maybe we put the hospital inside the patient from time to time, right? But to sort of circle back, we are hoping to, you know, as we move in towards Series A, possibly as early as this fall, we're hoping to get some partners at that level. Right? Because we see a new kind of medicine dawning on us. You know, the first time a tube was slid into a patient in a minimally invasive way, you know, with like an endoscope-style tube, it was in 1901. An optical device was used to look at an unborn baby. And so when you think of the standard of care and you're like, oh man, the latest and greatest in medical technology, like you might be decades, many decades overdue for some change. And so we kind of feel like, yeah, right now a lot of people think of us as frontier and crazy, but I think the instant we have our product in the market and millions of patients are asking why they ever went to the hospital just to sign paperwork, let alone actually see a doctor for 5 minutes, I think people will be like, oh my goodness, I can't believe it was ever like that. So yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of room for this new kind of medicine.

Yeah. I mean, just the leaps and bounds of just what the pandemic forced us to deal with and have to adopt telehealth. It's like, oh, I had to go into the doctor and fill out the forms and do all this other stuff. And I could have just done this on a Zoom call.

Right.

Why would I do, why would I go back? Why would you go back? You know, there's, there's, so there's even more leaps forward. That we're not even aware of.

Something that I would sort of throw in there, which is like, I'm on both sides of this. One is like, telehealth's great. I think we're awesome with our little tiny robot pills. I love that a patient can be conscious instead of sedated when they're on that Zoom call. So it's actually, you're more present than you would be if you were physically there with a tube jammed in your body. But for things like mental health, you know, I'll tell you personally, I mean, I've had my own share of like needing to talk to someone and I'm not gonna talk to my therapist over a Zoom call. I tried it and it's not the same, and I'm not gonna pretend it's the same. I, I, I, I've— and that's kind of ironic because I'm like the hardcore telemedicine guy. So it's— the world is changing rapidly, right? So let's, let's see where it goes.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, it goes to a lot of different things. I mean, you were fortunate enough to actually do an in-person FI program. It's been nearly 3 years. So I've been able to do that. I'm hopeful. Maybe we'll start in Texas, but it might be something where we get to do— we get back to in-person. We just did that. We did our review sessions, idea and progress review in Texas in person, and it just felt good. Actually see people, like people have legs. I don't know if anybody has legs anymore, but people have legs. Those are still things. So that was cool. And that just kind of tells you, yeah, there is a limit. There's certainly a limit, but if you're, if you're help producing cost for a lot of people, you know, yeah, like some people are having to drive into cities, big cities for these things, they could do this, like rural people that don't have access.

People get on airplanes, trains, planes, and automobiles in the developing world to just to get a 10-minute endoscopy. It's, it's kind of ridiculous, you know, I, I come from a sort of non non-glitzy glamorous, you know, background. And it's expensive to be poor, right? It's very expensive to be poor. You pay more for just about everything, not just as a percentage of your income, but your daily operating expenses. You're getting zinged and stabbed in so many humiliating ways when you're poor. I would like Endyotics to be sort of a beacon of dignity and agency to everyone in the world. It's kind of critical to me for that because it was only a few years ago that I was a kid walking around the forest barefoot playing with sticks and twigs and exploring old barns and kind of wondering how I was going to connect that reality to the world that I would see in movies or read about in books. I felt this terrible disconnect. I felt so lost and I felt like I was an immigrant in my own country. I felt cast out and not welcome. And most of that was just in my head, right? I take credit for that. But, but there are so many people out in the world that are still getting whipped around and beaten and not, not really seen. I would like Endiotics to at least be a beacon of light for people who aren't feeling well. I want them to feel like we've got their back. Right, like you see a NASA logo from back in the day and you can't help but just think, like, you see a NASA sticker and it just, it warms your heart because NASA is for everyone, right? NASA is supposed to be good for any human being. Like, that's so cool. We're all on team, team human, right? I'm hoping and endeavoring that we can build a company where Endiotics, which means to go inside the human body to understand what is wrong, and that TX means to Fix it. That's treatment. I want people to think of Endyotics as this crack team of badass biohackers and engineers that has their back. That's like literally trying to be for them, be there for them, you know, on the worst day of their lives, right? And not to be a company where people think like, oh, we're here to profit off of human sickness. And that's why I say like, my goal is draw a circle around that endoscopy. I want it to be 10 times cheaper. Because, you know, I'm speaking to future Tory now. Like, we can hold him to account, you know. What if I become some terrible tycoon and I just harvest people for their sickness? That would be sad.

No, we're having this on the record now, so you're telling yourself in the future this is from the past.

Past Tory. I think we can do better. There's an opportunity here. You know, someone, someone likes to speak about abundance, right? I think we have an opportunity in this century to take a hard look at how we organize ourselves and do it better than we did in the last century. And I think we're experiencing some growing pains right now with that, but this is our chance to do it right. Founders are leaders in the community. They're like rock stars in the business world. So like, let's work together to show the world that there are people standing up to do this better. That's my goal, is just to be a part of that. Yeah.

And I have a feeling you're going to be a part of it very much more than that, my friend. Absolutely. You got me on a bunch of different tangents on that, just on that, what you just said. One, I've been watching that show on Apple TV, For All Mankind. I don't know if you— I love that show. I want to live in that dimension of reality because they continue to go and explore the world, the universe.

And I'll get incendiary, right? Like, I recently went on Facebook and I coined the phrase— I don't know if I coined it, but I'm trying to have coined it— pseudo-tech. I've kind of finally just had it with the vast majority of investment money and brainpower flowing towards greedy, lazy grabs for low-hanging fruit. Like, I literally have most of my friends who are like software engineers are just like monetizing at Facebook. And it's like, you're brilliant. We built incredible giant Tesla coils at Burning Man together. We went to the Smithsonian with our art. We became international artists. Burning Man meant so much to us. But then 90% of you go back to what you think is a tech job and you're really just selling ads.

Yeah. They're gonna call it investing and resting. That's what they do. They invest.

I am so like, I am over it. I'm calling it out. Like, I'm trying to hire 2 software engineers right now, right? But I'm competing with monster giants to do that, right? Like, we're a tiny, scrappy little startup company, and I'm trying to get a great software engineer and a great embedded firmware engineer. And it's hilarious to see the incredible brain drain that our economy puts on smart people, right? Because they just get lured to these extravagant salaries And it's like, all right, fine.

You want—

if you just want to make money, if you just want to get yours, get yours. But don't claim you're in tech if what you're really doing is just selling ads. I'm sorry, you don't get to be my friend and just say I'm in high tech. No, you monetize at Facebook. Like, stare yourself in the mirror and take ownership of that.

You farm, you farm cash over there. That's what they— yeah, like, they're— oh, I mean, there's probably not going to be a lot of them left. I mean, if you're seeing on the news for the past week, Zuck got angry at one of these employees for asking about like time off and he's cranking up the hours and bringing them in. So I think those days might be numbered for a lot of people at the— I can't even say it. I was an early Facebook employee. I still call it Facebook. I can't take myself, get myself to say Meta. The Meta.

I think people forget that they're dying, right? Like every time your heart beats, that's like, you know, you get about a billion heartbeats if you're a mammal. Elephant, mouse, roughly 1 billion. It's not even that many, right? You're spending your heartbeats for what? Like, do you think you can take the money with you, right? Like, you— and then the other thing is, if you had all the money in the world but you haven't created anything, right, you literally just have money, then all you can do is buy consumer tech. Right. Like, I'll admit I used to want a Lamborghini because I love the story of non-aristocratic Ferruccio Lamborghini, who took tractors from warfields in World War II and turned them into farm equipment, made a fortune, bought a Ferrari, and then was given the cold shoulder by Ferrari because he was not aristocratic and founded Lamborghini. Right. The raging bull. I love that story. And I used to want a Lamborghini. But honestly, I couldn't care less about any of that now. Like, I get to wake up every day and, you know, pull this little thing out of my coin pocket and look at it and realize, like, with the help of my friends, with the help of Founder Institute and this community, I was able to rip this idea out of my mind and drag it into reality. And now it's real, and now there are people all around the world who want to be a part of it. I have never known a dignity or a luxury like that in my entire life, and there's no amount of money that could ever purchase that dignity or purchase that luxury. There's nothing for sale on the planet that I want more than to make these robots and make them real, because I'm just trying to get to two moments in time, all right? 2 moments separated by months or separated by years, but the first moment is coming maybe as early as a few months or maybe as late as a few years. But that first moment, that first milestone is when a doctor takes my team aside and says, I want you to sleep well tonight because today, because of PillBot, we found something scary that we would not have found, right? And we are able to cure it because we found it so early. Because you made it accessible and cheap. So you saved a life today. I want that moment. I'm racing to that first moment, and then my team is racing to the second moment. And that's when that happens for the 100,000th time, right? Because at that point, the epic adventure that has been and will be Endyotics will have reached some sort of maturity, right? And that heroic ascent will be over and it'll just become normal. And at that moment in time, I'll think to myself, all right, Mr. Tory, like, not bad, dude, not bad. Like, you've done something good. And like, all this white hair, all that gray hair, like, all the marks on the skin, you know, and all the bags under the eyes, like, it doesn't weigh heavily at all, right? Teddy Roosevelt said, spend yourself in a worthy cause. Right? And that's what we're doing. We are dying. The question is, are you actually living? And I would hazard that if you're just like making money and going to parties, there's more to life than that. A lot more.

Oh yeah, yeah. Again, a good quote right here. Hey, that's Cindy. Cindy's calling it out, you know. What do you spend your heartbeats on? It's a good way to think about it, right? You only have a finite amount of those beats and you get less and less every day. So that could be—

don't be sad that you're dying, right? Like, celebrate the fire that you're in, right? Like, this is an incredible gift. It's transient. Appreciate every little bit of it. But don't think you're going to take those accounts with you when you go, right? It's not going to happen. And I'm not saying, like, don't seek your fortune. Like, oh my goodness, I was homeless at times as a kid. I, I am actively seeking my fortune. I consider that part of a life well lived, right? But see beyond the account and actually ask yourself, like, what could you do with your life if you really tried to do something big, right? Maybe more than the people around you, maybe more than the people around you are expecting of you, right? Like, step up to the plate. And if you're freaked out and scared like I was, You can ask for help. You know, that's why this network is here to help you step up to that plate. We're here to put the bat in your hands. We're here to put the helmet on. We're here to give you the uniform, tell you where to stand and show you how to swing. Right. Swing for the fences. Right. That's what we're here for. That's what this community is for. And that's why I'm so grateful to be a part of it.

Yeah. And again, we're grateful to have you a part of it as well, my friend. Well, I'm going to change gears a little bit. Yeah, we've been going a lot all over the place. And you did mention these Tesla coils that you build out of Burning Man every once in a while. You did talk about, hey, not every— not all life isn't just all parties and stuff. But yeah, if you're showing us every year, I had a chance to look at these coils. And you talk about building really small, but you could build really big as well, Torrey. And again, I was privileged to see that, what, this past April? The, these, these, these awesome, awesome Tesla coils, these, these feats of engineering. Uh, but you've been working, you've been building these just like as an art project for, for what, well over a decade, right?

You know, I, uh, like, I was raised by hippies, like, like hang gliding hippies, probably, uh, doing all the fancy, uh, like mind-altering substances. Um, thank goodness they love sci-fi and air shows, right? Because that would, that rounded it out. But when I heard about Burning Man, I thought, oh, hell no. I was raised at Burning Man, essentially. You know, I don't need any more of that in my life. But a friend, a fellow aerospace engineer, Gene Gisson, really awesome guy, met him in 1999 at Cal Poly's aerospace program. Gene, Yevgeny Mikhailovich Gisson is his full name, he was actually in the explosion for the SpaceShipOne first commercial flight to space. Under Burt Rutan, and 3 of his buddies, I believe, passed away. They found him like tangled around a cactus. He's Russian, he's very hard to kill, and basically was in critical condition for a few weeks. That Gene Gissen. He's still around. He's a very passionate engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Gene said, Tori, you're going to Burning Man. I need to show you this place. And so we went there, and I brought an open mind, and about 30 seconds rolling onto the open playa, it was like I was like, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen because I saw like epic massive art being put together by really interesting people from all over the world, very high-functioning people and a few low-functioning ones as well. And I just sort of immediately thought like, oh, I can beat these hippies at their own game easy, right? Like, oh man, my ego lit on fire and I was like, I want to be a part of this. I want to build. I want to own a big stage. And the thing about the Burning Man community is like it gives you a stage. Like if you go out there with a project, people will support you. They'll celebrate it. They'll give you a place to build it. They'll give you a license to build things that are not legal to build in other places. Like, you know, 400-foot zip lines and 5-story towers and 30-foot Tesla coils, right? And yeah, my buddy Dan Moyer, a brilliant electrical and computer engineer now at WPI getting his PhD in robotics, one of our co-founders here at Sextant. He's now known as a CTO Emeritus while he works on that PhD. Dan took me aside and he said, hey, Tori, you know, I kind of want to build a giant Tesla coil for our camp. We had founded a theme camp called Sextant, named after the navigational device, which is kind of a symbol of scientific endeavor and adventure. And he said, let's build a giant Tesla coil for Sextant Camp. And I said, Cool, man, uh, how big? He's like, 5 feet tall, man. And, uh, I'm like, all right, great, that's a big Tesla coil. And he started asking me, he said, look, you're the engineer, you're the aero guy, can you make me aluminum donuts for the toroids to shoot the sparks off of? And I said, sure. Turns out that was pretty hard. I hit my local makerspace, I started 3-dimensionally forming aluminum. That was really hard. Then I found this HVAC ducting company, Acosta Manufacturing in San Jose. And they had one out of like 7 machines in the world that could cut a 6-inch wide aluminum tape in a sine wave down the middle, yielding 2 bands of tape where the width of the tape varies according to that sine wave. They wrap it around a cylinder, and it's timed just right that you make a spiral HVAC duct with really smooth donut-like geometry. So anyways, I made friends with them. Turns out they had only ever run steel through it. And I asked them, could you do aluminum? And they said, sure, you'll have to buy a giant spool of aluminum, like off a truck. I asked them if they took American Express, and yes, they did. But the thing is, the machine had adjustability. And this is the lesson for founders or artists, and really kind of those are one and the same, right? The machine had adjustability, and Dan had asked me for a 6-inch cross-section by 2-foot, 24-inch diameter, and they could go to 24-inch cross-section and 8-foot diameter. And so I went to Dan and I said, Dan, uh, what if we made it a little bit bigger? And he did some calculations, and then he literally laughed out loud and was like, we're going to be ordering 400 pounds of copper wire, we need like multiple miles now. And that's how they grew from 5-foot-tall on paper to 32 feet tall, you know, out on Playa, was just raw human ego, right? I just wanted to be special out at Burning Man. I wanted attention. I think there was sort of like a leftover unmet attention need, you know. There's the big person inside us and there's a little person inside us, and that little person inside me was still hungry. Hadn't been satisfied. And that project took years to complete. We were laughed at by a large community watching us fail year after year, and we would take it to Burning Man and fail to have it work, but then we would come back and build it again and still fail. And eventually we did get it to work, but by that time we had this international group of people that were part of the project that were vested in it. We've become this international family, and when the time came to stop making other people's dreams come true in Silicon Valley as a med device engineer and to launch this company with my friends to make my dreams come true, we had a community come together to write first checks for Endyotics, and they all said the same thing. They said, look, your perseverance with the Tesla coil is why we're writing this check. Because your team is smart, but everyone around here is smart. You know, your team has access to tools and equipment and, you know, everyone does. You know, that's— that doesn't make you so special. What makes you special is that you will work nonstop for 3 years in a row against all odds with nothing looking good. And you will not quit ever until you make it happen. And that is the person we want to place a bet on as a founder. And I will say that, you know, we're entering, we're now in our third year as Endiotics. And only, only in the last few months have we gotten this damn robot pill to a size where a normal person could swallow it and it could actually float neutrally and move elegantly in XYZ. It's 3 years into this adventure before Endyotix is really truly looking like a winner, right? Um, now if someone wants to invest in us, I, I'll no longer say like, consider this your highest risk investment. I would say consider this high risk, big, big reward potential. It could go to zero, but you know, we're actually not just a lost cause, you know, this is actually starting to look pretty good. But 3 years of pushing through the mud to get there. And the other part of the learning there is, if you have an idea, do not choose some easy or medium-sized idea, because the last thing you ever want to be is an old man with an awesome train set in his garage that no one wants to see, right? Because you can easily spend your entire life building it, You can spend all of your money building it, and then you'll be the old guy with the train set in your garage. No. If you have an idea, go ballistic. Build something that you can't possibly build yourself. Build something that if it succeeds, it's going to be heroic. Because either way, you spend your life and you spend all your money, you spend all your time, all your energy, your soul you pour into your hobbies and what you love. You might as well be working on something while you're in that fire. right, this temporary thing we call life, you might as well be working on something that will attract people from all over the world to join you, to help you do it, to help pay for it, and just to be there when you fall to help catch you, right? That's why you need to swing for the fences, because then you don't have to do it alone.

Oh, there's so many nuggets in there, man. I like how you're able to translate all that. And then again, it just shows, you know, the very earliest of stages betting on the founder is really the only thing an investor that looks for opportunities at that level can do. Are you the person to actually do it? Um, and do you have the, the metal, the perseverance to do it? And just seeing you do that out on the playa with these, with these coils is, is proof enough that you're going to go from this big proof of concept, like, pill that an elephant could probably swallow to actually something that a human We never built a scale model.

We just went to full scale and got our asses kicked at full scale. Get your asses kicked at full scale.

Well, those coils caught the attention of just other people, too. You brought them here to Austin. You drove what, from Oakland?

That was a very interesting phone call. So I got a call from one of Elon's inner circle and basically said, hey, Elon asked for the big Tesla coil from Burning Man. And I thought, like, hey, this is either a chance to blow my company and waste our last bit of money on sort of a fool's errand, or this is a chance to meet some interesting people and step out into the unknown, maybe find a ray of light of serendipity, right? And my instinct was like, if Elon's asking for the big coil, let's bring the big coil. And so something not everyone knows is when we— we called it a team building trip, so I actually used Endyotics money to pay those gas bills, right, and rent that truck to haul that thing, and we drove it out. When we got to Austin, Texas, just a few hours before we got there, we had about $160 in the bank account. We were literally on our last legs getting to Austin to the Cyber Rodeo, and I managed to extort my dear cousin Jake Fox for $10,000.

He got pulled over in that Porsche, right?

I managed to extort the poor guy to come be on our crew, but throw down some cash and kind of, you know, give us the ability to get back to California. But we flew our lead investor, Ed Jean-Louis of TL Venture Partners, and we said, Ed, you put a term sheet on the table. We're trying hard to close money. Dude, you want to really meet the team? Come out to Austin and be part of this crew, right? I want you to feel and smell the playa dust on these coils. I want you to get your hands dirty. And sure enough, Ed showed up. And basically helped us build the damn thing. And, you know, we got to show them around the Cyber Rodeo, which was pretty cool. But that felt good. It felt good for the person willing to lead the round and price the company and do the due diligence. For Ed to actually sweat with the team and actually understand, like, there's more to this than a PowerPoint presentation. You know, this isn't a slide deck. It's not just a roll of the dice. You know, this is a group of very passionate people who consider themselves as a family doing something on instinct because they feel it's the right place to be. And within a few weeks of returning from the Cyber Rodeo, we had for the first time ever more than $1 million in the bank account. And it— I feel there's a little bit of a spiritual link to that because, look, we all suffer from depression. We all suffer from freezing up and being scared. Like, I hide under a blanket sometimes with a cup of coffee, right? Right. No, I've literally done that. I've like, I've hid under my desk and just like recited that Paul Atreides poem, like, I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And as a fear goes through you, you turn your eye, you see the path of the fear, right? When the fear is gone, there's nothing. Only you will remain, right? I've had to put myself in a dark room and just say that over and over again and maybe get the words a little better, read it, read on my phone. Because we get as founders so ridiculously overleveraged that you are essentially at the human equivalent of just redline for months and even years. And literally the only thing you have going for you is your faith in your team, your love for your idea and your mission, and then just faith in yourself, right? Because ultimately each person gets to choose when they quit, right? You get to choose, like, unless you're physically dragged out of the building. Usually people who quit quit before that, right? They quit when it gets hard or when it gets ugly or when they get ridiculed, maybe when their families start to question them, you know, when they get an offer of another job at Amazon Web Services. $500,000 a year, oh, that starts to smell pretty good when you're terrified and you're already at 50% pay and you're starting to, you know, figure out how you're going to survive the next few months. It becomes very easy to quit, right? But it's a personal thing, and for those who are unwilling to quit ever, for those who are able to make themselves dangerous, you can do really big things, right? And that's the thing is like, maybe you don't have an Ivy League background. Maybe you didn't have all the resources growing up. Maybe you've had some trauma and some pain. Well, think about it this way, you know, as I did when I was like getting ready to launch this company, I was realizing most of the people in these rooms I'm going to be pitching to have not been homeless. Most of those people weren't eating like government cheese, right? Most of those people don't have that pain and I realized there's no one in this valley that can hurt me more than I've already been hurt and I decided to just make myself invulnerable. There's no one in Silicon Valley that has anything on me except me. I am my own enemy. I am my demon, no one else. That is a personal thing. No external force in the world has anything on me but that guy in the mirror. And that is the multi-year struggle that you get to go into as a founder because you're basically fighting yourself every single day to keep going and not to have today be the day that you quit. Let someone else quit today.

Oh man, I feel like we We could be talking all day. I just love hanging out with you, man. You need to get back down here a little bit more often, right? It's too hot right now. You don't need to come.

We have air conditioning in this building.

It's amazing.

Unfortunately, I got AC in this studio. But yeah, outside, it's not fun. I wouldn't want to build Tesla coils out by the factory right now. That was a fun time. We definitely got some things. And again, I'm glad to see how, again, you leveraging that as the team building exercise. You just brought on like a key person on the team that I had met. He was driving the dually all the way down as well. Yeah, uh, that operating officer, Bill Dixon.

Well, we got him from Larry Page's company, Wisk. Um, everyone's building flying cars right now, and besides the folks at Joby, I would say there's a lot of derivative thinking out there, and there's a lot of people who think they're really, really smart because they're making a flying car, and it's like, no, you're not that smart. The guy who invented the lithium batteries that made your dream possible, that's the brilliant guy. You're playing with very awesome batteries and very awesome electric motors and very well-understood aerodynamic principles. You need to sort of check yourself a little bit and understand, like, where the real genius was that made that possible. And Wisk has like hundreds of employees and they still aren't like flying their cars around. And it's like, I think they have too much money, right? I think they have too much money and too many heads and like they've gotten too comfortable, right? If you really want to do something big, you need to get savage, right? Like when we build robots, we're doing it knowing that we only have a few months of runway, right? When we swallow robots, we're doing it because Well, I think it's legal to swallow your own robot. I think I am the definition of informed consent, and that certainly saves me hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, going and doing it some other way, right? Make yourself dangerous, get out, you know, way out on a limb and swing for the fences, and then maybe you might have a shot. But the instant you get complacent, like, man, look at what's happening with Facebook. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has blown more money on Meta than the entire Space Launch System.

$10 billion.

That's the amount of money NASA has blown on their space rocket to the moon, which Elon is by like 3 orders of magnitude eclipsing, right? The Space Launch System is like this epic monumental waste of money and complete like representation of like our government just not understanding what innovation means anymore. Just, just outrageously out of touch, right? By, by 3 orders of magnitude is the cost difference between Starship and Space Launch System for essentially the same capability. I mean, it's like I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, right? Um, no, no, no, maybe you don't always need all the money in the world. Get savage, be dangerous, right? Be, be irreplaceable. And then maybe you're going to do something great. You do not want founders who are comfortable, right? That, that is a recipe for disaster because then you get lazy and you stop taking risks and you stop finding serendipity. And then before you know it, someone else is doing whatever it was you dreamed about much better.

Then you're spending a lot more money playing catch-up. Basically, yeah.

I mean, it's interesting, like, I don't have anything against Mark, but it's like, I'm sorry, dude, you are not entitled to the future of the internet. You made a social network, you kind of got lucky, and that's awesome. You are not special, and you are not entitled to the internet's future. And you're blowing more money than NASA blew on a horrible bad idea of a space rocket.

And that much money on the, on the James Webb too, and that's, you know, Showing us deep into the, to the cavernous space.

James Webb is supposed to be cool. I mean, it's amazing, but it's 20 years late, right? Like, we are outrageously out of touch with what's possible and what we ought to really be doing. I'm just glad there are people out there who are showing us that, right? Like, okay, James Webb is cool, but what happens if you scale it up to fit in a Starship? Can we just build that right now? And hurl that thing out to a Lagrange point and not wait another 20 years, right? James Webb is like, what, 3 times physically larger than Hubble? That is utterly unacceptable, okay? We need to be 100 times bigger, okay? Like, I'm not gonna live long enough to see all this cool stuff, and I want to see it all, right? We need to raise the bar, we need to be more ambitious, And we need to make fewer excuses. Like, come on, let's do this. It's more fun this way.

I know, I know. And then you get to see the LinkedIn crowd is just going nuts. They've been hanging on every bit of this. I'm sure Dustin behind the scenes going, dang, they're gonna really go for hours, aren't they? So I want to get— I need to start wrapping up for him, though. I know we could— we can— we should— I'm going to bring you back. We should probably just have another show, just you and me, just going on like once a week.

I don't want to be talking down to vulnerable people. I'm hoping that people who are dreaming about doing something crazy and feeling crushed by the world, please reach out directly to me. I want to help any way I can.

That's good.

Yeah, I'm not here to disparage industries. I just feel like sometimes, sometimes it's healthy to say we can actually do better. A lot better.

Yeah. So, so yeah, how can the audience follow this journey? I know where you are, but like, what, what people watching FI Land right now, where can they follow you? How can they get in touch? How can they keep seeing and just learning more from, from what you're up to?

If you want to just chat with me, friend me on LinkedIn and just say, hey, you know, I'm reaching out for, for X reason. I'm a human being, you know, I'm still in a position where I can just accept a request and chat with you on LinkedIn and Those messages are how I stay sane as a human. So I consider that very sacred. If you're trying to sell me enterprise software, I probably don't have time for you. But if you're a human and you just want to talk, all right, I'm actually available to have that chat. And I do really love making introductions for people and trying to help people out. But try to make it human. Like for me, I just say, hey, I make robot pills. I'd love to be friends if you're up for it. You know, that's my LinkedIn connection request. Look, you don't have to accept it. But please don't be mad if you get it. Because I was honest when I said that.

Awesome. Yeah, I love the fact how available and accessible you are for the audience. That's awesome. And I'm sure you're probably getting blown up on the LinkedIn right now with all of the requests. One last question I've been asked. I've been asking every single guest that's been on the show. You're certainly no different. And I think you've answered it a couple of times, but I want to see kind of how you formalize it just in this one setting. There's somebody in the audience right now, somebody in FI land. Maybe they've been inspired by this story. Maybe they've been noodling on an idea for so long and they've just been scared to pull the trigger. But maybe now they've gotten a little kick in the pants to go and do it. Dori, what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them before they start?

That's so simple. I mean, if you've got an idea you're passionate about and you don't know how to do it, that was me, right? Like, the pill camera company sold for almost $1 billion in 2014, and I have sketches that say Endyotix going back in my notes and my, you know, Google Photos back to 2014, and I think earlier than that. And we didn't found Endyotix until 2019, and I didn't decide to get serious until 2018. So what happened in those 4 years where I was sketching the Endiotics logo, thinking that when I got the logo just right, I'd be like halfway there, right? The reason for that 4 years of delay was my own depression, my own, you know, feelings of not being good enough, my imposter syndrome, my self-loathing, my laziness, right? All those real things that are part of being an actual human. The one thing that changed it was deciding that my life needed to change or, or I was going to become cynical and kind of check out. And the other half of it was seeing a targeted ad on Facebook of all places that said, come pitch your idea for free at the Founder Institute. And I clicked on it and it was just a few miles away in Palo Alto. And now it's just a few clicks away for anyone on the planet. And I walked into a room and I got my ass handed to me. But for the first time in my life, someone called me a founder. And for the first time in my life, someone said, that's a crazy idea. You might want to consider applying to this program. And so I applied to Founder Institute and, and I made a commitment to myself when I got accepted that that would be the last time that I would think all those dark thoughts. And that would be the last time that I would make all those excuses, and it would be the last time that where I fundamentally acted on being sorry for myself, and that I would at the age of 37 finally, finally go for it, go all out like kids going for Harvard when they're in junior high school. I never did that. I never tried. At the age of 37, I got really ambitious, and Founder Institute helped me to go and make that real.

Fantastic, man. Thank you again. This is a fantastic episode to wrap up season 2. I'm glad we can make it. I know we had you earlier in the show, uh, let's start at the beginning, but we had to do some rescheduling because, you know, you were traveling on that end. But I'm glad we were able to wrap up with this. So I hope you can come down here to Austin again soon, maybe, you know, with the whole team in tow and giant trailer with a bunch of copper wiring and aluminum wood. Maybe just you, we can just hang for a little bit. But we'll be seeing some friends too later next month as well. I don't know if I'll be able to catch you out there in space and time, but maybe.

Looking forward to it, Martin. It's going to be soon.

Absolutely, amigo. Absolutely. Thank you again, Tory. Thank you all for the audience. We've had some amazing comments. Jake, Carol, Cindy, as always, asking some great stuff. Please be sure to connect. Um, Torrey, we'll let you get back to it, man. Keep building. We're gonna bring you back again. I want to make sure we reserve 2 hours next time because I want to know once after what happens when you get out of— when you come back from Dubai after you swallow that pill on stage. I want to hear what happens next.

We're gonna do it. All right, Martin, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Let's bring up Dustin. Final show of the summer.

Wow.

That's all right, we're running along. I told you we're gonna run long.

Yeah, no, no, that was great. It was, um, really inspiring actually, because I know about Endiotix on the technology side, but I think, uh, hearing Tori's kind of founder journey and his vision and persistence, uh, and how it ties back to Sextant as well, I don't know if I did know all that stuff. So, uh, yeah, really, really cool. Um, but, uh, we're here now, Founder X, as you alluded to at the top. We have been preparing for months for this, uh, big virtual conference and we've been plugging it at the end of every single one of these episodes, but it's now, it's finally here, right? So Tuesday through Thursday, next week is the day. We've got a lot of information up on the website. If you're part of the FI network, like you've probably seen this in emails and on social media, but if you haven't, if you're just seeing this now, go over and check out founderx.com/attend. Attend, and that is where you can see like the full schedule is now up with all the keynotes and speakers and panelists who are going to be out there next week for— and you want to highlight, you want to tell us a little bit, Martin, about some of the highlights that we're going to have?

We've got some awesome guests coming up, some amazing keynotes, founders. We're doing another showcase, our quarterly showcase is wrapping up everything, but as we lead into it starting on Tuesday, We have some prolific angel investors, some prolific VCs. Maybe they might not be too common in, uh, in the greater, you know, world of startups, but they're the ones making things happen behind the scenes. They're early investors, some of the biggest companies in the world. We're going to learn how they come and do that, they make those decisions. Um, so, you know, check out some of the roster. Like, me personally, I'm, I'm sitting down with a couple amazing keynote speakers as well. You're going to hear, learn from our co-founder CEO Jonathan Gretching. He's going to tell you a lot about the state of FI. We're going to have some global updates around, around the world as well. So we're going to learn about what FI has been up to in regions, not just what you know, you know, North America. We're going to hear from some of our top performing leaders in Asia, Africa, Europe, um, you know, uh, Australia. It's going to be amazing. I'm really looking forward to this, really kind of bringing the whole community together. We haven't been able to do this again. I think I mentioned at the top of the show since 2017 in person. So hopefully, you know, again, this has been a passion, love project in the making over the last 6 months getting up to this point. So I'm happy to be able to kind of provide this all to the community. We've had an amazing team behind the scenes putting this together too, and it's really been an all-hands effort. Effort from HQ. Um, you know, I'm a couple of the names, you know, that's just coming right off the top of mind. Again, some of the, some of the keynotes that we have, you know, Jenny Felding, an investor. Uh, we have, oh, we have so many people. I'm, I'm actually sitting down with Patrick Lee, one of the co-founders of Rotten Tomatoes. That's going to be on the final day. Uh, we got some amazing stuff. Check out the whole roster. We've got so many sessions. We've got a couple dozen sessions, some that are going to be geared towards all the mentors, advisors, leaders that are running programs throughout the world supporting startups, um, that are, that are touching things about working more formally with startups as from an advisor, how to invest in them effectively, uh, provide value, how do you launch a venture capital fund, a lot of really cool stuff in conjunction with VC Lab. Um, you know, another founder, Adeo, as well, you know, he's— many of you know, in FI land has been Building out VC Labs similar to what we've been able to do over the past decade and change, teaching founders how to launch enduring startups. You know, we're working on the same projects to teach emerging fund managers around the world how to launch enduring VC funds and invest in those founders. So really excited to bring all that together. You know, on Thursday we're closing it out with our, with our quarterly showcase, another great round of founders pitching their startups at the pre-seed. It's a little bit earlier than where Tori's at now. These are just coming out of the programs over the past year or so. So we're gonna, we're gonna be showing some of the best and brightest around the world, um, showcasing what they're working on.

And that day 3, open to everybody. So yeah, days 1 and 2 are just for the FI Network, but day 3 also has some amazing keynotes as well as, yeah, the, the founders who are going to be pitching and 6 investor panelists who are going to be giving them feedback. But this Day 3, anybody can join us. And so that— we'll make sure to drop the link that's clickable, but it's there on the screen as well. That's to RSVP just for Day 3.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, I may remiss without mentioning these keynotes. Again, Esther Dyson, prolific investor, founder of Wellville. Andrew Phileb, CEO of Wrike. James Joaquin, co-founder of Obvious Ventures, but has sat on the boards of various dozens of companies and has been an investor for a very long time. Phil Libin, a big friend of the family. Phil, founder, CEO currently of the new presentation software, literally called Mm-hmm. But you may remember him as the founder, CEO of Evernote. Again, as I mentioned, Jenny Feldin, Patrick Lee, Of course, we're going to have a special appearance from, from our founder, Adeo, talking about all things VC and then a ton of workshops too for our founders. So again, if you are in the FI Network as a grad, if you're currently enrolled in any of our current summer, like late spring programs, you're able to attend as well. You know, if you are in the application process and are looking to join one of our fall or late summer or winter programs, there's opportunities to participate in some of this programming as well. So make sure you're checking your emails, make sure you're signing up for those updates. We are going to be at capacity. This is the only time we're able to bring the whole community together all around the world, wherever you're at, morning, noon, evening, you're watching this in FI land, you'll be able to interact, meet people at a very high level and get some great thoughtful content that we've been curating throughout the network for you. So I'm really excited. You'll be seeing me, you'll be seeing me hosting a lot of our track programming, but behind the scenes. I'll be moderating a couple panels as well, and of course leading the showcase on day 3. And hopefully by that point, you know, this will, this will look a lot better. I promise y'all, I promise y'all, it's gonna look good.

We're super excited. Like, it's going to be a very interactive event. Yeah, there's going to be different networking lounges, a founders and funders networking lounge, and a mentor Q&A lounge. Um, so there'll be lots of, uh, yeah, chances to interact with people from all around the world, from across the FI Startup Network. So yeah, we're really excited. Obviously we've been preparing for it for a long time. Go check out founderx.com/attend. If you are one of these people who Martín mentioned, like, you know, you're an enrolled founder, if for whatever reason you haven't received an invite, this is a gated event, days 1 and 2 are just for the FI Network. You can email us support@founderx.com, and that's our dedicated inbox to make sure everybody from the network can get into the event. Um, but yeah, day 3 is open for everybody, and, uh, yeah, we're just really looking forward to it after so much preparation.

Oh yeah, man. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. And then for, for some of you that might be in some of the major cities in North America, around the world too, um, we're hosting some in-person gatherings as well. Um, so I know we're doing some stuff out in Silicon Valley. We have a great meetup event happening immediately following Founder X on day Day 3, August 4th, that Thursday in Denver. Um, I'm hosting a big close-down event here in Austin, Texas, open to anybody in the FI community. If you're watching this right now in FI land, you're based in Austin or anywhere in surrounding Texas region, shoot me a message on LinkedIn or wherever you're finding me on the internet right now. I'll send you an invite. Love to have you come. Um, we're going to be closing down with the in-person, so it's truly hybrid in that respect. So Definitely, if you are in the network, check with maybe the local leaderships in each of those cities, see if they're putting on anything local. Definitely get down there and, you know, toast some drinks for a great week of programming, great week of events. And hopefully by next year, you know, we might have something more in person for everybody to come in. But we'll say that until next week. I'll say those announcements.

We're gonna get through this one virtual, very accessible to everybody. So yeah, we really—

I will be sleeping be next Friday, so I will be sleeping. And then, you know, I'll be back, and then I'm gonna take the rest— I'm gonna take the end of August off for a little bit. Maybe I'll meet up with Tor. We'll see what happens. There you go. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's— but that— I think that's a wrap. I don't know how many— was like, how many episodes do we have in season 2?

I think this was our 6— this was a 6-episode run.

So yeah, so we've gotten like 12 episodes in. We've already broken like 12, 13 episodes in. I'm liking this, you know, I think we need— and we're only going to be keep adding more. So if you have any comments, thoughts, ideas, maybe guests you want to help, what you want us to see if we can bring on the show. Yeah, all y'all out there in FI land, let us know in the comments. We'll be doing— subscribe to our YouTube, get some updates on our LinkedIn. It's where we see a lot of the activity. You know, make sure you're following this because we love being able to put this stuff. Thank you, Dustin, for constantly just, you know, you know, reminding me to make sure that we're getting our guests to answer the emails so that they're showing up, and, you know, building out all this great program, bringing in the news, and making a lot of this happen behind the scenes, man. Um, appreciate all that work as our producer on the back end. Absolutely.

It's been, it's been a pleasure. I think this was better than last season, and as you say, we, uh, we'll eventually be back for a third season. We're going to take a number of weeks off until after Founder X, at least to recuperate some, but We will be back. And yeah, thanks everybody for tuning in and for watching and engaging with us and asking questions. And we'll see you back here next season, whenever that is.

And as always, everybody, wherever you're at in FI land, take care of yourself, take care of each other, build that future that we all want to see for the people that you know and care about the most.

We'll see you next time.

All right.