BoneChat #69 - Open discussion.

Did you see the, uh, press release I put up in the, uh—

I did.

Don't you— we can start.

Congratulations, that's awesome, Mark. I love that collaboration.

You like that?

Yeah, I really do.

Thanks.

Mark's pushing the limits on AI better than most people. Why don't you kick us off? So VenOps and Wishpond, what is it?

Well, I started VenOps, just as a background, as a basically a channel, um, knowing nothing about compliance. I launched a compliance company and, um, the whole purpose of it was to establish relationships with medical practices And I really thought by now I'd have 10,000, and instead I only have 1,000. But still, that's a lot. A lot of medical practices that you have a relationship with. And the original, the original strategy was to create a channel and then kind of like the Mississippi River, float other things downstream, you know. And so this Provencis is the first one the first product that I felt had enough, um, innate energy to kind of lead that channel and, and break through those practices. So there is a— I have a relationship with a Canadian company, uh, called Wishpond, and, uh, we have struck a collaborative agreement for VenOps to market their AI package to the healthcare industry in large. So that could be either your medical practice as an AI virtual assistant, it could be your home healthcare dealer taking calls from clients and customers to deliver oxygen, it could be a medical device company, you know, with a link on your homepage to say, this is kind of what we do, this is why we do it, here's our KOLs, whatever you want to say. Anything basically a, a non-clinical human person could probably do, the AI can do to a certain extent. And they can also integrate with your CRM or your EMR or practice management system and make appointments and that sort of thing. So we'll see where it goes. I mean, we're all sort of in the very forefront of this at, at the academy. I did a pretty thorough sort of recon of the hall and I found several startups. And nobody knew what they're doing. I was great. It just, it was so entrepreneurial, just a bunch of enthusiastic wishers. And, and everybody from a couple of doctors that started one up to probably the most sophisticated effort, uh, was this company from San Francisco called Across Medical. They of course are in the right place as far as raising money. They have a couple of Sequoia Fund backers uh, you know, and a couple of really sharp people. They have like a 2-man sales team, and they, they, they picked up like OrthoIndy and a few other— Chesapeake— a few accounts, not that many. Um, and I don't think any of the companies that I met at the academy, um, since most of them were really kind of non-healthcare startup types really understand how hard it is to move the needle in that, in this healthcare world, you know, to build that critical mass. Anyway, so that's, I, I called it Prevencis, which is kind of sort of a made-up Latin, you know, leftover from my parochial school Latin, uh, classes, you know, pro being through and vencis being, you know, come or advance. And, uh, we'll see where it goes.

So this is, this is outbound. This is outbound AI sales. Yeah.

It can be outbound or inbound.

Okay. Wow.

And it's phone numbers, it's voice, it's people calling, it's bots calling people.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I, I could do like a 3-minute demo right now of one in which I call, uh, a made-up imaginary orthopedic practice and make an appointment cuz I twisted my ankle. You want me, you want me to do that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Just a second.

I'll let you listen to it. Her name is Sarah. We'll see what she, we'll see how she does.

Hello, this is Sarah with Summit Orthopedics. How can I help you today?

Oh, hey Sarah, this is Mark Maloney. I was playing this new game called pickleball and I twisted my ankle. It really hurts and I think I might need to see a doctor.

Sorry to hear that. I'd be happy to help you schedule an appointment with one of our orthopedic specialists. Can I get your phone number so I can follow up with some available times and dates?

Sure, 678-895-1159.

I've got your phone number, Mark. How's your ankle feeling right now? Oh, swollen, throbbing, or just aching?

It hurts a lot. Uh, it's a little bit swollen. I can't get my shoe on. I probably need to see somebody as soon as possible.

I'd like to get you in to see one of our doctors as soon as possible. Let me check our schedule real quick. Would you prefer to be seen today or tomorrow?

Today?

I've got a few openings left for today. Can I get your date of birth, please?

Uh, it would be December 18th, 1985.

I think I can, uh, squeeze you in today, Mark. Let me just check with our doctor's schedules. We have a 4:30 PM opening with Dr. Smith. Would that work for you?

I'll be there. Thanks.

We'll get you all fixed up, Mark. Go ahead and put you down for 4:30 PM with Dr. Smith today. We'll have all your information ready when you arrive.

Thanks a lot. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay, so that's— that was Sarah. I made up a bunch of others, but I won't bore you. They can be inbound or outbound. In other words, I got a couple there that can be programmed for outbound. I just recently, in my orthopedic business, I picked up Treece Medical for Chattanooga in Eastern Tennessee, and I made an AI to text a doctor to say, hey, you know, Dr. Smith suggested that you listen to this because we're, you know, bringing Treece to your area. If you get a minute, hit this number. And then that particular doctor would text that number, and it would say that we're bringing Treece in, we're doing, you know, we're doing dry labs, wet labs, whatever. I mean, kind of whatever your imagination. I mean, listen, we're just at the beginning of this. I don't— nobody really knows where it's going to go exactly, but it's kind of fun.

This is so— it's like filling the top of the funnel, and you get warm leads with that. Um, and you can— the, the thing people don't realize is you can, you know, it works 24 hours a day, and the, the bot can talk to 10 or 100 people at the same time too.

Wow.

Yeah, so my, my wife is going through some pulmonary rehab, a real, real-world example. And so if you're going through pulmonary rehab, one of the things they're doing these days, even if you don't normally like use oxygen, they're beginning to use oxygen kind of like a football player uses it on the sidelines. They sort of pump you up before your exercise or before your rehab session. And so they delivered these little this little oxygen thing for her to use when she goes to rehab. And I called yesterday to order a couple, and I'm talking to this home healthcare dealer, and suddenly they said, listen, if you don't want to wait, talk to our, our AI virtual. And I did. It was a no-brainer. I was in and out, happened real fast. So that's kind of where, that's where it is already. And it kind of reminds me of, I get the same feeling with this that I got When we started eTrauma and we started do— bringing digital imaging into, into orthopedics, everybody was using film. Everybody thought, well, this, you know, this'll, this'll take forever. It took 5 years and Kodak Medical was out of business. Their whole film division, which had been around for decades, had shut down. That's how fast it moved. EMR the same way. And I get the same, I get the feeling that AI's gonna do the same thing.

Yeah. All right.

So, Mark, that, that was amazing. The only thing that's not believable is that you're getting an ortho appointment the same day.

No, the, the most unbelievable thing is that I was born in 1985.

That, that, that I would've believed compared to getting an ortho the same day.

Yeah. And Dr. Smith just got out of his residency last week too. That's the other problem.

Dr. Smith, he's an AI too. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's, it's like every company is going to have these things, these, you know, bots that— ah, it's, it's fascinating. Yeah, that is really interesting.

And so we have so many smart people on this channel, which is such a great thing. How would you— if— how would you use this Would you focus on medical practices, which we know are slow adopting and risk-averse, or would you market this more to medical industry and device, or just a mix of two and see where it goes? What does everybody think?

You know what comes to my mind straight away is training for Salesforce. So because we have like, you start building a network of reps around the country and around the countries, and they are calling your product managers every day for questions and questions and questions. So creating a layer between the product manager and the sales force could actually be a pretty interesting, quick application in the inside of the industry.

That's a good idea.

There's actually a surgeon from WashU that developed this. He's reached out to my team for sales training. Um, you know, one, I, I obviously it's a— I, I would target the distributors. It kind of reminds me of when pain management was doing those compounding creams, you know, and everybody, the, the distributors are the ones that really put that in place. It's the ones with the relationships. Um, I, I don't know, just putting that out there.

Yeah, those— a lot of those distributors that did the compounding are in jail.

Yeah, exactly. But it, but it, you know, it adopted so quickly. I am, I'm so glad I never got involved in that, but man, it evolved quickly. And those people, they just had mailbox money forever until they didn't.

So I was the same way. I got— people were banging on me for 3 or 4 years to get in this. It's great, they're awesome. And you You know, they're buying yachts and going on vacations. And finally, literally 6 months before the balloon burst, I actually signed up a couple of clients. And before I knew it, the money that was coming in was like, oh, this is bad, this is dangerous, this is not right. Yeah, I got out fast. And a couple people that invited me in actually went to jail.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I like the idea of the product manager a lot because if you're a distributor rep and you have like 10 products, you, you know, you're like an inch deep and a mile wide. You don't know that much. And before you go in and maybe make a sales call, and if you made a phone call to Sarah or Alvin or somebody you could ask them, hey, what are the top 3 things this guy, you know, this doctor does this, so forth and so on. You know, how should I hit him? And they could tell you. That's a good idea.

Interesting.

Totally got distracted, Mark, when you asked your question, but I think you want to know how to market it. And, um, is that what your question was?

Yeah, just how, who would you target? Would it be the professional side or the industry side? And how would you market it?

Yeah, I think you have a really strong play here with CFOs and HR, right? Because they're the ones that are hiring, you're replacing staffing. This is simple stupid for a CFO of any organization, right? You take, you take what is your monthly cost of this AI robot and most AI programs, I'm assuming yours too, can be modified to talk to anybody's different business here, right? So like it could work for a clinic, but it could also work for inventory issues or You know, so, so there is a little bit of programming, but even at that cost, you're talking a fraction of the cost of a real human being who's probably going to make mistakes. And when you listen, I mean, I think you have something really cool with what you just showed us demonstration-wise to prove to a CFO or a CA or an HR that this sounds real. It's interactive. It's not robotic. It's It's not like the old style where you get an answer and you know you're talking to a robot. That was, that was a, a pretty cool investment, I feel like. So I think you go into those two streams and it's, it's kind of simple stupid at that point, right? Because they can free up their team for a fraction of the cost. I think it's, to me, it seems like an easy sell across all platforms. It depends how much scope you have there for programming.

I agree with that, Colleen, because, and simply because I know several practices that, um, you know, if you hit 1 to talk with a rep to schedule an appointment, you could just literally funnel all of that out. Because I know several practices that are not calling their patients back. They're, they're simply going to putting them to voicemail. And literally there were voicemails 3 months prior that never got addressed. So if you could even just like segment that one aspect of the market and capture it, it would save so much just on scheduling appointments and time and investment from the office staff perspective.

There's your hook too. How many clients have you lost in your voicemail system?

Yeah, I, I, I met a guy who has a BPO service for medical practices. Like, he's more like family medicine. But he has increased practice revenue by like 15% just by making sure patients get callbacks and then they get calls for follow-up visits.

Those are great points. Actually, that's a great emailer. That's a good opener. How many patients have you lost?

What do you—

what would you charge, Mark? Is it just like $100 a month or something?

Or for— okay, so you just heard maybe like what, 3 minutes, 4 minutes? So I could sell you 16 hours for $500.

Okay.

So that's—

so that's a lot of phone calls, a lot of engagements. Yeah, a lot of engagements.

Or you can do it per phone call in.

I could.

Yeah.

But the way that the software is written right now is by that time. Just kind of already programmed, which is cool.

So if they only use 3 minutes, they only pay for 3 minutes. They use 90 minutes, they pay for 90.

Well, for $500, they get 16 hours. Yeah. So, and that's a monthly forecastable number. It's a known number for the CFO. They like that predictable number.

Uh, and if you look at the cost of just having somebody man that phone, even if it's like a, a virtual type of assistant. $500 is nothing.

Yeah, agreed. And you— there's not a language barrier. Um, that would be another thing is, uh, press a certain number if you need, uh, um, non-English, outside of English speaking, and then you'd have an automatic translator. That would be a big value add, particularly in certain markets.

Mhm. Yeah, I mean, Sarah can speak other languages, you know, so it's kind of cool there too.

I don't know if you guys— there was some big political thing in India, and the guy that won the election used an AI bot, and he was talking to like 10,000 people at the same time.

He and his opponent both used it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the thing, that's— it scales, you know, it scales so far. You can have multiple conversations at the same time that a normal person can't.

Well, it's going to be fun.

Yeah, we— keep us posted.

I appreciate the feedback.

Yeah.

Uh, so no topics, but, um, Colleen Ferrer talked about She thinks the IPO market may be opening up soon. I'd love to hear about that.

Well, I don't know, Colleen, where did Colleen Gray go? Because I think, um, Colleen Ferrari is not the expert. I just happen to know a lot of investors. But the, um, the conversation has come up that, you know, just last, just in the last week, two different investors have told me the same thing. And they say you're going to start seeing this IPO open up because right now when you look at when money, like when the interest rates were right, And when they started to lower, everybody doubled down. They started spending cash. They started writing checks. And now we're at that 5 to 6 year mark. And, and money's expensive. So they, they either need to find somebody to buy their company, right? Which is money's expensive and there's a lot less risk, or they need to go to IPO. So it's more of a conversation now than it's been in a long time, it sounds like.

I think there's only one company that's filed an S-1, but they'll be testing the market, but I haven't seen a lot of action yet.

I think the other thing that's happening is we're seeing an increase in M&A activity. Small, but you know, it's got to start somewhere. So I think that's another positive trend that will help with, you know, getting investors to start writing checks again.

Yeah, agree. I've seen that as well, actually. Just got off the phone with somebody.

Yeah, I, uh, know a VC that had $200 million committed and for an AI fund, and they only brought in $76 million of it because people were holding on to their money. They're just holding on to it right now.

Wow.

So it's hurting, it's hurting everything when people hold on to money. It hurts everything, like the whole industry, everything stops. And so it forces companies, like Colleen said, to go to IPO.

Yeah, I think I— Osseo is, uh, just killing it. Uh, they're doubling sales every year. I don't know, they're probably going from $30 million to $50 million this year. And I— they may be getting— just my speculation— but they may be getting too expensive for an an acquisition. And I think, I think they may take a run at an IPO later this year. Um, yeah, it's fascinating. And interest rates is a big factor, right, Colleen? It's, uh, if interest rates drop, you know, a little bit, then there's more liquidity in the market.

But if—

yeah, I mean, if, if interest rates drop, then the risk-free return on capital isn't necessarily as attractive to investors, and they start to think about, you know, taking a little bit more risk with money.

What do VC funds do if they have, like, what Alyssa said, $200 million in a new fund? What do they do with that money? They just stick it in a money market account, or I mean, what interest do they get? I have no idea.

I think the challenge with the VC is that they're not filling their funds.

I'm sorry, I'm—

so I think the challenge with the VC is that they're not actually filling their funds. I've been chatting to a couple of people who said they can't actually get their funds filled. So I think there's plenty of stuff to invest in, um, but you can't— they're not necessarily getting everything they want into the funds to be able to invest. I think it's a, it's a, it's a mix of things.

Yeah, they're super, super selective right now. Everyone I've talked to, really, really selective. So, so there's, um, you know, if you follow Berkshire Hathaway, they have more money in cash than they ever have had percentage-wise in the history of the company. I was just listening to this thing on Squawk Box too. When you look at interest rates, right, and how the Fed operates interest rates, kind of an interesting place because when inflation goes up, you raise interest rates. When recession looms, you lower interest rates. And we're right in the middle of inflation going up, recession woes. So the Fed is kind of stuck in this place like, what do we do? We're right in the middle. And I think everybody— I don't know if I shared this last time we talked, but I worked— did I share this about JP Morgan and Chase? I work with advisors from JP Morgan. And, um, they're really interesting. Every week they have the economists come in and they do this meeting with all of the economists and they say, hey, this is how the business is going to be. This is what we're predicting, blah, blah, blah. And I think it's been now like 6 weeks in a row that they've pretty much had this meeting and said, we have no idea. So that's kind of a terrifying message, but—

Yeah.

Surprising but terrifying.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uncertainty is never good for markets in general and giving people the comfort to spend money. And, and we're kind of, we've got a little bit of everything going on. We've got uncertainty, we've got a really large number of companies competing for scarce capital. That became obvious to me attending the LSI MedTech event. It's, stunning to me how many companies are trying to raise early-stage capital right now.

Supply and demand problem. Kyle, you got a comment?

I was hoping Ben would weigh in on this since he's in like the thick of all of this with Nanocon.

What's—

Ben, do you have any sentiment here?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think that we have I think we've done a good job raising capital, but it's really been a mix of new investors and old investors re-upping their support. And I actually would say that maybe, you know, a little bit more than half of the capital we've raised over the last 18 months has been through existing investors that are really excited about the progress we've made and wanting to re-up their investment. So I think that, you know, the bigger VCs, we're hoping to maybe raise a $20 million Series A towards the end of this year. The bigger VCs that I've known for years, the household names in the space, are all still out there, all still saying they're interested, but that, you know, they're telling me the same thing that they have told me since I founded the company, which is they have to see human clinical data. So, you know, that milestone for a PMA device is huge. I think that, you know, companies are really kind of struggling to bridge this in-between gap of like the company being really early and then hitting that big value inflection point where bigger players will come in. Um, I mean, I know some fund managers of, you know, some of the bigger $150 million funds who, who did fill out their rounds, but I think, I think again, as other people have said, they're, they're being really selective and kind of continuing to move the needle, uh, a little bit further, at least for, you know, implants and hardware and that kind of stuff. I don't know if I can really speak to AI and software, but at least on my side of the industry, that's kind of how it's looking. And so it's funny too, because I've actually started to get turned down by investors because we're at the tail end of closing out this bridge round. I've gotten turned down by investors who for years told me I was too early, but this might be the good time for them to step in. And they're saying, oh, now you're actually too late for us. We want to do earlier stage stuff. So it's— my head feels like it's on a swivel all the time. But, uh, I don't know. I, you know, I think if you can, you could get the company to a certain point, those, those kind of like marquee big check writers are still out there writing checks. It's just, it's getting harder and harder to cross the valley of death, to kind of use that tired term.

Interesting.

So yeah, Mark, so I've got a question on actually a kind of a separate, a separate subject. And I don't want to cut off the talk, you know, on early investment right now. So I'll wait a minute.

Okay.

Well, let's, this sort of dovetails. Yeah, Colleen Gray and I had a discussion. I'd love to get everybody's feedback on this. We're actually thinking about using BoneChat. As a way for startups to practice their pitching. And because they, you don't get any feedback, you know, when like everything that was just said in 5 minutes, there's way too many companies vying for too little money and they don't really hone their, let me show you what I want to hear people saying, this is a great idea or terrible, or, you know, go jump in a lake. Something.

Uh, where is it? Hang on.

While you're looking, I love that idea.

Yeah, okay, same.

One of, one of the biggest complaints I've ever had in training or leading a sales force is it's typical sales rep, or actually salesperson, spends hours, days, weeks getting an appointment, and they spend seconds rehearsing.

Yeah, it's a good point. So this is— I just, I just wrote this up today. Pitch smarter, pitch faster. What, what's the problem? Basically, there's no feedback for startups. What's the solution? Oh, go ahead.

I would add, Kuretsu has a really good, um, pitch training course, um, to where you just spend like an hour and they teach you how to pitch to Koretsu. I would add an option to teach companies what is valuable to investors and here's how to pitch on top of that, because I think there's a lot. So we're doing this at the NASA Innovation Summit. I'm, um, I'm, I'm teaching the surgeons how to pitch and what their pitch deck should look like and what's important to investors. And then I think Mark Viscogliosi is going to help me and provide context while I'm teaching.

Cool.

Yeah, there's interesting. All right. Well, anyway, that's— so you guys think that's a decent idea? So, okay, so maybe once a month we'll have a pitch day and somebody will come in and pitch and we'll tell them that's a great idea. That's a terrible idea. Your messaging's wrong. You're not, you know, you're not telling the investors how to get their money back or whatever, whatever it is. We'll give them real feedback.

Go ahead, Mauricio.

Yeah, another thing, if you can, we can add to that, like the, not only the company pitch, but also like if you have a product that you're going to market, what would your sales pitch be or how would you train your sales force? I think there's a ton of very valuable experience in this group on how to how to pitch a product to clinicians and all of that.

Yeah, agree.

Do you think there's time limits on it?

Sorry.

Yeah, yeah, it'll be— well, we— the Zoom calls are an hour, and I think the pitch would be a normal pitch, like 8 minutes or something, and then it would be Q&A. Good question. Emmanuel?

I'd suggest maybe putting a bit of structure around it, you know, Most kind of pitch decks have got, you know, particular structure to them. So giving feedback under particular headings, so much easier is on the receiving end to pass feedback and do something with it if it's specific, as opposed to everyone just kind of piling in and saying, well, I didn't like this bit, I didn't like that bit, you know. So your market sizing, go-to-market strategy, if you just think about the different categories to give feedback on, I think it's a little more specific and they'll get a little more value from it.

Yeah, Tiger, do you have some sort of sheet to work from?

You know, tick, tick, tick. Make sure they hit a list.

No, no, no. So the way it works is they have joined BoneChat, they would upload their deck, and then they would pick one of the pitch days. And so we could all look at their deck ahead of time if, if you're so inclined. And then it's just cold. They just come in and pitch, right?

But I think, um, you were saying, uh, the other gentleman was saying it's a good idea to kind of make sure they get feedback on different areas, right?

Yeah.

I like Eminol's idea. Yeah, so there'd be like check, you know, maybe 10 checkboxes, you know. Is the market size explained well? Is, you know, is the patent protection there? Is— does the management team look right? You know, whatever.

So have you ever heard— a very good friend of mine told me this story, um, and he's done You're freezing, Colleen.

You froze.

Yeah.

So Tiger, I think Emmanuel's point is really valid where if we are going to collectively say that this is something that we want to offer as an opportunity to engage and give feedback, there's going to be a couple of categories. And it'd be nice to know that their general structure is not something we need to be critical about, like who's involved, what's the market size, you know, time to market projections, that there should be boilerplate standards. And most, most companies are probably going to be able to put that together. There's lots of publicly available information. But the other thing that we probably would do is say that we're going to critique, call it the believability of what they're doing. We would critique their delivery method. We would critique the, you know, something like that would be worth discussing or sharing beforehand. So we're not just haphazard vomiting all over somebody after their pitch deck, you know, whether it's 10 of us or 20 of us, because, you know, one of the things I think there's some value here, but, you know, we've all been involved in pitches to some degree. Some of that information is welcome and some of that information is not very welcome. And it would be worthwhile for us to be mindful of where we can do something that is, that is not just a regurgitation of anything that they would here and, and, you know, running through it with their family members or previous colleagues or whatever. So this is a cool idea. I love it.

I like it. I like adding some structure that's in coaching. And I like the idea of sales teaching them how to pitch their sales force. I like that a lot. Well, thanks.

I think also taking it one step further and using AI to analyze the pitch and then posting, uh, on BoneChat the individual company and why the BoneChat crew advocates for a certain company. Um, if we all, like, if 70% of us gave a thumbs up, you could have like a tomato meter reading. Um, and I would only do this obviously for the ones that are viable and good, but if they met, like, 70% of us gave a thumbs up and here's why it could be utilized, it could be valuable to investors because it's an own— it's a central community specific to orthopedics and spine.

I like that a lot.

Yeah, that's what's missing.

The broken femurs instead of the rotten tomatoes.

Yeah, there's, you know, there's all sorts of pitches out there. But, and you see it advertised a ton that they're pitching at this thing, but nobody actually gets to hear what they pitch or the responses unless they watch the video. Um, and so it keeps it to where people are learning about these companies and why industry likes them.

You could give, you could give your AI the structure, the analytical structure and then actually record the pitch live, transcribe it live, and have the analysis in about 10 seconds. That's how fast it could be done. I mean, this, this could all be done almost virtually real time.

That's exactly what I did for my company because we're sending out, we're closing the notes and there's just a little bit of money, but we have 20 to 40 investors and it's basically first come, first serve. So I wanted to provide a market analytics that hasn't— that really doesn't— it's not centered around Illuminate. It's just saying, you know, here's where Illuminate fits in to give, to give some market awareness.

Cool.

I love that.

Wow. Eric.

Yeah, I did. I don't know if this is the right time or not. We sort of moved away from it, but I wanted to ask Ben a couple questions about the Class 3 funding conundrum.

So, yeah, yeah.

So, so that's what, that's what we're facing right, right now. I have an IEE that's going in early next week. And that, that, that's great. It could, it could get approved, but there's nothing we can do with it because we don't have the money to start, start a study. So we haven't been able to raise money for it yet because everyone's saying, hey, yeah, yeah, it's a great product. You know, come back when you have some clinical data. And so it's, it's, it's that, it's that chicken and egg kind of thing going on. So We're hoping that once, once we get our IDE approved, that that may help loosen, loosen some, some money up for us. Or, or maybe if we can get enough money that we get, you know, 50 patients in or something like that, maybe that'll help. I just wanted to hear what, what you thought might be some milestones that, that, that might help loosen up some, some money for us.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, that, you know, we did a good job in a couple areas. One is we just have a tremendous amount of preclinical data and like very convincing preclinical data. So I think that, you know, that always helped us get over the line, at least with investors that had the capacity or had the advisors in their network to look at that data and understand it. So I think that that was, that was helpful. I also think, you know, we did a really, really good job of just building a really good network of clinicians and physician advisors and also converting some of them into investors and then having some of those individuals who are willing to, you know, field diligence calls with investors and really pound the table and, you know, say, as a surgeon, I absolutely want and need this. It's a no-brainer for me. So I think that's also something that really, really helped. And then, you know, I think, I think the other is having really active anchor investors who are also willing to sort of get on these diligence calls and again, really pound the table and, you know, talk very intelligently and very assertively about why they invested in Nanocon. So really also relying on, you know, my, my investor base. To also kind of help support and move the needle. And I got that advice early on from a friend of mine who's been successful in the pharma space who said, you know, we can get on these diligence calls and get these pitch meetings and, you know, talk about our company all day long, but it's when the money talks to the other money that real decisions seem to get made. So again, not knowing anything about the makeup of your cap table, I think that That's always really helped us a lot.

So I mentioned, you know, like I said, getting, getting our IDE approved and then maybe getting some patients enrolled. Is there— is our thinking correct that that might help or does that not really do it?

Actually having some patients enrolled, you mean?

Yes.

I mean, I guess it depends. I mean, if one of the bits of feedback you're getting from investors is that they're worried that enrollment will be slow, I think that might help. And it also demonstrates that, you know, you're able to execute quickly. So I don't think it hurts. I mean, we've, you know, got a surgeon who was really aggressive with enrollment. Even before we got the regulatory clearance to start the trial. So I think that probably did help a little bit. Um, you know, I think the other thing too, and, and, you know, maybe you actually have a great answer for this, um, but just really understanding the exit comps, um, and also really understanding the size of the target market, um, because I think, and again, this is another bit of free advice that I'll pass on that I got from, uh, you know, an investor and a mentor early on was that if you're, if you're going to go down the, uh, the PMA road, your target market better be a billion dollars or more. So I think, I think also just, just kind of having strong, you know, having a strong handle on what our market looks like and being able to talk about it convincingly, I think has also helped, um because it gives investors a little bit more confidence that, yeah, they're going to have to wait, but, you know, this could be a much better return than, you know, a, a quicker opportunity.

Great, great.

I also think, Tiger, what you were talking about could help us, because, um, you know, I'm, I'm not the one doing the pitching. I'm not involved with that. But I did look at our pitch deck the other day, and it was— I was embarrassed to read it to myself.

Yeah, most pitch decks are very technical and they don't speak to the investor's needs, but that, that's normal.

Thanks, Ben.

Yeah, Eric, I, I just asked two different AI engines your problem. I said I have a Class 3 medical device with limited funds. I am having trouble raising funds before the clinical trial. Would it be helpful for me to create a simulated medical trial and how accurate would it be to do a virtual one? And I got an amazing amount of feedback up to and including a pitch deck, which I'll share with you.

Wow. That would be great. And it just, you know, obviously I want the company to stick around as long as I'm with it so I can continue to get paid. And, and, and it's really cool technology. But, you know, we all know that that doesn't really always make it happen.

I mean, I think of with the, with the amount of data, you know, 30% of all of the data in the entire world is healthcare. I don't know if you know that or not. It's not financial or money or porn. It's healthcare. So that's an incredible amount of data. But so you could— your, your virtual clinical trial has a pretty good chance of actually being pretty real, realistic. I mean, if you're trying to convince people, I'm saying, that's all.

Yeah.

So, so I have another question, Tiger, when the time is right for the group.

Go for it.

Okay.

So one of my partners um, is an orthopedic surgeon in Phoenix, and, uh, I've been helping him with his, um, EMR accelerator, which is now AI-enabled. Okay, and there's two parts to it. The company is called Tempita, and the designer doctor has basically used it to accelerate his efficiency like 35% in his clinic. So it, all it does is it shortens the amount of documentation time when using your EMR, which is a giant burden for most doctors. Okay? And so it's two parts to it. One is you, the doctor, have to create sort of these smart templates, which are accelerated in their usage by AI. That's kind of part A. But Part B, which is another secret sauce, is once you've created the SOAP note or the actual orders and notes, there's another component called Autopilot, which takes that information and puts it in the 10, 15 different places that you have to put it into when using an EMR. Because an EMR is burdensome in two ways. It's burdensome in creating the data to put into the EMR, Instead, instead of just dictating and somebody else doing all the work, all the work and putting in the chart, now you actually have to click and paste and put it in different places in your EMR. And I'm talking Cerner, Epic, Athena, you know, all of the big ones, ModMed. They are all a pain to do this with. So we have found it to be very difficult to get doctors to take the time to create their templates. And so, but the Autopilot, which is automated and easy, I'm thinking that maybe that's the sale. Because it could be used on any EMRs. It's EMR agnostic. And I was just curious what y'all thought.

Yeah, I don't know enough about EMR systems, but I know they don't, they don't They're islands. They don't talk to each other, you know.

Well, ours can talk to any of them because it's browser-based. There's no connectivity. There's no, you know, no HL7 or FHIR connection or anything else. So that's all.

Anyway.

Speaking of browser-based, is it firewalled? I mean, what is—

There's no firewall. There's no barrier.

So how do you protect patient data? That'll be the first question people ask.

Yeah, I think you have some HIPAA kind of— that's going to be the biggest obstacle to overcome with providers. And it may not be an obstacle, but I think, like, I think Tiger and I just jumped to the same conclusion.

Yeah, it's not, it's not an obstacle.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, sounds like it. That's cool.

Thanks.

Interesting.

Wow.

What, what else?

We're, um, you know, it's funny, Mark, I was, I'm working with a, um, a big pharma company right now. And it's kind of interesting. We're talking about AI and there is no— like, you think about some of these note takers and all of this stuff, right? And they cannot get out of their way with the privacy issue. Like, no matter how, you know, I have this— I probably should make an introduction to you, Mark, because these guys are working on this AI, isolated firewalled AI for specifically for pharma, medical device, things like that. I should probably make a connection so you can reach out to them and, and talk. But it's— doesn't matter how much— how, like, how I tell them this is an internal tool, you're the only one using it, there's no access. It is like— and it's like a concrete wall and a rubber hammer. Like, I can't get through it.

Really?

Well, and it's because years, right? They've— this is privacy IP, like, you know, this is— it's, it's there. It's solid.

So there's, there, there's gatekeepers. There's quality nurse gatekeepers that, you know, protect everything.

You gotta get past that. If you're afraid to attack, you'll never win.

Oh, 100%, 100%. They've gotta integrate this stuff. They're gonna be behind. If they don't, but the problem is, is there's—

I've actually worked in implementing software systems into hospitals. There's so many people that never even talk to each other that have a yes or no. And so to get all of those people, you're talking like 60 different people in a room all together at the same time to actually get a decision made. And nobody's willing to make a decision. I mean, it's a 2, 3-year process, and it's expensive. So unless you're providing— the company that I was with, they charged like $30,000 to implement it within the system, and that just knocked it out right in and of itself because they're not willing to pay for it to be implemented. If you keep it under $25,000, typically like a department head can sign off of it, on it. The problem is, is there's multiple department heads that will be using it. So who's willing to sign off on it and attribute it to their budget?

Yeah, you know, within, within every— that's, that's really smart, Alyssa. Within every deal, there's a myriad number of no people, but there's only one yes person. Once you find that—

problem. Yeah, that's the ultimate problem here is because there's multiple yes people in software deals. And finding out who those people are aren't necessarily the person you think they are on paper or on their title.

Golly, sounds like—

I like the rubber, rubber hammer and the cement wall.

That's—

I've been beating that rubber hammer. Maybe I need to find that one person, Mark, and hit him with the hammer, her with her hammer, you know, I mean, regenerative medicine practices, those are big ones.

ENT private practices are really, because they can say yes or no quickly. I mean, I wouldn't go with hospital institutions until you have a really complex understanding of the software, how it works, and you have a lot of data.

What if you target surgery centers, you know, they're The decision-making is faster, probably. They have less systems. The systems are younger.

You talking to Colleen?

Talking to you, Mark.

Oh, anything privately owned, anything privately owned where it's just a handful of people that could say no.

And that surgery center, I think, is going to be more responsible— responsive than anyone because it's owned by a smaller group of people and they're more focused on that bottom line. I mean, they're more reactive and responsive to that bottom line, I think, than a hospital, right? So you can show the value and, and what they're saving in time, how they could do more surgeries, less money, less payroll. It's a winning solution.

Yeah, if I was gonna do software, I would do 100%, like, private practices, ASCs. I would go— and I wouldn't even think about the larger institutional people. I think that the little ones are being burdened with more and more compliance and more and more regulations and more and more challenges to billing and more and more everything. And they don't have the resources to deal with it. And the tools that are out there are made for the big guys who, you know, have a ton of infrastructure to support it.

I think we all agree.

I don't know how you have the patience to talk to pharma people.

Yeah, it would be amazing to, especially for these small private practices, to be able to schedule Yeah, to be able to schedule an appointment after hours is a big deal. It's, it's, you have a completely untapped market after hours scheduling. That would be massive for small companies, for any.

That would be a great name for a great product. After hours, after hours scheduling, after hours scheduling.

I like it.

And it's a bot they'll, that they'll never know.

I know Sarah never sleeps. So like I said, Colleen, I don't know how you have this patience to talk to pharma people because my, all my experience ever with pharma people is pharmaceutical companies seem to make so much money that nobody cares that they get anything actually done.

Yeah. My, my, you know, where I found a little niche is the startup pharma space. So now it's kind of interesting. The phone is ringing because we have, you know, we streamline businesses, right? We make you more profitable. We leadership, communication, all of that piece. So pharma, all these companies that have all these big dollars going to them, the P's are investing big in them. All of a sudden the P's saying, well, I don't have another $5 billion to add to your, you know, or whatever. And they're saying, okay, how are we gonna make it work with what we have? And that's what makes my phone ring. So I'm not going in there for AI, but it's absolutely on the table. But they're the hardest people to, to kind of bring into the, you know, this century with AI for sure. But yeah, mo— most of it is organizational design that we're doing with them because now I think they're, they're in trouble, right? The pipeline is drying up because the, you know, it's harder for them to get money in these drugs. But yeah, they're a little frustrating. You have a lot of people who have never trained to be a leader, never been trained to be a leader in a leadership role. And so they're, you know, they just make decisions, communicate improperly, and it's, it's a challenge but fun too, in a weird kind of way.

So When I first got out of the Army and when I was resigning from the Army, part of the reason I was resigning was that I really hated staff people. I liked people. I like, I like to be on the line, you know, I like the, I like to be outside, like the action. I was, you know, I like that part of the Army. I was definitely more of a Patton kind of guy than an Eisenhower kind of guy.

Yeah.

So When I interviewed with pharmaceutical companies when I first got out and I flew up to Chicago and up to Philadelphia, everybody I met were like staff people. I hated them. I said, I cannot work with these people. And then I got an interview. I flew to Kalamazoo to talk to Stryker and they were so bare bones and just so practical. I'm going, oh, these are my people. Yeah, these are my people.

Never looked back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, guys, I have to jump. Thank you so much.

So a little bit of housekeeping thing. Thanks, Colleen. So everybody's on Slack. You know, more— some people use it more than others, but actually we're going to port everybody over to another system called Glue. And it should be G-L-U-E. It should be seamless. It looks exactly like Slack. All the conversations and is coming over, but, you will have to download Glue, the Glue app onto your desktop or cell phone, however you use it. So anyway, that, look for that. Glue's better, faster, has AI stuff. You can just start a conversation on Glue and it'll automatically give it a title and a thread.

It's, it's better.

Anything else?

Closing?

We didn't talk about LSI much. Uh, a few people were out there. Um, Alyssa is the only one left, I think. How was it?

I didn't go. I was at— I— no, I had— I was in 4 weeks. I was in DC, New York 3 times, London, and San Diego. I was like And everybody's searching for money at LSI. I just, I've just never heard the value ever translate across the board, across the finish line. Yeah, I got to see Mark there. I'm sorry I missed you, Kyle.

No worries. San Diego was pretty wild for myself as well, so it was really neat to catch up with folks. I just wish I had seen the sun a little bit more.

Yeah, it's beautiful place.

It was great to meet you, Alyssa, and Kyle. And I didn't, didn't see everybody. Who, um, is it Thomas Hill?

What's his—

Thomas Kinder?

Yeah, Kinder. I saw him.

Yep, Subchondral Solutions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was good. All right, thanks, Tiger.

Thanks, guys.

Been great, everybody. Take care, everybody.

See ya.