Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

Did you know up to 0.5% of your toothpaste is plastic? 🚩

27 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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Tim Draper and a co-founder discovered plastic microbeads in toothpaste and started a venture to fix it. They called in Pranav to join the team and describe how their disagreements in the lab over design actually made their technology stronger.

0.1 to 0.5% of your toothpastes are plastic. Every morning you wake up and you brush your teeth and you think about it. I just could not shake that feeling off. I rang up Pranav because I knew he also wanted to do something in entrepreneurship. One phone call and we decided. We lucked out with the team. They're all very passionate. The way we deal with conflicts and we realize that we're very different people, but yet we respect each other's opinions. We still have so many arguments in the lab. His way of designing—
My thinking is different, her thinking is different, but we have to prove each other, yeah, this is right or this is right.
It's in good spirits, and our tech is better than most because it has come from very different thought processes who fought to prove each other wrong. But when either of us is right, the celebration is just the same.