Speaker 3 (00:08.159)
Everybody welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus with my usual suspect Grant Chapman, CEO of Glass Board, a hardware product development firm located right here in Indianapolis. Today we have a super exciting guest in Tristan Hanslund from Hinckley Medical. How are you doing, man?

How's it going everybody?

Speaker 1 (00:26.882)
How are you guys doing today?

doing fantastic. So for the folks that are just now tuning in, could you give us a brief overview of yourself and the company as well?

Yeah, my name Justin Hazlett, founder, CEO of a company called Inkling Medical. And we build hardware and software into like the ambulance space. So hopefully you don't need our stuff. But if you do, you're in good hands in ambulance.

And Tristan, your origin story, one of the reasons we were really excited about this podcast was just, honestly, you reminded me a lot of myself. Starting in college, it was actually a college project of yours, right? You've actually evolved it out, grown it out of the university, and turned it into a pretty successful business. We'd love to hear that origin story.

Yeah, yeah. Super, super fun. so really the, the origin had a conversation with a family member and family member was going through paramedic school and, it was started complaining to me about being bad at guessing people's weights. And as an engineering student at the time thinking I can solve every problem in the world. I was like, that's stupid. You know, like don't guess people's weights, just put them on the scale. Like, obviously there has to be a way to obtain these. And.

Speaker 1 (01:37.494)
truth be told, I thought that that was for sure just him again being stupid. But it wasn't. This is actually a thing in EMS where paramedics and EMTs don't have a way to obtain people's weights in the field. Instead, relying on estimation methods, such as guessing, which is you don't actual skill as often trained. Again, this is to no fault of the EMTs and paramedics alone. It's just a technology problem that we felt as though we could come and solve. that was about my sophomore year of college.

Um, junior year of college did market research for a while, um, tried to figure out basically, um, is this a local problem or is this an everywhere problem? You know, why is this a problem? Why isn't this having to be solved? It seems pretty obvious to me. Um, and then senior year, uh, actually kind of started working on a company before my senior design project and was able to sponsor my own senior design project using some capital that we got through the

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where I went to school innovation, side of phones. So the origin story, probably similar to the money and different than others. Whereas this kind of an idea that I always knew I wanted to be in entrepreneurship. And, you know, this is definitely a space that I find interesting because it'll still scratch you back. You know, like seal good edge. Like I want to make a positive impact on people's lives as well. And, you know, my tech and especially in EMS space, was very underserved when it comes to technology.

Absolutely. I'm curious, why is it so important to know the weight? What aspect of that EMS experience do you need to know that I'm 250, 260 as opposed to 300?

Yeah, especially important for pediatric patients. Medication dosage is very dependent on a person's weight. So, best way we can describe it to like a non-clinical audience is basically like, imagine giving like a five-year-old like three beers versus a 300 pound adult male three beers. It like the same effect on the patient, but at the different magnitudes, right? Especially if someone's, you know, has that alcohol tolerance or doped up. That's why, especially for like pediatric patients, it's also can be important for adults depending upon the bed.

Speaker 1 (03:46.258)
but also for elderly patients that may be more fragile. It is important for a specific dosing when it comes to like paralytics, potentially like fentanyl pain management, ketamine, different medications such as that.

Well, I think it's one of those things that the smaller you are, the more accurate you have to be to be in the same percentage right or wrong in guessing someone's weight, right? Like, hey, if you are 300 pounds, I can be off by 30 pounds in the direction. That's only like 10%. But if you are 100 pounds soaking wet and you're off by 30 pounds, that's 30%. That is like, know, crazy amounts of difference in dosage. And I think that scales, which gets really tough for the EMS and the paramedics trying to guess weight of like...

you're going to want to guess on the safe side, but is that safe medically? Right? Hey, I'm going to, you know, underdose this person, but is that going to give them way more pain than they have to deal with in the way of the hospital? Or is that even going to, you know, treat their anaphylaxis? That's what they're suffering from. Like all those different, you know, metrics are tough to guess on.

Absolutely, yeah. A lot of EMS studies are roughly around 20%. Plus or minus is considered a critical dosing error if you're outside that. So you're 100%, right? It's based off percentage, right? It's not based off a standard pound. So if you're talking about a three-month-old patient that's roughly 20 kilograms, you'd have to be very precise. If you're talking about a 300-pound patient, like you said, plus or minus 20%, it's like six pounds.

size.

Speaker 1 (05:10.094)
So again, that's where it comes in to pediatric patients, specifically elderly patients as well, even small adults. So it's important and it's hard to, again, these EMS professionals are technologically underserved. they're kind of forced into doing this and they do have their own methods of dealing with it, but there's a reason you can do it at a carnival, right? Because it's hard to do. It's like a...

Some people can do it, I've met like one or two that are pretty good at it, but the vast majority of people self-admit that they're not extremely good at estimating people's weights. And again, all this, just seems silly because we spent on the ERED, like red scales for like a better part of a decade, that this hasn't made it, the technology hasn't made it on DNS. was just kind of like, I know it's signal that this, there's a lot of room for innovation in this space.

Right when I think that one of the things you stumbled across you just said hey this core technology has been in the hospital for a long time You guys just had to go make it mobile Right and this is the challenge and this is like the iotification of everything iotifying things is pretty easy when it stays in one place Right you wall power you can power forever battery life doesn't matter. I can have wired comms to know Yeah, and then all of sudden when you're like I need to make this mobile and like

My gosh.

Speaker 2 (06:22.472)
Everything gets hard. It's hard mode, battery life, ingress protection, durability.

I'm curious too. So Tristan, as you'd like, we have a really good understanding of the problem. So maybe we can start diving into the actual solution, how you solved this problem with both the hardware and the software component that you've had to integrate together.

Yeah, yeah. I'll focus heavily on the hardware side of things. And you're 100 % right, man, the amount of barriers that we had to bring in this hardware to market, one, it's FDA regulated. That's a big one. But just the technological design aspects of it, mean, it's like, waterproofing, like if I have to make one more case for an electronic component, like I might just quit engineering. It's like for a while there, my job was solely making like watertight cases for electrical components in like a big system.

Waterproof stuff? That months. Not the worst. man. Okay I got one more question. Waterproof cases or finding the right connector for the application, which is worse?

man.

Speaker 1 (07:24.973)
wow.

Wow, that's a tough one. Probably waterproofing. Yeah. Because at least you don't have to do the waterproofing usually yourself or do the connector assembly yourself. But yeah, try to find the right connectors that are waterproof connectors. If you can find me any sort of high number of tin waterproof connector that's not absolutely massive, that's something new. If you do that, you're going to be very successful. But yeah, it's...

Yeah. Shout out to Shout out to anyone looking to build a company. good waterproof cheap connectors. Let's go.

Yeah, one for cheap and high pin number counts, you would add beyond to something. They're sure. Yeah, the other you asked a question I think.

Yeah, totally. Diving into just the actual product itself and how people use it, how you've developed that journey in and of itself.

Speaker 1 (08:21.59)
Yeah, yeah. So it's a patient scale FDA regulated, but 510k to be approved. Meaning we didn't have to go through the FDA process to sell it, but we have to comply to all the FDA regulations. It attaches to the top face of ambulance screenings. if you're watching TV or like in watching ER or all those newer shows, it's like the big yellow gurney at the thing with wheels. We attach to the top face of that. And we basically just.

take the patient's distributed weights, run it through not just all the load cells then together, but there's some filtering and there's an equation, like in a SACS equivalent that they have to do and all there. But it's attached to the urine cell. The patient gets on the grain, we get the patient weight, and what's that they're to do, any sort of like medication doses calculations and things like that as well.

And so just like breaking that down for everyone that like needs like a theater of the mind, you've got a gurney and you guys have built like a multiple sections of your device or platforms of your device that cover the gurney because the gurney moves, right? It can, you know, tilt upright, it can tilt flat. It's really hard to cover one surface with a rigid piece. You have to be able to move. So you're adding up all these weights or loads across your sectors is what I might call them. And then you guys are running math to say, OK, I need to subtract this overage because it's being read on two different sectors and calculate the patient weight.

and then that goes to your central processing unit on your piece of IoT. And then how does that get to be used by the user?

Yeah, yeah. So kind of starting from the beginning, you can take a mattress off an ambulance, and you may notice there's like three to four separate panels. So basically what we did is we created one individual cover on top of these panels, like almost smashing the dimensional space. So yeah, I inputted a minimum of four low cells on each of those, all of the controlled by kind of like a master control panel. So there's 18 different sensors on there. And the leap of technology wasn't necessarily auto-unlocking load cell read.

Speaker 1 (10:19.374)
You do that in probably a measurements class in college, state of the year, junior year. But how do you get 18 of them to read accurately? And importantly, how do you do so without adding the $50 per load cell? The problem didn't become, I mean, obviously there's the whole water freezing and connectors and headache there. But the fun part of the problem was kind of the signal conditioning side of things. It's like, how far can you condition a signal before you basically lose the signal itself?

And how fast can you show that out and how can you make it well, just grabbed the most relevant information and how much averaging can you do without reading too much battery life. And that was a really fun problem to solve. Right. And like, how do you improve battery life based off of basically like turning these on and off more rapidly. And what does that look like when you turn something on and off rapidly to a bunch of filters? It all came out to be a signal conditioning kind of electrical engineering problem.

with the headaches of water to machine connectors, stuff like that. But the system itself, 18 load cells, we started by creating a system that just lays flat. So if you know anything about a distributed load, right, if you're laying something flat like this and you have a bunch of different panels, you're just going to take the straight up normal force coming from that, it all together, and it's going to equal the patient's weight. But what happens with ambulance journeys and patients is, as an example, someone's throwing up.

Right? You know, your friend's throwing up, whatever reason, maybe unconscious, you're going to turn them on your side so they don't, you know, choke on their own vomit. It's the same thing for EMS or situations in which you can't have a patient fly. You have to raise them up. And so as soon as that happens, it blows the whole normal force calculation out of the water. So what we did is I took back out only my statics, my book in my sophomore year. It was so fun. I remember thinking in that class, like,

You know, I'm never going to use it. So I, am paying attention, promise pay attention in school. Sometimes he will use it. So I took that out, uh, trying to get that mathematical equation for a static body on top of, uh, different, um, basically things worth like that. And that's kind of what we have now is that we have a measurement where if a patient's flat, right, we can read like that. But as soon as you go up, it's basically like a predictive statics equation where we basically predict the backrest angle.

Speaker 1 (12:39.278)
And based off of that and making a couple assumptions, know, it's actually really only like one or two assumptions. We're to accurately basically predict the patient's weight to plus or minus 3 % in one check FTA model, but realistically it's much more accurate in that lateral environment.

That's awesome. And then do you guys have like an IMU or a magnetometer like get that angle? Like do you have a gyro to get what that angle is or are you guys truly just doing it off the distribution of the load and empirically testing and say, hey, we think here's our equation for if we see 80 % of the load increase on this one panel, they're likely upright because humans are usually X amount of uniform across these panels.

Yeah, that was a fantastic question. So actually we found that that's not necessary because this is a distribution of the patient's weight based off the SADX equation was able to compensate for the, it actually helped us compensate for like any assumptions that are like mildly variable, especially when it comes to like the friction assumptions in there. by not having that backrest angle, like gyroscope or something to actually calculate what that is, we were able to predict the weight more accurately, which was very surprising for us.

To be honest, I still can't quite wrap my head around why that is. But based off of like year of in cheerful, like in the steel data, it was more accurate to do a download.

And that's all that matters, right? I love that thing in engineering. Actually, I don't really understand why we can do this as well as we can, but it works every time. So let's send it.

Speaker 1 (14:07.512)
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, it makes sense because it's basically, you know, you can like wrap your head around it behind it. So you would think just having more information would make it more, which is actually not the case because again, signal conditioning, this times more components. Like how do you kind of make sure that that angle reading accurately? What happens if you're on a hill and all those things kind of came into the factor where in psych well, it was actually less helpful than you said.

Yeah, more variables of the equation makes the equation harder, even if it might make it more accurate if you could solve it. like back out, so we've got patient weight. We've established we've got that in all these really cool like angles and way you can, know, any way the patient's laying on it, you can capture that. I'm in the EMS, how do I use the patient's weight or how do I access that data? What was your journey from like, was it like cell phone connected app first, and then you got a display or vice versa? Or like, where have you gotten now to like actually like put that information to use for the EMS?

Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:03.054)
Yeah, very early on we kind of got asked that question. even before we got launched our products, like, okay, yeah, patient wait is helpful, but what we use it for is kind of the reason that it wouldn't be helpful. Right. So our scale does have an LCD screen on it. They stand in just like, do you think bathroom scale type output, right? It's going to be kilograms of sounds. It's going tell you to wait. It's going to lock into place. But we also can send that information over via Bluetooth connection.

What tends to do is the number of other data variables that we can capture. like patient on the journey, patient off the journey, patient, you know, fighting or like a lot of movement in there, patient being perfectly still. Like we can tell how bumpy the ride was. We can tell what type of patient it is usually. Not so often, like you'd be at like 300 pound pediatric patient. And like most likely to be a male adult. You can have some estimations in there.

And we take this information and we send it to what we call our OneDos app. So our OneDos app kind of is like, just think of like a tool or an application that helps paramedics when they're working with patients, right? So with this, they'll be able to send them with patient weight. And they say, need to do a weight-based calculation. They don't have to take out the phone calculator to be able to just say, I just need to draw this in the mail readers. our software is very focused around helping paramedics limit liability.

cognitive offloading, on the intergrants, and all focused around while you're with the patient, not as much so on the operation.

No, that's great. So I'm an EMS. I put my patient on my gurney. I wheel them into our ambulance and we're driving to the hospital and I need to get them something for the allergic reaction they're having. I can go to my OneDose app, type in the drug I'm looking for, right? know, norepinephrine or whatever it is. It's like, oh, I got my weight from the scale. He is a 200 pound male. Is he a male? Yes, correct. Okay. Here's your math. Here's how many milliliters or milligrams to dose.

Speaker 2 (17:03.374)
go do that and that's helping take the liability off that EMS because they're not doing that middle math. They're not guessing the weight and guessing the multiplication in their head to act fast. They're recording this, the steps are recorded, the knowledge of what data is being acted on is recorded. So now the only thing left in like a malpractice suit would be did he literally just grab the wrong vial or the wrong dose out of the box is the only one left.

Yeah, so absolutely right. Now, I'll throw in a little background knowledge on EMS as a whole. They're under the Department of Transportation, not under the Department of Scalics. So what that means is their liability is actually oftentimes more, especially on the criminal side of things, than the liability of like a nurse or a PA or doctor inside the ER. So there's case there than the United States here, in which paramedics

you know, either whether the stake be honest mistake or there's some malintent not be maliciousness involved. That's, you know, kind of outside of it. But like a wrong medication. Right. Was that even if it isn't actually, I think it potentially be facing those things of like manslaughter charges. So liabilities, it's very common in saying EMS right now. And and these are people that aren't necessarily making a lot of money while doing so either. So having tools such as our self-rule helps them.

Not necessarily like with their patients, know, whether it be a center facility transfer or return, but with those critical patients for a lot of that stress, value of a lot of potential errors could happen. With dosage calculations, I know I'm much once again, I'll make a note of that.

I think it's really cool, just the overall impact that your product's having. I think that you guys are deployed over 27 states. And what's the feedback you're getting with all this in mind from those EMS teams that are using the software and the actual product itself?

Speaker 1 (18:57.742)
Yeah, a lot of our feedback, as you can probably imagine, very positive. mean, people want something they can rely on mostly over, especially with patients where it can be, you know, the stairwell, pediatric patients. And, you know, the things that keeps us going is like when a paramedic reaches out and say, hey, we just use your full system on a pediatric patient that was getting a helicopter out of street, right? Well, that's like the absolute most critical case, like pediatric patient, helicopters coming, like that means they're

every moment matters and knowing that they use our solution in there that made a difference to that patient. That's the still good stories that we will keep not just me but our whole team and the whole mission of what we're trying to do going. So that that feedbacks awesome and then this feedback of honestly we knew we were kind of on to something when they first started with this is this is really cool right I can will my patient and just figure out how much medication we can base off of that you know and then as soon as you start reaching the category of

You know, I want to be able to don't know what I do without this anymore. Like you kind of become relying on it in a good way. Not like a bad way where people are letting technology take over by any means. But that's definitely, you know, it's a feel good. And that's how we know we're going in the right direction.

Mm-hmm. No, that's awesome. And then like how is the journey been in the world of hard tech and we always joke hard It's in the name but like how was that like, know crawl walk run journey from like your first set of prototypes at school To your first one sold for money to the ones that you're proud to sell for money now, right? Cuz it's always that journey like the first one you sell for money isn't the one you're proud to sell for money now

Yeah. Yeah. mean, man, that journey is quite a while, right? You're right. It's we, we lost our software beginning in 2024 and software is extremely different. So the hardware journey is, it is long and can be grueling, but it's incredibly rewarding as well. Right. So starting in the lab in college, just trying to figure out what the seamen looks like, right? The actual shape of it, the actual, where is it going to attach to the carry? How don't we go into long T?

Speaker 1 (21:02.828)
Am I using load cells or can I do something else? Like there's an idea of, you know, potentially just having an inflated measuring the difference of pressure in there. Instead of having 18 load cells and you have three sensors, then just actually press them and they'll take their belt. So I through a bunch of iterations like that. Kind of came onto something that attached it to the top face. You know, it's like easy to get to, easy to recalibrate. Doesn't void the warranty because you can read this thing forward. You don't have to unscrew anything. You just try to get on there.

And that iteration from iteration, it was a fun yearning. We launched our first field trial in the beginning of 2022. And I started remembering looking back on those times and arriving on scene. This was an agency that's going to help us out. They're going out of their way to do it. They have people on there. the one time we came there and we pressed the power button.

And then there must have been electrical shortness or something like that. And for just like, yeah.

The magic smoke comes out of one of the boxes you're like well we're for tonight and like don't you have a spare in the truck? And like this is one of one

This is one-on-one and we'll talk to you next week. So just, there was a lot of, you know, PTSD built up from going to a place and like just when we're the ones that are pressing the on button, they're being like, come to my track, on. And then once it's finally consistently did that, you know, that's definitely an indicator that here at least not a bad engineer.

Speaker 1 (22:36.216)
From there to getting our first sale in the middle of 2023 was roughly around probably 14 trials. first of which was very much so. Well, let's just see what happens. Like obviously they're not going to use this for anything besides this. Yeah, it works in the field.

Yeah, and you're using like user feedback at that point, right? Yeah, feedback.

Yeah, not sales. Yeah. There's no way she'll pay money for that. but the user feedback is extremely helpful. It's not even at that point. It also wasn't even necessarily about that Christina system. It was just about in this spot as it's being used underneath the mattress, like what potential issues you'll raise in the top base. have arm rail, like a main issue and just getting that preliminary feedback from people like chat and we chart in English was extremely valuable. And

Going down that iteration 14 times, it will die and change substantially. Very, very much so substantially. Troubled. Just different requirements to pop in and out. Where it's like, nope, too heavy. Nope, too high. Nope, needs to be able to remove these reek as patients leak underneath mattress and roll it up. Yeah, so then it's waterproofing. Yeah, then it's like, you also can't have anything with latex or any of the logical act and stuff in this medical as well.

And all this while maintaining good compliance with FTA, good manufacturing practice, and documentation practicing. That's why it took three and a half years to get it to market. And then even that first one that we sold, know, it worked. It was good, but it was rock though. was not any of the, to get slashy stuff that we had on there. now blacker in some different colors.

Speaker 2 (24:20.992)
It's amazing how long it takes to find all of the corner cases is the word I will use Right like yeah, you as the engineer in a lab is like yeah This is this works every time I turn it on it works every perfectly way and then you give it to a user and you start cringing as they start doing things that you don't do to it and They break it in any way they break the connector off the edge because the way they folded it up isn't the same that you would fold it up because you know there's a fragile connector there

Right? And it's that journey of watching your users break your stuff over and over again until you finally made it bulletproof. It's like making, I think they're making your house like pet proof or child proof. You don't really know how to do it until you have kids or pets. And you're like, that looks like a danger right now. We need to fix that. And you're slowly working your way through this prototype that becomes production. And all of sudden you're really proud of it. out of that, how much of you guys, how much are you guys making in-house now versus contract manufacturing?

versus how much you did back then. Because I think this journey is always enlightening where sometimes people start contract manufacturing at the very first time they're selling. I lied. We need to bring this back in-house to iterate quickly and then get back out for contract manufacturing again. And where were you in that journey?

Yeah, we, we had a couple of good advisors that I think really helped. I'm a first-time founder, started right out of school, so I don't have a lot of experience. So we never actually outsource our contract manufacturing. We do everything in house kind of final assembly. best way to describe this kind of like puzzle piece, like we outsource potential like sub assemblies in there and we do final assembly in house. but being able to iterate that fast is absolutely.

Necessary and talking like 2023 all the way through 2024 just figuring that out and doing everything at house And we have the luxury of being a medical device as well. We're pretty low-volume We're not like there's never gonna be a time where we need to ship out 10,000 of these in box There's we're just not that we're we're a b2b very specific niche, you know There's only a hundred thousand ambulance journeys in the United States roughly and they up to 120 So there's never gonna be a time and like we're shipping 10,000 itself. So by having it in

Speaker 1 (26:32.078)
in-house maintaining quality control, really helpful, maintaining FDA compliance, really helpful. There's definitely things that Laura had to make, like maintaining your own inventory and knowing how long we trans are now, obviously in Paris, figuring out, okay, when is this going more potentially going to a different place overseas to get some of the electrical components which we claim to get here in the United States.

You know, not that I'm in the avenue of giving advice, but anything, if it's low volume, the more you can maintain control of those design iterations and do your assembly house. Even like it was literally me doing the assembly for like two and a half years. Right. I was literally doing it. Um, your, your product's going to come out the other side better. So there's things that I changed that hurt potentially not hurt, like complicated design requirements because of manufacturing of the cost.

And we're talking like waterproofing. We can't have, you know, 16 ingress points and expect to waterproof something without having water come in. You know what I mean? Vanessa's like, well, let's just protect the vital stuff by making cases for our life-a-good opponents and make sure everything else is waterproof from there. we, yeah, by doing everything, definitely, it helps. And honestly, it's the best. So you're dividing something, it's not going in, you tell yourself, you know, you suck.

And then you go back and do that about 200 more times. And then maybe you have something pretty difficult.

I know we think that's so important glass word as well like all of our engineers are their own technicians right they're the ones that emmy is we clean up their own 3d prints and assembling their own prototypes the double ease are building their own circuit boards and harnesses I mean everyone's pulling harnesses because no one the double ease or the emmy is like to build harnesses with connectors so it's always drawing straws and whoever loses gets to go build that week's harness set Yeah, you learn really well to make good Manufacturable parts if you have to go embrace the suck and build the ones you built the first time that are like Impossible to get to that screws you've an Allen key at the

Speaker 2 (28:26.046)
worst angle you hooked in there and if you slip it you're done you you strip the screw and it's all over

Man I will never use the Phillips screw again like we like I How many times that's good like a Phillips screw? Want to tagging something to the gurney and like how to drill it out and then just breaking drill bits like it's torts or nothing for me anymore like it's only gonna be high Torx body exactly like I'll never use them and or to obviously

high engagement Torx bits.

Speaker 2 (28:59.594)
So good. love this episode because like we almost never actually get to the nitty-nitty gritty of like how awful it is to prototype in these painful lessons This is so good. Yeah

Yeah, you know, they're so fun. You do learn a lot of those lessons. And again, like being able to assemble yourself and embracing the sock like I love that term as well. It does help you because someone's gonna have to assemble. Right. And the more difficult something is to assemble naturally, the less quality you're going to have on the back end, just because difficulty always equals issues and issues always equal lack of quality. So if you find that you're having trouble doing it and you're one that designed it,

Imagine someone that didn't design it or maybe doesn't have an engineering degree at all. That's just, you know, helping to put them together. Right. It's, it really does help. And, you know, I loved it too. So I do do it sometimes. Like if I, if I really like, right, let's do a design change. going to, I'm going to for sure assemble the first couple myself.

And Justin, on the subject of embracing the suck as well, on your fundraising journey. I think I saw that you got $500 for your senior project, and you went on to raise a little bit over a million bucks for your pre-seed round or your seed round. And where are you at in time and space now, and how big is the company?

Yeah. So that's actually very funny. So first $500 from, from school, to closing kind of like a $1.1 million, like friends and family, pre-seed, you know, whatever. to now we're actually just now closing the $1.5 million, pre-seed seed round. so we are just closing that now, literally this week. Congrats. And we have roughly around, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Raising money is helpful.

Speaker 1 (30:45.112)
but different types of stuff. We have 10 people. We have five engineers, only three of which ever do any engineering, and we're gonna keep it that way. And three sales reps, a couple of developers, Assembly Associate that does assembly now, and a few part-time people that help us with onboarding and things like that.

That is such a fun staff size.

I remember when we were about that big and it is like you were just at the level you can still fly by the seat of your pants on everything. Like you don't actually have to have every single procedure or vacation policy or anything written down because you're all just working together every day and it's in everyone's head rent free and you as the CEO can just manage things in real time every day. You would touch point every employee every day at least for five minutes right? And like it's that really painful barrier you cross over between like 15 and 20 that all of a sudden everything has to get out of your head on paper.

all of it, not just your manufacturing quality docs, you already have to have on paper because you're GMP, but all the things you do as a founder are no longer just yours to run because the team's too big and you need coverage. And it's that's a fun gap. But again, I think that where you're at is fantastic. And again, you guys are designing your own parts, you're assembling them, you're working with manufacturers across the world that some are circuit boards. I'm you have some plastic parts or machine parts or things like that.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:09.324)
you know you're you you've got that full experience the supply chain and and now scaling is fun you've done everything once

Yeah. It was, mean, the best, certainly back to the number of employees. mean, the best company in the world would be doing $10 million a year with 10 employees. Right. Like we have a fantastic team here. know everyone's so rapid eyes with the best. Um, and, uh, I think you're onto something there where, you know, a number of people does correlate to the among promise you can have fast. Right. So everyone, we still require everyone in office, um, which everyone actually likes.

Right. We have flexibility. what you also, we, we also hired our first three people with unlimited vacation time. Cause I don't know, like you're to come work with us. Like we don't take vacations. So, um, there's definitely going to be an inflection point here, probably at this next chaunche capitol as we go into potentially like a series in it where we expect things are going to change. So we cherish every day where we're in our side office on ability next to like a railroad company.

with no storefront and we don't pay utilities.

I love it.

Speaker 3 (33:16.478)
I absolutely love it. Tristan, know, Grant and I have a lot of conversations with founders ranging the gamut, whether pre-seed, seeds, up to series A level, because we run something called the Hard Tech Venture Network as well. It's a part of Hive, which the Hard Tech podcast is within. And we always go back and forth with each other on the different levels of founders we have conversations with. we actually have a rubric that we put together because we sent it out to the VCs, et cetera. It goes from like zero to three. And zero is like a

Probably not a fantastic founder for a series of reasons, as you could imagine. A great zero. And then three is like, hey, this is the person that you're going to bet on.

because this person's got it. And honestly, man, throughout this entire conversation, I'm not bearing the lead. You absolutely have it in so many ways. Thank you. It's been clearer than your ability to lead, articulate the problem. just even the way you've talked about solving problems, you said you're having fun. That was a fun problem to solve. Not everyone says that. But it does make solving problems that much more fun if you just trick yourself and lie to yourself that it actually is. I think well done there. With all that in mind, one of the last questions I always

to ask is if you had advice for a founder just like yourself starting out maybe three and a half years ago or something like that or they're in their sophomore, junior year of college and thinking about taking a leap to even potentially go as hard as not just doing something in hard tech but also in the medical field, what would that advice be?

Yeah, I think it has to be, well, you have to have a certain level of self-discipline if you're going to do it, but also you have to enjoy the journey. Right. It's, I, were talking to founders at a summit just last week and one of them sold recently for like, I'm not kidding, probably like half a billion dollars. And when he was sitting there and, know, he was watching like his bank account, it finally came in, like he showed his wife and she literally looked at him and he was telling the story and he's like, oh, cool. Can you go change our baby's diaper?

Speaker 1 (35:13.39)
So it's like the end isn't the goal. The goal is the journey and the goal is learning process. And if you can't like the journey about it, you know, it's just too hard, right? If you don't like what you're doing every day, you're never going to be able to do something for 10 years where it takes seven of those years potentially not to be paid. And to get to that point of having a product that people don't feed. And then another year to get to a point where people like it. And then another couple of years to get to a place where someone loves it. You know what I mean? So just enjoy the journey. And if you're not enjoying the journey, then you're probably not either doing the right thing.

where you might need to say, you know, I want to get out of FDA regulation territory because that can be headache. And let's go and do something like B2C, like let's move fast. Let's iterate a software product every 24 hours, right? With this new AI stuff out there, you can do things like that. So yeah, just embrace the suck, like enjoy the journey. It's fun. It's the best learning possibility you could possibly have, right? You're never going to walk away with nothing, right? You're going to have always what your experiences have and really you've learned. And if you can do that and you have fun with it,

for sure, think that's the most successful.

No, I love that. I love that the you know the your story about the the dollar sign and the scoreboard at the end of the day doesn't actually mean anything Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's like when I have conversations with founders that are the happiest It's always this is how hard it was and how proud I am of me and my team for getting through Insert the suck here, right this thing that happened and that was difficult or this big mission they got over and I that is the real magic in the journeys is when you're you're getting to those points that every time you get through a hard thing the team is like

That was incredible. I can't believe we survived that wild ride or this vendor that dropped the ball. We picked it up and saved the date on the delivery for the client. And it's one of those things like those are the stories that you retell over and over and over again. It was never. You remember that one quarter we made the most money? Like that's never been the story someone tells at the dinner table.

Speaker 1 (37:05.006)
That's now elected.

No, no. Honestly, I couldn't agree more. Sorry, go ahead, Tristan.

Yeah, no, was going to double back on what you guys are both saying. I also think that it's something to do with when you're striving for being a founder, doing founder mode is very difficult. You're playing at the extreme level. So therefore, you have to be performing at an extremely high level. And I think it really ranges the gamut, whether you're trying to play an extreme level in the medical device space, you're doing it in product development. I mean, even on my side, I like to work at an extreme level on go-to-market kind of things. And think if you're striving for anything extreme,

at an extremely high level, then embracing the suck is actually the path to get there. To achieve these things that you really want to achieve, you actually just, if it sucks, you're probably doing it the right way. You just have to give it little bit more time, which really sucks.

Well, it's one of those things like with that extreme the highs are really high and the lows are like get a shovel like Floor we are continuing to go down and in the the hardest thing and Trish I'd love to see if you've experienced this The hardest thing isn't actually how high the highs are or how low the lows are it's how rapidly you could swing between them I think that is the thing that is the hardest has been for me in my journey the hardest to like really emotionally handle and take take is like

Speaker 2 (38:31.086)
Like the velocity change between the highs and the lows like the low lows suck I've got a good team and we laugh about how bad it is and the high highs are phenomenal We're all high-fiving and screaming up and down the hallways, but man that rapid transition to be a tough day at home

and those.

I mean, it's happened so fast and that's how you know you're doing something right. Like if you're in a startup world, you shouldn't be doing things like that. So, right. You're going to make so many mistakes and it's going to really suck, but you don't get from, you know, one trance of awesomeness to the other without the most worse mad valley. But yeah, it's, essentially an emotional roller coaster, right? That's something that you don't really think when you get into it, like how mentally challenging when it was just to maintain the stench, go to work every day and battle it. But it is.

For me, it's probably the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life as well. And like having two co-founders that are just absolutely killers, like they're way better than me at everything they do. And just surround yourself with people that are better than you, because if you're the smartest, most careful person in probably not doing it right either. It makes all the difference too. Like if you guys have emotional support for each other, it's like basically going into a marriage, right? We've been doing this for five years now. And we're just now raising like a pre-seek ground.

The timelines and like almost like relationship or marriage.

Speaker 2 (39:49.024)
And you're probably closer to your business partners than your actual romantic partners. Like I spend more time with my business partners than my wife. Which is crazy to think about, but it's incredibly true.

Yeah. Like 10 hours a day with these people, like sitting 60 truck.

When you can't tell me that you don't call one of them on the way home every night to catch up on that meeting that you had at the end of the day, right? Like that is just the playbook But I think the the fascinating thing about the other part of having like business partners is it's challenging from like getting everyone agreed and aligned and all that But the amount of different perspective is so useful If everyone's gotten posture syndrome, you can actually just throw all the ideas on the table and I fight about them until one of them wins

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:30.062)
And it's not like one person made the bad choice. It's now we logically beat each other up and this is the only surviving choice to go with today. And if it sucks and it was wrong, we did this together. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's that balance between toxic workplace culture and, you know, the term that I just recently heard, like soft ass company is it's hard to find that, you know what I mean? Like, cause you have to be cutthroat and you have to be able to defend your ideas because we're just going to be so much stuff coming your way. But you also can't have the toxic worst day culture where nothing gets done and people hate coming here. So finding that balance and duking it out with your co-founders and people you work with where, you know, come close to family members, right?

Or my case started a company with my brother, which, you know, if you read all the books, it's like the number one thing you're not supposed to do for whatever reason. who else are you going to, you know, convince to come work for you for three, for three and a half years. It's kind of hard to find that person, but having the right people around you always makes the journey. And to me, that's the most important thing. Then at the end all you got is kind of like that journey and the learning experience thing. Especially if you want to be like a serial entrepreneur, it's like,

apps.

Speaker 1 (41:42.092)
What happens when you sell your next company? just kind of back right back in, right?

You got to embrace the journey, embrace the suck, hire people who are way smarter than you. Everybody, this is the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Hericus, with my co-host, Grant Chapman. And Tristan, thank you so much for being on the show. This is absolute joy.

Thank you.