We just cobbled together some money and had no external investment, just our own money and our parents' money. And we just hacked some stuff together and, built the thing, and we actually got permission to put it into a shopping center in a mall in Boston. Very gracious that, you know, that they actually allowed us to do that. And we put in there, we put a big sign up, it said free vision test, and sure enough, get, like, lines of people check their eyes. And that to us was the big proof that, like, this is a thing. People care.

Welcome to Medsider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful life science startups in the world. Now here's your host, Scott Nelson.

Hey, everyone. In this episode of Medsider, I sat down with Matthias Hofmann, co founder and CEO of Eyebot, a company automating vision testing through kiosks that deliver doctor reviewed eyeglass prescriptions. Before Eyebot Matthias led product development at Formlabs and served as an R and D lead at EyeNetra, where he helped bring the first smartphone based vision test to market. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering with graduate work in vision science and optics. Here are a few topics we explored in this conversation. First, when commercial adoption isn't meeting expectations, how do you determine what's really holding it back? Second, can you validate demand before clinical credibility, or do they need to move in parallel? And last, what makes a fundraising pitch truly memorable to investors?

Before we dive into the full episode, if you're a Medtech founder or CEO preparing to raise capital, you should check out the Medsider fundraising cohort. This four week live workshop combines small group sessions with real time feedback to help you sharpen your investor story, build a targeted investor pipeline, and run a focused fundraising sprint instead of a never ending slog. Over the month, you'll walk away with an investor ready narrative and deck, outreach scripts that actually get responses, a refreshed LinkedIn profile, a simple content plan that keeps you on investors' radar, and a repeatable system for running your raise. You can join the waitlist at medsider.com/fundraisingcohort. Again, that's medsider.com/fundraisingcohort. Alright. Let's get to the interview.

Alright. Matthias, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you coming on.

Thanks for having me.

I know things are hopping at Eyebot, so I especially appreciate your time and really looking forward to this conversation. Think there'll be some interesting things that you share for our audience that I think for the most part are gonna be quite helpful. So first one on the docket though is really just your background, right? I recorded a very abbreviated kind of intro at the beginning of this episode that touched on your background, but let's start there. Give us like a one minute kind of elevator style pitch of your history before co founding and running Eyebot as CEO.

Yeah. Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. So my background, I'll just give you the abbreviated version because throughout my childhood and also as an adult, I traveled around and moved around a lot. But the short version is that I'm born in Switzerland, born and raised. I did have a stint living in California and then back to Switzerland, but mostly raised in Switzerland. And then around 19 years old, moved to The United States for college. I did college in engineering, then ended up in graduate school in vision science, optics, physics, that kind of thing, and then ended up as a postdoc in Boston working on mammography. So I'm very mission driven.

So my mom at the time had breast cancer. She's fine now. But I felt that was a calling for me to work in a field that I felt like can contribute to loved ones. And yeah, so I worked in mammography for almost well over a year until I that was at Harvard Medical School.

So I walked into somebody at the school at a function who just started his new startup called EyeNetra. And it was an MIT spinner. And it was the first startup or first company to use smartphones to do a vision test. And I thought that was amazing because I have bad vision. Need glasses. I've needed glasses my whole life. I've always wondered why it's so damn difficult to get new glasses. I'm enthralled by this idea and of course startup culture in life. That was back in 2013. So I hung up my academic code immediately. And two weeks later, I was like, hey, I'm joining this startup. And so that's how I really started in the industry. And there's a lot more after that, but that's kind of the transition into how I joined the vision care industry.

Okay, got it. See, have you always been, even growing up, have you always been a little bit more your appetite for risk is like higher than or greater than most, right? Because it sounds like you made the jump with relative ease into the world of startups.

I think so, yeah. Maybe I'm more of a person that once I see something very clear in my head, I go for it. Yeah. I think that also helps a lot with decision making in startups because you have to make decisions with incomplete information a lot. You try to gather up as much information about and facts and even anecdotal things before you make a decision. But at some point, you just have to make a gut call and then stick with it, which is the hard thing.

No doubt. We'll get into that in a little bit more detail here. But we're reporting this in early '26. It looks like it may be based on your LinkedIn profile. You started Eyebot back in the '21. So we're like, call it almost five years, right around five years kind of in the making. Touch on maybe a little bit of the origin story around why you decided to give this a go. And then obviously tell us more about the technology because the website, which we'll link to in full write up, eyebot.co, super cool website. Like the technology looks very cool. So yeah, take us back in time to why you started the company and then touch on the technology as well.

Yeah, really the origin actually of Eyebot goes back all the way to 2013. When I joined that vision care startup. We were the first ones to use smartphones to do a vision test to get to a prescription. We were the first ones to bring that to market. We tried everything from, you know, 2013 was a time when smartphones were in everybody's pocket and everybody's wondering, well, what can this supercomputer do in my pocket besides being like a Facebook and Instagram machine? And of course the excitement was around mHealth and well, can I do blood pressure?

Can I do a vision test to get to a prescription? And so the answer is yes, but that's essentially the thing is the theme is it's yes, but and we brought it to market, did all the necessary work for clearance, did all the clinical studies necessary, we did all the work and we came up with all these different solutions that on paper worked. But the big thing that we could not get past was that people don't want to feel responsible doing their own health care. That is not so obvious when you start a company like that, is that Barbara and Bob don't want to fidget on this hacky thing. And, you know, at the end of the day, you get maybe five to 10% of the population do something like this and the rest taps out.

Yep. That was a realization we made around 2014, 2015. And of course, that was a bitter pill to swallow. But we learned a lot and especially actually what I took away from that time was that, yes, back then, even ten years ago or so, the doctor shortage was already a problem. We knew we were building the right, like we were solving an important problem. We were solving an important problem the wrong way. That was a big lesson for me. Yeah. Nobody doubts or like I think you can ask anyone, do you enjoy buying eyeglasses? And the answer is typically no, it sucks.

Getting a prescription is cumbersome and complicated and requires scheduling and planning and all this stuff and money and it's been that way for a long time. It's pretty antiquated and we knew that the problem was the same back then. It's an even bigger problem today. There's less doctors, the population has grown, the more people are myopic, more kids are myopic, they're going to be adults soon. And we're actually having less doctors. We have less eye doctors today than we had ten years ago. And actually in ten years, will be 30%, even 30% less doctors than we have today. And so back then we knew it was a problem. We just solved it the wrong way.

And then I left that company and it's been marinating in my head for years of like, gosh, like what did we do wrong? And it was very clear at some point it became clear to me it's an interface problem. It's not a technology problem. It's the interface that needs to be solved. And that's actually once you eliminate all the things that you know are true and you know about the industry, you end up essentially with a kiosk. Did I ever imagine that I would ever build a kiosk company?

Of course not. But what ended up happening is that through a process of elimination, we realized that that is the user journey and interface that people that the majority of Americans can understand and interact with. Yeah. And that was a really important insight. And so that's actually how while yes, we started the company in 2021, the making of this is far longer actually.

Yeah, like a decade, almost a decade in the making, right? Sounds like, yeah. Of want you to touch like just briefly on the technology because we'll get into it in a little bit more detail, but just real quick on timing. I couldn't agree with you more, right? That's so crucial to any startup, it sounds like you didn't maybe necessarily have the right solution back at EyeNetra, but also maybe the timing was a bit early. We're seeing like the burgeoning of consumer driven health at a whole another level now versus ten years ago. And I think with the proliferation of LLMs, like it's probably just going to like accelerate things, right? I mean, people are going to go to chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude to at least to get a baseline of where they see what's wrong with them or what they possibly could do before consulting a clinician. But anyway, I just wanted to mention that because timing is so important. You're building a startup, don't be surprised if that's the frustrating aspect, right? It's like you maybe have really cool technology. Just the market's not ready for it. Yeah, touch on your technology.

We were too early.

Totally, totally. Yeah. We could probably spend the next forty five know, going through example after example, but touch on the kiosk, right? Because like again, eyebot.co is a website. I highly encourage everyone to check it out. Again, we'll link to it in the full write up, but it's eyebot.co. Website's super cool technology, I would say is even cooler, right? So give us a sense of like, is this? If I'm going to, if I see this kiosk in a Walmart, like what is it and what's it doing? Take us, touch on that briefly.

The way we thought about it is actually that well, kind of finishing my point on smartphones. The problem with a smartphone is it's not actually measuring anything. It's really just like a glorified survey that you're doing. And that's not going to get you to a prescription very accurately or efficiently. And that's really the problem.

So the learning from that was, well, actually, how do you create what are the requirements and the minimum amount of tests and measurements you need to do for an efficient but also accurate and well tolerated prescription that when you put on the glasses, you're just like, oh, this is amazing. And you look at the entire exam lane and you realize, okay, this instrument, you don't need that for a prescription. You don't need this, you don't need that. And when you chop things away, you realize that for the prescription, there's four things that are what we consider essential in getting to a very accurate and well tolerated prescription. That is a refraction technology, meaning that we can measure your settings of your eyes or the correction needed for your eyes, but also a tool that measures your current glasses.

So we have a lensometry technology that you put the glasses, your current glasses into a tray and measures the current glasses, what the settings are, because it is actually very important to know what you currently like or don't like. And the third thing is we do a visual acuity test. It's a letter based test that also helps our doctors dial in the prescription. And finally, and as important as all the three that I just mentioned, is actually very good intake information about your history and your preferences, your hobbies. Like what do you want to use your glasses for?

What did you use them in the past for? That is actually usually handled in a micro conversation of the doctor in a clinic. When the patient sits across the doctor in the clinic, they had this micro conversation about this and that and the doctor immediately knows, ah, this is what you need. Like you need computer readers. You didn't know those existed, but I can make that for you.

And so it's really those nuances that are really important. So we do all of those really core things and then we collect all that information very quickly in about ninety seconds actually. And you don't have to stuff your head into a machine or anything like that. You just stand there. It does all the work for you.

And that was, you know, that from the smartphone days I realized it had to be something that just works without people understanding how it works. It just happens. And so I collect all that information, goes to the cloud, and then every session is reviewed by a doctor who then crafts a prescription if the person is eligible and crafts a prescription with a clinical training of over ten years in the clinic typically. The same way they would if the patient was across from them in their own clinic. Got it. We get really high accuracy and really high tolerance.

So after that kind of telehealth review, if you will, I'm going to call it that, but I'm not sure if that's the best way to describe that. Then I'm assuming as the patient, the prescription, if I need glasses or if I need a change, I guess, prescription that's just delivered to me like via email or via text or something like that?

Exactly. Once the doctor effectively crafts the prescription the same way they would in their own clinic, that prescription then is sent to you via a signed PDF into your inbox, email inbox. We always deliver a minimum of one copy into one of your locations that you can receive a prescription. And also if you opt in, if you're in a store, for example, Walmart, you then can also opt in for getting a fax sent directly to the store.

I see.

And I know this fax sounds so antiquated, but actually it's working really beautifully because that means the optician in the store immediately also gets a copy and then they can take the conversation, you know, that handoff with that conversation to the patient who is in the store because they also need to learn what's available in terms of what kind of lenses you can get and what kind of settings you can get, what kind of configurations you can get with glasses.

Got it, got it. So just to review, I see this beautiful looking kiosk in Walmart. I go to it. I don't have to peek in the hood, like I'm at the DMV. I think we're all familiar with doing the vision test. Like the DMV, it's like you gotta put your head in the tunnel. So I just basically stand in front of this kiosk, it's like quick minute and a half and then it collects a bunch of data. I get the the the telehealth. Is that is that a telehealth consult with with me then as as as the patient then or the data is just reviewed kind of like asynchronously?

Exactly. The data is reviewed asynchronously. So the journey is you walk in, you do a test, ninety seconds. It goes into, you get a text message essentially that says, yeah, review. You even see where it's going and once it's done, almost like a Domino's pizza tracker. Okay. Doctor reviews it. And then in the case when you qualify, you get your prescription. And if something of interest is found in the images, the doctor may actually refer you to.

Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So because I think the natural inclination is for someone to kind of look at your technology from a 30,000 foot perspective and say, oh, the consumer does all of this, but no, the data is still reviewed by clinician.

So it's like they don't have to sort of take that burden on themselves and sort of trust this kiosk that it's delivering the right information, right? You still solve for that. So that's super helpful. So where's the, again, we're recording this in early twenty six. So where's the company at in terms of like it's lifecycle? Are you, you're actively commercializing this technology? Okay, got it.

So it's in different retailers. The one that we're public about is Walmart and Sam's Club. I can't speak to the numbers, but we're very excited about where we are today.

Yeah, very cool. Definitely exciting, exciting stage. I think most stages in a startup are very exciting, but especially when you're kind of early into entering commercialization, right? You're actually diagnosing or treating, you know, real, real patients or real consumers. So with that said, let's spend maybe the next twenty, thirty minutes kind of going through some functional areas that every startup, right, has to kind of navigate through its journey if it's gonna see, know, some semblance of its success.

And I wanna touch on the first one, right, which is largely around product development. I think some of the more intense challenges are in those early years, right? Where you're trying to get your product, your device, your technology, trying to get to the next sort of milestone in terms of development and oftentimes with very little capital, very little dollars to be had at that stage. Take us back to kind of maybe those early years at Eyebot. Are there a few things that stand out in terms of things that you either did right or you did wrong that might be helpful for other founders and CEOs to learn from?

Well, that's a two parter. So the question is the early days, and I give you some tips on what to do, what not to do, and mistakes made and learnings made. It was 2020. It was peak COVID. And I started tinkering with this idea of what if it's this new kind of interface, like a kiosk type interface?

And the very first thing that I cared about was what is actually the user journey, not technology. I've built all sorts stuff like we'll figure out that later. Like what is actually the thing that people are comfortable with using and can use? And so that was the first thing we did. And so I called up Jack, my old co worker from Formlabs. It's a 3D printer company. And I told him, hey, come to this makerspace. I have built a thing and I want you to look at And I need actually a mechanical engineer that's good at like actually turning this into more than just a thing. And he shows up and he's like, yeah, I've never had an eye exam in my life. What is this all about?

I was like, Jack, you're almost 30. How did you end up with eye exam in your life ever? And he's like, well, welcome to American healthcare. And then we test his eyes and sure enough, has astigmatism negative one cylinder on both eyes, which basically means that at night, like you can actually see a lot of star shapes when you're looking at, when you're looking at lights and things. So those could, that can be very easily corrected. I happened to have the right lenses with me. I popped some stuff together and I put on a frame on his eyes to just prove to him that he has astigmatism. And he puts those glasses on and he's like, Woah. And he looks around like this maker space. He looks outside and he sees a tree with leaves.

And he's like, I didn't know I could see all those leaves. Exactly. And you've been living like this forever. It's not just you Jack, it's like there's one in ten Americans is not wearing glasses even though they should. Know, something like 8,000,000 Americans are not buying glasses because they can't afford them.

And it's ridiculous. It's like how does that even in a first world country, how is that even a thing? And so Jack and I looked at each other at this point and we were like, well, even though we had this rickety prototype on a benchtop, we're like, you know, this is a massive problem and there may be a handful of people on this planet that know how to solve this problem. And we looked at each other and we're like, well, let's be the ones to solve it.

I don't care how long it takes, but like we know it's a massive problem and let's just do it. And we shook hands and we started the company. Then the very first thing after that, it was we started building a prototype in his apartment. We used friends and family money, honestly. Just cobbled together some money and had no external investment, just our own money and our parents' money. And we just hacked some stuff together and built the thing. And we actually got permission to put it into a shopping center in a mall in Boston. Very gracious that they actually allowed us to do that. And we put it in there. We put a big sign up that said free vision test.

And sure enough, get like lines of people checking their eyes. And that to us was the big proof that like this is a thing, like this is people care. And what's and I have this on my desktop, this picture that I will never get rid of is who like, not just how many per day, like we're talking like 60 to 100 people checking their eyes a day on this box. Then, but who? Like within a two hour period, we're talking like black, white, Latino, Asian, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, everybody.

Like big beards and little old ladies and everything. And I still get goosebump moments. The goosebumps from thinking about this moment of realizing that we've created something that actually applies to such a broad spectrum of the population because we all have eyes, we all need to check them and it's unbelievably hard to go check your eyes. That was to us like the big proof. And then of course, we immediately ran around to like venture capital like, hey, we got a thing.

And so we raised the first $2,000,000 as a pre seed. We also at the time actually got National Science Foundation funding. So SBIR grants that was the first money in. Oh, that's not true. Actually, it was VC money. The first money. Yeah, at the same time also got, it all happened sort of at the same time, also grants from the government. And with that, we were able to start really building the technology that made this interface work.

Okay.

The very first thing was not even worry about the technology, just prove that people cared.

That's awesome. This was like early twenty one, but how quickly were you able to get that first prototype in that? I think it was like you said a mall, right? I believe where you actually have like real people using it and kind of lining up to use it. How like give us a sense for kind of how quickly that was.

I mean, Jack and I, we rented a WeWork. We at some point, we couldn't do it from his apartment anymore. So we got a WeWork and then we're clearly the only hardware startup in a WeWork. Because everybody else was just a private computer clicking and clocking. And we were just like all these parts rolling around WeWork, screws and all. And so yeah, we were definitely the most interesting company there because we had a lot of people like watch almost like in a zoo. Yeah. Like watching us like these two weirdos build a kiosk inside of WeWork.

Yeah, good story. I'm glad you, one of the things I always share with newer founders, right, that haven't been around startups is like make sure you document that journey because it's like so it's so easy to kind of blaze through and look to the next thing that you need to get to next milestone, etcetera. And you kind of forget about like all those moments that are really fun and should be kind of captured.

Yeah. And even with software startups, but especially with hardware startups, it takes a long time to really get things rolling. Yeah. And you just have to That actually is the second part of your question. The learnings, It takes just longer than you think. But what we learned is to just, you know, like the north star of where this is going. To us, it's very clear what that north star is. We want to make vision care accessible to all equally. You shouldn't have more or less access to getting a prescription and getting glasses depending on your geographic luck. That makes no sense.

Or even your income or anything like that. But it just takes a lot longer. And so we focus on just what is the really next big milestone. We just get there and then we just set the next milestone and you just keep doing that. And then because it always feels like then you accomplish your main goals. They don't have to be massive. But then you get there and you look back and at some point you look back and like, wow, this is actually a pretty turning into something now. Yeah. But it just takes patience.

Yeah, it takes time. Yeah. Oftentimes two times longer and two times the cost or what is it? Two and four, two times longer, four times the cost

or something like that.

Almost like if you knew how much time and effort goes into it, you just wouldn't do it. Yeah.

Hey everyone, let's take a quick break to talk about Fastwave Medical, the company I co founded and lead as CEO. We're developing next generation intravascular or IVL, systems to tackle complex calcific disease. Over the last few years, we've closed a series of oversubscribed funding rounds, bringing the total investment into Fastwave to over $50,000,000 Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing, too. The 900,000,000 acquisition of Bolt Medical by Boston Scientific in 2025 and Johnson and Johnson's $13,000,000,000 acquisition of Shockwave Medical signal a lot of attention on emerging IVL startups like Fastwave. And we're making serious progress. In addition to recently receiving our ninth patent, we've successfully completed peripheral and coronary feasibility studies and are gearing up for pivotal trials. If you're interested in investing in the fast growing IVL market, head over to fastwavemedical.com/invest. Again, that's fastwavemedical.com/invest. Now let's get back to the conversation.

I had this conversation a lot with, even with my group of kind of co founders Fastwave is like even knowing that that's true in almost every startup, right? Especially in the kind of life sciences or like Medtech Healthtech space is that it does everything takes longer and is more expensive. As a CEO, you still kind of you do need to set definitive, at least goals, right? Like we want to accomplish this particular milestone or this particular development effort in six months, nine months, a year or whatever, and it's gonna cost X amount. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can use that as an excuse. You still need to set these goals, but you know, be playing the fact that it does, it almost always takes longer.

Think it's of the best analogies I've heard recently from someone was that it feels like pushing this boulder up a hill and then all of sudden, like the boulder's rolling, you feel like, oh my gosh, it's moving, it's moving, it's moving over the hill. And then it goes over the hill. But then you realize that was just like a local maxima. This is like the boulder stops again. You're like, okay, here we And then like and then it's like you keep pushing the next over the next big hill that's after that.

Yeah. It is. It is. It's a good yeah. That's a good that's a good analogy. Yeah. And then sometimes that boulder's a little bit too heavy and it pushes back on you, you know.

The funny thing is the problems that I have today, if I go back two years, I'd be like, oh my god, that's amazing. We made it. Yeah. I'm dealing with today what have to do with scaling and have to do with producing fast enough, which all sounds like, wow, it's like a champagne problem. But it is actually more stressful than when you're in the days when like nothing really mattered and, you know, the stakes weren't as high. Yeah. So it just it's all relative. Yeah. Like probably in two years we'll look back and be like, oh, the problem I'm having today is like a joke. So true.

Like the problems, the near term problems in front of you always feel so huge. And then, you know, you'd run into even more challenges and bigger hurdles, you know, a year or two from now. I'm looking at our set of questions. I wanna be mindful of times. I'm gonna combine kind of the next two into one because I think we covered some of this already, but I want you to touch on it from a slightly different angle is kind of this notion of, as a patient, saw this, whatever, ten years ago at EyeNetra where like patients largely, they didn't want to make a decision about their healthcare and it had it fall solely on them. They didn't want that burden. They wanted still like an optometrist or ophthalmologist to be involved. Is that something that you were mindful of right out of the gate at Eyebot? And maybe kind of overlay how you're thinking about clinical data, right? Because you've got clinical data that probably you need to use to convince clinical partners, retail partners, etcetera.

But also you've got the patient element too that probably wants to know, hey, this is actually legit, you know, and it actually is accurate. You know what I mean? And so yeah, maybe, maybe touch on that topic.

So on the clinical data side, yeah, of course, one of the first things we did, Jack and I, was to partner with optometry and in clinics to very quickly iterate and test using IRB approved clinical studies. And because we the technology that we built had to be built around the user experience. And so we had to very quickly try this, make changes, bring it back to the clinic, try that until we had the configuration right and also the technology right to do accurate measurement. And so we've done over, I think, close to 3,000 or more patients in the clinic, but all through iteration, right, over the last four years. We do 50 at a time and then we do 100 at a time and then we back test and check again and so on.

And then we would track essentially how close we are to the standard of care and we get closer and closer and closer to a point where we feel that actually we're beating the accuracy and tolerance that you would typically get from the traditional path of getting in an eye doc setting. And so once we had that data to prove it and show those charts and show those data points, retailers started signing up. They're like, okay, this is the real deal because they've heard a lot. There've been a lot of other ideas rolling around. It was never really the real thing.

It was too hacky. We made sure that by the time that we really go engage with, you know, B2B contracts and retailers that we're ready and this is the real deal. We don't want to present them something that's not ready yet. And so we made sure of that. And then once they agreed that it's right, the consumer, we also learned that takes a lot of their trust from the brand.

And so the context here is really important. A lot of the trust that people have in using a technology like this actually is rooted in a brand or a company or a store that they already trust. And that kind of came with that. So really, focus was on making sure that retailers understand and believe in our mission and believe in our technology.

Okay, got it. Yeah, it's interesting because I think someone could make the argument that, look, if you present to a Walmart or name, name, other, you know, some of the retailer, a business case, like this is what we're doing, this is what we're solving. This is like how it benefits Walmart, etcetera. Maybe that could sort of seal the deal, right? Or at least open up some sort of like sort of data partnership, but they're still looking for clinical data, right? I mean, need to make sure that like the technology is legit and that, you know, their customers, right, are being served well as well. So at the end of the day, clinical data, crucial That's to kind what Yeah.

You gotta have an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that this is the thing.

Yeah. I wanna touch on on fundraising because it sounds like you've got some some interesting things to share on fundraising. But just maybe let's talk real quickly on on your commercial model. Right? Did you know, you know, out out of the gate that this is like this was like where you were gonna start, you were gonna go to a Walmart or other retail partners and establish this kiosk or did you kind of work through some other other ideas or other, you know, go to go to market, you know, plans before landing on this one?

We always knew that the model was going to be that we work with enterprise. Okay. That enterprise essentially is our customer, not the consumer, because what we really our vision is that ultimately we want vision care to be open, accessible and effectively free. And I know that sounds almost too ambitious or not possible. But actually, if you through automation, a really automated data collection or testing, you can provide so much efficiency that actually the patients or consumers can get their eyes checked for effectively free, which obviously is a win win solution.

There's so many folks out there that have never had an exam or had had larger gaps in their vision care. And we capture them all the time. Every day we see people with that have had an exam in twenty years or have never had an exam. 55 years old, never had an exam. And so, yeah, we realized that essentially that automation allows us to create this kind of model.

From the very beginning, we encourage the partner that we work with to not even charge people money for this because it is a benefit. It is also potentially a very good driver into their business and that seems to be showing quite well. So and then, of course, there's they can be able to sell their goods more efficiently. So that was always the business model.

Where we did pivot more recently was that we started at the most extreme end of of what's potentially possible is that you can essentially do a kiosk that is like unstaffed. It's just a kiosk that somebody can use, get their vision tested, get a prescription if they qualify, and then also buy glasses with an online retailer. That's where we started and we realized that was potentially two steps too far.

Society is not ready for that pure hybrid digital interaction. One day, well, I think it'll be ready. But I learned from maybe I didn't learn because that's where we started. But when I was at Formlabs, Max, who's the founder of one of the founders of Formlabs, he's like, when you introduce new things, you only have one token, maybe two or three. So you got to be careful about not going too far. I think with with the very first test we did, we stepped a little bit too far, but we wanted to see how far we can go to understand where if society is ready for something like this. Yeah. Now what became very clear, very fast is that as soon as you put a person there to explain to people and understand and let them understand how it works, conversion just like went up double digits immediately to buying glasses.

And then the next step is, well, what if you also put product there for people to try on like glasses to try on frames to try on conversion goes up more? And it's kind of obvious, but we didn't expect like how big of a jump. If you look at the data, 85% of the eyewear market is in brick and mortar stores. That is an unchanged number. Even during COVID, it only like changed by like a percent or two.

And that's where the glasses are sold. This is in stores. And to us, that became very clear that really where our early bread and butter business is, is actually in eyeglass stores. Okay. Over something like over 50% of eyeglass stores are struggling to find a doctor. Not only is it not that lucrative of a job anymore, but also the doctors just don't exist. They're not around. The schools are not creating enough young trained optometrists and ophthalmologists that are retiring today. So more are retiring today than coming out of school. Wow. And a lot of the stores just struggling to even find a doctor once a week.

Yeah, yeah. Super helpful. I'm glad you touched on kind of the slight commercial pivot too. Right. And lessons learned only gleaned when you're actually in market. Right. And beginning to like a slow roll launch that that's good stuff.

I would say that the business model actually is the same, but the context is different.

That's why I hesitate calling it a pivot.

But this is normal and you have to just be open to truthfully looking at the facts and then make good decisions based off of that.

Yeah. With that said, let's jump to fundraising because you closed, I think it was a $20,000,000 series A last year, kind of mid, kind of what, Q3 of last year, looks like based on our notes. You mentioned before we hit the record button, you've got some interesting takes on fundraising. So let's hear them. Like, what do you think is most valuable for other founders, CEOs that are raising either a seed, series A, kind of earlier on in their fundraising journey? What are some of the key tips that you've got for them based on your experiences?

Along your journey, you get tons of advice, right? From this and that, should do this, you should that, okay. But there is one piece of advice that I have maybe three in my register of like the most amazing advice I've ever heard and one of them is this one. Shout out to Andrew who may or may not listen to this.

You can do almost your entire raise or your the whole raise over Zoom. And there's an amazing advantage of doing fundraising over Zoom because it is your rectangle. It is your real estate and you get to craft your persona and your real estate the way you want it to be. No matter what shoes you wear, doesn't matter how tall you are, doesn't matter what pants you have, it doesn't matter. You can craft the persona and narrative around your company in a very particular and very strategic way. And so the background matters, lighting matters, everything matters.

And so that's number one because you have to understand like they see, you know, 10 pitches a day and you want to stand out. And so you have that opportunity and it's your rectangle. And what's also really good is that you can have conversations with folks rather than being in a boardroom where everybody's sort of like staring at you and looking for every like little micro movements that you're doing. You can actually just have a conversation with people face to face over Zoom and get them excited about something and show your enthusiasm over Zoom. Now, I never pitch with an open pitch deck.

That is, I think, is just my opinion. Take it and take it or leave it. But I do best when you don't even open a presentation. You just talk about the problem, talk about how big of a problem it is. And once people are like, understand that the size of the market and the size of the problem and then almost like, well, here's the solution. It's pretty obvious at this point. Right?

Did you get some weird looks, though, from from from investors that are almost looking, they're like, Matthias, when's the when am I gonna see slides? When am gonna see that

If you put up a slide deck, they're gonna be in Gmail and LinkedIn. Click around. Right? But and this is this is again, Andrew, shout out, is that once in a while, like things may slow down, the energy slows down in a pitch. And that's when you open the presentation. That's when you show that's when you open it up and you're like, hey, look at this and this. Here are the figures. Here are the stats. Here's the picture on this technology. Thirty seconds though, and you take it away. Back to me. Back to me. Look at me.

I love this. This is good stuff. Well, what else do you have for us? Yeah. Because these are counterintuitive, but I would say the second one especially, right? I don't think I've ever pulled that off or it's like, because it's so easy to rely on slides. You know what I mean? It's kinda like a security blanket for you, but like this is good. Okay.

Especially early stage, what are they investing in? They invest in you. That's the thing is they're betting. I you know, it's maybe a little disingenuous, but, you know, especially early stage, pre seed and seed, it's like they're gamblers in Patagonia. Right? Yeah. Now, of course, have a process.

They do obviously a lot of homework and math and check the facts on the industry and size, etc. But at the end of the day, they have to roll the dice and be like, is this the guy or the gal that's going to be on Forbes? And we would love to find that person. And ultimately, they're investing in the person who will do whatever it takes to just crash this car through all the obstacles to get to the destination. And that's ultimately what pulls the trigger. You gotta call yourself.

Yeah, that's good. That's good. Was there a third thing that you're gonna call out?

Was I? I'm not sure.

Those are good. Those are really good tips. I think maybe, I think the first time I've heard someone say, don't effectively don't lean on a pitch. In fact, try not to use or I should say slides, try not to use them. Right?

Everybody goes like, oh, what is the best pitch set up? Yeah. What is the, you know, order of slides and not more than 10 slides and I said like, it's gonna be 20 slides and whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Because they've seen so many, it doesn't matter anymore.

So true. So true.

What you need to sell is, I would say the three most important things to sell is how big is that like, this is a massive problem. And everybody without really any doubt can shake their head like, this is a massive problem. Two, how big is the opportunity? Because like, yeah, maybe you can get to 50,000,000 ARR at some point even quickly, but maybe you're tapped out on the market.

That's it.

Not interesting. They can't bet on it because you have to show them that given all the things that are true, you can expand into making a billion dollars in revenue and that you can you can claim that statement without people like we can pass the red face test on. Yeah. Yeah. That's how big this market has to be. Otherwise, they just can't the venture math doesn't work out. They can't invest in it.

Yeah, no doubt.

You may have a fantastic small business, right? That makes you very rich. But if it's not venture scale, they can't invest. Yeah, I'd say the third one. And then again, that already pointed out to it is the third one is okay, cool.

So you got this massive problem, you got a solution that solves this problem, you got a massive market opportunity. The third thing is, is why you? why this guy or why this? Why not go to like Cambridge and pick up some folks at MIT and Harvard to do it? Like, what's special about you? And if you convince people that while there's only about 10 people on this planet that can do this, They're like wow we found the unicorn.

Yeah got it. I'm nodding my head right obviously we're referring to on zoom but people are listening to this audio but I'm nodding my head because back to your point earlier about being remembered like so so important I mean these VCs like literally are getting pitched constantly. And, it's not all about, you know, like, you know, creating differentiation or or, you know, being different per se, but that is an important aspect of to all of this is right. You've gotta you've gotta be of the 10 pitches they saw today, who do they effectively remember at all, right, if anyone. And so I think that's so that's so so important, especially in the in the in the earliest stages, right, where you've got a lot more to get sort of you got a lot more to prove, and they're taking maybe a larger a larger bets in terms of risk anyway.

Be memorable. Well, actually, one of my favorite pitches was a general catalyst pitch where the first five minutes all we talked about was seltzer water. Because it's like, yeah, I mean, we already know about what this is about. So now am I drinking? Cool.

Yeah. That's that's it's such good advice. I know we're running a little bit you you still have a few minutes. Are you you still good on time? Yeah.

This is this is this is great. I'm glad we we left a little bit of time for fundraise the fundraising topic. Good stuff. With that said, let's jump to the rapid fire portion of interview. But again, for everyone listening, eyebot.co. I highly encourage you to check the website out. We'll also link to it in the full write up on Medsider. So with that said, let's breeze through. I might cut these rapid fire questions a little bit short here, but just real quick on hiring, building a startup team.

What if you had a single, like, kind of narrowing it on one particular thing that's really crucial to kind either either recruiting or building out a team at a startup? What would that be?

Well, every startup is different. I can't provide a formula. But for us, what is true is we don't care about your degree. We don't care about what school you came from or what company you came from. Like, yeah, sure. If you came from Facebook or whatever. Okay, great. That usually raises some attention. But ultimately, we only care about what you've like, what you've done and how you've done it. And is that going to carry forward?

And also, if you have just a bit of an ego, you're not going make it up at our company because you have your ego at home. We are open, honest, transparent. And that's, I think, the way to go. And every culture is different, but we have a culture where people can make mistakes and even suggest changes, even significant changes without like feeling blowback. In fact, it's encouraged.

And we also we have a couple of rules. One is you can ask anyone as many questions as you want. You can ask the same question five times in your own. It doesn't matter. Because it's usually that's the kind of stuff that makes stupid decisions or boneheaded decisions is by just covering things up because you don't want to be like be put on the spot, right? We want to avoid those situations.

Yeah. Going back to ego. Yeah. Typically someone from a big ego is not gonna survive in that sort of environment. I'm gonna jump to this, we're gonna do three rapid fire questions this time.

But the second one here is, let's say we've got a small group of Medtech Healthtech entrepreneurs in Boston and we're doing dinner. Towards the end of the dinner, maybe finishing up the glass of wine and you wanna leave them with one thing, like the one, the single most important thing they need to get right if they're gonna have success with their startup. But what do you think that would be? What's the billboard message for other Medtech Founders CEOs?

Yeah, it's really good consultants to make sure that you are doing everything right on the regulatory side to do have really good strategy in place many years ahead You think you need, but also use common sense and don't let the consultants just make everything complicated. So take everything with a grain of salt, question it, and then use common sense to move forward. You're going to get so many different opinions and advice and it's almost going to be the most conservative possible thing because they also don't want to put their neck on the line. So you have to be able to balance the input and understand actually what this is about and what is important and then only do the things that matter and then don't do the things that just have absolutely no impact on stuff.

Yeah, the common sense part is so good, right? Because like inputs really matter. And if you're getting inputs and not understanding kind of like how those inputs are being derived or where they're coming from, it's like, you know, it's probably a component of that that you're missing out on. So, all right, last question, Matthias. Let's go back to maybe whether you wanna take us back to like your postdoc in Boston or maybe your early startup days at EyeNetra. Anything you'd whisper in the ears of kind of the younger version of yourself and call it your mid to late 20s?

Mid to late twenties. Yeah, just make it. It's fine to make mistakes. You gotta make a lot of mistakes. Just do it. People think that like the career is over when they're like 28. Just go. Yeah, just do a lot of stuff and take risks. You can take risks. The most successful startups are actually by founders in their forties. Let's look at the facts. A lot of people have to get experience first before they actually build something good and strong and reliable.

Gotta get those gotta get those swings in those reps. Yeah. This is this has been fun. I can't thank you enough. I know we're a little bit over time.

I don't wanna be sensitive to your your schedule in the throes of a very busy startup. But, again, for everyone listening, eyebot.co is the website. We'll link to it in the full write up on Medsider. We'll also link to to Matthias' LinkedIn profile as well. You can check check out his background with a little bit more detail, maybe even reach out to him and say, hey. That fundraising tip was good. No slides.

No slides.

These are my key slides, just like it's three of them actually that really matter. This is just a topic. Look, you should have a full pitch deck, by the way. But it doesn't have to be in the in the pitch. Just like that's for afterwards for them to review and for the diligence team to to get into it.

Don't let slides become your security. Maybe that's the message. Yeah. That's good that's good stuff. Yeah.

But but again, thanks everyone for your listening attention with us. I'll have you hold on the line here. But again, eyebot.co, check it out. And again, for everyone listening, you got this far. Appreciate your attention as always until the next episode of Medsider goes live, everyone take care.

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