Max Hodak: How Startups Build Speed

**Max Hodak** (0:07)
My name is Max Hodak. I'm the CEO of a company called Science. We're gonna talk a little bit about infrastructure at startups. So I've spent most of my life working on brain computer interfaces. This is almost 20 years ago now. I started my career as an undergrad working in a lab at Duke. This is from our very first Society for Neuroscience Conference. The experiment I was working on back then was, if you put electrodes in the brain of a monkey, and then give a monkey a joystick, and you record the neural activity as it's playing a game, if you make the joystick, say the cursor goes sideways when you push forward on the joystick, which does the brain do? Does the brain represent the joystick or the screen or something else? There it turns out that there are neurons that do both. At our company, Science, our main product is a retinal prosthesis. It's a chip that's implanted under the retina in the back of the eye to restore vision to patients that have gone blind due to loss of the rods and cones in their eye. On the left, this is one of our patients on the cover of Time last November. On the right, you can see there's a picture of the implant with the glasses. Every little one of those hex grids that you see on the implant is essentially a solar cell. When this is implanted under the retina, the patient wears glasses that have a camera that sees the world and a laser projector that projects onto the implant. When it projects the image in infrared, wherever the light is absorbed on the implant, it creates a little electric field to excite the retina, thereby directly bypassing the dead rots and cones to stimulate this visual signal back into the retina for the first possible opportunity. And this is a pretty cool product. It finished major clinical trials last year. It's been in three clinical trials now. It was covered in the BBC last fall. One of our patients finished a 300-page novel with the device and mailed us the book. But I'm not gonna talk about this work for the most part for the next 30 minutes. We're gonna talk about infrastructure and lessons. Maybe this is Startup School, maybe there's some things that you'll find useful in your company. So Picasso was noted for saying that when art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. And when artists get together, they talk about where to buy cheap turpentine. This is also often phrased as amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. A quote from a guy that the United States named a tank after. And there are surprisingly few lessons that are really broad across companies. Typically, the experience of running a startup is you're just looking at a continual stream of facts that hit your desk every day, and you're trying to make the best local decision that you can for those facts. And if it looks inconsistent over weeks, that's usually the way to go. But there are a couple of topics that keep very repeatedly coming up that are universal experiences, at least for deep tech companies, which is the thing that I know most of my experience is in, not just pure software. And so there are things that keep coming up, like buying things.
So your first reaction might be that if you do software, you don't need to buy things. It will be me alone in an empty room with some computers, writing software, and this is going to be how we build a company. And if this is you, yes, you have figured out a reason why VCs love funding software and why they've done so much of it for the last 25 years. But if you do anything other than pure software, you will be buying many, many thousands of things. This is us about, I think, six months into the company. And it's a little tough to make out. There are a lot of computers. There's also a bunch of microscopes and other electronics and 3D printers and resin and PCBs. You're buying things really continuously. And so it might sound really obvious, like a really basic question, like you surely just buy things. So for you as the founder, you can use a credit card. Credit cards work great. You can buy lots of things with credit cards. You can also send a wire transfer. The question is, how does your 17th employee buy things? Do they have a credit card? Let's say you hand out credit cards to all of your employees and tell them to buy what they need. So you start getting messages like this.