DeAndre + Grant (00:01.411)
All right. And everybody welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus my usual suspect Grant Chapman. How's it going everyone. Dave great to meet you.

DAVID E ALBERT (00:11.066)
Pleasure, gentlemen.

DeAndre + Grant (00:12.749)
It's hard to believe that we're already going into season three of the Hard Tech podcast. Season two, had 42 different episodes of founders and product leaders all across the country. And I'm super excited to welcome Dr. David Albert to the podcast.

DAVID E ALBERT (00:25.924)
Thank you gentlemen, thank you for the invitation.

DeAndre + Grant (00:28.289)
Absolutely. Now, David, I would love to get it kicked off on a brief intro of yourself. Of course, your company is extremely well known, but for those who don't know you personally, would love to just get an overview.

DAVID E ALBERT (00:38.81)
Well, you know, what I am as a dysfunctional founder, I started a live core when I was 55 years old. I don't recommend it to anyone. And so now I'm a 71 year old grandfather. As I was saying earlier to Grant, I've been married 42 years. So I have four children, all grown grandkids. And I've fathered four companies. My first one back in 1988 when I left clinical medicine because

Somebody didn't want to buy one of my hardware inventions. And here, almost 40 years later, I have 100 patents. I founded four companies, sold them, gone public. Was the chief scientist of GE Healthcare Cardiology in the early 2000s. And again, made the mistake of coming up with a new idea.

when I was way past the age that you should be doing things like that. And so I'm still going, you know, with no end in sight, unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess. As the philosopher Pitbull, you all may be familiar with him, says, any day above ground is a great day. So at my age, that's a fact.

DeAndre + Grant (01:53.783)
That's awesome. wanted to lead with the congratulations condolences for all of the above. It sounds like it's been a wild ride.

DAVID E ALBERT (01:59.882)
It has been a ride. My wife keeps saying, got to write a book when I finish this deal. And I think she's right. The people we've interacted with, the experiences we've had been amazing, absolutely amazing. So the ride's still going. Can't do it yet.

DeAndre + Grant (02:06.478)
That's right.

DeAndre + Grant (02:20.717)
No, I love it. And David, part of your background is so interesting. Part of it you already mentioned, but you actually left clinical medicine to go into starting these, you know, four or five different companies. I'm curious, what was, what was that moment that made you decide, Hey, I'm actually going to leave my stable day job. I'm going to just jump into the wild west and start a, start a company. What was that journey for you?

DAVID E ALBERT (02:39.386)
Well, I was in medical school and biomedical engineering graduate school at Duke University from 1977 through 1984. I built, when I was still a student, I built a wrist-based heart rate monitor. Sounds like something standard now. Well, it wasn't in 1981. And so I got a patent on that and I licensed that. And then I built an ultrasound machine, a heart monitor.

ultrasound machine and I licensed that. And, you know, when my fellow residents were eating ramen noodles, because at that time you got paid about $18,000 a year as an intern and resident, I was driving a Corvette I bought for myself, which, they kind of, they were kind of pissed off about that. So then I'm in my training and, and I come up with another idea for an EKG microscope and I build a prototype as I normally do.

applied for patents, and then nobody wanted to license that. And that really upset me. And so I went to my wife and my father and I said, hey, you know what? I'm going to drop out of medicine and start a company. I knew nothing about business. Absolutely zero. I didn't know the difference between an S-corp or a C-corp. I didn't know anything. I didn't know what a balance sheet was, P &L, nothing. So...

they were a little concerned. We had a baby and another one on the way. And my wife was an intern. And so, you know, they were like, I think this is a very, very bad idea. But my two mentors, they were both cardiologists, one at Duke, guy named Dr. Galen Wagner, and one at the University of Oklahoma, who's the chief of cardiology, Dr. Ralph Lazara, convinced my parents and my wife.

that if Dave fails, so just come back and be a cardiologist. Why, you don't need to worry about him. He's got a great plan B. And I never look back. And that was, and it's not always been straight up and to the right. There are a lot of times, you know, I've failed, but I think what I've learned is, is that failure, and by the way, that's a badge of honor in Silicon Valley where a live quarter is now headquartered in Mountain View. It wasn't.

DeAndre + Grant (04:57.133)
Mm.

DAVID E ALBERT (05:01.754)
35 years ago, but when I failed, the companies haven't failed. We've just failed on a product or failed on an idea or failed in clinical validation. Each one of those has been what I would call very expensive tuition. Okay. And that's what it was. You know, I should have gone to business school 40 years ago, but I didn't. And so I learned, and I think the most important thing I learned.

DeAndre + Grant (05:16.591)
Right. It's a school of hard knocks.

DAVID E ALBERT (05:29.548)
is what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. And being honest with yourself about what you're not good at and finding those people, again, the trite notion that there's no I in team, to build a company, it isn't one person. It wasn't just Steve Jobs. It wasn't just Bill Gates. They, you know, built companies with teams of really competent, smart people. And so I think I learned that lesson fairly early on and that helped me then succeed.

DeAndre + Grant (06:00.175)
No, that's amazing. And I think the tuition at the School of Hard Knocks is one I always rather pay than actual tuition check. It is the lessons are faster, they stick longer, and you're never going to forget them. And half the time they're a great story later. Absolutely.

DAVID E ALBERT (06:13.348)
Well, you got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and you know, your ego may be bruised, but hopefully it's not broken.

DeAndre + Grant (06:19.917)
I said, do you still have one of those? Mine died a long time ago. I'm okay being wrong, as long as you get right every once in a while.

DAVID E ALBERT (06:22.458)
Again, I raised my wife and I raised four kids all the way through adulthood, okay? And so I can tell you that my ego was shattered long ago. And one of my kids is, it just says, dad, your head's getting big. I'm gonna pop it. And so I've learned that that's part of what, my job is to embarrass my kids, their job.

DeAndre + Grant (06:35.569)
Hahaha

DAVID E ALBERT (06:51.842)
is to humble me. And so that's the symbiosis.

DeAndre + Grant (06:53.454)
That's right.

You know, David, one of the things that I kind of heard in that story is really just one of resilience. You know, I think it's, know, Napoleon Hills or something along those lines, think and grow rich where, you know, you burn the ships, right? But you actually had the options should you have chosen it, like your two mentors mentioned. he could just go back and be a cardiologist. And, know, that's a pretty stable career. What actually kept you going when things got tough? Did you burn the ships or how did you mentally just continue even after failure? Because something Grant and I talk about all too often,

is that's one of the beauties of the West Coast is that failure now, at least in more today, is seen as as success. And if you failed a couple of times, great. Now I actually bet on you and I'll invest in your company because you actually know what it takes to succeed. We're growing more and more in the Midwest. But I'm curious, what kind of created that resilience? What did you lean on during those times when things weren't going as well?

DAVID E ALBERT (07:47.279)
This was all in the Midwest. I lived in Oklahoma City. Okay. Today we're best known for our basketball team, the Thunder. You Thunder up by the way, tonight against the Lakers. But you know, that isn't the mentality there. And so there was a great motivation to not fail, at least not fail completely. Like I said, you're gonna have little failures and little successes.

DeAndre + Grant (07:51.758)
Okay.

DAVID E ALBERT (08:16.634)
and you just need to add those up and have it be a positive rather than a negative number at the end of the game. So I learned that. And my last company, which we went public and then sold to GE Healthcare, was I placed it in Seattle. And this is back to that notion of there's no I in team. At the time, the center of technology for a lot of medical technology was Seattle.

You had a number of companies. Certainly you had Microsoft. You had this beginning company called Amazon. At the time, it was a bookseller. But that's where you had talented people. had, at the time, wireless computing. had things that today people take for granted that at that time were revolutionary. And then I started a live core. And at the time, you know,

Silicon Valley was the hot place for digital health startups. And so I went out and found the right people who were available to help it be a success. And they were in the San Francisco to San Jose, Silicon Valley corridor. so, you you put, just like I said, know what you are good at and know what you're not good at. Know where you can find the right people.

DeAndre + Grant (09:30.531)
Mm.

DAVID E ALBERT (09:41.267)
And I've tried to take advantage of both those understandings in building successful companies.

DeAndre + Grant (09:48.513)
like you've learned that all too well Grant, if you're experiencing glass word. It's so funny when you finally get to the point like I can't do that. Like I used to able to say I can do anything. I'm that's the one thing I'm really not good at. Can we get Sean in here to be organized? of our part of the team or someone else? it's such a core tenet to growing in leadership is realizing you shouldn't be doing. You should. Your job is to find people that are better at everything it is that you thought you were good at and bring them on board and then you've won.

DAVID E ALBERT (10:07.876)
Absolutely.

DAVID E ALBERT (10:18.589)
This podcast, let me just say this. The last time I designed an electronic circuit or I wrote a line of real code was 1990. And well, I still program. I just do it in a high level language, English. And after that, I found people who could design...

DeAndre + Grant (10:32.109)
year I was born.

DeAndre + Grant (10:39.629)
Yep. Which ironically today can turn into software.

DAVID E ALBERT (10:43.886)
Hardware better than I could, who could write code better than I could. And so that was, I've maintained at least my capability of coming up with the right idea. And so then finding the right people to implement that idea and the right people to market that idea, the right people to sell that idea. Those are the things that I've come to appreciate.

DeAndre + Grant (10:56.655)
Mm.

DeAndre + Grant (11:10.221)
No, I love that. And diving into the hard tech side, one thing you said earlier I want to not forget to touch on. You said when you were in your residency, you started prototyping some of these early things you were selling and licensing. What did that mean then? How did you go prototype that wearable heart rate monitor?

DAVID E ALBERT (11:25.754)
Oh, because I could build almost anything analog, digital, microprocessor based. And this is a funny story. I actually, for some critical components, went to what no longer exists, RadioShack. Yeah. So neither RadioShack nor Frize exists today. I don't know. Of course, you can buy anything over the internet.

DeAndre + Grant (11:44.717)
Radio Shack? Yes! I knew this was coming.

DAVID E ALBERT (11:55.407)
So I could get 1 % metal resistors at any value I want and have it delivered tomorrow or any type of microprocessor or anything, op amp or whatever it is. The point is at that time, first of all, there was no internet. there were catalogs, paper things, but we had Radio Shack and then on the West Coast you had Fries. And so those were go-to places.

DeAndre + Grant (12:00.558)
Mm-hmm.

DAVID E ALBERT (12:24.507)
for me to come up with components. And I wasn't against buying something and tearing it apart to salvage a component. That was in my repertoire. So my wife is happy because I, know, my parents, my family back in Oklahoma, when I came home and fixed a radio that was broken, I said, you kind of know about this. I said, yeah, I do. I know how this works.

Well, we turn it on and there's the voice. I said, well, this is an FM AM radio. Let me explain to that. The point was I could build those things. And today it still matters because, for instance, I don't train deep neural networks, but I know how they work. I took advanced signal processing and I took linear algebra and multivariable. I know how those things work at a

fairly fundamental level, and I know their weaknesses and their strengths. And that's another thing. Just like you know your own, know the weaknesses and strengths of whatever technology exists. Because too often, entrepreneurs, inventors, get tied up in the technology, not in what it's supposed to do. And it's what it's supposed to do and how people interact with it that will determine the success or failure of a business.

DeAndre + Grant (13:49.583)
I think that's a great segue into just the origin story of AliveCore. And if we kind of rewind back to 2011, you actually took a pretty counterintuitive approach. You made a bet on mobile, where while other people might've kind of thought, what are you getting into? No one actually has phones. You made a bet early that ended up, of course, paying off. Would love you to just kind of dive into that a little bit and kind of talk about why you made that decision and just the general origin story of AliveCore.

DAVID E ALBERT (14:14.276)
Well, it really was about, you gotta go back to 2007. So 2007, Steve Jobs made his famous, one more, as he's walking, one more thing, and came back and introduced the iPhone. And I saw the iPhone and I immediately contacted using this advanced technology called Skype, no longer exists by the way, Microsoft shut it down.

And he's in Australia and he's an outstanding hardware engineer, still a part of a live core, still designing most of all our electronics. And I said, this will implement an idea I had back in the nineties that just couldn't be implemented. And he said, no, mate, it won't. It's locked down. It doesn't have any way to develop anything. So then 18 months later, so now we're talking about probably the beginning of 2000, late 2008, 2009, Apple introduced the app store.

and the ability to develop apps. They didn't have that in the beginning. There were only the apps that came with it, App Store and Develop Apps. And so I called him again and he said, no, mate, it's just, I said, they've locked down the Bluetooth. You have to buy this special chip, authentication chip in order to interface with the Bluetooth. Apple's well known to keep their walled garden very walled. And I said, wait, I got an idea. So really in 2009, we began working on

my idea to how to implement it, the technology. And in 2010, I took a Lark, I took my money and we went to Hong Kong to a manufacturer I knew, had a little factory in Shenzhen. And we took a prototype I had and we went there and they said, well, we'll build you 15 prototypes of this design. So on 2010,

December 14th, my birthday by the way, of 2010, I received a box from Hong Kong of 15 prototype iPhone 4 EKG cases. And my friend's right-hand man, who's an amazing genius programmer, still programming almost all our stuff here at Livecore, lives in Australia, he wrote an app.

DAVID E ALBERT (16:35.875)
And it worked. It just absolutely worked perfectly. then went actually, my daughter was graduating from college. And so we went to Boston. She was at Harvard. She graduated from college and stuff. And so finally on December 30th, I was going to go the next week to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And I was going to show this new invention, this iPhone KCKG to a number of companies. But there were going to be three companies that weren't there.

including General Electric, healthcare, they weren't gonna be there. So I made a video. Now my nine-year-old, who's 26, also graduated from Harvard, at today 26, then nine, I said, how do I make a YouTube video? He made YouTube videos in order to modify Nerf guns. Okay, you can see how complex this is. So he said, dad, let me show you. So he's the youngest of four. He showed me how to make and how to upload a YouTube video using my webcam.

I had an Orbit webcam, if you remember those things, big stick. And so on December 30th, I went to my little office and I made an unscripted four minute video showing this. And as I was uploading it to YouTube, there was a box that says, click this box, upload to your LinkedIn connections. And at the time I had about 400 LinkedIn connections. They were people.

from my business experience. So they were like a GE Healthcare and Medtronic and places like that. They weren't people outside of people I knew. They were people I knew only. Today I have 17,000 LinkedIn connections, but at the time I had about 400 and they were people I actually knew. Most of the people that's 17,000, I have no idea who they are. So I clicked that. I don't even know why I clicked that. And then I clicked it. I uploaded it to YouTube, shut my computer down and went home.

DeAndre + Grant (18:07.093)
yeah.

DAVID E ALBERT (18:32.645)
The next day was New Year's Eve, had a date with my wife. We went out, had a glass of champagne and I came home. And at literally two in the morning in Oklahoma City, I get a call on my mobile phone, on my iPhone, and from my partner in Australia. And he goes, mate, what did you do? I go, what are you talking about? Dude, it's middle of the night here. Happy new year, by the way.

because they're ahead, they're across the day line. So it was the next day, was already, you know, later in the day in January 1st, he said, you've got 150,000 views of that video. And in 2010, 150,000 views in 12 hours was gone viral. And it kept just going, it was... And the next night, which was a Saturday, I got called by the...

DeAndre + Grant (19:18.444)
in 12 hours is insane.

DAVID E ALBERT (19:29.541)
producers of Good Morning America and Fox & Friends, saying, Dr. Albert, we'd like you to come to Las Vegas and be at our show. You have to come to the convention center at four in the morning, because it's seven in the morning on the East Coast. And we'd like, and I did that. And I was on, and I got hounded. And I started getting emails and text messages and phone calls as I'm there in Las Vegas, people hunting me down, including company out of Cupertino that sent people to find this guy.

And so that became the genesis of what is today AliveCore because later I was contacted by a little company called Qualcomm and their arm called Qualcomm Ventures. And then later that year I was contacted by a guy named Vinod Khosla. And those are two of my...

earliest investors, Vinod is today our chairman of the board and very well known, well, billionaire, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world. they became, and by the way, GE Healthcare called me up. And so that began the odyssey that is this company, it wasn't really planned, to be honest with you, it just happened. And so today we have a nine figure company and

DeAndre + Grant (20:34.169)
Mm.

DAVID E ALBERT (20:56.592)
We've sold millions and millions of devices and have hundreds of thousands, a million active users all over the world. Mayo Clinic is an investor in our company. GE Healthcare is an investor in our company. And, you know, I've received literally thousands of messages saying thank you for saving my dad's life or my life. And so I guess it's been OK. But I can tell you it wasn't planned. It was a

And in 2011, people said, I'll tell you, I went to a company that I knew really well, I'm not gonna name the name. And they said to me, Dr. Albert, number one, no Medicare aged person is gonna spend $99 to buy this device. And two, no doctor is going to interpret that EKG without a CPT code, without getting reimbursed by Medicare.

DeAndre + Grant (21:56.537)
Mm-hmm.

DAVID E ALBERT (21:56.893)
I went, gosh, you know what, you're the experts. guess I don't know what I'm talking about. They've come to me and said, hey, you were right. This notion of people taking control of their own healthcare, paying for things, whether it's an aura ring, a woo, whatever, a cardia, the world changed. And I guess I felt like it was headed that way. It just, at the time, you maybe had a Medicare age people. You probably had 10, 15 % that had a smartphone.

DeAndre + Grant (22:11.224)
Mm-hmm.

DAVID E ALBERT (22:27.388)
Today, I'm in that age, it's 90 % because that's how we see pictures and talk to our grandkids. So I'll be honest with you, that evolved and it brings back the famous quote, Wayne Gretzky, don't skate to the puck, skate to where the puck's going.

DeAndre + Grant (22:43.471)
just going to ring that up. I was like, this is skating the puck. You called your shot before it was cool and said, we're going to get there.

DAVID E ALBERT (22:48.726)
I exactly, said that guy's there's the pass. I need to skate to where the puck's going. So I'm there when it comes, when it arrives. And so I, I can't tell you that that's because I'm smart, but you know, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good gentlemen.

DeAndre + Grant (23:07.281)
that's awesome. So going back to that in a world that is usually very heavily planned, like medical device, very regulated, things like that. How did you get this launch? Was it a wellness device to begin with?

DAVID E ALBERT (23:17.578)
my God. Let me just tell you that was, so I'm at this, I'm at CES and I get a phone call from a gentleman who I just saw a couple of weeks ago at a medical meeting who had been my student. He was an undergrad biomedical engineer. was a grad student at Duke and I was his TA. He later went to the patent office and then to the FDA. Once at the FDA, he was retired from there after 25, 30 years. He called me and he said, Dave, what are you doing? Cause the FDA had seen the video. Everybody.

DeAndre + Grant (23:45.507)
course and now you're on the radar.

DAVID E ALBERT (23:46.437)
And he said, I said, listen, dude, just be honest, tell everybody. I did not plan this. did not, you talking to the wrong guy. I think a virus is something that you get a vaccination for. I didn't know anything about viral videos and this. I had no idea that that would become something public. My son was, my oldest son was a Duke and he called me up and said, dad, I have friends in like Montana.

who heard the audio from your video on the radio in Montana. So this thing had gone, and so I just said, listen, you guys can blame me, but you gotta understand, this was not a planned thing. I had no control. Yes, absolutely no malintent. And that was cool. So when we started the company, we didn't have a 510K, but we were wanting one and we were gonna apply for one. And I've gotten...

DeAndre + Grant (24:29.549)
Yeah, no malintent.

DAVID E ALBERT (24:43.676)
25 of them, so I know what I'm doing. So what did we do? So for the first year, we sold it to veterinarians, which have no regulatory. We sold many thousands to veterinarians. And today, if you went online and said, cardia in animals, grizzly bears, obviously dogs, cats, and horses, obviously, shoes by track vets all over the world because horses develop atrial fibrillation and dogs and cats all over the world.

DeAndre + Grant (24:45.613)
Yep, we go through it all the time.

DAVID E ALBERT (25:14.512)
but then it's been used on bears, eagles, bonobos, gorillas. There's a gorilla. a great TV station in Cincinnati had a show several years ago of they trained a silverback gorilla. They would hold a cardia and it would stick its fingers out on through the cage on this, on the cardia to get its rhythm because it was having a fib. So gentlemen, we sold

over a million dollars in our first year revenue by selling the veterinarians until we got our 510k. So that was a little bit of bootstrapping. I had friends in Oklahoma, we have one of the vet schools, Oklahoma State University. There only like 25 or 30 vet schools in the country. And I had gone up and done it on a horse. That's a story in and of itself. But I knew that veterinarian medicine was not governed.

DeAndre + Grant (25:46.031)
to veterinarians.

DAVID E ALBERT (26:13.053)
so you can get veterinarian drugs and all kinds of things, veterinarian equipment, the FDA. And so I took advantage of that. And still to this day, we probably have 25 peer-reviewed publications on using in, if I told you water buffaloes, I mean, all kinds of things, that just amazes me.

DeAndre + Grant (26:31.823)
No, it's incredible, David. I'm curious to kind of zoom out a little bit. Why did you even make that decision? You know, I think that some founders might think, hey, we have to go through the process. have to make it through the FDA, get our 510K. Before then, we could not sell the product. What kind of instinct was that to say, hey, look, no, we have to actually sell it. Let's just sell it to a different market that could buy it today.

DAVID E ALBERT (26:48.285)
That's the...

DAVID E ALBERT (26:53.383)
gentlemen, the more money you can, the best funding you can get is customer funding. Okay. This is the reason I said we generate a million dollars of revenue in our first year in 2012, the million dollars. So a raw startup generating a million dollars of revenue, finding a way when your path

DeAndre + Grant (27:04.646)
For everyone just listening, that was a $20 bill.

DAVID E ALBERT (27:22.493)
to human use is blocked or restricted. We could still, we did studies and things, but those are very restricted. That's just being an entrepreneur, my friend. That's just seeking, you there was a book a number of years ago, Gorilla Marketing. Well, that's G-U-E-rilla. I did G-O-R-rilla marketing, okay?

DeAndre + Grant (27:47.331)
That's amazing. That's just the grind. That's the hustle right there. That is awesome. you

DAVID E ALBERT (27:51.419)
Well, that's just the you do what you have to do, my friend. That's the that's the note of being flexible and opportunistic.

DeAndre + Grant (27:59.599)
And so you've guerrilla marketed your way into the veterinary school or veterinary industry realizing there's no regulation while we wait for the human regulation. We built this thing and I only interpret here for when listening into an iPhone case because you couldn't get the Bluetooth chip. So did you use the headphone port to transfer the signal? The 30 pin?

DAVID E ALBERT (28:09.115)
That's correct. That's what we did.

DAVID E ALBERT (28:20.347)
Nope, nope, nope. did it ultrasonically. So we transmitted it as an FM signal at 20 kilohertz and got patents. So that was my idea. Correct, except it's inaudible. So at 20 kilohertz, it's inaudible. So it was magic to everybody because including people in Cupertino, they wondered how we did it because they knew they brought down the Bluetooth. so I found a way again.

DeAndre + Grant (28:29.537)
Was that through the audio, like the microphone input? my goodness.

DeAndre + Grant (28:48.643)
That is incredible.

DAVID E ALBERT (28:49.725)
You figure out how you can do something. And we still make that product, essentially. We now have a universal device that can work with any phone of any size, or Android, iPhone doesn't make any difference. And that technology still exists today. some 16 years later, it still works.

DeAndre + Grant (29:14.231)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

DAVID E ALBERT (29:15.837)
And so, we've learned, we've got a lot of different technologies and evolution of those products, but it worked and it worked well. And I remember doing a video on a plane from Oklahoma City to San Francisco. And the video was I was sitting in the window right next to the jet engine. So it was a 737, I think. And it's really loud. It worked perfectly.

Not only did it work perfectly at the time, you weren't supposed to have Bluetooth or wifi on there were no wifi in the cabin. That was before they figured out that that wasn't going to interfere. You just didn't need to have your cellular signal. So I had an, a airplane compatible, EKG device, went wireless EKG device that, that other people didn't have. So that was, and it was used by a number of people. fact, probably two months after that.

DeAndre + Grant (30:04.749)
wireless EKG.

DAVID E ALBERT (30:16.145)
viral video, I was called by a guy named Dr. Eric Topol, very probably the world's most famous cardiologist. And he had been for 10 years the chief of cardiology at Cleveland Clinic and he was now at Scripps. He's written a number of books, included us in it and me in it. But he called me up and said, you got to give me one of these. And I did. And then about a month later, he posts a story that he put in his books that he was on a flight from he'd been at the NIH doing a review.

was on a flight back to San Diego where he lives. And about an hour into the flight, captain comes on as there are a doctor on board. And there were several other doctors, but they were all surgeons. They said, Tobol, this is your gig. He goes up and he takes our device out and puts it on the guy's chest and tells the captain, gotta land it. This guy's having a heart attack. The guy later got a stent and he'd had a heart attack. And he was able to diagnose it with my device and potentially save that guy's life. So it worked.

You know, again, find a way, gentlemen. Entrepreneurs have to find a way, whatever it is.

DeAndre + Grant (31:15.8)
That's awesome.

Yeah, Jurassic Park life finds a way. Entrepreneurs got to do it too.

DAVID E ALBERT (31:20.663)
Exactly, you know? Jeff Goldblum was, that was one of his best roles. I love that.

DeAndre + Grant (31:28.463)
We quote, life finds a way all the time. digging into this for the hardware listeners that like, love the, I'm gonna call it a guerrilla engineering tactics here. This is what I call first principles engineering at prime. You are solving a first principles problem. I just need to measure the heart rhythm. Let's go do this as simply as cheaply, as mobile as possible. I can't connect to the phone. How do I transmit data? Well, humans transmit our data through sound, right? We talk at each other. I can do that to the phone.

DAVID E ALBERT (31:56.634)
Absolutely, that was it. This is the first wireless technology right here called voice.

DeAndre + Grant (31:58.351)
Like you.

DeAndre + Grant (32:02.15)
Right. Yeah, just yelling at each other. what I just want everyone listening, because I'm picking up on this, like reading your emotions, doing this is everything you do is all the first principles problem first, and the rest of it will fall into line. And I think that's so important for everyone that's listening to really hold on to. I have so many people that get so wrapped around trying to solve a complex problem with complex stacks of technologies and stacks of solutions. But tackling things first principles is usually the best plan.

DAVID E ALBERT (32:26.3)
Well, it's.

DAVID E ALBERT (32:29.949)
And proving an idea is real by building a prototype has always been my strategy. What you guys probably don't remember, because you're not old enough, is back in 2010, if you wanted extra battery life on your smartphone, you bought something called a Mophie case. Today, Apple makes them, and now we can just do MagSafe batteries and all kinds of things. And wireless charging.

DeAndre + Grant (32:56.355)
Yeah, I know the founder of Mophie. He's incredible.

DAVID E ALBERT (32:59.279)
So I bought two or three MoFi cases and I shelled them out because they gave me a platform where I could put a battery in my circuit. the first prototype was a MoFi case that was shelled out and made to do this, put a piezo as the speaker and all this in a MoFi case.

DeAndre + Grant (33:16.249)
cannibalize mofie.

DAVID E ALBERT (33:26.557)
and made two or three of those until one actually worked pretty well. And that was, you know, again, I wasn't going to go have custom stuff built. So you have to find a way.

DeAndre + Grant (33:40.557)
No, and that's incredible. And again, ironically, the founder of Mophie has a very similar story where he saw this problem that phones were dying, you know, all throughout the day. And he just flew to Shenzhen one way, ticket, parked himself in China until he came home with the first, you know, like beta unit to go show around to go get funding to go buy the inventory for a full production round. But that's...

DAVID E ALBERT (33:47.771)
Yep. Yep.

DAVID E ALBERT (34:02.074)
Well, that's a very similar notion. I flew to Hong Kong and then went to Shenzhen and then came back and again got cases because people, I don't know if they 3D printed the original cases, it was a fast mold. It's amazing what they can do, by the way. But today we've diversified our supply chain. We have still China, but we also have Taiwan. We have Malaysia.

Because, you can't control macro events, gentlemen. And in the hardware world, the hardware world, we've all learned, you know, tomorrow, paid tariffs, have all those kinds of things, you know, shipping during COVID. I live here, I live in Santa Monica, and from here I can see, you could see 30 ships outside of Long Beach.

DeAndre + Grant (34:35.905)
Not anymore, I can't predict them.

DeAndre + Grant (34:51.255)
a logistics.

DAVID E ALBERT (35:01.064)
just parked because they couldn't. mean, we've lived through what is the so-called ancient Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. Alivecore has been several interesting times.

DeAndre + Grant (35:17.101)
Honestly, dude, I think that really leads me into my next question, which is like just building regulated hardware at scale, right? When it comes to ISO guidelines and FDA good manufacturing practices, when you guys are purchasing tens of thousands of units at a time and they're all coming off the line, what does that look like at scale? Right? I think that at least I'm generally familiar with, you know, what earlier stages looks like, but once you get to this scale, what are the best practices that you guys have learned? just going through that process.

DAVID E ALBERT (35:44.447)
First of all, we build automatic test equipment. So everything we do is custom. So we build our own custom automatic test equipment for the factories. And so we end up building that, installing it, training it. There are various builds. they go through various acronym names of the different stages of the build till you get to the final manufacturability, where we build in the tens of thousands. You're absolutely right.

And so I would just tell you that you do it under ISO 1345. So we can't just go to Joe Blow manufacturer. We have to have an ISO 1345 listed manufacturer. And then we, you know, you have to serialize everything, every device, you need to be able to track it all the way back. These are some of the things that you get when you are a medical device. Now we sell direct to consumer, an FDA class two medical device.

And that's a process in and of itself. And so you've got the reporting of any incidents, complaints, all of these things. So I would tell you that manufacturing at scale, there are firms around the world that can do that. And by the way, you're also trying to do it because we're selling direct to consumer at a very

reasonable cost. So we're trying, we're selling a regulated medical product, direct to consumer through, through, it is consumer electronics, it is today. And so you go to consumer electronics show. When I went in 2011, January 2011, there was, digital health didn't exist. There were no products. Today, there's a huge section of digital health at CES. A huge section. It's a major part and CTA is very involved in it.

DeAndre + Grant (37:21.091)
that's basically consumer electronics as well.

DAVID E ALBERT (37:42.481)
At the time, it didn't exist. And so I've, you know, somebody said, Dr. Albert's the father of digital health technology. And I said, no, no, no, I'm the grandfather, first of all. I'm way older than the father. And the fact is I was there from really the beginning. In 2010, people would, the term digital health had no meaning to most people. And the notion that we would have smartphones that would connect us.

in every aspect of our life, from banking to transportation to communication to your health system and your own healthcare just didn't exist. And so I think we found the way and there have been many fast followers after us, including all the big companies. mean, the Apples and Samsungs and Googles, you know, and today we have a new generation, the whoops and auras.

And some of them take a medical approach. Most of them are into more consumer. mean, AliveCore, we do really hard medical things and diagnosing things like heart attacks and tachycardias. And that's a little different. And well, it's very different than, let's say, an aura who's trying to tell you, you know, it's a good day to get pregnant or not pregnant or whoop. It's a good day to work out hard or it's not a good day to work out hard.

We leave that to them. you know, hardware, software, we have a quality system that we have to have. We're audited by not only the Food and Drug Administration, and by the way, huge issue today, cybersecurity. The FDA, cybersecurity. You hear it every hospital we go to. There have been so many ransomware events that, you know, shut down hospitals for days, paying out millions of dollars.

DeAndre + Grant (39:26.102)
I was just going to ask.

DAVID E ALBERT (39:39.348)
So the FDA is in Europe, it's even worse. They've got really strict regulations and now AI. And in Europe, there's all kinds of AI regulations as well as cybersecurity, as well as medical device regulations. so, gentlemen, have to, we sell in almost 50 countries. It would be hard to do as a raw startup.

So it's best to start in the United States where the market is large and at least defined, then trying to go to the rest of the world.

DeAndre + Grant (40:16.387)
As we always say, crawl, walk, run. When you're building a new technology, a new company, you want to engineer your steps and everything from the hardware, from the regulatory side, from your customer, beachhead. Everything you want to do is crawl, walk, run. Now can do this in very quick succession if you're good. It doesn't have to be a long time between crawling and running.

DAVID E ALBERT (40:31.487)
Yeah, if you're really good. also take it one step further. I like to get into my Lamborghini and drive fast. I don't have a Lamborghini by the way, but that's the analogy carries on. But you've got to monitor your suppliers. These are all things. And the good news is we've hired people who really understand this, people who built Kindle, not by the thousands, but by the millions.

DeAndre + Grant (40:37.345)
Yeah, right. Yeah. And then they get the car afterwards.

DeAndre + Grant (40:44.813)
No, I love that.

DAVID E ALBERT (41:01.009)
of units who built iPhones. So there are people who have that expertise, who know how to handle things in Asia, who know all about the transportation. And then there are people who've done the medical manufacturing. And to be honest with you, if you're a major consumer manufacturer, you have the same concerns about product quality that we do in healthcare.

You can't have your iPhones be failing. That becomes a very visible, very public thing. so companies like Apple or Amazon have very high quality standards and do all the same things we do in medicine. And that's true for both their hardware and their software, which by the way, are just one in the same now. mean, it's hardware, software, it's delivering a solution and that solution is inevitably both.

DeAndre + Grant (41:54.659)
Yeah, no, I agree. I love the hearing that narrative that you guys are designing and building your test equipment, know, your bed of nails, your automated test equipment to collect the quality data, you're collecting your own quality data in your manufacturer's site to, you know, trust but verify in real time.

DAVID E ALBERT (42:02.024)
We do all that.

DAVID E ALBERT (42:08.691)
We have to. It's the trust. Yeah, Ronald Reagan had it right. Trust but verify.

DeAndre + Grant (42:12.749)
Yeah, and you're doing that to not only maintain your quality and regulatory standards you have to as a med device, it's so that you can have low failures, so you can have high margins and in this low dollar consumer electronics space, it's all added together. is what we joke, eating your veggies actually does make you healthy at the end of the day. It's not just because you have to.

DAVID E ALBERT (42:33.145)
Yeah, it's exactly right. You've got to do those things if you're going to do it well. And relying on, totally relying on others and closing your eyes, it's not a strategy for success, gentlemen.

DeAndre + Grant (42:45.871)
I guess to that point, the next question I really have is all around quality systems, right? The foundation that you really can't skip. And I think you actually mentioned on our first call that if you underestimate the FDA process as a medical device startup, you kind of just missed the boat entirely no matter how far you get along. Honestly, there's a very common conversation that even Grant and I will have amongst the team of there's a certain point when you should have a conversation with us, but if you're medical device,

company and you're you think you're at the finish line and you just now are having a conversation about, know, the quality management system. You're actually far too late. You basically are. You're at square one. So I'm curious, David, like, what's your advice there or just thoughts there on setting that up from the beginning?

DAVID E ALBERT (43:25.311)
Well, if you think all you have to do is get a 510K, well then you just don't understand. You are naive, really naive. If you don't have a quality management system, if you aren't inspectable for that QMS, if you don't have the proper training and the training logs and all of the other aspects that go into a medical quality management system.

then by the way, you won't get a 510K and they'll come in and tell you this is insufficient and you can't ship product. And that'll be a rude awakening. people, this is why there are some garage med tech startups that just, you don't have to take your shoes off to count them, you know, that have been successful because you need people that understand the process, that understand the requirements.

And that's just the United States. Forget going to Europe now, where they've changed from two different really systems, from what was called the MDD Medical Device Directive to MDR, which is the new system. And as people try to homogenize ISO standards, because it used to be there were standards in every country, had a different standard for different things. If you've traveled internationally, just think about

all the different plugs you need. Well, know, all the different kind of plugs you need and the kind of plug you're going to need when you go to this country or that country and whether it's 220 or 110. So it is that on steroids. And so I think you cannot start a medical device company without understanding what it's going to require. And what that means is you need to seek advice.

DeAndre + Grant (44:57.849)
Now my wife is Swiss. I completely understand this.

DAVID E ALBERT (45:24.233)
from those who have done it.

DeAndre + Grant (45:27.587)
No, I think that that's my favorite advice is you can start a medical device not knowing what's in front of you as long as you're willing to listen to someone that has early and often this is the the what know down or you and I always joke they have and they have nots between the founders we hear pitch us through the hard to venture network of their medtech startups there's the ones that are like hey I don't know all things ahead of us but we've hired these three consultants and as soon as I close my round I can pay them to figure all this stuff out I'm like alright cool they'll be fine they've got a good head on their shoulders they're looking for the right data then we have the people like

DAVID E ALBERT (45:34.889)
That's correct.

DeAndre + Grant (45:55.705)
we're going to be in market in 12 months from right now. And I'm like, sweet summer child, this is going to hurt. But we're going to tell you how this is going to happen.

DAVID E ALBERT (46:03.153)
like that happens, you know, it's, it's also around the notion of, you know, move fast and break things. And I try to tell people that this is healthcare. Human beings involved handle with care. You can't just, you can't, you can't move fast and break things. You can try to move fast, but you can't break things. So that is really, put some,

DeAndre + Grant (46:10.541)
Mm-hmm.

DeAndre + Grant (46:19.266)
I like that.

DAVID E ALBERT (46:31.623)
regulators on your efforts.

DeAndre + Grant (46:34.763)
that. One of the questions I've got for you David is throughout the entire conversation I just like Grant was mentioning before you hear this like immediate go emphasis to kind of go from first principles when you're building or making a key decision whether it's in on the engineering front or whatnot. Could you speak a little bit to your process even as you guys have scaled with keeping the pulse figuratively not figuratively on on the customer as to what they really want. I think you guys not only like

were counterintuitive in getting to mobile early, right? So you have this more novel technology, but the rate of adoption was clear that you guys have product market fit and have continued to do that. So what's just your guys' process for, for lack of better term, just coming out with the next big device? How do you guys think about?

DAVID E ALBERT (47:21.321)
Well, I think, you know, we're a little unique. I'm not going to say we're completely unique, but we're a little unique. Why? Because we both have A, a significant direct to consumer business, and B, a health care, which is basically a B2B business. So we have, you know, places like Mayo Clinic, full, as I said, an investor and a partner. And we have people buying it after watching a TV ad and going on Amazon.

And so we have separate audiences that have completely separate expectations and goals. And so we have to understand both. And I think we've come to have methodologies to understand. I I don't even know how many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of reviews we have from Amazon. I mean, guys, we've, you

when you're selling a thousand something a day, you get a lot of feedback and you've been doing it for years. And some of it's good and some of it's really bad, you know, and we try to understand why and then understand the environment you're in. So, you know, there's this huge, you can call it the Maha movement or you could call it the, you know, taking responsibility for your own healthcare movement or the fitness movement.

DeAndre + Grant (48:22.187)
Hahaha

DAVID E ALBERT (48:45.236)
You know, you've got people inject themselves with peptides and GLP ones and, all kinds of things. and so, you know, that's one thrust is understanding that business and where do we fit in and how, you know, how to best develop a product for that market. And then there's cardiac patients after a heart attack or after bypass surgery or after getting a stent. And that's a completely separate group of people in a completely separate, you know,

user base and the people who then are responsible. patient might record their own EKG, but their cardiologist is one consuming it. we have a unique business in that we have these two distinct areas and we have to keep our finger on the pulse of both. And we do that.

DeAndre + Grant (49:39.703)
No, I love it. think that's great that you've got these very divergent markets that consume both the data and the device itself. And that's got to keep you guys so fresh that you're not just trying to get feedback from one ICP that's always what you're going for. You have these very polar opposite styles. The new, I'm trying to biohack, be optimal, et cetera, at home. And I just had a heart attack and I just want this to work. And I've never been involved in my wellness or health.

DAVID E ALBERT (50:01.28)
Absolutely.

DAVID E ALBERT (50:06.624)
you hit it on the nose, the head, your head on the nose, whatever, that's exactly right. And so we're working on products for both, as well as products for really very intense medical applications. So again, as consumer digital health has grown, we've grown with it, but we've also grown...

as digital tools become more more utilized by healthcare professionals. So we keep, as I said, we keep our eye on both areas.

DeAndre + Grant (50:46.691)
David, I always like to wrap up with the question I ask at the end of the podcast, which is around advice for hardware founders. You've built five companies, sold millions of devices, and navigated every phase from startup to scale. What's one thing you wish someone would have told you whenever you were starting off with a live core, even the companies before? And what would you tell a first-time founder entering into a regulated device space?

DAVID E ALBERT (51:11.082)
Well, as you well know, today it's easy to start a startup in deep learning, large language models, AI. The root word of hardware is hard. Building physical atoms is difficult. Building at scale is very difficult. Building it to international, highly specific standards is extremely difficult, and doing it and growing it and scaling it is tough.

So if that's what you want to do, do your homework before you jump in. Know what your requirements are for the markets you're entering and have a fairly good view of what it takes to get there. That's my best advice.

DeAndre + Grant (51:58.167)
I could not agree more. That was even better so than I could have ever said hardware is hard. I love it. Everybody. This is the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host, DeAndre Hericus. David, thank you so much for being on the show. It's an absolute pleasure.

DAVID E ALBERT (52:10.164)
Gentlemen, thank you for this invitation. It's been wonderful.

DeAndre + Grant (52:13.423)
Awesome. Thank you so much. And we will stop the recording and let it finish uploading. Perfect.