Biosense, the 2020 Story: Part 1
--
First, a little prologue. I remember as last year wound down Anil and I went to get some pizza to celebrate the end of a rough week. We talked about how long it had been so long since I’d last written anything. I absolutely love writing — but with everything going on I guess I just forgot how to reflect. Not healthy. Finally, 3 months into 2021 I’ve had some time to think about how much happened in the span of 12 months. With a couple personal things clouding my thoughts for these last few days, I figured this would be a great time for me to refocus and attempt to get a grasp on a hell of year, both to clear my own head and setup some plans for the rest of 2021. I’m splitting the story into parts to make it easier to write and read. Enjoy!
Let start with a quick recap, just so you get the irony —
I’ve spoken a few times about how my motivation with this entrepreneurship stuff is derived from Nietzsche’s “will to power” thesis: that the ultimate driving force behind our humanity is not some desire to maximize pleasure, nor to discover and pursue a static meaning for existence, but rather to have the power to overcome oneself, others, or the environment.
There are much surer ways than creating a startup to gain power over others and the environment, especially since most startups fail horribly, but I felt building something was the surest way to gain power over myself. I saw the process as the most efficient way to expose myself to a massive range of experiences and emotions. Perhaps by broadening this bandwidth of “exposure to life” I’d build the power to face personal dilemmas later in life.
I still strongly believe in this approach to living, but its funny now that when you ask for life to give you experiences, a pandemic might just show up. Be careful what you wish for I guess. With the virus and Biosense, 2020 was the most experientially dynamic year of my life yet. Not the most enjoyable year, but certainly jam packed with novelty.
Life was pretty great before corona arrived. In December 2019 we’d just raised $100K from 8VC — a bigger budget than I’d ever seen in my life. None of us expected the investment. I remember the deal came through on the last day of the fall semester while I was studying for a final. I immediately called Anil and Venkat (and my dad) and then I just hung out in the courtyard behind 1981 (a coffee shop in Berkeley) in complete shock. Waves of anxiety and ecstasy came and went, rendering me unable to stand straight for a good 15 minutes. Just pure shock. Then, for the next couple days I felt invincible. We could drop out now!
After putting on lawyer hats and doing some heavy paperwork, we booked tickets to Ann Arbor, the first stop on a trip that we hoped would include Indianapolis, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Manhattan, and Baltimore. We had relationships with academic researchers in all these cities and planned to spend sometime in their labs, asking questions and learning about deep rooted problems by doing research with them. At the same time we’d build our technology, have them test it, and iterate based on feedback. Seemed like a great plan!
It was a pretty terrible plan. First, we’d come to learn that academic researchers had very little money to spend and really loved to encourage folks our age to be interested in science. We spent a lot of time hearing about how great were for pursuing such a bold project at this age and spent no time making money. Their comments and were almost too encouraging, pushing us in all kinds of directions without a solid foundation. We worked on entirely irrelevant aspects of our technology, such as live data streaming and the web portal, when our core functionality was absent. Communicating with devices required massive amounts of moment-to-moment management during studies and many of them failed horribly almost every time we tried to use them. Bluetooth range was terrible, and we had to hand solder batteries every time. Users couldn’t really use our technology, which meant any user feedback we got was empty. Attempting to be constantly on the move meant we had no infrastructure — no “home base” to assess and overcome these fundamental issues.
In Michigan we’d work 12 hours a day sitting in the lounge of Anil’s building (or, when we need a change of view, we’d drag our monitor and toolbox to a room on campus) trying to gain some control of the situation. The pressure was on 24/7 to have a completely functional product ready before the next study had to be run. The problem was we had little clue what being functional actually meant. Without clear, informed design specifications and priorities, the possibilities of what could be done were endless. There was never not any work to do. Almost daily we exhausted ourselves. We’d go to sleep at odd hours feeling like shit because nothing worked. I’d consider that whole period some of the most tiring days of my life so far; and they arguably had no productive outcome.
Mornings in Michigan involved dashing through the snow to ultimately useless meetings with faculty, quickly filling our thermos’s with free blueberry flavored coffee from the 7–11 downstairs to wake us up. We meal-prepped a ton and also took advantage of snack-pass to get some dirt cheap pizza and latte’s. I slept on Anil’s floor and we hung with his housemates and friends from SEP, which is a college entrepreneurship organization that Venkat, Anil and I all joined independently (kind of a weird coincidence). I went to a club with some of them one night and drank vodka mixed with pickle juice. That was fun.
In February we went to Santa Barbara for a few weeks, which was a nice break from the Michigan weather. Anil and I slept in a shack on the beach that was a part of Venkat’s house there. (In fact, he almost set in on fire the night before I arrived). We’d flown from Michigan to LA, and then rented a car to drive up. If you ever get a chance to drive from LA to SB I highly recommend it. It’s a beautiful drive, especially with the setting sun as a backdrop. Venkat’s shack was unfurnished so we had to buy an air mattress to sleep on, and his kitchen was kind of dysfunctional so we also bought an insta-pot to cook out of as well as a mini-fridge. Another great plan, except we never really figured out how to get the instant pot working well and gave up after one really shitty meal. Instead for 3 weeks we survived on vending machine snacks, the occasional meal out, dining hall food when we could get it, and a shit ton of alcohol.
Seriously — Venkat’s house on Del Playa was run like a frat house. We had to “pledge” to enter on our first night there. I spent much of that night throwing up on the beach, which is a pretty good be metaphor for Biosense at the time. The table in his living room was always occupied by many different kinds of powder, so we everyday we’d lug our equipment a solid mile onto campus and then lug it back late at night. You can see how getting any work done at all took a lot of effort, and we actually left a little early because of how difficult it was to just survive compared to Michigan.
There were definitely some positives. One night I went to a mountain party, which is a bunch of college kids doing drugs and throwing makeshift sets on top of a mountain until sunrise. Insane night — no lie, Santa Barbarians are some of the absolute best people to party with.
We also started thinking heavily about expanding past academia into pharmaceuticals, where we were starting to realize all the money was. There was still a lot of momentum to keep focusing on academia, but I had my first few conversations with industry folks while in Santa Barbara. With Venkat there and no immediate pressure to run studies, we made a little progress on a few core technology issues, putting together basic processing scripts and organizing the filesystem. We still felt like shit most of the time because nothing really worked, but the beach air was therapeutic. I have fond memories of walking back from the campus computer lab, singing “Bob the Builder” at the top of our lungs with the wind howling in the background, while swinging around our orange toolbox. I learned a new word — “fried”. It’s come to describe a state where you’re so mentally fucked that all you can do is silly stuff like singing “Bob the Builder” to gain some kind of pleasure. (If you don’t like singing then you can also watch Seinfeld to un-fry yourself.) It’s a word we use a lot at Biosense, which is probably not a good thing.
After Santa Barbara we stayed in Berkeley for two weeks, which were pretty uneventful. From Berkeley, we went back to Michigan for a bit. By now coronavirus had started making some noise. Most labs were closing down and traveling was difficult. Around mid-march we decided that it would be best to hunker down in Fremont and ride the pandemic out (keep in mind, we only thought it would last for a couple weeks at most). Anil went straight home, and I took an Amtrak to Chicago. After staying with a friend in the city for a night, I took a long bus to Indianapolis, and then caught a second bus to Bloomington (which ended up being the wrong city). Our most significant champion was a professor (Woody Hopf) at the University of Indiana, and it was important we meet him and install some equipment so that we could remotely run a number of experiments we’d planned with him once our technology was functional. This trip was a complete mess. First I arrived to the wrong city, then I missed the bus back to the right city, and also I left all my luggage at a bus stop. With the help of an extremely nice Uber driver I was able to install the equipment at Stark Neuroscience Center in Indianapolis. We’d cleaned a few things up over the previous weeks that made the possibility acquiring useful data from this group of studies likely, so we were all pretty excited. Woody drove me to the airport and I caught a flight home.
I was super hungry on the flight because all the restaurants at the airport had closed down. Corona was very real, but I don’t remember feeling too bad. I figured we’d be back at it in a month or so, maybe this time in New York or Washington DC, continuing this journey of talking to tons of academics and trying to develop core features at the same time. In the meantime I was relieved to be taking a break from traveling, especially because I was starting to realize how bad I was at it.
I consider these first three months of 2020 the Biosense “exploration phase” because we honestly made very little actual progress. We did become aware of deep-rooted problems in our thinking, our work-process, and in our technology. In the coming months we would discuss, wrestle, and defeat these problems. Stay tuned for Part 2.
