Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - A Case for Open-Source Medtech: Interview with Openwater Founder Mary Lou Jepsen

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we had a fascinating chat with Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and Chairman of Openwater, a medtech company developing breakthrough diagnostic and therapeutic wearables for cancer, stroke, mental illness, and beyond. Openwater is rethinking how medical devices are built — not as single-purpose machines, but as flexible platforms that function more like smartphones. A physicist and prolific inventor, Mary Lou holds nearly 300 patents and has launched over 50 products across VR, AR, holography, and consumer electronics. Previously, she led engineering at Intel, Facebook, and Google, taught at MIT, and now serves on the boards of Lear Corporation and Luminar Technologies. She has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people. In this interview, Mary Lou explains why the traditional “one disease, one device” model falls short, and how her team is applying consumer electronics and open-source principles to develop scalable, software-driven tools. Backed by renowned investors including Khosla Ventures, Vitalik Buterin, and Esther Dyson, Openwater is aiming to make advanced care more accessible worldwide.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VII. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Mary Lou Jepsen.

Look, open source is not a synonym for charity. It actually gets us a lot more revenue. We go profitable faster. Every way I did the numbers, we were 100x more profitable faster. And the added benefit of should we succeed, saving more lives more quickly, which I know shouldn't be a goal but is my goal and probably everybody is if it all things being equal. You save more lives or less lives, you'd probably prefer, I think, everybody. I got all my investors to admit that would be a good thing.

Hey, everyone, it's Scott. In this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Mary Lou Jepson, founder and chairman of Open Water, a med tech company developing breakthrough diagnostic and therapeutic wearables for cancer, stroke, mental illness, and beyond. A physicist and prolific inventor, she holds nearly 300 patents and has launched over 50 products across VR, AR, helography, and consumer electronics. Previously, Mary Lou led engineering at Intel, Facebook, and Google, and she has been named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation.

First, apply consumer electronics principles to expose inefficiencies in health care. Mary Lou challenges the assumption that small-scale production ensures quality. In fact, she argues that low volumes often lead to higher costs and less thoroughly tested devices. By designing general purpose platforms that update via software, like smartphone, for example, she aims to show how modularity and scale could unlock better access, lower prices, and faster innovation in clinical care. Second, challenge the regulatory sequence and shift the moat from exclusivity to execution. Mary Lou argues that collecting data seriously slows innovation and locks in higher costs. By enabling parallel data collection and shared safety data sets,

companies can iterate faster and scale sooner. In this model, competitive advantage comes not from regulatory barriers, but from the ability to improve continuously and serve patients. it's better. Third, open source can be a strategic lever in MedTech. Often seen as a threat to profitability, open source is rarely embraced in regulated industries. Open Water takes the opposite view, using openness to accelerate validation, attract collaborators, and reduce duplication. By inviting others to build on their platform, they aim to shift the competitive edge from protecting IP to advancing faster through trust, transparency, and execution. All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of MedSiter

mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health, and other proven medtech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every MedSider interview isn't easy. That's why we created Medsider mentors. These ebook volumes distilled the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest format. To check the latest volume out, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes, plus a treasure trove of other

resources. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. We recently revamped Medsider with swanky new features, especially for our premium members. In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to our entire interview library dating back to 2010. You'll also get Medsider playbooks, curated guides, packed with actionable insights and topics like fundraising, regulatory challenges, reimbursement strategies, and more. And if you're fundraising, don't miss our exclusive investor database featuring over 750 life science VCs, family offices, and angels. We've even created three custom packages to help you with your next fundraise. Learn more about Medsider Mentors and our

premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's dive in the interview. All right, Dr. Mary Lou, Jepson, appreciate you coming on to MedSider Radio. Thanks for having me. Thrill to be here this morning. Absolutely. I mean, you've got such a story background, right? And you're doing some really interesting things with open water. So I think this will be a fun discussion. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this episode. But let's start there. I mean, if you can give us kind of a two to three minute, you know, elevator style kind of overview of your background leading up to founding open water, that'd be great. We're back at you with your background. It's amazing and it's really great to be with you. I was early in

VR and AR in holography and holographic video as a teenager and did that in undergrad and grad school, creating a lot of world firsts in holographic video and city block-sized holograms and founded the first micro display company, did a lot of early VR and AR during the last century and projectors, because prior to that, I don't know if people realized he used to print out transparency sheets to put on overhead projectors is what they were called. We made projectors for conference rooms and then for big screen TVs and really fine slimness because people probably don't know the old style TVs, the big blocks. The diagonal is the depth, which means doors are only 36 inch max. So that's the biggest diagonal you could have for a screen until we invented projections and direct view.

LCD and so forth. So then I went into a lot of consumer electronics because the most expensive component in consumer electronics and what enables us to now call them screens is the screen, which used to be separate from the hardware. My background is also an electrical engineering degree, computer science professor, PhD in physics, also a degree in art in there and worked as an artist for a while because screens are sort of, well, visual. So I understand the human visual. system. And that really moved me into neuroendocrinology from a brain tumor and BCII, meaning not just brain computer interface, but body communication interface. So while I was doing all these, this work, I co-funded as an MIT professor. I made a $100 laptop that with my co-founder

Nicholas Negroponte and one laptop per child to get low-cost laptops to cross the digital divide for low-income and middle-income countries globally to change the equation of what a minister of education could do about the education of the kids in the country. That became the fastest-growing consumer electronic category ever recorded as a not-for-profit open-source effort, which was pretty heady, won a lot of kind of big awards, pretty swirly. And then, then sort of dug in and left MIT and moved to Asia to sort of try to perfect all of consumer electronics from this startup and made some progress in making really low power management systems and really fantastic screen technology that got bought by Google. And so I ended up then

working for Sergei Bryn, who bought the company and running advanced consumer electronics at Google for Sergey, which was pretty great because they had Android and that enabled the scale. people don't realize that maybe Apple makes five times more per device than Android, but Android scale globally is 10 times. So they make more money and they have more impact. And they have more eyeballs by a lot than Apple devices. I happen to live in Silicon Valley where people actually don't know that. So trying to be interested in scale and human behavior, really, I had a little detour because Mark Zuckerberg bought this company called Oculus for a couple billion dollars and was going to scale VR.

And that had been a dream of mine since a teenager. And they had these amazing people, but nobody had ever shipped hardware at scale, distinguished by the screens and the optics. And I had done that my whole career. So I got sucked in and did what I could for two years and then said, you know, we can really use all this stuff we're developing for AR and VR and VR and LiDAR, and that's just the stuff that ends with R, to maybe create body and brain computer interfaces using the fact that not just drugs penetrate our body, light does, sound does, electromagnetics do. And the way we can modulate and

control that, we can steer it any way we want to, we can control for scattering and descatter things. We can do. No one's exploring this. And no one's exploring this because I have that kind of budget at Google and of Facebook. And my bosses, Sergey and Mark said, especially Sergey, who was married to Ann Wajicki at the time, when 23 and me was called a medical device and she was shut down. And he said, the regulation rightly is just too much. Let's just do consumer electronics. Let's just ship stuff people can use and change their lives that way. And so I still budd me because health care is just so expensive. The device that saved my life in MRI in 1995, same size, same cost, just the profit margins are higher.

They're 90%. They're the biggest profit center for hospitals at so-called non-profit hospitals. Anyway, I just thought somebody should try to use what we did in consumer electronics to make it up on volume to try to save more people. And given that, my most successful project was a not-for-profit. I struggled to get health care for most of my career. But when Google buys a company and then kind of Mark Zuckerberg buys you as a company, like you're okay. You can buy your house. You have enough money to live on forever.

Well, maybe not forever, but we haven't achieved that yet. I thought, well, somebody should try this. I don't need the money anymore. My health care is secure for the rest of my life. So I dug into this nine years ago and started to use all of that capability in high volume consumer electronics in mixed signal and analog devices to start this company open water. So cool. And it's almost almost a decade ago, which I imagine you think that's wild. You know, started the company that long ago. But really, really interesting background.

To a certain extent, I mean, I can relate, right? Because I personally have spent most of my career in traditional medical device. So I've seen sort of that side of the table and how sort of the sausage is made. But I had this experience with a company I previously co-founded called Juve, which was, you know, We were the one of the first companies to create a category around in-home photo biomodulation. And so it was a class two device, but commercialized that direct-to-consumer almost entirely online. So, like, it really opened up my eyes to, like, a lot of the challenges, right, in traditional healthcare. You know, and there's different ways about delivering healthcare to the consumer. And it was just a really, really fascinating experience.

And so with that said, tell us a little bit more about open water, because it's a very unique kind of model. it's a very unique company. I mean, we'll certainly link to it in the full write-up on med site. And it's openwater.health is the website. So just as it sounds, openwater. Dot health. But for those that have never heard of the company, give us kind of a middle school kind of age description.

Or, you know, if you're presenting open water to a class of middle schoolers, well, started it, you know, light sound infrared, penetrate the body. But doctors sort of, they're not opposed to physics, but they just learn about biochemistry a lot in, med school, Latin, anatomy, do a lot of rounds, don't sleep. They're totally not opposed to consumer electronics or physics. They just don't really know about them. And I just think it's been an under explored area. And to hear about due and what you did with photo biomodulation at home, I'd like to dig in on that. That'd be really interesting. So I thought, okay, MRI,

1000x cheaper using light and sound and so forth, ultrasound that penetrates our body, infrared light. which is non-ionizing radiation and electromagnetics. At really, really low levels, could we read and write the body and brain? And in fact, spent the first three, four years of the, the first three years, four years of the company, creating systems that could do that, gave a big million-person TED talk and so forth on that technology

with live demos on stage of focusing through flesh to basically turn on a neuron with light. things like that. But at the end of 2019, all these stroke doctors started calling me up saying, hey, that's pretty cool. But, you know, half of my patients die every day, day in, day out. Could you just diagnose stroke more quickly? It looks like you can see blood flow. Number two, cause of death. And I'm like, huh, maybe we could add some real value and real impact there. So we created a prototype, got it in the hospitals. It turns out we can see blood flow 20x better. than anything we can find in the literature with a laser in a camera chip that's shipping in a

smartphone. Not the laser, the camera chip. The laser was a million dollars in the size of a room, but four years later, we've got all this great data and clinical results at Penn and Brown and Hartford Hospital, a bunch of other places, unseen blood flow. So we thought with that as an experiment, like, okay, we want to get to MRI, read, write, thousand inch cheaper wearable, but what should be the first products that can really help move the needle on the healthcare system? system. I happen to live in the U.S. You do two. Leading cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. health expenses. 25% approximately of our economy. You know, it's really expensive. Not a lot of people can afford it. And why not try to use what we did? When you go into a hospital, when I look as a consumer

electronics person, everything I look at is 10, 100, $100,000, a million. How do we scale and general purpose devices and the manufacturing know-how that we have to make things that are more interesting using the manufacturing processes that already exist in multibillion-dollar fabs with really high quality. The FDA considers a quality billed 10 units a year. I was a CTO. I left out. I was a chief technology officer for a division of Intel 21 years ago. Our sample size was 10,000 units. 10 units. There's nothing quality about that. Anyway, so I just like, what can we do with some of the subsets of the technology we're developing to get it out into the market fast? So the other thing we started doing is trying to selectively kill cancer cells with diagnostic levels of ultrasound,

lower than used on pregnant women in their fetuses. And we killed all the cancer cells, first in organoids where we took a bunch of different glioblastoma lines, 16 of them, and ran through frequency sweeps of over many octaves, but at a higher frequency than you can hear in many rhythms. And then we replicated that in mice and moved all of the mice in our study into remission from 100% deadly form of human brain cancer. But we couldn't get into humans because we didn't have, because of safety,

for somebody that's going to be dead statistically in a year, for a level of ultrasound shown safe on for a hundred years on billions of people, including pregnant women and their fetuses for the last 50 years in the U.S., which sounds to somebody like me, insane, just insane as we were going through COVID and they were trying these vaccines. Anyway, but whatever. So we found an IRB at University of Arizona that was written such that we could get in and try to treat it at different frequencies to turn on and off neurons. And we moved nearly half of our patients with severe treatment-resistant depression into remission with the very same device, which has implications for Alzheimer's,

addiction, and all forms of mental disease and all forms of cancer. Then we started a study because somebody funded us to do it on amyloid microclots using the very same device and showed that we could reduce amyloid microclots are the hallmark of acute COVID, as well as type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, and aging itself. They're about 30 microns in size. It's thought, that they can't get through the capillaries. Your capillaries are 5 to 10 microns in size. And so basically they don't call it a stroke, but the cells die around the capillary that's 5 to 10 microns in size because they don't get any oxygen or any nutrients.

That's the theory. So we using low intensity ultrasound, which we can focus anywhere into the body to millimeter size, but just giving a blanket of it, we reduced the number of microclots by 95% and the ones that remained were sub 5 microns in size. So like we've got a general purpose universal device here really. And to on each of these we had people saying, hey, go get clinical approval on this device, but they were all these handmade devices that cost a million dollars, which is kind of expensive. And so people really wanted us to push for a regulatory approval, but I'm a consumer electronics person. And I think, but if we get regulatory approval for

something that costs a million dollars, we can't make any changes to it. So then we spend whatever, five years and whatever, 20, 50 million dollars plus the capitalized cost to get approval. Have we changed anything? The average new therapeutic treatment costs $300,000 as it gets through regulatory. So why not lower the cost of the device first, make them in volume since it has scale approaches, make it open source, enable innovation, iteration, scale, and trust, and sub-1,000 devices by the time we start shipping, start shipping them at 10K instead of a million dollars. We literally save anybody doing this $990,000 out of the gate and enable lots of people to start trials in parallel and share the data. They can just share the safety

data if they wish, but also the efficacy data. Because the reason a new drug costs on average close to $3 billion and a new medical device about three quarters of a billion on average, according to comprehensive studies of all those approved by US FDA over the last end years, capitalized costs, is because we collect a lot of data. Regulatory wants more data. We all want more data. But why do we have to collect it serially? It could be cheaper and faster to collect it. in parallel because people are dying now, not in 20 years. People with those diseases are going to die. And we care about that?

Can't we move it faster? And can't we make it lower cost and scale it? Like, that's what we do in consumer electronics. Like Apple could have sold that iPhone for a million dollars a piece. I know lots of people who would have bought it. But by selling it for about $1,000 a piece, they changed the world. And enable these trillion-dollar gig economy things like Uber. Airbnb and so forth. Do we want to understand more about biology and health and lives or not?

Do we want to use the tools of our time that includes Moore's law? AI is cool. Fantastic. I mean, you have a million PhDs out on some island that you can just talk to for free. That's great. But that still doesn't cure cancer. And so you need something. And so for that, you also need the hardware infrastructure for it. But what we're doing is actually the treatment for cancer is literally pick your poison right now. Chemotherapy or radiation therapy. The chemo kills the cancer, hopefully before it kills you. It depends on your moon system.

But what we're doing is just sending almost like an opera singer can ping a wine glass and just match that note and selectively make that wine glass vibrate or even destroy it. We're doing that at levels that don't harm anything else in the room by analogy, anything else in your body. So at a cellular level, we can pick metastatic cancer cells that all have a mechanical property that's common. All metastatic cells different than other cells in your body have really huge nucleus and really hard small cytoplasms. So we're able to tune in frequencies and rhythms that selectively excite that and just melt the membrane walls. and by doing that, that's called lysis, it releases proteins that vaccinate your body. I don't care if you're an antivax or you're for this vaccine.

The proteins released by your cancer cell, enable your immune system or whatever you have on it to see those proteins and mount an attack against the very cancer you have. That's incredible. So it sounds like, Mary Lou, it sounds like you've got this general purpose device, right? And again, we'll highly encourage everyone to check out the website, openwater.com health again, and just go to the tech. page. But you've got basically this one kind of, you know, you call it general purpose, kind of universal device. But right now you're targeting blood flow, neuromodulation, oncolysis,

which I think you kind of just described there. And then, and then acoustic optic imaging. So kind of another kind of imaging kind of capability. Those are the kind of the four buckets. Well, it looks like we can do pathogen deactivation, like selectively maybe kill COVID without arming anything else. And also, as we look at the field, there's, We don't stand alone. There's people using these million-dollar systems they've built over years to turn on and off stem cells, to rejuvenate senescent cells to stop cytokine storms. And yet, it's very hard for a million-dollar unit to ship.

It's much easier to ship a thousand-dollar unit. I know we're selling it for 10-K right now, but that's because it's small volume production until we got through clinical trials. But yeah, it's the first use of therapeutic ultrasound at diagnostic levels was in the 50s. But, you know, a million people have been treated with it for a variety of cancers at higher intensities over the last 20 years. And we figured out how to lower the intensity so it can be at home use, wearable use for, you know, addiction. Like, yeah, it's a general purpose device that spans cancer mental disease, but also things of the immune system. And it looks like pathogen.

And yes, in addition, cardiovascular disease, we can see blood flow, but we can see any movement. We did a two-year study at Penn & Brown, seeing if we could detect large vessel occlusion stroke, which is the severe type of stroke. If your large vessel is occluded, it blocks all the blood flow downstream. So if you can get the right therapy within a two-hour window, 90% chance of no neural deficit number two killer in the world. But in this study, we could see tremors and other movements. So we think that we could see kidney flow, lymph flow, anything moving in micromotions

of your body because the way our technology works is we're capturing, sorry, I fell in love with holography when I was kid, we're doing holograms. We now have camera chips in all of our smartphones that cost a buck, and they cost a buck because it's not much silicon. And so the pixel sizes are the size of the wavelength of light. That means you can record the waves in the wavelength of light. And fundamentally, that's more information. But it really looks like waves on the camera chip.

If you blow up the thing, when we're using really special laser light that's called highly, it's highly coherent and we pulse it because your body moves. But it looks like waves on the ocean. And we can read those waves like a sailor can read the waves on the ocean and know where the fish are, know where the land is, no whatever is. but we can see your blood flow really accurately or any micromotion whatsoever in your body that's not been possible to see before. So that's great for stroke detection or maybe even, you know,

long COVID detection with the microcloth theory of it blocking capillaries, but many other diseases as well. So not just blood pressure, but flow. I'm right there with you. This kind of, I'm generalizing, but this sort of field of using light wavelengths or sound frequencies to modulate various sort of cellular activities. It's like, it's so untapped. And I think, I mean, we're starting to see some sub-movement, I think, kind of in traditional medical device world,

it's, you know, there's some some neuromodulation devices, right, that are that are sort of coming online, so to speak, right? You've got sort of a burgeoning field of bioelectric medicine. But yeah, I'm right there with you. This is like a huge, a hugely untapped kind of opportunity. But to your point, in order to like get the, you know, to get these sort of devices in hands of consumers at scale, you know, if you don't kind of approach it from a consumer, a consumer sort of framework, you know, you can't really realize a lot of those. Can't make new chips. We made new, we've made really complicated new lasers, new transducers. You don't get to be in these $10 billion fabs. If you ship 10 units a year for 13 years,

it's not Moore's Law. Moore's Law is everybody marching in these two-year increments to improve the technology. And so you're thrown out of the fab. So, you know, some of my friends will buy your own fab. I'm like, okay, so that's, you get a cheap fab, but then can you scale, get the quality, inexpensive fab. That's like a billion dollars, five years, capitalized, or maybe you can do it on a smaller budget and just spend 200 million.

But still, like, it's five years. Like, why not just design it in the best factories in the world that exist? I mean, I built factories in the U.S. I'm all for we could get hot button issue nationalism. I'm for not getting on the plane to go to Asia all the time and every single night of the week being on calls. But the reality is I built factories in the last century in the U.S., but the funding was taken away from that for the last 25 years, as we know.

And so the reality is if you want to ship product, people are dying now. If you want to ship product now, we're not actually in China. know we're in a lot of other Asian countries. But you go and work with those factories that exist, you convince the manufacturers who live on 2 to 4% gross margin, literally, that they can make more margin by entering health care. And their employees will work harder than they ever had because if this works, they might be part of the team that cures cancer or cares mental disease.

And their investors will like it because they're diversifying. And so you convince them to take a risk on you. with your track record and everything you have. And then you throw everything you can at the project. And you kind of ignite and catalyze everybody you can all around the world to do that, including ministers of health and so forth. And so, yeah, so how can we look at this given, I mean, just the world we live in with these drug shortages, for example, for why are we having drug shortages?

Can't they figure that out? But, you know, we don't have those problems in consumer electronics. We make general purpose devices that can be changed in the software layer. So you have different apps that are the treatments that use the same device that's low cost. So that shouldn't be new, but is. I mean, okay, we have our step trackers and so forth, the heartbeat rates, which were invented in, I think, the 1840s. Yeah.

But they're still now. You're right on. So like kind of certainly back around to the uniqueness of the open water model. Sounds like I can I can go and purchase a $10,000, you know, a device for $10,000, right, directly through open water. But you're- Absolutely. We're shipping now. Yeah.

But you're open sourcing. Although we're sold out for the next six months to get in line. We sort of said, they're going to do a group build. Everybody get their orders in. Thank you, everybody that did. That helped us get many, really great manufacturing partners for this to show the excitement. And we're shipping them as soon as we're. we can make them. But we're scale. It's like exponential scaling right now as we go through them. So yeah,

they're out the door. Because you've open source the model, someone else, you can, in essence, someone else can come to open water and say, I want to, I want to focus on oncolysis as an example, or blood flow. Sure. Make a custom unit or whatever or use ours. I mean, you can make your own raspberry pie. You can just buy one and you make it, but it's up to you. And so we still make money by making more of something for every 10x more you make of something. It's a slight exaggeration. to say it's 10x cheaper. We enjoy a portion of that as profit, but we are kept honest. We can't gouge. You can just go take the design to somebody else. It might cost you $10, $20 million in two years to do it. So we might own the long tail. It depends how well we execute, what competition

we get. But, you know, I've got a smartphone. This was pretty unique in 2008. Now they all look like this, right? And everybody makes money on it. So like, make the pie. bigger. We have this huge problem called health care. A World War II number of people die globally every year, 55 million people and the 1% can get, or you may amortized over insurance, maybe 10% of rich country populations get good care. You know, there's billions of people. Why don't we just solve it together and learn more about biology, about disease, about health, by doing this in parallel at scale and it's the handheld hospital. I mean, yeah, we have two devices shipping down. Ultimately, it'll be all integrated. We think in something like a smartphone that's wearable. But the smartphone,

the modern smartphone, has lots of different modules in it. It's got four camera chips. It's got nine radios. It's got an ultrasound array. It's got an array of 250 lasers in it. It's got an accelerometer so you know where it is. It's got all of that stuff in a thousand dollar price. There's no reason that can't happen, and there's no reason we can't scale it out to full consumer electronics. There's a concern about this moat, the notion of a moat, which is important when it takes close to 30 years to ship a new drug. The vaccine for COVID being the exception, not the rule, but we're dealing with a hangover with that, with inflation and so forth, with the money.

Try to save what could have been the extinction of humanity, right? So it just seems to take longer. They call it literally E-Room's law in health care, which is Moore's law spelled backwards because more ends with an E. So you imagine it upside down. Because it takes exponentially longer and more money to get a regulatory approval. We all want more data. A regulator wants more data.

A doctor and the patient want more data. We want less risk for taking something for it. But why not collected in parallel with these general purpose devourable? We've come upon through nine years of effort and trying for a general purpose device. It didn't come out of nowhere. We didn't pick a single rare disease, which I'd say every single one of the billionaires on my cap table that my investors have told me to do. Pick a single rare disease, get that approval first and go and ship that.

But then you're doing a million dollar solution for a single rare disease. I don't know. I'm older. I've been doing this a long time. I'm 60. I don't have 30 years to ship the damn product, or I hope I do, but like, that's ridiculous. Let's go faster. Let's do it the way the way technology does. Bill Gates said over my dead body for open source. He just open source the first MS DOS, finally. But Microsoft embraced it even. You know, Google's got Android, Apple runs on Linux, AWS is open source, Microsoft bought GitHub,

IBM's profits are sort of ruled by Red Hat. Open source is the engine of innovation for scale globally and technology. There's closed source stuff on top of it. But we're missing that part in this world where a nonprofit hospital in the U.S., a room can cost $10,000 a night. Legally, it might be nonprofit, but in actuality, people are making profit on that. Undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Yeah.

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