MIT Media Lab alum Alex Westner has glasses that show captions to hearing-impaired people during real-time conversations. His approach is to refine existing technologies to deliver an excellent experience in one use case. Loved the focus and his dedication to detail.
Highlights:
Alex Westner wearing XanderGlasses
Sal Introduces Alex Westner, Sound Technologist & Founder of Xander – Glasses with Captions for the Hearing-Impaired
Xander Seeks to Assemble Existing Technology into a Great User Experience
XanderGlasses Are Great on Privacy Because Nothing Is Recorded
Xander’s Speech Recognition Is Built on Kaldi, the same Opensource Platform Alexa Uses
Xander Trims Features of Augmented Reality Devices to Focus on It Use Case
Maybe There’s an Annual $200 Million Market for XanderGlasses
XanderGlasses Are Certainly Cooler than Hearing Aids (Faint Praise!)
Xander’s Go to Market Approach
What If Google Gets into the Business?
Alex Westner’s Entrepreneurial Journey
An Easter Egg for Raul
Alex Westner’s Parting Thoughts
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of, “Augmented Reality for Hearing Loss”
Guest: Alex Westner
Sal Daher: This podcast is brought to you by Purdue University Entrepreneurship, and by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish and Richardson. Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations of Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we have Alex Westner with us. Welcome, Alex.
Alex Westner: Thanks Sal. Thanks for inviting me, happy to be here with you.
Sal Introduces Alex Westner, Sound Technologist & Founder of Xander – Glasses with Captions for the Hearing-Impaired
Sal Daher: This is a very special podcast. Raul, pay attention! You're going to love this. There's a special surprise for you in the second half. Alex Westner is a sound technologist, and a founder. He is the founder of Xander, which is basically caption glasses to help people with hearing loss. They show real-time captions of the conversation that you're engaged in, right in your field of view, so that it's not AI, it's-- what's the term for it?
Alex Westner: Augmented Reality.
Sal Daher: Augmented Reality, AR.
Alex Westner: Yes.
Sal Daher: It's really awesome. Anyway, Alex, tell us what problem Xander is addressing?
Alex Westner: Xander is looking at this problem of hearing loss, and what we learned as we started studying the problem is the solution, which is hearing aids, is not going to be enough to do it. We've been looking at hearing aids for decades, and hearing aids are now even using machine learning algorithms to do more advanced noise reduction, and picking out the speech from noise, et cetera. But just the nature of hearing loss, it's both physiological and neurological. We're starting to believe that hearing aids may never be enough to actually completely solve the problem for people.
Xander is saying, "Look, we almost have a mandate to say that if we're going to help them, the increasing population that is experiencing the effects of hearing loss, we have to provide other information that's not in your ears. We have to provide visual information now that we have the ability to do so. The coming of these smart glasses and augmented reality glasses is a golden opportunity for us to get started today to provide additional information that's visual, that's easy to follow when you can't hear very well. We sort of our slogan is when you can't hear what people are saying, Xander is going to help you see what people are saying.
Sal Daher: Awesome. Alex, can you describe for us, and also, if you can send us some graphic assets of the device, any videos and so forth, we'd love to have them, and to share them, put them on the webpage. But anyway, can you describe how the device looks, and how it works?
Alex Westner: Sure. So, the device, we're not inventing the glasses themselves. Creating glasses is challenging, but we did find a couple of companies out there that have been successfully making glasses in a form that we're able to add our use case. The company we've been partnering with is called Vuzix, V-U-Z-I-X. They're based in Rochester, New York, and their recent pair of glasses the Blade[s] (https://www.vuzix.com/products/vuzix-blade-smart-glasses-upgraded). They look more like a thick pair of goggles, I would say. Between goggles and glasses, they're a hybrid in between those two continua.
Sal Daher: Glaggles. We'll call them glaggles.
Alex Westner: We'll call them glaggles.
Sal Daher: I should mention one thing right now. I met Alex at Walnut Ventures. He pitched at Walnut Ventures, and I found what he was saying very, very interesting. I needed to talk to him more, and to follow up with the podcast. Investors, particularly like this aspect: Alex is doing this in a very low capital or capital sparing way, by not trying to reinvent the whole thing. He's using existing components, and really buckling down on the stuff that where his expertise can be of most value, so please continue.
Xander Seeks to Assemble Existing Technology into a Great User Experience
Alex Westner: No, thank you. That's great
Sal Daher: The device that you're sourcing from an existing vendor...
Alex Westner: Right, right. They're not perfect, but like you say, there's a great mantra from Merrill Evans, who's an advocate in this space, and she has a t-shirt that's “progress over perfection”. I think that's a great mantra, especially in the accessibility tech community where you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to solve every single problem. You just have to do enough to make a difference, and that's why we're excited to get out.
So, the way it's going to work is, basically, if you were a customer of XanderGlasses, (https://www.xander.tech/) would ship you a pair of glasses. You would take them out of the box, you would turn on the power button, and that's it. That's all you have to do, and you put the glasses on, and you start seeing the captions of what other people are saying floating in space about three feet in front of you.
Sal Daher: [laughs] This is like in a movie where you're reading people's minds. But actually, you're reading what they're saying. Alex Westner: Yes. That's really the effect. We had to do some technology pivots to make that experience so simple. Basically, we've had to put the entire speech recognition technology onto the glasses. We're not relying on a phone, we're not relying on a cloud, or Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi, or passwords, or anything. That's what we've learned in working with customers, and taking this out on the road. It's surprising how often you don't have a good sell signal, and boy, we're making a product to help people Have conversations. Those conversations can be anywhere.
They can be in deep buildings. They can be in hospitals, they can be in clinics, they could be in the subway, they could be in the airplane. There are so many places where we found, you just don't have a good connection. Moving the tech onto the glasses will allow for three critical benefits.
One is simplicity. The fact that I could send you a pair of glasses, and all you have to do is turn them on, that's amazing.
Two is reliability. We're not depending on any other technology or a cell signal.
XanderGlasses Are Great on Privacy Because Nothing Is Recorded
Three is privacy. Everybody asks us about privacy when it comes to AR glasses, and smart glasses. It's because, it started with Google Glass, and the awareness. "Oh wait, do you have a camera on your face? Are you recording me? Wearing tech glasses does raise privacy issues, but for us, we're not recording anything. We're not even connected to the cloud. We're the only product that can claim, there is absolutely zero privacy issues. There is no chance of any of your conversations being stolen by anyone else.
Sal Daher: It's totally synchronous. It means that the software is not learning?
Alex Westner: Right? Not today. [chuckles] We do have a longer-term vision where we can get into that.
Sal Daher: It's interesting. This is like contrast between Alexa and Siri. Is Siri still cloud-based? I think it is. I don't think it's resident on the devices.
Alex Westner: Google and Apple are starting to do a bit of a hybrid, where they're trying to do some of the model locally, and then some in the cloud. Google, I know especially, I don't know as much about what Apple's doing, but I am aware of, for example, on Google's pixel phones, they do have a local speech recognition library running on their Pixel phones because they're manufacturing them, and they can do that. It's not part of the standard Android build that other device makers get.
Sal Daher: I think Alexa originally was engineered so that the speech recognition was local. They could get very good speech recognition, and Siri was terrible.
Xander’s Speech Recognition Is Built on Kaldi, the same Opensource Platform Alexa Uses
Alex Westner: We're building our own speech recognition, and we're building on top of the same opensource platform that Alexa was built from.
Sal Daher: Awesome. What is that platform called?
Alex Westner: It's called Kaldi. K-A-L-D-I.
Sal Daher: K-A-L-D-I. Kaldi?
Alex Westner: Yes. Most commonly used in academic settings for research. It's led by people at Johns Hopkins University. They are one of the leading universities in this area of speech recognition.
Sal Daher: Very good. Your speech recognition is built on an open-source KALDI platform. Phenomenal. I've had a interview with Jay Batson, who was very instrumental in building a very powerful open source platform. I'm trying to remember the name of it. It's the one that's used in basically the backend of all the big websites, and it's just, the economics and the advantage of open-source software are phenomenal, Drupal.
Alex Westner: Oh, right.
Sal Daher: We oldsters eventually remember things. [chuckles] We never forget anything. We just may take time to remember. [chuckles] he headed up a company that was doing development on top of Drupal, and it's extremely reliable. It's hard to work with, but it's very, very sturdy.
Alex Westner: Our idea is, we're not gonna try to become the next Siri, Alexa, Microsoft, Google in terms of the capability, but we are trying to tune this technology for our use case, which is, we call it conversational speech to text, or conversational speech recognition. A lot of these platforms are trained for enterprise use cases, and call centers, or just transcribing YouTube videos.
Our use case is really conversations, and when you really listen to how conversations go in the real world, they're pretty sloppy. We don't speak in like a script on a TV show, or a movie. We use very basic vocabulary. We interrupt each other a little bit. There's a lot of strange pauses. We don't finish sentences. [chuckles] There's a lot of interesting things happen in a real conversation. We're interested furthering the field there, because that's what our application is. There is opportunity for us to continue to develop IP in this area.
Sal Daher: Okay. We beat up on Apple in their incarnation of Siri, but in a sense, what you're doing is sort of like Steve Jobs coming in and having MP3 players were a dime a dozen, but he created the iPod, which was a really well-designed MP3 player, which created the whole business. So, there's potential for having a good user interface, being really consequential.
Alex Westner: I see what you're saying. There's a little bit of an analogy. I think, if you look at, AR glasses and smart glasses are really early right now, and they've just started to appear to general consumers in the last few years. The companies making them I think are just kind of guessing at what those features are. For some reason, Siri activated on my laptop. I don't know why. I think she heard us talking about her.
Sal Daher: We were speaking ill of Siri, and she activates.
Alex Westner: She heard us talking, that's crazy.
Sal Daher: I hope Alexa doesn't chime in.
Xander Trims Features of Augmented Reality Devices to Focus on It Use Case
Alex Westner: That's crazy. Anyway. MP3 players had all of these features, and it was sort of this kitchen sink experience, and Steve Jobs and Apple made it simple. I think that's the part that where I think we're similar in goals, is these smart glasses have all kinds of features, but we're trying to trim out everything for one specific use case. We just want to be able to provide captions for people with hearing loss. We're not trying to simulate whales jumping out of floor, or play games, or record videos, or send stories to the web. We're really just, we're not trying to create the metaverse, we're literally just trying to provide this health benefit.
That actually enables us to provide something useful, and compelling, but also simple, because we don't have to solve 10 different use cases for 10 different customer types. It's one use case, one customer, and that allows us to create this nice experience.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Can you tell us where you are right now with the business? Let's talk about where you are, and how you plan to make money.
Alex Westner: Sure. We have working prototypes. We do need to spend some time to get our accuracy up. We're starting with some baseline that you get out of the box, and we have ways to go to improve that. Not years, I would say months, not years, but the rest of the prototype and the experience is done. All we need to do is just make sure we can tune that engine, and we're ready to go. We're planning to launch in Q2, Q3 of next year. We will use, it's basically a direct-to-consumer one-time purchase model. It's not a subscription, it's not complicated.
People already are experienced in having to buy their own hearing aids. Not everybody gets coverage for hearing aids. Oftentimes, you don't have insurance helping you out to buy hearing aids, so a pair of hearing aids can cost you-- the average cost of a pair of hearing aids is $4,600. They can cost as much as $6,000 per year. Most of the time, they're not covered by insurance. People having had to buy hearing aids, when they say, "Oh, well we're selling these glasses, and they could be $1,500 or $2,000," they say, "oh, that's nothing. For a typical consumer product, that sounds outrageous, but when you're coming from the experience that our customers have had, it's actually quite reasonable.
You'll be able to use a Flex Spending Account, or a Health Savings Account just like you would use if you're employed, and you have an insurance benefit to buy glasses through a special pre-tax account. We can offer payment plans, but the other exciting development is we're also pursuing insurance reimbursement through... There are some supplemental insurance coverages and plans that actually do cover hearing aids. We're starting the path of, how do we get our glasses into the vendor lists so that when a vendor offers a set of hearing aids to a health plan, we would show up on that list as well with some kind of benefit?
The fact that we are developing our glasses as a single-feature appliance again also helps us in this regard. If we were making a general-purpose pair of smart glasses, it's not a health product, then it's just--
Sal Daher: It's hard to convince people to get something they might be using for watching television or something.
Alex Westner: Exactly.
Maybe There’s an Annual $200 Million Market for XanderGlasses
Sal Daher: Instead of just engaging with people. Okay. All right, give an idea. Ideally, if everyone knew about your device yes, how many people could use it in the United States right now?
Alex Westner: In the United States, there are 48 million people with hearing loss. That's about one out of every six adults.
Sal Daher: How many of those have enough hearing loss where they would go to the point of getting a $2,000 device?
Alex Westner: 17% of that population owns hearing aids. 17% of that-- what are we doing? Some quick math? It's like 15 million or?
Sal Daher: 17% of 48 million. Let's call it a fifth of 50 million. It's something like 10 million, right?
Alex Westner: Let's say there's 10 million people who have already pursued the path. They've already started buying hearing aids, so they're already convinced enough that they have to do something about the problem. That's 10 million people that have started their journey. I think that is probably anyone in that area is a good customer for us. If we get even narrower--
Sal Daher: Every year, how many are added? The 48 million that you mentioned, how many new people are coming-- [crosstalk]
Alex Westner: It's actually growing. It's growing because of the, population is growing. The aging population is actually expanding. People are living longer.
Sal Daher: What I'm saying, steady state. How many new people are added to that 48 million every year? Is it 3%? Let's say 3%. Populations used to grow at 3% a year. They were aging at around 3% a year. Let's say that's a million and a half people. Is that right? Yes. It's a million and a half. A million and a half people a year are being added to the population of hearing loss.
Alex Westner: Sure.
Sal Daher: Let's say one in five of them are going to get hearing aids. Let's say you saturate the existing market. Your steady-state possible sales, new sales in a year would be something in the neighborhood of 20% of that one and a half million, 300,000 people. You'd be looking, trying to address 300,000 people every year in sales with this $2,000 device. If a third of the market uses your device, that's 100,000 people a year. 100,000 times 2,000 is $200 million market, ongoing. That steady state, but initially, you're going to get a big bulge of sales.
Alex Westner: Sure.
Sal Daher: It's a pretty considerable market. [chuckles]
Alex Westner: It's a pretty big market. There's also the potential, even in going out and talking to people, we've learned that nobody really wants a hearing aid, and so, we also have an opportunity to reach people where our product could be their first device. All the estimates you just ran through are for people who already started their journey, but there's the 80% of the folks who haven't yet bought a hearing aid, but they're suffering.
Sal Daher: They're Xander-first. So, they're caption glasses first?
XanderGlasses Are Certainly Cooler than Hearing Aids (Faint Praise!)
Alex Westner: Exactly. Because it's affordable. It's much cooler than a pair of hearing aids. It doesn't have the stigma associated with the problem the way hearing aids do. A lot of people we've spoken to who are experiencing hearing aids are saying, "I would much rather buy your glasses than go down the path of hearing aids." We say, "Thank you very much. Also, please get your ears checked out by a professional, because you never know what could be causing your hearing loss." We're kind of playing both sides to say, "Sure, let's get started on your hearing journey. You should buy a pair of glasses from us, and also, you should take care of your ears and make sure that there's nothing else going on." It's important.
Sal Daher: That is cool. I can even imagine a dictation. You're captioning, and then, for people who have mild hearing loss, it separates the sound, and it reads to them in their ear what people are saying with a voice that's in the right frequency that they can understand and all this stuff.
Alex Westner: There's a lot of possibilities, for sure.
Sal Daher: I'm an investor in a company called XMOS, and they bought a company founded here in Massachusetts. A professor from UNH created an algorithm for separating noise and sounds, mathematically separating it. It was very, very effective, because usually, you're familiar with this. Filtering, it's just basically cutting frequencies and things like that, but what this does is it mathematically decomposes the different types of sounds, and then it can just subtract them without subtracting sound, but they're going in a direction of industrial uses would be something like having voice control in a car.
You're sitting in the passenger seat, and knows that you're the passenger, or it knows that you're someone in the back, they're VC-funded, and they have sales, and so forth. I mean, serious sales. But the technology is there to do the sound separation and so forth. But it's just, it's very, very hard lift, and something very lightweight, like what you're doing, I think has a lot of potential here.
Alex Westner: Right. I think one of our biggest challenges in all of this is battery life.
Sal Daher: Ah, yes.
Alex Westner: Wearing a wireless pair of glasses on your head. Battery life is a huge issue. We can imagine all kinds of interesting algorithms and technologies to throw at this problem. Like, "Hey, let's also do lipreading from the camera that's inside of the glasses," right?
Sal Daher: Absolutely. But you've got to be power-sparing. Your caption glasses, how long does it run for?
Alex Westner: Our initial prototype of our onboard is about two hours of talk time. We are trying to get that to three or four if we can. Our design goal was, "Get me through the Thanksgiving dinner with my family."
Sal Daher: Awesome.
Alex Westner: That was our design goal.
Sal Daher: We're recording this by the way, the day before Thanksgiving 2022. Thanksgiving is on our minds here. Some Thanksgiving in the future, it's going to be a very helpful device.
Alex Westner: There are ways to extend that battery life. The company that makes the glasses also makes this really interesting device that's a battery necklace. It's basically a lithium-ion battery that you just comfortably wear around your neck. And it actually is nice and comfortable. It connects via USB to the back of your glasses. If you needed these all day for a job, for example, and you really needed 8 to 10 hours of talk time, you could actually wear this battery pack, and you could have an all-day use. The battery is not, probably just tuck it under your shirt even. It doesn't even need to be exposed. That's another option for all this.
Sal Daher: Here's, help the transcriber session. Xander, the company is X-A-N-D-E-R. Your name is Alex, A-L-E-X, Westner, W-E-S-T as in Tom, N-E-R. The name of company, the manufacturer device is?
Alex Westner: Vuzix, V-U-Z-I-X.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Oh, are you comfortable talking about how many people are using the device right now?
Alex Westner: We don't have devices out there in the world. Actually, I have one. We gave away our first pair of glasses last week to someone who is likely going to be a lead investor for us.
Sal Daher: Hot dog.
Alex Westner: That warranted us giving him his own pair of glasses. That was the first time anyone, not me, actually owns a pair of glasses.
Sal Daher: Other than publicity here on the podcast, what kind of help could really help you move the ball?
Xander’s Go to Market Approach
Alex Westner: That's a great question, because we're getting closer to thinking about, "How do we get to market?" We are likely going to launch with a Kickstarter campaign. We have to buy a bunch of glasses, and we don't want to have to ask our investors for extra money at the start just to buy our first round of inventory when something like Kickstarter is available. Basically, we're going to use Kickstarter to test demand, and how many people can we reach, and how many glasses do we need to order in our first run? Really, we're just starting to plan out our Kickstarter launch campaign. Where people can help is, we need to build that mailing list so that when we launch the campaign, we have thousands of people that we can email on day one, and really get a strong, like, "Let's meet our goal in 48 hours," that kind of thing.
Sal Daher: Listeners, if anybody with hearing problems, you might go on Kickstarter, get them on Kickstarter, even if you don't, give them a Kickstarter gift subscription, if such a thing exists, and get those people signed up. Alex, have you thought about equity crowdfunding?
Alex Westner: We have, but we were already further along in our own journey of building this round that it was a little too late to start on equity crowdfunding. We looked into it a little bit, it just didn't feel like we're going to have to switch gears to the point where I didn't want to disrupt our existing committed investors.
Sal Daher: Another person with a sound background that's been on the podcast, Sam Bogoch, he's a friend. He's the founder of Axle.ai, and he's a big proponent, even after they had raised money in their seed round, he had a lot of success on Republic with his equity crowdfunding. You might think about that because this is a natural, this is something that's very accessible to people. Not that the population who's investing in Republic needs support with their hearing because they tend to be young, but they have parents.
Alex Westner: I would say that partner organizations have been extremely helpful to us. In your call for help, I would say what other organizations could partner with us. Two examples. We are in with the VA... Veterans...tinnitus and hearing loss are the number one and two health concerns amongst veterans in the US. They were very eager to bring us on in their innovation program. The VA works with startups to get to know them early, and influence their product and their design.
Sal Daher: I didn't know that. It's the last organization I would think of working with startups. [chuckles]
Alex Westner: They've been awesome. We've had access to clinics, to veterans, and probably in January/February, we're going to be sending glasses to four clinics around the country so that when veterans come in for audiology appointments, they'll be able to try out our glasses, and give us feedback, and give the VA some feedback, is this something that the VA should carry and provide to their veterans? That's one amazing partnership, and we just found out that they're going to feature us in their next newsletter. That's just fantastic. It's a great collaboration. It's a great story, and it's a big part of our company.
Another example of a good partner is AARP. I made some good connections at AARP. We just got invited to pitch at their event at CES in January. They have this great-age tech collaborative. It's another great part. When we won a grant from the National Academy of Medicine, they ran the story in their newsletter, which is wonderful. I didn't even know that they were going to do that, and they did that. Organizations like that have been fantastic. The Hearing Loss Association of America, we went to a Boston chapter picnic, where we got a lot of feedback from people, we've gotten to know a lot of the local HLAA members. Organizations like that, I would love to continuing partnering with. They've just been off so fantastic and supportive.
Sal Daher: That's tremendous. I'm just thinking, are you on Twitter?
Alex Westner: Yes, still.
Sal Daher: Okay. Yes.
[laughter]
I mean, it's like the electric company, it's kind of like to change your wires. What's your Twitter handle?
Alex Westner: Oh, my Twitter handle, I have to spell it.
Sal Daher: Personally, or the company, or?
Alex Westner: The company doesn't have a Twitter handle yet, because as a business, we've done pretty well on LinkedIn, we have a LinkedIn presence. But for our customers, all of our customers are on Facebook.
Sal Daher: Oh, that makes sense.
Alex Westner: Yes, we're not even going to really bother too much with Twitter.
Sal Daher: I must confess that Twitter has not been as valuable as LinkedIn for us for the podcast, we have a much bigger presence on LinkedIn, much more valuable. I was just curious, because I thought that there could be a connection there, but good. Alex Westner, we've talked about the company, and what I thought I would do is just do a brief promo for the podcast, and then go into your entrepreneurial journey, a little bit of a biography, and how you came to be a founder. First, is there anything else about the business that you'd like to touch on?
What If Google Gets into the Business?
Alex Westner: Yes, we probably should mention something, everybody asks me about, "Hey, what are you going to do when Apple, and Meta, and Google all come out with their glasses?"
Sal Daher: Yes. That question was asked at Walnut.
[laughter]
Alex Westner: I get that question all the time, and usually, that's like the deal-breaking question where people have already ruled us out.
Sal Daher: Oh, he's gonna be roadkill?
Alex Westner: I guess, and my answer has not been satisfying to other people, but I still feel it's compelling, which is, it's that laser focus on the customer. All the other companies mentioned, they're going to have to create generic consumer-friendly glasses to satisfy all kinds of different segments and demographics. Our goal is to satisfy one use case for one customer, and we can do that in a much deeper and richer, and more compelling way than a big tech company could, that's got to be our only way to really compete and survive as we go forward, and the deeper and the deeper we go with our customers, the more we're going to learn and uncover. We're going to be out in market in less than a year.
Whereas those other glasses companies are projected to be two or three years away. We also will become very good at learning quickly, because we'll have glasses in the field, and we'll have a little bit of an advantage of, "Oh, we know where some of these other problems are, and where to go next." Having a bit of a head start is helpful. Having a focus on the customer is essential, I think, and it actually is leading to creating new IP, and creating new differentiators for ourselves. I feel even the insurance thing, you won't be able to get your Meta eyeglasses covered by insurance, but we can get our glasses covered.
Sal Daher: I think the best answer is, yes, but we're going to be the specialized device, and maybe we will be abstract to software that can just sit on their device.
Alex Westner: That could be, yes.
Sal Daher: You could end up being a software. This is funny. Thanks to Raul. Raul is our sound engineer for the podcast. I interviewed Chris Savage, and Brendan Schwartz, the founders of Wistia, which is a very, very successful video platform, and, Brendan Schwartz talks, and actually does a video, if you Google Brendan Schwartz Google problem. You have Brendan Schwartz explaining. People say, "Oh, but Google is going to come in, and is going to do this." Okay. His take was basically, Google doesn't care about what you're doing until you are really, really, really big. If you're focusing on a very narrow thing, you can build a lot of business. Eventually, yes, they'll come to care about it.
Alex Westner: Right, right.
Sal Daher: But, yes, you can argue that this is like part of the core competency for Google in search and all that stuff, but that may end up being an exit. Who knows? There's a lot of running ground. Google cannot do everything.
Alex Westner: Yes. Exactly.
Sal Daher: Especially not now, these are different times. I think there is plenty of ground for a highly specialized, well-designed user experience that could get taken up by Google, or Apple, or whatever.
Alex Westner: Or a hearing aid company.
Sal Daher: Or a hearing aid company. Yes. I interviewed for the podcast someone who is doing these intercom systems for multi-family buildings, or apartment buildings. The next generation. There is already a business that exists, that's well-established, that's VC-funded and so forth, but what they're doing is they're creating a platform that can be used by the incumbent businesses that don't have the connected intercom business, so it's like an option to the big players. There's lots of examples for that.
Alex Westner: Right. Thank you for sharing all this. I'm going to use that next time someone asks me.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Alex Westner: I'm going to play them you saying it, not me saying it even.
Sal Daher: No, no, no.
Alex Westner: [laughs]
Sal Daher: Alex, the question is execution. How well do you execute? Okay. If you execute really well, okay, you're going to make inroads. If you don't, you're roadkill.
Alex Westner: Right.
Sal Daher: Pardon the expression again.
[laughter]
Twice in a podcast, but you're going to be in a tough situation.
Alex Westner: It's another reason why we really like these partnerships. It's because, in a way, it's easy for the VA to understand what we're doing. It's easy for a AARP to understand what we're doing. It's easy for the National Academy of Medicine to give us a grant because they say, "Oh, this is very clear. You're addressing this health problem, that's very important to us." If we were coming in with, "Oh, this is just a feature of a giant platform," I don't think they would feel the love.
Sal Daher: No. No. Okay. We can then move on to the next section of the podcast. I would like just to invite the listeners who are finding value in this really interesting conversation with Alex Westner, sound technologist and founder, because this is a learning enterprise. We're here to learn how to build better companies. This conversation could be helpful to a lot of founders, to angels, to other people who are trying to build new companies, so give us a hand.
First, follow us on whatever platform you listen to on podcasts, so that similar podcasts will show up in your stream every week. Also, consider leaving a star rating. We always like five-star ratings. If you have a pet peeve about the podcast, you could express that in writing, because if you write anything, the algorithm says, "Hmm, somebody has taken the time to write something." You don't have to write much. You can write, "Sal, talk less, please, or whatever."
As long as you give us a five-star rating, we're fine. Okay. Then, it's amazing what it does, Alex. It's incredible. Really, it causes the algorithm to privilege that episode in its offerings to people who are going on the platforms, and then all of a sudden you get a lot more downloads than a normal launch. Usually, there's a week period, we launch on Wednesdays at 1:30 AM, and then that next day there's a big surge. The algorithms, Apple, I should say, the Apple algorithm, the latest podcast is highly rated. It always has the highest bar ratings.
The older podcasts, some of them are high-rated because they're popular, but some of them, they just tail off, so they privilege the recent launch. If you couple ratings and reviews with that immediate launch, you can get a big effect. It doesn't work as well three weeks out. Give us a hand with that. Anyway, Alex, let's get to your entrepreneurial journey.
Alex Westner’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Now. You studied electrical engineering at Rutgers, and then you came to this amazing place called the Media Lab at MIT. Tell us about what goes on in the Media Lab, because you hear the most amazing things coming out of there.
Alex Westner: [laughs] So this was back in the mid to late '90s at MIT, at the Media Lab. I think Nicholas Negroponte was still the director when I was there, so this is early days, founding days.
Sal Daher: Those days, it was still just media?
Alex Westner: It was still just media. It was just a big playground for anything. I would say anything to do with some computation. So, it could be more physical, it could be haptical. I think the lab was really exploring the, how do you combine-- oh, well, I had a whole lot, and then I got Bits and Atoms initiative. There's the digital world, but also the physical world, so how do we start thinking about these two worlds coexisting? This was in the mid-'90s, and now Zuckerberg calls it the metaverse, but okay.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: It's being obstructed gain. It's becoming bits again. The atoms, they have the Beats.
Alex Westner: 25 years go, that's what the lab was working on. It was fun, it was a big playground of anything you could imagine, you could try to build there. There was the Demo or Die mantra that really stuck with me I think in more ways that than I realized, which is, the lab was not about publishing academic papers, it was about creating useful things that showed potential of technology to solve real problems.
Sal Daher: Let's unpack that. Demo or Die, you mean created Demo or Die instead of Publish or Perish?
Alex Westner: Yes. Exactly. Instead of Publish or Perish, it was Demo or Die. If you couldn't show something of your work, there is no point to your work. It had to do with the funding model for the lab. MIT, I think at the time it was like 85% government funded, and 15% commercial, and the lab's funding model was the opposite. Most of the money for the lab came from other commercial business, and not really government.
Commercial businesses wanted to see real potential commercial impact, and so that drove the Demo or Die mantra, which is we have to show things. We can't just hypothesize about what's possible. We have to prove it. In proving it, we're going to learn a ton. For me, that got me on the path of being more customer-driven in terms of testing ideas, and being wrong, and failing and not hiding behind theory, but valuing real product over hypothetical R&D.
Sal Daher: Okay, well, it is interesting. Echoes of the Langer Lab at MIT, and the lab in the life sciences, the biotechnology material space, they say that they are in the Pasteur quadrant, in a sense that Pasteur was a scientist who was doing basic science, but also creating technology that was useable. Pasteurization of milk and things like that. It's very consonant with MIT. MIT is really not just pure science, although a lot of people are doing pure science at MIT. It's taking that science, and making it usable. I didn't know about this Demo or Die formulation. Great. After the MIT media lab, you worked in sound for a few years, and then you got to-- instead of being an engineer, you became a product person?
Alex Westner: Yes. What happened was while I was working at a small company doing some programing on audio effects, I also had a band. I was running a band. What you learn in running a band is you learn about business, and marketing, and sales. It is a business. It's like 90% business and 10% actually playing music. As I was learning really about customer acquisition, and product positioning, you can call it that, but how do you get fans? How does your band stand out? That's product positioning? How do you grow your mailing list? That's customer acquisition. It's the same concept.
I was applying those three concepts to this small company I was working for. My annual review, my boss said, "You're not actually a great programmer, but I really love the business stuff that you're bringing to my company. Can you do more of that?" I said, "Okay, sure."
Sal Daher: Someone detected your superpower.
Alex Westner: Yes, and my weakness.
Sal Daher: And your weakness, right.
Alex Westner: We kind of flipped the script on me, and I didn't even know what that job was. It was basically product management. 20 years ago, that job wasn't really common, no one really knew what product management was at the time. Now, every team and company has product managers, but at the time, that was not a thing yet. I would say I was an early product manager. Having an engineer background really helped me as a product manager to know what was possible and what wasn't possible.
Sal Daher: Okay. Then in 2018, you joined Fidelity Investment, the most unlikely place for a sound person.
Alex Westner: I spent 18 years. I think about 18 years in audio and music technology. Got to the point where I felt like, "Well, I think I might be done. I think I spent my whole life on this, and I don't know what else I can do. I need to take a break and see what else is out there." I Googled best places to work in Boston, and I found all kinds of interesting opportunities.
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Alex Westner: I wound up at Fidelity Labs because they spoke the same language in terms of how to think about innovation. They were really into the design thinking, and lean methodologies, lean startup methodologies, and I really love the idea of testing myself. "Am I a good product manager because I'm a domain expert in audio and music tech, or did I really have the business chops?" For me, also going to labs and leaving that industry that I knew really well was also a bit of a test. "Can I hack it here? I know nothing about FinTech. But can I make it? Can I do good work?" And, yes, I've been there five years, and I think I have done great work.
Still a year into my tenure there, I already started feeling the itch of, "Boy, I want to do something in audio again." [chuckles] I did start researching on the side just other ideas that I've had and were percolating. I just started doing some research on the nights and weekends while I was at Fidelity.
Sal Daher: This is how Xander came about and Fidelity is supportive of your effort?
Alex Westner: Yes, Fidelity has been great. As long as I'm not doing financial services, they're very happy to support whatever I'm doing, as long as it doesn't interrupt my job there.
An Easter Egg for Raul
Sal Daher: That is tremendous. Now, we promised my sound engineer, Raul, an Easter Egg. Let me set the context here for the Easter Egg, is that before every interview, I tell the guest, "Listen, if you need to clear your throat, if you need to cough, you just raise your hand, give it a second, a pause, go ahead and cough, and then give it a second pause, and then continue." Because there's a bit of software out there that Raul can use, it just automatically takes that out. It knows where it is, and it takes it out, and then Alex says?
Alex Westner: [laughs] I was part of the team that built that software?
Sal Daher: What's it called?
Alex Westner: Well, so there's a local company called iZotope, and they make the leading product in that space called iZotope RX. I think they're up to version 10, but it's become an industry standard. It's known as the Photoshop for sound.
Sal Daher: Photoshop for sound. Gosh. It was like, "Here's the Easter Egg for you the day before Thanksgiving, Raul."
Alex Westner: [chuckles] I can cough and Raul will use our product to take out my cough.
Sal Daher: Exactly. Very good. Now, is there entrepreneurship in your family, Alex? Do you have a model for that in your family?
Alex Westner: Wow, I don't. I have no model for entrepreneurship. I think that's a great question. Where and how did I learn to do this? I can say there was a bit of anti-pattern, which was as a kid, I do remember my dad went through a period of time where he really didn't like his job and his work. It affected him so much that it really stuck on me as, "Wow, I better really like what I'm doing as a career." I think that's been one of my guiding principles and values, is I have to love what I'm doing in my job. It's just so important. I think being an engineer, learning that engineering maybe wasn't my thing, but seeing this excitement about, how do you make technology actually work for people? That is thrilling, but work for people in a way that they're actually going to give you money for-
Sal Daher: [laughs].
Alex Westner: -and they give you more money than it cost you to make.
Sal Daher: Make, yes, that's the challenges are stacking themselves.
[crosstalk]
Alex Westner: It's amazing. That's problems for centuries, so that just became a passion, I think.
Sal Daher: Fascinating. This is an anti-model. That's fascinating.
Alex, as we think about wrapping up our interview, is there anything that you want to communicate to our audience, founders, angel investors, people who work at startups, and people who are interested in startups for other reasons? I wouldn't be surprised of the future sometime... Fidelity Investments has a very, very good user experience for customers. I'm a customer of Fidelity, when you call in, they recognize your voice. All the security is done with your voice. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future somehow for people who have hearing loss, there would be some software being used by Fidelity somewhere eventually.
Alex Westner: Maybe there'll be a customer for me someday. [chuckles]
Sal Daher: Hope so. I hope so. Awesome. Any parting thoughts that you have?
Alex Westner’s Parting Thoughts
Alex Westner: I think, yes. I would share one thing. If I could share one thing, it's about this area of disabilities and assistive technology. What I learned when I first started talking to investors is there is definitely a knee-jerk reaction against this space, and there's an assumption that, "Oh, this is small. This is niche. You're talking about old people in nursing homes with no money." There was a very initial close-minded attitude towards the market that we're looking at. If you just look at it logically instead of emotionally, you see that the opposite is true. This is a very huge market where people spend a lot of money to solve problems, and it's only a growing market.
I think it's just, someone told me about the curb test, which is wheelchair ramps were designed as part of ADA compliance regulations, and they're designed to help people with wheelchairs. How many times do you see people on wheelchairs and ramps nowadays? Rarely. It's strollers. It's UPS and FedEx people carting packages up and down. It's people on skateboards. It's bicycles. Everybody uses them, and so, having a narrow view of disabilities or assistive technology has been very unhelpful.
Sal Daher: It's heavy vehicles jumping the curb, and running over people too. There's a reason for the curb. It scares me with grandkids, the corner. I have them three feet away from the curb because, cars jump the curb all the time with curb cuts.
Alex Westner: The AARP has been doing a great job of starting to educate investors about the opportunity of age tech. The younger generations have far less disposable income than the older generations right now.
Sal Daher: [laughs] The younger generation's paying for the older generation.
Alex Westner: Pretty much. If you look at where the money is, if you're a pure financial investor, if you want to look where the money is and who's spending it, it's not going after the next shiny toy for a 20-year-old. If you're just even taking a practical view of where this economy is going, and where people are going to need help, I think Xander's in the right spot, and I'm glad we stuck to what we're doing.
Sal Daher: We did a back-of-the-envelope calculation earlier in the podcast. That's a $200 million-a-year business. Very good. Alex Westner, founder of Xander, caption glasses to help people with hearing loss. I'm very grateful that you made time to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Alex Westner: Thank you for having me. This was always fun to chat about anything business related.
Sal Daher: Loved this chat. Also, if you're in Cambridge, let's get together for coffee. I'm always up for the coffee. Excellent, so thank you again, Alex Westner. Thanks to our listeners for listening, and also please, if you remember, follow us, and leave a rating and a review. I'm Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher