Eddie Martucci, PhD, "Digital Therapy for ADHD"

Rather than purloin my kids' Ritalin, I play EndeavorOTC daily to improve my attention and be sharper. Eddie Martucci, PhD is the founder of Akili that developed the app which is backed by real science. In fact, the kid's version is FDA-cleared to treat ADHD in 8-12 year olds. Don't miss this great chat.

Eddie Martucci, PhD,

Highlights:

  • Sal Daher Introduces Eddie Martucci

  • The Science Behind EndeavorOTC

  • "... This is not IQ. This is attention. You can have extremely high IQ or low IQ and have a high attention score and low IQ or vice versa..."

  • "... people with ADHD, it is not that they don't want to pay attention ... It's that that system of the brain that allows you to filter out what's irrelevant to your goal and focus in on what's relevant, that part of the brain, that interference filter is weakened..."

  • "... You cannot become addicted to it because can't do it for more than 25 minutes period..."

  • Eddie's Entrepreneurial Journey

  • Advice to the Audience

 

Digital Therapy for ADHD

Guest: Eddie Martucci, PhD

Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs.

He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful in some of the startups, which I'm involved, including a startup, came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.

Sal Daher Introduces Eddie Martucci

Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today I am delighted, I say that a lot, but today I am just hyped to have Eddie Martucci, PhD, founder of Akili Interactive. Welcome, Eddie.

Eddie Martucci: Thanks, Sal. Really excited to be here.

Sal Daher: I should say, I invested in Akili Interactive years ago, very early stage, then went public years back, but in almost 10 years that they've been at it, they have built a phenomenal thing. The first digital intervention to treat ADHD in children and FDA-cleared, phenomenal thing. Taking off from that, they've launched what they call EndeavorOTC, which I have been playing with, and it has actually helped make me sharper. If you find that I'm unusually clever today, it's because of EndeavorOTC. [laughter]

Eddie Martucci: This is good. This is a good pitch, Sal. [laughter]

Sal Daher: I say it from my heart because I played with it this morning. It's a driving app and it has all kinds of obstacles. You're supposed to capture some creatures along the way. It was designed for kids, but it is beautifully designed. It is very compelling and heck, it has science behind it. My wife and I have been using it. I think my business partner was very interested in it. I think I'm contaminating a lot of people around me with this because I'm in my late 60s. I can use it to be able to focus my attention. For me, it's useful to be able to focus my attention better. Is it true that your attention wanes a little bit as you age?

Eddie Martucci: Absolutely. Attention is something that builds up as a child, and as a teenager and young adult. Then both your attention, meaning your core base level of capacity or ability to pay attention, but also most importantly what's called the executive functioning, which is how you want to allocate your attention, that really comes online. Frankly, what you want to stop yourself from doing, [laughter] whether it's being distracted or it's being impulsive, that part also develops at the same time. Most people think about memory fading with age because they're the most dramatic stories, and everyone knows about Alzheimer's. Interestingly, the earliest cognitive faculty that fades seems to be attention, seems to be how you're able to place your attention. Actually, funny enough, that is really where the basis of this company started is over a decade ago, almost a decade and a half now, at the lab of Dr. Adam Gazzaley at UCSF.

He had studied what are the weak links in cognitive functioning in the 60-plus, 60 to 70-year-olds. Unlike what most people assume, which is, oh, they're the memory's waning, it's actually almost all about attention. What we do has applicability from kids, certainly working-age adults, all the way up through folks who are aging and concerned about age-related issues.

Sal Daher: Awesome. EndeavorOTC, as I said, a driving game with some challenges along the way, which is the distraction. Would you just go through the whole thing and the principle that's behind it because there's science behind this that's deeply studied? Please, go ahead.

The Science Behind EndeavorOTC

Eddie Martucci: Sure. I'm glad you highlighted that because it's really important to me. I started this company over a decade ago, and it's really important for people to understand this is not a brain game, this is not a crossword puzzle, or things that people do to wake up in the morning or something, or to get their brain going. This is a product that's built on about a decade of neuroscience research, and then another decade of us validating it in clinical trials. We've now run clinical trials across about 10 different populations, most in ADHD, and so children with ADHD, adults with ADHD now.

What we've seen is that this has extremely strong effects on the ability to pay attention, on how to place your attention, but also, and this is where it gets really interesting. I could talk about the neuroscience later, but-

Sal Daher: Sure.

Eddie Martucci: -because this is pressing on the attention systems in the brain that are really critical for real-world processing, we see real-world benefits for patients. Things like quality of life, and they're called functional impairments in the real world, like how they're able to do things like remember where they put their car keys or hold a conversation for long periods of time. In kids, we've seen math and reading improve, so it's really cool.

This product, EndeavorOTC, is the exact same technology that's inside EndeavorRx. EndeavorRx is our product for children with ADHD that went through a whole host of clinical trials including FDA authorization a couple of years ago, and now is being prescribed all over the country by pediatricians and psychiatrists. It's been prescribed, I don't know, somewhere in the range of about 15,000 times. We have a salesforce out there that's teaching docs about this. EndeavorOTC is the same core technology, but it's different in a couple of ways. First, and this is most important and what most people want to know, it's the same core technology, but it is available without a prescription. The reason we did that is we ran a large scale, about 250 patient study of adults with ADHD, all ages, 20 all the way up to, I think, we had someone in their 80s in the trial. What we saw across the board was incredibly strong attention and quality of life benefits. In fact, in both of those domains, stronger than we see in children even, which surprised us.

Sal Daher: If I recall correctly, the study in the older adults, it was almost an order of magnitude larger, the improvement than in children.

Eddie Martucci: You're right. It was because the average in the trial was about seven times the attention improvement, but older adults had even bigger improvements. You're right, it's almost an order of magnitude from the pediatric average, which is mind-boggling. We're still trying to understand exactly why that is, but the simple suffice to say is it's solving a problem and it's really helping people. We saw that in the trial. We did market research and found out that adults with ADHD, unlike children, families with children, adults actually prefer not to have a doctor intermediary or an insurance intermediary.

They just want to be able to get a product that's affordable that they can use right when they hear about it. EndeavorOTC is built-- OTC means over-the-counter. Think Prilosec OTC or Claritin OTC. This is basically the same technology as the medical authorized product, but now available for direct purchase without a prescription from a doctor. The other difference is we stripped out a lot of stuff. You alluded to it, it is still based on the kid's product. The interface is a little more childlike.

Sal Daher: It's very cute.

Eddie Martucci: It's cute.

Sal Daher: It's beautifully done. It's very cute.

Eddie Martucci: It's funny, there's a lot of adults, and you can see online there's a lot of adults that say-- We got about four stars on the app store and a lot of adults say, "I like it, actually, it's good." Then you get some adults who are like, "This is stupid. This is a kid's game." That's fine. We're okay with that.

Sal Daher: Those are very highly sophisticated gamers who we're expecting different themes and so forth.

Eddie Martucci: That's right. How dare we make a kids' game? We do intend on improving and basically branching the adult product to be more and more suitable for adults. What is different, even today in day one, is that we took out of it, all of the things that supported a care journey for a child. There are symptom tracking apps, and questionnaire apps, and then connections to the doctor. All that stuff is gone. This is just a very streamlined experience. You've done it. On day one, you can download EndeavorOTC with a free trial. You actually get a Focus Score, which is the first clinically validated, and we can come back to this, but it's the first clinically validated in our data. Clinically validated measure of focus that actually correlates with long-term outcomes. You get a Focus Score, and then you can start using the product on day one. Essentially, playing a game somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes a day, and hopefully, getting these robust medical impacts from our technology.

Sal Daher: I may not shy to admit that I started out at pretty terrible levels. I think it was at 18, and then immediately jumped to 35 or something, but now I'm at 51.

Eddie Martucci: That's pretty good, man.

Sal Daher: I imagine for somebody who's 68, that's probably not too bad.

Eddie Martucci: I think it's pretty good.

Sal Daher: It's not like Eddie Martucci at 70.

Eddie Martucci: [Laughter]. I really--

Sal Daher: As you see that guy, he's a PhD researcher, and attention is his game.

Eddie Martucci: Attention is my game, and I've used this product a whole lot because it's my product. [laughter] I hesitated posting it when I got my Focus Score once we released the feature, but I felt like it was important to really educate the world that you can get a metric like this now. I think about this--

"... This is not IQ. This is attention. You can have extremely high IQ or low IQ and have a high attention score and low IQ or vice versa..."

Sal Daher: Now, remember, this is not IQ, okay guys? This is not IQ. This is attention. You can have extremely high IQ or low IQ and have a high attention score and low IQ or vice versa.

Eddie Martucci: We call it core cognitive functioning. What is your base core cognitive functioning? What's really cool is if you're 68 or if you're 41, in my case or whatever, it's not like you should be at this number, just like weight or anything else that's in a healthcare sphere.

Sal Daher: There's a range.

Eddie Martucci: There's a range, and it's what's your goal? Most importantly, can you improve it and then maintain the improvements you've made? That's how we think about cognitive functioning too. Unfortunately in healthcare, we don't do a lot of focusing on cognitive functioning. Docs don't talk about it much, but I think, hopefully, we're bringing a new dialogue to the market, and people can start really tracking themselves and improving themselves.

Sal Daher: I just want to go back here a little bit to the comparison before with some of these games like doing crossword puzzles, doing all these things. The criticism you hear is that these games are lightweight interventions. Why are they lightweight? Because most of what our cortex does is process images. That's the stuff that's heavyweight. Walking through new landscape, learning new paths and so forth, that's stuff that keeps your brain active. It's all these things like doing crossword puzzles, even a Rubik Cube, or something like that. It has an impact.

There's very localized development and all that stuff, but it doesn't get the whole brain engaged. What I think is interesting about EndeavorOTC is that it's high-value intervention. It's a light intervention, but it's high-value. The thing that controls all the stuff that goes on in your life because if you can focus, if you can plan better, you're going to do more stuff. You're going to use your brain more. If you're forgetting stuff all the time and so on, you're just in a well of frustration and you're not going to get as much done. You're going to remember your keys, you're going to get outdoors, you're going to see landscape, your brain is going to process lots of images, and it's going to keep your brain now operating. I see this as a little bit like weightlifting. It's like weightlifting for the brain. It's very healthy thing for older people to weightlift.

Eddie Martucci: I often use the physical fitness analogy. I like that you went there where this is "a muscle" that is important that you build up. Like walking, if you build up your muscles that allow you to walk, and then you can do a whole range of things in life. People often forget that the core dependency on doing all the things you mentioned out in the real world like appreciating nature, or holding an in-depth conversation with a spouse or loved one, or reading a book, all those things depend on your ability to pay attention and to control where you place your attention.

Sal Daher: Absolutely.

Eddie Martucci: In today's world, this has been well chronicled. There have never been more demands on our attention. People that have ADHD, which is where our product's labeled for, but as you mentioned, lots of people beyond that are concerned about attention, and for good reason. There are more demands than you've ever seen before because we all have phones and computers, and the world around us is chaotic. We're overloaded with information, that people who, let's say you had a problem paying attention before, now, it's really tough. This technology we have, it's patented here in the US and in a couple of other countries in Asia.

Patented to technology to actually activate the part of the brain that controls how you control your attention. It's not just diffusely getting you sharp on something, it's really targeting. We have about six peer-reviewed medical publications on this now. It's really targeting and activating that very small part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which deals with, when you have conflicting and lots of information, how do you manage that and decide where to control your attention. There might not be a more basic human function than that to be able to live a healthy life. That's why we care so deeply about attention functioning.

Sal Daher: It's the extremely high-value thing for us to have the ability to figure out what's important for us to look at, to pay attention to, and what's not important to pay attention to. You want to go a little bit deeper? My audience is not shy about that. It's a pretty techy audience. Go ahead and talk a little bit more about the science.

Eddie Martucci: Sure. The science here was, as I mentioned, started at UCSF, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who's now written a bestselling book called The Distracted Mind,

Sal Daher: Who has also revealed his attention score online.

Eddie Martucci: He has. He's revealed his attention score.

Sal Daher: Very impressive for someone as gray-haired as he is. I'm pretty gray-haired, so well as of impressive starting score.

Eddie Martucci: One would expect one of the foremost studiers of attention in this world to have pretty good attention. He was bold enough to take the test, and then put it out there. The basic science here is that when your brain is trying to pay attention, there's a lot of different things going on. You have the goals you want to attend to, and then you have the things you don't want to attend to that are always competing for your attention. This part of the brain in the middle front part of the brain, it's part of the midline prefrontal cortex, and like I said, this one area is called the anterior cingulate cortex.

We call it the interference filter for the brain. I want to hold a conversation with you right now, but there's a whole lot of interference. It's all the external stuff, this stuff outside my window right now. I apologize, there's a vacuum going in my house. I can hear it, I don't know if you guys can. My dog is over here.

Sal Daher: That's the virtue of the microphone. The dynamic microphone picks up only the sound that's closer.

"... people with ADHD, it is not that they don't want to pay attention ... It's that that system of the brain that allows you to filter out what's irrelevant to your goal and focus in on what's relevant, that part of the brain, that interference filter is weakened..."

Eddie Martucci: Actually, perfect analogy, I hadn't even thought about. This microphone that I'm using right now is filtering interference. It basically knows that the sound that is close, that is in a certain range is what it's supposed to pick up, and it filters out everything else. Our brain actually does a very similar thing, but that gets weak over time, and it can be overloaded. This is what I always found, people who struggle with attention, and let's talk about ADHD for a second because that's really where we started our clinical research and where the prescription product is labeled for, and this EndeavorOTC is directly targeted for.

We see people with ADHD, it is not that they don't want to pay attention, or people who, as you mentioned, who are 60, or 70, or 80, don't want to be able to pay attention to remember anymore. It's that that system of the brain that allows you to filter out what's irrelevant to your goal and focus in on what's relevant, that part of the brain, that interference filter is weakened. What we can do is strengthen that filter. Here's how the actual science works.

What Dr. Gazzaley's figured out was that if you force that part of the brain to do the most complicated thing it has to do, which is actually juggle multiple things at the same time, multiple goals that you actually want to accomplish, if you force it to do that, and you train right at the edge of your ability level, that part of the brain strengths. Now, you've used the product, and anyone who uses the product now can understand why in a racing game, it's forcing you to do this motor task and drive this character.

Sal Daher: It's frustrating sometimes.

Eddie Martucci: It's frustrating, it's hard. You have to focus on that. At the same time, you have to focus on making decisions about things that are popping up on your screen. Both of those, I don't know if you can feel it or not when you use the product, both of those are adapting every single second to your ability level, and they are literally at the edge of your ability. The reason it's difficult is think about the analogy as if you had a treadmill that was always putting you right at your 80 or 90% ability, that's what this is doing for your brain. The reason I love this product so much and have continued to build it for the last decade, I don't think there's ever been a product for the brain that does anything quite like this, where it's essentially targeting a part of your brain that controls a larger function, and then every second of the experience, it's activating it in a way that strengthens it.

To your point, some days it feels rewarding, some days it feels really tough, and it can feel crushing. Overall, on average, we saw an EndeavorOTC that after two months of using this, you don't have to use it every day, you can take days off here or there. After just six weeks of using the product, 70% of people had improvements in overall quality of life. That to me, is a big benefit and worthwhile, especially when there's essentially very few side effects.

"... You cannot become addicted to it because can't do it for more than 25 minutes period..."

Sal Daher: A catch and aside here, I have someone close to me who has very severe ADHD combined with other conditions and so forth, but attention is one of the problems. She was reluctant to start on EndeavorOTC until she heard that it's limited to 25 minutes a day. You cannot become addicted to it because can't do it for more than 25 minutes period.

Eddie Martucci: That was purposeful.

Sal Daher: Don't worry, your kid is not going to become an endeavor, or your geezer, the geezer in your house is not going to become addicted to the game.

Eddie Martucci: We often get questions, it's so funny you brought that up. We often get questions on both sides of that, where you say, one, "Why would you use a phone when phones are the things that are killing us with information?" On the other, it's like two shots at it, the other being, "Well, aren't you going to addict people more?" The way I answer both of those is on the former, instead of ignoring this technology we have because there are some things like social media that I believe are generally detrimental, there's clearly positives in what we have.

Let's leverage what we have because you can do things like what I just talked about with the brain that we're never conceive of before. I'd rather leverage that technology, and get 20 or 30 minutes a day that's actually proven to be productive than to totally ignore the device. Then on the flip side, you're right, we just put a governor on the product for the exact reason. We heard it.

Some people early on would want to grind, as I say, grind on the game for way too long, and that's the last thing we want to do. The last thing we want to do is introduce something else into someone's life that starts to functionally distract them from other parts of their life. We want to give you the ability to self-manage your attention issues, to do your daily medical treatment, which, by the way, is pretty fun. You sit on your couch and play a game, and then shut it off when you've done your daily amount, and go about your daily life, and take some days off when you need to. The beauty here is the effects seem to maintain even when you take some days or weeks off after some early work. It's a really new paradigm in activating your brain and brain health. I hope it becomes more accepted because I know a lot of people need it.

Sal Daher: I think humanity, but all its history, has been in an environment of want, of not enough this, not enough that. We are experimenting with the first time, living in an environment where we have way more than we need, and we need to decide what we're going to do. In that environment, being able to pay attention, to focus your attention, to screen out distractions, to be judicious about where you're going to put your time is essential for your life, for the quality of life. This is something that helps your quality of life, especially as an aging person. Look, I was a big fan of Akili before, I was an investor early on, I believed in you.

Eddie Martucci: Thanks. I appreciate it.

Sal Daher: I believed in the PureTech universe, these guys are very impressive guys. I've invested in some of their other companies, but let me tell you, the experience using EndeavorOTC is just phenomenal. I think this is going to be an enormous success because as you're getting older, other than just being able to have more muscle, better circulatory health, and things like that, being able to control your attention is crucial, and it declines with age. You can do something about it. It's like push-ups for the brain.

Eddie Martucci: [laughs] Well said. To your point about quality of life, now we've proven it in a clinical trial, which is that's our brand always, is only make claims we can stand behind. That adult ADHD trial, which again went 20 years old all the way to 80, one of the outcomes was a validated quality of life scale. We know what you just said is backed up by the science now, the clinical science. I'm really proud of what our team was able to do here. As of today, as of early September, it's only available on Apple products. It's climbing the medical app rankings in both phone and iPad, but we are feverishly working on Android because we know we've heard of a ton of feedback.

Sal Daher: Wow.

Eddie Martucci: People every day are like-

Sal Daher: Oh, yes, you have to be on Android.

Eddie Martucci: -"Where's the Android?' It's coming as well. We're a small, but mighty team. We just keep trying to knock down those access barriers. Our goal here is remove friction from brain health care and allow people to get good products that'll help them. That's the mission we're on and keep on.

Sal Daher: Awesome. I should also mention that Akili is a-- I said I was an early investor, I invested as a private investor. Akili is now a public company. You can invest in it if you're interested. It's, A-K-L-I. We don't give investment advice in this podcast, but I must say that I invested originally, and then I bought the stock after the spark. I own it both sides and I believe in the company. I'm a CFA charterholder, I have to disclose my interest in this. Your using the game or not using the game makes no difference to me because this is a publicly traded company, but I urge listeners to really give it a try. It's a great experience. Don't worry, you're not going to get hooked on it because you can only do it for 25 minutes. I've tried. [laughter] I wouldn't do it for more than 25 minutes. Eddie, if you don't mind, I would like to do a very brief promo for the podcast.

Then in the second part of the podcast, just cover briefly your journey to becoming an entrepreneur, and how the idea of a video game to treat ADHD came about because this is so intriguing. First, I want to ask our listeners, if you are interested in this fascinating conversation with the scientist who has founded a company that can actually improve your brain functioning if you play a video game, this is pretty spectacular, validated by science, if you find this fascinating, help this podcast get found.

First, follow us, follow the Angel Invest Boston podcast so that it shows up on your feed every week, but also give us a rating and a review. We like five stars. My mom told me to ask for five stars. Mediterranean mom, it's like tiger mom.

Eddie Martucci: You listen to your mom, you listen to your grandma.

Sal Daher: Absolutely, the nona, your nona.

Eddie Martucci: Exactly.

Sal Daher: Anyway, the point here is that if you review us, more people will find this podcast, and they will benefit from these tremendous conversations. Now, I'd like to talk to Eddie about his entrepreneurial journey. How is this guy? I listened to some of the podcasts that you've had, and I know that your dad was a pharmacist, still a pharmacist, still practicing it, I understand.

Eddie Martucci: Still, he is.

Sal Daher: Then you went to Yale, PhD, and all this stuff. How did you decide to become an entrepreneur?

Eddie's Entrepreneurial Journey

Eddie Martucci: I am a big believer in a couple of things. One, that you can't take credit in various circumstances you fall into. I've had a lot of interesting circumstances that one could argue set me up for this type of journey. The second is, I'm a big believer in just being open to opportunities, and then jumping into them when you have them. You're right, I grew up in a household. Most of my teenage years, actually pre-teenage years were spent in a pharmacy that my parents owned. My dad decided to branch out from the chain life and start his own thing. That was a-

Sal Daher: Whoa, that's entrepreneurial. Ok, yeah.

Eddie Martucci: -small family business. Not just people here are pharmacists, which got me into medical, but no, it was Martucci's Family Pharmacy. I got to see my parents doing the books and running a business. That was pretty cool, although I said I never want to do that, famous last words. I went to college to study biochemistry, and then I was at Providence College. Then I went to Yale for graduate school, just really fascinated with drug design and drug development. I had a chance encounter through a family friend to meet an innovator scientist named Kevin Tracey, who has a research lab in Long Island, and has started about a dozen companies, maybe somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen companies. It was really an incredible -- short, but incredible experience where I got to see someone who loved science, but was helping to spin out innovations into companies and grow them. I just became enamored with it immediately and I said, that's what I want to do.

Now, I had no idea how to do that. I was a PhD student. It was just like in the front of my mind, I would really love to be an early employee at a innovative startup company because I felt like one of my superpowers was-- I don't think I was the best scientist. Meaning, I was smart enough, I loved it, but I wasn't going to repeat the experiment 15 times. There were other people who loved doing that type of science, the super meticulous over and over repetition.

For me, I loved the new ideas, and I loved talking about them to the world, and I loved trying to make new things possible. This was exciting to me, but I had no idea how to find it. The third chance encounter was I happened to see this posting for PureTech Health.

Sal Daher: Awesome

Eddie Martucci: My first, literally first job out of finishing my PhD. I rushed to finish my PhD because I was like, "I want to get out in the entrepreneurial world and build businesses."

I finished my PhD in four and a half years, which was pretty good timing for the program I was in. I was lucky enough to get a chance with Daphne Zohar and team, this is back in 2008 or 2009 when, I think PureTech was only about a dozen people. In one of the earliest versions of PureTech's life where they built-- Really, they do a whole lot of amazing things now, including their own R&D programs, and it's essentially a big biotech company now. At that point in the life, they were building companies off of innovative science.

There's nothing like it in the world, and I was lucky enough to interview there and get the job. I've said many times, I don't know if I could get that job twice if I was asked because I must have just smiled really well that first day and lucked into it. I got to cut my teeth the first days out of graduate school on doing all the little things it takes to build a business out of innovative science. Fortunate enough to be in areas where people inspired me and excited me. It was never my goal, it may still never be my goal [laughs] to be CEO of a startup business, but I just kept following the product development, or rather I kept driving the product development because I was inspired by it, and I loved working on this new cutting-edge area. It's almost been a, stumbling wouldn't be the right word, but I find myself describing my journey often as I just looked at the one or two steps in front of me and just kept doing it because I loved it, and here I am.

Sal Daher: Life is so much like that. My own life, the number of times that just chance encounters made massive differences in my future career. This is the thing, you've got to be open to opportunities. You got to do your homework, try really hard, but you also have to be open to opportunities. Then stuff happens, which is just amazing. This is why it's so important to be out and about in the world, physically in real life running into people.

I walk every day. I walk 4 1/2 miles, I'm keeping off 100 pounds of body weight. I'm walking 4 1/2 miles every day, I'm doing other kinds of exercise. I see people all the time, and I discovered things that I wouldn't know otherwise. We humans are so much smarter when we interact well with each other. That is just like it's so important. Key to that is having control of your attention.

Eddie Martucci: [laughs] Exactly.

Sal Daher: Being able to focus on the conversation and being able to understand what the other person is saying, keeping track of that. This is so valuable. Great. Eddie Martucci, as we think about wrapping up this interview, I would like you to take a moment. What advice, what thought do you want to leave to our audience of angel investors and founders? What advice would you give?

Advice to the Audience

Eddie Martucci: Oh, wow. I think for founders, there's two pieces of advice that are related that I try to tell people now when they ask and I frankly try to remind myself pretty often. The first is it's actually related to what you were just talking about in terms of taking opportunities. People will often ask me, I'll tell them any story. People will often ask me, "Okay, when I see this opportunity, how do I know if it fits my plan?" What I'll say is, and this is I guess, piece of advice 1A, is forget about something that you see here as an opportunity, fitting some plan that you made up in your head.

Instead, think about how does this thing in front of me inspire me, and excite me, and get my energy up because that's all that really matters. The truth is to build a good company, this is not a business school case, where you can put hard work, and all-nighters, and just logic it out. You have to have the passion and energy to do something that most people, frankly, every day will tell you is not a good idea or is-

Sal Daher: Oh, absolutely.

Eddie Martucci: -not good enough, or that there's 15 problems with it every day. You have to have that internal, I call it pure human curiosity, and motivation, and energy to want to tackle it. That only comes from something that very few people are motivated by to do that, unless it's something that is actually exciting to them, viscerally exciting. That's thing number one is, think about that and forget the path. I tell people that all the time-

Sal Daher: That's right.

Eddie Martucci: -there is no path. The second part is don't operate under the illusion that even with all that said, that you're going to love it every day because you won't. It's really, really hard. Some days, and some stretches you go through is most days you won't love it in the moment. Do something you love every day. That can be totally different from the business you're trying to build. If you love sports, go play a sport every day. If you love, I don't know, movies, music, whatever, but founders can often get consumed and think, and I fall into this trap a lot, that if I'm not literally 100% of my focus on my business at every waking minute of every day, then I'm failing.

I actually think that's almost true, but not quite because you need to derive energy from the other things you love, and life is too short. Now, the beauty is if someone told me, "Oh, great, then I'm going to work halftime," that ain't going to work. You still got to grind, and you still got to put in the hours. You're sometimes going to miss birthday parties, and you're sometimes going to miss family things. That is all true and that's the only way things are successful, but you need to derive energy from the thing you're building and from outside the thing you're building, the other things in life that you love.

It took me a very long time, and I still have to remind myself to do this and to focus on that. I think that's the way that it becomes sustainable and then you, hopefully, build great things. To the angel crowd, man, I've never thought about what advice do I give to angel investors? I actually think similar to how you and I were talking about telling entrepreneurs or people who want to build things to find opportunities, I would tell angel investors sometimes to let the mathematical brain take a break for a second once in a while and think about this thing which you can't quite perfectly model.

Does this thing deserve to be in the world? This thing that someone is pitching you, does it deserve to be in the world? Shut down the perfect economics for a minute because you can always come back to that. Similarly, I think we overlook as humans in this world where we're taught to calculate everything. We often overlook intuition and energy. I think a lot of investors sometimes forget that they should also be inspired by wanting this thing to exist in the world, then you can do the math and think, "Does it at all make sense in the realm of possible?" I think if we have that, then we have some really good enthusiastic support for new ideas. Not every new idea that deserves to be there is going to make a good business, but I think a little bit more passion and energy, both from entrepreneurs and investors is a really, really good thing.

Sal Daher: Excellent. I have heard you talk in another podcast about planning and how to deal with plans versus goals and so forth, which is really very insightful. This is amazing. You are a philosopher on top of being an amazing founder.

Eddie Martucci: [laughs] I just read a lot of people's good stuff, that's all.

Sal Daher: [laughter] Inspiration first, plans later. That's Eisenhower who planned D-day. He said, "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." Your plans are going to get jumbled up, be ready to chill out. Motivation, that's what's really key. Well said. Eddie Martucci, I'm very grateful that you made time for your busy schedule to be on the Angel Invest Boston program. I'm very grateful to you also for having made it possible for me to use EndeavorOTC.

My wife uses it, I use it, I think other members of my family be using it. You're doing tremendous thing. This is definitely something that deserves to be in the world, and is doing a lot of good. Listeners, try it out, EndeavorOTC by Akili Interactive. Thanks a lot, Eddie Martucci, PhD.

Eddie Martucci: Thanks Sal. This has been awesome.

Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.