As a practitioner working with foot injuries, Eric Greenspan became so excited about the potential of the smart insole developed by startup IWS that he joined the team. Great chat about the promising field of connected devices in healthcare. Walking six miles per day gives me a strong appreciation for Eric’s work.
Episode highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Eric Greenspan
What Innovative Wellness Systems (IWS) is Solving
"... What we're really offering patients is peace of mind..."
"... It helps the podiatrist document the value of their orthotics..."
"... This is not a diagnostic tool. This is a monitoring device..."
Innovative Wellness Systems' Founding Story
How Eric Greenspan Became an Entrepreneur
The Team Roles at IWS
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Smart Insoles”
Guest: Eric Greenspan
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 for 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 to 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 Eric Greenspan
Sal Daher: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. I'm Sal Daher, an angel investor. An angel investor is not a venture capitalist. It's a person who invests in early-stage ventures. Today, we're talking to Eric Greenspan. Eric Greenspan is a board-certified chiropractor, but he's also involved with a very interesting startup called Innovative Wellness Systems, IWS. What IWS does is it's creating a connected health solution. Ah, connected health, that's the theme here on the show. A connected health solution to problems of monitoring injury and helping people optimize their recovery. This is something that Dr. Eric knows a lot about. Welcome, Eric Greenspan.
Eric Greenspan: Thank you so much for having me, Sal. A pleasure to be here.
Sal Daher: Awesome. Awesome. Eric, tell us what problem Innovative Wellness Systems is solving and how you're going about it.
What Innovative Wellness Systems is Solving
Eric Greenspan: Sure. We're solving a couple of different problems. The best way for me to describe it is to tell a story.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Eric Greenspan: I've had patients before who have gotten into accidents or have had injuries. We'll take a knee injury as an example. They come to me on a Monday and they say, "Hey, my knee is bothering me. We're going through rehab after surgery." I say, "Okay, when's your appointment with the orthopedist for the follow-up for surgery?" They say, "It's Wednesday." I say "Great. Go to the appointment on Wednesday. I'll see you Friday."
They come in on Friday, and I say, "Hey, how did it go with the ortho?" They say, "Well, not good. It's frustrating because when I saw the ortho, I was feeling great and I had a really hard time explaining to the orthopedist what my knee is like on a bad day." I say, "That's interesting," and I said, "Well, let me ask you a question. I'm involved with this cool, innovative company. We're building a smart insole called the WellSole." Basically, as you would guess, it goes into your shoe. It has sensors that can connect to an app on your phone. It also is linked to your doctor's dashboard so they get to see the way that you're walking in real-time, not just the way that you're presenting in the office.
When you have that conversation with your doctor and they had a hard time really understanding what you were saying, "do you think this information would have helped you?" She said, "Oh, yes. That would've helped me out a lot because I wouldn't have had to stumble over my words to explain to the doctor what I was moving like on a bad day."
Sal Daher: Right.
Eric Greenspan: Because when a patient comes back for subsequent visits, they're pretty much giving subjective information. We're using the in-office examination to grab objective information, but we can't get real-time objective information outside the office. This offers an opportunity to really expand the communication between a patient and a doctor.
The other solution, the other problem that we're solving is from another story where another patient said to me, "Hey, hip is feeling better, but the problem that I'm having is when I go to the gym and I do cardio, my hip hurts after. I don't know what I'm doing at the gym that's causing the pain. Doesn't hurt while I'm working out. It's only after." I said, "Well, I'm working with this cool, innovative company. We're building this smart insole. It gathers information in real-time. Would this have helped you?" She said, "Yes because that way, you would understand the way that I'm moving at the gym." I said, "Exactly."
That's what we're going for here is to allow the clinician to understand what impact their treatment has had on the patient outside the office and also allow the patient to explain to the clinician what they're moving like outside the office.
Sal Daher: This is so interesting because this is making use of a connected device to provide information to the practitioners who are involved with this so the patient can get the right care. I see parallels to a company that I interviewed a long time ago called Folia Health for helping patients keep track of their symptoms. Patients who have these chronic diseases that are ongoing, they see physicians frequently. They see specialists frequently, maybe 10 times a year or 12 times a year, but that leaves 350 odd days in the year when they don't see the physician and their symptoms are occurring all the time.
Folia Health provides people who have these kinds of conditions a way of recording and keeping track of their symptoms so that when they are in front of the doctor, the doctor can understand better what's going on. Instead of just looking at a very narrow- looking through a keyhole, the physician can be looking at the whole picture, what's happening over the entire year.
Eric Greenspan: Absolutely.
"... What we're really offering patients is peace of mind..."
Sal Daher: I see what, IWS, Innovative Wellness Systems' doing here is similar in the sense that it's capturing information. It's not self-reported information, it's capturing information independent of the wearer, but it is providing that broader window. Instead of looking at a keyhole, you're looking at a much wider window.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. Then I'm also thinking about people who like to run, who like to walk, and people who have gone through multiple injuries before. They just went through their third episode of knee pain, and they're going into treatment somewhere, and they're like, "Okay, here comes number four. Let's go through treatment and get me back out to running." Then we go back out to running, they're really, really nervous. It's anxiety-provoking when they go out for that run when they're starting to kind of get back from the injury.
What we're really offering patients is peace of mind. Because when the app is giving positive feedback saying, "Hey, your movement is really looking good today, thumbs up, keep up what you're doing. Keep following the treatment plan with your doctor, keep up with your exercises." Or if there's an alert that's coming in saying, you know what? You're not really moving the right way right now. There's a little bit of an imbalance going on, whatever it's picking up. That alert will be sent to the patient and they'll say, "Okay, we got to catch this early, and let's have a conversation. Are you symptomatic? Are you feeling okay? Even if you're feeling okay, let's fix this problem before it becomes a symptomatic problem.
Sal Daher: The kind of stuff that you pick up normally, is it like that, the fact that you're favoring one foot versus the other or something like that, or the pressure's uneven across the foot. What's the typical thing that you say, ah, something's going wrong here, you need to address this.
Eric Greenspan: When I'm doing an in-office exam without the WellSole, and I'm just watching somebody walk or squat, I'm looking for rotations in the knee. I'm looking at the foot to see if it's overpronated or flat. I'm looking to see if they're shifting to one side versus the other. When they're squatting, I'm seeing if those signs are being amplified, if their knees are really bending, and if their feet are really flattening out even more. What we're doing is we're going to take a patient who comes in on day one where they're symptomatic and they're not moving correctly.
They start wearing the WellSole and they go through a course of treatment, call it a month. At the end of a month, they're feeling a lot better and they're moving a lot better. The WellSole has tracked the way that they have moved. It knows what they look like on day one when they're moving poorly and they're in pain, and it knows what they look like on day 30 when they're moving well and they're not in pain. As they continue to wear the WellSole when they've completed treatment, if there's regression back to the way that things presented on day one when they were moving poorly, those alerts are going to be sent out, which is, again, the thing that'll give the patient some peace of mind.
Sal Daher: Okay. You mentioned that Sole is connected with an app. Is there a way for the patient to keep notes in the app as things progress?
Eric Greenspan: Absolutely. I was going to comment on your Folia comment, and absolutely, they can keep a diary and give symptoms in the way that they felt. Also, that information will be picked up on the clinician dashboard. Like with Folia, I'm sure that some of those people who have those chronic issues, they know what to look for, for certain problems, but there might be days where they have some sort of symptom and they ask themselves, "Is this something I really need to worry about?" If they're recording it and their clinician is picking up on it, they might say, "Whoa, that's a problem right there," even if the patient didn't know it was a real problem.
If I'm getting messages on my dashboard for my patient and I see something that's going on there that's really concerning, I can reach out and say, "Hey, you mentioned this, tell me more about it."
Sal Daher: Yes. This is real life. It can be real-life feedback. It's not just during the visit the clinician has the possibility of making an intervention if something crops up that looks problematic. Is that picked up by some kind of algorithm or is it just the clinician looking at it?
Eric Greenspan: It's going to be the clinician looking at it, especially early on. We're going to be gathering that data and comparing it to the patient's individualized wellness baseline. The way that you walk is going to be different from the way that I walk, even when we're both pain-free. It's going to be very patient-centered.
Sal Daher: This is really very interesting to me because I'm, I'm someone who walks six-seven miles every day.
Eric Greenspan: Great.
Sal Daher: Sometimes I run and there are times when I don't feel as well as other times, and sometimes a hip will hurt, and sometimes a knee will be a little stiff, and sometimes not. It's hard to tell what's going on so I could see the value of this over time. Even if you're in reasonably good condition or health, over time, you might be doing some things that could be causing more chronic problems that don't have to be treated but maybe you can address it with better orthotics or something like that.
"... It helps the podiatrist document the value of their orthotics..."
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. I'm actually really glad you brought up the idea of orthotics. We've obviously taken a pretty significant deep dive into your orthotic market and seen what they're doing. One of the things that podiatrists are up against is sometimes they have a hard time explaining to a patient why their $800 Orthotic is superior to an over-the-counter insert at CVS, even though it is, but still there's a challenge in actually explaining the difference.
If you're going out for your walk, excuse me, and you're having some aches and pains and you go to your podiatrist and they try to say, "Hey, we want to sell you an orthotic," and you're like, "Well, I don't really understand the difference between an $800 one and a $40 one I can get at CVS." They say to you, "Well, here's the difference. We're actually going to look at the way that you're walking with sensors. We're going to make sure that when you go out for your walk and beginning that hip discomfort, we can match that hip discomfort up with a specific movement pattern that's being demonstrated on the WellSoles app, so it's going to be a great education opportunity for you."
Sal Daher: It helps the podiatrist document the value of their orthotics.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly, and also, if you're having that hip issue and you're doing certain stretches or exercises at home to try to fix that problem, you want to know if it's actually objectively changing the problem so you can watch and track your progress on the WellSole.
Sal Daher: Okay. What is the business model or have you not decided yet on a business model?
Eric Greenspan: It's going to be a B2B SaaS company. We're going to be selling this to chiropractors, physical therapists, and podiatrists. There are 400,000 of those practitioners in the US. I think a mistake would be if we went direct-to-consumer because we need to put this WellSole into the hands of an educated customer. Someone who understands biomechanics and can draw the pertinent information from the WellSole and explain it to the patient.
It'd be a little-- There are competitors out there who go direct-to-consumer and the information is really hard to understand. They're basically going for a run with their smart insole, and basically, in their ear is somebody barking at them. "Get more on your toes. You're landing too hard on your left foot." If that was me, I'd rip the headphones out and throw them in the trash. That'd drive me crazy. With this, we're going to gather the information that's really going to help the patient.
Sal Daher: How many times have I had some horrible condition and gone to my primary care physician to explain it to them, he says, "Oh, that's just a virus that's going around. It'll be gone in three days. Don't worry about it." Being your own doctor, being your own physician or specialist, people have to give credit to people who have trained and have practiced and see a lot of cases that those people will have a much better discernment than you with some toy technology.
Eric Greenspan: Yes.
Sal Daher: Interesting. You're going directly to practitioners. How much traction have you gotten so far?
Eric Greenspan: We're creating a waiting list right now. Right now our product is still going through some R&D. We should be ready to start to deploy the WellSole probably early to mid-next year. Our waiting list is growing and we have some really well-known popular names on there. Some really good clinicians who are interested in it. Basically, every colleague I've talked to is like, "Oh my God, that's amazing. I want that in my office." I said, "I know. Just be patient, it's coming."
Sal Daher: You are in prototype mode right now and trying to get out to actually have the device in the clinic.
Eric Greenspan: Yes, we have the prototype. We're doing a human factor study right now. We're waiting for that to be completed and then we'll start to get some WellSoles out to practices.
Sal Daher: What kind of regulatory approval is necessary for you to start selling this?
"... This is not a diagnostic tool. This is a monitoring device..."
Eric Greenspan: That's a great question. I'll tell you the full story. We initially started thinking about doing smart insoles for monitoring diabetic foot ulcers and that would've required a lot of regulatory approval. It's a market that we want to help because they need our help, but for right now, there were too many hurdles to jump over and it was a little bit too dangerous to go there at this stage. With what we're doing now, because this is a monitoring device, it's not a diagnostic device, it's a monitoring device, we can go straight to chiropractors, physical therapists, and podiatrists.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay. Okay.
Eric Greenspan: In a typical case, the diagnosis is going to be confirmed. Somebody has iliotibial band syndrome, which is pain on the outside of their knee. We know what the diagnosis is but fixing the problem and monitoring it is a completely different animal, so that's what we're going for. This is not a diagnostic tool. This is a monitoring device.
Sal Daher: Okay. That makes an enormous difference. Being able to go directly to the practitioners without having to have a very heavy regulatory burden. Good, and so you guys have bootstrapped yourselves to this point I understand.
Eric Greenspan: We've bootstrapped quite a bit. We've also received a lot of non-dilutive funding to cover the expenses for R&D.
Sal Daher: Oh, from what sources?
Eric Greenspan: State of Massachusetts through UMass Amherst.
Sal Daher: Very good. What's the founding story of the company?
Innovative Wellness Systems' Founding Story
Eric Greenspan: Sure. It actually ties back into the diabetic foot ulcer story.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Eric Greenspan: Ted Finn, who's the original founder of the company, had a friend who had a diabetic foot ulcer and he saw the treatment that was done for it and it's pretty barbaric. It's wound care and if you can't get the wound under control, oftentimes, it leads to amputation, and unfortunately for Ted's friend, it led to his demise. He saw this happening and Ted's an entrepreneur. He's a great guy, really smart and he saw this happening. He said, "This is wrong. There's got to be a better way to do this. In the year 2022, we shouldn't be amputating people's feet for wounds."
That's really where we started and we're still using diabetic foot ulcers as our North Star but we're going into the wellness market initially, wellness meaning otherwise healthy people who have mostly athletic injuries. That's why we're going for physical therapy, chiropractic, podiatry.
Sal Daher: All right. Very high stakes in the diabetic ulcer market. Yes.
Eric Greenspan: Absolutely.
Sal Daher: Very interesting. Eric, is there anything else that you want to touch on in regards to IWS, Innovative Wellness Systems, and its connected insole at this point?
Eric Greenspan: Just a couple of business aspects. One thing that's really exciting for practitioners like myself and all my colleagues is, right now, when we treat patients, that's the only time we're actually making any money. When we leave the office, that's it. The register's closed. With this, because we're creating a SaaS source of revenue, clinicians are going to be able to be outside of the office still collecting revenue.
This sort of technology does not exist. There's no product like this in chiropractic, physical therapy, or podiatry, so when I talk to other practitioners about it, one, they love the idea because they know that they're going to really, really help people. They also know that if they prescribe this to a patient and they go home and that patient's sitting at their kitchen counter looking at their WellSole app and their husband sits down next to them and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" It's like, "Greenspan prescribed this to me. It's awesome." I'm going to get that referral. It creates a lot of trust and loyalty and more adherence for doctors
Sal Daher: Part of the business model is to share some of that SaaS revenue with the practitioners?
Eric Greenspan: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay. Okay. That, therefore, incentivizes the practitioners to take the time to become familiar with the device and to understand its full potential because it can be very sustaining to their practice. This is really, really interesting. Eric, we're at the halfway point here and I thought perhaps what we could do is the second half of the podcast, we could focus on your personal journey of entrepreneurship, being a practicing professional, earning well, but deciding to spend your valuable time on a venture.
First, I would just like to put in a little plug for the podcast. I'd like to ask people who are listening to this who are inspired, who like it, to first subscribe to the podcast, to follow the technical term now in the Apple Podcasts universes, and to follow the podcast. Also to go to the correct place and leave a rating, where we hope it's a five-star rating and a written review. It doesn't have to be much. You don't have to write paragraphs and paragraphs. A few lines will get the attention of the Apple Podcasts algorithm and we'll bring these really compelling and interesting conversations to more people who may benefit from it.
You're doing a service to other people if you found the podcast interesting, by taking the trouble to do a review, doesn't take much time, you'll be helping other people discover this really very constructive and positive content. People like Eric Greenspan and some of my other guests take their time to create. I'm very grateful that they're willing to do that. Oh, by the way, with reviews and ratings, there's not immediate gratification. You're not going to see the reviewer right away. Takes like 24 hours.
Anyway, Eric, how did you come about becoming an entrepreneur? Here you were, you had a thriving practice. What made you decide to complicate your life, to sacrifice so much to get involved with the startup? What got you over the threshold?
How Eric Greenspan Became an Entrepreneur
Eric Greenspan: Kevin Brooks who's a member of IWS pulled me into it. He was a friend of mine for a while and he said, "Hey, we're looking for a chiropractor to bring on board. Are you interested?" I said, "Yes, I'm interested."
Sal Daher: He was a friend of yours for a while, and then he pulled you into this and is no longer your friend?
[laughter]
Eric Greenspan: We talk once in a while.
Sal Daher: Just joking.
Eric Greenspan: We're back to just small talk at this point. [chuckles]
Sal Daher: Right, right.
Eric Greenspan: No, but it's been great. I've actually always found myself, always thought I'd end up in a company like this, as corny as that may sound. Going way back to when I was still in college, I was looking for a job during the summer. I was walking back to Back Bay Station after applying for jobs at Mass General Hospital, just for anything I could do for the summer. I stumbled upon a running store called Boston Running Company, which is no longer there. I go in, lurking around, the guy says, "What are you doing?" I said, "Just looking around." I said, "I just went to apply for a job at Mass General Hospital." He goes, "How'd that go?" I said, "I don't know. We'll find out"
He goes, "You want to work here?" I said, "Yes," and I got a job there. [chuckles] It was that simple. I said, "Well, what do we do here?" He said, "You just watch people walk and you match their foot mechanics to the right shoe." I said, "Okay, show me how to do it." It was pretty simple but really effective. Somebody would come in and they'd say, "Hey, I need new paired running shoes." I'd say, "All right, let me watch you walk." I see that their feet were mild to moderately overpronated, and I'd say, "Well, you need this stability shoe here. Try on these three stability shoes and see which one works best for you." It was just like going to Marathon Sports and I really liked it. I started becoming really interested in gaits.
Sal Daher: I love marathon sport. I'm a loyal customer of Marathon Sports here in Cambridge. They're also on Wellesley and other places. If you walk a lot, if you run a lot, that's the place you've got to go because they're really, really good. Because shoe models, they change all the time. These guys are up on the different types of models and how they work with different types of feet, invaluable shop, really great shop.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. Then I took it a step further and I got my degree from UMass, and my major was Kinesiology, which is the study of human movement. That was a nice segue into chiropractic. I continued to become more interested in biomechanics and I just thought, "You know, I really had a positive impact on people just by changing their shoes." That simply. When I got involved with this company, I said, "Yes, I'm supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be doing this. It was a no-brainer when Kevin offered it to me.
I came in as an advisor and I just thought, "No, I'm going to do more than just what an advisor would do." I really put a lot of work into it. I helped with grant writing. I worked with everything. I said, "Get me involved with fundraising, get me involved with product development." I just kept doing more and more just because I thought this is a great opportunity to really make a great product to change people's lives.
Sal Daher: Tremendous. Unlike Cortez, you have not burned all your ships. I understand you still have a practice but you spend a lot of time on this.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. The practice is there every day. I'm always working on my practice, always focused on patient care. The thing is they're not mutually exclusive.
Sal Daher: No.
Eric Greenspan: When I'm in my practice, that's what the essence of this business is, is creating deeper and deeper understandings of my patients and their needs and how the WellSole can meet those needs. Oftentimes I'll talk to the guys on the team and say, "Hey, look, I saw a patient today and this is information they gave me. They were interested in this. What do you guys think?" Because I always tell my patients, "Hey look, I'm building this new cool insole that has sensors in it, and it can pick up on all this information and there's going to be an app."
I always tell them, "This is not for me. This is for you. Tell me what you want. This is like your wishlist for any information you want to glean from your foot mechanics." They go, "Oh wow, cool," and they do, they give me information. One guy said to me, he's like, "Yes, I really want to be able to go up for a run and have a better understanding of what my biomechanics are like." I said, "Sure, that can definitely help with that." Then he said, "Whoa, hold on. What about my golf swing?"
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Eric Greenspan: I said, "What about your golf swing?" He said, "I want to know if I'm swinging properly." I said, "Yes, it can help with that." I said, "That's not what we're going for, but it's going to pick up on balance and weight distribution, which is a big thing with a golf swing."
Sal Daher: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. There are so many possibilities here because eventually when you have a lot of installed devices, you're going to start seeing trends among different types of patients and so forth, and I think you're going to learn tons and tons, the next level of your SaaS platform. Tell me a little bit about the components of the company. What's your function, your role in the company?
The Team Roles at IWS
Eric Greenspan: My title is Director of Medical operations, but as we talked about in the start-up, titles don't matter.
Sal Daher: Yes, you're a chief bottle washer and sleeping in the hallways.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. Yes. I don't care what you call me. Even if it's something insulting, I can deal with that. Call me something but we're all pitching in and doing whatever we can do.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Eric Greenspan: The interesting thing is, the more we talk about it, the more we just have conversations, whether it's over dinner, lunch, a beer, whatever, we're just getting more and more information and refining what we're really trying to do here and refining our pitch. Just having conversations is key within itself.
Sal Daher: Okay, so would you tell me the cast of characters in the startup? You're the Director of Medical Operations. Who is the CEO?
Eric Greenspan: Johnny Cator. Johnny has got a background in software. He's an app developer. Great guy. Everybody loves Johnny.
Sal Daher: Okay, so he's like a SaaS app person.
Eric Greenspan: Yes, exactly.
Sal Daher: You're the biomechanics person, and who else is involved?
Eric Greenspan: Ted, who I mentioned before, is involved.
Sal Daher: Give his full name.
Eric Greenspan: Ted Finn.
Sal Daher: Ted Finn. Okay.
Eric Greenspan: Yes.
Sal Daher: Ted Finn, the guy with a friend who had his foot amputated and ultimately died because of diabetic wounds untreated.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly.
Sal Daher: The original founder.
Eric Greenspan: He has a strong background in shoes. He's sold over 100 million shoes worldwide in, I think, nine different countries. He's had a successful exit before, so he's great to have on the team. Greg McKenna is our CTO. He's an engineer. Another really smart guy. He has a background in business as well. Dana Stearns is our Chief Medical Officer. He is an emergency room physician at Mass General Hospital, and he's affiliated with Harvard. He's a teacher at Harvard as well for anatomy. Kevin, who I mentioned before, who pulled me into the team, he's our--
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Your "former friend".
Eric Greenspan: Yes, he's our business developer. He has a background in athletic training and personal training. Interestingly, we're talking about the Super Bowl way back when the Super Bowl happened, and if you remember, Odell Beckham Jr. tore his ACL in the Super Bowl and almost cost the Rams the Super Bowl. He found a picture on Google Images of Odell Beckham Jr. practicing the day before the Super Bowl. There was a picture where his foot was planted and his knee was bent in, which is the position where you're vulnerable for an ACL tear.
Sal Daher: Ah, you could have told--
Eric Greenspan: Then in the Super Bowl, he tore his ACL, that same ACL.
Sal Daher: Gosh.
Eric Greenspan: What's really interesting is, I think to myself, okay, if you have a 53-man roster, it's really hard to look at all of the minutiae of biomechanics for all these players, but if you have the WellSole in all these players--
Sal Daher: In all their stinky shoes.
Eric Greenspan: All their stinky shoes, all 350 pounds of them, each one, and you can aggregate all that information for the medical team so the athletic trainers and the doctors can sit down--
Sal Daher: Yes, you can have an algorithm spotting troubles and having the medical staff look. It will give the medical staff, like, superpowers.
Eric Greenspan: Yes.
Sal Daher: They'll be able to see through walls, so to speak.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Phenomenal. Yes.
Eric Greenspan: Then they can take a star like Odell Beckham Jr. and say, hey, we got a problem here with the way that you're landing.
Sal Daher: How would you address Odell Beckham Jr.'s problem prior to the ACL tear? What would have been done to the way that his leg was moving?
Eric Greenspan: Usually, that problem manifests because of instability either in the foot or in the hip. I'm overgeneralizing here because Odell Beckham Jr. has never been a patient of mine, unfortunately.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Eric Greenspan: Largely, the knee is controlled mechanically by what the hip and the foot do. The knee is a simple joint.
Sal Daher: Right.
Eric Greenspan: It flexes and extends. The hip and the foot do a whole bunch of different stuff, so if you're landing in that position, it could be weakness in the outer part of your hip or some instability in your foot, or it could be some muscular stiffness elsewhere that's causing that to happen, but again, it would require an examination, like, get them back into the training room--
Sal Daher: Then they can do something about that that will prevent that ACL tear.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Or minimize the likelihood of the ACL tear.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly.
Sal Daher: This is really fascinating. This is really fascinating.
Eric Greenspan: Thank you.
Sal Daher: That they could analyze and see this on video. Astonishing. That is so astonishing.
Eric Greenspan: I love it. You can wake me up at 3:00 in the morning and be like, "Hey, you want to talk about the WellSole?" I'm like, "Yes, what do you want to talk about?"
[laughter]
Sal Daher: That is tremendous.
Eric Greenspan: Yes.
Sal Daher: Eric Greenspan, at this point, are there any thoughts that we haven't covered, anything that you would like to convey to people who are in the audience who are thinking of starting a company, who are founders, or who are angel investors looking at helping to build companies?
Advice to the Audience
Eric Greenspan: Don't lose sight of the reason you did it. When you're going through something like this and it's really challenging, sometimes you're like, "Why am I doing this?" You want to throw your hands up and walk away from it, but if there's a reason that lives inside of you that keeps you going, you got to keep going back to that reason why you did it in the first place.
The reason I did this is because of the background that I have and the effect that changing someone's biomechanics can have on their health. I also think about my friends, people who are athletes, a lot of runners who have dealt with many injuries over the years like, this isn't for me, guys, this is for you. I want to build this for you so you can go out for a run and rest assured, peace of mind, comfort, you know that when you're running and the WellSole's giving you a thumbs up telling you that you're doing a good job, your chance of injury is diminished greatly.
Sal Daher: This is really inspiring. Did you have any models about entrepreneurship in your family or around you when you were growing up?
Eric Greenspan: My dad was a CPA.
Sal Daher: Okay, well, independent practitioner, yes.
Eric Greenspan: Yes. He was involved in that. My great uncle, as he puts it, was a peddler. He was always selling something. He actually put up a shop in Norwood, and they've had it open for 49 years. He's run a small business before. Yes, even just growing a practice, trying to understand how to explain things to laypeople, meeting patients, or going out and marketing in the early days, like setting up a table at a road race or a health club, saying, "Hey. My name is Dr. Eric Greenspan," and offering a free analysis of neck pain, back pain, and athletic injuries and being able to have a conversation with those people and explain to them what I do so they understand it is a skill that was hard to develop, but once it was developed it was really, really key to move my practice in the right direction, and those same skills are applied to IWS.
Whether I'm talking to a colleague, an investor, whoever, you need to be able to explain to people what you do. In terms of other people, my brother-in-law grew a company called Babyganics. It's a company that-
Sal Daher: Wow.
Eric Greenspan: -basically it makes baby products, lotions, wipes, stuff like that, and hand sanitizers. We have Babyganics stuff all over the house.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: You use it or do you have it every time your brother-in-law shows up, you put it out?
[laughter]
Eric Greenspan: I don't want the other stuff. [laughs]
Sal Daher: Brother-in-law care. Yes.
[laughter]
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. No, we use it. It's good stuff. It's really good stuff.
Sal Daher: Tremendous.
Eric Greenspan: Yes. I've been around entrepreneurs my whole life and I know that sometimes you got to grind it out for a long time to get to where you want to get to. There's a lot of pride in going through the painful part of it because that's what makes the success sweet, it's when you grind it out and get through the hard stuff.
Sal Daher: Yes, it is. It's funny, just being a descendant of someone who was a peddler, it reminds me of a conversation I had with my business partner of many years, Robert Smith. Now late Robert Smith. Bobby, Bob Smith. "Bob, what did your family do up in Maine?" Well, they are Jewish immigrants from Russia to Maine, and he said, "They were peddlers. My grandfather was a peddler." His father became an attorney. It's a very typical progression from small business person to the professions.
Then I thought back, that's what some of my ancestors did in Brazil. They came over from Lebanon and they were basically peddlers. They were selling merchandise in these small shops or supplying the shops that some of their relatives were in in the interior. It's just funny that my family, they were peddlers in the interior of Brazil and his family, they were peddlers in the interior of Maine, and here, your family, they're peddlers in the interior of Massachusetts.
[laughter]
Eric Greenspan: Exactly. Yes. I totally agree with you. A lot of people who come to this country, they come here and they have that entrepreneurial kick. They just want to get it going. In terms of people coming here from other countries. When my grandparents came here, my grandfather I think he spoke five languages.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Eric Greenspan: He spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, a whole bunch of languages. He came here and English was his worst language when he got here, and he had to get a job. He went to a butchery and he's trying to talk to the butcher and trying to get himself a job. The butcher says to him, "Do you have a wife?" He said "Yes." He says he got the job, but it turns out he actually asked him, "do you know how to use a knife?" He was a butcher his entire life.
Sal Daher: [laughter] That is so funny. That is such a riot.
Eric Greenspan: Yes. I know it's amazing how the world works, but a lot of that grind that I got came from my parents, my grandparents, and looking at the way that they came to this country with absolutely nothing and they just made it work.
Sal Daher: Yes, that's surprising. These little accidents of immigration can be so consequential. It's astonishing. It's so funny that your grandfather's English was so poor. He spoke five languages but English wasn't one of them. It gets me thinking, Joseph Conrad, tremendous English stylist, his first language is not English. Born in Poland, I guess his first language was Polish. He became a superb master of English prose. Immigrants can do astonishing things.
Eric Greenspan: Amazing things, because their backs are against the wall. They have to succeed. They have no option.
Sal Daher: Yes, they burned the boats. They burned their ships. They can't go back and they got to make things work.
Eric Greenspan: Exactly.
Sal Daher: It's tremendous. Okay. Well, Eric Greenspan of Innovative Wellness Systems, really grateful that you made the time to be at the Angel Invest Boston Podcast.
Eric Greenspan: Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.
Sal Daher: Tremendous. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.
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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.