Ethan Pierce’s startup Adaptive Reader makes great literature accessible to kids not reading at grade level. Harnessing generative AI with sophisticated prompts and quality control by humans creates compelling texts based on the classics. Ethan and his co-founder even have a promising business model. Great chat!
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Ethan Pierce
Adaptive Reader and What it is Solving
"... It's much better if they have this contact with the author, albeit in a structure that's simplified. After all, we're always reading Dante in the translation. We're reading Homer in the translation. It doesn't make it any less compelling..."
Teachers' Opinions of Adaptive Reader
"... That controversy, the conversation, the passion around helping these students read is really important and that's why we've been really grounded in research here and these conversations with these experts. I think talking to these teachers, the biggest challenge that they face is just getting kids to read at all..."
Ethan's Entrepreneurial Journey
Palette
How Adaptive Reader Came About
How Can Listener's Participate in Adaptive Reader
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “AI Helps Kids Read”
Guest: Ethan Pierce
Sal Daher: Hey, this is Sal Daher. I'm delighted you found the Angel Invest Boston podcast in which I interview people who know a lot about building technology startups. I now have a Substack about losing and keeping off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s. It's called Aging Fit and my goal is to build a community of people interested in keeping fit as they age. Look for Sal Daher on substack.com. Daher, by the way, is spelled Delta, Alpha, Hotel, Echo, Romeo. Enjoy the podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Ethan Pierce
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher, excited to be talking to tech founders who are building really, really world-changing companies. Today, we'd like to welcome Ethan Pierce. Welcome, Ethan.
Ethan Pierce: Hi, thank you so much for having me on.
Sal Daher: It's awesome, Ethan. Ethan is the founder of Adaptive Reader. Now, if you recall my interview with Drew Madson of Readlee, Ethan was a co-founder with Drew at Readlee. His company, Adaptive Reader, is following on in that but in a different way, different direction. We're going to talk about this really exciting company that's using artificial intelligence to help kids who are struggling with reading. Tell us the problem you're solving.
Adaptive Reader and What it is Solving
Ethan Pierce: Yes, absolutely. As you mentioned, I was on the founding team with Readlee. I was the chief product officer there and we would listen to students reading aloud and imagine you're a 10th-grade English teacher, right? We would listen to these students. They were reading at a fourth-grade level, a sixth-grade level, and they were struggling with that 10th-grade text and they might only get every other word or every third or fourth word. They were struggling so much with that basic vocabulary and sentence structure that they weren't understanding the text at all.
This is so common in US K–12 schools. So many of these kids get to high school and they're reading two or more years behind grade level and that might be because they're a multi-language learner. It might be because they're neurodivergent or had dyslexia growing up and got a little bit behind. There are so many reasons that kids can get there but that is really what we focused on. How do you help support these students to get to high school? They're reading behind grade level and so what we did, we actually went ahead and started using a large language model to look at the sentence structure and look at the vocabulary of the text these students were reading in their classrooms.
We're using large language model to take The Great Gatsby or Frankenstein and actually rewrite those books, change the sentence structure and the vocabulary to that eighth-grade reading level, that sixth-grade reading level, that fourth-grade reading level. It's challenging for that student but approachable for them.
Sal Daher: Interesting, very interesting. Now, Ethan, you're not just going to ChatGPT and giving it a prompt, "Give me a sixth-grade level Frankenstein," and it spits it out, right? It doesn't work that way. I don't know, if you try that, you may have varying results. Please tell us what your actual process is.
Ethan Pierce: Yes, absolutely. I challenge you all to go out there and do that. It's an interesting experience. I think a couple of the important things. We use seven different world-class literacy indexes. These are algorithms that actually help to assess the level of the text. We've built our own proprietary tech platform. We do use these large language models to do these translations, but then we assess that against seven different literacy metrics.
I think listeners might be familiar with the Lexile level, that's a very common one that folks are familiar with, to actually assess how challenging or easy a text is. We actually have human-in-the-loop editors. We hire English teachers who have taught these books in their classrooms, are familiar with them, to go through and read our edition. They compare them side by side with the original and the translated text. They're looking at those literacy metrics to see, is this actually at that sixth-grade level that we're looking for? Does it actually accurately reflect the context of the original? Not only that plot but the core themes. We work really hard to maintain that. We're not trying to dumb down these texts. We're trying to update the sentence structure and vocabulary so that they're approachable for students who are behind grade level.
"... It's much better if they have this contact with the author, albeit in a structure that's simplified. After all, we're always reading Dante in the translation. We're reading Homer in the translation. It doesn't make it any less compelling..."
Sal Daher: In the case, for example, of Frankenstein. I have Frankenstein here. I will read two passages from it, the original passage and what you call your Silver Edition passage, which is the sixth-grade reading level. The readers can get a sense that, these are difficult works, challenging works for even the best readers. Imagine if they're in a class and it's a kid that's just struggling with English, it's a second language, and she loves the story. She loves the idea of reading, but the words are so hard and the sentence structure is so complex. I'll give you an example from Frankenstein. Before this, it's funny, with Frankenstein, we're creating a monster here. People are going to start thinking, oh my gosh, they're taking works of genius and dumbing them down, bowdlerizing them. They're doing this, they're doing that. No, no, no, no. Hold on a second. My argument here is not that we're going to change these works of genius into dumbed-down sixth-grade everybody's going to be reading. There's not going to be any more original Frankenstein. It's only going to be the Silver Edition Frankenstein from Adaptive Reader.
What we're going to do here is we're going to create these works that are stepping stones to Frankenstein that allow kids to participate in a class discussion. All the kids in the class can read this. They can read the Silver Edition, they can read the Gold Edition, or they can read the original work if they're advanced students, and then they can have a discussion instead of getting the story of Frankenstein third hand in the culture, which, Frankenstein is pervasive in the culture. The whole thing that Mary Shelley created here, this creation of hers is pervasive.
It's much better if they have this contact with the author, albeit in a structure that's simplified. After all, we're always reading Dante in the translation. We're reading Homer in the translation. It doesn't make it any less compelling. Anyway, just to give you a sense of the difference it makes, this is an original passage from Frankenstein. "Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seed of frost and desolation. It ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight."
That was the original text. Now, the Silver Edition, which is the sixth-grade reading level. "The cold wind makes me dream even more about my journey. I have a hard time believing that the North Pole is just cold and empty. In my imagination, it's a beautiful and wonderful place." Here, what's the crime that we've committed here? Okay, we have archaic language, early 1800s, beautifully written. Does a 10th grader have to struggle through inspirited? Try to figure out if that's inspired. It means the same thing. Eventually, when they're college students, when they're advanced high school students, they'll struggle with the hard words. Let's make this accessible to them.
Anyway, this is just to give readers a sense of, or I should say listeners and readers too, because this gets transcribed, a sense of this phenomenal thing that you're doing here, Ethan, because I'm really excited about your work. Because getting kids to read is essential. It is not a natural thing. Reading is a really, really hard thing to do. If you can get a kid to read a work of genius, albeit reduced to a sixth-grade level, great. Tell us about the traction that you're getting. Because I understand you have a very astute commercial approach to this. We'll talk about that later. Tell us about the traction, what you're hearing from teachers.
Teachers' Opinions of Adaptive Reader
Ethan Pierce: Yes, so we started this, I went full-time on this in July. We're very early stage, just over three months now. We are continually getting new teachers, new principals, new special education directors who are hearing about us, coming to the site and purchasing real physical copies of these books, ordering these books for themselves to test out for their classrooms. That's a really exciting thing. We have a public school district here in Massachusetts that's testing these out in their classrooms as a sort of proof of concept, which is incredibly thrilling.
I think, most importantly, we've done 45 user research interviews with special education teachers, with bilingual coordinators, with high school English teachers, and with the school admin, and sort of the relief on their face to hear about this solution, the promise that they see is really powerful. There's one quote that always really gives me chills and it's this 10th-grade English teacher and she says, the thing that my eyes are just bright about is it seems like a most cruel and unusual punishment to take a 10th grader reading at a fourth-grade level and send them home with Frankenstein. To send them home with a version that's right for them, that they can work with, that's really powerful.
Sal Daher: Then come back and participate in the discussion of the class. Because kids, I watch my grandkids. It's like one the playground is doing something, they all want to do it, and pretty soon, they pick up. They pick up basketball, they pick up something, they pick up reading. You want them to find a thread, to get a start on this. It's a stepping stone. It's not a destination, people. Don't get riled up because in my own house, this is like the line from scripture, I have set a sword between brother and brother, between father and son. It's like the discussions here are very intense when I brought this book up.
I'm not going to name any of the characters in the discussion but some people were like, oh, this is wonderful, makes it accessible. The others, oh, this is horrible. It's an insult to literature and so forth and unpredictable. It's so funny. I would not have predicted that some person who's very knowledgeable about teaching young kids was incensed, and someone who's less was not. Anyway, this is going to be a little bit controversial but I think it's really valuable.
"... That controversy, the conversation, the passion around helping these students read is really important and that's why we've been really grounded in research here and these conversations with these experts. I think talking to these teachers, the biggest challenge that they face is just getting kids to read at all..."
Ethan Pierce: That controversy, the conversation, the passion around helping these students read is really important and that's why we've been really grounded in research here and these conversations with these experts. I think talking to these teachers, the biggest challenge that they face is just getting kids to read at all.
Sal Daher: It's a no-brainer, believe me. [chuckles] It's better than getting them to read some derivative book of Sonic the Hedgehog, off the game or something, It's not classical literature. I love the fact that by an accident of copyright, you're dealing with works that are out of copyright, therefore, great classics, okay, such as The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, and what it does is in this time of, just now, now, now. We once had an exchange student who would not watch a movie that was made before 2000. [laughs] I think she has reconsidered after her teenage years, but when she was a teenager, a young teenager, would not watch. It's just old stuff. Anything before 2000 is old stuff. This is circa 2010 or something. You're speaking up for the timeless things.
Okay. You're getting a lot of inbound interest because you did a lot of work talking to 45 people who were involved with this. I have a nephew. Shout out to my nephew, William, an ESL teacher in high school, ESL History teacher. I'm going to make him aware of this because it may be useful in his classroom. Now, Ethan has very cleverly targeted certain amounts for sales that are below what most principals can approve, can just sign off on. Why? Because he's also a very clever businessman. He has on-demand printing and has a good profit margin on each one of the books. The books are not that expensive to produce. He can deliver them.
What's the turnaround time for delivery of something that you already have in your machine? Let's say a school wants a shipment of Frankenstein. Give me a hundred Frankensteins. How long would that take?
Ethan Pierce: About five to seven business days with an 80% margin.
Sal Daher: Whoa. Ethan. I think this could be very, very successful. I invite my listeners to go to adaptivereader.com and read about this and engage with it, and connect people with it because you're helping this young man have an 80% margin, but don't think about that. Think about the 1000% margin that these kids are having for actually reading a book. Okay? By the way, the teachers want physical books in this post-COVID era with so much online learning and so forth. There's demand for the actual physical book, not the electronic version, which is wonderful to have. It has a beautiful cover. I'll put some graphics on this and we'll put a reference to your website.
Ethan, this is a fascinating thing that you've done and that you're having this traction. By the way, I met Ethan because he pitched at Walnut Ventures and people were really impressed with his work and a bunch of the angels are following up with him. Just for people to understand in general, an angel group like Walnut, the way they work is one person heads up the due diligence and organizes the whole thing. The other people go along for the ride because the person who's most interested usually will do the due diligence. The idea of angel groups is really to have, and I'm talking to the angels here, why it's important to work as an angel. I invite people to come and join Walnut because I tell you, it's so much fun to work with companies like Adaptive Reader to actually help them get the business moving. Okay? You might even make some money at it. It's a great thing. Walnut Ventures is the most fun group I've run across.
Anyway, so what the angels would do here is one angel or two, who happened to be very interested in this, would organize a due diligence, which means a longer meeting, might be an hour and a half, two hours. First, in person, and just going over the details. Then they might talk to a few people who know Ethan. Then after that, there might be interest.
Initially, that due diligence is you're trying to get one or two people to set that meeting. Once you have that, it's a little bit of herding cats, you got to go after all the different-- I'm telling this, I'm actually advising Ethan on how to deal with Walnut at this very moment. Okay, so this is angel investing is going on in real-time on the podcast. Then, after the meeting, that's been organized by one or two individuals, like the five or six or seven people who are interested, you follow up with them, and they write their own checks.
Now, there are different groups. For example, Launchpad has a much more formal process. You apply, and then they have somebody who's, if they decide to look at you, it's much longer. They write bigger checks but it's more formal, more formal. They actually have staff and so forth. Walnut is all about volunteers, so it's a very different experience, it's very personalized, but it can be also very positive for the founders and the angels.
Anyway, just wanted to make this note that Ethan presented recently at Walnut and people were, I should say, it was a very exciting presentation because the discussion afterwards was brother against brother, father against son, biblical, shall we say. In the end, I think everybody appreciated that what Ethan is doing is really, there's tremendous business here, tremendous business potential. Ethan, let me just do a brief promo for the podcast unless there's something else that you want to say about adaptivereader.com.
Ethan Pierce: Yes, I think the one thing that I just really want to root in to that brother-to-brother controversy, like that two sort of things, if you leave with anything here, one, we encourage these teachers to go back to that original text in the classroom, right? Even if you're reading at a fourth or sixth-grade level, we encourage these students as a class, they come together, and they do a close reading of Inspirited by the Winds of Change, right? They have the educator there who can help them struggle through and understand that difficult language and that difficult syntax.
We have other teachers who actually have the kids read the book twice and there's a lot of research behind that, so it gives them an understanding of that plot and then allows them to struggle with the language once they already understand what's going on. The other thing that I'll just sort of end with is, why do we still read Frankenstein, right? Why do we still read it? Is it because it's a language? Because it's a beautiful language, and the humanities person in me loves that language. Are we trying to get these kids to just understand that Victor created a monster, who, spoiler, killed his beloved, fiancee? Or are we trying to get kids to, or students, to understand some of the deeper insights and the deeper questions that Mary Shelley is asking in that work about your creation, about being an outsider, like the monster is?
When I talk to teachers, the big aha for them is, hey, I can move beyond just struggling to get kids through this surface-level comprehension, and we can start to actually tackle those core standards, those core learning elements that we're trying to get to. Inference, understanding character development and the relationship between characters, connecting what's happening in the story. Frankenstein, what better, what better story is there to the advent of AI right now? Things that are happening in real life. That's what I think truly makes this really powerful.
Sal Daher: Aha. Yes, they should read Aladdin and Frankenstein together in classes.
[laughter]
Ethan Pierce: Absolutely.
Sal Daher: Beautiful. This is really wonderful. Let me tell you, your response, talking about the teachers reading the original text in class. Let me tell you that the fraternal opposition that I got here is convinced by that because she outed her-- She said, "It's my better 40%" She said, "Well, if they read the original text in class and they struggle with that, that's good." It is kind of an on-ramp just convinced here. Look, this is a startup that gets engagement, okay? [laughs] You don't have to agree or they agree or disagree vehemently. That's why you're getting so much inbound, I suspect.
Let me do a brief promo for the podcast and then let's get into your entrepreneurial journey. You are listening to the Angel Invest Boston podcast, in which I, Sal Daher, an angel investor who's been doing this since the early 1990s, investing in startup companies. I've invested in over 70 companies in that time. I've had some great successes, I've got some failures, a lot of failures.
Over that time, what I've learned is that the most important element in understanding a startup is really the motivation of the founders. This is why we have these conversations with founders. Surprise, surprise. Frequently, interviews like this are part of my due diligence process. In addition to Walnut having a meeting, I can do due diligence on the motivation of the founder. I can do due diligence on how the founder sends me full-resolution portraits, okay? Execution. Are they any good at execution? Some founders, you ask for a full-resolution portrait and they send you an 85K image. That doesn't show good execution.
The whole point of this podcast is to help us to understand better how to help startups, how to find the startups, the founders that are going to build tremendous startups, and how to help them. I invite you to help people find this podcast by first following it on whatever platform you listen to podcasts, and then going the next step and giving it a rating, five stars is what my mom told me to ask for, and leave a written review.
Surprise, surprise. A few lines, it doesn't have to be much, okay, really gets the attention of the algorithm of the platform. Then all of a sudden that particular episode gets a lot more downloads because it gets featured because somebody cared to leave a written review in this day of people being very hurried. Therefore, please follow us, rate us, and review us, and they get more people to hear really impressive founders like Ethan here on this amazing journey.
Let's get into Ethan's entrepreneurial journey. Ethan, you are a Harvard undergrad. You could write your own tickets. You could have gone into corporate America in some area with one of the tech companies and you could have made just a lot of money and work long hours, but you could have had an easy existence in a lot of ways. Why did you decide to go bang your head against the wall and start new companies from the time you were at Harvard? I understand you started a new company when you were there. Where do you get this?
Ethan's Entrepreneurial Journey
Ethan Pierce: This is the third time around on the ground floor for me. I raised some money in my senior year at Harvard for my first company. I think part of it is just I love building things. I've done the corporate America thing. I've been a product manager and a product designer at a big corporate innovation lab. I know that world. It's a great thing, but being able to be on the ground floor bringing a concept to life, there's something just, I think you talk to any founder, there's something really invigorating about that.
Sal Daher: In Peter Thiel talk, you're a Zero to One person. You're not a one-to-end person.
Ethan Pierce: Absolutely. Emphatically.
Sal Daher: Did you have any models of this in your childhood as you're growing up? Parents entrepreneurs? Are they people, creative people went off on their own? Is that where you got the idea?
Ethan Pierce: My whole family are sort of blue-collar entrepreneurs as they call it.
Sal Daher: Oh, okay.
Ethan Pierce: My grandfather is 83 and he's still out there with his pool cleaning business.
Sal Daher: Awesome.
Ethan Pierce: He's had a million different businesses over the years from real estate to-- I've watched him, my parents, and my aunts and uncles, all go on their own entrepreneurial journey. Some of them have been successes and some of them have been failures, but I remember being three years old and selling flowers at the end of my road, little bouquets that I made. That was the model and I actually did very well with that. I franchised by the time I was five so it was a lot of fun.
Sal Daher: Whoa.
[laughter]
Ethan Pierce: I didn't know what that meant yet.
Sal Daher: You had no idea. Your mom probably said, "Oh, that's a good business."
Ethan Pierce: Yes.
Sal Daher: Ethan Pierce, this is such a great story. Then you're a senior at Harvard. Tell us about Palette, your first startup that you raised money for actually.
Palette
Ethan Pierce: Yes, so Palette, we had this question, and this is back a decade ago. Art appreciates over time, right? There have been examples starting in the 1970s of the British Rail Pension Trust buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art and then selling it 20 years later for pretty massive returns. Big investors have been doing this for a while, but could we actually pool money from smaller investors to buy those blue-chip artworks, the Picassos and the Dangos, that do appreciate over time?
We pull that money and so Palette, the idea was buying fractional shares in blue-chip artworks, really amazing first venture. There's a company called Masterworks that does this today that has done incredibly well. I think biggest learning from that first venture is the only thing worse than being late to the game is too early. We were on the very cutting edge of alternative investments, before crypto was mainstream, before all of these other asset classes had talk consumers that there were investments other than real estate in the stock market.
Sal Daher: Yes, 2013, alternative investments was still a daring thing in a lot of quarters, and so too early. Then after that, you graduated from Harvard, that was too early. What did you do after that?
Ethan Pierce: Yes, so from there, I went into product design. I worked at VistaPrint Corporate Innovation Studio which is one of the places that I learned, hey, you can have a fantastic business with customized print products, printed on demand, shipped, and delivered, great margin.
Sal Daher: Ah, wow.
Ethan Pierce: I think what we're doing right now is just the first step of that and the idea of being able to really customize these books and have them printed on demand. You think about printing these books with a large print for people with visual impairments, adding dyslexia fonts. There are so many of these customizations that this print-on-demand capacity allows us. We're even working on bilingual editions for those students that you mentioned-
Sal Daher: Excellent.
Ethan Pierce: -those English language learners, so being able to scale that with this print-on-demand capacity, I think is really powerful. Have made my way through product design and product management roles, mostly that Zero to One phase. Was that Fincura, which I'm sure some folks here on the podcast know, in that early product design capacity--
Sal Daher: Would you say the name of the company again?
Ethan Pierce: Fincura. Another Boston Techstars company. They were acquired by Numerated recently. Really fantastic company using AI technology to scrape data from financial statements.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay. Therefore F-I-N-T-U-R-A.
Ethan Pierce: Yes.
Sal Daher: Excellent. How did you connect with Readlee?
Ethan Pierce: I was in the Harvard Innovation Lab working on something and I met Drew and Steve, and they kept saying, "Hey, we really need some product management insights. Will you come consult with us for a couple of months?" That came like, "Hey, will you join the team? Will you help us?" I was just so inspired, not only by their vision and their mission but from what I was hearing from teachers about this problem that they have.
Sal Daher: Explain briefly what Readlee does and why it took off during COVID so that the audience can go back and listen to the podcast with Drew Madson. It's all about Readlee.
Ethan Pierce: Absolutely. Readlee, which was I think Read Aloud Productions at the time--
Sal Daher: Drew said it's read in English, le en español.
Ethan Pierce: Yes.
Sal Daher: With lee as in lee in español. Please continue.
Ethan Pierce: Yes. They would actually allow students to read aloud to the computer their assignment, and then the teacher could not only listen to that recording, but we used technology to actually compare what the student read aloud to the original text to see how was the student struggling with that reading. How were their literacy skills developing? That had a great exit to Paper last year, which was really exciting to be able to expand that technology to the millions of students that Paper serves.
Sal Daher: I understand that the exciting thing was that it really took off during COVID because people were doing remote teaching and this was a tool that was really helpful for teachers to be able to evaluate how the kids were reading if she or he couldn't actually be listening to every kid read as they might be able to do one-on-one in a class, and so this worked out tremendously. Now we have this powerful tool that a kid can read and it can evaluate, compare it to the text, and see how well the kid is reading. Awesome.
Ethan Pierce: Absolutely.
Sal Daher: Yes. Then the exit. How did Adaptive Reader come about? Well, you told us a little bit, that you would see these kids struggling, different grade levels, and so forth, and so you decided to start this as a solo founder?
How Adaptive Reader Came About
Ethan Pierce: Yes, so I started tinkering on this, moonlighting on this in April, went out there, and started having some user research interviews. Went through the painful process of trying to get ChapGPT to make one of these books as a prototype.
[laughter]
Ethan Pierce: I've done it. I've been there and learned. Then Eric Carlstrom, who some of you might know from EverTrue, he's the CTO over there. We've been connected for a while. I started chatting with him and he's been our CTO to help us build out this technology product, which has just been absolutely incredible.
Sal Daher: This is so exciting. You're a product person and now, there's an expression in Portuguese, in Brazil, Brazilian Portuguese, you have the knife and the cheese in hand. [laughs] It sounds rude in English. Cut cheese has terrible connotations, but in Portuguese, the expression, you have the knife and the cheese at hand, okay? Here you have this background, this expertise in on-demand printing, okay? Because you worked at VistaPrint, you've done all this work, and now, at the same time, ChatGPT comes along, large language models, and you also have this product, sweating the details of the product, this discipline that you've acquired, so I see that you have all the right elements.
The other thing is you got this bug to start companies and actually get them off the ground. I see this as a really promising project and that you're going to make a tremendous grilled cheese sandwich with this.
[laughter]
Ethan Pierce: I love that analogy. I certainly hope so.
Sal Daher: Ethan Pierce of adaptivereader.com, check it out. We've covered the problem that Adaptive Reader is solving, how it's doing it, traction it's getting, the process that you went through, 45, you talked to 45 stakeholders to understand the problem, and now it's getting inbound traction from teachers. How can listeners help move the ball for you so that this really, really constructive technology and this potentially very profitable business can get off the ground? How can they participate in this?
How Can Listener's Participate in Adaptive Reader
Ethan Pierce: Absolutely. I would say the first thing, go to adaptivereader.com and get one of these books for yourself. For the skeptics of you, you've heard a little bit of that sample. You can actually download the first few samples, chapters of Frankenstein for free and read more of that difference for yourself. Then I ask you, share that with your local high school. Share that with an educator who has been important to you in the past. Maybe it's a parent of a student that is struggling. That's an incredible way. Parents can be incredible advocates. That is one way. Then for the angels of you who are out there, feel free to reach out as well. I would love to grab a coffee and share more about our vision for this product.
Sal Daher: Yes, I urge angels to really take this. This is a project that could do a lot with angel help. I see angel written all over this because it's making connections for people, getting the resources, and so forth. Angels use a little bit of capital. Angel money is a little bit of capital and a lot of sweat equity. That's really what it boils down to. Angels are just putting money. Yes, it's good too. I'm not going to minimize that, but the full angel experience is where you put some money and then you roll up your sleeves and you actually get to work.
People like my friend Phillip Lockman works full-time. He's an executive at a company. He's also an angel investor. He rolls up his sleeve, he puts money in and he helps the companies and he connects with people. The guy is amazing. Angels really can be very helpful to companies. I think this is a company that could really benefit from support from angels. Ethan Pierce, thanks a lot for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Ethan Pierce: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Sal Daher: Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
[theme music]
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.
