The genius founder of several great startups, Mike Singer, MD/PHD somehow found time to teach himself patent law, to learn Portuguese and Hindi and even to play lawyer in court and to win a lawsuit on the use of drones. I learned an unusual number of things from this polymath. Founders and angels, don’t miss this one.
Click here to read the transcript of this episode.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Michael Singer, M.D./Ph.D. and Thanks Peter Fasse for the Connection
Mike Singer’s Current Startup: Cartesian Therapeutics
How Cartesian Was Funded – Not the Usual Story
“…we find that we can be more capital-efficient than some of the other businesses you may have on your show. It's as simple as taking more initiative.”
“…while the numbers in these trials are smaller than studies you may read about in the newspaper from day to day, they can provide meaningful efficacy information.”
One of Mike Singer’s Previous Startups: Topokine, acquired by Allergan
“…Murat and I were part of the team of doctors at the time, at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, that made an unusual observation, and that was that patients using a certain glaucoma eye drop were experiencing a strange side effect.”
“…a lot of mice have been cured of diabetes by a lot of experimental drugs. They just don't end up working as well in humans.”
Another of Michael Singer’s Startups: HealthHonors, Acquired by Healthways
Transition from Being a Working Physician to Being a Founder
“As you get older, you gain more insight. You look back on your life so far and you get more insight. And I realize I was probably always an entrepreneur, and the unnatural part of it was working as a physician.”
Mike Singer’s First Business Growing Up
Mike Singer’s First Startup: Previva, R.I.P.
Loving Mayan Ruins
“…Indiana Jones was a terrible archeologist. I mean, everything he touched, he destroyed.”
The Movie “Gravity”
Mike Singer’s Formula for Success as an Angel Investor: “Cool people with technically sound ideas, protected by a moat, preferably by patents. “
Mike Singer Portfolio Exit: Medumo
Mike Singer Portfolio Company: Remedy Plan
Mike Singer Portfolio Company: RockStep Solutions
Mike Singer & Sal Daher Communicate in Portuguese & Hindi, Briefly
Why Speakers of Portuguese Think They’re Smarter than Spanish Speakers
The Influence of Tupí-Guaraní on Brazilian Portuguese
“…if you decide to be an expert, you have to contend with the fact that there is a diminishing return on investment. The more effort you put into learning more, the harder it becomes to learn more.”
"You will probably execute at least one contract a week. Has it ever occurred to you that you should pick up an introductory law book on contract law and read that book?"
"What's an F-ologists, Father?" "An F-ologists is this guy who was in prison for 30 years with the F volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he only knew things that started with F." It's overspecialization.
Mike Singer Plays Lawyer in Court & Wins
Advice from Mike Singer to Founders: Plan for Success
Mike Singer on Steven Pinker’s Enlightment Now
Mike Singer is Optimistic about the US & the Globe
“If you think that the world is going to end in 10 years no planning is needed, but we optimists believe that we need to do some planning.”
Transcript of Polymath Founder
GUEST: Founder and Angel Invester Mike Singer, MD/PhD
Sal Daher Introduces Michael Singer, M.D./Ph.D. and Thanks Peter Fasse for the Connection
Sal Daher: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today we are really privileged to be speaking with a repeat founder, a scientist, a physician. Let me put it this way. My brother-in-law, Peter Fasse, who is one of the top patent attorneys here in Boston, told me one day, "You got to meet this guy. You got to meet this guy, Michael Singer. He's just amazing. He's a polymath. He's what you'd call a polymath. The guy is unbelievable. He has made himself into a very capable patent attorney. Even though he's an MD, PhD, he's a scientist, he's a founder, he's taught himself patent law. And he does other amazing things." So anyway, welcome Michael Singer to Angel Invest Boston.
Mike Singer: Thanks for having me, Sal.
Sal Daher: I don't mean to embarrass you. Michael's from Pennsylvania.
Mike Singer: That's right.
Sal Daher: People from Pennsylvania embarrass easily. I had a roommate from Pennsylvania. He was the nicest guy, he was absolutely, off the charts brilliant guy, very low key, who would just embarrass easily. But, anyway, Mike has founded a bunch of companies. He's working at a really interesting company right now called Cartesian. Mike, tell us what Cartesian is addressing, what it's doing, and what stage it is.
Mike Singer’s Current Startup: Cartesian Therapeutics
Mike Singer: Today, in 2020, Cartesian is a fully integrated clinical-stage company developing cell therapies focused around mRNA engineering. We have three assets in the clinic, as of today. These are in three different therapeutic areas, and each one of them represents a first. So we have Descartes-11, which is the first CAR T therapy for a frontline cancer, which is multiple myeloma. And there's a personal story there, behind our founding the company and our focus on myeloma.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: We have Descartes-08, which is the first CAR T-cell therapy for an autoimmune disease. And more recently our team in Gaithersburg, Maryland, developed Descartes-30, which is not a CAR T-cell but rather a mesenchymal stem cell therapy. And this is for acute respiratory distress syndrome, which we also call ARDS. And the most common cause of ARDS today in the world, unfortunately, is COVID-19, which was the impetus for that therapy. So, a platform developing cell therapies with mRNA, three diverse assets, and more in the pipeline.
Sal Daher: Wow. That's very challenging. How are you funded?
How Cartesian Was Funded – Not the Usual Story
Mike Singer: Well, funding has been a peculiar and wonderful experience for myself and my co-founder, Murat Kalayoglu. We have been friends and business partners working together since 2003, if you can believe it.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Mike Singer: And we also met your brother-in-law Peter around that time, so it's a relationship that goes back a long way. Another person we met at the time... We were all ophthalmology residents at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and one of the attendings teaching us cataract surgery was Bonnie Henderson, an ophthalmologist there. And her husband, Ted Henderson, was and still is a managing director at Schooner Capital.
Schooner Capital is a private investment firm in Boston. They've been in business for 50 years, as a matter of fact. And we were fortunate to meet Ted at Schooner Capital early on. We've had a long relationship with them as our lead investors. So, while most of the guests on your show are probably accustomed to pitching to venture capital and working with venture capital money, it's something... I've pitched to venture capital but we've never taken their money.
Sal Daher: It's interesting you mention Schooner Capital, because over 100 episodes into the podcast, we hear Schooner Capital repeated again. It was mentioned in the first episode that I recorded-
Mike Singer: Really?
Sal Daher: ... because Michael Mark, my colleague in Walnut, was also funded by Schooner Capital, way back when.
Mike Singer: Well, when you've been around for 50 years and you have such diverse interests as Schooner Capital does, I'm not surprised that the name comes up on your podcast frequently.
Sal Daher: I had a friend who worked at Schooner at one time, and they were peripherally involved with emerging markets at the time, and really a great guy. And that's how I got to know the people at Schooner. But anyway, it's remarkable. So, Schooner is not a traditional VC. Basically, it's a wealthy family that invests its resources in things that interest them, that they think is profitable, and so it's not your typical sort of VC firm.
Sal Daher: So, you had a lead investor, Schooner Capital. For this kind of stuff that you're doing, you're in clinical trials, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars of funding that's needed.
“…we find that we can be more capital-efficient than some of the other businesses you may have on your show. It's as simple as taking more initiative.”
Mike Singer: Well, yes, although we find that we can be more capital-efficient than some of the other businesses you may have on your show. It's as simple as taking more initiative. The founders and the team perform a lot of work that some other companies might outsource to an expensive service provider.
Sal Daher: You're into your fourth startup, so you've made a few mistakes along the way.
Mike Singer: Yes.
Sal Daher: And you've learned from those. But anyway, what's the timeline for readouts with Cartesian, with the various therapies?
Mike Singer: Well, probably the easiest thing is to say where we are right now. With each of those assets, we're in a Phase I/II clinical trial where we're currently enrolling. Stay tuned for updates. As you know, recruitment right now... If you ask anybody who's trying to recruit to do a clinical trial-
Sal Daher: It's slow.
Mike Singer: Well, it's also unpredictable, with COVID-19. I think that's why we're careful about the guidance we provide.
Sal Daher: Yes, yes. Where was I reading today that enrollment in cancer trials are way down because people are very reluctant to participate?
Mike Singer: That's right.
Sal Daher: And for listeners who are not familiar, Phase I, II, it's basically about safety of the therapy, very basic stuff. You might get some reading on efficacy but it's mostly about safety at this point. Is that right, Mike?
Mike Singer: Well, it's a little different in oncology and in cell therapies. And the reason is that with a small molecule or with a conventional biologic, you may very well run an initial Phase I trial in healthy volunteers, to characterize the safety and pharmacokinetics of the agent, but in oncology and with cell therapies we tend to treat patients. We go directly to patients in need with therapy, where there's a more compelling risk-benefit equation to enroll them in the trial.
“…while the numbers in these trials are smaller than studies you may read about in the newspaper from day to day, they can provide meaningful efficacy information.”
And so, while the numbers in these trials are smaller than studies you may read about in the newspaper from day to day, they can provide meaningful efficacy information.
Sal Daher: Oh, interesting.
Mike Singer: Yeah, particularly if the agent has a dramatic effect, we can detect that quite early.
Sal Daher: Oh, that would tremendous. Okay. So, let's talk a little bit about your previous startup.
One of Mike Singer’s Previous Startups: Topokine, acquired by Allergan
Mike Singer: Topokine! Yeah.
Sal Daher: Topokine! Topokine, okay.
Mike Singer: Sure.
Sal Daher: Tell us the founding story of Topokine.
Mike Singer: Well, I've already mentioned that, as you can tell, I was once a physician, scientist, and an ophthalmology resident, and I-
Sal Daher: And on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, so he's very humble. He's from Pennsylvania. If he were from New York City he'd be saying, "Ah! I was king of the world. I was the best, the best!"
Mike Singer: Pennsylvanians, we are a humble people. Yes.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: Yeah. What I was about to say in that spirit is that I was essentially a failure as an academic physician. My business partner Murat and I met in residency, and probably are a great disappointment to the doctors who trained us. But anyhow, I got two really important things out of residency. One is that I met my business partner, Murat, and the other is that I met my wife, who was an optometrist-
Sal Daher: Awesome.
Mike Singer: ... and was working at the Veteran's Hospital.
Sal Daher: Well, because you were working so many hours, you didn't have contact with normal human beings outside of your profession. That's the reality.
“…Murat and I were part of the team of doctors at the time, at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, that made an unusual observation, and that was that patients using a certain glaucoma eye drop were experiencing a strange side effect.”
Mike Singer: It's probably true. I didn't get out much. Anyhow, so Murat and I were part of the team of doctors at the time, at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, that made an unusual observation, and that was that patients using a certain glaucoma eye drop were experiencing a strange side effect. And this first came to light in patients who, in very rare instances, were only using the eye drop on one eye. Usually, glaucoma affects both eyes.
Sal Daher: Oh, a differential trial.
Mike Singer: Yeah.
Sal Daher: Okay. Yeah, okay.
Mike Singer: So, kind of an accidental observation, patients using this on one eye and they noticed something was different between the two eyes. And it turned out that this eye drop was causing fat cells around the eye to shrink.
Sal Daher: Ah.
Mike Singer: The eye is surrounded by a pillow of fat. Right?
Sal Daher: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mike Singer: And when that fat starts to shrink, it's something that the patients could see and-
Sal Daher: My eyes are surrounded by a mattress of fat.
Mike Singer: There you go.
Sal Daher: Yours is a pillow; mine is a mattress. Yeah, but anyway, so people were getting lean eyes from this medication.
Mike Singer: Yeah. And if you took a little of the fat out from around the eye, which surgeons occasionally do, you would see that the fat cells were actually shrinking. And they weren't dying, they were just smaller. And so that was a curious observation. So we asked the question, "What if we could take this compound and turn it into a skin cream, and rub it on the skin and make the fat underneath shrink?" You couldn't imagine any reason why anyone would want to do that. Right?
Sal Daher: Right, yeah, become really baggy. That's great.
Mike Singer: So of course patents were filed for, which is always important. And then we set about doing exactly this: We formulated it and we studied some fat mice. There are genetically fat mice that overeat, and they actually have diabetes as well, and a lot of fat under their skin.
Sal Daher: Poor guys.
Mike Singer: And when we got the results, we were disappointed. The chemical in that eye drop didn't work when we put it on the mouse skin. But we persisted, and we noticed that with a change in the molecular structure that we were using, it did work. And the reason had to do with how the drug penetrated in the skin and how it was metabolized locally in the skin. So then for a few years we ran a series of painstaking studies, really having to develop our own new field of science around delivering drugs across the skin into fat, and modulating that fat, and measuring those effects. And we got it working.
And as we started to move into clinical trials, we realized that you could reduce a certain amount of fat around the eye. And because people are very well attuned to small differences around the face, it's very easy to detect visually, but our initial hopes of having something that you could slather all over your belly and instantly trim inches off your waistline turned out to be too ambitious. Now I will say we were able to cause fairly impressive slimming in rats and mice. Okay?
Sal Daher: Ah, okay.
Mike Singer: In fact, we were able to reverse their diabetes, but-
Sal Daher: With this cream?
Mike Singer: Yes, yes.
Sal Daher: Wow.
“…a lot of mice have been cured of diabetes by a lot of experimental drugs. They just don't end up working as well in humans.”
Mike Singer: But I'll say this, a lot of mice have been cured of diabetes by a lot of experimental drugs. They just don't end up working as well in humans.
Sal Daher: Ah.
Mike Singer: But what we eventually settled upon, this was thanks to one of our advisors at the time, John LaMattina, former President of Research and Development at Pfizer who came aboard-
Sal Daher: And also, at PureTech Health.
Mike Singer: Absolutely. He pointed out to us, "Guys, you know that this works on fat around the eye, and there is a major aesthetic problem, which is fat prolapsing behind the eyelids and causing what looks like puffy eyes, but actually it's a condition called steatoblepharon, particularly on the lower eyelids. It happens with aging and soft tissues around loosen up, and it makes people look tired and sad, when in fact they're not. So it causes other people to misread their facial expressions. And there's surgery for this."
We realized that this was a problem, a tractable problem. And so, we ran [a] Phase I trial, we ran a Phase II trial, randomized controlled trial with 90 subjects. And there was a statistically significant reduction in eyelid fat, improvement in appearance.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: And this was according to independent ratings by the physician and the patient. And no one knew whether or not they were getting the active or the placebo. That was the story of Topokine. The asset was acquired by Allergan a few years ago. And what happened since then is a different story.
Another of Michael Singer’s Startups: HealthHonors, Acquired by Healthways
Sal Daher: Excellent. I also understand that you started a company that was acquired, called HealthHonors, in the sort of behavioral economics space?
Mike Singer: We did. Murat and I-
Sal Daher: You and Murat, again.
Mike Singer: Well, yes, although we're working backwards in time here. So this was the second company.
Sal Daher: You're like the Blues Brothers.
Mike Singer: Yeah. We wear the same sunglasses and everything. So Topokine was the third company we started, and the second company we started was HealthHonors. HealthHonors was an idea we had. We were thinking about how patients don't remember to take their medicine on time. It's actually a little more complicated than that. Even when they remember, they just become tired of taking their medicine. And it's human. It's not that they're doing anything wrong. It's just human.
This is particularly the case for medications that have a preventative value but don't provide any immediate relief. And so you can think about blood pressure medication, glaucoma medication, cholesterol medication. And surprisingly, people even have a hard time continuing to take medications for HIV or for a transplant, to prevent a transplant from rejecting.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: And it's simply because they don't feel any immediate benefit when they take medicine. And it's hard to keep on taking your medicine.
Sal Daher: It is, it is.
Mike Singer: So we had the idea, "Why don't we use principles of behavioral economics to motivate people to take their medicine on time and as prescribed?" And one of the best ways to motivate people is to use intermittent reward. And for people who aren't familiar with that term, the best way to say it is that Las Vegas has perfected the science of intermittent reward.
Sal Daher: Intermittent. The value of a lottery is much greater than the expected value of the payoffs.
Mike Singer: That is absolutely it. Forgive me if I veer a little bit into-
Sal Daher: No, no, veer away. This is an interesting topic. Yeah.
Mike Singer: It's an entrepreneurship story, because this was early on, when we were just struggling founders. We literally started by building a portable electronic slot machine that had an alarm clock on it and a little pill dispenser. And when it was time to take your medicine, you pressed a button and took your pill out, and the slot machine turned on, only if you took your pill on time.
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: The slot machine would turn on and you would find out if you won a prize. And the slot machine would remember. And after a month you could redeem... This wasn't remotely enabled or anything like that. It's a simple machine. But you could redeem all of your points, all of your winnings for real gifts, a gift card.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: We built this because we wanted to test out the principle. I can tell you now that we tested it with Tic Tacs. We gave it out to volunteers and had them try it out with Tic Tacs, and compiled the data. And the reason we wanted that data, of course, was to convince some investors to write us a check for a few thousand bucks, so that we could go into a real trial.
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: It worked out. No surprise that the slot machine actually did work. People were willing to take their Tic Tacs on time for the chance to win prizes. And the next step was, we were able to run a real trial, reviewed by an institutional review board and everything, at a local pharmacy, using people's cholesterol medication.
Sal Daher: Awesome.
Mike Singer: And we showed significant effect, and one thing led to another. Pretty soon we were working with a major managed care organization running another trial. We were able to sell the solution to... Well, I should back up. We weren't selling slot machines, of course. We developed a-
Sal Daher: The Gaming Commission is going to knock on your door.
Mike Singer: Well, that's right. We developed, actually, a sophisticated set of algorithms that were, unlike like Las Vegas, were not random. They were designed to help each patient achieve their maximum health.
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: Okay? So they were purely driven to maximize a person's engagement and the adherence, as we call it, the percentage of scheduled doses that they take on time. So, soon we were involved in the launch of a pharmaceutical brand, working with a major pharmaceutical company. We were working with a pharmacy. And we also began to get interest from major employers, because it turns out these employers are paying for their employees' and families' healthcare costs, and they don't mind at all paying incentives to their employees. So we saw the most uptake with those people.
And after about three years, that company was also, was acquired by a disease management company called Healthways. And I should mention, because Murat and I were greenhorns as far as entrepreneurs, we had a seasoned CEO come in and join us, John Sheehan. John had already had a couple of successes of his own. He's here in Boston. He invested some of his own money.
Sal Daher: Always a good sign, yes.
Mike Singer: Yeah. And worked tirelessly at it. So, not only was he instrumental to that success but we, Murat and I, learned a lot from him. We still work with him today, and we're invested in his company now. And I've learned a lot of important lessons from him.
Transition from Being a Working Physician to Being a Founder
Sal Daher: Far out. So talk to me a little bit about the transition from being a working physician to starting a company.
Mike Singer: Difficult.
Sal Daher: Were you kind of moonlighting while you were starting HealthHonors, prior to CEO?
Mike Singer: Yes, to some extent. You can imagine... I met my wife. My wife's parents were delighted she was marrying a doctor and we would be secure, securely employed, and so on.
Sal Daher: Who'd soon tear all that up? Yeah.
Mike Singer: I actually graduated from residency. Her parents came to my residency graduation. And I slowly had to explain to them that I wasn't going to be going into practice. I wasn't going to be doing fellowship or anything like that. Actually, I did work as an attending for the Veteran's Hospital, first of all because it was very rewarding work, but it did help to provide some financial cushion while we were tinkering away to get HealthHonors started. And there were certainly times along the way where we had to work night jobs and so forth to support ourselves.
Sal Daher: Okay. What brought you to this idea of entrepreneurship? I mean, you're a highly trained scientist, physician. And then you go into this environment where you have to be very in the box, very precise, you don't make mistakes, you don't take risks, and then you go and do a crazy fool thing like start a company.
“As you get older, you gain more insight. You look back on your life so far and you get more insight. And I realize I was probably always an entrepreneur, and the unnatural part of it was working as a physician.”
Mike Singer: As you get older, you gain more insight. You look back on your life so far and you get more insight. And I realize I was probably always an entrepreneur, and the unnatural part of it was working as a physician.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay.
Mike Singer’s First Business Growing Up
Mike Singer: And I think I was disciplined. I always wanted to take good care of patients.
So, I started my first little business when I... I must have been six or seven years old. And we had a neighbor who had these decorative landscaping rocks. They were beautiful rocks. They might be about the size of an orange or a grapefruit, and different colors, and nice and smooth and polished, hundreds of these covering their front yard. And I guess at the age seven, I thought it was okay to just take one of those rocks, or maybe 10 or 20 of them. And I did. And I colored them with crayons, all different colors.
Sal Daher: You hadn't read up on property rights, yet.
Mike Singer: No, no. I thought, "They're rocks, right? You can take a rock." They didn't miss them anyhow, but I colored them with like a quilt pattern, with crayons, and then I walked door to door selling them. I learned right away about the importance of networking and luck and entrepreneurship, because one of the doors I knocked on was the home of a guy who owned a radio station.
Sal Daher: Ah.
Mike Singer: And that week, I got free advertising on the radio. So I had a terrific, terrific couple weeks of sales after that, in the neighborhood, but I also learned early on that if you saturate your market your sales might decline after that.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay. There was a limit to the demand for rocks, painted rocks, colored rocks.
Mike Singer’s First Startup: Previva, R.I.P.
Mike Singer: Yeah, one per household, that was about it.
So, I was an intern at Brigham And Women's Hospital and I had this idea to build an inhaler that was connected to the cellular network. And the reason was, when asthma patients are getting sick they tend to have serious exacerbations that develop over days. And as they're doing that, patients intuitively will take their albuterol inhaler more often to relieve their symptoms.
So, the idea was, why don't we measure this in real-time and see if we can predict serious asthma attacks? So I started that project then. And even when I was a resident in ophthalmology, I kind of secretly was working on that project on the side. So I've had the entrepreneurship bug the whole time, and it just took a little bit of courage and help from others to fully embrace it after finishing residency.
Sal Daher: Well, you'll be interested to know that that is a fruitful problem that you were addressing, because I remember seeing about a year and a half ago, I saw a pitch by a woman founder, very interesting. And she had this electronically enabled inhaler.
Mike Singer: Yeah.
Sal Daher: And the approach there was really around training, around making sure that the inhaler was used properly, so forth. It wasn't necessarily predicting health events, but basically about making sure that it's used in the correct way. A lot of people make mistakes on how they use their inhalers.
Mike Singer: Very true, absolutely. And from that, so Murat and I actually, our first corporation that we formed was actually to try to commercialize that inhaler idea.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: And we failed. We failed.
Sal Daher: Was that Previva?
Mike Singer: That was Previva, which was probably also the worst name for a company. We were in the MIT 50K pitch competition. It's 100K today, it was 50 back then. And we actually were finalists, but one of the judges said, "Let me understand what your name means. Previva, are you preventing life?" Just a terrible name.
Sal Daher: People don't think about names. It's so funny, you know? It's like, "Run it by your mom or your sister or somebody."
Mike Singer: Exactly. Yeah. So we talked about HealthHonors a moment ago. The original name for HealthHonors was MedIncentive. The idea we were giving people incentives to take medicine. And it was spelled Med Incentive, I-N-C-E-N-T-I-V-E. We found out there was a company called Med Encentive, M-E-D E-N-
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: Well, you get it. One letter difference.
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: And we actually called our patent attorney, Peter. We figured he's a patent attorney, he can help us with trademarks as well. And we said, "Do you think we need to change our name, because they're one letter different from us?" And he said, "I think you need to change your name."
Sal Daher: A patent attorney that would give you free advice.
Mike Singer: Yeah, yeah. So, we changed it.
Loving Mayan Ruins
Sal Daher: It's not illegal. That is hilarious. That's hilarious. You taught yourself patent law. You were a first author in an article on Nature, which is a very prominent journal. You also are an amateur Mayan archeologist. So what drew you to Mayan ruins?
Mike Singer: When I was a kid and I saw a picture of the largest pyramid at Uxmal, which is an important Maya site in the Yucatan Peninsula, south of Mérida, fell in love with the culture just looking at that picture. Another important thing happened. My grandmother bought me a VHS cassette of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Sal Daher: Oh, yeah.
“…Indiana Jones was a terrible archeologist. I mean, everything he touched, he destroyed.”
Mike Singer: And that had such an effect on my imagination. I know now, having taken a bunch of archeology courses and visited work at some of these sites, that Indiana Jones was a terrible archeologist. I mean, everything he touched, he destroyed.
Sal Daher: He was a disaster! There was stuff, boulders rolling down, he was setting off all these traps which had been there for a thousand years. No, you don't want to do that. You want to observe how these mechanisms could function after a thousand years of sitting still. You know, when I watched the movie Gravity?
The Movie “Gravity”
Mike Singer: Yeah, yeah.
Sal Daher: Ah, it bothered me so much. I mean, it's a great movie in so many ways. The acting is superb, the storytelling, but the kinetics, they have awful kinetics.
Mike Singer: Oh, it just doesn't make sense?
Sal Daher: It doesn't make any sense. The kinetics doesn't make sense. The vector math doesn't work out. It's all wrong.
Mike Singer: That just confirms to me that I don't know anything about kinetics or vector math, because I didn't pick up on it.
Sal Daher: Yeah, don't think about that. But as an engineer, I'm looking at it, "Oh, it's all wrong. It's all wrong. That's not how bodies behave in space," but everything else is brilliant about the movie.
Mike Singer: It was a great movie.
Sal Daher: Yeah. It's like, what is it that Mark Twain said? “You know when cats get to pulling fur in a summer night? All that horrible hollering you hear is bad grammar. Cats have terrible grammar.” Well, I think Gravity has terrible kinetics. So, let's talk a little bit about your angel investing. You're invested in about 25 startups.
Mike Singer: Yep.
Sal Daher: Do you have kind of like a theme, the kind of companies that you like to invest in?
Mike Singer’s Formula for Success as an Angel Investor: “Cool people with technically sound ideas, protected by a moat, preferably by patents. “
Mike Singer: Cool people with technically sound ideas, protected by a moat, preferably by patents.
Sal Daher: Ah.
Mike Singer: And I would say in that order.
Sal Daher: Makes sense.
Mike Singer: Yeah, yeah. And what I'm saying is not terribly novel. You'll hear this from a lot of people.
Sal Daher: That's a lot like what my investing thesis is turning into. It's basically looking for stellar founders with really great technology, that are defensible. Hopefully, it's some kind of a platform, something that has multiple uses so they can have multiple shots on goals. Do you want to talk about some of the startups that you're invested in?
Mike Singer: Sure. Well, let me talk about one that exited last year, and actually was my first substantive angel investment.
Sal Daher: Sure.
Mike Singer Portfolio Exit: Medumo
Mike Singer: That was the company called Medumo, based here in Boston, started by a small group of physicians.
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: The problem that they were focusing on initially was that patients show up for colonoscopies and often they're not prepared, in the technical sense, for the colonoscopy. Of course, there's a problem that they just don't show up.
Sal Daher: Younger people don't know what this means.
Mike Singer: So I personally have not gone through this yet.
Sal Daher: Okay. What it means is-
Mike Singer: Yeah.
Sal Daher: ... there's this gallon with a powder inside it. You go to the pharmacy, he says, "Why?" I have a prescription. You think they're going to give you a pill. They give you a plastic gallon with powder inside. And you're supposed to add ginger ale or water. And then you're supposed to consume that entire gallon. And it makes you go like crazy. And then you spend a whole day clearing out your bowels. Okay? This is a family show, but this is part of family life. So people look at that thing and, "I'm not going to drink a whole gallon full of that disgusting stuff." So they arrive at the colonoscopy un-prepped. So please continue.
Mike Singer: Inadequately prepared.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: And you can imagine the effect that this has on the gastroenterology suite, because it's a well-oiled machine. Right?
Sal Daher: Yes. It's going to be a very messy, messy situation. Yes.
Mike Singer: So you don't want utilization... At a facility like that, you don't want people sitting idle, so it's a real problem. And Medumo, these were experts in medical education and patient education, and they had the idea that they could set up a system as simple as this. When they schedule your colonoscopy, they ask for your cellphone number. They enter it into a field on the computer. And from that moment on, you get text messages telling you exactly what to do and when. It's very easy. It doesn't require any extra work. And if you want more information, those text messages have links.
Sal Daher: Just that?
Mike Singer: Well, they'll take you to instructional videos, if you need help. So it takes you through it without asking you do download an app or do anything crazy. Now, this was the initial technology, of course.
Sal Daher: So, you don't show up at the pharmacy and you're handed this thing, "What is this? What is this?" Good.
Mike Singer: They take you through every step of the way. And of course they were able to expand to other procedures, build analytics, build other kinds of helpful tools. And that company was acquired by Philips Healthcare last year.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Mike Singer: And it has just been a terrific success story. So what else can I tell you about? How about a company called Remedy Plan?
Mike Singer Portfolio Company: Remedy Plan
Sal Daher: Remedy Plan, okay.
Mike Singer: Remedy Plan is a drug discovery company that focuses on identifying drugs that can cause cancer cells that have stem-like features to differentiate. And the reason is that cancer cells that have more stem-like features tend to be more harmful and more persistent. Cancers that are well-differentiated and don't have those characteristics are easier to treat. So it's an entirely different way of thinking about drugging tumor cells. Instead of asking the conventional question, "How do we kill this cell, and how many different drugs can we layer on top to kill them," they're interested in forcing the cell to differentiate and to become less harmful. Why? So that other drugs can then be used to kill them.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay, okay.
Mike Singer: So they have a proprietary screening method and they've done a terrific job in identifying compounds that work in this way, to differentiate tumor cells, and they're now planning to bring those forward into the clinic.
Sal Daher: So, stem-ness, does that mean that the cancer cell has a possibility of mutating in different directions that are not so predictable?
Mike Singer: It has the potential to differentiate in more than one way-
Sal Daher: In more than one way, okay.
Mike Singer: ... and then to narrow its phenotype.
Sal Daher: Okay. So these compounds will kind of force the cancer cell to commit itself to one particular phenotype.
Mike Singer: Yes.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: Absolutely. Because, as you know, when a tumor is biopsied, one thing that the pathologist will look it and they'll comment on whether it's well-differentiated or poorly differentiated. This is another way that I think about it. You typically want to hear that the tumor is well-differentiated. A poorly differentiated tumor means it's badly behaved and has the potential to behave in worse ways.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: Yeah.
Sal Daher: Huh, didn't know that. This is a cool company. And what stage is it in now?
Mike Singer: They're at the candidate stage.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Mike Singer: So they've identified a couple candidates that they're prepared to take forward. Yeah, and it's just been terrific. It's an exciting point of time for that company, where they're just looking now at the horizon about getting these compounds into the clinic.
Sal Daher: Tremendous, tremendous. Why don't we talk about something topical, a company that I'm evaluating right now, RockStep Solutions.
Mike Singer: Hey!
Mike Singer Portfolio Company: RockStep Solutions
Sal Daher: You're invested in RockStep.
Mike Singer: I'm an investor in RockStep.
Sal Daher: So, tell us what RockStep does. By the way, I'm going to be interviewing Chuck and Julie for the podcast, of RockStep. So this can serve as an introduction to what RockStep does.
Mike Singer: Terrific. Well, I hope I do justice to what they're doing. RockStep is a company developing a differentiated cloud computing system to manage preclinical and nonclinical studies. And by that I mean animal studies that are used in drug discovery and demonstrating the safety of drugs before they can be tested in humans. Okay? By the way, it can also be devices or procedures and so forth, not only drugs.
Sal Daher: Yes, right.
Mike Singer: Now, software like this is developed and widely available for human clinical trials, but I was surprised to learn that for managing animal studies and animal study facilities there really has not been a solution. Everything is really quite old-fashioned, and particularly now with the coronavirus crisis, there's a need for a cloud solution that they can allow facilities to manage these studies and integrate them across the organization.
Sal Daher: Yeah. I'm excited. Chuck comes from a scientific background. He's faced the problem head-on. And Julie, the other co-founder is very hands-on on working to create a product that's really accessible, that's easier to use, and so forth. I'm impressed so far. I haven't made a decision yet, but I'm impressed by the team.
Mike Singer: Yeah. Chuck and Julie are special. They have very deep industry experience. They've been working in the industry for a long time. And I feel very secure investing in them, in that regard. It's a contrast to some of the other companies I'm invested in, where these are very inspirational young teams that in many cases have just finished graduate programs and decided to take a risk. Two ends of the spectrum, and both very inspiring.
Sal Daher: Yes. A veiled reference to the fact that Chuck, like me, has some gray hair on him, but unlike me, he has a lot of energy. He's a tremendously energetic guy.
Mike Singer: He is very energetic.
Mike Singer & Sal Daher Communicate in Portuguese & Hindi, Briefly
Sal Daher: Yeah, yeah. That's great. Let's try something funny, just because I speak Portuguese, you speak Portuguese, but you also speak Hindi.
Mike Singer: Yes. Yes, I do.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: But if you're going to ask me to tell a joke in Hindi, that might be hard.
Sal Daher: No, no, no. I'm going to ask you a question in Portuguese, and then you answer the question to me in Hindi.
Mike Singer: Oh my goodness. All right.
Sal Daher: And we'll see if it works.
Mike Singer: Okay.
Sal Daher: Michael, [Portuguese] quantos lados existem em um quadrado?
Mike Singer: [Hindi 00:39:01].
Sal Daher: Okay.
Mike Singer: Let's see how well I did.
Sal Daher: So, let's translate that.
Mike Singer: So, you asked me, "How many sides are there on a square?"
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: And I said, or I tried to say, "There are four sides," but I was struggling to ask myself what the word for a geometric side is, so you're a... So let's see here. Our listeners will correct me. That's fine.
Sal Daher: How did you come by learning Hindi?
Mike Singer: [Hindi 00:39:37]. So I just said that at university I studied for two years.
Sal Daher: Oh, you studied Hindi for two years. Is it because you got sucked into Bhangra, or something like that?
Mike Singer: Actually, it was a class that fit into my schedule. Most of the language courses were every day of the week, and there's just no... I was in the middle of graduate school.
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: There was no way I could do it, but Hindi was special. I think it was only two days a week, and I figured, "Why not?" Of course, it happens in reverse. You take Hindi and pretty soon you're falling in love with Bollywood and so on. So, I'm a big fan of a lot of classic Hindi films and music. I can't say I've kept up with all the latest releases but I am a big fan.
Sal Daher: And how about the Portuguese? What brought on the Portuguese?
Mike Singer: Similar situation. At Yale there is a... There was, perhaps there still is, a class called Portuguese for Spanish speakers. And the faculty are Brazilians or Portuguese faculty typically, who also know Spanish. And the beauty of it is, you walk in and on the first day they know how to speak to you. So there's never a word of English in that course.
Sal Daher: Interesting, interesting.
Mike Singer: Yeah. I took that for a year, and they compressed two years of Portuguese into one year.
Sal Daher: So, this is, it's taught by Spanish speakers to people who already know Spanish but they want to learn Portuguese.
Mike Singer: It's taught by native Portuguese speakers.
Sal Daher: Oh, speakers, okay.
Mike Singer: So, for example, my teacher was a, I think he was a Brazilian poet, which was just terrific. Yeah.
Sal Daher: That is wonderful. You know, the funny thing is that Portuguese is a language that has evolved slowly, for many reasons, and Spanish is a language that has evolved much faster. However, Portuguese has the disadvantage of having a lot of vowels, and vowels that are nasal, like ão, em, that kind of blow people's mind. The Spanish speakers don't have those vowels, and they can't hear them. When people use it they say, "What is this person saying? What is this person doing?" So a Spanish speaker can read Portuguese writing very easily, but when they listen to spoken Portuguese they have a hard time. However, the Portuguese speakers, when they listen to spoken Spanish-
Mike Singer: Yes.
Why Speakers of Portuguese Think They’re Smarter than Spanish Speakers
Sal Daher: ... it's easy, because I think all the vowels that exist in Spanish, exist in Portuguese. And they work the same way, and it's a phonetic language, so they can make sense of it. So, people who speak Portuguese think they're smarter than people who speak Spanish.
I used to belong to a squash club in downtown Boston which, rest in peace, is now defunct because of the virus, Boston Racquet Club. And it was very nice. It's a club where they actually, they washed your squash uniform for you, or your squash clothes, and then they handed you a towel and so forth. It was a very nice club.
And the guys who, in the towel desk, one guy was from Brazil, the other guy was from Central America. And the guy from Brazil thought he spoke Spanish, so he would kind of add a little Spanish sounds to his Portuguese. So one day Paulo said, "I speak Spanish." And Manuel said to Paulo, "You know, Paulo, when you speak Spanish to me, I learn so much Portuguese."
The Influence of Tupí-Guaraní on Brazilian Portuguese
Mike Singer: Well, I'll tell you, one thing I love about Brazilian Portuguese is the words that come from native languages like Tupí-Guaraní.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Mike Singer: So there's a saying that's relevant to entrepreneurship. It's, "descascar o abacaxí" which means, literally means... abacaxí, of course, if you went to Portugal, that's not the word for a pineapple. You would say, "ananás."
Sal Daher: [Portuguese] descascar o ananás
Mike Singer: But if you talk about peeling a pineapple in Brazilian Portuguese, it means, correct me if I'm wrong, but it means to accomplish a very difficult task. Right?
Sal Daher: Abacaxí is a difficult thing, because it has this thing on top of it that's difficult to handle, it has a thick skin. And so a thorny problem, in Brazil, is called an abacaxí.
Mike Singer: Exactly.
Sal Daher: You know, it's funny, the Tupi-Guarani language has influenced Brazilian Portuguese not just in the vocabulary, but also in the syntax.
Mike Singer: Really?
Sal Daher: Yes. The “você”. The form of speech that Brazilians use most of the time, addressing people in the third person, is the reason that it is used in Brazil is that it comes from a form of Tupí-Guaraní, which was the sort of official language in Brazil until around 1750. It was Tupí words written down with a Latin alphabet. And the documents were written in it. The Portuguese colonials spoke Língua Geral. It was called the general language.
So, in 1750 an edict came from Portugal. It probably took three months to get to Brazil... in those days everything took three months... that henceforth Portuguese was the official language of Brazil, no longer a Língua Geral, which was this sort of transliterated Tupí-Guaraní. And so after that, the reflexive form of verbs, Brazilians don't do that. [Portuguese] Considera-se, você considera. Brazilians will not use the reflexive form because it didn't exist in Tupí-Guaraní, the reflexive form. Only lawyers use it.
Mike Singer: That's amazing.
Sal Daher: [Portuguese 00:45:30]. That form of speech is very typically Brazilian. So it's not only the abacaxi and all these other words, it's also the grammar.
Mike Singer: This is fascinating, and I can tell we're kind of kindred spirits. Yeah. Probably a number of other guests on your show, too. I want to come back to this point you made about having diverse interests. We're talking about Portuguese grammar and Hindi and my archeology. I have a theory about expertise. Of course, the world needs experts. That's the only way to advance the envelope of our knowledge.
Sal Daher: No doubt, no doubt.
“…if you decide to be an expert, you have to contend with the fact that there is a diminishing return on investment. The more effort you put into learning more, the harder it becomes to learn more.”
Mike Singer: But, if you decide to be an expert, you have to contend with the fact that there is a diminishing return on investment. The more effort you put into learning more, the harder it becomes to learn more. So I prefer to take the easy route, and to me, more eclectic route in life, which is try to learn a little about a whole lot of different disciplines but combine them in novel ways. And I think this is kind of a skill that entrepreneurs should learn to cultivate.
Sal Daher: Well, yeah.
"You will probably execute at least one contract a week. Has it ever occurred to you that you should pick up an introductory law book on contract law and read that book?"
Mike Singer: For example, I'm a big proponent, I say to every entrepreneur, "You will probably execute at least one contract a week. Has it ever occurred to you that you should pick up an introductory law book on contract law and read that book?"
Sal Daher: Yes.
Mike Singer: It might take you a week or two.
Sal Daher: It doesn't mean you're going to become a maven about contracts. It just means that you have a basic understanding of structures of contracts. And it could serve you in very good stead.
Mike Singer: And your lawyers will appreciate it. And certainly with patent law, because I know patent lawyers have to spend a lot of the time explaining basic concepts to their clients. And it's not an intuitive field, right, unless you're taking some time to read about it. So I had this attitude about all kinds of things. The same for taxes, the same for estate planning, a whole sphere of topics that entrepreneurs might think kind of uninteresting or something that they just leave to their advisors, but... People say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Well, I think it's actually an essential thing.
Sal Daher: What you're saying is sort of a disciplined approach to being a dilettante. It's a kind of getting to 101 in various disciplines, like taking the 101 course of various disciplines. And you know what that might do is it might allow you to make a connection, and to say, "What if I take discipline A and discipline B, and combine something?" And then you're going to discover one little area in there where you can really become an expert in the intersection of these two, which would never occur to someone who's siloed in highly specialized work.
"What's an F-ologists, Father?" "An F-ologists is this guy who was in prison for 30 years with the F volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he only knew things that started with F." It's overspecialization.
My dad was a mathematician. In mathematics, people spend a career working on a particular set of problems, and just salami-slicing it, publishing a couple of papers every year, five papers every year. And it's all in the same area, and it's all little minor developments. And my dad used to call those people F-ologists. "What's an F-ologists, Father?" "An F-ologists is this guy who was in prison for 30 years with the F volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he only knew things that started with F." It's overspecialization.
Mike Singer: That's funny.
Sal Daher: If it starts with H, if it starts with E, they don't know about it, but if something starts with F, they know everything about it. So they're siloed, the siloed knowledge. So many that made great discoveries come from the intersection of completely unrelated fields. And I'm talking to you today, on a day when I just read that Bob Langer is now a billionaire.
Mike Singer: Oh, that's something that appears in the news?
Sal Daher: Yeah, something appears, because of Moderna. The prices of Moderna, it was on-
Mike Singer: Ah, I see, I see.
Sal Daher: ... on Forbes. But he's made a career out of making connections of various stuff that's completely unrelated, but always with the theme of getting stuff into stuff, and so forth, but somehow or another making these connections. So I think your approach is much to be commended. It means that an amateur, even a terrified amateur-
Mike Singer Plays Lawyer in Court & Wins
Mike Singer: Or better yet, not terrified. You may have seen, I sent you a little blurb, a few years ago, after we sold Topokine I wanted a little break and I wanted to try... I was thinking about starting a completely different kind of business. I was interested in drones for emergency medical deliveries, EpiPens and-
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: ... Narcan. What if you dialed 911, suppose that somebody had an opiate overdose. And you dialed 911 and the dispatcher sent a drone to you. I mean, they can track it to your phone. Right?
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: They sent a drone to you and dropped off a Narcan in an auto-injector. How amazing would it be?
Sal Daher: Brilliant.
Mike Singer: Or, somebody had an allergic reaction and they dropped an EpiPen because they didn't have one. So I invested a chunk of money to get some professional drone equipment and start building the delivery pod that would make this possible in the field. And a couple weeks after that I found out that my town of Newton, where I live, basically outlawed drones. I was a little angry, and I looked at this as an opportunity to try something new, which in my case was to sue them in Federal court.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Mike Singer: It was a little terrifying to get up in front of a federal judge and argue a case for an hour against the city's legal team, but I did it anyway.
Sal Daher: You were doing it pro se?
Mike Singer: Yes. It wouldn't have made sense to spend that kind of money on it. Right?
Sal Daher: Right.
Mike Singer: And it was a civic exercise. People feel that the courts aren't accessible to them, that the civil justice system isn't really accessible to them unless they're prepared to pay a lot of money, and it's not necessarily true. People can educate themselves, if it's just a matter of principle. And judges listen to pro se litigants all the time.
Sal Daher: Yes, they do.
Mike Singer: So it's just another example of doing something I really believed in. And I argued the case, and I happened to win.
Sal Daher: All right!
Mike Singer: And it was an education for me. I came out of it believing, even if I had lost, I would have come out of it believing more in the American system. Today, I believe that the judiciary is the most functional branch of our government. And they're doing a terrific job, despite all the imperfections. Of course there's imperfections, but they're doing a terrific job.
Sal Daher: That's very good to hear. So, to close out, Michael has promised to talk about two topics. One, boring but really important, for people who plan to be successful, and the other one is not boring, it's very exciting and inspiring. So please, first the boring one but is extremely important for people who are going to be very successful.
Advice from Mike Singer to Founders: Plan for Success
Mike Singer: I mentioned before, one of my mentors, John Sheehan, who was the CEO we brought in to help us out at HealthHonors. And early on, John sat us down and he said, "Plan for success." And we looked at him like this was some trite remark that would be obvious to anybody. Of course we're going to plan for success. He said, "No, really think about it. Is everything you're doing here predicated on the possibility that you may actually be wildly successful? For example, you might sell your company for a lot of money."
Sal Daher: You might, for example, give your kids some shares of your company while it's still worth peanuts. You put that into a trust.
Mike Singer: Yeah. So now, narrowing down to the practical implications, it's actually a profound idea. And there's much more general implications of that, but I always repeat this now to entrepreneurs that I'm advising. But, yeah. Now let's talk about examples of what you could do with that. If you knew that your stock that you just issued yourself for pennies, for your brand new company, might someday be worth millions and millions of dollars, there are some things you would be wise to do with that.
And one of those is, if you have children or family or anybody else to think about, bear in mind that it's a lot easier to give stock worth a few pennies to somebody than it is to transfer millions of dollars, because Uncle Sam will be waiting to collect the gift tax from you, or at least you'll be reducing your gift tax exclusion.
Sal Daher: It's complicated. That's why you got to plan for success. Success is complicated.
Mike Singer: That's right. And these steps are not difficult to take if you plan ahead. And then the other one is, of course, that there are... Congress, in its wisdom, has recognized that encouraging entrepreneurship in certain areas, particularly in life sciences, is a good thing. And they've created tax incentives to do that. Five years ago, most people were not aware of these. Fortunately, people are more aware of them today. They're talking about them.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Mike Singer: And qualified small business stock, Section 1202 of the Internal Revenue Code, and something that every entrepreneur should be familiar with. I meet entrepreneurs who are building businesses that are probably not going to become operating businesses that they hold onto for decades and live off the cash flow. They're building businesses that they hope will be acquired after proving out the technical merits of their inventions.
And sometimes they set those businesses up as partnerships. And I can never really understand why they do that. When I ask them, they usually don't have a good explanation.
Sal Daher: It's easy. Yeah.
Mike Singer: Yeah. The answer is, if you want to take advantage of the qualified small business stock provisions, you want to set it up as a C corporation.
Sal Daher: Yes. Well, okay.
Mike Singer: So, that's one little piece of advice. I always have that conversation with new founders about estate planning and tax plan.
Sal Daher: That's very wise, very wise. Okay. So now let's get to why it is that you're optimistic about the future.
Mike Singer on Steven Pinker’s Enlightment Now
Mike Singer: Yeah. Even before the coronavirus pandemic I felt like there was a kind of trend of pessimism that had descended over the United States, and over the world too. But there was a sense that America's moral compass was off and that we lost our dynamism in American exceptionalism, and that generally that the state of the world was on a downward trajectory. Okay? I read a book by Steven Pinker, who's a Harvard linguist. I'd say he's much more than that. He's a great thinker, a great intellect.
And this book, I've read several of his books now, but this book was Enlightenment Now. And the premise of the book is that actually, if you look at the data, the state of humanity has been generally on an upward trajectory ever since The Enlightenment. Okay? So some crucial things happened during The Enlightenment that have allowed us to improve the human condition in almost every way you can measure over time. Now, the progress is uneven and it's not always equally distributed. We know this.
Sal Daher: Sure.
Mike Singer is Optimistic about the US & the Globe
Mike Singer: But if you actually look at various measures, today, in most of Africa on average, conditions on many measures are as good as they were in the United States when my parents were born.
Sal Daher: In the '50s. Yeah.
Mike Singer: So the change has been kind of imperceptible to people, I think. It's allowed people to feel that things are actually getting worse, and to think that there's poverty and so forth, that actually are-
Sal Daher: No, in the last 30 years, a billion people have left poverty according to the United Nations measure. One dollar a day, inflation adjusted, a dollar a day, a billion people have left poverty. And this is owed to the whole system of increased international trade, which has allowed countries that produce commodities to sell their commodities more effectively, to buy manufactured goods at lower prices, lower trade barriers, and so forth. I remember back in 2017, the 200th anniversary of free trade, David Ricardo's position on free trade. And it just went by. People didn't realize this. But I mean, the benefits of trade are so massive, because trade is really about teamwork.
Mike Singer: Yes.
Sal Daher: It's the whole idea that you can't do anything by yourself. I mean, you're arguing for a little bit of self-sufficiency, learn a little bit about patent law, learn a little bit about contract law, but you're not saying become a patent attorney.
Mike Singer: No.
Sal Daher: You're not saying you're going to build your own test tubes and all that stuff. I answer back to you: Matt Ridley and some of the work he's done on innovation, some of the work he's done just in the idea of human progress, and the idea of collaboration and innovation. I am also very, very positive about the future of the world and about the future of the United States. And I say that as someone who was an immigrant to the United States, from Brazil.
Americans do not have a proper understanding of what unbelievably dynamic place this is. I've had occasion to interview a whole bunch of founders who are immigrants to the United States, and every single one of them will tell me, "This place is, it's so much easier to get stuff done here-"
Mike Singer: Yes, yes.
Sal Daher: ... back in Brazil, than it is back in Germany, back in wherever you're from. So I see a very bright future for the United States. I see a very bright future for the world, sort of led by the United States, this engine of innovation. There are other spots of innovation in the world as well. The United Kingdom is a very innovative place, and there are other places in the world, but the United States is a very special place in the sense that it has such a massive economy. It is possible that you could have reverses, catastrophic events that kind of reverse that process of improvement, but I think it's a very positive note to wrap up the podcast to say that, if you're a founder, plan for success, plan for a very bright future.
Mike Singer: Yes.
Sal Daher: So, do your estate planning and tax planning.
Mike Singer: There's a future worth planning for and-
“If you think that the world is going to end in 10 years no planning is needed, but we optimists believe that we need to do some planning.”
Sal Daher: Millenarians who think “come the millennium, everything is going to end” or whatever, those people don't have to plan. If you think that the world is going to end in 10 years, no planning is needed, but we optimists believe that we need to do some planning.
Mike Singer: That's a great way to put it.
Sal Daher: Excellent.
Mike Singer: What fun, to be here and talk with you. Thanks so much.
Sal Daher: Oh, this is so much fun. I could go on for hours and hours. I mean, this is tremendous. I'm really grateful to you for making time from your very busy schedule of founding your fourth startup to talk to us. I'm very grateful to you for your advice. You told me something today, an offhanded comment that made me open my eyes. I'm going to tell you off the air.
Mike Singer: Okay. Well...
Sal Daher: Every time I'm on these, I learn tons and tons. I mean, this is tremendous.
Mike Singer: So, I'll close in Portuguese, if I may.
Sal Daher: Please.
Mike Singer: [Portuguese] Muito obrigado. Foi um prazer falar com você.
Sal Daher: [Portuguese] Igualmente. Para mim foi um grande prazer falar com você, Michael. Muito obrigado. Thank you very much. I think Americans by now know what [Portuguese] obrigado means, [Portuguese] muito obrigado. It's much obliged. Thank you.
Mike Singer: There you go. There you go. [Portuguese] Obrigado. Ciao.
Sal Daher: This is Sal Daher at the end of a tremendous interview. I had so much fun. This is Angel Invest Boston, and I'm Sal Daher.
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.