Raul Rosa, artist, musician, and sound engineer, discusses his work with the Angel Invest Boston Podcast, some of his favorite interviews, and his own startup, Podspot.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Raul Rosa
Raul's Favorite Interviews
Fortified Bike
Howard Stevenson
PodSpot
Wistia
Piction Health
Savran Technologies
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Art and Craft”
Guest: Raul Rosa
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 Raul Rosa
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. This is Sal Daher, an angel who's really interested in figuring out how to best build technology companies. Today, we have an interview which is a little bit offbeat, but it's very close to home. Welcome Raul Rosa.
Raul Rosa: Hey, Sal. It's strange to be on this side of things.
Sal Daher: Raul Rosa is a composer, sound engineer, and artist extraordinaire who has made the Angel Invest Boston podcast sound as gorgeous as it sounds all these years. He's also a very thoughtful person. He's also a founder, an entrepreneur who's had a bunch of businesses. He's working on two businesses right now and he's had a lot of experience building businesses, jumping from one business to the other, fighting reverses, losing space, coming back, that stuff that happens to entrepreneurs. I can tell you in these almost seven years that Raul and I have worked together, the guy is just, I have learned so much from Raul and perhaps you might learn some too. Anyway, welcome Raul.
Raul Rosa: Thanks for having me, Sal.
Sal Daher: Raul, talk to us a little bit about how you got into being an independent artist. How did you decide to do that instead of just getting a job somewhere and just going along and getting the W-2s?
Raul Rosa: Well, I guess it started from, I mean just out of college. You might not know this about me, but I went to art school, Maryland Institute of Art.
Sal Daher: I knew that.
Raul Rosa: Oh, you did know that. Okay.
Sal Daher: Yes, I did know that.
Raul Rosa: I forgot about your photographic memory.
Sal Daher: It's not photographic, far from photographic, but I do remember a few things. Old people, Raul, you're going to find they remember things way back, but something that was said yesterday, they can't remember. Anyway, so please continue the story.
Raul Rosa: Yes. I went to Maryland Institute. I was a painting major. I was basically working for myself in the gig economy from the outset. At one point, I worked graphic design, was the creative director of a newspaper. In my 20s, I pivoted to sound design, worked in television for a while, did sound design for movies and documentaries, worked in studios. I crossed over to doing music, scored some films, commercials, produced some artists, some podcasts, owned a recording studio with a friend for 10 years. Eventually, I started PodSpot with Tim Reid. On the periphery of corporate, but mostly 1099s and not W-2s until fairly recently.
Sal Daher: Growing up, did you have entrepreneurial models around you, or was it--
Raul Rosa: Not really. We moved here when I was really young. My parents were immigrants from Cabo Verde.
Sal Daher: Vem de Cabo Verde?
Raul Rosa: Showed out really well in the World Cup recently.
Sal Daher: With small countries in the World Cup and FIFA World Cup. Uruguay also does really well for the three million inhabitants or whatever.
Raul Rosa: Slovenia has maybe three of the top NBA players. I don't know. It's just they're hyper-focused.
Sal Daher: Then Brazil lays an egg. Ah, always.
Raul Rosa: Yes. When my parents moved here, I was really young. They worked regular jobs like immigrants do to make ends meet and provide for the children. They weren't entrepreneurial at all. It was just something that maybe the ADHD, I never really liked 40-hour-a-week jobs.
Sal Daher: Yes. He didn't 40-week jobs. He liked 67-hour-a-week jobs. Because that's what you had been doing.
Raul Rosa: No, it's true. It's diverse, but I do end up working a lot more than is probably healthy. My parents, aunts, uncles, no, I can't actually think of one entrepreneur or musician. There's none of that in my family either.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow. Now, let's talk a little bit about some of the interviews that we've had on the podcast in the last seven years that stick to your mind. Then after that, let's talk about your own startup and what it's doing. Are there any episodes that we had that stick in your mind?
Raul's Favorite Interviews
Raul Rosa: There's a ton. In terms of, just from a personal thing, I became friends with Tivan Amour from-
Sal Daher: Great guy.
Raul Rosa: -Fortified Bikes.
Sal Daher: Is he also a musician?
Raul Rosa: Yes, I actually ended up producing a song. He has a great voice, producing a song with him. It was debuted at his wedding to his wife as a surprise. He sent me the video, it was really cool.
Sal Daher: Amazing. Amazing. We've got to play the Tivan Amour video. I can ask him.
Raul Rosa: Yes, sure. He'll probably love it. He's coming next Friday. We're going to work on a new song.
Fortified Bike
Sal Daher: Let's put that video on the website. Okay. Tivan Amour is a tremendous founder. He founded a company called Fortified Bike. Fortified Bike, what they were doing is they were creating an urban bike that was really practical. It was also hard to steal. They managed to get quite a bit of business. They were selling tens of thousands of these bikes. They were having them made in Taiwan and then shipped over here. They're very successful, very clever designs. Then Tivan discovered that the really exciting part of the business wasn't the bikes, which is, I mean building bikes is a lot of friction. It's a lot of friction.
He discovered that they were really, really good at creating communications with people who were thinking about buying bikes and automating in different ways. He had the idea to create a company that eventually became Tone Messaging, which was a company in its day. Now it's perhaps, been overtaken by bots and so forth, but actually, he was automating it early on. He's like an early player in that field and he built Tone Messaging and he exited very successfully. It was a very nice exit. He went off to work at Tone, for the acquirer.
This is a wonderful thing to have this coda to the story that there was a music video, a tribute to his bride, because I remember he just was crazy about her. That is awesome. We got to put that in. Listeners, look for Tivan Amour's episode on the podcast. I think it was called Growth Rider because he rode, he was very good about building growth. It was just an amazing pivot. The people who were investors, the original investors got a chance to switch their investment into Tone Messaging. It was a great adventure. I love that story.
Raul Rosa: Yes. Also, Ben Pleat with Cobu. I love that story. Something that's really needed, having an elderly mother in an apartment complex.
Sal Daher: I'll tell you something. I hope Ben doesn't get upset about this. For years after we did the podcast, the portrait that you took against, because we used to record in the studio, Raul's studio was in Charlestown near this grain elevator silos for receiving grain from ships. These industrial buildings, brick industrial buildings. There was a wall there that had excellent reflected light. We took all the portraits against that brick wall. Raul took a portrait. He took a portrait of Ben Pleat. That was an excellent portrait. That became Ben's official portrait for several years after that, because it was so well taken.
This is Raul's, this is the thing about it. Raul, you taught me this. The thing about artists is that they are consumed with these ideas or these concepts and they are obsessed and they have the energy and the motivation to drive, to keep iterating, keep doing it over and over and over until they find the thing that works. The thing that is really expressed as what they're trying to express. This ethic of the artists of just sweating the details over and over and over, it translates from across media, from photography, music, I imagine, to writing. I didn't realize this. I didn't know this before observing you as a working artist. It's a real eye-opener for me. It's one of the things I learned from you.
Raul Rosa: That's cool. I didn't know about Ben still using that picture. That's cool.
Sal Daher: I don't know if he uses it now, but he used it for like four or five years after that.
Raul Rosa: Where's my royalties, Ben?
Sal Daher: Anyway, let's talk about Cobu. Ben lost his mother. She was an immigrant from Eastern Europe. She was a very social person. She was a real estate broker in suburban New York City. When she moved to Manhattan to– what's the sitcom from the '80s? Dream something in the sky.
Raul Rosa: Oh, The Jeffersons.
Sal Daher: The Jeffersons, yes.
Raul Rosa: To the East Side. Yes.
Sal Daher: Exactly. She moved to her dream. What was the dream something in the sky?
Raul Rosa: A deluxe apartment in the sky.
Sal Daher: A deluxe apartment in the sky, her dream apartment in the sky, her dream palace in the sky. It was a bust because the place was gorgeous, really wonderful, convenient, and everything. Everything worked well, but she didn't connect with anybody in the building. This most gregarious woman who had been a very social and very successful real estate broker in suburbia became isolated and depressed in her deluxe apartment in the sky. Ben was shocked at this. Eventually, she overcame it. She figured out ways around it. He said, "Wait a second, my mother has this problem and she's so social."
Other people have this problem too. He went off and he created a social network for creating connectedness in buildings. What he does is he works with the building owners to create social interaction in the buildings.
Raul Rosa: Yes, that's really cool.
Sal Daher: It is just amazing. You follow him on LinkedIn every week, there's another property that's signed up, "Oh, Florida, some high-end building in Florida, and so forth. Amazing. It's just an amazing thing. Ben is such a dynamic founder. Benjamin Pleat, listeners should look for that podcast. They'll be inspired.
Raul Rosa: Other than that, I love the Howard Stevenson. Gil Syswerda was really great. We actually hung out at Podspot and was talking AI after. That was really fun.
Howard Stevenson
Sal Daher: First let's talk about Howard Stevenson. Howard Stevenson is a giant as well as Gil Syswerda. I'm not talking about his beltline. I'm talking about Gil's prominence in the artificial intelligence world. Howard Stevenson was a giant in the study of entrepreneurship. Very early at Harvard Business School, he was offered a professorship there after he did his PhD to create a path for studying entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. He turned it down. It could have been a very, very comfortable position. He turned it down and he went into business. Among the businesses that he helped found was nothing less than Baupost, one of the top hedge funds that is out there.
People have heard of Seth Klarman. He helped hire Seth Klarman. He and his partners, there were three partners who put together Baupost and founded this hedge fund. This is only one of the many things that Howard Stevenson did in the business world before going back to the business school to study entrepreneurship after having had a lot of experience. That is an episode that is loaded with wisdom about building a company and also building a career, building your life. For example, don't take cash. Take a percentage of the company. This is what he used to do. He used to do consulting gigs as a professor at Harvard Business School in these various enterprises.
A lot of people would take very big consulting fees and he would take much more modest consulting fees and always take a percentage of the company. Some of these turned out to be huge investments. The funniest thing, because we interviewed him at his family office, we had a remote and his most successful investment was this utterly boring company that when he first heard about it, he was like, "What?" It was the business of insuring cell phones. When you go buy your iPhone, you pay $2 a month and they insure your iPhone against breakage. When he saw the business plan for it, he said, "Wow, these guys are really impressive." When he first heard about it, he was like, "Please, what a stupid business."
This is the most successful angel investment he ever made. At the time that we had the interview, I think he had done over 400X already and he was still invested. This silly business, but it was very well thought through. The founders were super capable people and he invested because of the founders. It turned out to be his most brilliant investment ever, insuring freaking cell phones. It wasn't a fancy thing. Isn't that something?
Raul Rosa: The under-the-radar ones are always the ones that do the best.
Sal Daher: Yes. It's like you're about to exit and that last comment is what pays for the whole thing. Everything else is a loss except for the one that pays for the whole thing. That's how angel investing is, sadly. I've seen a few of my angel investments go up in smoke recently. I had the opportunity to get out at many, many, many X. The thing is that even if a company goes public, even if a company is doing all sorts of things, life is really tough in the public markets. I guess the moral of the story is take the money and run. When you got 12X in an investment, put it in your pocket and go, don't hold out for Howard Stevenson's 400X necessarily.
Of course, you're going to cry in your beer. You can cash out to your original investment. Reduce your 12X to 1X and then go on. Because if it does a great thing again, that's fine. Take the money when you can. Anyway, Gil Syswerda, what a character.
Raul Rosa: Yes, I think that was like a six-hour interview. We only recorded like three hours, but we were there like six.
Sal Daher: No. Six hours. Then we did an episode online as well in addition. There's plenty of guilt to go around, but I think you will find every conversation. The guy is so funny. He's such an unbelievable raconteur and he's done so much. He was using AI to help Paul Tudor Jones, top hedge fund guy, figure out patterns and crops through satellite data, things like that. The guy's done amazing stuff. Right now, he's consumed with generative AI and all the things that are happening in AI and keeping track of that and discussing and looking at where these things are going.
If anybody has a chance to follow Gil, I swear to follow him because he has very, very interesting thoughts and he understands what's happening right now in the world of AI. Like only somebody who's actually witness some of their couple of founding papers in the business, his particular end of it. A funny guy, a very funny guy. That was a great interview. The fun thing about it is that we had it at a PodSpot location. Tell us what PodSpot is, Raul.
PodSpot
Raul Rosa: At that point, PodSpot was something different than it is now. PodSpot is a company I started with Tim Reid and Kristen Vagliardo to make recording podcasts easy and fill the delta between high-end recording studio, expensive recording studio, and just crappy computer recording. Something that gets you 85% of the way to an amazing recording, but not at that cost. You used to record at my studio. We had the studio in Charlestown for 10 years as a brick-and-mortar.
Sal Daher: Excellent bricks, outstanding bricks.
Raul Rosa: Very photogenic bricks.
Sal Daher: Oh, another one that has great pictures from there, Susan Conover. There's great pictures.
Raul Rosa: I was going to mention her. Yes, Susan Conover, Alice from Alice's Table. There were a lot of--
Sal Daher: Yes, there are great pictures of that brick wall as a background and the lighting was perfect. There were no shadows in there. Please continue. Yes.
Raul Rosa: We were there for 10 years and we were set up to do high-end music recordings with multiple microphones and multiple instruments. For many years, we were just doing voice podcast recordings. It would just be one microphone, the same sound chain that I would use. We had hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment there that wasn't being used. People were paying premium prices to just go record that. There was a delta between, or there still is a delta between high-end studios and people recording on their computers. We're trying to create something in between the two.
We came up with PodSpot. We developed our own recording software that optimizes recording. You just sit down at a kiosk, press a button and it records. Press another button and it sends it to your email, automates away the need for an engineer or any levels. It's all done automatically. The idea is we would put these into co-working spaces. I'm not paying any leases. I'm not worried about real estate or anything like that, but we'd go to co-working spaces, take one of their rooms, and make it a studio for them. We charge them monthly and whatever they charge their own customers is their business. that was the idea for PodSpot. Unfortunately, we had it at three places ready to open March of 2020.
Sal Daher: It caught COVID. [laughs]
Raul Rosa: It caught COVID.
Sal Daher: It died from COVID.
Raul Rosa: All of Boston shut down.
Sal Daher: Pretty good people. The worst. I mean that's the thing with startups, but it's a brilliant idea. Listeners should know that one of the biggest problems that you have with sound recording is volume. Okay? How loud you are, because there are two people talking and these are recorded separately. The sound engineer manages the level of these two so that you have a recording that sounds pleasant. You can't have somebody who talks very softly like this, but the other person is very loud, having a conversation, it's extremely annoying. This is the reason why podcasters wear headsets is so they know how they sound like and how loud they are.
Raul Rosa: You can self-modulate.
Sal Daher: Yes, self-modulate. When there are two people, it becomes more complicated. This is why Raul and his partner created a module that the relative volumes of the two speakers, it's controlled in the unit.
Raul Rosa: Yes. The whole idea was that I wanted people not to know they were using a computer, that they were just pressing a button, the levels are taken care of. At the end, they go home and it's just in their email. They don't have to worry about getting the files or anything like that. We did trudge through that year. Unfortunately, we weren't able to open in 2020, but in 2021, we did open a location in Venture X in Marlborough. Shout out to Ryan. Ryan Gagne.
Sal Daher: Shout out to Ryan Gagne. Great location, Venture X in Marlborough. Sadly, PodSpot did not work out there.
Raul Rosa: Yes, we appreciate that he gave us a shot. We were there for a year. It was still slow going, people slowly coming back from pandemic and he was doing whatever he can to get people in. Since then, we are now in the middle of a pivot where we are taking the whole studio and putting it into a suitcase so people can just still use it as co-working spaces. It would be behind the desk and they'd put it on the table when they needed it or they can use it at home. There's a pivot they were working on right now.
Sal Daher: I've been waiting for this unit. I want to buy the first one. I want to buy two. One on one side and one on the other.
Raul Rosa: Yes, and they connect. That's the cool thing is that you can have one in California and one in Boston and once the recording's done, each box sends the good local recording to your email so you get a good high quality recording. Then again, don't even know that you used a computer the whole time.
Sal Daher: That is tremendous. Raul, any other startups that come to mind that we'd join? I remember you connected me to Wistia. To the guys at Wistia.
Wistia
Raul Rosa: Oh yes, Wistia.
Sal Daher: That you do music with.
Raul Rosa: I didn't do music with them.
Sal Daher: I had a connection with one of the guys there.
Raul Rosa: People that they lived with but this was just happens [crosstalk] .
Sal Daher: That's the thing. You've got to listen to the Wistia Podcast because Wistia is a video platform that is very successful and they were very successful with not a lot of capital. One of their secrets was the Wistia house. They lived and they worked in the Wistia house. The founders, the girlfriends and the spouses and so forth, it's quite an amazing thing and it was very frugal. They shoe-stringed it to the point where they finally nailed their business model. Eventually, they moved out to a deluxe office space.
Raul Rosa: In Cambridge.
Sal Daher: In Cambridge but that house in Summerville perhaps it still stands because it was not entirely structurally sound. You knew one of the guys from those days?
Raul Rosa: Yes, great guys. They lived in a house they called the castle and there was a sister house named the orphanage. I knew people from there so that's where I met Brendan and Chris.
Sal Daher: The castle, the orphanage. You know I remember the founders having a conversation. We did a video and he said, "Don't worry about Google big footing you." In those days the big concern everybody had was, "If you do this, Google's just going to come in and is going to eat you up." Everybody was scared of Google and his idea was really forget about that. Just build the thing, respond to your clients, figure out a business model that works, and go for it and forget about Google because they have a lot of things to do. They've got a lot of fish to fry. They'll only pay attention to you once you become a really, really successful business.
Wistia was a very successful business. I imagine eventually Google started paying attention to them but by that point, they were a rocket ship. Anyway, any other startups that come to mind, Raul?
Raul Rosa: Editing this, I mean I listened to each episode like three times [chuckles] in effect.
Sal Daher: The most intense listener is Raul.
Raul Rosa: I mean Susan Conover with--
Sal Daher: Piction Health.
Raul Rosa: It's Piction Health now, yes. Liberty, that's another one. Çağrı.
Piction Health
Sal Daher: Yes, Çağrı Savran. Let's talk a little bit about Susan Conover. There's several episodes of Susan and she is so inspiring as a founder because Susan was a management consultant. She got her MBA at Sloan School. She's a really, really smart person and she didn't need to get involved with a startup. She was very successful as a consultant but she had a problem with skin cancer. Because she's very fair, the sun exposure is a problem for her.
She had problems accessing medical care for the skin condition that she had and she managed to beat it but from that, she said, "Look, someone with my situation has problems accessing dermatological care with specialists and so forth. That's a problem that has to be solved." She had so many iterations of this thing. She finally discovered the right model which is kind of like a hybrid. She has clinics but she also has an AI that screens people for their conditions. You can go to Piction Health if you have some skin condition that you are concerned about and take a picture and they will get it arranged to have it reviewed by a dermatologist.
The initial screening is done with an AI that she has developed with I think a million diagnose images. The AI knows what a dangerous thing looks like, what a simple thing looks like. It's interesting because that is a company that cannot be replicated. Basically, she has an advantage now having trained her AI to do this and nobody else really has the ability to put together the data set anymore for this kind of stuff. Let me put it this way, she has a proprietary data set. At the same time, she's setting up practices in different states, and she's working with dermatologists to remove friction from the process of people figuring out what skin lesions they have and how to treat them. Amazing.
Savran Technologies
Sal Daher: Let me just talk a little bit about Çağrı. Çağrı Savran, he's the founder of Savran Technologies, a company on whose board I sit, and it is an ultrarare cell company. Çağrı's a professor of mechanical engineering, I think biotechnology or biomedical engineering at Purdue University. He had developed this technology for finding extremely, extremely rare cells in blood and bodily fluids. He has succeeded with angel funding to take the company to the point where they are having some very impressive results. Through this way, I cannot talk out of turn. I'm a board member. I have to be very careful what I say about what they're doing.
The company has matured its technology to a remarkable degree where they're looking at capturing various types of extremely rare cells in at least three different types of applications. It all has to do with this determination of this professor from Turkey, Çağrı Savran, who just had this brilliant idea that the patent office couldn't believe that the thing hadn't been patented already. It was so simple, but extremely clever, very brilliant. It's a testament to the kind of talent that United States imports, and the kind of people who are attracted to America. America is a place where people come.
There's actually statistics that I saw somewhere, that people on average, they earn 35% more than they did where they were. If you're a Swede, you're likely to earn 35% more here than if you're in Sweden, so people want to come here to do cool things like you're doing, Raul. Anyway, Raul, if we think about wrapping up this podcast, take a moment and think, what advice you would give to founders and what advice would you give to investors? By the way, Raul, part of being a working artist, is Raul is a guy who makes ends meet, owns his own house, owns his own car.
I have never had an experience of being in Raul studio and having a bill collector knock, interrupting a recording session. It's chasing him because he plays his bills on time. Raul is a very capable businessman. He's run a business for all these years. What advice would you give to founders whom you've interacted with, and also to investors?
Advice to the Audience
Raul Rosa: For founders, I'd say, listen to the Angel Invest podcast.
Sal Daher: Self pleading here.
Raul Rosa: No, it's true. What I'm going to do is later on when you're asleep, I'm going to retake all my answers. Maybe I'll get Ethan Pierce's AI to redo all that.
Sal Daher: The running joke of the podcast is that Raul because he edits very closely, removes all the ums and ahs and ah, ah, ah, that I gain 15 IQ points on the podcast. When people meet the real person, I'm much dumber than I am on the podcast.
Raul Rosa: You've gotten smarter, because you used to say that you've gained 20 IQ points, and now it's only 15. Through the 200 or so episodes that I've worked on with you, I've met some incredible people. The thing that they all had in common, was that they're amazing self-starters. They want to change the world, and whatever they're doing, whether it be Cobu or Susan Conover with Piction Health, it seems to be in service of something bigger than the house that they want to buy.
Sal Daher: Raul, this is a very powerful point. People who have studied startups, they say that startups that are founded because people want to make money, don't succeed. The startups that succeed, are they're founded, they're not thinking about making money. They're thinking about, how can I solve this problem? In order to solve the problem, we have to create a company that makes ends meet. That becomes a secondary thing, but the most important thing they're trying to do, is they're trying to solve the problem. Susan Conover doesn't think, "Oh, how am I going to be really, really wealthy?" Because she doesn't need it.
She was a very well-paid management consultant before. Didn't need to go through all the headaches of this. She's seized with this problem. Ben Cobu, same thing. The guy is very high-functioning. He could have gone in a much very easy, could have been in real estate. A lot of connections in real estate. He's a very capable guy. He would have made tons and tons of money. It's not certain. There's a lot of uncertainty in startups.
Raul Rosa: I guess find something that you wouldn't mind doing in three years after not making money or four years.
Sal Daher: The thing is that after five or seven years of doing this, you're not the same person that you were when you started. You've had an experience that nobody climbing the corporate ladder has had. You will be able to see things that other people just can't see. You picked up on a very important point. Any thoughts for investors?
Raul Rosa: Yes. For investors, we always hear from investors that they're betting on the horse and not the race, the founder and not the company. Companies fail and pivot and they'll stick by the founder if the founder is a star. I just want investors to be mindful of the lens they're defining resilience through and making sure that black founders and founders of color and women founders also get the opportunity to fail until they succeed.
Sal Daher: This is an interesting thing. One of the things when you looked at some of the women who were trailblazers in professions where they were the first women to break into it or the same thing. You look at different ethnic groups. They were the first ones to break into a profession where there had been a lot of prejudice against them. Usually, those first people who are breaking through are- it's like Jackie Robinson. The guy was just an outstanding ball player and he was so good that they didn't look at his skin color. Okay?
For founders, you have the chance of finding someone who is breaking barriers because of breaking artificial barriers who is way better at founding companies than the average founder who fits the normal profile, who's going to get backed more easily. There is an opportunity for investors, I think, to look for the unusual founder and not look so much at the profile, but look at the trajectory of the founder, what the founder is doing, how much the founder progresses from the first pitch, and the pitch that you hear three months later. Just look at that. All the other data is really very noisy, but if the founder is moving the ball forward, that's the thing to look for.
Yes, I think that's very sound advice. Raul, I'm very grateful that you made time to chat and I'm also very grateful to you for your making me sound smarter and better. Much, much better in real life. It causes disappointments when people meet me, but at least I get to imagine myself being a better, smarter person, thanks to your excellent efforts and through your artistry, and your just remarkable professional workmanship.
Raul Rosa: I can't take all the credit for that. I will say over these seven years, you've become an amazing interviewer.
Sal Daher: You will get much less disastrous. [laughs]
Raul Rosa: No, it takes less time to edit you for one thing.
Sal Daher: Well, I learned a type of day when I'm more likely to be, ah, um, ah, ah, ah. Times when you drink coffee. I remember we had that conversation. I was like, "Hey, did you have like three cups of coffee before this interview?"
Sal Daher: Raul, when did I have my last caffeine? We're recording right now. It's almost six o'clock, 6:00 PM. My last caffeine was around 8:00 AM today.
Raul Rosa: Okay. I was, I thought you were going to say months.
Sal Daher: No, it's been 2022. No, that's great. Yes, no, the half-life of caffeine in your body is six hours. The quarter-life is 12 hours. If I had caffeine at eight in the morning, at eight o'clock in the evening, a quarter of that original concentration of caffeine in the body is going to be there. You still have caffeine 12 hours later, but it's only one-quarter and then it tails off slowly. You always have some caffeine in the body, but then you get used to it and you sleep and you manage to not stutter.
Raul Rosa: You should do an episode on the health and aging on caffeine. I'm curious how that shoehorns into all of that.
Sal Daher: There is a very interesting episode that I'll point to the listeners. I'm going to be doing Aging Fit, which is a substack that I have. I plan to start doing some podcasts, but I can point listeners, if you're interested in caffeine, look for the episode in the Huberman Lab podcast, Andrew Huberman, that he did on caffeine. It is fascinating. That's where I got the thing about the 12-hour quarter-life of caffeine. There's a really cool thing about caffeine and how it makes you like the things that are associated with its consumption, including the people, the mug. You like the mug? Oh, my mug.
Don't drink caffeine with people that you don't like, because you might start liking them. Then maybe that's a good thing, right? I should drink caffeine talking to you, but then I would have a lot of ums and ahs and you go crazy thinking them out.
Raul Rosa: That makes it sound like you don't like me, drink caffeine and talk to me. Wait a minute, Sal, what did you just say?
Sal Daher: What does that mean? What is this deep meaning? Have you been holding this back all these years, these seven years?
Raul Rosa: It all comes out.
Sal Daher: Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Anyway, thanks a lot, Raul. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.
[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.