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- [00:00]
Apple Watch Narrator
If we knew more about our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With Sleep Score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions and sleep duration. Then every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score from 1 to 100. So you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from okay to very high. Know your sleep score with Apple Watch. IPhone 11 or later required.
- [00:35]
Brad McCullough
Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Brew Ride Home Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Brad McCullough. This is a portfolio profile episode. We haven't done one in several months. This is an investment that the Riot Home Fund has made that is one of the more exciting ones or the ones that I've been more proud to make for many years because it's so frigging tangible. And I will explain that in a second. But before I get there, I want to introduce who we're talking to, the founders of sora, which you can find out more at Sora System IO. We're talking to Jeff and Leo. Jeff. Leo, could you please say hi?
- [01:21]
Jeff Capero
Yeah. Thanks for having us, Brian. Great to be with you.
- [01:25]
Leo Kobayashi
Thanks for having us again. I'm Leo Kobayashi.
- [01:28]
Jeff Capero
Jeff Capero.
- [01:29]
Brad McCullough
Jeff was the first one. I'm going to do a little more intro than I usually do on these because our audience is more software developer, tech based. I'm going to explain a concept to you that there is something that you have seen in the real world that you might not know. The term for the general term is an aed, an automated external defibrillator. If you've seen things bolted to the wall, usually in red or white or something like that, you've walked past hundreds of them without thinking about what they are. It's usually a defibrillator, right? Or something to help someone with cardiac arrest. What SORA is doing is taking that a step further. We live in a world where there are more than 81,000 people who died from opioid or opioid overdoses. In the US alone in 2023, opioid deaths have more than doubled since 2019. Another 60,000 people die every year from severe bleeding after traumatic injuries. Trauma is the number one killer of Americans between the ages of 1 and 46. So what Sora wants to do is essentially take AEDs and add in things that are more than defibrillators. This company wants to put them on every wall in the same way that you see them in, you know, gyms, movie Theaters, et cetera, et cetera. The two founders we're talking to today are career ER doctors who saw that you could take what is commonplace and make it better, but then also make technologically responsive. And so whoever wants to go first, Leo or Jeff, where did the idea for Sora come from?
- [03:32]
Jeff Capero
I guess I'll start in 2017. You know, that death curve from overdose was really climbing, particularly in West Virginia and Rhode island where we work and the government's task force. I asked the question, why don't we just make this naloxone spray up the nose for the reverse as an overdose publicly available, just put boxes on walls. And so we did the quick and dirty and had no tech cabinets, so we put up a wall, $5,000 Department of Health grant. We had our first save within a couple months, and it was a person who received multiple doses of naloxone in her apartment and walked out of the hospital alive. And so in emergency medicine, we love an antidote. We love something that takes somebody from the brink of death and returns it back to their family and loved ones. So that kind of. That's where I caught the startup bug and realized, as we do this at scale, we need to manage these things. They need to be monitored. We need to make sure they're up to date. We make sure they're going to be there when they're needed. And why would we restrict it only to overdose when we could have a solution for cardiac arrest and overdose and bleeding all in the same place? So that's where we started working on the cellular IoT connected. And in our pilot testing, we've had nine confirmed rescues. We knew the exact date and time, and it was remarkable where they happened. One was in a university campus center in the middle of the night, and the other one was in a hospital right on the river in Providence, where we're based.
- [04:57]
Brad McCullough
Before you go, Leo, I want to underline that this is why I was happy to write this check. So even before nine people are alive today, because even in testing this out and, like, figuring out if this would work, like nine lives saved, it's remarkable.
- [05:17]
Jeff Capero
And the pilot tests were not, you know, wasn't hundreds of units we had out there was, you know, a dozen and a half.
- [05:25]
Brad McCullough
Go ahead, Leo.
- [05:27]
Leo Kobayashi
Yes, and so, you know, having worked in emergency medicine, I think this is my 25th year. It's. It's been an interesting career. It's always unfortunate when someone comes in and, you know, despite all the technology, 2026, there's nothing to do. I mean, you Know, someone is just past the ability to be resuscitated. And so, you know, having unfortunately seen enough of that unfortunate presentation, you know, having worked with Jeff on a variety of academic projects, I thought that this might be an interesting and potentially meaningful venue to pursue as a recovering academic. Having worked on a variety of research projects with Jeff, you know, we've spanned a variety of different technological interventions in healthcare and healthcare adjacent sectors. And I won't pour you to tears with some of the harebrained ideas we worked on. But there's legitimate interesting things that are actually commercial products that we were peripherally involved with. But having done a lot of the work, we figured that we could try to make a product, bring it to market and help save more lives. That's how I got involved also.
- [06:40]
Brad McCullough
Leo, didn't you make some career sacrifices or a little bit of like, hey, if we're going to do this, I need to see if this is real. Can you go a little bit deeper into your story of again, working in level one trauma centers or what I, what convinced you that this was something that would put you down the entrepreneurial route?
- [07:10]
Leo Kobayashi
I think a lot of different factors. There's, there's a life saving aspect. Clearly, you know, we know this works. I mean, this isn't some vaporware that, you know, there might be a return on some type of investment in five or 10 years. This isn't a mystery pharma that it's going to take, you know, years to develop in a lab. This is, you know, what we're working on and what we have deployed. It's a fully working system and it saves lives. And so having the validation for even from the pilot testing, that helps keep, that helps keep me going and remain interested in pursuing this. Also as mentioned, I mean, as a, having been in academia for a long time, I mean, writing papers, getting grants, you know, getting promoted and all that is all exciting, interesting, and part of the academic career at the same time. Once the project's done, the grant's over, you've presented at a conference. Well, there might be difficulty sustaining what you've spent a lot of time and money and your life on. And so having, I hate to use the word, but sort of like a legacy, something that then you can bring out into the world which is sustainable and continues to deliver. It was a very worthwhile achievement that I'm hoping to accomplish through this.
- [08:35]
Brad McCullough
And Jeff, I think you kind of touch on this. Sora isn't your first attempt. You have been iterating on what this could be for a tangible irl, real world solution, which at what point did, hey, let's not just add the saving people from overdoses stuff into it. At what point did you also figure out, like, hey, we should also make this responsive and aware where, hey, this was opened and maybe you should refill it. But also, it's not just a box. It's not like a fire extinguisher. It's a fire extinguisher, which could also potentially call like 911 because there's a fire. Right?
- [09:28]
Jeff Capero
Yeah. The Nalox boxes that we built in 2017 were literally like repurposed IKEA boxes that I worked with a RISD professor, which was super interesting and fun. And we sweated out in our driveway drilling holes and plastic boxes against better advice. The public health need is enormous here, and as we know, these are highly effective. I think that our system's agnostic for what you could put in it. But I think that a little bit of a broader stroke is that this sidewalk is unsupervised. So EMS response time might be eight minutes, but if you're in a rural location, it could be two or three times that. If you don't have the tools you need on scene to help a person, you literally can watch them die. We know that EMS dispatch is now leaning into giving instruction. So you don't know cpr. I tell you how to give chest compressions and tell your body to get the defibrillator, then these things should be mapped and they're not. We're leaning into a vision of where the sidewalk is managed, where people know where tools are and they're told how to use them, and they can intervene at the earliest moments possible.
- [10:38]
Brad McCullough
And even if this isn't fully built out yet, let me sketch a scenario and tell me if this matches to the vision. Again, I'm going to use a movie theater as an example. Right. Again, A defibrillator on the wall. We're all familiar with that for years and years. But what Sora is doing is more than a box. It's like inventory, expiration monitoring, open alerts, but also a central app. So I'm working at the movie theater and there's a situation going on. I open it and I know that there is an app potentially connected, that also can walk me through what to do with what's inside. Is that what we're doing here?
- [11:23]
Jeff Capero
We've gone lower tech right now, so there's user guidance. We have grab and go containers inside our cabinets. You'll see at our website, which should give simple instructions what to do. There's infographics that come with each tool, but it's not currently with someone at the helm giving instructions. We want 911 to be that person. Our system is on a lower tier cellular right now than our cell phones, so we cannot guarantee instantaneous communications. And we aren't linking directly to 911 because if people are doing something illegal like taking recreational drugs, they might not want 911 to be activated for that purpose. We want the bystander to help and call 911. So we're giving prompts to call 911. It's not that we couldn't have our system Revised to activate 911 or provide a higher tier cellular service for instant communications, but it sort of meant as, oh, last night at 10:30, the box was opened. You better go recheck it and stock it.
- [12:22]
Brad McCullough
And then maybe down the road, like sort of QR codes and stuff like that, Right? Okay.
- [12:26]
Jeff Capero
QR codes are on the box. And we know a lot of people just walk out by out of curiosity and scan QR codes. We talked to teachers in K12 who said they put a QR code on the wall with no label and kids scan it. They're just out of curiosity. It's like, oh, now you know about dating, violence. Congratulations. So the physical presence of these boxes matters. People walk by and they see the word overdose or bleeding every day. It's kind of in their mind that that is there for purpose and they know where to reach.
- [12:55]
Brad McCullough
Leo, let me ask you this. There are millions of AEDs out there, but not necessarily with also overdose and severe bleeding tools inside there. Why hasn't anyone built a better sort of Batman tool belt where there's other things in there, like, you know, what is it? Nalaxone and tourniquets and things like that. Why hasn't this been done before and why do you feel like now is the moment?
- [13:31]
Leo Kobayashi
I think now the advantage that we have is that I think there's been a conversions of different things that make what we're attempting more feasible and more appealing and doable. I think the advent of advanced IoT technologies, full pipelines, full stacks that they're almost like, you know, off the shelf that you can implement to accomplish something like this. I think that's a very important component. There have been previous attempts and their ongoing competitors with different focus points doing supply chain management and inventory management. There are disadvantages and there are challenges to what we're trying to accomplish. And I think that they're not insignificant. And I think that that can result in difficulties in bringing this to real world implementation. You know, for a variety of reasons, and with all the prototyping that we've done, we've settled on similar technologies with a particular vendor, which I can disclose later, I have no conflict of interest. That helps provide pretty robust infrastructure that helps us accomplish this. And the other aspect is a societal public perception element, which is that unlike when Jeff started putting up naloxone boxes on walls almost 10 years ago, the stigma, I believe, has been dramatically reduced. People are much more aware of naloxone. And in parallel, as we're all aware, unfortunately, mass casualty incidents are ongoing. And every day you just hear about events. And so the public perception of the need for these types of tools is going up. And so I think that those definitely increase the acceptability and the need for what we're doing. I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [15:26]
Brad McCullough
No, I was going to say, I believe. Not to bring it down a little bit, but I believe some of your early traction has been on university campuses when we're talking about things like incidents and things like that, because again, we're talking about overdoses, but also mass bleeding incidents and things like that. Is. What do you see where this is useful? Like workplaces, transit, stadiums, like is it. It's basically like the sort of, you know, outside your home, real world. Like this is. That's. Forgive me for using this term in this context, but this is the addressable market.
- [16:15]
Leo Kobayashi
And the answer to that is yes, all the above. I mean, any public location, any, any space, community space, otherwise, where there is potential for unfortunate medical emergencies in public, I think is definitely a potential market for what we're doing. It's. You know, I have an anecdote about this. When we were doing prototyping early on, there was actually a second generation locksbox that and Jeff's, the nonprofit that Jeff had worked with previously to install these. They installed in locksbox in a particular facility and we instrumented it with our prototype technology just to monitor it. This was a affordable housing facility and there was no drug activity within the. Within that particular area. And when we went to check on it, as we were instrumenting this box, inside this Nalox box was no naloxone. It was literally a bag of Hershey's Kisses. And someone had either taken out the naloxone and replaced it or, you know, left a thank you. And the point of that being if there are these rescue supplies but they're not monitored as they get Deployed in public settings, I think it creates initial hazard. So I think that that's why what we're doing is timely, relevant and meaningful to what is currently going on. With all the unfortunate public emergencies, I
- [17:46]
Jeff Capero
was going to jump in briefly on why nobody else did it. In our perception, all these public health responses are siloed. So Stop the Bleed campaign cares about stop the bleed hemorrhage and all the local opioid education, naloxone distribution groups care about opioids and sometimes we don't talk to each other in these different silos. And so taking an all emergency approach, other people have. There are some multi use cabinets without technology, but those that use technology tend to be focused on a single emergency such as especially in the ad space. So the pieces are out there, the components are out there and we're just trying to deliver a platform that's flexible to put whatever you want in it, but really to be responsive to those minutes matter emergencies. Because you know, you could have the knowledge and not have the tools and that's criminal. And so you know, millions of people trained and stopped the bleed. But the location of the hemorrhage control devices is a little bit mysterious and not widely known or properly accentuated.
- [18:51]
Brad McCullough
Okay, the components aspect of this is going to lead me into eventually I want to ask you all about your again deeper journey from doctors to founders. But let's, let's do two questions that'll get us there. So number one, hardware is brutal. I know as an investor and a founder myself, and also you're operating in a hardware space that is highly regulated coming from medicine and I know you also have also a technical co founder that you know software and things like that. What did you underestimate? I mean we're going to get into underestimating all sorts of stuff, but about building a physical product first and foremost.
- [19:41]
Jeff Capero
Oh, we have how many hours do you have, Brian?
- [19:47]
Brad McCullough
Give me a couple of juicy ones.
- [19:51]
Jeff Capero
We were getting the grant, we had a small business grant, Sbir grant with NIH and that and wrote on commerce grants. And that was awesome because we've got talent in the building. We got people who actually design talents instead of us cobbling together something with scotch tape. So what we really focused a good amount of our attention was on building an aluminum cabinet which is very unique in the marketplace with a beveled window and it was quite gorgeous. But then came tariffs and then came the need to pre order those and to know your volumes. And that was one misstep I'd say in building A physical product, another one really has been just like anticipating the regulatory. Even though we're a non FDA device, Leo can talk about the kind of approvals that we need in a regulatory stamps of approval. So Leo, do you want to take that or do you give another direction?
- [20:42]
Leo Kobayashi
No, absolutely. And just as an aside for the, the aluminum container, it's, it's beautiful. It is one of our SKUs and
- [20:55]
Brad McCullough
it is, and it's one, it's one. Design awards.
- [20:57]
Leo Kobayashi
I believe I was going to say it's won three separate design awards. I mean it's a beautiful industrial design product and it's available, but yes, it's hard to source and you know, yes, hardware, you know, you start with ordering something off Amazon or McMaster car, just like, you know, cobble something together, you know, you use, you breadboard it and then like you send it out to some, you know, local fab and try to get a pcb and then like, you know, the traces aren't right or the batch, the batch quality is low or the components fry and it just becomes sort of this, you know, it becomes a rabbit hole. You know, getting professional engineering consultative help is definitely critical and not having to go down specifically.
- [21:50]
Brad McCullough
Sorry, speak to that for a second. Consultative help, what does that mean? Again, imagine you're a listener that is maybe not a doctor, but someone that's outside of the technical field or whatever. What does that mean, consultative help for you building your business?
- [22:04]
Leo Kobayashi
Yes. And so we've had the good fortune of working with some excellent consultative entities and maybe some not so excellent, but still very good entities. So that stems all the way from branding and identifying colors and fonts and visual language to figuring out how to make the container, how to physically manufacture the container. And then one of the more significant lifts that we had to go through is just the pure electrical engineering of making a PCB in a circuit that will pass muster that's not going to blow up with lithium polymer battery and create an additional hazard in addition to being on the wall. And so not having the technical background, at least not the engineering background to do it. You know, that was where funding from sbir, the NIH was critical because they helped us overcome that particular hurdle. Get an external entity help design the PCB and get it to the point where we could outsource it for manufacturing. And so, yes, absolutely, external, expert consultative input is invaluable.
- [23:17]
Brad McCullough
Jeff. I assume that neither of you have had experience with design before. What have you learned about design being functional work in terms of getting a product to market? And then giving you credibility in a market. Again, we're talking about a hardware thing, but this could be applicable to software or whatever. Have you learned anything about how it looks and how it feels might have changed your mind about the product?
- [23:54]
Jeff Capero
I think it's amazing to work with folks with those chops, because we ain't got them. And we had some really ugly things that we prototyped. And I think some of the design challenges were to make this approachable and super clear to the people walking by or potentially using it. And I think our designers really delivered that. We have people who worked in training, like training for overdose response or training for cardiac response, who helped us with the language. And so I think that just we had this general approach that this is here for you. And we didn't want to be standoff with the red and black colors that we see in the defibrillators or fire extinguishers. This is more like a welcoming color scheme, Large, clear fonts. Nih. It was the Child Health and Human Development Branch who supported us. And they're like, how in the world do you expect somebody to sort out which emergency this is here for? And so I think they've. I think we've accomplished it. And, you know, I think the firm that we are, that we work with, we still work with them, they're super proud of what they created, and we never could have done it alone.
- [25:04]
Brad McCullough
Let me ask both of you this question. I'll give you each a chance to answer this. Before you went down this path, what did you think being an entrepreneur and doing a startup was? And then, now that you've gone down this path, someone like you that had no experience with this, what's the biggest learning that you would take away? About what? The reality of not knowing this, not having gone down this path before, the. The reality versus what you thought it was.
- [25:46]
Jeff Capero
Leo,
- [25:49]
Leo Kobayashi
I guess I can start with the input from various accelerator entities and incubator entities and people who, you know, get individuals started on this path. And, you know, in fun, in retrospect, it's funny, you know, there's like, yeah, 18 months, you know, you'll make it big and then you'll cash out. It's like, right, okay. And, you know, now in retrospect, it's like, yeah, okay, I was going to
- [26:18]
Brad McCullough
say, who told you that? What the hell is this?
- [26:23]
Leo Kobayashi
And, you know, not that we believed it, but, you know, that's sort of like the unicorn that gets dangled. And so, you know, like, okay, well, maybe it's not a complete Unicorn with respect to just any kind of advice. And once again, it's not like we've made it quite yet.
- [26:39]
Jeff Capero
Right.
- [26:39]
Leo Kobayashi
Like we're still working on it, but from where we are at, you know, a few years into what we're doing, I guess my one specific and brief on terse but hopefully meaningful input or suggestion is to consider startup as a verb in the sense that it's a process and it takes time, it takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of money. And it's not, you know, it's not. It's not always flashy, it's often exhausting, and it's not always a.
- [27:10]
Brad McCullough
It's not always a side hustle. It does consume a lot of.
- [27:14]
Leo Kobayashi
Yeah, sorry, it does. And so, you know, it's maybe not a marathon, but it is definitely process. That takes time. And so, you know, if you're. If one is looking for instant gratification like some of us emergency physicians, probably not the best way to get your kicks.
- [27:34]
Brad McCullough
Jeff.
- [27:35]
Jeff Capero
I mean, I guess, you know, I mean, we have advisors in our undergrad campus here who, you know, say speak with 100 customers before you even propose your idea. And you know, I thought we had that covered with our prior experience and then additional customer discovery work we did, but I just think you can't lean on that enough. We've benefited from a lot of people who give their time just to mentor us and we're really lucky. So I would say tap your ecosystem locally. I'd say hard lessons continue to be that I might have thought or hallucinated that the funnel, we weren't prone to the funnel, but you need that broad funnel to get your business spun up. And we are not immune at all. The other one was more recently, as we turn a little bit more to distributors as a go to market, is where is currency being exchanged in your market? And I think that otherwise you're just knocking on the doors from the outside and people don't know who the heck you are.
- [28:40]
Brad McCullough
There's no reason to pick up, go into greater detail about that. What specifically are you talking about?
- [28:46]
Jeff Capero
I think we could be knocking on doors one at a time. And not understanding the market mechanisms for where people buy similar products was an oversight of mine for sure. I think that we're now there and we're bringing on talent to help us do that.
- [29:01]
Brad McCullough
Because you're in the market, but you're not necessarily the procurers. So learning how sales works, even in something that you are familiar with, in an arena you're familiar with Yeah, I
- [29:14]
Jeff Capero
mean, content knowledge doesn't matter. You need market knowledge. Right. So if there's safety distributors that sell to colleges, it's much easier for them to get their phone call picked up than us knocking on the college's health services person who isn't even the person who makes the purchases.
- [29:31]
Brad McCullough
Right. I was going to say you don't know. You might know who those people are in a perfect world, but you don't have the relationships with them necessarily. And then also you might not understand their motivations, their economics or things like that. Right. And so that's why salespeople exist, I guess.
- [29:49]
Jeff Capero
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, this, because on the other path is nothing but friction and nothing but labor and nothing but costs and trying to, you know, trying to access it, create something from scratch, create a salesforce from scratch.
- [30:01]
Leo Kobayashi
Say, I think one of the brand marketing experts we've been working with, I mean, you know, he has his approach to helping startups get to market, but, you know, he just keeps bringing up this idea that, you know, the founders, the people who are running the company, they think, you know, everyone is waiting with bated breath for the product. And the reality is that, you know, they're getting bombarded with tens of thousands of messages every day, you know, advertorials, influencers, commercial commercials, and you need to somehow get their attention. And so, you know, it's not like, you know, you make a product and it's perfect and you're done. There's just so much more to this than, than just making the perfect product.
- [30:46]
Brad McCullough
Listen, doing any product or any business, you're never done. Even when it goes to market, even when you have product market fit, you got to iterate, iterate, iterate. That's what the market is. I'm gonna, before I wrap by asking or telling people about how they can get involved and learn more, one more sort of flip the script question for both of you, which is you're literally doctors working in ER environments. You're academics or something. This might be impossible to answer off the top of your head, but is there something that you, you from that environment have a perspective on entrepreneurship and starting a company that you've learned from fucking treating people in a crazy emergency environment. Is there some sort of thing where as you've been doing this company, you're like, oh, I pulled that out of my toolbox from being in the er, so if you've got one, I'll take one from both of you.
- [32:00]
Leo Kobayashi
Yeah, yeah, I guess I can start. And so I'm Sure. A lot of the viewers and you've, excuse me, watched the Pit, that show about life in the emergency department. And for full disclosure, I've only watched one episode because a, it's triggering and so, you know, I want to go home, sit on the couch and watch more work. But I think one thing it gets right is how challenging it can be and the need to be resourceful and have, for lack of a better term, the grit to keep going. It's a very challenging environment. And so I think working and compensating for the shortcomings and the limited resources and other aspects of working in that particular environment are definitely helpful to doing the startup route. As mentioned, you know, just the, the process of, you know, doing this for years and, you know, having to overcome obstacles, unintended or rather unexpected challenges, obstacles.
- [33:10]
Brad McCullough
Before you go, Jeff, I'm going to reframe that as saying, taking the Ls, like if you're, you're going to take some losses and like you're saying that that's sort of something that's been inculcated in your career that, like, that was maybe not unfamiliar to you.
- [33:31]
Jeff Capero
Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah. How you, how you move forward in those situations. I think, you know, the, you know, when someone comes in and they lost a young person, because I work in pediatric emergency medicine, you know, where's the pain felt? I mean, certainly family and friends feel the pain, but what we're doing is completely obvious from a public health standpoint. And I would say we have front row seats to people's worst days. We're a participant in the worst day of their life. Unfortunately, it makes you want to do something. It makes you want to do more than the clinical care, especially when the horse is out of the barn and it's too late for that family. These solutions are stupid, simple. Like, it's like, you know, flonase up your nose, spray for naloxone to reverse an overdose. It's, it's too dumb for somebody to die that way. And similarly, you know, if a tourniquet around the leg saves someone from exsanguinating in the 5 minutes ride to the hospital or for the ambulance to show, you know, we don't want to die stupid deaths. And yeah, there are root causes that are way beyond this and training in public health. But we're at this, like, very last stop of prevention with what we're doing. Like in this moment. If something doesn't change, this person's fate is sealed. And I guess part of that pain that we feel we share with our families in the ER has been rolled into our efforts to make this thing live in the real world. And there's a tricky component of it where we chose not to do this as a nonprofit. We thought it was going to take a lot of resources to spin this up, which it did. The NIH SBIR grant is available to, you know, companies only. I think ultimately we want to succeed as a company, but I think our success as a company actually is a public health solution in itself. So, like Leo said, if we get a paper published, you know, we can put it on a refrigerator, and maybe our mom, you know, congratulates us. But if you do something that has lasting power, you. We could publish a paper on our cabinets. And we have. But if it's not a real business viability, are we really going to see millions of them like we do for
- [35:39]
Brad McCullough
different leaders if you can't get in, in the real world? So, I'm sorry, Jeff. I conflated sort of what Leo said in terms of when you take losses, you still have a mission and you go forward. But if you have a different answer in terms of what you have brought into being an entrepreneur based on being a doctor, if you have another answer, as.
- [36:09]
Jeff Capero
I'm not sure, I think, like I said, yeah, we just. We see where things fall through the cracks, and when things fall through the cracks, you know, it's our impulse to patch them. Better yet, to get to the root causes.
- [36:21]
Brad McCullough
But that's the entrepreneurial instinct of, I see a problem, it's my problem, and I want to fix it. And that's better. Again, we're going to wrap up here in a second, but I always say that I know we're in a bubble when the. The young people and the pretty people show up and all they want to do is make a company, but they don't have an idea, they just want a company. I love entrepreneurs that are like, I have a problem, and so I'm going to make a company. Like, that's the right order of operations to me. And so, you know, that's one of the reasons why we invested in y'. All. Okay, so I'm going to reiterate that if you want to find out more about this company, Sora, it's Sora System IO the link will be in the show notes. And I want to say if you want to get in touch with them, you could be a customer, you could be a startup right now that could use one of these in your offices. You could be listening to Me and be like, hey, my kids gym could use that. Sorasystem IO or email me, I'll put you in touch. But also where are you at in terms of the product? Are you hiring? If people find this interesting, maybe there are people out there that are like, hey, I can put these in my supermarket chain or something like that. Where are you at and what should people know about where you're at?
- [37:57]
Jeff Capero
We're looking to sell for sure. It might be your alma mater, it might be your business where you think these belong. A lot of people are focused on the safety of their clients and their staff. So absolutely looking to sell. We're building team. Also we're looking to onboard sales talent, particular sales talent with distributor background.
- [38:19]
Brad McCullough
Leo, I'll give you the last word.
- [38:22]
Leo Kobayashi
Well, I think I just have to, you know, point out that we are building on some tremendous work that's already being done. I mean there are grassroots efforts as well as some governmental level efforts to try to address some of these awful conditions that are out there. And so I just absolutely have to make sure that there's a shout out to all the OEMD groups, all the hemorrhage control entities and you know, people who got the AEDs in the backs of police cruisers and you know, just public safety stations. We hope to expand on what's been done, but we wouldn't be here without their previous efforts.
- [39:04]
Jeff Capero
Yeah, that's, that's a great point.
- [39:07]
Brad McCullough
Listen, I'm. I'm not patting you on the back or me on the back, but I did. The last weekend's bonus episode was me saying that the first company I ever started that I still own has helped hundreds of thousands of people find jobs over the last 25 years. And I've always liked that. And I'm always biased towards investing in a company that hey, we're going to make money, but also, hey, we're doing real things like saving people's lives.
- [39:36]
Leo Kobayashi
So.
- [39:38]
Brad McCullough
Jeff, Leo, again, it's sora. SORA System IO if this is meaningful to you, compelling to you, if you want to be a customer, get in touch with me or just go to them the website. You can get in touch. Thank you both for coming on and talking about this.
- [39:58]
Jeff Capero
Thank you Brian. Great conversation. Appreciate it.
- [40:10]
Bloomberg Narrator
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- [40:25]
Leo Kobayashi
Com.