How to Build a Medtech Startup in High School
The Harry Glorikian Show
Rohan Kalahasty, Sai Mattapali, Vytal, for September 26, 2023
Final Transcript
Harry Glorikian: Hello. Welcome to The Harry Glorikian Show, where we dive into the tech-driven future of healthcare.
I’m sure most listeners would agree that building any kind of startup is hard. But starting a medtech startup is even more challenging, given the long timelines for product development and all the regulatory requirements companies have to meet.
Now imagine how much harder it would be to start a company if you were still just a senior in high school.
Recently I learned about a company called Vytal that’s building eye-tracking technology to measure brain health. And I knew right away that I wanted to have the co-founders on the show.
Not just because the technology sounded cool, but because CEO Rohan Kalahasty and the CTO Sai Mattapali are both 18 years old, and both entering their senior years at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia.
I don’t know what you were doing at that age, but I sure didn’t have ten employees and over a million dollars in seed capital. And I wasn’t out there building AI software to translate gaze-tracking measurements into biometric deta, or raising venture capital, or rounding up beta testers, or figuring out business models. But that’s exactly what Rohan and Sai are up to right now. And I thought it would be fun to hear what starting a med-tech business has been like for them.
From our interview, it sounds like some of the challenges they’ve faced have been absolutely typical, like how to build a network of partners and how to meet government standards for new medical devices. And others have been a little unusual.Like how to get time off from school to meet with investors and how to convince their parents that the business won’t take too much time away from their studies.
I’m impressed at the progress Vital has made. And I hope their story can be an inspiration to other young entrepreneurs. Because in the business of healthcare, medical technology, and drug discovery, we need as many smart young people as we can get to come up with the ideas that are going to help keep an aging population healthy and active.
Sai unfortunately had a poor Zoom connection and he dropped off the call after the first few minutes. But Rohan guided me through the rest of the story about Vytal. So here’s our full conversation.
Harry Glorikian: Rohan, Sai, welcome to the show.
Rohan Kalahasty: Hi. Thank you.
Harry Glorikian: So it’s really good to have you guys on here. Um, you know, I had read about you guys and I wanted to have you guys on the show. I mean, it’s interesting. Normally we get, you know, older CEOs on the show talking about their technologies, But I really want to give the listeners a chance to sort of get to know you guys, right? So maybe each of you can do a kind of, you know, short self introduction. Tell us tell us a little bit about yourselves, your background and, you know, doing it according to rank order. Rohan, you’re CEO so why don’t you start and then Sai and then you know how did you meet and what inspired you guys to work together. That’s let’s start there.
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah, of course. So Sai and I met, I think it was ninth grade. It was actually through a computer science project. Our teacher paired us up pretty randomly, and we’ve been pretty close friends ever since. And on my side, I’ve always had an interest in both artificial intelligence and the brain. So I’ve always been doing a lot of work in these two fields separately. But Vytal was kind of something that came at the intersection of my two interests. And the actual idea for Vytal started at an internship I did over at Harvard Medical School, and at that internship I was reading about eye tracking for the first time, and I was learning about all the different improvements that had been made recently in the eye tracking field. So I already had a lot of knowledge, like through past research, about how changes in your eye movements can be linked to these various different neurological conditions. You know, these include Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and it was kind of natural for me to try to combine those two pieces of technology, right? The AI based eye tracking solutions and that past research to try to make a solution to looking at your overall brain health. And that’s kind of when I approached Sai because I had worked with Sai and a lot of projects in the past and I thought and I knew that we made a great founder team. So that’s kind of my side of things.
Sai Mattapali: Yeah. And I mean in terms of my side of things, I was also pretty interested in AI, especially in the early years of high school. I sort of strayed away from computer science and got more into entrepreneurship, business and neuroscience. So in terms of like finance, I worked at a couple of medtech startups that became backed by Y Combinator. I’ve worked with some venture capitalists as well as an intern, so I was able to provide like that financial guidance and, you know, add to the dynamic that Rohan and I had built together. Whereas, you know, we have like a team where, you know, we cover our bases with neuroscience, AI and the entrepreneurship side.
Harry Glorikian: So you guys have had a boring sort of high school experience, right? I mean, neuroscience, Harvard, you know, working at venture capital funds. It’s just like every everybody that’s out there these days. Do me a favor. Tell me a little bit about the company Vytal. I mean, when did you guys start? You know, what’s the product or technology, You know, walk me through where, what you guys are trying to do and the gaps you’re trying to fill in the market.
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So. Vytal started approximately two years ago. It was around the second quarter of our sophomore year of high school. And again, as I said, as I said before, the idea came from an internship that I did over at Harvard. And to give some background like to why we created this actual product. So the background or the necessary background is that there’s been almost 30,000 papers linking changes in your eye movements to those aforementioned, you know, neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s. But to actually calculate those very minute changes in eye movements, you needed these very, very expensive headsets, right? These headsets started around $5,000 and they could go up to easily $30,000 to $40,000. Right. So this wasn’t a piece of technology that could be accessed by a large pool of people. And what we’ve done at Vytal is we’ve created a product to essentially completely streamline the process of calculating those exact same clinically validated biometrics using just a laptop. So the way we’re able to do this is we take advantage of an AI based gaze tracking solution that has a 2.5 degree error, which is about the same as Tobii glasses under imperfect conditions like the ones that you see at home. Right? So we’re able to calculate these biometrics at very nearly the same accuracy as those very expensive headsets, essentially democratizing their use.
Harry Glorikian: Interesting. So. How many people are working on this project?
Sai Mattapali: Yeah. So right now we have including Rohan and I, we have ten people, right? And you know, that just includes a variety of web developers, and people who are specializing more in gaze tracking.
Harry Glorikian: Understood. So I’m wondering, like, because usually when somebody goes down a road like this, is this like a personal quest for either of you? Do you guys have any, let’s say, friends or relatives say, with cognitive issues or brain injuries who could have benefit from a test like this?
Sai Mattapali: It wasn’t necessarily like a direct personal connection. It was more so just our realization together that a lot of medical research actually…
Harry Glorikian: Rowan, I’m going to ask you to actually repeat some of that, because he was his connection is not that great.
Rohan Kalahasty: It was the same on my side. But I think the point that I was trying to get at was that in the past we have done a ton of research and we published too. And what we’ve seen is that at least in the sort of research and development space you kind of publish and after you publish, you don’t actually see what you’ve built have a real impact on the world, right? And I essentially got kind of sick of that and we wanted to sort of build something that would have a huge impact and that we could actually see have an impact on people. And that’s kind of why we went down the entrepreneurship route, right? Because the truth is that money rules the world. And when there’s money behind a project, right. And there’s some, you know, money coming in, like for a product, that’s when a product can truly have a huge impact on the biggest number of people. Right. Oftentimes pushing something through sort of a non-profit route actually reduces the amount of impact that it has. And I think that’s what I was trying to get at.
Harry Glorikian: Okay. Well, so let’s talk a little bit about the science behind this idea that gaze tracking can reveal clues about brain health. Right? So, I mean, what kind of data is there to show that performance on gaze tracking testing can be a useful marker of, say, cognitive injury or decline. And then. What sorts of conditions can be diagnosed with, you know, using eye tracking data? I mean, are we talking about Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, something else?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So I think here it would be good to kind of look at a specific biometric. So one biometric that we look at a lot is called latency. It’s essentially a measure of how long your brain takes to respond to a given stimulus on the screen. So that specific biometric has been shown by I think it’s been like 12 papers to be linked or to be heightened in Alzheimer’s patients. And it’s heightened very early on in the Alzheimer’s progression. So that’s an example of a biometric-to-disease link that we’re actually able to shed light on. So I think that’s kind of, you know, how we can actually use these like these biometrics to help move towards or give evidence for a specific diagnosis. And there’s really a large variety of diseases with these, you know, biometric these eye biometric changes. Right. Just off the top of my head, these include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS. There’s even a few others, but there’s really a large number of diseases that have been linked with these biometrics. And what we’re essentially doing is just democratizing the usage of those biometrics so they can actually be used in a clinical setting.
Harry Glorikian: So basically you’re going to have to combine it with something else or some symptoms to actually get to a diagnosis, because this all by itself is not going to necessarily narrow it down.
Rohan Kalahasty: Exactly. And we’re kind of essentially giving doctors an extra set of metrics to essentially, number one, screen for diseases. Right? This can be used as a very early stage screening tool. And it can also be used to track the progression of these diseases. Right? I mean, if you saw earlier this year, we finally saw the first Alzheimer’s drug be approved by the FDA. But there’s obviously a lot of debate about whether or not that drug actually works. Well, you know, this can be a tool, a very cheap tool to actually see whether or not your symptoms are improving due to the drug that you’re being administered. So I think those are the two main use cases of this product.
Harry Glorikian: Well, it’s funny because the first thing that crossed my mind was Apple’s new headset, right? The amount of effort they put into eye tracking was not trivial. It’s almost like you almost want to be an app that people can use with that headset and give you an extra set of users that that, you know, you might be able to gather data from. But just so listeners sort of understand what we’re talking about. So, you know, let’s talk through some of the details of this test itself. So what happens when you take the test? You know, can you walk us through, say, the process?
Rohan Kalahasty: So the way that the test looks like from start to finish is one click button. Take a test after you’ve created an account, we walk you through a calibration process. So the way we’re actually able to get a very accurate gauge tracker for every single person is that we calibrate a specific gauge tracking solution for each user. So that calibration process takes about a minute. But once you’re done with the calibration process, there’s one other pre-process, and that’s called distance estimation. So we have to actually calculate how far your face is away from the screen. And we actually do that by, again, using the width of your eye. But using that data, we calculate the distance of your screen. All that takes is about, you know, like 20 ish seconds in total. So it’s all a pretty short process. But after you’ve, you know, finished all of those steps, you can actually get into the actual neurological health testing. So how the actual gaze testing works is we walk you through four gaze tracking tests. These are pro saccade, anti saccades, fixation, and smooth pursuit, right? So these are all very, very simple tests.
Rohan Kalahasty: For example, smooth pursuit is kind of, as the name suggests, just look at a dot that’s moving smoothly in a circle around the screen. So it’s not jumping around. All you have to do is track the dot, right? But from these four gaze tracking tests, in total, they can take anywhere from 1 minute to 8 minutes. It kind of just depends on which biometrics you want to calculate. But yeah, the full battery takes eight minutes, but after you’ve finished all those tests we output, I think it’s 26 different biometrics. And each of these biometrics is associated with a normal range. So you can kind of see, um, you know, which biometric is in and out of range. And since each biometric is associated with a different disease, you can kind of use it to shed light on your overall brain health.
Rohan Kalahasty: I think kind of the analogous piece of technology can kind of be considered like a blood pressure machine, right? A blood pressure machine isn’t giving you a full diagnosis. It’s giving you two numbers that tell you about your overall heart health. We’re essentially giving a set of numbers that talk by your overall brain health, and I think that’s kind of the best analogy there.
Harry Glorikian: So what are some of the main sort of use cases that you envision for your product? I mean, your website mentions neurology, concussion screening and clinical trials, right? So could you walk me through. You know, one or more of those and explain how the data might be useful in each case.
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah, so I think one of the pretty cool ones in my opinion, is using it for clinical trials. So as I said before, there’s a lot of research being done using eye tracking as a basis in the medical field. If they didn’t have to spend, you know, $20,000 on a single headset, they could really get a lot more data by just being able to put a laptop in front of a patient’s screen and have them take tests even multiple times a day. Right. So we can cut down those costs for many of those clinical trials by a huge margin and also give them a lot of value. Right. They’re able to take way more scans, way more tests and get the exact same quality biometrics. So that’s kind of the usage on the clinical side of things. I think the other one that you mentioned was concussion screening. So concussions or traumatic brain injury is another one of those diseases that’s been shown to be associated with changes in your eye movements. And this could be this product can essentially be used to, again, screen for concussions very early on. And again, try to prevent those sports players from keeping on playing after they have gotten a concussion. Right. So, again, it can be used as a pre-screening tool or a longitudinal tracking tool, and those are the two main use cases.
Harry Glorikian: So how do you envision a physician, say, using the data? I mean, are you designing the test to sort of definitively diagnose a cognitive disease? Or is it just a data point that a physician is going to use to make his or her own assessment?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So that’s something that we’ve actually debated a lot at Vytal. And since we’re still in the beta testing stages, we’re still kind of playing around with that nuance, right? Right now what we’re leaning towards is, you know, positioning this product as a way to actually give doctors an extra data point to further a diagnosis that they’re making. And one of the reasons why we’re kind of leaning towards doing that is because doctors are very, very skeptical of artificial intelligence. Right? They’re not going to want a full diagnosis to be made using an artificial intelligence system. And that’s been seen at so many clinics around the globe. So by kind of just positioning this product to instead kind of aid them in a diagnosis, I think it can actually reach a much larger amount of people.
Harry Glorikian: So. Just thinking about that for a moment. I’m almost thinking like, could you make this available to the average person? From a health and wellness standpoint. Right. Of, you know, and that way you could gather a lot more information from a larger pool of people. But just sort of an idea that’s popping into my head. But let’s talk about like, what is the state of the art for eye tracking tests today or before you guys built NeurOS? And I know you’ve you’ve mentioned a few times, you know, expensive, bulky equipment. Um, you know what is out there today that anybody who needs this need has to use.
Rohan Kalahasty: So the gold standard is definitely those eye tracking headsets created by Tobii. So Tobii is a huge post-IPO company. Um, and what they’ve actually done is that they’ve really hiked up the prices of their eye tracking solutions because they’re the only big player in that space, right? There’s a lot of other smaller companies like one that comes to mind is called Gazepoint, but Gazepoint is not nearly as popular as Tobii, and their prices are actually pretty similar to Tobii anyway. So really the gold standard is those very expensive headsets created by Tobii. And it’s not just the headset itself. You have to download extra software to actually compute those biometrics and do everything on top of it. So it’s not just the issue of money, it’s an it’s an issue of it being easy to use. And I think we’ve solved both of those issues over at Vytal. But yeah.
Harry Glorikian: So. The question is more like, you know, what’s your central innovation. Your secret sauce, as they say. And don’t tell me anything confidential. Right. But you know, just what is it? Are there any key insights or software engineering tricks that that get you guys to get good gaze tracking data from the camera in a smartphone or a laptop?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. And I think the secret sauce lies in the gaze tracking solution that we implement. We spent a long time iterating on that solution. It’s an AI based solution and we actually take advantage of some of the current state of the art in the space, such as meta learning. But I would say that’s where the secret sauce lies.
Harry Glorikian: So. But in reality, right, I mean, this is eye tracking is not anything new, right? I mean, UI research has been using eye tracking for a long time. I mean, I think, you know, a lot of companies will ask people to sit down in front of a computer and scroll through the website, play a game, and eye tracking software will measure where they’re looking as a way to get feedback on whether the design is being effective. I mean, in the same way, there’s a lot of advanced eye tracking technologies in the newest augmented reality and virtual reality equipment. Like I was saying earlier, like the Apple Vision Pro. Did you guys benefit from any of that work or is everything sort of de novo from what you guys came up with?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So I think we mentioned before about eye tracking being used by these UI, UX researchers in the past has benefited us. Their research was probably the whole reason why AI based gaze tracking solutions from a laptop or a smartphone was first developed in the first place, and we definitely benefited off reading of I mean, reading all those research papers and trying to, you know, build off their solution. But I don’t think that the thing they said, after all of those solutions are not really AI based solutions. They’re solutions that are based on those bulky pieces of technology. So I wouldn’t say we benefited off that as much.
Harry Glorikian: So, I mean, there must have been a moment when you realized like, wait a minute. I can implement a medically useful gaze tracking test on a smartphone or a laptop. When did you have that, like, sort of holy, you know, I could do this moment? And then even more like, what made you say, and I’m going to start a company around this.
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah, I think that was definitely over at Harvard. It was really the aha moment. Kind of came really randomly. I think it was when I was reading a paper on gaze tracking. Actually, I think this paper was from Google. I think it was. But that was kind of when I realized, Hey, this product can actually be used in a medical setting and have a huge impact. And that’s kind of where the Aha moment came. And I kind of explained why we went down the company route. You know, before when we first started building out the product, I wasn’t planning on making it a company. I was kind of just building it for the sake of building it and trying because I didn’t really know anything at that point about how entrepreneurship worked and how products actually are able to, you know, go into the space and have an impact. So it was really after I learned about the entrepreneurship space and I learned what it took to actually have something that can affect a lot of people that I went down the right route.
[musical interlude]
Harry Glorikian: Let’s pause the conversation for a minute to talk about one small but important thing you can do, to help keep the podcast going. And that’s leave a rating and a review for the show on Apple Podcasts.
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It’ll only take a minute, but you’ll be doing a lot to help other listeners discover the show.
And one more thing. If you the interviews we do here on the show I know you’ll my new book, The Future You: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help You Get Healthier, Stress Less, and Live Longer.
It’s a friendly and accessible tour of all the ways today’s information technologies are helping us diagnose diseases faster, treat them more precisely, and create personalized diet and exercise programs to prevent them in the first place.
The book is now available in print and ebook formats. Just go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and search for The Future You by Harry Glorikian.
And now, back to the show.
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Harry Glorikian: So I know you mentioned that you guys are in a beta testing now, so you’re trying to get people to join that. So how is that going? Are you getting as many beta testers as you need and the type of people that you need?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So the beta testing actually filled up a lot faster than we expected. So it’s kind of funny. Like the first thing that we that we use to kind of sign up beta testers was called Typeform. We actually ran out of those Typeform responses in like two days because it was limited at a thousand. So we actually got a huge amount of responses and I think that’s because of some of the attention that we got on LinkedIn and Forbes. But I think that’s why that beta has filled up really, really fast. But there’s definitely been no shortage of people who are interested. We’ve done two cohorts so far. Each of those cohorts have been around 50 people, and it’s been really cool to see people who are actually interested in the technology that we’re using, you know, really because they’ve had family members that had struggled with this in the past. And it really just goes to show, at least to us, um, you know, how fruitful this endeavor can be. So but so far, for the first testing cohort, we found a bunch of, you know, small bugs and issues with our application. And we’ve, we iterated on that for about two weeks. And then we went straight into the into the second one, which is still going right now.
Harry Glorikian: So when do you think the product might be commercially available?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So that’s something that we’re really thinking about right now. Um, we’re hoping to make it commercially available during early 2024. Um, after we run through two or three more big testing cohorts, and we think that’s very, very feasible right now.
Harry Glorikian: So I guess then the question is, okay, now it launches. What’s the business model? Would you sell copies of the app through the App Store. Would it be, you know, like a SaaS or software as a service product with some sort of annual subscription fee? What do you think you guys are leaning towards?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So our business model is going to be a B2C and B2B hybrid. So I think you mentioned before the consumer route can have a lot of impact and but it can only have a lot of impact if we give the consumer some sort of interpretable explanation of their biometrics. Right. And that’s something that we’re working on building out right now. So that’s going to be a part of our third beta testing cohort. But that’s kind of how we’re planning to pursue the consumer route. And with them, we’re going to do a subscription based model. We’re not sure about the price point yet, but that’s how it’s going to be for the consumers. And then for the businesses, we’re planning on targeting those clinical trials that I mentioned before and really just giving them a huge value proposition. Right. You know, here’s something that can allow you to get way more gaze tracking data for way less money. And that’s kind of the two business plans that we’re planning on pursuing.
Harry Glorikian: So I read the article in Forbes. Right. And it said you guys have raised about $2.5 million in funding for the company against a valuation of $12.5 million. And you know, for everybody on the who’s listening, that that would probably be called your seed investment. Talk a little bit about what it’s been like to start the company. I mean, who are the investors? How did you get them on board and how you guys are using the money? You know, those sorts of things.
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So just to give a quick correction, it was we raised $1.3 million, so a bit less than what you said. But when we first started the company, we really didn’t know what we were doing and we really didn’t have a big network. So a lot of the advice that we got was really just by reaching out to random people on LinkedIn and sending cold emails to people that, you know, we thought could be helpful to just talk to. It was really random. The response rates were kind of all over the place, but the people that we did find to talk to us were insanely helpful and they really gave us a lot of great advice that really pushed us down the road. But on the investing side, our first investors were over at Powerhouse Ventures. So Powerhouse Ventures are their local firm there over in Ashburn. So it’s like 30 minute drive from my house. But they were our first investors and they covered our pre-seed round of about $100K, and then it was using them plus a few other groups that we raised our seed round. And really all of this happened last summer in around a three-month span. And really in that three-month span we made way more progress than we than we had made ever before. Right. It was kind of like something just flipped in our heads and we knew exactly, you know, the routes to go down. And I think it’s because it took us time to actually build an intuition about the field that we were working in. But once we had that intuition, things started moving a lot more smoothly.
Harry Glorikian: So how you guys allocating the money? I mean, how long is the capital going to last? Right. I mean, typically, as soon as you raise your round, you’re thinking about your next round, right? So where are you guys in that whole process?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So one of the really great things about running a medtech startup as a high schooler is that we don’t need to actually support ourselves, right? We have our parents, which is great. So we we’ve had no need to pay ourselves salaries. So really we’ve been able to save a ton of money then, right? Because for most medtech startups, most of that funding is going towards the salaries of the employees. So that’s kind of been something that kind of given us a competitive advantage. But for the rest of the money, it’s really all being pushed towards the trials that we’ve been running recently.
Harry Glorikian: Well, it’s funny because any company that I started on, maybe I just didn’t do it the right way. I never paid myself anything until it really got going. And then and then eventually you’re like, Oh, this is what it’s like to get a paycheck. But what’s it like to run a medtech startup? I mean, you’re both still full-time high school students, if I’m not mistaken. I mean, what kind of support have you gotten from the environment around you to strike out on your own as student entrepreneurs? I mean, what about your families? I mean, I’m sure somebody like make sure your grades are still good. I don’t care about this company thing.
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah, that’s, they were definitely skeptical. Both Sai’s parents were definitely skeptical at the start of the medtech startup. But after we started to raise funding and we got some, you know, national attention, they definitely started to get more on board. And we definitely had some, you know, interesting moments along the years of like falling asleep in class or having to, you know, like, miss random days of school to go meet with investors. And that’s been interesting to like explain to teachers. But overall, I think the support has been really fantastic and Sai and I are really lucky to go to a science and technology school and be surrounded by a bunch of, you know, other really, really smart kids who we can talk to about this. So it’s been pretty great so far, I would say.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I mean, you’re going to Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Fairfax County. I mean, do they actually have, say, an entrepreneurship club? I mean, is this the kind of place where students are encouraged to do original research and innovation or even start companies?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah, I mean, we do have an entrepreneurship club. I’m not sure how much entrepreneurship that they actually do. Like neither Sai or I are a part of that club, but there’s definitely a big push at TJ towards the research side of things. TJ actually has research labs and it’s mandatory in your senior year to do a research project. So there’s definitely a big push towards research at TJ, but I wouldn’t say that there’s a big push towards building companies.
Harry Glorikian: Okay, So if I read your LinkedIn profile correctly, you both participated in the Y Combinator Startup School, right? Which is a seven-week online program for new entrepreneurs. What was that like? And, you know, did you benefit from that in, you know, the Y Combinator way?
Rohan Kalahasty: Definitely. I mean, I would say that that was like the first place that Sai and I actually like learned about what a medtech startup actually looked like and were able to build an intuition about, you know, how the whole medtech startup space looked like. It was really just I don’t I don’t even remember. It definitely took a long time to do over the summer. We both did it last summer, but it was definitely worth it and we both learned a lot.
Harry Glorikian: All right. So what’s the career look like long term for both of you? I mean, Sai’s not here, so maybe you can speak for him. But do you think you’ll both head off to college after high school? Would it make more sense to take a gap year or maybe even a few years to focus on building the company? You know, where are you guys? What’s next?
Rohan Kalahasty: Yeah. So we’re planning on applying to college this year and we hope to go to a school with a large focus on entrepreneurship like Stanford or Harvard or MIT. You know, all schools that have a huge amount of startups and medtech startups coming out, you know, out of them. But, you know, if we do get into one of those schools, we would probably take a gap year to focus on Vytal and see where it ends up, you know, after that year.
Harry Glorikian: So what do you want to major in then?
Rohan Kalahasty: I guess I’m still kind of debating it. I think I’m going to try to major in computer science because although I love the medical field, I’m really open to building startups in any field. So I think, you know, computer science is the basic, you know, information that I can use to sort of, you know, build a startup in any field, right? So I think that’s why I’m planning to go down the computer science route. But I think, like the reason why I still want to go to college is not exactly for the knowledge. It’s more about, you know, meeting all the really insanely smart people at the school that I attend and having a whole new set of people to talk to, right? Because I feel like one of the, you know, probably one of the core reasons why Vytal has been successful so far is that my team, because my team is all like they’re all insanely smart kids and really just being around them and having them as my friends has been one of the reasons why Vytal has been, you know, able to get to the point that it’s at, right? So if I can be in an environment where I can sort of recreate that, that would be great. And that’s why I want to go to college. But yeah.
Harry Glorikian: Yeah, well, being around insanely smart people is always a good thing, right? If you’re not learning from the people that are around you, that’s problematic. But so what’s the exit for Vytal? What’s the best-case scenario? And do you want to keep working on it and bring out other types of tests and branch into other types of conditions? Or is it. You know, get this to the right place, sell the company andr the intellectual property to a larger diagnostic software or medical device company.
Rohan Kalahasty: So Sai and I’s goal is to have Vytal’s product have as big of an impact as possible. And to be honest, I think that that kind of leads us down the second route, right? Because Sai and I are still high schoolers. We still don’t have an insanely strong network within the medtech startup space, right? We’re still building it. So if another company is willing to buy us out and still push the product out into the market using their resources, that’s where we feel that Vytal’s product can have the biggest sort of impact. And that’s why sort of our, you know, you know, best case scenario play is to sell Vytal to the right company and kind of move on to another medtech startup.
Harry Glorikian: What’s been the hardest thing about being a medtech entrepreneur?
Rohan Kalahasty: I think the hardest thing about being a medtech entrepreneur has been kind of learning all the different regulations that we have in the medical space. Both Sai and I already had some experience with the medical field from those internships that we did in the past, but nothing in the tech space. It’s very, very different than building in like fintech for example. Right? There’s way more regulations that we have to worry about at almost every step of the way. And it’s definitely been a ride like learning about all those specific things and learning how to deal with them.
Harry Glorikian: No, I was just going to say that’s why there’s a difference between health and wellness and. You know, hardcore. Like we’re going to diagnose you, right, of something important. So what’s been the most surprising thing?
Rohan Kalahasty: That’s kind of hard. I think probably the most surprising thing, at least like, in my opinion, the thing that made me the most happy was speaking with all those different beta testers. You know, we did one on one calls with almost every single beta tester like either Sai or I, and it’s been pretty great, you know, learning about people and having people actually, you know, put their trust within us to build something great. And I think that’s been something that’s been not only surprising, but really cool to see.
Harry Glorikian: So I guess last question, but what advice would you give to, say, other high school students that are considering starting their own companies? Don’t do it?
Rohan Kalahasty: No, I would say start early. I mean, entrepreneurship is a field where the most important thing is truly your network. Right? And that’s something that I didn’t really understand when we first created the medtech startup. And it was really only when we realized how to properly, you know, reach out to people and make new friendships in the space that Vytal has been gaining success. Right? But the earlier you start, the earlier you can build that intuition and the earlier you can build your network, right? So I think the best thing to do is start early. But yeah.
Harry Glorikian: Well, I’m sorry that, you know, Sai dropped off, but, I mean, it was great to talk to you and get insight into what you guys are doing. You know, hell. When did I do my first? Well, I guess I did. I was deejaying when I was a kid, so maybe that’s entrepreneurship. But nothing like this. I didn’t do anything like that until I was in my mid to late 20s, I think. So I wish you guys incredible success. And, you know, it’d be it’d be, you know, keep me up to date as things are going.
Rohan Kalahasty: Sounds good. Thank you.
Harry Glorikian: That’s it for this week’s episode.
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