This case, what you’re treating, we do recommend, you know, different packages and we will say, okay, for this patient, think about including, you know, an extra refinement because this is a more complex case. So it’s totally, totally customised. And the idea is that you’re not overpaying ever for something that you don’t need or something that you don’t want. And also so that people who come in with different preferences have those needs met.

This is Dental Leaders, the podcast where you get to go one on one with emerging leaders in dentistry. Your hosts, Payman, Langroudi and Prav Solanki.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Sonja Shimotsuki onto the podcast. Sonia is an Oxford graduated doctor who didn’t really work as a doctor that long and then joined Boston Consulting Group in their start up business sort of area as a consultant and is now the founder of 32 Co, which is an innovative sort of disruptor in the eyeliner space. Lovely to have you, Sonia.

Lovely to be here, Payman Thank you for having me.

We’re actually at Sonia’s offices right now. Sonia You know, let’s start with one simple question. Do you now regret studying medicine? Should have studied dentistry.

It’s a good question. No, I’m not someone who regrets things. I take everything as a learning opportunity. I had a fantastic time studying medicine, being a doctor. I was a doctor for four years. I got a chance to work in some amazing places, have some amazing experiences, meet great people, and fundamentally learn a lot about health care, which has helped where we are now in terms of this business. But I think I wasn’t so much aware of dentistry as a profession when I was choosing my, my, my degree. And I think had I known a bit more about it, I would have been very tempted. I think I went down a route of exploring the Max Facts conversion and published some papers in Max Facts, but decided that the additional four years at the time was probably too much to convert. So don’t regret any of medicine. Loved it as a as a discipline and as a science. My degree was very academic and I really enjoyed that. But I think wanting to do something more entrepreneurial meant that I had to go and find a slightly different route after I’d done done my time.

But what was it what was it about you that made you want to do that? Rather than taking the traditional path of either becoming a GP or a surgeon or whatever?

Yeah, I when I while I was at medical school, I was running a different business. I ran an education business tutoring business, which I really enjoyed. I got got the bug. I think building something yourself, watching it grow, making a lot of mistakes, making some good decisions and ultimately building a business that that did did okay while I was while I was studying and then latterly into being a doctor. So I think what was important for me is the freedom to be able to make decisions about where my life was going. And although medicine is very varied, you can become, like you say, a GP, you can choose the surgical path, you can become a medic. The route that I was initially going down, which was to become an eye surgeon, an ophthalmologist, felt more and more and more restricted the more I got into it. So for those who don’t know, when you when you study ophthalmology, you go through a series of of exams and then you subspecialize in ophthalmology. So you’re not just looking at the eye, which is already a small part of the body. Now you’re looking at a specific area of the eye, maybe the cornea. And that that started to feel really quite restrictive for me. And I wanted to do something where I could spread my wings, build something, innovate, be creative. So that’s I think, why.

At the time when you were thinking of giving up medicine, were you getting advice from, I don’t know, parents or people saying, you know, why would you?

Yeah, yeah, a lot of that. What were.

You thinking? You said were you thinking had you made your mind up?

Yeah, I think I had. I think the interesting thing where I where I where I studied, I was surrounded by a lot of non medics as well. So I was able to see what they were doing in their careers and people going down really interesting different routes to what I was doing. And so I had exposure to people going into the city, you know. Building businesses, going into law firms, going into investment banks. And so I knew. What else was out there. When I started to think about leaving, I think, you know, parents always want you to they want you to succeed and be happy. But being a doctor is kind of kind of cool. So I think that’s difficult. And there is an element of what a waste. I don’t see it like that. I think it’s helped build me into where I am today and what I am today. But, you know, that kind of sense of loss that, you know, we’ve lost a doctor. I think the fact that I then went into into BCG and did a lot of health care consulting, so going back into hospitals with a completely different hat on and saying now trying to improve the hospital systems, trying to improve theatre efficiency, trying to improve access to certain services with a completely different mindset, meant that that, you know, that knowledge was still being put to use.

And to be honest, I had a lot of medic friends who had also left and who were not necessarily encouraging. I think, you know, I think BCG, for example, it’s tough. It’s really hard work. So it was more be mindful of what you’re getting yourself into. The grass isn’t always greener. This is how it’s different and this is how it’s better and this is how it’s worse and make up your own mind. But if you want help, we will help you get in. So I had a lot of help leaving medicine because although I think the assumption when you’re a medic is that you can do lots of things and you’re very academic and you’re all very clever, I didn’t find that to be the case when I left and went into the real world and had to do things like build models on Excel and, you know, present and and all of those things that you don’t get taught as a medic. So there was a lot of learning to do there and it was quite humbling for a while going from thinking that I mean, thinking that the world kind of owes you something because you’re a doctor to being right at the bottom and having to learn things from scratch. I think that was a really good experience.

And I guess, you know, you grew up in the Netherlands. Yeah. And for someone to get into Oxford in the first place, you would probably top of your class and that sort of thing. And then you’ve gone through medicine in Oxford and now it’s the first time really, where you feel at a disadvantage compared to your peers.

Yeah, it’s funny when I so yeah, to all of the above. I was very academic. I loved school, I was good at a lot of things at school. And so it made it very easy for me. I decided to go to Oxford, you know, I did well there. And then when I got when I when I got to my first day at BCG, I always tell this story because I think it’s really important. They they said, look, everyone here has always been top of their class at everything. You think that you’re going to be amazing at this. Let me tell you now, you’re going to be rubbish at this job for the first six months. And then they said, And now what you’re thinking is, Ah, I am never the person that’s rubbish at anything. I’m going to nail this, but you’re not. So get comfortable with that. It’s going to be a steep learning curve, but you’re going to figure it out because we’re going to help you. And they did. It was fantastic company to work at. So yeah, it was it was humbling, but but also very empowering to be on that learning curve and actually get, you know, acquire a whole new set of skills very quickly.

And a consultant’s life is as hard as a junior doctor’s life in many ways. Yeah. Constantly on a plane and you’re constantly going around the place, what would you say? You know, there’s loads of dentists these days who want to stop. Is your advice? You know, caution.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think there’s an element in medicine, dentistry. There’s an element of you think that’s all you know and that’s who you are. Yeah. People tell you your skills are transferable, but deep down you know that they might not be. So. I don’t know if it was a younger sister or something who was a dentist and said, Oh, I hate all of this. I want to do something else. Would you say go for it or would you not say go for it?

I always. I do. I do get asked a lot, you know.

You must. Yeah.

You know, how did you get out and what would you advise? And I always take the calls because I was on that. I was on the other end of that when I was leaving. And there were some very kind people randomly giving me lots of advice. So so I spend a lot of time listening to them and figuring out whether whether they really how much they know about leaving. Some people come with a very clear set of goals. You know, I’d like to get into consulting. I’ve done X, Y, and Z, What do I do now? And some people just say, look, I just don’t know what to do and but I don’t think I’m happy. And my first advice is the grass isn’t always greener. Being a doctor is a fantastic career. I think it can be really challenging for for a lot of reasons. And so is being a dentist. So what is it that you’re trying to optimise for? Because from a from a work life balance perspective, when you factor in pay, dentists do well, I would say from an early age.

Yeah, they do well early. Yeah.

So that makes it difficult. It’s kind of a golden cage in a lot of ways. Medics are paid less well, easier for them. You know, there’s a lot of shinier opportunities for medics. But, you know, working in an office 9 to 5 or, you know, 9 to 9 to midnight, as it was often at BCG, you know, it’s not right for everybody. You know, if you’re used to getting up, being around people and patients using your hands, then you might find it quite stifling and quite. Uninspiring. You know, it just depends what you’re trying to optimise for. If you if it’s just money, there’s plenty of ways that you can make lots of money in dentistry. So it’s trying to start almost again in a different career. Doesn’t sound like the most sensible thing in the world.

So I think with dentists, it’s really money that’s the problem, isn’t it? I think the current situation with the lawsuits and GDC is putting a lot of people off. But okay, so what is what is it like entering consulting from the beginning? Do they train you really intensively for the first six months? Yeah. What is that training?

I think to some extent you’re thrown in the deep end and it’s, you know, you’re carefully selected for your problem solving abilities. So the interviews are very much about problem solving, quick mental maths, you know, being able to reason through problems. And so when you get there, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing is I don’t really know how to build a model. Okay, well, we’ll provide a little bit of training. Here’s a mentor who can help you, but you kind of got to go and build it yourself because that is the only way that you’re going to learn. So the way that they did it when I joined was because BCG is quite diverse in terms of the industries that it works in. I mean, it works with every industry, health care being one of them. I had said, I want to work in anything but healthcare because that’s what I’m trying to leave and, you know, explore the world of work in different ways. But they said, start your first project in healthcare. It’s an area that you’re familiar with and you will learn your trade, your skills, where you’re comfortable, and then you can go and progress on to different things. So I think I spent three months doing some work for a trust with a with a team. I think it was looking at referral pathways and trying to trying to optimise those and reduce waiting times, you know, relatively NHS trust. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, some of the places that I worked before, so I kind of, I kind of knew them.

So yeah, and that does involve, you know, Monday to Thursday you’re on a, you’re travelling normally, so you’re in a hotel somewhere and then you come back to the office on Friday, you know, during those times. I think the big difference is that, you know, you’re not if someone phoned, if if work needs to be done on a Saturday, you’re coming in on a Saturday, you know, your phone doesn’t turn off. You know, that’s one of the things that I explain when I say, look, here are the trade offs. You know, when you leave hospital, having done your shift, you know that there is another junior doctor looking after your patients. You’re not going to get phoned as a junior doctor, different if you’re a consultant. But so there’s no off time. You know, you’re expected to do the work and it’s project based, so you know, you’re going hell for leather until the end of the project and then you stop and then you go on to a different project, which might be something totally different in a different country, in a different industry with a different team, which is also what made it fun. But it’s quite relentless. So it’s, you know, it’s the kind of industry where you have lots of people that start and then as you get more senior, you know, fewer and fewer people stay for different reasons for some people.

So did you go into it knowing you were going to leave it and do a start up, or were you thinking at the time that you’re going to go up the whole consulting partnership?

Yeah, I think I, I wanted to keep my options open. I was very open to really enjoying that life. And I think I think I would have enjoyed it. But I also got to a point where. And again this a partner sat me down once at BCG and said, look, you know, you’re getting to the point now where you really, really understand what this job is about. You kind of get it now. Now you have to decide whether you want to to keep going or whether you want to go and do something else and be really honest with yourself about that. What are your strengths and weaknesses and where do you want to where do you want to go? And I think at that point it was quite obvious to me that this is what I wanted to do. Having said that, I had a nice transition because while I was there, I moved into a different, completely different part of the company, which was the start up arm. So it was a different group. It’s called Digital Ventures. And they basically we build start ups for corporate clients. Oh, so while I was there, I, I was building what is now the world’s leading app for patients with haemophilia, which we spent a year doing that built up the team. It’s now a flourishing company in Germany that’s doing great things. And so I essentially got to go straight into the start ups through through the BCG route, which was fantastic for me.

And but it’s not start up in the same way as you’re now, you know, having to raise finance and there was a big company behind it.

Yeah. So the finance was in place already because it was someone paying for it. It was, it was the kind of the next bit, which is, okay, now build the company, build the product, hire the team. I guess that.

Gave you confidence.

Big, big comfort, blanket. Of course, you know, you don’t there’s no risk there for you as an individual, which is a completely different, completely different ball game to when you’re doing it. You know, you’re out by yourself. Just got to figure it out. You know, build this thing, get some people to buy some stuff, you know, It’s very different. Yeah.

So now, now, now 32 Co which a couple of years ago was 32 stories. Yeah. First incarnation. The first.

Incarnation. Yeah.

And I guess you pivoted the if you explain let’s start with I was on your site today and the first thing it said was something about the broken aligner industry. Yeah. So what’s your analysis of the aligner industry that that would, you’d characterise it as broken. What, what what are the bits of it that. Yeah.

I think specifically it’s broken for the dentist. So when we look at the aligner industry and where it came from, it’s it’s, it’s been around for over 25 years. You know, it was invented by two students who again went and raised a lot of VC money and turned it into what is now Invisalign. You know, it’s thriving business. They they IPO’d quite soon afterwards. And essentially they’ve led the charge because they owned the they held the patents for so long. So they built the technology and nobody else could really build this, which meant that they really controlled the industry, they controlled the costs, the margins, and and they built a very successful company off the back of that. As soon as the patents expired, anyone was able to make an aligner. And that is what we’ve seen. And people have adopted different models from going directly to patients and cutting out the clinician altogether to doing what I would kind of class as Invisalign copycats because it’s basically doing the same thing with a bit of different branding. But in all of this, I think the what has been lost, I think in the commercialisation of this device is the real clinical expertise that’s required to do a good job for your patients. And what I mean by that is that the direct to consumer model cuts out the clinical expertise altogether, forgets about it, says it doesn’t matter. You know, if some of these patients are unhappy, they’ll sue us.

But we’ve got waivers. So they won’t get very far. And that’s that side of the market, which I think, you know, if you look at Smiledirectclub shares share price, it kind of tells the story of what’s going to happen to that side. And then on the other side, I think what we’ve seen is that there’s been an increasing kind of trivialisation of the process. So make it easier and easier and easier and easier. Don’t think about it too much and kind of hope for the best. And when we speak to dentists, we increasingly hear. Look, I would like to provide this sort of treatment, but I don’t necessarily feel like I have access to the expertise, the training or the support to do a really fantastic job at this. Every time I’m aware that this is a specialist treatment, moving teeth is a specialist discipline. I’m sort of being lured into a sense of a false sense of security by just the ease at which I can sort of go on a one day course, get an account within two minutes. I’ve got a sort of cartoon and I can press go. But when I started doing it, I realised that I was running into problems. I didn’t really know how to plan treatment. I wasn’t really sure how to assess complexity. I got to the end of treatment and refinement after refinement, after refinement.

What I thought was going to be a profitable treatment ended up not being so I wasted so much time and the sort of high refinement rates have become normalised in a part of treatment. It’s just what people expect. So I think it’s broken in the sense that people have forgotten to take it seriously and have and have been sort of fed this line that don’t worry about it too much. Everyone’s doing it. Just kind of, you know, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. And what we’re seeing from yeah, to your point, the indemnifies and and younger dentists coming out is actually, I don’t want to do that. I would like to do this properly, but I don’t have any way of doing that. I can go on a on a on a course that let’s forget about the sort of one day courses because I think everyone kind of accepts that there’s not much you can learn on a one day course that you will retain. But let’s say you go on a year long course. It’s expensive, it requires travel. It’s not that accessible to people. So obtaining the knowledge and having, you know, real time help from someone who knows what they’re doing is is lacking because that’s really what dentists are asking for. And that’s what we’ve tried to do to kind of fix this, this broken system, we think, for dentists.

So that’s one side. Yeah. And the other side is like a marketplace. Yeah. For the device itself. Yeah. Explain. Just take, take, take me through that. So the one side is an orthodontist helps the dentist through the process of treatment planning. Yeah. Now we know what we’re going to do. You then tender it out to different labs. Yeah.

Yeah. So the other thing that’s broken is the sort of vendor tie in. So dentists will be tied into a specific brand and we’ll literally feel tied in because they might have got a scanner and sort of have to pay that debt off with cases or they might be trying to get to the next level of a of a discount, which it can feel. I mean, it’s a bit mad really in some ways that you as a clinician are really being told what to do by a company in terms of where to buy things and what price you’re going to get. And you know, they say jump and you say how high? That’s what it feels like to a lot of people. And and it doesn’t need to be that way because, as I said, the device has come off patent. There are global manufacturers all over the world making really high quality aligners often for the big brands. But but, you know, whacking a different label on and using the same 3D printers and the same materials. So for us, it makes no sense that a dentist is being tied into increasing prices when this is a commodity device. Once you’ve got your treatment plan, you can get it manufactured by any manufacturer that’s of a certain quality and your patient will get great results provided that that treatment plan is is has been well planned, reliable and safe.

So what we want to see is increased democratisation in the market whereby dentists can choose they are the masters of their own destiny, as it were. They can they can choose from different manufacturers and make purchasing decisions based on their preferences, price, shipping, speed, you know, the things that are important to them that those manufacturers are very keen to offer and essentially cut out the middleman and get kind of a wholesale kind of deal. And the nice thing about having a manufacturer and marketplace like this is that because we are pooling all of our dentists orders, we are basically giving them mass buying power and mass purchasing power, which gives them huge negotiating leverage in terms of price, which as an individual dentist, you would obviously never have. So rather than having to sort of fight for, you know, getting up the discount rung the day you join, you’re part of such a big group of people that you’re getting the top discount from from day one. And that’s what we’re trying to do is get the prices to be more reasonable for dentists.

Understand that. But but let’s say someone one of your users. Yeah. Does loads and loads of treatments. Does he not get a further discount from someone who does 1 or 2 a month?

No, actually I think that’s quite important for us is we we want to treat dentists fairly and the same.

I’m fair. Is it? I mean, if the guy is doing so many in every other.

But how.

You would get your own volume discount by doing so many.

But you would never get the volume discount that you would get if you if you pooled everybody’s together. So it’s a group buying thing. And I think dentists are often. When pitted against each other. To be honest, I think there is a lot of competitiveness and I think if you can work together as a group, everybody is better off because there are people who are missing out on the clearer line a game, as it were, because they feel isolated. They’re not supported, priced out as they’re priced out because the guy next door has got a bigger discount. So you’re not giving those people a chance to access this market. And if we really think about it, you know, coming coming at it from, you know, what are we actually trying to achieve? We’re trying to increase access for patients as well. So for us, if every dentist can do a line of work, whether they choose to do 50% of their work in Aligners or, you know, a couple of cases, you know, a month or a year, we want to treat those people the same and give them the same level of support and encouragement. If they want to do more, then great. But if they don’t, I don’t think that they should be penalised for that.

Okay. A couple of other things then. So let’s imagine this scenario. That patient comes in asking for Invisalign. Classically, the dentist explains to the patient that it’s not about the system, it’s about the treatment plan. Yeah. Is that how you train them? Yeah. Patient says okay, you know best doc when they received their product is any aspect of that branded 32 Co or the dentist brand or is it just generic sort of it can be.

It can be a mixture. So for for we try and keep it relatively neutral to try and communicate that this is a high quality device that doesn’t have all of the extra branding on top of it. We can and do brand for dentists if that’s important to them. Some practices have a strong brand, others don’t. So that is something that we do for for the for the groups that we work with. So and again, you know, this comes back to what we’re trying to do is to to empower the dentist. If you promote a brand of aligner in your practice and you spend money on that AdWords, you know, cost money, those are expensive AdWords keywords. And a patient comes in and has a fantastic treatment with you and then says to their friend, Oh, wonderful treatment, what did you have? Oh, I had this system, this brand. Where is the patient going to go? Are they going to come back to you, the dentist who provided the treatment, or are they going to go and Google it on the Internet and find any local provider we’re trying to do is make sure that patients come back to you. So if you can have your own branded aligner now suddenly we’re talking about Payman Airlines. I had a wonderful experience with with, you know, Dr. Langroudi, who was fantastic. You know, you should go and see him rather than go on to the website of of a system and find any old provider, any old, you know, not you. So that’s another thing that we’re trying to do is promote the dentist over and above ourselves.

Yeah, I think the stronger the brand is, the more likely that problem is that people will go shopping around. Yeah, exactly. The brand. Exactly. That is a problem. Yeah. Yeah. Even we see it in bleaching. It does happen. Yeah. So. All right. The. Patient comes comes to that same dentist says Invisalign. Dentist talks to them, says this is a better way of doing it. The product comes if he wants with his brand on it. The difference when you’re when you’re tendering out to the different labs, how do you explain to the dentist which lab is better or worse or quicker or cheaper, or does it get a choice? Yeah, they get a choice. Here’s a lab in China that’s a bit cheaper and slower. Yeah. Here’s a lab in Germany that’s quicker and more expensive.

Yeah, there’s all sorts of things.

Those are the only two moving parts. The cost and the time. Or is it.

Materials, Plastics. Plastics as well. So the way that we’ve we’ve done so we’ve worked with probably, you know, 30 of the biggest global manufacturers and I say use that word quite deliberately. It’s the manufacturer, not the brand, because one manufacturer can carry hundreds of brands and they do. And what we have done is basically created them in terms of level of service and the quality of their product. So anyone who’s on the platform has been vetted to be of a high standard in terms of those two factors. That means that we give dentists essentially the freedom to confidently pick any one of these because all of them are going to do a great job. But I might have a preference, for example, in terms of material, we list the material and other brands that use that material. If that’s if you have a preference, if you think I really like the way that that plastic feels my patients do, then I’m going to go for that one. But what we tend to see happening is that manufacturers will run deals. Obviously they want to get the attention of these dentists. So, you know, you might get a deal on for two weeks on a specific plastic from a specific manufacturer. And that’s what we want. You know, we want dentists to be getting better and better deals on their on their materials.

The other thing that we give them choice on is the finish. So we have people who say really like the sort of wavy scalloped edge. I think it looks nice, but the evidence suggests that perhaps a straight edge gives you slightly higher retentive forces. So every patient you should be able to customise your treatment depending on what the patient wants. If the patient wants a nice maybe they’ve got sort of bulbous gums and you know, it might chafe a bit. You go for a scalloped edge, whereas if you’ve got a more complex case where maybe you’re using elastics, maybe you want to use a straight edge. So all of these factors are there things that dentists don’t get taught about. So part of our training and what we do in product as well is to sort of explain, you know, here are the differences based on this case what you’re treating. We do recommend, you know, different packages and we will say, okay, for this patient, think about including an extra refinement because this is a more complex case. So it’s totally, totally customised. And the idea is that you’re not overpaying ever for something that you don’t need or something that you don’t want. And also so that people who come in with different preferences have those needs met.

And the orthodontists. I mean, I think some people would dispute whether just being an orthodontist is enough. Yeah, they need to be orthodontists who have got a special interest in the line. Yes. Yes. How are you picking them? Have you got, like one chief? One who tells you about.

Yeah. So our clinical lead is is Professor AMA Joel, who many, many of your listeners will know. And yeah, you’re right. Having just being a specialist orthodontist isn’t necessarily sufficient to be to be both clear aligner experience and also a good teacher. Those are the two things that we screen for. So when new orthodontists apply to work with us, we, we schedule interviews. We we look at their their interests and the cases that they’ve done. We have a community of orthodontists, so they meet each other and basically we’re we’re making sure that that they’re meeting. I suppose the the minimum standard in terms of service that they can provide because it is a service at the end of the day. I mean, they’re helping and they’re mentoring, but the dentist needs to be needs to feel reassured by the advice and the mentorship that they’re being given. So there is a lot of training, there’s a lot of support as well between specialists. So if a really tricky case comes in, it’s not uncommon at all for us to talk about it, you know, with multiple authors and say, how would you how would you do this if you’ve ever seen this before? And they obviously really enjoy that as well because they haven’t seen everything either. And sometimes getting it through the lens of a of a dentist actually really makes people think about, well, how do I how do I explain this? Because an author might see the nuances of this case and understand why this is complex. But if if you’re a dentist and you haven’t had orthodontic training, you might miss certain parts of the occlusion that might make it a more tricky, a tricky case. So actually coming taking a step back and saying, well, how would I explain this? What actually is going on here is a good learning experience for the specialist as well.

What do you say to someone who might say to you, look, a company like align. Has got more expertise than any other supplier. Yeah. And are you saying it is. It’s purely a commodity? There’s no there’s nothing about an Invisalign experience that’s better. Or maybe this is a bit unfair. Make the case for Invisalign.

No, I think it’s a fair point. So I think what they’ve done really well, as I said, is really simplify the process. So I think now it’s clear that when your plan is submitted, it’s it’s, you know, sort of an automated simulation comes back. A technician based somewhere who’s not a dentist, not clinically trained, is interpreting your instructions and is designing the tooth movement. That makes it very easy. And it means that you’re very quickly getting something that you can put in front of your patient and you can sell. And ultimately dentists want to sell. So that’s what they’ve been very good at, stripping back any of the technical complexity and almost saying, Look, don’t worry too much about it. I think there is some. There is some. I suppose there’s a misconception that there’s lots of AI in the background that’s doing this. When you look at the regulations and the software that’s being used to plan treatments, the the license, because the FDA, you know, is the the American body that approves these sorts of softwares because these softwares are medical devices. It’s on condition that it’s operated by a licensed dental professional who understands orthodontics. So, you know, the idea that this is all done by AI, I mean, the the regulation is predicated on the fact that it has to be done by a dentist, which suggests that the AI itself can’t do the treatment planning. It’s not allowed to do that because it’s not it’s not in a position. To plan treatment yet? Not by itself.

Yeah, it needs. It needs human input. So. So that’s, I think what they’ve what they’ve done. Well, I think what we’re saying is let’s amplify the clinicians input. Let’s, let’s recognise how important it is and let’s make sure that people are trained to do it well and let’s try and do that in a way that makes it as easy as you would get with Invisalign. But with that added expertise being thrown in, thrown on top, so you still get a plan back. It’s still a you know, you still get a lovely simulation, but on top of that, you get the advice of an expert who’s done many, many cases before, explaining to you not just what they’ve done, more importantly, what they haven’t done. So when you think about when you’re consenting a patient, what do you have to do? You have to tell them what are the risks and also what are we not going to address. And Invisalign can’t do that for you, right? It can’t help you understand what’s going on. All it can do is give you a simulation on that moves the teeth into alignment. And if that’s what you want, because it’s a simple patient, you want to think about it too much, then that’s great. Genuinely, I think that’s great. But if you’re trying to understand what’s going on, that’s not enough. And I think that’s where that’s where we’re enabling a far greater population of dentists to take this on.

Then you can always get an orthodontist to plan your Invisalign Spark whatever case. And that exists, right? I mean, there’s lots of dentists do that. Yeah. They get a really super, super experienced, you know, specialist to look at any of their cases that they’re worried, worried about and to make the treatment plan. Yeah. So does that is that competition to you then is it must be right?

I don’t think so. Not in the same way because the the challenge with that is, is workflow. How do you get it to that specialist? You know, you have to give them a login to your this is what we hear from dentists and specialists who do this. It’s a pain. So I have to remember the login for this person, do it for them. How am I communicating with them? By phoning them, you know, how am I giving them feedback on this? If they’re paying me, how are they paying me? It’s a really clunky process. And I mean, the big thing is that you’re paying in addition to your lab bill, whereas with us it’s baked in, so it’s not an extra service. It’s part of the workflow, it’s part of the experience, it’s seamless. So I think what we’ve done is, is go one better and just make it all easier. Actually, interestingly, the the specialists that we speak to who try and go down that route, they find it most annoying because they’re busy people. Right? If you’re not going to make it really, really, really easy for them to do this, which is what we do, then it’s just a headache for them. And they’ll do they’ll do a couple here and there for friends, people who they feel that they really want to help. But everybody else, you know, if you don’t know and also you’re you’re a bit unlucky.

So as most of your time spent not your the company’s time spent making the platform frictionless. And I don’t know it’s probably a stupid example, but my my parents live in Spain. I tend to just go to Easyjet. Yeah, I’m sure there’s cheaper or whatever. Better. Yeah. But like, I just like the website. It’s just I just feel like I can get my ticket quicker. Is that, is that front and centre in your mind that you want the experience for the, for both sides, I guess both the dentists and the specialists to be pleasant and frictionless. Yeah. And so in, in many ways you’re definitely not a device company are you. You’re not making any devices. You’re, you’re an education company. Yeah. And I guess a tech company is a tech company.

Yeah. Yeah. So most so, you know, we’re a team of over 40 people now and half of that is tech and product. So it takes a lot to build this sort of infrastructure and it takes a long time and it takes a real knowledge and understanding of building products. So our our product lead, Dan, has got a lot of experience building digital platforms in healthcare. And his his role really is to scrutinise to the nth degree every user’s experience and to try and optimise it. And that’s a real art and a science at the same time. Some, some some listeners may have been in contact with Dan because he does a lot of user research to really understand, Well, what do you want to happen right now? What would be the ideal flow for you? And the nice thing about being a Start-Up is that our earlier users will see all of their feedback being built in continuously. And again, because we can move fast, it happens really, really quickly. So we’re about to release some new features that are that are based directly on feedback that we’ve had over the last two months about things that that people thought were a bit bit clunky. You know, they wanted it to be slicker there or. More information here or this easier to find. And we’ve built all of that in two months. So it is it takes a long time to get this right. And I think the most important thing is that you never rest on your laurels. You’ve never got it right. You’ve never built the perfect product. You have to keep going, keep going until every single customer is delighted with what you’ve built.

Well, you’re never going to delight all customers. My my experience has been a lot of times you delight one customer and annoy another one. And at the same time, yeah. So and it’s really difficult. You look you’ve chosen to go in health care software, I guess, right? That’s where you’re at. Yeah. You could have you could have gone into software as a service, something else. Like why did you come back to health care after after shunning it at the beginning? Did you did you not think you were just going to do like a Silicon Valley type? Start-up In some sort of enterprise software.

Yeah, that’s a good question.

Because it is slightly complicated what you’ve chosen to do. Yeah. Firstly, we’ve got the, the biggest company in dentistry. Yeah. And I guess that’s why you’re going after them, right? And all the other competitors are too. Yeah. But you’ve got the dentists quite slow to change. Yeah. You know, we were having this chat before, um, and you know, if they’re making it work for themselves, it’s quite a difficult to get someone to change something they’re doing happily. It’s quite hard. Yeah. So did you did you not think of doing something more traditionally, You know, tech.

Tech? Yeah. So I think a couple of things. Firstly. You can’t build something that you don’t care about. I think genuinely and I you know, when when I came into this problem, it was never so much about dentists or clear aligners and it still really isn’t. We are a tech company that’s helping clinicians. That was that’s always been the core. And how do you help clinicians? You give clinicians access to expertise, you know, expertise that they can’t get anywhere else. When I was in working in in A&E, in in one of the biggest trauma centres in Europe, you know, it wasn’t until I left that I really understood that when I was walking around that A&E on a shift, I could just turn round and tap on the shoulder of any of the consultants, you know, leading, leading pre-hospital doctors and, you know, neurosurgeons and vascular surgeons and just ask them something. When when I then sort of took a step back and looked at primary care GP land and and dentists, it was very clear that none of that existed. No access to help. It’s very siloed. It can be very lonely and it can be and that can that can be very scary for people. So the vision for me was always, how do you empower clinicians? How do you connect them? How do you make information from experts flow to people on the front line who have patients who want treatment, and especially more specialised treatment, more innovative treatment, newer treatment that they didn’t have a chance to learn at school because innovation is happening at such a rate in healthcare.

So to come back to your question, why this? I saw both innovation in healthcare happening at breakneck speed, and then I also saw or realised that had I been still been a doctor, I would never have been able to get my hands on any of these new devices or these new tools or these new drugs or these new protocols, because how would I have known what to do? I would have been a GP. I would have never had access to that. So it would have taken another generation to get this into the hands of clinicians. So that was always the vision of the company is accelerating that process to get general clinicians up the curve more quickly by giving them access to expertise. And what better way than having a world expert in whatever you’re working on literally at the other end of a platform in a way that’s convenient for you and easy. So yes, we’re in the clear aligner space, but we don’t really see ourselves as just a clear aligner company. We think of ourselves as a as a technology company that’s helping clinicians. And it just so happens that we’re looking at clear aligners because there is a big gap between just the sheer volume of patients that want this treatment and the number of clinicians that are that are currently providing it.

And if patients are resorting to kind of at home treatments that are delivered online with an impression kit, we’ve got a problem, right? Because they should be able to go to their local dentist no matter how complex, and find an answer, even if it’s look, you’re way too complex for for a dentist to treat. With aligners, we’re going to refer you to a specialist. The vast majority of patients don’t fall into that category. And if enough dentists are saying, look, I don’t do this, where are these patients going to go? You know, everyone has a specialist orthodontist that they can just, you know, go and visit in a heartbeat. And everyone lives in central London, you know, the rest of it. So now to your other point, why not build a SaaS company? You know, I have a lot of, you know, friends and other founders and CEOs doing really interesting, different things. And I think the the the learning, I think, for me is that it’s never easy. No industry is easy if you’re trying to sell productivity tools. Into companies. I mean, good luck with that at the moment. If you’re trying to sell fintech tools or accounting tools into accountants, just too slow moving as dentists or lawyers, so it is never easy. The point of building a Start-Up is to really break things, shake things up, find holes, find problems, which is never plain, is never plain sailing.

And look, I’m interested. I’ve been in this market for 22 years and you came and asked me some questions, but I’m quite interested in fresh eyes on on this market. What’s your sense of dentistry as a market? And the difference between that and medicine and GPS.

And yeah, I think dentists are much more commercial. Also, part of the reason why we started in clear aligners, so that gives them a lot more freedom to manoeuvre and ability to make purchasing decisions which as a supplier helps. I think. It, it feels like. It is driven by. To some extent, themes and tropes that are prevalent on social media. Because that’s what people see. I think it’s a it’s a community of people that really want to be connected and go to a few different sources to find that connection. And, you know, I think there’s a there’s a desire to to be around other people a lot more. I don’t see, for example, in medicine anywhere near the kind of meetups and dinners and parties that you that you see in dentistry courses that people it just doesn’t really happen. It’s, you know, medicine is a lot more fragmented than than dentistry. So I think it’s a great place to be if you’re a young dentist and you’re willing to participate in the community and learn from others and, you know, go on courses and days out and things like that. And yeah, for anyone setting up a company, I think because of that, it’s tight knit and you need to earn the trust of, of dentists. They’re going to be looking around at other people and asking the question, Does anybody else use this? Has anyone else got good things to say about this? And but once you’ve established that core of trust, then it’s, you know, then suddenly everything is much easier. But yeah, it’s you have to be humble coming into this and introduce yourself politely to the market and say, Look, this is what we’ve got to offer. We think there’s a problem. Um, and then hope that you’ve, you know, hope that you’ve got it right, hope that you’ve actually listened and built something that really solves their problem rather than something which you thought was nice to build but no one actually cares about.

And what about as a founder now that I mean, you said it at Boston Consulting, you know, you were in that area where it was start-ups, but you didn’t have to worry about raising cash. Yeah. Now, what’s the most stressful part of your job? Is it going into profitability, raising cash, your burn rate? Yeah. What what keeps you up at night? Right now?

Uh, all of the above, I would say so. Raising money comes in waves. So when you’re doing when you’re out, you’re very. You’re far away from. You’re taken away from the business. So you have to really trust that the people that are in the team are, you know, capable of of manning the ship, which in our case they very much are. And so those periods are.

Take me through the process. I mean, it has to be you and your CFO, I guess.

Yeah. So all just me or just you?

Yeah. And so what does it take to raise raise cash for a Start-Up?

So, yeah, the process is I mean, it’s a dark art in many ways. I think, again, have had the benefit of many, many founders before me sitting down and there’s a very strong founder community basically that helped each other. So it’s firstly go and talk to them and figure out, right, who am I supposed to be talking to? Who’s who’s, who’s investing in this kind of business? Who who are investors that are well known, who, you know, reputation is important, who is interested in this industry? Have they got any similar investments that would suggest that they’d be interested? And then it’s just a lot of meetings, a lot of meetings.

So when you say strong founder community, were you in some sort of incubator or something where you were?

No, no, just just, you know, a lot of just through the years have met and know and spend time with a lot of founders who who help each other a lot with this kind of stuff.

And so you so you’re gone. Just step by step. Take me through the process. What do you do? Send an email, knock on a door.

So normally, no, normally normally you’re introduced by somebody else to the investor, whether it’s a.

One of your other investors, maybe.

An angel investor. Yeah. Or a a VC firm or a family office. You know, there’s different flavours of investors. You’re normally introduced by somebody else or they find find out about your business and contact you usually by email or on LinkedIn, and then you go and meet them and you go and talk about your business and you have to make it. You have to really. Bring it back to real basics because none of the people that you’ll be speaking to will know anything about Clear Linus or probably won’t know much about Claire. Linus Yeah, certainly not the industry. They certainly won’t have researched it because most of these investors are invest in lots of different things. So, you know, one minute they’re looking at a fintech product and then the next minute it’s something really specific in dentistry. So you talk to them about your business and if you’re successful in kind of convincing that this is interesting and things that are interesting are companies that have a, you know, a big vision. You know, it’s not just about what we’re doing now. You know, where can this go? People will probably have heard of the terms, Tam, you know, how big is this market really, and how big?

Total addressable. So, so, so is that do you end up having to oversell and say, you know, say stuff that you really have no idea about in the future? Do you know, what do you do? You say we’re going to be global doing this.

I think experienced investors, especially VC investors, understand that it’s a vision. I mean, obviously, you don’t know and they’ve been in this game for long enough to know that if you pick a winner, which is obviously what they’re all trying to do.

The right resources will come to that winner.

Exactly. Yeah. So so they’re taking a chance every time they invest in a company and they’re sort of projecting into the future, you know, where if this is actually going to happen, this is the opportunity. And if we’ve got a portfolio of 50 of these or 100 of these and one of these goes to the moon, you know, we’ve made our money. That’s how they think about this. So you’ve got to convince them that you’re going to build a billion plus dollar business. Otherwise, why would they invest if it’s a VC fund? I mean, other you know.

Your venture backed. Your VC backed. Yeah. So then does that not weigh on you that that the majority of of their investments of which you could be one isn’t going to get anywhere. I think.

It’s I think it’s really motivating.

Actually it’s motivating to become the.

One so we raise money from one of the most well known tech funds and one of the most established tech funds in in Europe and the UK. And you know, there are other investments. So the investors are very early in us. They wouldn’t normally invest this early in a business.

In 32.

Stories in 32. Co 3232 stories is a it was a pre-COVID incarnation that we. That for Covid reasons, we basically started from scratch with 32. Okay.

Sorry I interrupted you. There were early investors in 32.

Sorry. Yes, there were very early investors. As in early from their point of view. So at at seed stage, you know, the other investments that they’ve made at this stage with things like Revolute. Right. So that’s your example. I mean, that’s a 50 billion plus dollar company. So that’s really motivating because these guys are experienced, they know how to pick winners and they picked this company with this vision. So it’s now up to you to go and prove it. I think there’s no point in having fear or reservations about this, you know, And and if that’s I think if that’s the mindset, then I think one would find this life very, very tough.

And what’s what’s the level of support, stroke interference with your tactics, your vision, your you know, how often, how often do you meet the investor and how often do they give you a suggestion of what you should be doing that you don’t agree with? And in sort of thing.

So so balderton have been fantastic. They are a they’re a great fund. We we get a lot of support from them. So as an example, you know, they’ll have a senior senior executives in residence they call it. So those are people who have come from, you know, top, top companies who have really specific expertise in a certain area, for example, product or tech or HR or legal. And we just have access to those people. So that’s been hugely helpful for us because if you if you can hear from people who’ve made all the mistakes in the past, you know, you can learn a lot and you can you can go faster. So meet them regularly in regular communication. They’re they want you to succeed. They’re trying to help. And so far, you know, it’s been a very positive, very positive experience for us.

And you’re not you’re not a techie yourself. Right. So what’s it like? What’s it like having a tech company when you’re not a techie?

I have to learn it, basically. You have to learn the language. I think I’m proficient enough in terms of understanding product that the tech bit, you know, we have a fantastic tech lead. So you hire the right people, basically. And. And make sure that you know what you’re talking about. I think I kind of internally have a bit of a rule that you you have to figure out how we’re going to do this ourselves before you hire in someone else to go and do it for you. I think it’s always it’s a very natural reaction to say, well, we don’t know how to do this. Let’s hire in an expert. And I think that invariably that leads that leads to.

You don’t even understand the vocabulary, understand the problem.

You can’t measure it. You can’t track it. So although so we invest a lot of time in in in forcing ourselves to figure it out, understanding what that expert is going to come in and do, and then they can go and do it. So to to enable that you need some pretty smart people on the team, some some generalists who really know how to solve problems and are unafraid and are really hungry to go and figure the next thing out. So that can sometimes feel quite chaotic, I think. But it’s very, very motivating.

And what percentage of your team are. Working in the office and what percentage you know.

About about third in the office.

And the others are all over the world. All over the world. Yeah. Oh, how interesting. Yeah.

Different different skills in different countries. You know, Covid did did us some real did a real favour. It just expanded the the the talent pool internationally and it becomes very just very normal now to have talent from all over the world working with you.

And so we were talking about AI before and it’s kind of it’s very early, isn’t it, to understand how that’s going to affect everything. But surely you must be thinking now. Yeah, very much so. Either you’re going to what, stop hiring any more people or even shrink the team a little bit because each one of these guys is now going to be empowered to do so much more. Yeah, that’s certainly. Are you thinking about that?

Certainly. Certainly looking at that. It’s it’s something that’s that we’re actually running some special projects on to try and figure out what the impact is on on a business like ours. And again, being where we are in terms of the agility that we have versus a big, slow moving corporate, we can actually do all this stuff and do it very quickly. So we had a speaker in yesterday. We bring speakers in to come and talk to the team yesterday who sold so built and sold a an AI legal company. So what they were doing is using AI to automate discovery in legal processes. And he came in basically to talk to us about how did I impact his business, to see how we could we as a team could learn. So do that quite a lot. Bring in bring in external speakers just to spark creativity and interest in other sectors and see what we can learn.

So this would be through that, through the founder community that Yeah.

Yeah. And just to be honest as well, just from Oxford, just very, very big groups of people doing lots of interesting things and spread all over the world and building cool companies and yeah.

So on. Dental Leaders we have a thing where we talk about errors, okay? You know, from that sort of black box thinking idea where you know, when a plane crashes, they, they, they figure out what went wrong and then they share the knowledge with the whole community. So. So that it never happens again. Yeah. But in medical, we tend to hide our mistakes because the system’s never blamed. It’s always the individual that gets blamed. And so that book was about, you know, if we did discuss mistakes in medicine more, then we could learn from each other’s mistakes. Yeah. I’m not going to. I’m not going to I’m not going to get you to tell me your biggest mistake as a doctor. But what would you say is your biggest mistake as a businessperson?

Hm That’s a good question. Um, I’d say the first I’d say in the early days, because when you’re starting to work on businesses, you are it’s never the first idea that you have. That’s actually the thing that goes on either. It’s, you know, you’ve been a couple of ideas and then the next idea, you end up pivoting to something else. In my experience anyway, so in the early days of trying to figure out what I was going to build made a lot of mistakes and I think all of them were related to not listening to customers. So not obsessing about what the customer wants or needs and even going a level deeper into what are they not even know that they need? What is the implication of what they’re saying and. If you’re if you’re not obsessed with customers and trying to solve their problems, you’re never you’re never going to build something that they fall in love with. And in this competitive environment, in terms of building tech companies, you’re never going to you’re never going to succeed. Eventually, eventually, you will be caught out, no matter how much marketing spend you put behind it.

Well, what about that Henry Ford thing about, you know, the the horse?

I love that. I think it’s one of the guiding principles, I think, for us.

So but what about that thing that the customer has no idea what he needs?

Yeah, but that’s what really good discovery is about. So that’s what a good product lead does is right, They say, Right, tell me about your problems. And then they ask it a different way and then a different way and then say, Well, what if I told you this? How does that make you feel? So they almost try and trick you into really revealing.

It’s really figure.

It out, really figuring it out. And again, I don’t give away all of Dan’s secrets, but that’s what he’ll do when he speaks to our dentists is to try and get them to again. The biggest mistake that people make, I think, is in building products is I mean, there’s an ugly word for it. It’s called solution izing. It’s kind of coming at the problem, then immediately saying, here’s the solution. Because if you haven’t really understood, really thought about the problems, that there might be 50 other ways of doing it. But if you have this gut feel that it should be this. It takes real discipline to stand back and say maybe it’s hang on, maybe it’s not that. Let’s go back right back to basics. What is the problem? Let’s quantify let’s codify it and let’s think of all the different ways that you could solve it. And invariably, the thing that your gut told you was the right answer. It’s probably not the best answer.

So what was your mistake?

What was my mistake? So I I’m talking about lots of different companies where I went down the route of what was I tried to go down the route, for example, of I was really convinced that. There was a there was a there was a niche in the market for luxury towels. And the reason that I thought that was because I was going into people’s bathrooms and I was like, There’s your hand soap, which cost £40 and you’ve got your Jo Malone candle, which costs, I mean, I don’t know how much Jo Malone candles cost now, but it was expensive and yet you’ve got this crappy hand towel that doesn’t even, that doesn’t feel very nice. So I went round. Um, all around. I went literally everywhere. I went to Portugal to find out where these things were made to to to figure out if there was a better way of making a towel that wasn’t your normal stuff and whether we could premium ize it because towels are not very expensive. Even the really, really premium ones are quite cheap. So we went down this really long rabbit hole and talking to suppliers and designing what it could look like. And I hadn’t actually spoken to towel owners at all in that process. I actually hadn’t spoken to anyone and said, If I gave you a hand towel that costs £150 and was made of cashmere with gold laced through it, would you buy it? I didn’t do that. I didn’t do any user research. So. Um, and it turned out to just be a dumb idea. It was not a good idea. The financials didn’t make sense. No one really wanted it. People were quite happy with their fluffy marks and Spencer’s hand towel. So. So I would say I wasted a lot of time, but it wasn’t a waste of time. It was hugely, hugely valuable to learn that lesson.

So I don’t see that as a mistake then.

No, it’s not mistake.

No. No mistake.

A mistake. Did you.

Ever lose? Lose a key member of the team? And then later on reflect that maybe you could have done something differently to keep that person or blindsided. I don’t know the all the problems of running a 50 man team. Yeah, I’d expect some errors in that side.

Yeah, no, definitely some errors. I think the reason why I’m struggling is because, number one, errors happen all the time and you get and you you build a muscle to, to, to look at it as an opportunity to solve a problem as opposed to something that’s bad. And I really meant it when I said like, I don’t ever regret things. I think you have to prepare and you have to make sure that you minimise the rate of errors. But every time something goes wrong here, it’s like, Oh, I can see why that happened.

Look, I mean, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have been, you wouldn’t be who you are if you weren’t optimistic. Yeah. You know, it takes an optimistic person to start a company and raise money and all that at the same time. You. You seem to be a bit of a glutton for punishment. Yeah, because, you know, medicine. Oxford. Yeah. Bcg. And now this. I mean, you can’t have much time on your hands. I mean, you must be working seven days a week.

Yeah, I guess. I guess again, I think I do believe it’s a muscle. I think that you learn how to work hard and you learn how to work efficiently and then you learn how to carve out time for the things that are important. So I genuinely love working. I love what we’re doing here, so it doesn’t really feel like work. And even when it does, even when it’s bad and, you know, a big mistake happens, uh, the next in the next five minutes, something amazing will happen. So it’s really, really up and down. And I think that think about the dopamine hits that you’re getting every time there. So it’s probably a bit of a bit of that. Uh, but I do think that I do think it’s something that you have to practice and working hard and being okay with that and building structures around to make sure that it is sustainable and that you are enjoying it. Um, but yeah, I’ve, I’ve, you know, I’m not, I’ve not forgotten your question about mistakes. I think it’s, I think it sounds like I’m being evasive. I think I genuinely mistakes happen all the time and I make mistakes. And the example that you just cited, which is, you know people leaving the team and that, you know, where you didn’t want them to leave, that has happened. But we managed to get them back, you know, So so I again, it is a mistake. But, you know, manage to find find a resolution. I’d say we’re fortunate that, you know, with a lot of companies, if they’ve been around for a long time, they can point to one big marketing or launch error. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve had that.

I’ve had long enough to make.

I am sure it will happen. I am sure it will happen. But not not of that, not of that kind of magnitude I think.

Yet what’s, what’s been your worst day?

Um, when I thought. So fundraising. The first time when I thought that we weren’t going to raise because the I made a big mistake. I went raising over in December, which is it.

Was winding down.

Unbeknown to me. If you start raising after Thanksgiving, nobody’s got any time. So I spent a lot of time talking to sort of exhausted investors who just wanted to go away for Christmas. No one was giving out term sheets, and then I had to start from scratch again and lost a lot of time, lost a lot of energy. So that was a mistake, which I won’t make again. Um, but, but thinking, you know, it’s relentless, right? You’re talking to investor after investor and half of them hate it because they hate dentists or something and then the other half don’t understand it. And then how.

Many do you have to talk to before one bites?

Um, I think you’re talking 50 plus.

So 49 people say no and they.

Don’t say no.

Or they sort of say, well.

People people are investors are looking for consensus. So as soon as a big VC comes aboard, suddenly everyone piles in. And we were way oversubscribed. You know, there’s a there’s a catalyst, you know.

Sheep like herd mentality. Yeah.

And you can understand, right? I mean, it’s the same with investing in anything. If you suddenly feel like, Oh, people are really interested in this and they’re interested, I’m going to be interested. So it’s before you’ve got to that point, when is it going to come? And again, I’ve spoken to lots of people who had been through this and said, When does it I’m exhausted. I’m sick of the sound of my invoice. I’m sick of my the story that we’re telling. Um, lots of blank stares and yeah, literally people being like. I don’t know much about dentistry, so I’m I’m out. Like, you sort of knew that when we were coming into this conversation. So then and then the sort of the best day then comes literally the day after where it’s, oh, it’s all fine. And you know, we’ve got one of the top VCs backing us now, so everything’s going to be plain sailing from here.

And so you said they invested in the seed round. Was was that the only round you had or have you.

Yeah, we’ve owned on seed. Yeah.

So. So then there was a valuation. Yeah. Now right now, the macro climate for for all of finance but for start-ups seems seems much more difficult. Yeah. And you must feel, you must feel sad about that because all the years that you didn’t have a Start-Up was the golden years of. Yeah, of Start-Up. Certainly it affected you now.

Certainly 20, 22, 2022 would just bonkers years in terms of valuations. I mean, money was free. So. So then you’re going to invest in riskier assets, right?

So, so you’ve been valued at that time at quite a high valuation because of the time?

Yeah, I think we’re okay. Actually. I think it was I think we’re okay because certainly early, early stage, you know, things weren’t going so bonkers. I mean, there were companies that were raising, you know, $1 billion valuation with just a deck and no customers and no product. You know, they’re a bit screwed. You’re never going to go into that valuation. So I think it’s harder for them. I think we were, you know, we’d already built the product to a great we already had customers. You know, we had a really, really good story and it’s only grown from there. So so the market is in the market is so volatile. I think for early stage companies, there is still plenty of what they would call dry powder. If you’re a growth stage company, you are struggling. You are struggling because you know you’ve raised 500 million valuation. Okay, Well, now you’ve really got to grow into that because multiples on revenue have, you know, halved or it’s a third suddenly. And now no one wants to do a down round. So everyone’s doing convertibles and it’s kind of postponing the pain. And everyone hopes that in 2024, suddenly, you know, interest rates will drop and it’ll all be back to normal. And it might be, you know, it really might be. You don’t.

Where were you in 2008? University Oh, yeah. So I don’t know what it was like in the sort of Start-Up World back then, but I don’t think it recovered until sentiment didn’t recover until 2016. Probably.

Yeah, maybe more.

2018 or it wasn’t the kind of thing we haven’t had a 2008 event quite yet. Yeah, but it wasn’t a 1 or 2 year recovery at all. Yeah. If anything, things were worse and I felt like things were worse than 2010 than they were in 2008 because, you know, you felt like you were never going to get out of it. Yeah. So, look, I don’t think there’s ever a good time to do anything. It’s one of those things that there’s never a good time to have a kid or start a company or you just do it. I understand that. But with your experience, it must you must laugh a little bit at your sort of the luck of the draw to now when it’s your thing to be to have these challenges. Yeah, yeah. And so the Silicon Valley Silicon Valley Bank was the first and there was a lot of start ups that, that were exposed. Start-ups Yeah, it was a bit crazy really, that there was so much exposure, I suppose to one bank. Yeah. And you know.

I knew a lot of founders that had tens of millions.

Well, you.

Know, over the weekend, just like panicked whatsapps being like, we’ve got 25 million stuck in SVB. We don’t know whether we can get it out. Luckily, it resolved really quickly. Banks get bailed out. That’s the rules. That’s how it seems to happen. So luckily, luckily it was okay. I think it was really scary for people for for a while.

Although this might not be the case, you know. So know. Have you heard of the notion of bail in? No bail out. So they did it in Cyprus. When the bank went down, they took the money from all the savers.

Right.

Rather than bailing it out. Yeah. And it depends. I mean, I know. Credit Suisse. Big, big name to be in trouble. Big, big name. Yeah. Um, who knows where it’s going? Let’s let’s hope it’s not awful. But then that said, it’s been too good for too long. That’s. That’s it really, really hurts.

Yeah, it’s certainly true.

From, from the finance side. Yeah.

And it’s the same in dentistry, right. I mean multiples on practices were. Yeah. Very, very, you know, favourable for a long time. The interesting thing is that when you look at recessions, I mean, health care is always very resilient. Yeah. Weird. You know, during I mean, obviously during Covid people had lots of disposable income, but, you know, a liners through the roof. Yeah. You know, when when when the chips are down. Okay. People aren’t buying. People maybe not going on holidays. They’re not buying kitchen extensions, but their health, what have they deemed to be their health? It’s always pretty safe.

Yeah, I feel like dentistry has been quite, quite resilient. Quite resilient. A lot of times dentists can switch into needs. Doesn’t help me in you. Yeah, with our wants. But. But then. But then that keeps that keeps the boat afloat. And then. And then they go back to. Yeah. To want. It’s actually quite a nice time because when I qualified back in 96, I wanted to be a cosmetic dentist. There wasn’t, you know, there wasn’t any education on it. There wasn’t. There wasn’t there wasn’t the the conversation there where a patient would come into you come in for a check-up. The conversation of would you like wasn’t even a thing. It was always you need, you need, you need. Yeah. Whereas now if if a dentist can say I want to just do a liners. Yeah. And they can say that pretty early on. Yeah. And it’s interesting work, right? It’s nice work. It’s consensual kind of work because it’s like. Yeah, there’s no blood. Exactly. Yeah.

It makes people happy as well. Ultimately, you go into healthcare because you want to make people’s lives better. I think that’s what most it’s five year degree. It’s a long time to be slaving away. If you don’t feel there’s some existential need to to to bring joy to people. And I think that point around disease treatment is and feeling a bit dirty about money and commercials I think is kind of UK based teaching, I think, and perhaps rightly so. You know, I always talk about medics being totally financially illiterate when it comes to the things that they prescribe and do and how much they cost. So you’re walking around a hospital and you’re like MRI here and these 17 blood tests here and no idea what it costs. Yeah, because the bill doesn’t go anywhere, so people don’t value it. Patients don’t necessarily value it because it’s all sort of free. I mean, growing up in the Netherlands. Where we have had you know, it’s a sort of private mandatory insurance kind of process where and because it’s a small country and everything works fantastically well there, you know, you get great health care, but you get a bill, you don’t pay it, but you see it often. So, you know, that’s interesting. What what went into that and you and you appreciate it a bit more whereas yeah here you walk in you know have a extensive. Bowel surgery, whatever it is. And obviously a very, very grateful, but no idea what it took to make that happen.

What other what other differences do you see between the UK and the Netherlands?

I think so. When I came to the UK, I mean, I know that I speak like this, but I was very culturally Dutch, I think. Why did you.

Come to the UK? Because of Oxford?

Yeah, I just really wanted to go to. I also went to a link. No, I went to the I went to a British school in my secondary in Holland, in my secondary school. So my parents sort of worked as sort of diplomatic in diplomatic type roles in in The Hague. And so we so I went to Dutch schools and Dutch friends and, and then they decided that to give me the chance of going anywhere in the world for university, that we should go to a British school. And I found that really tough. Initially, I had to wear a uniform. Only school in Holland, had to wear a stupid uniform. And I found I found the kids quite soft. You know, I you know, the Dutch are the direct and and, you know, they’re not known for their sort of polite, you know, niceties. But I also got to appreciate the great sides of British culture, which is humour and sarcasm and all of those things. So yeah.

The Dutch have that too. I mean, I really enjoy working with the Dutch because you want to work with direct people. Yeah. You know, if you, if you ask for something, you want to know the direct answer to that. Yeah I agree. You know I’ve got suppliers in the US. Some are very good, but some whatever the question is, the answer is yes. Whether they can do it or not.

It’s unhelpful in business, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. It’s kind of the American way of sort of everything’s happy. And so whereas with my Dutch, I had customers in Holland a lot. They were 100% direct and honest. In business you need that, you know, you need to know even in the UK, I wouldn’t say we’re direct enough. Yeah. When it comes to work, I agree. I feel like we give messages, but not. Not. Not directly. Yeah, it’s all around the houses. Yeah.

Yeah. Platitudes. And then finally, we might say.

And then I work with the Germans a lot. A lot of. Most of our suppliers are in Germany. Yeah. Again, very direct and excellent for work. No. Interestingly, with the Germans, you can’t discuss price at all.

Yeah. Interesting.

And both we’ve got customers in Germany and suppliers in Germany. Both of them. Price isn’t even on the table. Yeah, price is the price. Now we can talk about everything else, which is so delicious. Yeah. You know, with my part of the world, it’s the only thing you can’t discuss. Quality times, only prices.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

Although I find the Dutch just the perfect combination of. I know they don’t like being. You guys don’t like being being compared to the Germans because that’s the Germans. They get on very well. But I find them the perfect combination of the German efficiency and UK sense of humour and all of that, because you can have fun with the Dutch guy too. You can.

And they’re practical people. I mean, they’re well travelled and they don’t. They don’t see their dutchness as a sort of barrier to integrating with others, so they are open to new culture. Interestingly, everyone speaks fabulous English in Holland because they understand that in order to participate and punch above their weight, as they do in the global economy, you’ve got to be able to talk to people in their language. So a lot of the university courses are actually taught in English. And I remember debating we had this I don’t know if any of the any of the listeners did this, but the model United Nations debating tournaments, they were held in The Hague, the global one was held in The Hague. So we were the natural host school for it. So we hosted all these international kids and had this big debate. And these people are prepared for ages. And I remember debating against some Dutch kids and thinking, Oh, you know, your English is way better than anybody else’s here. But the English kids. Yeah.

The English, literally.

Yeah. Very. Yeah. Fantastic place to grow up. Very liberal and grow up fast.

I’ve had some wonderful King’s day, Queen’s Day celebrations there, too. Yeah. We’re coming to the end. I’m going to ask you to end it in the way that we always end it. So the same, same two questions. It’s actually very sad that Prav couldn’t make it today because he’s also an Oxford medic who stopped being a doctor. But I’m sure you two will meet. But my The final questions Fantasy dinner party. Three guests. Dead or alive? Who would you.

Have? Um. Dead or alive. And someone else is cooking, I hope. Sure. Yeah. Okay.

Delivery for that. Yeah.

So I think. I think I’d like to meet some people from ancient history. I think it must be fascinating. I think I love history because I think you can learn a lot from the cycles. You know, we think we’re going through whatever we’re going through and the first time it’s ever happened, it’s obviously nonsense. You know, history repeats itself. So and I’m fascinated by ancient civilisations and how far we got in terms of intelligence, um, and, and achievements and how that disappears in time. So I’d love to meet I’d love to meet an Aristotle, I’d love to figure out how much, how much smarter someone you know, who lived thousands of years, 2000 years ago is than I am today. I bet. I bet much more intelligent than I am today, which is amazing, I think. I don’t know if you have fun dinner party guests.

You know, there’s that aspect of humanity that never changes, right? If you read a if you read a Dostoyevsky book, there are characters in that book who you see in your street. Yeah. You know, whatever the rich guy, the jealous guy, the. The classic human traits. Yeah. That’s it. You talk to your parents about what it was. What was it like in the 60s? Or I don’t know if your parents are that old, but but you know, when you think 50, 60 70s, each of those decades has a particular flavour to it. And, you know, even though humanity has always been the same. We do, we do evolve as well. You know we do.

But but we don’t.

It’s interesting to.

We go backwards.

You’re right. It’s very interesting to see exactly how much or not. Yeah, it’s a very interesting choice.

Yeah, I think the loss of the loss of knowledge is quite scary. I mean, you burn down the Library of Alexandria. What did we really lose there? I mean, what would have been different? I find it I find the concept of the Dark Ages fascinating. How can you just suddenly make people forget everything? It’s so fragile.

The notion of like some sort of event that wiped out 99% of humanity and and all that information, you know? Yeah, sort of. Maybe, you know, the pyramids and all of that. Yeah, it’s very interesting. Very interesting. Okay, so, Aristotle.

So you made me think about. Yeah. People who. So what you made me think of there is. Okay. Would that be true if an asteroid hit now? I mean, we have we would be able to store things somewhere because we have the Internet now and we have even if all the servers were, it would be somewhere some of this information. So maybe another interesting person, people who are pioneers in technology. So someone like Tim Berners-Lee or someone like Ada Lovelace, you know, these people who are real pioneers in the way that technology has allowed us to do what we do today. Tim Berners-Lee obviously interesting because he never he gets credit, but he didn’t become a trillionaire. No, Yeah. For what he, for what he did. Like an academic. Just him. But he.

I think he’s still alive, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then someone like Ada Lovelace, who was never recognised for anything that she did.

But who is.

She? She. She’s considered to be the first programmer. And she was a woman and she was never recognised. British. British until she. Yeah, until after. Long after she died. So. So maybe we’ll have one of those to see if they’re available. And then maybe one more kind of contemporary person who’s, who’s a bit more fun. I’m actually really fascinated by Derren Brown. I think he’s a really interesting person. I think someone who has perfected his craft to the extent that he has. And and has scary powers as well. I mean, powers that some people would consider quite scary, the ability to manipulate and influence. I think it would be I think I’d be nervous having dinner. Having dinner with.

Interesting party with the Aristotle.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a whole barrel of laughs. Maybe quite serious.

But who’s who’s your favourite entrepreneur or. Technologist or.

Entrepreneur.

Or brand for that matter.

So. I really? I don’t know the entrepreneur, but the product that I think has been totally game changing for companies all over the world is a tool called Figma. Yeah, which is which is a maybe you’ve used it, but um, before Figma. I mean, what were people doing? I don’t really know. Yeah. So, Figma for those people who don’t know is a tool. It’s a design tool. It’s a design tool that any, any person trained or untrained in design can use to, to mock up pretty much anything. And we started using it pretty early. It’s now a million times better than it was even then. So I think I’m a big fan of that of that company. I also think notion is a is a is a tool that we use here. I’m looking at Josh, who’s listening, who is obsessed with notion. Josh is our chief of staff. Um, it’s just an organisation tool. It’s it’s if you look at it, it’s, it’s innocuous. But every Start-Up, everywhere that I know uses notion. It’s project management, a little bit of a project management tool, you know, um, record keeping, task setting, that kind of stuff. It does, it does a lot for, for, for us. So there’s another thing, so not really individual.

So are you guys organised in that same way as you go for sprints? Yep. Yep.

Yeah. The model, the model changes. I think as you grow you kind of you have to change the way that you know, the team is structured. But sprints, Agile, working works really well for certain types of projects. It just means you keep the pace up. You’re no one’s ever wondering what we’re doing and there’s so many of these models. To be honest.

I should have asked you your what’s your exit strategy? If you thought about that.

I think the minute you start thinking about exit strategy, you take your eye off the ball. I think it’s a really important you have to build the exits. Options will come when you build a fantastic company. Yeah, true. You obviously you have to think about it in your investors think about it and the sort of well, here are the seven options that might appear, but none of it happens until you’ve built a massive and fantastic company. So it’s almost not really worth your while thinking about it too hard.

It’s a very good point. Okay. So perhaps final question is it’s kind of a deathbed question. Okay. On your deathbed. Yeah. Surrounded by your friends and family or anyone who’s important to you, what are three pieces of advice you would give them?

Three pieces of advice. Um. Okay. So. I think my first one is. If they’re young people. I’m presuming that I’ve lived a long, long and healthy life. Yeah, because I don’t want to sound too, too preachy, but my it’s. It’s this concept that the world doesn’t owe you anything. Everything that you’re going to do is going to come from you and only you working hard and going and getting it. I think I’ve learned that from doing lots of different things and, you know, things not going very well, some things going very well, but always knowing that the only thing that was going to get me through was my own determination and hard work and discipline. I think that would be my first. I think there are lots of people who the reason I say that is because I think especially now, there are lots of people who feel like, well, because of this, I should get this and it’s unfair of this. And and I think that’s really unhelpful. I think if you if you can teach your kids that, I think it’s it’s a great way to be. The second is probably say yes to things. I don’t. I think you always regret the things that you don’t do and not the things you do do. Even if it doesn’t seem like an interesting place to go or an interesting webinar or, you know. Say yes to things that are different because you. You have no idea what you will learn. Don’t do the same things again and again. If you’re not enjoying watching webinars as an example, then don’t but try different things. You never know what will happen. And. I genuinely believe in the the goodness of people. I think even be patient with people, even if someone is being a rude, mean. Unpleasant, obnoxious, whatever it might be. There’s always a reason for that. And if you can be if you can force yourself to be a little bit more patient with people, you will understand a lot more. And and just have deeper, deeper connections with people.

I think one of my other guests said something like, be kind to people, especially when they don’t deserve it.

Yeah, that’s a nice way of saying it. It’s a more concise way of saying it.

But it’s a nice sentiment. A nice sentiment. Yeah.

I think, you know, working in an environment that can be quite stressful and quite chaotic, everybody feels at times overwhelmed, you know, snappy. And in that scenario, you know, we have we have a rule in the office, which is that nobody ever says anything negative about customer. It’s just a blanket rule. And why not? Because. Not because it’s sometimes not reasonable to be annoyed by something they’ve said or done, but build, build the resilience and the discipline to look at it from their perspective and say, Why are they saying that? Is it maybe because they’ve got a patient who’s giving them hell. They’re scared because something feels like it’s going wrong. They’ve not been given enough information. So if you can if you can force yourself to do that.

Yeah, it’s actually that’s one of my bugbears because people get frustrated, right? People in touch with customers every day. Yeah. Do you get frustrated? Yeah. Even if a customer is rude, it happens. Yeah. For me. You’re the only the only way to live is to blame yourself for for anything like that. Because the moment you start blaming the customer.

You really aren’t hiding to nothing.

Yeah. I mean, number one, you’re predicating your kind of happiness based on someone else’s actions. But number two, you shouldn’t be in business. You know, even even the error might have been a communication error. Right. Um, I sometimes I it’s so strange. Sometimes I do a webinar and directly after I’ve said something, someone will ask a question about the thing I just said. And it’s a little bit frustrating. Right. But then you’ve got to remind yourself that, you know, you’ve said that a thousand times. This person has just heard it for the first time, you know, Yeah, that’s still your fault. Yeah. It’s not even if the person’s not listening, that’s your fault because you’re not interesting enough. Yeah. You know, and making it your fault just makes it all easier to handle.

Yeah, it means you’re looking for the solution. Yeah. Yeah. And it not happening again. Yeah.

And, you know, it’s like you’re responsible for your own success. Yeah. Not not someone else. Yeah, but you’re right. That’s a bugbear of mine, too. In the office. That’s a good one. But I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve really enjoyed it. I wish. I wish you the best.

Me, too.

Um, how’s it going? How are you? Are you on track?

More than on track. Really? Really. Excellent.

Yeah, Excellent. And I’m going to see you at the dentistry show.

Yes, Yes. Brilliant.

Brilliant. So I’ll see you there. See you then. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for doing.

This is Dental Leaders, the podcast where you get to go one on one with emerging leaders in dentistry. Your hosts, Payman, Langroudi and Prav Solanki.

Thanks for listening, guys. Hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Make sure you tune in for future episodes. Hit Subscribe in iTunes or Google Play or whatever platform it is. And you know, we really, really appreciate it. If you would give us a.

Six star rating.

Six star rating. That’s what always leave my Uber driver.

Thanks a lot, guys. Bye.