Building a Business at the Intersection of Neurodata and Innovation With Rob Cooley

Founder Shares – Rob C_mixdown

00:00:01 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

We don’t really want a pat on the back and a good game tap. We want the hard questions from the hard people again. The Jim Robertson, the Joe Kalapese, the mentors that we have there. Uncw. All of these individuals and groups come together to support a burgeoning ecosystem called Wilmington. And it continues to gain momentum. And that momentum breeds success, success breeds more energy. And it continues to be kind of an ink spot for us in the Southe.

00:00:31 – Trevor Schmidt

Hello and welcome to the Founder Shares podcast, brought to you by Hutchison, a law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina that helps founders and entrepreneurs in technology and life science companies start up, operate, get funded and exit. So whether you’re already an entrepreneur or want to be one someday, or are just fascinated by the stories of how a business goes from idea to success or not such a success, this podcast is for you. Today’s guest is Rob Cooley, a pioneering entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Noreen, a neurodata science company. Revolutionizing the way we understand and utilize brain activity with innovative smart sensing materials, Nareem is pushing the boundaries of neuroscience to deliver groundbreaking applications that improve lives and advance industries. On today’s episode, Rob shares how his company is using Neurodata to tackle challenges in areas like sleep health, dementia and mental wellness. From early intervention to long term monitoring, Nerim’s technology has the potential to transform healthcare and redefine how we interact with data about the brain.

00:01:33 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

You’re not supposed to be able to collect brain waves without anything stuck on your forehead, right? The science hundred year old EEG electroencephalogram is 100 years old. So people are very, very comfortable with and so comfortable with it, they weren’t thinking kind of, I hate to use the word outside the box, but a little more innovatively. So we’ve taken some science and technology and turned it around a little bit to be conductive in terms of neural sensing. And that’s the fundamental value proposition we bring to the table. We’re patent protected. It’s really amazing what we’re doing with our research.

00:02:02 – Trevor Schmidt

Rob also delves into his journey as an entrepreneur, his experience navigating the challenges of a startup and his vision for a future where neurodata is a cornerstone of innovation.

00:02:12 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So this is the sine wave of an entrepreneur. It’s either all excitement or oh my goodness, we’re done. So it’s a very methodical approach. And entrepreneurs, it’s a DNA of folks who’ve done this in the past. No two journeys are alike in the entrepreneurial kind of pathway, but there are some blocking and tackling. Taking a view from the customer side who would use this. So I talked about all the way from insurance companies to clinicians to general consumers to war fighters. All of them would pause when we talked to them about the science and said, if that does work, because it’s a little Star wars and science fiction, but if it does work, heck yeah, but here’s the way I need to use it. And so the heck yeah moment was, okay, now there’s. Now there’s something here. Let’s figure out how to move it from cocktail napkin to benchtop to prototype to NVP to commercialization pathway, and then be very, very focused because there’s a lot of applications. Sure. We have to be hyper focused to succeed in one area, and that allows us to expand very, very rapidly.

00:03:13 – Trevor Schmidt

So was that an easy decision to focus on sleep first or was that.

00:03:16 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

It is because of the science. Right. It is closest to the head. It’s one of the things that we. We have a lot of expertise and there’s a lot of other tools out there that are trying to measure sleep. Not doing it so well unless you’re in a clinical sleep application with things glued to your head. So that. That’s why I sleep first.

00:03:32 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay. I appreciate you mentioning the fact that, like, not all entrepreneurs are the same, but they share some similar traits sometimes. So talk to me a little bit about your journey because I understand, like you said, you’ve been involved with life science companies, you’ve been on the VC side. I understand you spent some time in the military, so kind of talk through all of that and how does that end you up starting your own business?

00:03:51 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So I was an entrepreneur from the time I was a kid. Right. So not only paper routes, but hiring kids to do paper routes for me. Right. Landscaping and then hiring folks to do that. And then I was an innovator all through high school. And then my dad started his company with my college fund my senior year in high school.

00:04:10 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:04:10 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

I didn’t have any money to go to school and I wasn’t gonna stay in Northern Jersey. So I was being recruited by a couple schools to play some baseball. My high school history teacher came to me and said West Point was interested in you. They want to recruit you to go play baseball there. You get a scholarship. So I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t spell army had no idea that everybody got a scholarship to go to West Point and then showed up and was not your model cadet, but ended up doing okay. And then 37 years in the military after that and finished as a general officer. So I use it as a context to say the military is very fluid in terms of our most important asset, which is people. And I use my experience and expertise from the military in day to day activities with every startup and vice versa. It goes back and forth, but the journey is different. And so we take the approach of our people first and then it’s really about how to use those people most effectively. There’s only so many hours in a day, and that’s the part of the journey that’s really, really important. Especially when you’re in a super startup mode. You’ve got to attract the right folks. You’re always in a salesmanship environment. And very quickly either the customer or potential users will tell you very soon whether or not you have anything there. And then once you have something, you start to pull that string and move it down.

00:05:27 – Trevor Schmidt

You know, you talk about being an entrepreneur from like an early age as a kid. What was it that pulled you to it? I mean, was it kind of like the idea of building something? The idea of making money?

00:05:35 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

The idea of like, money’s not the issue, it’s about solving a problem. It’s finding a very. We call them the military wicked problem. That’s very complex, multifaceted, doesn’t have an easy answer. And then those are the ones that are kind of fun. Not only are they fun, it’s really intriguing. And that’s the kind of energy that entrepreneurs get from solving a problem. And it’s not taking something, making a little better. It’s a fundamental problem that’s really, really hard to fix. Let’s go after that.

00:06:01 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So how did you go about kind of building the team that’s at Nareem Now? I know you talked about how you met your founders, but how have you been building since then?

00:06:08 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So we’ve had great success in the academic world. With UNC Wilmington, we created a unique relationship with their psychology department, with their science and engineering, with their human performance, and we had to sell the project to them. Not only do we sell it now, a lot of them are on our advisory board. And their ability to think creatively in an academic environment, which is often very different from a commercialization business pathway, how do we find the nexus of that? And we’ve done that very, very successful, successfully.

00:06:40 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, I’m glad you mentioned that because that was going to be. My question is like, there is market differences between working in academia and working in the commercial realm. So how do you navigate that? And navigate in a way that they get to do what they’re good at, but also give you kind of the information.

00:06:52 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Absolutely.

00:06:53 – Trevor Schmidt

To make it commercial.

00:06:54 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So we understand the pathway. You know, Publisher Parish is an academic mode on an annual, multi year kind of mood. In our world, we’re in 30, 60, 90 day sprints. So we also run a parallel pathway in industry that allows us to continue to move the ball forward while giving the academic, our professors, our students, the opportunity to really challenge some ideas conceptually and then test. And we like to fail fast and fail well. Failing well is a little different. Most folks don’t like to fail, but in the entrepreneurial space, it’s a skill set. And it’s not only failing fast, but it’s learning very, very rapidly. And so we are together with our academic partners and we’ve had academic institutions around the country and it’s really thoughtful in terms of how we come to the table to make sure we put them in a position to be successful and it meets our criteria, our timeline. And again, UNCW has been phenomenal. Right now, I can’t say enough about what they’ve done.

00:07:48 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s great. Any examples from your work with the company so far of failing well, that you can share?

00:07:55 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Absolutely. So we think we’re going to have a design of a certain product and a certain prototype. We go to the market, customers and potential users, and we show them this, and within 13 seconds they’ll tell you, not even close. And here’s the reasons why. Okay, we take that, but what are the good parts? So let’s say 80% is bad, 20% is good. We immediately go back to the same cocktail napkin, flip it open, and then do it again and do it again and again, that iterative process. And again, a rapid, iterative process allows us to think very, very quickly and creatively because we get very caught in with blinders on about how good this technology is. The best technology may not sell. And that’s where you’ve got to combine technology with market need to succeed. And if those two don’t come together very quickly, you’ll find out.

00:08:40 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, well, it’s tough because sometimes you fall in love with your own product.

00:08:43 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

And nobody wants you to call your own baby ugly.

00:08:45 – Trevor Schmidt

Exactly. Well, and then, you know, you take it out into the world and the world’s like, well, maybe an ugly baby.

00:08:50 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

That’s right.

00:08:51 – Trevor Schmidt

So what are some of the challenges that you faced starting the company? I guess at the early stages.

00:08:55 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah. So we talked quickly about the team, we talked about bringing Advisors on funding is always an issue for a startup company. We’re always raising, we’re always in a salesmanship mode. You know, Wilmington is the eastern side of 95 corridor and we’re known for fintech financial technologies. That’s the encinos, the live oak banks and all the spin outs approved and all of those. You know, we have a healthy ecosystem and it’s growing. Folks like Jim Roberts, you know here, he lives here in the kind of RTP area. Joe Colopy from Greb Beat. Actually Joe and I were classmates at Carolina where we got our MBAs together.

00:09:30 – Trevor Schmidt

Really? Okay.

00:09:31 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

A long, long time ago.

00:09:32 – Trevor Schmidt

Another friend of the podcast, he was on a while back.

00:09:34 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah, just great. Jim and Joe are doing great work to just bring a spotlight and some attention to this thing called Wilmington. And it not only in the fintech kind of side, healthcare is now growing and there’s 7, 8, 9, 10 healthcare startups in that area. We come together, we support each other, we’re very, very collaborative. There’s no you or me, it’s us. We kind of move together and that, that goes a long way because there’s a lot of different expertise, non dilutive grant money, for instance, working with the Department of Defense. These are not only art and science, but it comes with repetitions and understand the expertise and there’s no, there’s no ability for startups like us to fail like somebody else did. So the fail, well, fail fast is if somebody else has gone through that process, especially in the Wilmington area. How do we leverage that experience? Yeah, very helpful.

00:10:21 – Trevor Schmidt

So what are some of the, I guess, shortfalls that working in a Wilmington, aside from, you know, capital?

00:10:26 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Maybe there is money, but it’s not threaded together. There’s lots of wealth in the general southeastern part, but it’s not threaded together like a series of angel investment groups in syndicates here in the Raleigh area or Charlotte or Nashville or some other places in the Southeast. We have a university, we have a community college. So we don’t have the Duke, the Chapel, Hillary State, Wake Forest kind of model.

00:10:52 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:10:53 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Some people that have the highly technical skill sets would love to come to the beach, but you got to attract them.

00:10:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:11:00 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

And so if you want to go to the beach and be a beach bum, that’s one thing. If you want to kind of enjoy the lifestyle, that’s another. But we don’t have hundreds of thousands of people to choose from now. We’re growing, but we’re not growing in the right segments from, from pure tech perspective yet.

00:11:15 – Trevor Schmidt

I guess to that end, what would you see as the big next step for Wilmington to kind of continue to grow as an entrepreneurial area?

00:11:24 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So we need somebody outside the fintech space to win and win big. That would draw enough attention and then attention follows attention and people will start to come there naturally. A lot of the folks in the fintech space have skill sets that are applicable in non fintech worlds. And so they’re also now becoming a pool of potential candidates for other startups kind of grow through with the company.

00:11:49 – Trevor Schmidt

Has there been a point or a moment where you’re like, you hit some traction or you saw some revelation, you’re like, yes, this, this really has a chance of making it well, I think.

00:11:58 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

I mentioned our war fighters when, when you go to that community as a fellow war fighter and they say, absolutely, this is something that makes sense. Or you go to a clinician or to a neuropsychologist and they ponder for a little while they have to get through the science because it’s Star Wars.

00:12:15 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:12:16 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

But once they get to that point and say, if you can do that. Absolutely. And you take that absolutely. Hold it tight and you kind of run down the street with it and you go back and figure out what absolutely means, that’s where it becomes really enticing.

00:12:30 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. And I imagine that’s part of the conversation you have to have with, you know, talk about doing funding and VCs and convincing them. Yes. Not only is this something that we can do, but here’s the need for it. So talk to me a little bit about how fundraising has been and that process.

00:12:44 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Right. You’re always fundraising, so every CEO out there, you’re always fundraising. And you want to fundraise when you have money, not just when you need it. And so you go through a series of growth hurdles. Right now we are pre seed, pre revenue. So we are in an organization that would be attracted to more syndicates, angels, high net worth individuals, family offices that have a thesis on supporting changing lives. If they have a thesis on sleep, that’s us. If there’s, we have a big mental health component. I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of folks that are very interested to support our science to deliver improved mental health outcomes. That’s the first phase. And then the second phase is selling product, having consumers buy it, which is great. And then you start to look at pre seed for VCs and then you start to expand that aperture pretty quickly.

00:13:33 – Trevor Schmidt

In these conversations, have you had any kind of pushback or is there any specific concerns that have been raised?

00:13:38 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Absolutely. So the big concern is Star wars. Your science shouldn’t work. Right. And so that’s our hurdle. If there’s one hurdle we had to overcome, it’s that people think our science is not going to work. So that’s why these correlative studies that we’re doing with UNCW are so important for us. It’s really an hourglass. Same thing for non dilutive grants from NIH and NSF and the dod. The scientists say, show me some data. I’ll acknowledge that there’s a chance this could perhaps work, but I need to see some data. And that’s where in the next couple of months we’ll be able to publish some of our really amazing findings with uncw. And that just opens up that other aperture. That’s that first step function for us for sure.

00:14:19 – Trevor Schmidt

How do you think about, because you talked about some grant funding, you talked about dod, how do you think about kind of working with those alternative sources of funding versus kind of taking on VC capital?

00:14:28 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So I think you must do it, especially in our tech space because they can offset some of the early science. You can’t be a one trick pony. You can’t only be a grant house and then put grants on your wall because they’re getting smarter and they want to have a dual use application for commercialization. So most of the applications are now asking for your commercialization pathway in the DoD as well. Unless you’re selling battleships or tanks, you better be able to produce a product or service that’s consumable in the civilian non military market space and that they’re asking that specifically. So if you don’t have that pathway, they’re probably not going to invest the dollars into you.

00:15:06 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So I’m going to pivot just a little bit and talk about kind of the data because you’re talking about people’s brainwave data. So you know, imagine some people have some sensitivities around that. So how does the company kind of think about data privacy and steps to take to protect that information?

00:15:20 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah, so that’s a critical component to what we’re doing. So at Phyllis Medical Systems, we were doing telemedicine before it was cool and hip a couple decades ago. And people were very concerned back then if your basic biometric information, temperature, heart rate got into the wild, that insurance companies would misuse it and make a bad decision on your behalf. Right now you walk by your smart refrigerator, your entire life story pops up.

00:15:43 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:15:44 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

All your biometric. And we’re very, very comfortable in allowing the basic Biometric information. We should not be as comfortable with the neurodata. That is truly. I said it was the next frontier. It’s a truly insight to you from a precision level. It’s the way your body operates. It gives you the indicators and the signals so we must protect it. So we at the very start have taken an approach that neuro data security is absolutely fundamental to us. So we include that in our data schema, we include that in our technology development. So much so that we are looking with some of the best encryption, blockchain level, neurodata encryption, personal hashing, all those types of science and technology that allow us to collect, put a neural fingerprint on at the point of collection, remove the fingerprint because we know somebody’s going to hack it. So when we move our data to the cloud for computation and science it’s just zeros and ones. So even if somebody does collect it they won’t know what to do with it. And then when it comes back down to you on your device or your desktop or your phone, you put a fingerprint back on it, a neuro fingerprint, a digital fingerprint that says okay this is my data and then I am the one that approves how I use that data. You know this is well beyond the GDPR requirements. HIPAA, HL7.

00:16:56 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:16:57 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

All those standard kind of data protocols.

00:16:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:16:59 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

This must be something that’s protected at the very source.

00:17:02 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, well I mean you know as, as an attorney by trade, you know I always am happy to hear people thinking about it but like yeah, especially with what you’re talking about here there’s this level of sensitivity.

00:17:11 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Well it’s more than sensitivity, it’s criticality I would say, I would offer. So, so people got used to over time, they’re biometric. They should not be as comfortable with their neurodegenerative.

00:17:22 – Trevor Schmidt

Well I mean it’s interesting because like yeah I feel like there’s been a shift and there continues to be a shift but the amount of comfort level we have of just giving away information about ourselves.

00:17:32 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah, take some of our social media. People are willing to give up privacy to have access to certain things. The neuro data though is a different level and we really got to be thoughtful and judicious about how we take an approach to that.

00:17:48 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, well talk to me a bit about how you know there’s going to be a ton of information that you have even once it’s kind of de identified and you know, aggregated together what, what do either you or you kind of the academics you’re working with, what do they see as possible once you have that type of information and from thousands and thousands of people.

00:18:06 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So that’s the metadata that we talked about, that third exchange of the data information. When you combined tens of thousands of individuals in a demographic with their neurodata, for instance, men between the ages of 45 and 55 that have sleep problems, now you’re able to look at that at a longitudinal and a meta level. Now you can draw insights out. Right? AI, machine learning, some of the algorithms are really amazing in terms of how to find those minute differences. But now you can look at it across a demographic, a population. That way you can use that data and then turn it back around and then use that to identify these things earlier, which is pretty powerful.

00:18:49 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, I mean, I just think about it. If you’re trying to do a longitudinal study now, like you said, you have limited ability to collect that information. But if it becomes ubiquitous and this information is out there for most people, so much more you can do with it.

00:19:01 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So that’s the social currency, right? That’s the ability to give back to society. So we are going to offer our consumers really a social credit. So we have a SaaS model, we have a device in a SaaS model. We’re looking at how to monetize this. And certainly we want to give our consumers a return back to them, a financial return. So if our SaaS model is 2999amonth, if they allow us to use their data in a meta level, protect it, we would want to give them a financial credit. But really it’s a more social credit to be part of this movement I was talking about in the very beginning. And when we do this at the longitudinal and meta level, it becomes very, very powerful. And that’s where the value of the company is. That’s where the value of this data becomes. But it all goes back to us protecting it at the very source. Sure.

00:19:46 – Trevor Schmidt

And do you find the kind of the customers you talk to have significant concerns about that or are they just more excited about the opportunity?

00:19:51 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Oh, they do. They absolutely do. And if they don’t, we remind them of that pretty quickly.

00:19:55 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:19:55 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So there’s lots of encryption and protection of data. We’ve seen our data privacy. We say that, and it’s not really there. So we’ve got to do some things fundamentally different. You know, that’s from a tech perspective. On the geopolitical side, some of our competitors are using neurodata to, you know, stimulate and change mood, emotion, Thought process action, and that becomes very, very dangerous.

00:20:22 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure, yeah. I did want to ask you, as you’re compiling this data, do you think of yourself as like an artificial intelligence company? I mean, you talk about a data company, is the AI a part of it?

00:20:33 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So absolutely, it has to be. So the answer is absolutely yes. So the level of artificial intelligence and the speed would be able to find those minute disturbances, anomalies that no human will ever get to, and certainly do it fast enough where we can then turn that around, put it back into the demographics. So Nathan has Ms. Once we identify those indicators through sleep disturbance that are future warnings of ms, now we can codify that and turn that back around to anybody who has Ms. Who’s been diagnosed with Ms. Now we can run a specific Ms. Algorithm against your sleep data and start to look for that specific indicator that says there’s something coming and then early intervention, get in front of it. The other piece that we do with this is we look at the efficacy of protocol and treatment, medications. So is the medication, the treatment or the therapy putting your brain in the right place? If it’s sleep, put it in the right place longer. If it’s a neurological disease, is it identifying early? And if it is early, what do we do? And is the treatment, the medication, the therapies actually reducing the cognitive overload or the cognitive stress at that point?

00:21:42 – Trevor Schmidt

So do you feel like kind of this, this moment we’re having in the entrepreneurial space about AI, is that kind of crowd out conversations about your company at all? Does it just.

00:21:53 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

No, I, I don’t think it crowds out anybody. I think if there’s any business that’s not including AI in their long term product and tech stack and data stack development, then you’re going to miss out. Yeah, but it’s not, it’s not perfect. Right. It requires humans at least today still.

00:22:09 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:22:09 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

And if it doesn’t require humans, then we’re all in trouble. But, but it is absolutely fundamental to the way we should think about, you know, operate. There’s a lot of, a lot of comment on, well, it’s going to take people’s jobs. You know, this is another revolution. We’ve gone through a series of them. There’ll be a number of jobs that will be automated faster, that allows the humans that were in that job to do other value activities. But if you, if you’re not thinking about it, it’s going to run you over.

00:22:33 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So what do you see as the biggest opportunities for the company, let’s say in the next 12 months and then maybe five years on for sure.

00:22:41 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So again, the data correlation studies are critical for us. Once we can prove that, it allows us to accelerate the development of the materials and then from there we can go to market. We believe we’ll be in the market with an MVP in the next 12 to 15 months and that’s in the sleep application. But following that, again that longitudinal analysis, the sooner we can look at those metadata stacks, we can start to look at the neurological disease, the dementias, the Alzheimer’s, the TBI concussive injuries, the mental health piece. That’s, you know, that’s something our society really needs some help on. If we can, we can get to that more rapidly, then that’s, that’s important to us.

00:23:18 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. And then imagine there’s different regulatory hurdles at kind of different stages.

00:23:22 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

There are.

00:23:23 – Trevor Schmidt

How do you think about kind of those hurdles?

00:23:25 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

For sure. So, so we’re going to go to market as a low risk class one FDA device, much like a wearable Fitbit apple, not making any diagnosis, but giving people information. We do see a 510 pathway afterwards that leads to the neuro telemedicine environment and that also leads to kind of the FDA slash insurance ability to kind of validate. There’s lots of precedent or predicates in the market about how to look at certain things a lot in the sleep area so we can follow that pathway so we don’t have to recreate it. But eventually a 510k for some of the neuro medicine capabilities of this would be critical.

00:24:01 – Trevor Schmidt

Now this may, you may have answered this because it may have to do with the longitudinal, not the longitudinal study, but the correlation study. Like what is the thing that keeps you up at night or the biggest hurdle that could kind of keep you from getting to where you need to be.

00:24:14 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So it’s speed and time at this point. We’ve seen the initial studies, every entrepreneur I’ve seen my prototype work, I want to get to the next one. We need to be thoughtful in how we look at these correlative studies because we’re not collecting the same type of EEG data, we’re collecting a different brainwave. And those correlation studies are important because on our prototype we actually have an EEG lead on the forehead. So we’re comparing what we’re collecting versus them. And we don’t need to be perfect to eeg, we just need to collect in a sleep categorization stage. And then once we do that, that opens us to a go to market faster and then it allows us with the actual neurosensing materials. Because there’s a number of materials that we’re reviewing right now. Once we validate that data, we can then go back, be very, very specific with what we’re capturing on what types of materials that allow us to develop the algorithms to say, okay, now we’re looking at sleep.

00:25:05 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. Now I haven’t asked this, but like is, is the, the fibers and the threads that you’re looking to create, is that something that you manufacture? Is that something that you can have to go to another source to manufacture?

00:25:15 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

So we have a number of exciting partners in the materials. I mean, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing is a growth space. There are many textile manufacturers that we’re working with that haven’t thought about conducting materials that we want. So their expertise in development and manufacture is important. We’re the ones kind of writing on the cocktail napkins again, what we’re trying to do. And that collaboration of partnership is pretty amazing. We have some fundamental partners that again, say you’re not allowed to do this. Came back to us after a couple minutes or days and said, let’s think about this a little differently. And now we’re really seeing. So our, our first materials are actually conducting electricity, which is phenomenal. Now we’re going to marry that with the data that we’re collecting, write the right algorithms and then present those data stacks.

00:26:00 – Trevor Schmidt

So I guess as you think about that or as you pitch it to like VCs and other funders, do you view yourself as data? Do you view yourself as like a hardware component? Mix of the above?

00:26:10 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

It really is a mix, but the high values in the data. We say we’re a neurodata company enabled by smart transformative neurosensing materials, but it’s the data component and it’s not collecting more data, it’s collecting the right data and then using that data to make informed decisions. We’re over sensed, we’re overanalyzed today and a lot of people get kind of stuck in that. And we don’t want to add more confusion. We want to be very, very prescriptive in terms of where we use our data. And we want to be complimentary to all the basic biometric information that’s out there as well.

00:26:42 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So I guess as you think about kind of growing this, have you found good support, either personally or kind of in the Wilmington area to kind of encourage you on this journey, or have you found that you’re just out on an island on your own and trying to do your best?

00:26:57 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

The Islands are lonely, but the islands are right, the Outer Banks. So we’re used to that down on the coast. But so for us, we don’t really want a pat on the back and a good game tap. We want the hard questions from the hard people again, the Jim Robertson, the Joe Kalapese, the mentors that we have there. Uncw. All of these individuals and groups come together to support a burgeoning ecosystem called Wilmington. And it continues to gain momentum. And that momentum breeds success, success breeds more energy, and it continues to be kind of an ink spot for us in the Southeast. So all of those together at 100 times a day. I’m thinking about the right person in the Wilmington area or internationally or somewhere on the east coast that can help us. Everybody to a. To a person has been very, very helpful to us.

00:27:44 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s great.

00:27:45 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

And Wilmington is that kind of community where because we’re smaller, we really have to kind of hold hands. And we don’t have the luxury of five or six of these and 10 of those. We’re pretty tight in terms of what we do.

00:27:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, as you think about growth for the company, I mean, do you think you can operate at your current size for, for a while, or do you think you have to add bodies to the.

00:28:07 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

We’re going to add bodies pretty quickly. I mean, one of the things that we did at Philips Medical System is we built a culture of constant innovation because we knew around the world in the medical device space and the information that our competitors were going to copy, steal and return. And so those copyright issues and those technology concerns are still valid. Moore’s Law says it just happens faster. So we would actually do a study to see when we expected our competitors to copy us and deliver, and we would deliver our new product a couple months before that. And it worked. In this space, we have to innovate. So our culture, the people that we’re bringing in must be innovators. You must want to solve a really wicked problem and then must want to solve that problem over and over and over again and continue to integrate into different areas. That’s why we mentioned the human capital and talent in Wilmington. Just because of the sheer size doesn’t have the volume or magnitude, but it’s coming and then we’ll attract it and then we’ll continue and then, you know, our hope is right. Our employees over time spin their own businesses out as well. Yeah, and that, that’s really where it’s the pay it forward kind of give it back model.

00:29:08 – Trevor Schmidt

And do you enjoy that aspect of managing the people.

00:29:11 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah, 100%. Again, this the military. My last job was chief of staff of the Army Reserve Command. So a couple hundred thousand people. You know, it comes down to the people. I mean, you can. You can force a P and L to look one way by offsetting people. That’s a very near term shortsighted model in my mind. But you got to focus on the people. And especially when we’re trying to help people. And not everybody wants to be part of our environment, our movement, and we’re okay with that. But those we attract are pretty passionate about what we do.

00:29:41 – Trevor Schmidt

Talk a little bit about how you manage. Like people who really do want to innovate, you really want to get. How do you focus that team? How do you continue to inspire them to do what they’re really good at?

00:29:50 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Right. So oftentimes it’s a lot of squirrels. People are chasing the squirrels. And you got to put the squirrels in the backyard at least, and then put them in the same tree and then force them on the same acorn. Again, some folks are hyper creative and can follow a little bit of that methodology and not give them absolute A to B to C, but give them kind of boundaries. And then it’s the constant communication. It’s where are we? It’s the look at our product roadmap, it’s the timelines. Where are we on our prototype? How’s that looked? What do we need to do next with either academia or industry to complement each other in parallel pathways? It takes a lot of thought in terms of how to align those resources. And then, you know, we talked about fail fast. You have to hire fast and hire fire faster in some cases. And it’s not meant to be anything but. This relationship didn’t work out. We want you to be successful. And if we do a greater job of looking at the proper lens going into our hiring, then I say hiring either full time or advisors. You know, then it’s a lot easier because we’re aligned in theory, we’re aligned in passion, we’re aligned in intent, and we can work out the other issues from there.

00:30:53 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, are you all based in Wilmington or do you have people kind of on a distributed basis?

00:30:57 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

No, we have folks all over. A lot of our clinicians are outside the Wilmington area. We have a lot of academia from uncw. Again, they’ve been just phenomenal. We have folks all over the country and then soon that’ll grow to be outside the world.

00:31:10 – Trevor Schmidt

And has that been harder to kind of manage a remote team or is that just different problems.

00:31:15 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

No, again, going back to the military. Be very simple, be very clear, and just follow through. There’s no two days that are alike. And, you know, you can spend hours and hours planning, but you have to be built to be flexible and malleable because, you know, you can write yourself a list in the morning of them to do these six things, and you get to one, and then, you know, the day goes sideways. But you got to understand where the priorities are and continue to move that ball.

00:31:35 – Trevor Schmidt

So we are the Founder Shares podcast. And so I like to ask all of my guests, what’s one piece of advice that you would share with somebody who’s thinking about starting a company?

00:31:43 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah, you know, for those who want to be an entrepreneur, just do it. You can sit there and study and research, but you know what? Just do it. Don’t put yourself in a situation where it’s all eggs in one basket. Think about building concepts and ideas and testing those, especially if you have a job. But don’t be afraid to try. And then once you start to kind of think about this entrepreneurial ecosystem and you go to webinars and seminars and you listen to this guy talk, remember that their journey is different than yours. And so the more that you can understand, listen to, you can put that in a basket that says, these are things I want to use. But more important, look at the things that didn’t work and put those in a basket and say, I want to make sure I don’t repeat that mistake. A lot of folks are afraid to try. Give it a whirl, because you don’t want to look back 20 years later and say, boy, I wish I had. And that’s not a fun spot to be.

00:32:33 – Trevor Schmidt

It’s not. Because you can’t go back and get that time again.

00:32:35 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

It’s gone.

00:32:36 – Trevor Schmidt

So how can our listeners connect with you?

00:32:38 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

Yeah, for sure. My email is robareen u r e a m dot com. We’re on LinkedIn. Email me, DM me, find me. I would love to chat with all of you. It’s. And that’s this whole, you know, entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s giving back and helping. Yeah, there’s only so many hours in a day. I do that in the military. I do that in startup world. I do an industry. It’s the way for us, many of us, to be able to continue that give back. And it, again, it’s not a financial thing. I want to make a ton of money. There’s obviously, you need to make money to continue the business. Business but if you can make an impact to society in the fundamental level that we believe we’re going to do with our, with our solutions, it’s fun.

00:33:18 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s amazing. Well, I appreciate you sharing some of your time with us today and we look forward to watching where the movement goes.

00:33:23 – Robert S. Cooley Jr.

It’s awesome. Thanks much.

00:33:24 – Trevor Schmidt

Thanks, Rob. That was Rob Cooley. To learn more about Nareem and its groundbreaking work, visit nareem.com that’s n u r e a m dot com or connect with Rob on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Founder Shares Podcast. If you’re a founder or business owner and need legal advice, be sure to check out our team@hutchlaw.com that’s hutchlaw.com we have the capacity to help you out with just about any legal need your company may be facing. We’re passionate about the innovation of economy and ready to help you on your entrepreneurial journey. The show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Trevor Schmidt and thanks for listening to the Founder Shares Podcast.