Mary Lou Jepsen On Building $100 Laptops And Now Raising $100 Million To Develop Wearable Imaging Devices And Therapeutic Tools

Mary Lou Jepsen is an award-winning, trailblazing technologist, entrepreneur, and creative thinker whose career has spanned some of the most groundbreaking technological advancements–from building holographic video systems to creating the world’s first $100 laptop.

Mary Lou’s latest company, Openwater, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Bold Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures, Plum Alley Investments, and Collab Fund.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Dive deep into technology and science in your early years to build a solid foundation before starting your entrepreneurial journey.
• Transform personal challenges into fuel for innovation and impact, as adversity can foster fearlessness and creativity.
• Break the status quo by addressing large-scale problems with unconventional solutions, such as making technology faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
• Grow as a leader by hiring experts in specialized areas to complement your skills and drive innovation.
• Focus on creating cost-efficient, scalable solutions to revolutionize industries like healthcare, reducing barriers to accessibility.
• Push against anti-innovation tendencies in established industries to unlock transformative possibilities.
• Leverage international manufacturing and partnerships to bring groundbreaking technologies to market quickly and effectively.

 

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About Mary Lou Jepsen:

Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is the founder and CEO of Openwater, whose goal is to put the functionality of MRI imaging into a consumer electronics wearable at comparable resolution.

Implications are broad for detection and treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease, internal bleeding, mental disease, neurodegenerative disease, and beyond—for communication via thought.

Mary Lou was previously the executive director of engineering at Facebook. There, she led various efforts in consumer electronic and software systems, including a continued transformation of the virtual reality experience at Oculus.

Prior to that, she was director of engineering at Google X, where she founded and led two “moonshot” programs for Google co-founder Sergey Brin. She was also previously the CTO of the display division at Intel.

Mary Lou founded or co-founded four startups, including One Laptop per Child, where she was CTO and chief architect of the $100 laptop. She has worked extensively with the Asian manufacturing hubs in Taiwan, China, Japan, and Korea, living in Taiwan for six years.

Her startup CEO experience includes leading the world’s only fabless display screen company based in Taipei. She has previously been a professor at both MITs—at the MIT Media Lab (in Cambridge) and at RMIT (in Australia) on the Computer Science faculty.

Mary Lou earned a PhD in optical physics and a BS in electrical engineering both from Brown University and an ScM in computational holography from the MIT Media Lab.

She is also known for her work as a multimedia artist, primarily in large-scale holography and Moon-TV. She is an inventor on well over 100 published or issued patents.

Mary Lou has been recognized with many honors, including the TIME 100 Most Influential People and The CNN 10: Thinkers. She has received major awards from the various professional societies in her field.

Connect with Mary Lou Jepsen:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Stern Strategy Group
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So today we have a CSUN founder, a founder that has done it you know before, a founder that they has worked with some of the biggest names that they you can think of. And they we’re definitely going to be touching on the building, the scaling, the financing, all of that good stuff that we like to hear.

Alejandro Cremades: but also you know other relevant topics you know like walking away from a salary that pays very well, or why you know you get going you know to begin with, or perhaps how to figure out a business model that is faster and cheaper than perhaps the other people that are really competing directly or indirectly, or let’s say you know the funding cycles. right i mean We’ve seen a lot you know with the markets up and down, with COVID you know lately, so I think it’s Quite a timely a conversation. so Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Mary Lou Jepsen. Welcome to the show.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to spend this time with you.

Alejandro Cremades: so Originally born in a farming Connecticut, how was life growing up for you?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Learn how to build stuff, for sure, and ah you know get dirty. Get your hands dirty. um Also, ah rebuilt car engines. And then I started test driving submarines for my high school job, had a security clearance. Did lots of stuff like that, but really loved math and art and um learned how to build stuff, which has served me well in doing engineering and entrepreneurship.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I guess there’s that’s where the love for math and you know and the creative you know in you, you know perhaps that thing came about. You eventually got into Brown, but I know that the MIT is saying ah university that a a school that you’ve definitely been you know very close to. so

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah, I got a degree from Brown, and then I did my ah did some graduate work. I did a master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab as it was starting off in the 80s.

Alejandro Cremades: So you became you became a professor, you know, as well.

Mary Lou Jepsen: was great.

Alejandro Cremades: So why a professor?

Mary Lou Jepsen: I did I came back in the mid 2000s as a professor there I did my um master’s degree and co created the world’s first holographic video system. So VR but without having to wear something on your head. And just in in thin air projecting video into a room by computing both the phase and interference of of light. So that was a tough project. A lot of people thought it was impossible. We got it done.

Alejandro Cremades: So ah in your in your um basically, in your case, when you were you know doing this, ah definitely one thing that dam that really gave you perspective and changed things was an illness you know that got you into a wheelchair. I think that that kind of like altered the way that you were going about things, the way that you were thinking you know maybe about doing a PhD as well. So what happened?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Sure. As a child, I was sick and often hospitalized and i with unknown diseases. And it became progressively worse in my 20s. And as I was doing a PhD, to the point where I had to drop out. But even when I spent several months as a as a when I was in 13, I just A lot of people thought I would die. They called my parents and told them I was dead. They made a mistake, but that was quite a shake up for the family. Luckily, ah was they got the wrong girl. um But you know the thing is, I just decided then it sort of takes you off the track of this whatever social thing you’re supposed to be. And I just wanted to live before I died.

Mary Lou Jepsen: You know, you get off of the rules of what you should do, be, wear, what color, whatever clothes, lip gloss you’re supposed to wear, all that crap from teenager and dumb. And so I just focused on doing math and art and kept going. But yes, I was in a wheelchair sleeping 20 hours a day, body full of sores, couldn’t move half of my face, and then the worst thing happened. I was doing a PhD in physics at Brown University. I’d come back and with my same professor from undergrad to do a PhD there.

Mary Lou Jepsen: I could no longer subtract. I didn’t think I deserved a PhD in physics. I didn’t tell anybody I couldn’t subtract. I thought that was right. There was no way they could look in my mind and know, but i really I was utterly defeated. Called up my parents, asked them if I could have a room at their house and go home and die, because no one could figure out what I had. I was at Brown University. There was a med school there. They let me see the professors. No one could diagnose my condition.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So um that seemed like it would be kapoots again in my life. But luckily, one of the professors said you have really these blistering headaches. Maybe you should have an MRI. This is 1995. MRI was not standard of care then.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Luckily, he paid for it. I didn’t know I needed it. They found the brain tumor. I got it removed. I petitioned to get back into grad school using the I had a brain tumor excuse that worked. I got the empathy vote. But for the rest of my life, I’ve taken a dozen medications every day or I’ll die. So I still focus on we’re alive now. What do you want to do? So try not every day, but I try to be productive and impactful as I can.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, without a doubt, I’m sure that that thing gave you a ton of perspective and definitely changed the course and the direction for you. And in fact, after this event, you got a bunch of money and you started your first company. So how did that come about?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah, so with two other students, they were at MIT, but i had ah I had been at MIT. I had a close relationship. ah ah We got a $4 million grant from DARPA if we would commercialize together our PhD research. So we started a company, moved to Silicon Valley. and off and running, and then we got, you know, Series A from, you know, Sandal Road, August Capital, others, and we’re shipping in a few years, these liquid crystal and silicon devices that were little tiny screens, but they were HDTV screens in a chip that we were selling for 20 bucks. It was going into virtual reality headsets, Qualcomm smartphones, rear projection systems that were really thin, some that were thick,

Mary Lou Jepsen: Pico projectors, all these kinds of things that weren’t possible until that moment. Going into laptops, going into all different types of things as a way to get to low cost next generation screen technology. So we did a really great job at that.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, after eight years there, you decided it’s time to turn page. So why how did that come about too?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Well, yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: And what was the lesson to be learned?

Mary Lou Jepsen: intel recruited from yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So Intel recruited me as a ah CTO of their display division. And I had some creative differences with a string of CEOs. I was the CTO of technology and creative differences with the CEO who I felt was making that such great decisions.

Mary Lou Jepsen: But what did I know? you know So anyway, I joined Intel. Back when Intel was Intel. And ah they made me chief technology officer of of the display division where we were using Intel silicon to make liquid crystal on silicon devices with the force of Intel behind it.

Mary Lou Jepsen: When we announced it at CES that year in 2004, it raised the market cap by billions of dollars. It was a big splash for Intel to enter into this. So that was exciting.

Alejandro Cremades: So then, so then with this, you know, you eventually, I mean, like we said, you know, MIT, you know, has been there, you know, all along the way. But eventually, you know, you decide ah to go at it again. I mean, as they say, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur entrepreneur, and you went at it with one laptop per child.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes, I went back to MIT to become a professor. I ran into the CEO in an elevator. The main building’s only four floors, but it only took me two sentences to explain why Intel Silicon can never work for screens. He said, come into my office, close the division. I saved him hundreds of millions of dollars. Everybody was mad at me. But it was never going to work. It was my job to speak truth to power. I would utterly collapse, decided I should never do companies again. Got that PhD.

Mary Lou Jepsen: And applied for jobs as a professor, got one and in the final interview for it started one laptop per child which became a billion dollar not for profit, fastest growing consumer electronic category ever recorded started that with the founder of the MIT media lab, much more, you know, well known Nicholas Negroponte and he uh taught me how to become a CEO for sure. I spent more time with him in the next three years than any other human being as we somehow like created this fastest growing consumer electronic product that could transform the lives of kids in the developing world out of nothing but hard work.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, you eventually left that and then all of a sudden you find yourself in China, you know, what what what kind of a,

Mary Lou Jepsen: Oh yeah I love that because the laptop was done and and it made sense I thought to you know, cast the give the baton to the next person because the challenge that from this thing everybody laughed about and thought was a joke that was now shipping, every project I’ve ever done in Ebony Worth, everybody has always thought it was hysterical when I started in and ridiculous and unbelievable impossible and possible.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Just decide what actually would be helpful when you’re telling somebody that is why, what the deliver reason’s underneath, because maybe you know something they don’t know, and then they can correct. But anyway, so it shipped. But I thought an early childhood education expert, particularly in the developing world, would be a good person to take my position. And I wanted to keep pushing the envelope on really innovative hardware, as we’d shown with that $100 laptop. It wasn’t a stripped down laptop. yeah It hasn’t. um It hasn’t ah been matched in many ways in terms of the technology and the the ability of of all the things that we created in it.

Mary Lou Jepsen: And I can explain it, but it might be a side point, different time.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I’d like to hear what happened with China, because i mean that obviously changed the course of things you know with your next business, you know which ultimately led you to so Google.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Oh, yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: so why so So what happened with execute?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah, yeah. so I’ve been traveling to China and shipping with Korea and Japan and Taiwan and Mainland China and Hong Kong, Singapore since 95. We’re now in 2008. I had 13 years of experience under my belt, but now I had access to the $10 billion dollars factories of Asia and had co-created the fastest growing consumer electronic category ever recorded in the netbook.

Mary Lou Jepsen: sir I had some sachet I didn’t have before and ability to work with them and give them what they need. So I thought the best use of me was letting go of the fabulous fabs at MIT that, you know, honestly, a postdoc can make some device once and then it might take another year with the contamination and whatever to get the thing going. You work with a factory and pick the country, Japan, China, whatever. They make one. Three months later, they can make a million.

Mary Lou Jepsen: That’s interesting, but then you got to make a business. But you can move the needle so much faster if you use these processes. I mean, two nanometer is on one place, one factory in Taiwan, right? That’s the place. It’s not really anywhere else if you want to do high quality manufacturing. And that’s that’s really what I wanted to do. So I then slept on the factory floors of ah Asia. for I already would had been doing that, just a lot more of it.

Mary Lou Jepsen: I didn’t really mean to, I had, you know, the company was also based in, in San Francisco, but I spent, I moved to Asia during that. It was 2008. There was a financial crisis. I got series A funding in Q4 2008. I think I’m the only one that did so. So it, uh, of any startup that I’m aware of, uh, the lights are on at the venture capital companies on Sand Hill road. The drinks were free in the fridge, but they weren’t writing checks.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So to come off of something like that, I mean, Time Magazine made me one of the 100 most influential people in the world and invited me to that party. And it was like pretty heady stuff. and And it was all for naught because all of a sudden no one cared because, I mean, the sky really did fall in Q3 2008, if you remember.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I mean, in in in in the end, you ended up going through an acquisition with Google and and obviously working directly with Sergey. So how was it like, they one of the co-founders there, so so how was it like going through a transaction, you know, for you, like going through an acquisition, you know, especially at this point, you know, you were the CEO of the company too.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: So, you know, now you have gone from like the technical level that you were used to, to now leading the range and also leading a transaction of that nature.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Well, very interesting because they were starting and I pitched to Sergey the same thing I pitched um when I wanted to join the Media Lab, brain computer interface. I thought we could do it in 2004. We probably could have. I just realized I could make $100 laptop faster. So did that. Pitched it to Sergey. Sergey loved it.

Mary Lou Jepsen: and wanted me, wanted to buy the company. The company it purchased didn’t go through. This is 2012. And so finally, we made a deal where I would jump. I had founded Pixel Chi, that company after one laptop hotel, that was the name of it, with my husband. So my husband would stay in Taiwan. I would sort of go to Google, but somehow they thought I was Pixel Chi. And I needed the team around me. And so we started contracting with them and eventually um Google let me Apple hire them. They let me buy actually another company too, even though we weren’t supposed to do anything outside of Mountain View. I did make the argument that we’re going to do consumer electronics. It’s kind of expensive to build a factory in Mountain View, California. So anyway, I was allowed to eventually as I gained trust um to bring in the team and Apple hire them and ah also bring in a couple of other

Mary Lou Jepsen: organizations to enable us to scale what we were doing at Google X in consumer electronics that could be rapidly designed and rapidly move the needle on on projects that google that Larry Sergey and Eric Schmidt, who was still there, really wanted to have happen.

Alejandro Cremades: So eventually you also, I mean, it’s amazing because all of a sudden you find yourself working with some of the biggest names.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So what’s the moonshot?

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, Sergei, Eric Schmidt, as you were pointing to, or Larry, but then also Mark Zuckerberg.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: How does Mark Zuckerberg get into the picture?

Mary Lou Jepsen: He buys this company called Oculus. Young Palmer Lucky got everyone excited about VR again. And he buys it for a few billion dollars. I think Palmer’s like 21 at that time. He’s wonderful, amazing. He’s got another gazillion dollar company now called Andarol that’s doing release.

Mary Lou Jepsen: interesting stuff and and and certainly um so he bought that he really wanted VR he he loved VR clearly changed the name of the company to meta because he loves it so much he’s invested a hundred billion dollars into it over the last decade it’s astonishing I didn’t actually understand that he would do all that but they were looking for somebody since that team was really good at gaming like they had John Carmack who you know, look at the top software programmers in the world, the top 10 individuals, he’s always somewhere on that list. He wrote like major video games in the 90s, basically single-handedly. Anyway, they had people like him, but they didn’t have anybody that had shipped at scale, devices that were distinguished by the screen and the optics and creative ways in what we needed to do.

Mary Lou Jepsen: for next generation high fidelity VR and AR. No one wants to wear a shoe box on your face. It’s not, I mean, it’s fine that they, you know, did it pretty well on the Oculus Quest One and Quest Two is better. ah But, you know, where we were really directionally going is to either nothing or there’s one thing that’s acceptable to wear on your face. I’m wearing it as a pair of eyeglasses. I don’t have to charge it up, et cetera, et cetera. It’s like, that’s what’s acceptable socially. I had seen what had happened with Google Glass.

Mary Lou Jepsen: I mean, you got a product problem when you’re called a glass hole thing. You know, there’s also social issues. So anyway, so I helped them a lot with that with um things that I think are finally coming to light, the sunglasses, VR, AR toggle with extraordinary fidelity and field of view. But also a lot of me is in the Oculus Quest too. But, you know, when you now have so many people involved and, you know, frankly,

Mary Lou Jepsen: people that didn’t understand even the technology and didn’t care to understand it, they really wanted their positions. I got, you know, I got it. It’s large company. I know like you got to do these things, but at some point, you know, I did what I could and I said, you know, like,

Mary Lou Jepsen: Whatever, it’s it’s I love startups because they’re small trusted teams that develop this extraordinary trust. In large organizations, moving the mindset of it is slog.

Mary Lou Jepsen: And so at Google, at Facebook, and you know, at Intel, there were these huge um barriers, it’s because we always did it that way, like at Intel, they had ratification committees on ratification committees, because whatever, you get a bit wrong, Wells Fargo loses a billion dollars, they had to do it.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah.

Mary Lou Jepsen: But in a new business initiative, where it doesn’t really matter if you get a bit wrong on a screen, like, you didn’t really need to do that. So a lot of this stuff, and particularly at Facebook, at that time, it was a younger company. Really, the executives in charge were excellent at optimizing click-through revenue for ad sales, because let’s face it, that’s what’s made the money in technology, social media, et cetera. I just got frustrated with the decision-making, and I just you know and just like, whatever, there’s enough people, Mark’s going to spend enough money. It shouldn’t be me that has to point out that $100 billion dollars to get to where they’ve gotten was not efficient spending of the money.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah.

Mary Lou Jepsen: kind of crazy.

Alejandro Cremades: but I mean you you also you also had the entrepreneur in you. So it was just a matter a matter of time until you got started with your next thing which ended up becoming open water.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yeah, I wanted to do. I love VR and AR. I do and um getting rid of all of that and I still am working on that on my my own, but not VR and AR.

Mary Lou Jepsen: But I think everybody wants a million dollar view. i do In pandemic, as you know, I do a lot of art. So I’m working on an art project to just give everyone a million dollar view with screens that are literally about $20 a square foot LCD screens, because screens happened and with amorphous silicon. And just you have a 3D and you take the content and you’re able then to feel like you’re anywhere, over the Eiffel Tower, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, on the moon, wherever. And it can give, because ah especially in pandemic, people move to have a more beautiful place to live. What if you could just…

Mary Lou Jepsen: put that in and not 2D, but like feel like you’re in the space and have it move and react and be correct in the lighting and all of that. We have all the footage. It’s easy to do. So anyway, I just had, I had some differences of opinion as usual and like that, but I just thought that what really everybody thought was nuts. When I tried to convince Sergey to do this, when I tried to convince Intel, MIT and Mark, they said great. And then they said, well, we really needed to do this. And that’s true. They really didn’t need to do this.

Mary Lou Jepsen: But I felt, especially like now that I had some money, somebody has to try this. Why not me? Because I really deeply think that it’s possible by modulating the phase of infrared light that penetrates our body, ultrasound and electromagnetics, to fundamentally selectively treat cells are this at a cellular level, cancer cells, not healthy tissue, turn on and off neurons, senescent cells, stem cells,

Mary Lou Jepsen: deactivate pathogens and so forth. So that was hard to get funding for because that sounds you know stark raving, which is why I think you can do it. But i started ah it was easy for me with my track record to get funding for it. Seed funding was easy. People were competing. I self-funded for a while, and then they just kept calling. and like very famous names and you know I picked some. Series A was relatively easy, but the R and&D for this was hard and it took a while. And in in medical devices, it takes a while to ah ship um because you need FDA approval. And there was a comprehensive paper published two years ago of every complex new therapeutic medical device that’s gotten regulatory approval in the last 30 years.

Mary Lou Jepsen: translated into 2024 dollars. And the summary is 700 million dollars, capitalized cost in 13 years. That’s the problem with improving healthcare. care And that’s why we have these 20 to 40 year moats where the expenses stay high. The um MRI machine that saved my life in 1995, is that better, faster, or cheaper? No, same price. It’s actually more expensive. It’s now a profit center for hospitals. It’s about 10 times more expensive because they get 90% gross margin on it.

Mary Lou Jepsen: where before it was standard of care, they didn’t do that. They were trying to get it into the system. And so you look at the system and like literally this week we had a headline in the Wall Street Journal saying, aren’t we justified in murdering healthcare care CEOs? I think absolutely not. I was just really surprised. What we have to do is make it better, faster and cheaper. And what we’re doing at Open Water,

Mary Lou Jepsen: And our results in the clinic so far are astonishing. We are curing mice of glioblastoma, 100% deadly form of human brain cancer. But not, the implications aren’t just on glioblastoma, it’s all aggressive cancers because they all have a mechanical property that we can exploit. They have a huge nucleus, small cytoplasm. We can exploit that like an opera singer can ping a wine glass, match the note that she hears, and destroy the wine glass and harm nothing else in the room.

Mary Lou Jepsen: It is literally what we’re doing with cancer cells. We change the frequency. We’re turning on and off neurons and taking people with severe treatment depression severe treatment-resistant depression out of it. Almost half of the people in our first study came out of it because you can see the signature of the overfiring neurons from depression almost like you can see a tumor in an um MRI. You see them, but by focusing ultrasound on them. These are diagnostic levels of ultrasound proven safe for 100 years on billions of people, including the last 50 years on pregnant women and their fetuses in the rich countries.

Mary Lou Jepsen: so it’s

Alejandro Cremades: So so let let let me ask you this you know as as you’re talking about this. If you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of open water is fully realized, what does that look like?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Hospitals are over. ah healthcare care costs go down. They’re right now 25% of our economy in the US. We can’t keep doubling. Well, actually we can double one more time than it’s existential. So we fixed that. And we learn more about biology than ever before possible because we create basically something like the smartphone. So we live in a world where people are trying to create these, but they’re big.

Mary Lou Jepsen: And they’re about a million it takes whatever c by the time you get approval and reimbursement, it’s about $1.5 billion dollars for a new device. Do a single rare disease, what do you charge for it? 5,000 people have that disease. A million dollars of treatment. That’s the world we live in right now. The problem is $700 million dollars in 13 years.

Mary Lou Jepsen: The problem for drugs is 26 years and $3 billion. dollars And so if you’re going to make a company that moves the needle on health care, you have to figure out how to move it fast. And so for that, I open sourced the company, which made my investors crazy because they yelled at me because they thought open source was a synonym for a charity. I’m like, no.

Mary Lou Jepsen: free as in speech, not free as in beer, et cetera, et cetera. But by open sourcing it, when you look at the cost of what that $700 million dollars is in those 13 years, 85% of that capitalized cost is the device development. 7% is safety and then the rest. And since you’re paying this compound interest of 8% a year, there’s a nonlinearity to it,

Mary Lou Jepsen: we can reduce the approval costs to one to $5 million dollars in one to two years. That’s all of a sudden fundable by existing mechanisms like venture capital, like a lot of different things. And so by making this platform, since we have a platform of being able, we’ve made ultrasounds so you can sort of pick any note over many octaves and any rhythm.

Mary Lou Jepsen: We also have a ah very beautiful thing that sees blood flow 20 times more accurately than by some measures than a multimillion dollar MRI using $1 camera chips and a smartphone and a laser that was a pain to design, but I’ve got it here now. It’s a diode laser that’s this size that’s going into production right now. So that ah allows us to do things like see blood flow for stroke.

Mary Lou Jepsen: which is the number two killer in the world and is a time to diagnosis issue. So this is this laser that works with eight smartphone chips. And this laser allows us to take holograms of the body. And so we see that we take the lenses off the camera chips. And what we see are look like waves on the ocean. And we read those waves like a sailor can read the waves on the ocean and know where the fish are, where the land is.

Mary Lou Jepsen: We know whether you’re having a stroke or not. According to, we did a two years of study at University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University. Nothing to do with my relationship there. Literally, there’s a guy there that changed the standard of care for stroke with one year and one paper. That’s why we worked with him. um Amazing, because we want to change things fast. And so how do you speed things up? You work with everybody else that wants to do it fast and and just do it fast. So we’re using, we’re making these things these,

Mary Lou Jepsen: This is the system for the head, but we’re also working on pathogen deactivation and amyloid um micro clot removal, like which is a hallmark of neurodegenerative disease, long COVID, diabetes, and um right.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I mean, if you guys are able to execute on this, it sounds like ah like a beautiful world, right? You know, the division being ah being realized. I guess, so obviously, for this too, it sounds like it’s capital intensive as well, right?

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, you guys have raised a about $100 million, sorry.

Mary Lou Jepsen: million.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah, so which is amazing.

Mary Lou Jepsen: We’ve got 48 million in the bank right now. Eight-year-old company. Start the company. we have to But we’re scaling up to ship these in the very factories that make our smartphones and laptops, the ones I’ve lived and breathed in for 30 years now to date myself.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So good relationships with them. Great team, by the way. Incredible team um on on hardware in particular. But the thing is, rather than going for a single rare disease of a few thousand people and it taking, what, 13 to 20 years by the time you get a reimbursement and spending $1.5 billion, a billion dollars, call it a billion dollars, what do you charge for it? A million dollars a piece. If this is good for so many different diseases, you sell millions of them. You make $100 a device. It’s a lot more money and it’s a lot faster. It’s a much better business and it’s much better for the world.

Mary Lou Jepsen: than business as usual in healthcare. care with the twenty to forty You don’t need a 20 to 40 year moat. Healthcare care is anti-innovation. And the very thing that kills us, that kills 55 million people a year more than wars is anti-innovation.

Mary Lou Jepsen: And is structurally, what you have to do is get more data. A regulatory agency, FDA, or whatever, pick the country. And we’re working with lots of different countries. Countries will own their own approvals, no drug shortages. This transcends drugs. So what do you need drugs for when you can selectively kill a cancer cell like an opera singer with a wine glass or turn on and off neurons exactly where they’re overfiring, stimulate stem cells, deactivate pathogens, wherever they are.

Mary Lou Jepsen: or amyloid. All of this is in research. None of it is FDA approved, but we’re shipping the devices as R&D. You can get them on our website now and start your approval process. ah so i and we are helping by We have requested everybody share safety data because you benefit from that. If you share safety data across all the trials, we should be in 100 clinical trials next year, which is for scale.

Mary Lou Jepsen: more than CRISPR, which, when the Nobel Prize and everybody’s heard of, 100 clinical trials. What is a regulator going to do with 100 times more data than they’ve ever had before? Will that make it easier or harder to approve the risk factor of the device? And what’s a doctor and patient going to do with 100 times more data than they’ve had before? We make money. We make a lot more money than the other way, but we in the limit as we approach this can save a lot more people too and it just surprises me like silicon and software and open source have changed every other industry in the last 30 years but somehow they’ve been blocked from healthcare care so lots are coming in hopefully

Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. And obviously, lots of lessons learned along the way too. And I want to and i want to touch on that you know real quick. If I was to put you into a time machine and I was to bring you back to the 90s, to that moment where you were getting started with your first day baby, with your first company, and and you had the opportunity of seeing that younger self and being able to give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a company, what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Mary Lou Jepsen: I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur. It just became the fastest way to get things done and have impact. I think those early years getting very good at and very deep dives in a variety of technology can make you so much better when you take that entrepreneur journey, especially if you do, if you do tack, because you have to have understand the tack, not just what people tell you the limits are. And so I think that’s very important. Elon says first principles and I’m like, well,

Mary Lou Jepsen: first principles. In science, that’s Aristotle. In Oxford, it was banned for you to deviate from Aristotle thought, which is why like Newton and Galileo, they were not a are at Oxford. So I wouldn’t say first principles, but like many principles and find what people dismissed before. But you can’t do that without deeply understanding the schools of thought and innovating yourself, I think, in technology.

Mary Lou Jepsen: But then you have to grow up and let go of it and hire people better than you in the interesting areas that they can go deep in. That’s another problem. So the one thing would probably be do the deep dives get really good until you’re about 25, then do the startup, maybe around then. Don’t wait too long.

Alejandro Cremades: So for the that’s amazing, Mary. For the people that are listening that they would love to ah reach out and say hi, and then also to learn more about what you guys are doing, what is the best way for them to do so?

Mary Lou Jepsen: community at openwonder.health. That’s our community site. Or join our Discord channel, which is openwonder.health.

Alejandro Cremades: amazing Well, hey well easy novel Mary, thank you so much for being on the Deal Maker Show today. it has been an absolute honor to have you with us

Mary Lou Jepsen: Thank you very much. This is great. Huge fan of the show. Learn a lot. Thank you.

*****

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