This Innovator-Entrepreneur Built $100 Laptops And Now Raised $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 journey is a masterclass in resilience, innovation, and impact. Through the highs and lows of her personal and professional life, she has demonstrated the power of perseverance and the importance of challenging the status quo.

In this in-depth interview, Mary Lou talks about walking away from a salary that paid very well and figuring out a business model that is faster and cheaper than direct and indirect competitors. She reveals her experiences with funding cycles and fluctuating market conditions during COVID-19.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Childhood of Curiosity and Challenges

Born in rural Connecticut, Mary Lou grew up on a farm, learning the value of hard work and hands-on problem-solving. By high school, her penchant for engineering was already evident—she rebuilt car engines and test-drove submarines as a part-time job while holding a security clearance.

Mary Lou recalls loving math and art and learning how to build things–which would later serve her well in engineering and entrepreneurship. Despite her creative brilliance, her early years were marked by significant health challenges.

As a child and later as a young adult, Mary Lou battled undiagnosed illnesses that left her hospitalized for long stretches and, at one point, confined to a wheelchair. The disease grew progressively worse by the time she reached her 20s.

These experiences gave Mary Lou a unique perspective on life. “I decided then that I wanted to live before I died,” she recalls, emphasizing how adversity shaped her fearless approach to life and work.

Through the challenges of spending 20 hours a day in her wheelchair, Mary Lou did her PhD in physics at Brown University.

Breaking New Ground in Education and Innovation

Mary Lou’s academic journey took her from Brown University to the MIT Media Lab, where she got her Master’s degree and co-created the world’s first holographic video system. This revolutionary technology projected images into thin air without needing a headset.

Looking back, Mary Lou recalls how in the late 80s, as a graduate student, she led an early peek into the possibilities of VR and AR without wearing anything on your face. 3D true-holographic video was projected into a room by computing the phase and interference of light.

While completing her PhD at Brown, Mary Lou’s health worsened, culminating in the discovery of a brain tumor. She remembers one of the professors suggesting she get an MRI because of the blistering headaches she battled. In 1995, MRIs were not a standard of care.

After successful surgery and months of recovery, Mary Lou returned to graduate school, channeling her near-death experience into an unstoppable drive to make an impact.

The Birth of an Entrepreneurial Vision

Armed with a $4M DARPA grant, Mary Lou and two colleagues from MIT founded her first company in Silicon Valley. The venture focused on creating cutting-edge liquid crystals on silicon (LCoS) devices.

These devices were tiny HDTV screens in a chip costing just $20. They became integral to the VR headsets, Qualcomm smartphones, rear projection systems of the early 2000s, and Pico projectors. When integrated into laptops, the technology resulted in low-cost, next-gen screens.

The company attracted series A funding from top-tier investors from Sand Hill Road, including August Capital. Thanks to its groundbreaking technology, it flourished, offering high-quality displays at unprecedented affordability.

After eight successful years, Mary Lou pivoted, joining Intel as the Chief Technology Officer of their display division. Her contributions, such as using Intel silicon to make liquid crystals on silicon devices, led to groundbreaking advancements that significantly boosted Intel’s market value.

Mary Lou recalls how Intel’s CES launch raised the market cap by billions of dollars, which was very exciting. However, creative differences prompted her to leave the corporate world and embrace her entrepreneurial roots.

Changing the World with One Laptop per Child

Mary Lou’s next venture, One Laptop per Child, became a global sensation. It quickly became a billion-dollar, not-for-profit, fastest-growing consumer electronic category ever recorded. Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab co-founded the project.

The initiative aimed to create affordable, durable laptops for children in developing countries. The $100 laptop wasn’t just a stripped-down version of existing devices; it was an engineering marvel designed to withstand harsh environments while enabling connectivity and education.

This endeavor was much ahead of its time, proving the skeptics wrong and showcasing Mary Lou’s knack for making the impossible possible. Eventually, she brought in an early childhood education expert specializing in the developing world to take her position.

Pioneering Manufacturing in Asia

After her work with One Laptop Per Child, Mary Lou shifted her focus to Asia’s manufacturing hubs, recognizing the potential of leveraging their advanced, high-quality production capabilities.

Mary Lou’s deep understanding of manufacturing processes and commitment to pushing technological boundaries allowed her to scale projects at lightning speed. Looking back at the project, she explains how she had been traveling to China since 1995.

Mary Lou had 13 years of experience shipping with countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. She also had access to $10B factories in Asia and had co-created the fastest-growing consumer electronic category ever recorded in the netbook.

Mary Lou reveals how she successfully got series A funding in Q4 2008 during the financial crisis. Her achievement earned the title of TIME 100 Most Influential People and The CNN 10: Thinkers. The crisis ultimately led to Google acquiring the company–another exciting experience.

Mary Lou’s reputation as a visionary brought her into collaboration with some of the biggest names in tech. At Google, she worked with Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt on moonshot projects, driving innovation in consumer electronics. She pitched the idea of making $100 laptops faster.

That’s how Mary Lou co-founded Pixel Qi, a company that created innovative, energy-efficient displays. Later, Meta sought her expertise, where she helped advance VR and AR technology, shaping the future of immersive experiences alongside visionaries like Mark Zuckerberg.

Collaborating with Tech Titans

Soon, Mary Lou was working with some of the biggest names on the tech scene, like Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. She talks about how Mark had bought Oculus from Palmer Luckey for a few billion dollars.

Mark was very enthusiastic about VR, so much so that he changed the company’s name to Meta. He also invested $100B into the concept over the last decade. They had been looking for the top 10 software programmers in the world, including individuals like John Cormack.

John had written major video games in the 90s, almost single-handedly. Mary Lou started working on the optics and screens needed for the next generation of high-fidelity VR and AR. They wanted to develop more compact devices, eventually creating Oculus Quest One and Quest Two.

Mary Lou helped with the sunglasses, VR, and AR toggles, which had extraordinary fidelity and field of view. Once again, creative differences led her to move on to the startup world. She had encountered barriers like ratification committees and small errors leading to losses worth billions.

The pressures of cost-efficiency and complicated decision-making processes were frustrating. However, Mary Lou still loved AR/VR and wanted to continue working in the sphere during her creative time during the COVID lockdowns.

She started working on a new project to give users a million-dollar view with innovative screens and no VR shoebox to wear on their heads. These amorphous silicon screens are about $20 a square foot LCD screens and could deliver the 3D effect.

They could make users feel like they were traveling anywhere in the world during COVID-19. That could include the Eiffel Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, and other locations.

Revolutionizing Healthcare with Laser and Smartphone Technology

Mary Lou started to think about the possibilities of modulating the phase of infrared light that penetrates the human body through ultrasound and electromagnetics. What if they could selectively treat cancer cells at a cellular level?

They could avoid healthy tissue, turn neurons, senescent cells, and stem cells on and off, deactivate pathogens, and more. Getting funding for the Openwater project was challenging, but thanks to Mary Lou’s track record, she got seed funding to supplement her bootstrapping.

The R&D phase at Openwater was time-consuming, and since it was the medical devices sphere, the company also had to get FDA approval.

Going back over the last 30 years to research for information about FDA approval, Mary Lou found that medical devices like MRIs are at the profit center of hospitals with a 90% gross margin. This is why they are 10 times more expensive.

Mary Lou was determined to make technology faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Her initiatives have led to the development of treatments to achieve remission of Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) in mice. This disease is a 100% deadly form of human brain cancer.

Mary Lou explains that they can use the technique to treat aggressive cancers that have a mechanical property they can exploit, like a huge nucleus and small cytoplasm. As a result, they can isolate and target diseased cells without affecting healthy cells.

This is what they are doing with cancer cells. They change the frequency by turning neurons on and off and taking people with severe treatment-resistant depression out of it. Close to 50% of the people in their first study demonstrated the signature of depression-triggered overfiring neurons.

Their treatment uses diagnostic levels of ultrasound that have proven safe for over 100 years on billions of people, including the last 50 years on pregnant women and their fetuses in rich countries.

The Vision for Openwater

Talking about her vision for Openwater, Mary Lou reveals that she would like to see a world where healthcare costs that comprise 25% of the economy in the US are going down. At the moment, building a new medical device may take about $0.5B.

But, when manufacturers get approval and reimbursement, the device costs $1.5B. If 5,000 people have the disease the device will treat, it costs $1M in treatments. A company would have to move fast to move the needle on health care.

Mary Lou open-sourced Openwater against her investors’ advice. As she sees it, of the cost of $700M in 13 years, 85% is the capitalized cost of device development, and 7% is safety. Since the cost incurs a compound interest of 8% a year, there’s a nonlinearity to it.

Lowering the FDA approval costs to $1M to $5M in a couple of years makes it fundable by existing mechanisms like venture capital. Thus, at Openwater, they have built ultrasounds that can pick any note over octaves and any rhythm.

Mary Lou gives an example of an innovation. This device uses a $1 camera chip, a smartphone, and a laser to measure blood flow with 20 times more accuracy than some multimillion-dollar MRIs.

The compact diode laser, which Mary Lou describes as challenging to design but now entering production has profound implications for stroke diagnosis–the world’s second-leading cause of death, which takes a long time to diagnose.

The device works with eight smartphone chips, creating holograms of the body by removing the lenses from the camera chips. The resulting images, resembling waves on the ocean, are analyzed to detect strokes with precision.

Backed by two years of research at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, Mary Lou’s system promises to accelerate diagnosis and improve outcomes dramatically.

Broad Applications and a New Paradigm for Disease Treatment

The potential applications of Mary Lou’s technology extend far beyond stroke diagnosis. Her team is exploring pathogen deactivation and the removal of amyloid micro clots associated with neurodegenerative diseases, long-term COVID-19, and diabetes.

Mary Lou talks about her ability to scale operations in collaboration with the same factories that produce smartphones and laptops. With $100M in the bank and an eight-year-old company, she emphasizes the importance of strong industry relationships and a talented hardware team.

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Mary Lou’s approach is different, unlike traditional healthcare models that focus on single rare diseases and require decades of development and billions in investment.

Her devices are designed for scalability and can be sold in the millions at a fraction of the cost, making healthcare innovation faster, more accessible, and better for the world.

The Openwater business model challenges the status quo of healthcare, which Mary Lou describes as “anti-innovation,” structurally resistant to change despite the immense potential to save lives and reduce costs.

Openwater devices go beyond conventional treatments by offering solutions that selectively target cancer cells or fine-tune neurons without drugs.

These groundbreaking advancements demonstrate how technology can address widespread health challenges efficiently and affordably. Mary Lou reveals that they work in multiple countries, shipping devices as R&D.

Customers can purchase the devices on the Openwater website and start their approval processes with the FDA or its equivalent in their country. They are requested to share their safety data across all the trials, which can benefit others. Mary Lou estimates at least 100 clinical trials by next year.

Lessons from the Journey

Despite not originally planning to become an entrepreneur, Mary Lou found it the fastest way to drive impactful change. Her advice to aspiring innovators is rooted in mastering technology deeply before starting a venture.

She emphasizes the importance of understanding “many principles” of science and technology rather than limiting oneself to accepted norms. Innovating, she argues, requires both rigorous knowledge of existing schools of thought and the courage to challenge them.

Finally, Mary Lou underscores the necessity of growing as a leader by building a team of experts who can explore areas beyond her expertise.

Her journey illustrates how technological innovation and bold entrepreneurial vision can challenge entrenched systems and pave the way for transformative change in healthcare. Her story is not just one of innovation but of the indomitable human spirit.

Listen  to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• 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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