Charles Wu

Wait, wait. Okay, before we start, I heard that you've been here for over two and a half minutes. Well, I was here when you started interviewing the girl. Oh. With the, what is it, the space material? Yeah. And then the other dude you just did. Yeah. And I'm still chilling here. So you've been here for over 12 minutes right now. Tell me, what's your name, where are you building? My name's Charles. I actually run a small little family office. But I also like to stay busy, so I funded my own little medical device company. So you are running a family office, you're building a startup. What makes you tick? How did you make your money initially? My first business was in the telecommunications space. So that's... That was around wireless and then my second business was in the fintech space. So that was in the payment processing and then I've done a few other things along the way. How many companies have you built? Well, you know, there's the ones that succeed and then there's lots of failures. So bringing back to that first company that you built, what was the moment for you that you thought to yourself, I need to build a company for myself? Well, it was actually the moment before. So I had... I've always been a person that, like, things have to make sense. Yeah. And I actually had a summer internship in Wall Street. And it just didn't make any sense and I didn't want to work. So I just started working for myself and then one thing led to another. So you spent one summer in Wall Street. That convinced you that you are... You can't be employed. Now you want to build a company. It just made more sense to, like, if I build a business, I get to just do stuff. Yeah. Versus if I work somewhere else, it's very political. You just kind of hang out and that's just not my vibe. Tell me more about the medical device company that you're building. Before that, what was the motivation behind building it? Well, the main motivation is my daughter is studying biomedical engineering in Baltimore right now. And she's 21. And she has a bit of an entrepreneurial bug. And me as a parent, I'm not saying business isn't interesting, but at this point, it's all the same s***. So I felt if I got into regulated medicine, when she graduates and starts her career, I'll be relevant as a parent. So the best way to start is to get started. So I got into the medical device space. And what's the medical device that you're building? Primarily, we're focused on upper airway visualization. So technically, the term is nasal endoscopy. And that's traditionally a surgical procedure. And what we're trying to do is we've unbundled the technology from the interpretation so that it's more available for allergists, sleep doctors, pulmonologists, eventually primary care, and things like that. So if you think of the analogy, we're doing for ENT what happened in radiology over the last 25 years. Do you have any medical, do you have any biotech or medical experience before building this? I have more of a technology. My partner in the business is an ENT, so he's an actual physician. And I'm just a very curious individual. So we just started talking. We had to solve some problems, and it just made sense. And what's the hardest part of building this startup? It's more patience. You know, in my other life, I still own a business in the family office that does over $100 million in revenues. And you know, I'm not like, you know, I've done okay in life. And now I'm back to bootstrapping and cleaning toilets and doing everything. And I have to stay humble and just build a business from scratch. What's next for you? What's next for the company? Well, right now, we're out of paid pilots, and we're in customer acquisition. Our goal in Q4 is to sign on, you know, 20 customers. And then going into Q1, we want to keep signing on more customers and blocking and tackling. Buddy, we've been talking for almost five minutes. You've been here for almost 12 minutes. I think that counts as 17 minutes. I think you might have the record. Oh, yeah. Yeah? All right. Who do you want to talk to? Who's your customers? My customer today is allergists. So allergists either in independent practices or private equity-owned allergy groups.