In a follow-up to our recent episode featuring Optios’ CEO David Bach, M.D., today Hall welcomes both David and Paul Sajda, Ph.D. professor at Columbia University to discuss the science behind Optios.

Optios is a leader in the rapidly-emerging neuro-­performance industry. Based on more than a decade of work at DARPA, hundreds-of-millions of dollars of proprietary research, and close partnerships with the world’s most elite organizations, Optios’ guiding mission is to build an intellectual framework and platform that supports the next phase in human development. Neuroscience is the next frontier in management. Optimizing leaders’ brains will soon be a critical source of competitive advantage in the business world.

David Bach, M.D. is a Harvard-trained scientist. Prior to founding Optios, David was a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, management consultant, scientist, physician, martial artist, and professional cellist. As an entrepreneur, he founded and built three prior companies: Touchstone Health, Empyrean Benefit Solutions, and Leprechaun HCC Management. Each of these became a $200M+ enterprise. His venture capital experience was with TA Associates in Boston. 

After spending a decade maximizing his physical and mental performance, David created Optios to bring scientific rigor to, and create commercial applications in, the rapidly-expanding arena of applied neuroscience.

David attended Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. His scientific training was at The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Paul Sajda, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Radiology at Columbia University and Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia, Paul was the head of Image and Signal Processing at Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, NJ. His areas of expertise include computational and experimental neuroscience, neuroimaging, neural engineering, and computational modeling. He has received numerous awards for his research, including an NSF CAREER Award, and has been elected a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

You can visit Optios at www.optios.com.   

David can be contacted via email at david@optios.com and Paul can be contacted via email at pauls@optios.com. 

Hello, this is Hall T. Martin with the Startup Funding Espresso -- your daily shot of startup funding and investing.

Raising a fund is hard.  Aside from sales, this is one of the hardest things to do in a startup.

Here are a few points to remember in your fundraise:

• Build relationships first and find investors second.
• Divide your raise into tranches and give yourself a reasonable timeline for each tranche.
• Investors will critique the business. Consider your business as an operational machine with the investor showing how to make it better. 
• Perform as much diligence on the investor as they are performing on you.
• Investors follow a common funding strategy and will run in a herd-like manner. Get a sense of which way it is going with your deal and adjust your approach.
• Just as you tailor the sale to the customer, so tailor your pitch to the investor. For example, do they appreciate impact deals? Do they want to see strong traction? -- adjust accordingly.
• Start meetings with those you know and can give you real feedback as this will be useful later with other investors.
• If your deal is complex or in an unknown sector, then use analogies to help them understand the value of your deal.

It’s a process -- for every 10 prospects you’ll get 8 “Nos”, 1 maybe, and eventually 1 “Yes”.

Keep going ‘til the money is in the bank.  


Thank you for joining us for the Startup Funding Espresso where we help startups and investors connect for funding.

Let’s go startup something today.
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