Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity.
Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?
Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet".
If he got the K-Sonar approved as a medical device, I think he'd be able to get paid from deep-pocketed insurance companies too.
Improving the range (and doing research on inner-ear microphone implants) could be done in later versions (if mainstream blind customers really are interested in playing tennis, which I am skeptical about). If v1 makes people more independent, that's a huge deal already!
I bet he could get pretty far just by reallocating his existing $200k/year budget to commercializing the technology, which has the potential to be embraced by a lot more people than the blind people he is introduced to (only 10% of whom even get good at echolocation-through-clicking).
Part of it involves surgery - which might be tricky to do incrementally.
It also doesn't sound as though he knows much about startup methodology or has the personality or desire to solve the bootstrapping problem. He's seems like a domain expert but not an entrepreneur.
I guess that means a lot of blind people will have fewer opportunities.
>If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet".
There is an easy(cheap, i'd say tens of dollars, see prices for ultrasound parking sensors) implementable "virtual cane" :
the pair of laser (like in laser pointer) + receiver + small chip which would re-scale the sensor output to the hand from light speed scale (10m / 300000 m/s = 0.00003s ) to the tactile feedback scale - tenths of a second.
The same can be done with ultrasound. The both can be even paired, for precision and cases of say low light (or sound) reflecting surfaces.
The main problem i think is that blind people have their hands full just trying to live the life, while non-blind don't care and or passionate enough to cross the threshold into doing something. The guy in the article is just a miraculous exception.
Unfortunately, medical devices don't really allow incremental development. Studies are incredibly expensive, and relatively minor changes can completely invalidate them.
Even Steve Blank recognizes the model doesn't fit for medical devices.
Peter Thiel? He's a transhumanist, and this seems pretty doable. Anyway, if he hasn't pitched Thiel yet, he should do it, the worst thing that could happen is that Peter says "no, that's not how I want to spend my money", and that'd be fine.
Kickstarter is a great platform for sales and marketing once you've got a functional and scalable prototype. It's not a great place to raise exploratory / research funding.
If you look at the history of Kickstarter's most successful projects, they tend to resemble pre-sales more than "donations." There's usually a product delivered at X level of individual funding, and 90% of the funding comes in at X level.
This model is fantastic for launching new products that are ready to go upon receipt of funding. It's not as successful for raising money for R&D.
I think the jury's still out on Diaspora. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being. That's my polite and respectful way of saying yes to you here.
But it's the case in point. Diaspora raised what would otherwise have been VC or angel dollars. Kickstarter isn't the platform for that. It's a bootstrapping platform optimized for product sales.
The people who succeed on Kickstarter have a) finished or finishable products that b) can be sold via "donations" on Kickstarter. This is because the patrons/backers on Kickstarter are far more likely to fork over their $50 and receive something tangible in return than they are to donate $50 to support a dream.
I'm a big fan of the Kickstarter concept. Huge fan. But human nature dictates the limits and strengths of its use cases. Your audience on Kickstarter is consumers, not financiers. These are consumers who receive no equity or charitable tax deduction for their "donations," and who will thus "donate" primarily in exchange for privileged or early access to a cool product. Or maybe to get their names in the back of the book. Whatever. Point is, they want to buy something. Inevitably, then, it becomes a sales and marketing platform and not a venture capital platform.
It's theoretically possible that the next Apple would come out of Kickstarter, but not the next Facebook.
Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?