The past few weeks have been some of the wildest and most fun of our lives. Things are picking up, and they don't look like they're going to slow down anytime soon. The Glass app market will be a gold rush, and we're gold miners. By the way, we're looking for folks to sell us pickaxes and solve theauthentication problem that every enterprise Glass app must deal with. If you were looking for a free million dollar Glass idea, there you go. Pristine will be your first customer and partner.
A quick recap of the past few weeks:
1) We hired our first non-founding employee, and we're in the process of hiring two more full time engineers. These days I spend north of 50% of my time recruiting so that Patrick and the engineering team can continue to make the magic happen all day everyday. We're looking for crazy. If you know any crazy engineers, we're hiring. Folks can apply here.
2) I also listed a job posting on the HIStalk jobs boards for Director of Sales and Business Development. I know that finding an exceptional sales-director will take a couple of months. I'm excited to play poker with lots of these folks over the coming months before placing a bet.
3) I presented at the MedCity Converge Conference in Philadelphia and CouchSurfed for the first time ever. It was awesome. I met a host of talented and connected individuals, partners, and my only non-anonymous HIStalk colleague, Dr. Travis Good, for the first time. Also, I need send out a huge thank you to Chris Seper and Veronica Combs from MedCity Media for organizing the event and inviting Pristine. Thanks Chris and Veronica!
4) I went to LA, and signed one of the most desirable pilot sites ever. They jokingly asked to start piloting the very next day. Even the IT team was excited. It was amazing to witness an IT team drive a bleeding edge, non-government mandated project. They're even more excited about Glass's potential in the OR than we are, if that's even possible.
5) Patrick and I went to Phoenix to speak with another super-incredible pilot site. We're working through the paperwork now. I really can't express how qualified these two organizations are to pilot our software. They are some of the best conceivable organizations that could possibly pilot Pristine's software and services. Monday July 15th (LA) and Wednesday July 17th (Phoenix) were quite possibly the best days of our lives, though they may not be for very long as things pick up :).
6) We raised an additional $100k in funding from a number of angels, bringing our committed total to $200k, and we've found an angel that wants to close the rest of the round ASAP. The dollars are flowing! It's not too late to invest though. If you or anyone that you know would like to invest, please reach out offline and I can walk you through our investor package.
7) The media has been nothing but supportive. I've done video interviews for a handful of media outlets, and folks have been writing about us on almost a daily basis for weeks, especially the MedCity folks during the Converge conference. Additionally, I'd like to give a special shout out to Dr. Charles Webster, blogger and tweeter extraordinaire, for running a 10-part series on Pristine. Thanks Chuck!
Looking forward, we have some exciting stuff in the pipeline:
I'm going to San Fransisco July 25th - 29th to meet with a host of angels, VCs, partners, and for a family wedding. Then I'm going to NYC July 30th - Aug 5 for more angel and VC meetings. I also won free tickets to SXSW V2V in Vegas through an online video contest (Thanks to John Lynn from The Healthcare Scene for posting the contest!). I'll be there August 11 - 14 selling the vision of Glass in healthcare. If there's one thing that I've learned over my first few months as an entrepreneur, it's that you never know who the other guy is: throw yourself out there and you'll find a soft landing, and always smile. I'll make it back to Austin from Vegas just in time to give a major live presentation on Glass use cases and usability, development, monetization, and Glass app markets back in Austin on August 14th.
We're still on track to start our first pilots in August. The engineering team is working frantically to make sure we hit our deadlines. Everyday we think of new use cases for our apps. We can't wait to find out to what users make of them on site in a live environment.
We're lining up some national-scale media as we approach the Glass launch at the end of the year. We can't talk about which media outlets we're working with just yet, but I can promise that it will be big-time. Glass is THE hot exciting new thing of 2013, and we'll be doing everything we can to fuel the hype and ride it out. Glass will change not only surgery, but entire care delivery models, and we want to educate the public on how Glass will change the world.
And of course, I'm still blogging as actively as ever. Tim, Travis, and I at HIStalk decided to can three posts I'd written in the past month. I've been pushing myself with writing and trying some interesting new things, and sometimes it just doesn't work out, but that's ok. I'm actually proud of this because I learn more from the "no's" than from the "yes's." Over the past few weeks, I've written extensively about app development and monetization on Glass. I think at this point, I can safely say I've written more about Glass than anyone on the Internet :)
HIStalk
HIStalk Interviews Andrew Farquharson, Founding Principal, VentureHealth (I'm conducting and editing the interviews)
HIStalkConnect Interviews Gregory Jacobson, MD, Founder, CEO, Kai Nexus
How Does One Herd a Few Hundred Thousand Sheep?
The Pristine Blog
The Enterprise Glass App Gold Rush
The Challenge of Developing Engaging Consumer Apps on Glass
The Challenge of Developing Contextual Consumer Apps on Glass
My Blog