Dental Insurance

Dental insurance for veterans was the fabs that make the LCD screens were running at negative % margin. There were multi billion dollar fines for price fixing. The CEOs were going to jails in California for the price fixing scandal. By the way I had nothing to do with it, I was a professor during that time. You couldn't hire a sales guy, you had to go to the DOJ website to find out if they were under indictment for price-fixing. And literally all of them were under indictment and so you had, it was awful. But Sergey Brin really liked what I was doing and hired the company. So I got to work for Sergey Brin at the end of it who was, Sergey Brin is a co-founder of Google with Larry. So that was good. In the end, but it was five years, hell. - Well, what do you think that your biggest learning was from that experience then? What did you learn that maybe you applied in your next startup? It sounds like you-- - Closed the company earlier. (laughs) I didn't want to lose th

Ameritas dental founded One Laptop Per Child, you actually were at the MIT Media Lab. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like to found One Laptop Per Child and how you were able to take that risk to leave MIT Media Lab and being a professor to start this company? - Well, the bigger risk was telling the CEO of Intel which is I had been at the previous year that the project they were spending, call it $ million dollars a year was never gonna work. 'Cause Intel only has what's called rail-to-rail processes and for this chip that we were making to be the best in the world, we needed graded levels of voltage, not just zero or high. And so that killed the project and then I thought I'd never do commercial work again and I applied to be a professor at MIT and got a call. And the founder had to stay two days to meet with the founder of Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte. And this sort of -minute meeting just for him to check off on me as a professor turned into a thre

how to renegotiate Humana dental handshake at that point, because they're not gonna sign anything, we can get something out of it. And I had to figure that out to try to save the company. That was hard. I know all the bike paths in Taipei now. - So closing earlier, since we're here in Berkeley, we have a lot of students who want to do like social impact startups and ventures. Is there any other advice that you would give to them about starting a social impact venture? - Yeah, you probably have the idea how do you get the money. And I would say what I do is they think of this crazy fun idea of something I want to do, and I start telling everybody I'm gonna do it. And you have to be willing to have them think you're stark raving mad, you just have to be willing. Like everything I've ever done of any note, when I first voiced it, people thought I was stark raving. So if they think that, great, you're on the right track. They're even a little bit j

I wanted to be at MIT as well Dental Insurance For Veterans But it's much more risky when you put all of your savings, you put your house up for mortgage, you take millions of dollars from your friends as I did at the end of cause I started this company called Pixel Qi where we were the, I mean I don't know if you remember Q but the sky really fell, it really fell. And in Q, on Sand Hill Road like there were free drinks in the fridge and the lights were on but there was no money going out of that. And I had just started this, I just created this billion dollar thing and I was commercializing a lot of that technology to get people, really low-power screens that were sunlight-readable, retinal resolution before Apple, didn't have retinal resolution that were in the lowest cost laptop ever made by far. They went into a $ laptop that we shipped that I designed and architected and shipped and delivered to high volume mass production. And so I got money but I had to t

Humana dental being one of those three and it's providing great return for humanity. That's fantastic, if it can even just do X, X, X, that kind of thing, it's also awesome. Everybody focuses on the top ones but you can work in that structure in a VC structure. They might not fund you if they don't think you can be one of those three, but if you fall short as thousands do, you can still have an interesting business that delivers a lot of good for humanity. And they're really great with that actually. - That's really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, I think we want to move on a little bit to some of your experiences. You have had a lot of interesting experience. So for example, you were head of the display division at Google X which is Alphabet's kind of moonshot factory for developing innovative ideas such as the self-driving car for example. So can you tell us a bit about your experience at Google X and really how did innovatio

intersection Renaissance dental laughed in my face just three months earlier and say, "Whoa, we could move a lot of product this way." And that design is really solid. The CTOs said they trusted it, yep, it'll work. So, you have to ear the negative feedback and just view it like a lawyer, like an engineer, just write it down, like it's just problem solving, simultaneous problem solving of all these things. And so that's what I would do is just tell everybody. And if it's really a fun crazy project if you tell people about it, kindred spirits, will be the path to your door 'cause they wanna work on it too and they're gonna be good at this other thing that you're not and then you can do it together and it's less lonely, somebody else can point out a thing. That's how I'd kinda do everything. You just start with this crazy idea but you have to be willing to let people laugh at you, it's okay, it's part of the proces