What Your Eye Really Shows

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley. Here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Jeff Dunkel, CEO of Optain. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Dunkel: Hey, thanks Jake. Appreciate you inviting me and excited to be here.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Thanks for joining us here. Where are you joining us from today, Jeff?

Jeff Dunkel: It is uh cold and rainy in Charlotte, North Carolina today. Uh but normally a beautiful area to live in. So that's my home, but usually on an airplane somewhere.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Uh yeah, that's the way founders and CEOs work, right? You got to be in front of the people that make a difference. Investors, customers, employees, home.

Jeff Dunkel: Absolutely.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. All right. Well, I'm on the West Coast, but a little bit more for the listeners about Jeff. He's not only the CEO of Optane, which is a rapidly growing health technology company using AI and computer vision to revolutionize early detection of diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and neurological disorders through non-invasive eye screening. With a track record of launching innovative medical solutions, Dunkel is leading Optane's mission to make preventative health care more accessible globally. There's a lot more to your story that we didn't capture there. I just don't have three pages to run down in front of me before we get to the important stuff.

So, um, yeah, a little bit more about Jeff. You know, he is a leader of companies. He's had multiple exits, um, large enterprise organizations, and he's really giving back from how I see it in a way that's helping humanity. So when we talk about you, Jeff, before we jump into your company and kind of what you're doing, what were some of the early experiences that shaped you into wanting to be a leader, but more importantly in the technology and medical space?

Jeff Dunkel: Uh, it's a great question. I guess, you know, from the get-go, my dad was on the business side. My mom was works at University of Tennessee Medical School. And so I kind of got to see both sides. Neither one of them would uh pull strings for us to get jobs as kids, my brother and I. And so, you know, I started Stein Mart coat tagging with price tags and then propane factories, you know, filling tanks. And so, I learned pretty quickly, man, I need to get somewhere where I can use my brain because this is exhausting. I eventually worked my way into research with medicine. I had a job with one of St. Jude's research arms.

And I think one of the most impactful things for me came kind of in college. I was premed. I was trying to build the resume for medical school uh and doing research on Duchenne muscular dystrophy and one of our candidates got a rejection letter from a major insurance company and uh head surgeon there a guy named Randy Holcomb looked across the room and said, "Dunkel, if you want to do something that's really going to matter, figure out how you can take away all of this stuff that stops care so that we can do innovative approaches and save patients." And you know it was probably a passing comment but it stuck with me.

And then years later I graduated, wound up switching uh to a premed minor, business degree. Came out of college and decided I wanted to be at the top level of organizations making decisions. Took a job with a division of J&J and at the time the president of that uh division happened to be Alex Gorsky who later became the CEO of J&J. And I sat down with him and he said you know "Why why are you asking to sit down in your first three days on the job? There's thousands and thousands of people here you know that would love a meeting." And I said, 'Well, I plan on eventually becoming a CEO of a healthcare company, and despite the fact that there are thousands and thousands of people, there's only one CEO. So, from my vantage point, there's only one that has some perspective on what I need to do.' And I don't know, maybe that was really cocky, but he took the meeting. He gave me some really salient advice that has stuck with me over the years, and I think it's probably made me a better leader in the way that I think about things and in the way that I promote individuals throughout our team.

And then the last was on an exit of Ortho Clinical Diagnostics. Eventually downstream I went to other divisions of J&J and was running the strategic uh contracting division with major health systems and we created a path to launch a new innovative product on um blood bank and it added about $600 million as we understand it to the bottom line of an exit to Carlyle. And that was the first time where I realized like a really strong strategy mixed with a really strong product had the potential to do amazing things financially and so kind of a culmination of those three, right? One person I truly admired for taking care of patients. One person I truly admired for learning and understanding how to orchestrate impactful businesses in the space. And then one experience on the windfalls that happen when you do that successfully kind of set the path for the rest of my career which has all been in startups.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really cool. Are you able to share the the advice you got from Alex?

Jeff Dunkel: Yeah. Yeah. I think you know he just said you know "When you're trying to move into leadership positions you're going to have to take risks." That was one of the things. So part of it was "Do it the right way, do it the ethical way. You know, you can't be cutthroat. You will make more uh by building people up around you than you ever will by cutting them down." And so that's you know one thing was at J&J they really valued what, not just that you could build a team, but you could build a team that would perform at the same level as you before you got the last promotion and the next promotion. And functionally, I kind of still believe that if you can't train someone that can replace you, then you're not doing a good job. And that's how you make bigger teams that are more functional.

The other was take risks. And so risk-taking is not easy when you're boxed in in major corporate locations, but you can you can find ways where you can take risks. And eventually, you know, I landed as a president's advisory role type of person in later companies because of the willingness to think outside of the box and bring things up and not have to have my name as the one that was getting all the credit. I'd rather giving credit to the whole team that built it. So, you know, those are the two main things that I'm definitely comfortable talking about. And he he did a good job for a couple years of checking in and saying, "Hey, I'm monitoring it. See you kind of working your way up the ladder. You know, keep it up." Uh, which was kind of cool for me as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, you need mentors. You also need leaders that can help provide the road map for people as they build their careers. And it's it's lucky to get that if you can. You can't always get it. Can't always find it. And we always say, hey, if you can't find your mentors locally, you could also find them online. And that doesn't mean you have to even connect with them. It could just mean someone you admire or they could have their own podcast or just their knowledge or their wisdom uh could be helpful, too. So,

Jeff Dunkel: Could be a mentor to me. Is that is that what's happening here?

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, maybe we'll reverse that. Really, you know, when I when I was a young boy, I was diagnosed with it. It wasn't a disease. It was an allergy. And that allergy was to the sun. So you can imagine a little seven-year-old running around and all of a sudden the next day you can't go outside anymore. It was pretty impactful for me and it impacted my skin. I used to get these bumps all over and uh impacted my eyes that got really red. So when I talked about you to our team and and shared what you guys are building, I thought it was really really cool because I can connect with having something that has to do with your eye but something that you don't always have the answers to. I want to talk a little bit about your company because when we talked in our pod prep call, you shared something that was amazing, which was you could take 45 seconds to look at somebody's eyeball and you could understand um some signals if there's potential for a heart attack or going blind or getting diabetes or potentially developing Alzheimer's. That to me sounds like science fiction. Walk me through...

Jeff Dunkel: Yeah. Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: How this actually works and...

Jeff Dunkel: Feels like, feels like science fiction too, doesn't it? Yeah, I totally agree. So, let me take one step back and and make sure that I make one thing clear. I am not the brains behind the science that we develop. Nor have I been in any company I've ever been at. I I'm the guy that if you have a tremendous product and I can connect with the customers, I can figure out how you make those two work in in the best possible way to kind of bridge that gap between a cool design on a napkin and commercial success. We have just some unbelievable individuals that work with us at Optane. Professor Ming Wong Ha um out of PolyU in Hong Kong and ME in Australia, Professor Zen G. Um we we have a team of folks internally that are not on the academic side.

And we spend a lot of time trying to understand why the eye can be so informative. Number one, and number two, why we haven't done this historically. And it turns out if you talk to almost any doctor when they went through medical school, they all learned that the eye was functionally the window to the body and systemic health that you could look through the eye. Uh and in looking through the eye, you can visualize the optic nerve, the optic disc, our cup, you can visualize the cardiovascular components. So you can actually see arteries and veins without uh doing any invasive treatment. And so it stands to reason that as we evolve and we start applying artificial intelligence, we can start to take an image of the back of the eye as an example shooting through the pupil, we can take an image and then we can extract key components of those features that I just mentioned: cardiovascular, systemic vision, neurological, etc. in order to understand what's happening in other parts of the body that are in other ways not related to the eye.

So we had some really cool breakthroughs. I think two years ago, we won an international award for the best non-invasive cardiovascular screening device. Functionally, we could take a picture of the inside of the eye with a camera that's sitting right behind me. Weighs six pounds. It's battery powered. And we image patients, most of which are non-dilated in a lit room, which is unusual for eye screening. And we can run artificial intelligence and we can parallel that in World Health Organization standards for cardiovascular screening uh which is called the Framingham model which is a 10-year risk uh predictor of heart attack or stroke.

And so if you think about that and you say well what was the old way that we used to do that? It was 15 minutes of family history. It was a blood draw with outputs. It was a blood pressure and you would put all this into the system and compute and then you would get a risk score. If we can be 90% effective to that, I mean, think about that. You're you're talking about the ability to screen rapidly and you're about you're talking about the ability to do that without well-trained and highly qualified individuals. And so that opens the door for more equitable downstream impactful decisions on triage, who should go to the next level from a doctor, who's doing okay now. And that's just cardiovascular. We think that we can get into other conditions like neurological, kidney. We've proven it with cardiovascular and we certainly have proven it within the within the space of vision loss. And so this whole field is called Oculonomics. It's the study of the data through the eye that gives us better visual understanding of of what's happening in the body.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. God, that's amazing. You know, we talked a little bit about like the health care industry and there's preventative and there's actually post-preventive where you're you already have the symptoms and you have the disease and now you know you're going through the process of as a diabetic you know insulin shots or if you're you know cardiovascular issues you know some other treatments but this is really it's not just about from how I see it and maybe you can fill me in. It's not just about early diagnosis. It's also about saving, you know, in some capacity in some countries their economies when it comes to all the cost that goes into supporting people that have disease.

Jeff Dunkel: Yeah. Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Walk me through that a little bit.

Jeff Dunkel: So, we're we're really trying to target frontline screening. And the difference between screening and diagnosis for those who don't know is screening is being able to point out that there is something here that we should be concerned about that is normally attributed to a known disease state, right? A reason that you go blind, a reason that you have a heart attack, a reason that you have some type of mental cognition problems, whatever that something is, we want to screen and we want to understand if there are markers that are present that are predictive of that patient having an eventual decline or being on a spectrum of current disease state decline. Now, that doesn't always mean that it's a diagnosis, right? So, diagnostics are both rule in and rule out. So, I need to not only rule in that you have a cognitive disorder, but I also need to rule out that this is some type of this is some type of cognitive disorder related to Alzheimer's or is it is it related to your blood flow, right? Or other components. And we'll want to do a retake on this part. But I think that's the I think that's the ultimate path. Let me pause on that because I want to get that I want to get that phrasing right. Yeah, I think the so ask the question again and let me kind of start over on that one because that's an important it's an important distinction.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay, cool. You know, Jeff, in our pod prep call, we talked a little bit about diagnosing and also pre-screening. And if you think about just in general the healthcare industry, we spend a lot of money once people have the disease.

Jeff Dunkel: Yep.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Not just in the US, but you know, different countries too. But it feels like your product helps eliminate a lot of that stuff. You just do it ahead of time and have a process to to diagnose before you become diagnosed, if you will. How does this impact healthcare from your view on a macro level?

Jeff Dunkel: Yeah. First, I'm going to uh Amazon you a megaphone so you can scream that from the mountaintops because you just nailed it. I think what we're looking at is a delta between screening and diagnostics. So there's a difference there. First one is is saying that there is something here that we should be concerned about and we need you to go to the next level to investigate because the disease state that we are looking for may be present. The diagnostics is the rule out. It's saying that there's nothing else and this is absolutely what you're looking for. The point of screening is to be affordable, rapid and scalable. The point of diagnostics is to be accurate and to create the downstream pathway.

So our goal is to try to get the biggest disease states in the world onto a single platform so that a single image of your eye can tell you what's going on all over your body and that from that one test from that one one minute commitment that we got from that patient that we have the ability to set in motion a series of steps in order to make sure that holistically they're taking care of their overall health. That's our priority and I think you can see that in the disease states that we're going after right so cardiovascular disease, metabolic diseases such as kidney function etc. But we start naturally with eye disease and that's where everyone that's in this state starts. And so what disease states those look like? That's diabetic retinopathy, the world's leading cause of blindness, macular degeneration right where the macula at the back of the eye begins to erode, that's glaucoma. And so you start with the known where your expertise lies because we have AI ophthalmologists and then you start to say "hey, how do these features start to translate to other systemic areas?" and you go and you bring in award-winning cardiovascular doctors so that they can work with your ophthalmologist so that we can find where we have overlap. And then you iterate and iterate until you have a product that is strong enough that you can bring it to the market in a way that's going to benefit patients. That's our process.

And yes, I totally agree, man. We we want to be out in front of every group that we can. We are trying to be a for-profit company, but we certainly try to put uh put our sympathetic hats on frequently. And so, we provide our device for screening for underserved populations at our cost pretty frequently. We want to do the right thing for patients as much as we want to be profitable. And we know that our reputation is based on our success. And so these are stories that we can build together with customers that are taking care of a global population.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, it's really cool to see you doing good in the world with a product and technology. Talk a little bit about the product itself. So, I'm a doctor. I'm screening people for their new glasses for the year and I want to make sure I'm testing their eyeballs. What exactly am I looking through to capture the eyeball within 45 seconds or a minute?

Jeff Dunkel: Yeah. Well, so first that's one application. I would say the majority of our patients come through primary care and not through optometry/ophthalmology. But in any instance, we have we have some disease states that have um that are attributed to downstream vision loss, diabetes being the number one predictor. And then the in the United States, every patient with diabetes is supposed to receive a visual screen of the inside of their eye to make sure that they're not going to eventually become blind, which makes sense. We don't want people to become disabled. We need to protect. And everything that we screen for, if we screen early enough, especially when patients are asymptomatic, can be either reversed or protected so that we don't see a continuation of demonstrable decline for patients. So, we're very specific in the disease states that we go after.

So, what does that look like? Well, I can kind of show you. So, this is a this is a fundus camera. This is our Optane Resolve. It looks kind of like a a large Oculus. If I had a dollar bill on it, it would be a dollar and a half long, right? And I would put my head in and then this instrument would do all of the talking and all the working for us. So, it would say, "Please stare at a flashing cross. Move your head up a little bit. Everything looks great." Our camera talks in seven languages. If you are a provider and you have an English-speaking person followed by a Spanish-speaking person followed by a Chinese-speaking person, you name it, right? Uh you control that and the dialogue to the patient um will trigger in their in their preferred language. We'll capture an image. It takes about 25 seconds on the front eye. The second eye likely your pupils are dilated. They go a little bit faster. We capture both images and we feed them into a system.

Now depending on where you are in the world and which regulatory approvals we have in that region, you will either feed directly into our artificial intelligence platform which will give you an instantaneous readout, or if you're in somewhere like the United States, we will feed that into our tele-ophthalmology program. A couple months ago we acquired a group called iIntelligence, the largest tele-ophthalmology group in the United States. A million and a half patients have been served historically. 12 million images can use that. We can use that team in order to better our AI product. But it also allows us to be better stewards of clinical care. So if you are AI only, which some of our competitors are, you can only give a referable and non-referable outcome on a single disease state on a single camera. Whereas when I send my image to my grading team, and we get that back within 24 hours, you're going to get a clinical report on what stage the disease state is and all of the other disease states that may be visible within that field of view. And so clinically, that's way more valuable. It's kind of like, think of it as the eye equivalent of you going in and someone draws your blood and you're supposed to get what's called a complete metabolic panel and instead you only get cholesterol, right? And your doctor's like, "Everything's fine. Your cholesterol is fine." You're like, "Well, what about all the other stuff?" Right? What about oxidation? What about my lipids? Like what about my um fluoride? And and they're like, "Oh, we didn't test it." Right? You had the blood right there, you had the you had the analyzer. Let's do it all. And so our philosophy is maximize. And in the United States, in order to do that effectively, you need the tele-ophthalmology human grader on the back end. And I think it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's okay. That's a good thing.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.

Jeff Dunkel: So that output will hit your EHR. It'll trigger a reimbursement for the doctors. It'll trigger a downstream clinical check-the-box, populates fields in the EHR and the patient knows that they're safe for another year. And that's the goal.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. For those that aren't watching the video, but just listening on your drive somewhere, the size of this really, it looks like a little box, is about the size of a Webster dictionary. If you can think of that, if you're back in the day, remember how big that could be. It's not very big. So, it's very portable. uh you know usually we see products that are built out and used in lots of growth in the country that they're actually made in or you know these days could be made anywhere but let's say it's the US but you're actually you're doing things for good, you're actually running these tests and using the products internationally already which is really amazing. We're about to go on a two or three week trip to Vietnam here uh coming up in the new year uh to travel around a little bit and I know that there's you know intelligent doctors and systems all over. Talk about kind of who's exploring using your technology today.

Jeff Dunkel: Well if you happen to be in Vietnam and you want to use a product let me know. Their country's first privatized hospital was an eye hospital and they do all the screening for their region of the country and they use our product. And so I was just invited over uh at the end of September to their 25th birthday and all the major who's who of Vietnam were all there and we got to give a talk about how we're trying to advance technology together. So Vietnam is a great example. We screened a thousand people at no cost for them that were just... they they just couldn't afford screening but they were certainly high risk. So it's a great example of a region where we're trying to do good and the downstream outcome of that is now they have evidence that the screening worked. They were able to identify, you know, five to 10% of their population that was problematic that would have been on the government dollar and force-push them into care and treatment and say these other percentages of individuals are fine and don't require overuse and abuse of the system.

And so it's a great it's a microcosm and we're doing that all over, right? We're we're doing that anywhere where we have the chance to go in and sit down and demonstrate. I will tell you, Jake, we're we're not very good at sales and marketing. We don't have a marketing department. We have two international BD guys and no one in the US. So right now it's just a bunch of people who truly believe in doing the right thing putting a camera in their backpack and flying in to sit down with hospital administrators and saying "We think the reason that this has failed and we think the reason this has not worked in the past is because no one has taken the time to think of things through your own eyes. Right? You need the clinical benefit. You need a fiscal return. Right? Because you're going to get charged money. You need to make money. But you also have to have a fit and form and function that meets your need."

And historically, we've tried to take these massive devices designed for ophthalmologists and put them in the hands of primary care and have this assumption that we're going to have these well-trained individuals that know how to dilate a patient in a dark room and capture their images and it's okay to take 30 or 45 minutes for that to happen. And as a guy who had a brief stint as a CEO in the um in the clinical space, I can tell you anything that took more than two minutes of my staff time or one minute of my doctor time that wasn't directly part of the interaction with the patient, we didn't want in our clinic. It didn't make sense. And so our opinion at Optane is it's the combination. It's the ability to have the tele-ophthalmology and the camera and the AI and the interface in the electronic health record as a single full stack that solves the people's problems. We think that's why we're getting traction and you know we've taken this to eight health systems in the United States with no BD, no sales and no marketing. Uh and we've won eight out of eight times. So I think the outcome speaks for itself and as we're now in this rapid scaling motion, which is what we're going into in 2026, I expect that that success will continue. So yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. It's it's all about speed. Speed and quality is is what you're looking at.

Jeff Dunkel: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, 5 years from now, if Optane has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams, what does the world look like? Are people getting their eyes scanned at the DMV when they renew their license, at the mall, through an iPhone? Paint me the future of what it looks like.

Jeff Dunkel: So funny you just said the mall. We launched 25 cameras into the malls across the United Arab Emirates at the tail end of October. And there they're using screening in their optometry centers in the malls through one of our one of our regional partners. And when they find something, they have a referral that pushes them directly into the hospitals or in the surrounding areas. So, it's a great example. Anywhere where we can get frontline, anywhere where we can get upstream, that's where we want to be. I don't know about the DMV. Um, haven't thought about that, but yeah, you could you could see a world where you would be using this for confirmation of individuals that are flying airplanes, right? You could you could see a world where, you know, if you're a commercial driver, there's a check the box to say you're not losing your vision, right? Here are the key components and you can do a standard visual field test, but do you have a disease that may become prominent over the course of the 10 years before your license expires that we should also be checking on seems to be a reasonable request if it's a school bus driver for our kids or something like that.

But I think really the core focus is still going to be can we iterate into areas where we can identify and where there is a connective tissue to the people that are going to treat the underlying disease states that we're going to discover. So I think we're going to continue to see focus uh in primary care. It would not surprise me if we start to see a tremendous increase in the research that we do. Uh you think about the money that pharma and medical device and health care centers spend on trying to understand disease states and and then think about how much easier it would be if you could do that with literally a flash of light in the eye uh and an image rather than blood draws and 30 minute uh 30 minute waiting periods for someone to get in and talk to a professional. Um I think it's going to be everywhere but gosh there's there's just so much and I think the real question, sorry this is a follow on to that. I think the real question is how much can you expand what you can see with the eye so that off of that single image you're getting one disease state, three disease states, 10 disease states, 12 disease states at functionally the same cost with the same burden on the staff and the same burden on the patient. That's where the breakthroughs are going to happen and that's where wide adoption happens. And I think in 10 years if we're wildly successful, this is the same thing as a blood pressure cuff and a weight when you're walking into your doctor. Everybody gets it when they walk in. It's part of the routine.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. You know, you've worked with HHS, the White House, FDA committees across multiple administrations. You've helped pass legislation to create the nanotechnology category. You've built companies that are acquired for millions. When this is all said and done, what's going to make it all worth it for you?

Jeff Dunkel: Well, I mean, it's a loaded question, right? There's a there's a financial side to this where you say, "Man, I could have just stuck with a company like J&J and ridden it out." I think the thing that makes it worth something to me is I really have a strong dislike of status quo. So I mean I think you should probably say it's money or it's health or it's something else. But I think like if you pulled deep inside my soul and said what's going to make it worth it? It's knowing that we participated in tearing down things that were not as good for patients but that persisted in status quo because the people that made all the money were the ones that had the products in status quo. That's the natural product life cycle. And when you're making money, you don't want competitors. So, you try to do everything you can to squash them. And there's just something about waking up in the morning and knowing that you're going to tear that down and create a new status quo that's going to be better for patients that just gets my blood pumping. I love it. I love every second of it. So, I I think the natural answer is, you know, a good financial outcome, better health for something else. But my real answer is I just want to beat the stuff that's out there that's mainstream that's just not as good. It's a simple competitive man in an arena type mentality and I think you have to have that as a leader of a of a startup if you really think you're going to make it big.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I like that man in the arena. God, we're all in the arena as leaders of companies and you have challenges. You know, you wake up one day and you got to add people, you got to let people go, you know, worry about your competitor. What's the one thing for you that keeps you up at night today?

Jeff Dunkel: I think speed. The speed at which you can evolve. You know, tagging on to the last comment, right? If you really want to break something down, if you give some, you give groups that have more resources, more money, and more control a chance to catch you, then you fail to be the one to disrupt things. And so from from that vantage point, you can't sacrifice quality. Quality has to be there. And so really, you're always trying to vacillate between how fast can I go and how much money do I have to spend in order to go that fast. And so it turns into you focus on things like your investment portfolio and your next round because you want to know that you have the resources to go as fast as humanly possible.

So I think what keeps me up at night is are we going fast enough? And the answer is always no. I know where my barriers are and I know when there's something like I'm not going to be able to control the FDA going faster. I get that. I would love to but I can't. Right? My team tells me all the time when I say "how do we make this faster?" I have a a Director of Clinical Operations and Clinical Affairs will tell me, "Jeff, you can't have nine women all be pregnant for one month and give you a baby, right? It takes it takes nine months to happen, right? So, you're just going to have to be patient when I tell you this is the timeline. This is the timeline." And I appreciate that. Like, I need to be grounded. It's my job to push. I need to understand that. And as soon as I understand that that's where my limitation is, then the expectation is that we hit nine months and we don't go long, right? So that's that's my number one concern at all times. My team would tell you that it would not be a surprise is how quickly can we move in order to maintain our advantage and do what we set out to do. Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Sure. You know, it's a crazy world in AI today. We're seeing lots of companies that aren't even hiring people unless they have experience with AI tools. In other words, they're using tooling to communicate with employees, internal people. It could be with their customers. It could be tooling for go to market. But behind it all, people are critical to any operation. You've had a lot of success of building companies and acquiring companies and making it work. What's your philosophy when it comes to getting it right when it comes to hiring?

Jeff Dunkel: I really try to, I mean culture is the number one thing, right? Obviously skill set, but when you're on a rocket ship and you're attracting talent and you get a lot of resumes every time you put a post in, right? Then you're looking to say, "Is the skill set there?" and you pass. And if you can't find it, you go to someone like, you know, like Matt Relevant and you say, "Hey guys, like here's what I'm looking for and you guys go and find it for me." That's our solution to not burning too many um working hours on the next person coming in.

But then we spend a whole lot of time going through a process. So we have a rubric. We take the we before we ever post a position, all of the individuals that are going to interface or that are going to have an outcome from that person. It's all in a rubric and we prioritize what's the must have, need to have, nice to have and we walk through a very structured process. Uh, and then at the very end and other people are doing that. So, we usually have a three interview set. At the very end, then they come to me and then the interview is more a conversation and it's it's me trying to figure out if this person is putting on a really strong face but is actually going to coast in the background or if they're going to roll up their sleeves and dive into it. We're big enough that we're hiring a lot. We're small enough that I still need workers, right? And if the if the sense is they're coming in with the intent of managing people, I don't need that. I can manage people, right? I need people that'll roll up their sleeves and they'll do the work. And there may be some management involved, but we should all be waking up in the morning ready to attack the problem, not attack a person, to attack a problem. And I think that's I think that's probably my my approach.

So that's number one. Number two is like I really don't like egos. I don't think you can be successful with big egos, but I do value conflict, right? So, what does that mean? It means that you're going to have times where your BD team and your product team are going to butt heads, right? Because BD is going to say, "I need this because I talked to this customer this day." And they're right. Product's going to say, "It takes me nine months to plan this stuff out." Right? "And if you're pivoting on me now, you're asking me to throw away what you told me was most important six months ago." And there's a dynamic there that has to keep a balance. And there has to be... I think if you don't have conflict in there, you're not pushing hard enough, right, in one side or the other. So, uh, so I look for people that are going to be open, that are going to engage in conversation, that are not scared to give an opinion, and then I look for people that once a decision is made, are willing to say, "Okay, I get it. That wasn't the way I wanted it to go, but it's in the best interest of the company, and we're all rowing together." So, that's that's kind of my philosophy on my level of interviewing, which is after all the technical boxes have been checked.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. really cool. Well, if you look at the company today, there is always gaps in where you want to go. If you want speed, sometimes it's people, sometimes it's operations, sometimes it's just optimizing how you do things, but every company that we talk to has gaps. So, just for the listeners out there that might want to just reach out to you, Jeff, and say, "Hey, Jeff, I've got what it takes to to work for your company." What are some of the roles that you have that might they might not even meet today, but maybe they're six 12 months away that you know you're going to have openings that you know you can attract people. This is your time to kind of shout out to them.

Jeff Dunkel: It's great. I mean, we're looking for AI. We're looking for product. We're looking for implementation, right? So, we have a uh the camera that's sitting behind me that you described. We we don't want to just mail that to a customer, right? We want it to be sticky. We want it to be a good experience. We want it, we want to go to the clinic. We want to make sure we're integrated. So we have a a very large commercial focus. Functionally, most things in our in our organization right now are either commercial, operational, uh or technical, right? Um and so there's a big focus right now on commercial. We built a really good tool based on the scaling, we will need to increase those folks that are technical, ML or engineers or product, front stack, back stack, back end, all of those types of members. So we're pretty open across the board. We're gonna have to we're going to have to have some folks come in.

Um what I am looking for though is I want people that are willing to roll up their sleeves and work, right? We we have it we get hit every day with resumes from people that are like, you know, "I ran 300 people in this organization" and that's great. I don't have 300 people in my organization, much less less than that team of that division, right? So we got to build it. We got to build it together. And then you know for the the higher level leadership positions you hire and you say "I want you to do it. I want you to standardize it. I want you to create the process and then I want you to hire the people that fit in that process assuming it meets." So, I'm always looking for go-getters. I think that's important and and I like a variety of ideas and backgrounds. I think that's also important to make sure you don't get you don't rabbit hole into one hole and can't get out of it because you can't think around, you know, whatever the next thing is you're supposed to be doing.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, you know, you can't always find uh the attitude and the go getting mindset on a resume. You can read through it and their skills look great and maybe they have the comp, you know, the experience and the comprehension to do what you want them to do, but it does take the interview process. So, it sounds like you've got that nailed down, which is really nice to see and hear. If anybody wants to find you or find Optane, where do they go?

Jeff Dunkel: Uh, yeah, so I'm Jeff@optainhealth.com. Um, so pretty pretty easy. Our our website is optainhealth.com. Uh we have uh uh we have ops divisions that does most of our screening. So don't be offended if you shoot me over something and I say "great" and forward it on. Uh we're about 70, 80 hours of work right now. I don't have time to screen a lot of stuff. But uh but um but we're we're definitely in the process of trying to gain access for talented individuals and put them in the hopper so that we have a so that we have a a pool of of folks that are ready to rock and roll when when they're needed as we grow and expand.

And I will say, yeah, to something you said earlier, I think it's okay to not have the experience. In fact, I think there's something to be said for being to have for having experience and being inexperienced, right? There is something valuable for people that could say, "We didn't know how to do it, but we figured it out." Right? And I think intuitively that's just as good sometimes because then we can train you on the way that we want to do things. And then we could say, "We have no idea how to do this thing, but you seem to be well equipped to help us figure it out." And that's part of startup. That's part of the fun, right? Um what's what's the next thing that you're going to do? We've already done this. We've done this very well. We have commercial viability. We have customers that love us. Now, we want to make them love us more. And to do that, we have to do this over here. We're not experienced there. Let's figure it out together.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. I love that. Well, certainly we'll get this out to as many people as we can to help you as you build and grow. And I want to thank you, Jeff, so much for uh your time today. It means um a lot to me that you came back around. We were able to make this happen. And also to the listeners for spending your time with us on this Friday. I'm your host Jake Villarreal signing off for now. Can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

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