Max Hodak
Max Hodak is an American entrepreneur and biomedical engineer who is the founder and CEO of Science Corporation, a company developing neural technologies aimed at restoring vision and cognition. He co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk in 2016 and served as its president until early 2021, when he left to establish Science Corporation. Science Corporation's PRIMA retinal implant, paired with camera-equipped glasses, has completed pivotal clinical trials showing significant vision improvements in patients with age-related macular degeneration. Prior to Neuralink, he founded Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory for life sciences, in 2012 after graduating from Duke University with a degree in biomedical engineering.
“There's this 10 bit per second kind of famous cognitive bottleneck... There's like a bunch of different independent lines of evidence for this. So there's some deeply evolved cognitive bottleneck at about that. And I think that this kind of rolls up through language.”
Source→“There was a company in France called Pixium that back in late 2022 had by far the state-of-the-art work... we're in a position to acquire them when we saw something that I think kind of nobody else really saw at the time.”
Source→“Prima has received CE mark approval in Europe and will begin commercial sales within weeks of the podcast recording.”
Source→“There's only one VC that I sought out at all at the Series A that I went to go pitch, which was Bob Nelson, who's a biotech investor.”
Source→“The brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer... If I put electrodes in M1, you will probably be using a computer in an hour.”
Source→“Our main product is a retinal prosthesis. It's a chip that's implanted under the retina in the back of the eye to restore vision to patients that have gone blind due to loss of the rods and cones in their eye.”
Source→“If you can learn one thing every week, and there's a competitor that's learning a thing every month, they will never matter.”
Source→“There are definitely some ideas that are worth funding with $50 million or $0, but not $5 million. You won't run the experiment. It'll be a really frustrating experience. You'll get an ambiguous outcome... figure out what it costs to actually run the experiment. Raise twice that.”
Source→“I spent five years running a company for my CEO at Neuralink. I was working with someone who has empirically excellent judgment.”
Source→“Won European approval to sell PRIMA, an implantable retinal chip paired with camera-equipped glasses that restores functional vision for patients with age-related macular degeneration.”
AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.