Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 3)

Andy Gotshalk: This technology was invented at the University of Utah, so our company is in Salt Lake City because of that. There was another professor at the University of Utah who had a strong business mind, which you don’t find too often. He was heavily involved in developing new advanced parts of the same technology and trying to innovate it. He saw an opportunity to basically buy this business as Cyberkinetics was about to go out of business and actually build a strong company that was dedicated to neuroscientists.

I had talked to him about this idea. He knew my experience. He basically asked me to move from Boston to Salt Lake City and run the company. To me, it was a great idea. It’s on the track of what I wanted to do in terms of growing these businesses and trying to get a product that was going to impact people. We took a step back and said, “We’re going to focus on technology first and then we’re going to focus on getting it into the market.” To me, what it said is, “We’re going to build a strong sustainable company, which is going to help us put this platform that is going to be long-lasting”.

Once we had the strong foundation, we’ll then launch other companies in different verticals. They could take off and succeed or they could fail miserably. Those things unfortunately happen, but the foundation is always going to be there.

Sramana Mitra: Can you summarize quickly what the platform contained?

Andy Gotshalk: I’d describe the platform, at a high level, as tools for neuroscientists to understand how the brain works. We separate them into three product lines: electrodes that can be implanted in the brain, systems to process the brain signals such as the hardware you connect to these electrodes and the boxes to process these signals, and finally the software to do some of the analysis and visualization of what these signals are.

One of our key differentiators in this kind of technology is the ability to record individual neurons. I’ll give you an analogy here. Your brain is made up of billions of neurons that control everything that we do. If we had the ability, and we do, to record every single neuron at every single microsecond, we will be able to decode the brain and know what’s happening all the time. We can then understand all these terrible diseases. What’s going wrong when someone has epilepsy, Parkinson’s, depression, Alzheimer’s? We’d be able to have all those signals and figure out where the issues are and hopefully, be able to provide solutions. The idea of our technology is focused on single neuron recording. It also helps us understand how the brain works. How does the brain control our hands, speech, hearing, vision, or memory? That’s the core technology.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk
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