Michael Murray (CEO, Kopin)

Can you explain your job to a five-year-old?

I would describe it as very focused around building very large TVs to be the size of your finger and putting those small little TVs as close to your eyes as possible so that you can see things that are unseen to the human eye. Being able to do that allows folks to use things like spatial computing systems like your Apple Vision Pro or medical instruments where you're able to see a 3D rendering of a surgery very close to your eye. And it's very high fidelity and high definition. 

And my job as chief executive officer is to ringlead all of that—make sure the technology works, make sure our customers are supported and their customers are supported with the best technology on the planet. 

What excites you most about your job?

I think for me, it's solving very difficult customer problems and watching our customers use our technology with their end customers and the good that it can do, the defense that it does, and the abilities that we create using our technology. That's what really drives me and keeps me interested in the business.

As an example, one of the best products we've been developing and now I've released to production is a surgical headset, which is taking a monitor off the wall and putting those monitors almost like a bifocal on a surgeon's view point and on their head. That piece of technology is really interesting.

It gets me excited about learning about how surgeons use that technology, the lives that it will save. And even just the pure fact that it allows them to not go through a full surgery and get neck cramps or headaches looking up at a monitor. So learning all of that really gets me excited and gets me out of bed in the morning. I'm very blessed and humbled to have the job that I have. 

Which trend will change the future of medicine? 

I think the role of AI is yet to be understood in medical devices. It's emerging, it's burgeoning. However, it's still somewhat nascent in the fact that we don't know how much is going to change the facet of medical instrumentation and certainly the medical industry from a standpoint of surgeries or home care or inpatient care. So I think that's number 1.

Number 2, the augmented reality of being able to support users and patients anywhere in the world. Again, using that technology and AI coupled together, working with folks in multiple countries through telehealth and potentially even virtual health. As an example, for any warfighter who has a AR/VR headset, they become a combat medic because their ability to relay information and visibly see what's happening on the battlefield or a patient on the battlefield and then using AI to quickly look up and see what symptoms are there and how to fix said symptom. That level of technology is now here. And I'm really interested to see what happens with the technology and how folks will actually use that real real term. 

Looking back, which trends have you missed or underestimated? 

Sensor integration, I think, is the thing. There was a big push back in the early 2000s for integrated sensors and integrated sensing and sensors intelligent at the edge. Remember the whole IOT thing which kind of didn't really go too far. Although everyone's “in it,” it really is the same thing as we had before. 

But I think intelligent sensing is an area where we're starting to see an emergence again because the cloud is great. It's wonderful, but it's slow. It's impacted by hacking. It's impacted by a lot of things. So having more intelligent sensing at the edge where the users are, where you and I live, is where the technology can add a lot of value immediately. That is something that I'm starting to see specifically in the medical industry versus that of some others where you don't want to have everything shipped up to the cloud or into a central processing unit or even off your physical being. You want that capability in your hand immediately, and you want it to give you a good answer or outcome. And that really requires intelligent sensing and sensor fusion at the edge where you and I carbon based living forms live, not up in the digital cloud.

I think that's an area where we were all caught a little bit off guard, even though we all have been talking about it for decades, we just haven't really done it. And, one of the things we talk about at Kopin is our neural display architecture, and what that really is a sensor platform and sensor suite, not only of a display that provides an image to you, the user, but we're also taking feedback from the user through sensing and then doing something intelligent with that using our AI engine that we're developing here at Kopin along with our friends at MIT CSAIL.

Which MedTech initiative or startup deserves more attention? 

I think I'll give you two again. Firstly, one that's near and dear to our hearts here is our partnership with the company called HMD. And that technology is just released to market. It's very exciting and, essentially, it solves one very specific problem and then a bunch of other ones. But essentially it solves this problem: If a surgeon is working on a patient, they're normally looking down at the patient and up at a display that's somewhere mounted on the wall. But if you think for a minute, as an example, when you drive, any human being, including myself, and you go to check your blind spot on either side, did you see my hands move? Right? It's just a natural connection that you have with your hands. And if you're my son who's learning to drive, it's more like this—but he's learning. That's just that slight motion. If you're a surgeon operating on a brain, a heart, a liver, these things, these slight little movements are really important. 

So what we've created along with our friends at HMD is somewhat more of a binocular so that The patient is obviously below the surgeon, but the surgeon's eyes just move up and down so they can see physically the patient, but the 3D rendered image is sitting above their nose so they can simply just look up using their eyes and never move their hands. That is the significance of that technology. The device is very lightweight, easy to wear. It's comfortable. It's designed for this application. So when we say application-specific optical solution, that's a very different solution than what a warfighter might need to have or a spatial computing user gamer.

So that's what we talk about. And that's the difference between those two technologies. That's example number one. 

I think example number two that isn't quite necessarily thought of as a medical device is around your wrist. I think the ability to take that level of sensing from a wrist or from a spatial computing device, using your eyes tells a lot about how you're feeling that day or that minute or that second. And going back to the neural display—we're able to take a tremendous amount of medical information away from what's happening with your pupils. As an example, just using fight or flight as a perfect example, we're able to tell if you're hitting fight or flight mode based on how your pupils react to certain stimuli. So I think those two innovations are really popular right now. And we're certainly on the vanguard in the cutting edge of it. 

Where would you put a million dollars? 

I think we would put it towards more of the neural display sensor fusion, because I feel like that technology will lend itself so well to surgeons, doctors, field medics, ambulatory technicians, fire, police. The reason being is when you're able to understand what's going on in the world around you, but the technology is also able to understand what that environment is doing to you as well, it's bi directional. I think that's going to have a tremendous improvement in patient outcomes.

And the quality of service, the better decision making that will go along with that technology. And also it'll be a much better display architecture that will reduce size, weight, and power consumption of all these spatial computing devices, as well as surgical headsets and implements where they already have a micro display, but it doesn't give you that sensor fusion.

It doesn't give you that feedback loop to say, ‘Your eyes are dry. You're dehydrated, you're tired, and you need to stop the surgery.’ That can save someone's life. So that's where I would put the money.

What's the best advice you've ever received? 

As a successful entrepreneur, I had my own startups. One that was very successful—the other few were flaming disasters. And as somewhat of a turnaround CEO, the best advice I give to folks that I coach either directly or indirectly that have startups or even run small companies is to really understand the problems that you're trying to solve or the overall value that you're trying to provide the real end customer. 

Now, what I mean by real end customer, as an example, Kopin provides certain technologies to our customer, and our customer then provides a full system to their end customer, which could be a surgeon, for example, or in the case of our CO3 headset, it's actually an implementer of a full surgical suite. So what is it that they're trying to solve for their business? Number one, what business goals do they have and how can we help improve those?

In many cases, we learned that it was software and recurring revenue and also lack of lawsuits for fatigue and so that was a big thing. So that's number one part of our Venn diagram: what is our customer's customer really trying to solve? That's number one. Number two is what is our customer trying to achieve through using this technology? And then number three: what are we—Kopin, myself, and the company and my executive team—what are we really focused on delivering better than anyone else? And if we're able to answer those 3 things in very short, clear terms, we're going to have a great product and a great business.

If we can't, and we're not true to ourselves, then what we're going to get is some product that gets out in the market, might do well, may not do well, but we never really speak of it again. And we've had a few of those over the course of our tenure here at Kopin. So that's a really big challenge because you have to go through your own executive team and yourself to your customer and then to your customer's customer. But you have to ask the right questions and you have to make sure that you have those answers very clearly defined and focused and drive towards them. If you can do that, you'll be successful. And that's the best advice I give to any startup entrepreneur.