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In September 2020, Jonathan Berent left his prestigious role of engineering on Google X to establish his own company.
“It was my burn of the boat,” Berent told me during our last conversation one day with Jon Przytr. He meant the way of pondering (popularized in the book by Matt Higgins, Burn boats) This calls for entrepreneurs to remove all safety networks, eliminate all possibilities of withdrawal and full involvement on their chosen path.
“When I left Google, I didn’t have a plan B. I had to get financing this startup. I had to find a way to pay myself and had to find a way to pay others,” says Berent.
This huge decision caused NextSensewhich produces bioral intelligentsia, which read brain waves to extend sleep, detect epileptic seizures before their occurrence, and potentially treat the states as depression. Unlike traditional EEG monitoring, which requires patients to have electrodes pasted into their skulls in clinical conditions, NextSense ear inserts are non -invasive. They work, intercepting high -quality brain signals by sensors in the ear.
One day with Jon Biera’s podcast, Jonathan tells me about his inaccued fascination with sleep teaching, a conscious dream and the unused potential of our brains. He also shares how he moved from running the Google Ads sales team to develop into a technical founder, and three key conclusions that apply to anyone who jumps to entrepreneurship, no matter their industry.
Come or not worry
Berent’s first attempt at BErent’s entrepreneurship took place in 2016, when he tried to run a company called Lucid Reality, working at Google.
Looking back now, he realizes that he does not intend to make adhesion without placing each feet on the ground.
“In 2016 it is halfway,” he admits. Although Google allowed employees to begin their very own firms, he still didn’t feel completely involved. “I have never had a full time, full passion and it has never gone.”
A failed attempt brought costs. “I probably wasted from $ 60 to $ 70,000 my dad, my aunt’s money and my own money in this little test experiment,” he says. But he also taught him a invaluable lesson, becoming what he describes as “MBA” in entrepreneurship and showing him what he is to not do when starting NextSense.
Choose your team properly
Building a suitable team was a trial and error process for Berent, who claims that they are now on NextSense 3.0 after a few iterations of its founding team.
He admits that he makes mistakes about his early employees. “I thought you had to be brilliant and passionate,” he explains. “For example, if you have enough passion and you have enough brilliance, you can do something, right? But you can also blow up a team, blow up a company with brilliant, passionate people who are not even and do not have enough equation.”
By pulling the page from the Google Founders textbook Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who emphasized the importance of the company’s culture, now develops the features he is looking for.
“Yes, you need passion and brilliance, but if there is a little less ego and more humility, I will double it,” he says.
Do not define yourself through your past
Berent’s deepest insight may relate to non-public re -development. As a major of philosophy in Stanford, he was marked as “blurred” and not “technology” (which suggests that he was more focused on liberated art than science). But when he was passionate about brain detection technology, he refused to limit him.
He claims that self -proclaimed labels often develop into our biggest restrictions: “People think about their past and have adopted some identity, have adopted a label. But we have amazing flexibility as human beings. We are really limited.”
This readiness to re -again accepted Berent from the Major of Philosophy to the director of Google Ads to the machine learning engineer for the founder – a journey that might be unattainable if he remained imprisoned in the original identity.
“Regardless of what label you have,” he advises, “realize it and throw it away for a few days and just see what happens when you stop identifying yourself as something.”