We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Paul Zak a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Paul, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
In the post 9/11 era, my academic lab was tasked by several government agencies to identify combinations of signals in the brain that would accuracy and consistently predict what people would do after a message or an experience. The idea was to give soldiers a new superpower called persuasion so they could, at least at first, try to use words rather than weapons to influence groups to cooperate with US objectives. This was a very noble endeavor and my lab spent several million taxpayer dollars doing this very rigorous and detailed work, and we helped create software the US military uses to measure and improve communications before they are released. In doing this work, we identified the brain network that values social-emotional experiences which I named “Immersion”. Immersion is a one second frequency combinations of signals from the brain that are measurable with neuroscience apparatus. Messages and experiences do not result in actions unless the brain evaluates the return on that action as sufficiently valuable. This is what the Immersion brain network does. After this work attracted media attention, companies starting contacting me about using our expensive machines and lab full of PhDs to measure and improve their marketing and customer experiences (CX). This showed me there was demand for a way to measure and improve CX. We started by doing bespoke work which was expensive and slow and frankly too academic, but our customers loved the results. To make this a scalable business, we spent several years writing algorithms that enabled us to measure neurologic Immersion from the brain’s “output file”, the cranial nerves. The “magic” of the first ever neuroscience as a service (NaaS) platform that we built is that some of the cranial nerves innervate the heart and we can apply our algorithms to signals we pull from (dumb) smartwatches and fitness wearables. In this way, anybody can measure what the brain values any place people are doing interesting things by using the apps developed by Immersion Neuroscience.
Paul, love having you share your insights with us. You created the first neuroscience as a service (NaaS) platform, what does that do?
The Immersion software platform has three primary uses. The first, which was our beachhead, was to give marketers and advertisers a way to objectively measure how effective their content is neurologically and in real-time both prior to the release of materials to improve them but also to understand why some content moves markets and some does not. The Immersion data are convolved from several signals to maximize predictive accuracy. Peer reviewed published research demonstrates that Immersion predicts market outcomes across industries with 90%+ accuracy very consistently. This technique is known as “brain as predictor” in which measuring neurologic Immersion for a moderate number of individuals, for example, 40 people, accurately predicts market outcomes.
The second application of the Immersion platform is to quantify the value of live experiences such as meetings, training, and education. My colleagues and I realized that for Immersion to be valuable, we had to do the data processing in real-time. Real-time neuroscience is quite difficult because most of what the brain does is keep people alive and conscious and only small ribbons of neural signals are the responses to content or an experience, i.e. are the Immersion signals. We used cloud computing to solve this signal extraction problem so that subscribers, for example, the global professional services company Accenture, can measure if the $1 billion they spend on training is effective. Neurologic Immersion is strongly correlates with information recall weeks after an experience, thus providing an objective measure of the return on training and meetings. It does this continuously and passively without asking people to complete a survey. It also allows event organizers to measure and test if changes to an event increase Immersion and thereby the value to attendees or not, leading to better experiences. What is valued neurologically is what is remembered and enjoyed.
The third application of the Immersion platform is in digital health. In published research, we examined how much social-emotional value the brain needs for people to be emotionally healthy. Those with high emotional fitness are engaged with people and in life and get value from these experiences, while those with poor emotional or physical health are socially withdrawn. We showed that people need six high value moments a day to build up their emotional fitness and we recently launched a new app called SIX that continuously measures if users are sufficiently engaged in activities to give them the energy and mood boost they need to stay emotional healthy. SIX is not another stress measure, but a purpose-built app that measures the brain’s metabolic investment in activities of daily living. The SIX app also links to users’ calendars so they can see exactly which activities give them the most value. In this way, users can curate their lives for greater happiness by leaning into those experiences that are most valued to them. Our published research shows that Immersion predicts whether people are happy or sad and have high energy or low energy with 98% accuracy. The SIX app also has a trained AI assistant that proactively gives users advice on how to be happier. Happy people are not only more pleasant to be around, but they are healthier and live longer. The SIX app is the cumulation of 25 years of laboratory research that my team used to create the world’s first continuous, predictive neurologic measure of thriving. I am super excited about SIX and my goal is to get one billion people to use the free SIX app within three years of its launch.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I started the company in 2017 with a cofounder who did his PhD in my lab at Claremont Graduate University and is a close friend. But, we are both scientists and were struggling to scale the business. In early 2019 we were invited to join an incubator for the broad band industry and the head of the incubator began to advise us on scaling. He was a 8 time tech startup veteran and after he completed his time running the incubator, he continued to advise us because he thought Immersion could be a billion dollar company. In essence, we “dated” each other for a few months, had several in-person meetings, and then we brought him on as our CEO in order to scale. Having a nonfounder CEO is very valuable because he brings a different viewpoint, and different experiences, and can also overrule me as founder on decisions that my cofounder may not be able to. Our CEO just reached his five year anniversary with us and it has really been a great match. He led the pitches for our successful seed round of VC funding and is such a pro at running a business. He defers to me on the science and I defer to him on the business, at least most of the time!
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
We brought our CEO onboard in October 2019 to start to scale us up pre-seed so our expenses went up but revenues were the same so we were losing money every month as expected for a startup. Then, the COVID lockdowns stopped the economy and all of our customers cancelled their subscriptions. Since I was self-funding, I had to decide to 1. Shut down forever, 2. Shut down temporarily and try to restart post-COVID, 3. Defer payments as much as possible, including salary deferments, and use our copious spare time to build V2 of our platform earlier than we had planned. We did #3 and received some government bailout money and pivoted to measure live online meetings and events. By the time we closed our seed round in December 2020 we had a better product, a battle-tested team, and were a much stronger company. We have continued to pivot, using market cues and spending time with subscribers, working to anticipate their needs as the best and highest uses of our platform.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.getimmersion.com/
- Instagram: @getimmersion
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getImmersion/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18396002/
- Twitter: @ImmersionNeuro
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ImmersionNeuroscience
- Other: https://your6.com/
