Max Hodak

@max-hodak · 40 positions · On ppll ↗

Co-founder and chief executive of Science, a neurotechnology company whose retinal implant restores sight to blind patients; before founding it he spent five years at Neuralink.

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What Max Hodak says most about

startups 6

Restoring vision to the blind is a good business, and a company doing it should aim to be profitable rather than permanently funded.
Telling your investors after a Series A that you are going to vibe-code your own purchasing system is contrarian enough that any reasonable board would question it.

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management 4

The annual performance review is disruptive and surfaces nothing you did not already know but had avoided acting on.
Performance review is best done as a PageRank-style computation over continuous company-wide votes, not as an annual HR cycle.

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venture capital 3

Treating brain-computer interfaces as one investment category is like having a single "drug bet" -- the field is as varied as pharma.
Telling your investors after a Series A that you are going to vibe-code your own purchasing system is contrarian enough that any reasonable board would question it.

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dementia 2

Treating the brain directly as a computer produces effect sizes medicine does not otherwise see — a deep brain stimulator takes a patient from unable to hold a cup of water to writing cursive in ten seconds.
Humanity is not good enough at molecular biology to make drugs that restore vision or hearing or stop Parkinson's.

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hiring 2

There is no right hiring process, but there is a wrong one: not having something you do religiously as a company.
Any one person or small group placed at the top of the hiring funnel will bottleneck the whole organisation, so first-round review should be distributed across the company as a vote.

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infrastructure 2

A startup's speed is set by boring internal infrastructure — purchasing, recruiting, spending — and that matters as much as understanding the technology itself.
Deep tech companies rarely fail because the technology does not work; they fail because nobody built the systems to run the organisation around it.

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