The following interview is a conversation we had with Henry O’Connell, CEO of Canary Speech, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $26M Raised to Build the Future of Vocal Biomarker Technology

Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Henry O’Connell, CEO and Founder of Canary Speech healthcare technology company that’s raised 26 million in funding. Henry, how are you? 

Henry O’Connell
I’m just doing great, and I appreciate the time to spend together. 

Brett
Brett, of course, I’m super excited, and I’d love to jump right in. So talk to us about what you’re building there at Canary Speech. 

Henry O’Connell
Thank you. So about eight years ago, I met with a dear friend of mine who I’d met 40 years earlier, Jeff Adams. And were talking about and had the opportunity at that point in our lives to do something different, to work together. He had just finished up. He led the team to build the Amazon echo. He had finished up his role and responsibilities there. The echo had been launched a year earlier than that. Jeff also built Dragon, naturally speaking, the nuance, the core foundational product of nuance, probably 25 years before that. So he had been in the speech market. I had been in research at the National Institutes of Health in a neurological disease group. That’s when we met 40 years ago. 

Henry O’Connell
And were sitting in this bagel shop in Provo, Utah, and he was talking about a couple of different things he was thinking of doing. And about 2 hours into that meeting, I asked him a question. I said, jeff, you know, recognizing the impactful career he had, I said, what do you want to do at this point? How would you apply what you have done and the skill and the expertise you have? How can you apply that, and what would you like to do? And he said, well, I’ve always wanted to use speech and voice to identify human condition and disease and make an impact. And I said, well, you know, I’ve spent much of my life in that field, and it just seemed like a natural for us to choose Canary Speech. And Canary Speech applies the analysis of vocal biomarkers. 

Henry O’Connell
We actually look at about 15 and a half million different data elements every minute. We process that on a 42nd audio of speech. We process that and have correlated with about a dozen different diseases. So what Canary Speech does, in a very practical way, engaging in the conversation between a doctor and a patient or in a call center, in annual checkup in a variety of different environments, we’re very capable of processing about 40 seconds of conversation and to create a score that relates to about a dozen different diseases and provide that in real time. So that’s what Canary does, and we do that in a HIPAA compliant healthcare environment. We’re a healthcare technology, and that’s where were born and that’s where we operate and where we live today. 

Brett
Just for those listening in and for myself, what do we have to compare that against? So you said 40 seconds of speech, you’re able to get 98% accuracy there. What’s the status quo? What’s the standard time it would take and what would be the standard process? 

Henry O’Connell
It’s very interesting, and there’s probably two broad elements, if you don’t mind, all of the algorithms that we develop which are related to these data sets that are coming out of speech, these sub language elements, we create an algorithm. That algorithm then can capture a speech sample from an individual, process it in milliseconds, and return scores within 3 seconds. All of those algorithms are built in partnership with clinical institutions such as Harvard Beth Israel, Hackensack Meridian, the National Institutes of Health in Japan, Tala Hospital in Ireland, Intermountain Hospital is working with us for models in disease areas. So everything we do is built in the rigor of clinical study with peer review, the diagnosis that we relate to, the voice sub language characters that we build these algorithms on the ground truth, if you will. 

Henry O’Connell
The label is created by the medical doctor during the process of doing a diagnosis for which they’ve been trained for years. So we’re using that as the ground truth, and then we’re reviewing all of that with their peers. And in the case of some of the work we’ve done with Harvard group on Huntington’s disease, that was published at the American Neurological meeting about a year ago. So that’s the rigor that we take. If you’re doing a diagnosis of a patient for mild cognitive impairment, or if you’re doing an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a patient could spend two to 6 hours with a group of neurologists or with a neurological team assessing where they are taking multiple tests through the day. Canary can analyze 40 seconds of voice. 

Henry O’Connell
And while this is not a definitive diagnosis, it’s an assessment, it’s one of the tools we’ve now put in their toolbox. And after that 40 seconds, the accuracy for mild cognitive impairment is 87%. The accuracy for things like Alzheimer’s is 93% to 96% accurate in 40 seconds of analysis. And we do that in multiple languages. You’ll find the same is true of other progressive neurological diseases, such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s. And we’re building models for Ms right now. Those operate in Japanese and English and many and often in Spanish. Also in Ireland and England. We’re working with organizations in the Emirates and also in Saudi Arabia. So it’s a tool that can be practical, and it also has a reach. It can be utilized in multiple languages in different parts of the world and across different geographic reaches. 

Henry O’Connell
You know, so it could be rurally deployed. It can be deployed anywhere there’s a smart device, like a smartphone or a tablet or through video conferencing. So that’s. That’s the correlation. We match it up to the clinical environment we’re using 40 seconds. We’re processing that in milliseconds of time, and we’re returning scores to device in real time. So, for instance, if a doctor is doing analysis for, say, Parkinson’s disease, while they’re speaking with the patient on their phone, they’re seeing a measurement come back of the individual’s assessment for Parkinson’s. And in addition to that, they’re seeing an assessment for their anxiety, their depression, and their fatigue all in the same 40 seconds. Now, a neurologist often is focused on analyzing the progression of this individual’s disease. Are the protocols they’re using helping to stabilize them? Do they see progression? Are they getting better? 

Henry O’Connell
But we’re also telling them where their anxiety and depression levels are. So they could make a referral to a psychologist or a psychiatrist for treatment if needed. So that’s kind of the additional information, getting in there, receiving that information while they’re still talking with the patient, which means they’re not doing a test afterwards, like a general anxiety test or a psychiatric test for depression, which are subjective in nature. Our information we’re providing is objective and can happen in real time while the conversation is ongoing. I think that’s the real benefit. 

Brett
So you and Jeff have this idea what happened next. I know. I’m very familiar with how you go to market with software. How do you begin to go to market with something like this? 

Henry O’Connell
You know, the wonderful thing about working with a person like Jeff, you know, we ended up staying in this bagel shop for about 6 hours together, just chatting the whole day. And after that question I asked him, he related to me the progress that had been made. Jeff was an inventor of many of the core technologies that we take for granted in speech today. 40 years ago, when he and I met, he was building mathematical models to decrypt spy messages. Speech and language didn’t exist at all. He was building models to listen to voice de encrypted into the messages that were being conveyed. During the cold War. I mean, it’s the stuff that wow. By novels are written up. It was his dream job. 

Henry O’Connell
The funding at the time ran out, or Jeff would still be there, you know, and the world would have missed all the other things that he has done. So we’re sitting there and we’re talking, and he gave me kind of the short history of where speech had gone, because there had been many attempts, and well funded attempts through brilliant individuals at the. Some of the most spectacular universities in our country and abroad, Cambridge and MIT and Carnegie Mellon and many others. Jeff created natural language processing as a commercial tool. And when that was commercially available, it could. You could analyze voice and get a string of information about what words had been spoken, and that was rich information. 

Henry O’Connell
And some of the early work done by MIT, which is groundbreaking, was they analyzed the literature, the books of Agatha Christie, this brilliant british novelist that wrote spy novels, which I just loved the books. And she died with Alzheimer’s disease. And going back 40 years through this rich set of literature and all the words that she had written, they could now digitize. They could analyze that. And from some of her talks and other things and papers that they produced, they said, aha, this is where she got Alzheimer’s disease. And here’s it. Progressing through her novels. Because the intricacy and the complexity and the use of language is shrinking across time. The problem with that is, most of us don’t get to take 40 years of novels into a clinic. 

Henry O’Connell
From a practical standpoint, it demonstrated that language and disease were attached, but it didn’t create a practical solution that could be used by clinicians and patients, remotely or otherwise, in clinics and hospitals and so on and so forth. Jeff was telling me all of this, and I related to him a story. He knows my family well. When my oldest daughter was eight years old, were living in the state of Massachusetts, and he and his wife and were in the same church group, and he was over for a birthday party, and he had written a birthday song for her with a piano piece that was original. And he sat her down on the piano stool, and he sat next to her, and he just went through this piano. He’s singing happy birthday to her. And it changed her understanding of what the piano could do. 

Henry O’Connell
I mean, the keys were flying, you know? And she. She went on to become an accomplished pianist after that. But it. And I had that vision of him still, and I always will. And I said to him, well, you know Caitlin. You know her well. I said, when she was a senior in high school, or she was in school, and she would come home from. From school after, say, soccer, and I’d be working, and it’s a little later, you know, just past dinner time, and she’s walking in, and she’s striding across the room, just from her gait, as I mentioned earlier, you know, multimodal biomarker analysis that our brain is doing from her gait, I knew it was a good day or a bad day when she would turn and look at me. Her face would give me information that I otherwise didn’t have. 

Henry O’Connell
And then when I’d asked her how her day went, almost anyone, any parent can tell you what the answer was. It was fine. And she’d continue walking, and like any good coach or dad, I would say, hey, no, no. Come on. Stop. Time out. Come back here. Just talk to me about it. And I’d find out whether it was a chemistry test or something the coach did or whatever it was, you know, and then I said to Jeff, you know, and he did. Caitlin’s married now, and while I would have kept her in the house forever, you know, as a parent, you don’t get to do that. And so she’s off now, and they have their first child, and I’ll admit to calling her twice a week. It’s probably more often. And I said. 

Henry O’Connell
I said to him, you know, when she answers the phone, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the words she’s speaking, and it’s irritatingly accurate. And I don’t have the physical cues anymore. I can’t see her walking. I can’t see her face, but I know whether it’s a good day or a bad day. And I said to him, how are we doing that? How are we putting that all together? Because we have a machine learning tool, and we use machine learning and AI to do what we do, but ours is, of course, our brain. And he said, I don’t know, but it has little or nothing to do with the words that people are actually speaking. Jeff likes to call it the musical component or elements of speech. 

Henry O’Connell
You know that I’m excited about what I do, and I’m not telling you I’m really excited about what we do. We know that, and it’s part of the unspoken or the non word elements of what we’re communicating to people. And I believe, after working in this space for the last eight years, that many of the words that we have created, like excitement or fear or whatever, are representations of what we hear, rather than an attempt to create an emotional response. They represent the emotional response we’re already hearing. And so that’s what Canary Speech did. At the time, we had no idea what was causing that. There wasn’t any. Any real research in the field. There were. There was no products that had been developed that focused around sub language elements. They were known because they’re part of speech, they’re part of natural language processing. 

Henry O’Connell
But we took that group and expanded on it a bit. But 24, 48 different data elements and derivatives of them, and that’s what we analyze every ten milliseconds, and we do that for 40 seconds to a minute, and we have this enormous data set. So in that bagel shop that day, the answer that when I asked Jeff, how are we doing it? He said, I don’t know. And I said, well, that’s what we ought to find out, because if we could find that out and create a tool, a practical tool, that could help relate those things in real time for people, this is all dreaming at that time. That would be practical, that could augment. Then you could do that, whether the patient was in front of you or they were in a. In a remote location in the middle of Ireland. 

Henry O’Connell
And we’ve done studies with the border people, which formerly we called them gypsies. We’ve done work in remote settings. It doesn’t matter where a person lives. Then you could augment the interaction between a doctor and a patient with real objective information that could help the doctor make a better decision about the care of that patient. And that would be something that would be. Be just wonderful, you know? So that’s what we set off to do eight years ago, before I. 

Brett
Dive deeper into the technology. Are you sure there’s nothing you can do to keep your kids after 18? My wife and I just had our first daughter. She’s four months. We’re already sad that she’s going to leave someday. We joke about that all the time of, like, we’re not ready. We’re not ready yet. 

Henry O’Connell
Yeah, we feel the exact same way. We were living in Virginia when Caitlin was going to start at Brigham Young University, and at the time, I was doing turnarounds. I was working as an interim CEO, two to three years at a company that was in distress. And so we found a job in Utah, and we moved the entire family here. And after that, our five kids graduated from Utah, from Brigham Young in Utah Valley, and all of them got married. Caitlin went on and got a master’s degree. Patrick went on and got a medical degree. All of them got married. And now we have nine grandchildren, and, wow. And so people always said to us, you know, you can’t just chase your children around. And my answer was always, well, you know, from a practical standpoint, of course you can. 

Henry O’Connell
You know, so we’ve, we have honestly just lived the dream with respect to that. And so we’ve been very fortunate. 

Brett
That’s amazing. I’ll tell that to my wife. Yeah, chase her around. Chase her daughters around. I love it. Now, how long did it take until you started generating revenue? That’s the big question we like to always ask. At what point were you commercializing this to the point that you could generate revenue? 

Henry O’Connell
So, and this is so important because I think there’s these evolutions that companies go through, as you’re aware, from talking to a lot of people who have started companies, and the same is true here. There’s a point at which what you’re doing is interesting enough to certain organizations like pharmaceutical companies or even health companies, and they want to explore it. You know, they have a, they have the resources to do it. They have some internal interests to pursue it. And so even by, we had created the web services, the capabilities, we had configured ourselves in a HIPAA compliant way. We had the ability to capture audio, do feature extraction. All of those basic things were in place probably within the first six months, and we self funded through all of that. 

Henry O’Connell
We had a small team, five, six people, you know, half of which were. Or more than that there. Well, it’s, it was six people, and three of us were in kind of the business side. And then there were two speech scientists and Jeff. And so we got that all put together. And there are certain bills you’re paying every month, and were just paying them, you know, like you do. But then organizations like Unitedhealthcare and some biotech firms that were interested in potentially using voice in their clinical trials. In the second six months, we got a couple of contracts for that, small contracts, and they’re more. While we protected the ownership of what were doing, they’re more like an engineering type of contract. It’s a project work. We got paid for doing it. 

Henry O’Connell
We actually did multiple ones with United Healthcare, probably eight of them, which really helped our company. We during, so during the second year we started, in the second year, were probably at about a million or a million won, and that would go up and down. It wasn’t recurring revenue like we have today. It was. It was project based revenue. We would do this thing, provide them with reports they otherwise would hire a university. MIT was great at that. Carnegie Mellon is fantastic at it also. Many of them are. And we got to a point in the second or so year where our technology was developing out, we had applied for patents, we had not been issued patents. Today we have twelve issued patents, but at the time, we didn’t have any. But our approach was novel enough that people were interested in it. 

Henry O’Connell
You know, weren’t doing word based analysis. We were really, truly doing analysis that were sub language and objective in nature. You didn’t choose to say a word. You couldn’t say, I’m feeling really great about myself, and today’s the best day of my life. We were measuring. It didn’t matter what you said, were measuring your actual anxiety based on sub language biomarkers. So that was interesting to people. And during those first few years, two years, two, three years in, we started moving our technology towards SAS, recurring revenue opportunities, like doing analytics and call centers, which is non clinical, but we would bring the models we developed with clinical partners into that. And that was attractive to them, because they felt there was the rigor of the clinical development being applied in an application that in the past had been word based analysis. 

Henry O’Connell
So that was kind of the journey. At some point, we would be approached by a pharmaceutical, or we’d be approached by a healthcare company to do that kind of work. They had friends that were, or they were graduates of a university, and they would go to their university. And we thought, you know, if a university graduate program can do what we’re hoping will be advanced technology, then we’re probably not in the right fitting situation. So we made a decision that we needed to elevate ourselves as a team and do something that hadn’t been done before, which changed the nature of who we brought on the team. In the past, we had two very bright individuals, but they were from the same graduate program. We made the decision that we needed to diversify that. 

Henry O’Connell
So we now have people who graduated in the UK, in Germany, in Korea, in the US, did postdocs in different parts of the world. There was a conscious effort to recognize that as good as any individual program was, the combination of five was going to better. You know, that you had to think differently. You couldn’t think within the box, but because for the last 35 years, thinking within that box had not produced a product that was commercial, that was practical enough to be important in a healthcare setting. So that became like a conscious decision on our part, that we needed to elevate our gain. And so, first few years, were in the million range. We were, but not SaaS recurring revenue. 

Henry O’Connell
And during the last two years, we moved into a SaaS recurring revenue mode, which has allowed us to build revenue month over month, which is a totally different phase of a company, as you know. 

Brett
How have you approached educating the market, educating buyers? I have to imagine with emerging disruptive technology like this, it requires people to think in a different way. How have you approached education? 

Henry O’Connell
It’s a combination of persistence and patience. Healthcare markets don’t change. They don’t change quickly. Their processes, their procedures, the tools they use are being used in situations and circumstances that are critical, life saving in many cases. And so they’re very, you really have to develop a relationship. We’re working with one of the organizations, healthcare companies, that five years ago was the first introduction. And I spoke to their board of directors nearly five years ago, presented what were doing. And the truth is, even then, there was a belief on their part that what were doing was both important and quite real, because when you talk about it the way you and I are, you know, the emotions of your children, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the words they’re telling you know? 

Henry O’Connell
And so that kind of story and that connection rings true with a lot of people. Doctors are doing that every single day when they’re sitting with a patient, and they’re evaluating the patient’s welfare, particularly in the behavioral health area. But they’re also very attentive with a progressive neurological disease. They see the disease progressing. They see changes in the individual’s way of communicating with them. Sometimes it’s their voice, sometimes it’s trembles in their voice or in their hands. But their observation through their experience provides them with an understanding, a real detailed understanding of the progression of the individual’s disease. We were offering to standardize that through vocal biomarker algorithms so people would get it. But in that particular case, that hospital group just was with us consistently over five years, and they’re commercializing with us. In fact, they invested in us three years ago. 

Henry O’Connell
Ish, not quite that long ago. Microsoft became aware of what were doing. It was shortly after they bought nuance. And Jeff still has three dozen friends that are senior people at nuancet. Jeff Adams does. And they’re a wonderful company. Both are Microsoft and nuance. And they became aware of who we are. And over the last two and a half years, they’ve invested a million and a half dollars, non dilutive grant money. We operate fully in the Azure platform web services. We take advantage of their AI tools and their high trust environment. It provided us with a reach globally that we didn’t have before, that we operate in multiple countries around the world, and that was just a real push for us. It also gave us the opportunity to begin looking at partnerships with them. 

Henry O’Connell
Operating within Microsoft Teams potential to operate together with nuance and Canary as a single solution. Nuance is capturing audio already. You know, it’s a perfect platform, you know, ambient listening, if you will, where not only do you get a transcription of what the doctor and the patient engagement was, but you also get information about the health condition of the patient. And that could be in real time, and it could be over video conferencing or teleconferencing, or it could be in person, or it could be on an app at home with a patient. So there’s just this. Some of it’s stumbling into it, as you know, and some of it’s directed, but that’s what happened over time. And then those things led to broader opportunities within a range of larger healthcare institutions. 

Henry O’Connell
This morning I was on, I was in the telephone video conference call in the Emirates in Abu Dhabi. It’s a country where 80% of the population speaks English. Our technology can be deployed there. That was a lead that came in to us through Microsoft. The journey that you take to where you get that sounds ridiculous, but you never know. You just don’t. You never know kind of how important something’s going to be. I stayed connected with this healthcare institution because frankly, I liked the people, I trusted them. They were just solid as a rock, credible people, and they gave us input. I mean, there was always an awareness that this could happen, it could be very important. But they also gave us insight into how it might impact in the organization. 

Henry O’Connell
How would you bring it in so that it was positive and it augmented this interaction between patient and doctor. Those are the kind of insights that you, just as a small company, even as a large company, you’re not going to get them unless you’re integrated into and working with customers like that. It’s just critical to companies. 

Brett
Now, I’m going to wrap up with the last couple of questions here. This one is more of a just high level question. So you’ve been building healthcare technologies for, I think, three decades now. How have you seen it evolve healthcare technology as a whole? How has it really evolved over the last 30 years? What are those top evolutions that you’ve seen? 

Henry O’Connell
It’s interesting. 30 years ago, you’d often develop technology more in a bubble. The engineering team with experience, a company that had developed multiple different types of medical devices and would be looking for the next generation device, and then they would take it out and say, uncover it and say, look what we’ve got. Don’t you think this would be great? 30 years ago, that was much more common. They talked about getting input, but the truth is they did an awful lot of development internally and brought it out, kind of like what Watson and crick did, and discovering the DNA structure. Of course, the lab next door that they worked with that had the x ray crystallography was very meaningful. In fact, it was indispensable. But when you think about that kind of discovery, we. The. 

Henry O’Connell
I think 30 years ago, the regulatory structure was a little bit softer. As it got stronger, there was a greater need for engaging with clients and with individuals to develop next generation something, you know, that really, truly, that evolution all the way up to when the pandemic happened a few years ago, that evolution was critical. When the pandemic happened, which was terrible for us in many ways. One of the positive things that came out of it was rethinking a little bit about how medical teams and medical personnel could connect with patients because of the demand and the requirement that some of that be remote. Telemedicine, for instance, expanded during that time. There’s been a contraction since then, but there was a real expansion, and they learned something from that. 

Henry O’Connell
And the services they were providing, Zoom, for instance, Microsoft Teams for healthcare, all of those platforms expanded because of that. And we saw that kind of expansion with Canary Speech too. Canary was an easy to acquire, very objective, detailed piece of information. Voice. I’ve mentioned how many data points we have, but voice is also the most complex motor function that we have. It engages many different elements of the human body and the human person. And because of that, diseases that impact on any of them can be analyzed from those components and contributors to speech. So that’s. I’ve seen this evolution over time. I think looking at it, and the pendulum always swings in different directions, as you’re aware. But in looking at it, we’re in a better place than we have been. I think we’re more aware of technology’s impact. 

Henry O’Connell
AI, for instance, artificial intelligence. People worry about it, and they hope for it, too. So you’ve already got a sense that we need to be thoughtful about how we implement AI, but we also believe it’s going to be very positive. And things that can be very positive also can be negative in ways. So I think now we have this balance in a sense that we’re stewards of what we’re doing. And I think that’s a wonderful thing that 30 years ago I’m not, things were not moving as fast as they do now, and there wasn’t as much a requirement for being. They were good stewards, of course, they were wonderful people. I’m part of that. But today I see as I’m working across these institutions that they’re good stewards of their obligations and responsibilities. And I think that’s a fantastic thing today. 

Brett
Final question for you here. Let’s, let’s end on a note of advice for other healthcare founders who are trying to build. So for a lot of those who are listening in, they’re on their first, maybe their second company, and they’re, you know, let’s imagine that, you know, they’re trying to build healthcare technology. What advice would you have for them? You know, what should they be thinking about? What should they know about healthcare and what should be top of mind or, you know, what would be that number one piece of advice for a health tech builder? 

Henry O’Connell
I think the most important thing, number one, and I always like to end in two things, but I think there are probably four. I think the most important thing is to understand what your vision is. What are you trying to accomplish? And this is not all altruistic. I mean, it could be that I’m on building something that I think will change the world, but I also think it’s going to employ a lot of people and support a lot of families. That’s a wonderful goal, and I think that’s perfect, but you need to have that vision. And for Jeff and I in that bagel shop that day, it was the application of speech to the analysis of, for the purpose of analyzing disease and human condition. Make a difference, you know, make a difference in healthcare. 

Henry O’Connell
Now, both of us were older at the time, so we had, anyone at any age can have that kind of dream. But I think that’s important. You’ve got to, you’ve got to ask yourself, what is it I want to do? Because that’s the stake you put in the ground. And you hope that stake is just three years away. You know, every vc that invests in any company hopes that stake is just three years away. And it’s all going to come to a conclusion and a pandemic isn’t going to happen, so it won’t matter. You know, when the pandemic happened, a lot of people pivoted and they went into different applications because developing the products that we’re developing required relationships with healthcare institutions that, during the pandemic, quite frankly, were very busy. 

Henry O’Connell
So you have to put the stake in the ground, and that stake may be three years out, it may be eight years out, it may be ten years out. Whatever it happens to be willing to recognize that and be persistent in believing you can get there. I think that’s just critical. The other thing is that you need to associate yourself with truly the best group of individuals. I don’t believe, personally, I don’t believe in this concept. If someone says, well, do you think all the members of your team are a, a people, a team, people, you know, versus a, B, C, and D, whatever their ranking system is? I always tell them, you know, I don’t rank people, but I believe I have the best team on the planet Earth. It’s not because any one of us is the smartest. 

Henry O’Connell
It’s because every one of us is equally yoked to the wagon, and we understand the vision and the tasks in front of us, and we know that achieving that is simply in a concert way, in unison, taking the next step. That’s why we’re in 18. We’re not in 18 because we have ten a people, or 15 a people, or 28 people. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that everybody is that in everything anyway, but I believe individuals that are inspired to work together can do things that are considered impossible. And as the saying goes, it simply takes a little longer. That’s number one. And number two, I think number three is, from an investment standpoint, be patient. Choose people who have the same belief and philosophy that you do. It’s hard. That’s a difficult thing for young startup companies to do. 

Henry O’Connell
And then finally, life is such, and I believe this to be absolutely true, there is always a win situation, whether you’re interacting with your employees, or you’re interacting with your customers and your business partners or your investors, there’s a win situation. And arriving at that sometimes is recognizing that the situation for yourself is a win, even if it wasn’t exactly where you began. I have a business statement, or that I always tell everybody is not. Every idea is a good one, and that includes my own. So believe in being right, but recognize you’re not always right, and you have to listen to the team. So that’s, I think, just critical. If you do those four things, if you’re persistent and your patience patient in that persistence, it takes time. 

Henry O’Connell
I think that people can achieve things that in the beginning, you had no idea how you were going to get there. 

Brett
Amazing. What a way to end an awesome podcast episode. Henry, before we wrap here, if there are people who are listening in that want to follow along with you and watch as you build this company, where should we send them? Where should they go? 

Henry O’Connell
Well, two places they can go to www.canaryspeech.com and if they have anything they would like to ask, they can send me an email at henry@canaryspeech.com. 

Brett
Thank you again. 

Henry O’Connell
Thank you. And you, please have a wonderful day. 

Brett
All right. That was awesome, man. You’re a great guest.