Latest / Dental Mentors / Building a $1B+ AI Empire in Dentistry with Pearl CEO Ophir Tanz

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Building a $1B+ AI Empire in Dentistry with Pearl CEO Ophir Tanz · Dental Mentors

• Dental Mentors: What's interesting about what is happening in software is that it is moving from a set of tools that would do things with you to a set of tools that are going to just do a lot of work on your behalf. We really think that we are headed to an endpoint where the dental practice of the future is humans delivering care and really agents doing the rest. If you think about it, there are just so many friction points around the patient journey. Think insurance verification, eligibility, scheduling reminders, cancellations, billing in revenue cycle. This is the stuff that makes the practice of dentistry difficult and takes time away from the goal. And what the future state is going to be is like a patient's agent. We're all gonna have agents that are gonna be our assistants effectively. That's coming really, really, really soon. That agent will be interacting with the practice agent, which will be act interacting with the payer agent. So all those friction points will still exist. They're just going to be managed agentically and it's going to create a fundamentally new paradigm under which practices operate Hello and welcome to another awesome episode of the Dental Mentors Podcast. I'm your co host, Matt Ornstein. I'm here with the other co host, Neil Zemba. And today today we have an amazing, ⁓ super amazing and special guest, Ophir Tanz. He is the CEO and founder of Pearl, ⁓ which I think most of you ⁓ would have heard of by now. So we really appreciate you coming on today, Ophir. And we're very excited to get into some cool topics. So thank you very, very much for joining us. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. everybody knows Dental Mentors is is focused on building wealth in dentistry. ⁓ so we're going to get into some cool stuff about ⁓ you know, how the company was founded seven years ago and what that journey has been like for you as a CEO and the founder and some of those challenges ⁓ that everybody has to go through as a founder. But before we do that, I'd love to ⁓ give you an opportunity to take a couple minutes and for the audience members that are not familiar with Pearl, which I would be shocked if they're not, but I'd love you to just take a couple minutes and talk about ⁓ Pearl, what it does. ⁓ I know you've released some really cool new features recently, and I'd love you to get into that just so everybody is perfectly clear about what your company does, the ⁓ issues and problems that Pearl solves and the opportunities. revenue wise and patient care wise that ⁓ get unlocked by peop by DSOs and offices that use Pearl. So I'll let you take it away. Yeah, absolutely. So ⁓ appreciate the opportunity to answer this question. Cause I feel like people like to dive right into the solutions that we provide. But that sort of misses the bigger picture about what we are holistically, what we're building holistically and what some of the natural endpoints are. So I think what folks are probably most familiar with is the work that we do in radiologic AI, which is identifying disease, other conditions, existing restorations, you know, natural anatomy in radiography. And we do that across two D radiography holistically, so bite wing, PA and Pano. We also do that across three D ⁓ modalities as well. And that is very powerful and fundamental work because it adds a layer of ⁓ standardization into the diagnostic practices of ⁓ of an enterprise or of a location and it makes it so that you can have a very clear communication with a patient. So there is a lot of uplift that just will naturally fall out, roughly 10 to 12 percent uplift automatically out of the gate when you enable. ⁓ second opinion, because you're identifying disease you might otherwise miss. You're also communicating more clearly. ⁓ as you mentioned, we have ⁓ a pretty broad suite of capabilities that really address a lot of the ⁓ moments within the patient journey. So second opinion ⁓ is one of them. That's radiologic AI and second opinion 3D. ⁓ we also have practice intelligence, which is a very, very powerful and robust tool set which ⁓ marries all of the data in the imaging system with the data in the practice management system. So you can have a very holistic understanding of what is happening in your practice, ⁓ and also engage in a variety of workflows to make the ⁓ practice of dentistry more systematic, reliable, repeatable. But also, you know, front office and management are in that tool set all day, sort of engaging in tasks. We have a voice suite, which enables you to obviously do things like ⁓ ambient listening, clinical notes, referral notes, period charting. That suite is growing as a capability. We have an RCM suite, which is you know probably the most painful aspect of running a practice. I'm glad to talk about. We have something new coming out. ⁓ not yet release called Practice Genius, which is really a way to interface with your practice in a natural language manner. Think ChatGPT or your enterprise or your environment. Super powerful and robust in terms of the nature of the conversation you can have with that entity, ⁓ both critically, financially, and ⁓ operationally. So we're really, really excited about that. The way that we think about what we are building is ⁓ if you look at dentistry or or rather like sort of AI indentistry a few years ago, around when we launched and a few years after that, AI was really a feature. and in this case the feature, you know, was a diagnostic aid. If you look at what it is today, I think it's much more of a layer where it sits across most of the mo important moments within the the patient's journey and it's adding a layer of of of value, whether that's returning time. automation, facilitating better decisions and outcomes. And I think where we're headed in the relatively near future is really AI is more so like kind of an entire operating system. So what's interesting about what is happening in software is that it is moving from a set of tools that would do things with you to a set of tools that are going to just do a lot of work on your behalf. ⁓ we really think that we are headed to an endpoint where the dental practice of the future is humans delivering care and really agents doing the rest. If you think about it, there are just so many friction points ⁓ around the patient journey. Think ⁓ insurance verification, eligibility, scheduling reminders, cancellations, billing in revenue cycle. Like this is enough that makes the facts of dentistry difficult. And takes ⁓ time away from the goal, which is elevating care. And what the future state is going to be is like a patient's agent. We're all gonna have agents that are gonna be our assistants effectively. That's coming really, really, really soon. That agent will be interacting with the practice agent, which will be act interacting with a payer agent. So all those friction points will still exist. They're just going to be managed agentically, and it's going to create a fundamentally new paradigm ⁓ under which ⁓ practices operate. And the last point I will make, which is just the most interesting point to consider in dentistry, but also I think civilizationally, is that intelligence is becoming a commodity. And if you think about it, like arguably the most scarce resource in humanity historically has been intelligence and the s like particular skill sets, right? So think about you know mathematics, analysis, Writing, ⁓ like, you know, research, you go on and on. This stuff is now available in a very high quality manner off the shelf. And, you know, what does that now mean for the reality of how we operate our lives? So when we think about URL, we really think we're kind of building a sort of robot. and not a physical robot, ⁓ a virtual one, but that robot has the ability to see. has the ability to hear, has the ability to effectively touch and do things in the world, it has a brain, you can talk to it. And ⁓ all the products that we build that in some cases do sort of still operate as point solutions are really part of this larger construct. And what we see with across our suite, even today, is that by virtue of having one service enabled, the other services are made better. So if you look at voice, for example, You're listening into the conversation that a practitioner is having with the patient, but we also know what the radiographic and clinical reality of that patient is. We're able to understand that, correlate it, do an analysis on the conversation, share feedback back to the practice about the nature of that communication, what was mentioned, what hasn't been mentioned. And it's just very demystifying. So I think that ⁓ again, it goes back to a higher standard of care and a ⁓ in a more systematic approach to high quality dentistry. That's amazing. ⁓ you don't have to answer this and that's fine, but are you willing to share how many dental practices are using Pearl software? Yeah, we have currently ⁓ about twenty five thousand, maybe twenty-six thousand now dental practices using Perl. ⁓ growing pretty rapidly and ⁓ You know, we're we raised around in ⁓ in July of twenty twenty-four and we've like seven X growth since then, a couple years ago. and we are, to my knowledge, the ⁓ largest player globally, meaning if you include international and also domestically. ⁓ and I think we have ⁓ the largest footprint in both private practice and enterprise, which people don't understand because there's so much so many claims made around that. I think if you actually look at Scorchorn, it's doing quite well there. So ⁓ I want to tell everybody too, ⁓ O'Fear is an incredibly nice ⁓ man. I c I you never heard me say this, but like in my you're like a a ⁓ unicorn builder. ⁓ I know ⁓ with your previous companies, it was it called gum gum? Did I miss saying that? Ironically, gum gum not in dental. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And ⁓ I think you build that, if I remember right, that got built in It's got an enterprise value of over a billion dollars. Is that am I accurate on that? Yeah. ⁓ you know, as as is wont to happen in technology companies, it it was volatile. ⁓ we got as high as two billion. I would say one billion was probably or a little billion plus was the fair the fair value. Yeah. Various times. But yeah, it's a it's a valuable, really powerful company. Yeah. I just want the audience to know, like, you know, you know, we have fun on this podcast, but like you're a badass, big time. ⁓ and I know you're building another unicorn with Pearl. ⁓ I know Neil's gonna have some questions, but I I just before I forget, like I think everybody would love to know like how did you achieve seven hundred percent growth, a seven X in basically two years? I mean, talk about the science of scaling. Do you have any ⁓ I'd love to hear about and any advice you have to other people in dentistry that wanna scale? Yeah. It's funny 'cause I was listening to I realized I'd not listened to an episode of this podcast yet, so I was listening to Huffaker. And obviously they're doing really well over there and he was funny as him. So I'm like, we're gonna we're gonna surpass them. We'll we'll see what they did more quickly. I'm very competitive with Mike and ⁓ Eric over there. but look, I think what the way that we think about what we're building, what I always try to do as an entrepreneur is I'm not trying to build cool things that the that I wanna convince the world to then That will enhance their the lives. Like I'm trying to just deliver inevitabilities. ⁓ and that's what I think we're doing at Pearl. I think the softwares that we are building and delivering to the market are inevitabilities and they're inevitable standards of care. What that means is even if Pearl didn't exist, they would find their way into the market eventually. So, you know, our goal is to identify what these inevitabilities are, and you know, build around them. I think we're very ⁓ Good at product, and I think we're really good at distribution. I mean, those are the two things that matter if ⁓ you're going to grow rapidly. I think that while things like intelligence and increasingly even product development are becoming more commoditized, ⁓ what is not a commodity is high fidelity proprietary data, obviously FDA clearances, and most importantly, distribution. Right? You need to have a very reliable mechanism. of getting your software into the hands of users is especially challenging in dental because it's so wildly fragmented. It's fragmented on every level. It's fragmented at the level of just like practices existing in every nethercranny of the country. It's fragmented in t completely from a software perspective. So there's a huge amount of nuance and architecture that needs be accommodated. ⁓ we work really well with distributors, with partners, with KOLs, we have a very large internal sales team. That's a lot of events, we do a lot of education, we're with universities and they all, you know, contribute to just like up knowledge and awareness. And in large part that's the hard that's like that's the key, right? Like if these things are really inevitable and we're right about that, then you just need to make people aware that they exist. And you know. Well what ⁓ s Neil, la my last question, then you can hop in and and go to town. Ophir, what would you say has been the biggest I mean, i Pearls has achieved amazing ridiculous success and has a lot a lot more runway to go. ⁓ but what's been the biggest challenge ⁓ as as the founder and CEO of Pearl? Has it been raising the money? Has it been developing the technology? Or has it been I'm gonna give you three choices, or has it been business development to get your product and services into the dental offices? Which one's been the most Yeah, I mean I'm happy to speak about all those. I would probably categor like put a fourth category in there if I was gonna talk about the hardest thing about building a company like Pearl. ⁓ I will say that in the context of Pearl, if I'm being totally honest, like raising money has been trivially easy. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One reason for that is we have pedigree and ⁓ have built successful companies. ⁓ it's very much like a club. Like when I was twenty-two or twenty-three and trying to get for ⁓ gum gum funded my previous company. ⁓ I was raising friends and family, I was having dozens of meetings, I was getting all nose. Like I went through all the difficulty of that process and I'm very familiar with it. And I work at a lot of companies and advise them that are going through that. If you are building something that is look, I mean, we're pretty sexy in the realm of what the market has cared about. We're we're staffed. Software, healthcare, AI. A lot of those are magic words. I'm not doing this because of their magic words. It's just like it happens to be a lot easier if you're raising within an existing set of CCs that the market is eager to back and fund. And because we have built a billion dollar company prior to this, ⁓ there's just capital available. So I would say that thankfully that has been an easier road with Pearl. What I would say is the most challenging aspect of dentistry, and I do think it's a uniquely hard category to build software in, really, really difficult. and this is not unique to Pearl. I think every single software company with indental experience is the same thing. It's that it's just wildly fragmented. And it's also weirdly proprietary. Software ⁓ dentistry is the only regulated industry in the country. This is very interesting. That has not been consolidated from a software perspective. It's the only one. there's a lot of reasons for that historically. There have been opportunities for consolidation, they weren't fully captured. Consolidation, by the way, isn't always the greatest thing in the world. It can lead to weird monopolistic behavior, and we see that in lots of categories as well. But it does make just trying to integrate and serve service customers that have very exotic. architectural realities. Very challenging. So in order to do what we do, or if any company wants to provide a service that touches PMS or touches, you know, as we do p imaging in PMS, you need to be able to like ingest that data, normalize it, and interface with it. That is step one. That is the hill that I see almost every single struggling or failed dental software company die on. And what's sad about that Is they end up dying on the hill, that isn't even the thing that drives any enterprise value. It's just a thing you have to do. But if you're not a company that's raised a ton of money and you can you can't put a ton of creativity and resources towards that normalization effort, you're gonna have a very difficult time. You're gonna just limit yourself to like I only serve open dental or I only serve Eagle Tough and only these versions, right? Think about it. When you're talking about dentrics or open dental. Or DEXIS, you're talking about many versions over decades of those systems too. So it's not like there's just 12. Like in in reality, there's like a hundred infrastructure real like ⁓ like combinations or more to interface with. So I would say that that just makes everything markedly more challenging. and it makes the price of admission extremely high. ⁓ and I don't think that's appreciated enough. And it's why I will sometimes tell entrepreneurs I want to get into the category to not do it. Or to just raise five extra money they think they need. Because it's kind of silly. We're all like just out here reinventing the same wheel. Like like just the normalization stack that we built in and of itself is like is a big asset to open up to the world. But because like everybody is trying to collect their fees and is so sensitive around protecting the legacy businesses. There's all types of contractual awareness around that as well. So, ⁓ it's a funny space in that regard. It's a lot of legacy players that are holding on with a very tight grip. And, you know, I think part of our ethos and part of what we do is like we partner with those companies and make them money and we we we help progress them and improve their platforms. But it's a challenge. There's a lot of partners and and and and you know, citizens to juggle. Yeah. Thank you. I don't remember your other your other two categories. Yeah. So technology above harder than business development? Well, technology hard for the reason I mentioned. and you know, yeah, I would say that is that is the hardest part ironically. And business development, I don't know. Yeah, I mean the challenge is like I love the space. It's a really small industry at the end of the day. We all know kind of everyone. And I I really enjoy that aspect of it. I also think that people have like generally the right idea and the right intentions and they want to win in the right ways for the right reasons. But like where the where the where the rubber meets the road is like, okay, we are aligned philosophically. We want to do the same thing. We want to do it together. But you don't have any engineering resources that can actually do anything reliably. So like then what do you do? Well you find other ways to kind of partner. Now, of course, this varies across a PMS partnership or distribution partnership or, you know, other sort of relationships. So it's a very wide landscape. I would not say it's been I mean, at first nobody would talk to us, just like any other company we're a nobody who nobody knew about. But, you know, over time we did have like I think All the right conversations and found a lot of the right kind of alignment. Where we have been somewhat disappointed, if I'm being totally honest, it's that our partners, just from a technical aptitude ability, have not been able to like meet their end of the bargain or or keep up. And that is another problem in the demo category. Like we know that. Everyone has that problem. So and and they're as frustrated about it as we are. It's not like they want it, or it's not that it's intentional. It's just that when you haven't have to build, you know, at a high velocity and you're trying to kind of keep your take together twenty five year old platform ⁓ like like operational, then you're very limited in the speed with which you can move. Awesome. Neo, why don't you ⁓ fire away some questions? Sure. Well again, I I can't thank you enough for for being on and we really appreciate it. And I wrote down I love what you I love I love your term Deliver inevitabilities. I think that's probably the most elegant way I've ever heard that described. ⁓ and I I I think that's I think that's a beautiful way of saying it. You know, you mentioned ⁓ you know, what what what's sexy or not sexy in dentistry. And speaking of sexy, that's actually my first impression of Pearl was how seriously you guys take design. It was just something that I noticed immediately. Before I got into dentistry, I was building software for the e-commerce space where it's like fireworks and great design and this kind of thing. And I just see year after year, you know, we own seven dental practices in Michigan and we're dealing with what I what I think is now the full blown HR crisis of people coming in. And I see people, you know, one of the things that we like to do with a lot of our team members is they come from other industries. We bring them in for other industries. We'd rather them have a better attitude and then train them as opposed to the person that's been doing it for 40 years but they don't want to change. But one of the struggles that I see a lot of dentists, especially with ⁓ you know, s single practice operators, this kind of thing, a lot of our audience and and dental mentors are, you know, the the owner, operator, entrepreneur that maybe wants to grow. And I we hire people from other industries that are used to consumer apps, their iPhone, phone video games, things like this. And they come into the office and I watch them. I won't say the name of the the Asian management system because I'm friends with them for, you know, modesty purposes. But I see the light, the life drain from their eyes when they see like, ⁓ this s these systems are horribly designed, very, very difficult to use. From a you know, from a rise perspective, also on the, you know, the the the dental vendor perspective, ⁓ you know, we we we see our clients all the time say, you know, we love certain features of our current vendors. But they might see something that they love that's a feature, but they're they're terrified to actually adopt it because of the because it's another dashboard or it's a very difficult to use dashboard or something like that. I was really curious as to your thought process as to what would how did you approach design from the beginning was was a a great, you know, a great focus and emphasis on design and and even your dashboards and ⁓ user experience. What it what was your what was your thinking there and have you seen it ⁓ improve your adoption? ⁓ are are there any other benefits that you could speak to as to as to kinda how you think about interface and things like that? Yeah, look I won't name names either, but I think you're right. I mean the if you look just visually at the at the UIs of a lot of these platforms, it's like it's Windows three point one. I mean it's like Shocking. It's just shocking. But you also look at like this question of why do people not then migrate to more modern platforms, which still exist. They might not be the best things in the world, ⁓ but they're on the cloud and they're prettier and they're better, you know, UIOX. And that goes back to this reason that the industry has not been consolidated ⁓ more completely. It's because you are on a platform that is on-prem legacy and you know, you have a calendar, you have a ledger, like you have a schedule, like you have these things and you're like, yeah, it's prettier, it's on the cloud, but like do I really want to go through like all the pain and the learning and the cost of just moving to a prettier thing? That's really what it is. It's just like it has some additional functionality, but there's really not a very compelling forcing function. And that's what's about to change, in my opinion. Is that AI is a forcing function that is going to force the industry to migrate at a significant velocity. And the reason for that is I'm not just talking about a prettier schedule. I'm talking about, hey, over here, all this work is being done on your behalf. You're making a ton more money. And all this leakage that's occurring, you know, with payers has gone away. Like you're you'd be insane to stay on your old platform in that case. So I would just say like that is what I what I anticipate is coming. ⁓ a real forcing function. ⁓ yeah, from a design perspective, ⁓ I've always cared a lot about design. I've I mean there's various after there's branding ⁓ and the general feel of a company and and then what it puts out and then there's the actual UIUX experience of it all. and you know I just wouldn't have any company that I didn't feel like had beautiful design. I I'm always feel like we can do better by the way. My CO and I are very aligned on this. I he was actually my CMO at at Cumgum. He's a multi-talented individual, couldn't really hold any C level title. ⁓ so are you talking more about the UI and UX or more about the branding around the organization? I guess more more UI UX probably in in in that case, if you if you see I mean really just have does does having a great UX result in better adoption and grassroots, you know, ⁓ rah rah kind of around around. I think there's two keys there. One is we really try to integrate as completely as possible into existing workflows. The hardest thing is changes behavior. Nobody wants another screen. Sometimes another screen is inevitable and it's worth it. And if it's inevitable, I mean if there's no other option and it's worth it, then that screen gets usage. But folks are comfortable in certain environments with certain workflows. And if you try to modify that at scale, especially in a DSL, you're going to encounter friction. That really does matter very, very much. and I would just say that we spend an exorbitant amount of time with users in their offices, watch them literally all day, interface with the tooltick, get their feedback. We have also incorporated over the past year and a half or so. an approach whereby our product managers are are either ⁓ are are like almost always co-piloted as a full time role with clinicians. So like we've done this thing where we have clinicians that have worked in dentistry for twenty, twenty-five years that are literally operating as product managers within the organization. ⁓ And that's been very productive for us because like They really understand the nuances of the pain points. They're able to talk to other clinicians and hygienists and front office staff in a way that they understand and they're repaired with very experienced PMs because there's a skill set there. But that has been ⁓ I think a real unlock because at the end of the day, the campus looks pretty, it has to like do the do the work productively and reliably, right? So that that makes complete sense. And I guess speaking ⁓ on on ⁓ the topic of of UX but also AI, I'm curious what you think will be 'cause I think everybody right now I think thinks of AI as that conversational chat GPT interface. What are some of the main ways and or maybe some of the most unexpected ways that you think people will be interfacing with AI in dentistry within a within the next five plus years? ⁓ what's so cool about that tool? We have it in the hands of a lot of customers right now, beta testing it. and it's just so fascinating. It's first of all, it's very addictive to just be able to like actually ask this thing, the things that you are curious about about your practice that you know that in theory you can go and kind of figure out and mine and but it's just a lot of work. and you know, there's like basic questions of like You know, how many cancellations am I getting and how often are we filling them? And do you you know, like in real time, one of our ⁓ one of the daily uses of this tool set is just like help me fill all my cancellations like a genetically. So like literally it was like find the best candidates for the cancellation, text them, fill the spot. You know, questions like do I need another hygienist? What is my day look like? ⁓ where are we underperforming relative to benchmark on treatment X? Like On and on and on. I there's really anything under the sun. ⁓ I'm really excited to put this into the hands of practice staff or use cases and practice owners to really more deeply understand the reality of ⁓ what is going on in their enterprise. And it's kind of interesting, like Claude just released a capability where you can just insert it as an agent employee into your channels. I don't know if you guys use Slack. But we're talking to this thing, and it was like going to HubSpot and going to Salesforce and knows the entirety of every conversation slack and and and Google that's overwhelming what it just knows. And we will ask it super difficult questions about the company. And it's coming back with like just like super high quality answers. And it's a it's a version of that very much built for the Dental Enterprise. The difference with what we've built is that then there's typical L L ⁓ Is that it's deterministic in nature. We're not just going like building a corpus of data and then hallucinating off of that data half the time. That wouldn't work. So we're literally going into ⁓ all of the requisite data repositories and database repositories and deriving ⁓ deterministic, traceable answers to hard questions. So it might take a little bit longer than Chat GPT, like Chat GPT is almost instantaneous. We might take you know, eight seconds, nine seconds, maybe even for a very hard query, twenty seconds to respond. Some of them are instantaneous. But you you're getting a lot of reliability out of that. Nice. So ⁓ I got a couple of questions. Ophir, I think you have the best head of hair in dentistry. My God. Your your hair's pretty good, Matt. Yeah, I for fifty seven. Hanging on pretty pretty good for fifty seven. ⁓ I don't know ⁓ again if if you're if you can answer this or not, but Just trying to give the audience a little bit of a feel for ⁓ practice owners that are not using any software, you know, similar to what Pearl does. I think Pearl's the best in the industry in your space period, bar none, hands down. But a at an at an ⁓ you know, an average practice, if they're not using any software that's, you know, does what Pearl does and they start using Pearl, yeah, can do you have some sort of a ballpark estimate on how much that practices revenue? would likely I mean we have so much data and so many case studies around this. I would direct people to our website. I know just just give me like a range on an annual basis if they if they start using Pearl. Yeah, absolutely. So it's typically ⁓ like an automatic ten per ten to twelve percent lift just from second opinion. It's another on average I would say the range on the low end is twenty to thirty five percent lift ⁓ from practice intelligence. I could talk about why that is. ⁓ but that's a very reliable workflow. ⁓ and then you have all this time saving and automation and that's a different kind of planification. But I literally believe that the only thing you need to do if you were a DSO owner is just like use this tool set completely and well, and you will achieve all the things that you wanted to achieve when you conceived of this DSO. Same goes for private practice, it's such a different kind of beast. And what's amazing to me is like look, some folks will like install RatedLogic AI and be like, ⁓ this is great, everyone loves it. And they think they're AI users, but they're not. I'm like, you just open the door to actually impacting your organization in the correct way and understanding it and driving like materially higher results. It is the highest ROI, most reliable, most powerful mechanism for increasing. Taxes productivity and production. ⁓ and it is like the only thesis you need as a DSO owner is to lean in into it properly. and you know, we have some partners that do that extremely well and they're seeing all the benefits of that, and many of it are not, honestly. They're just like on actually they're getting benefit and they're happy. This is like where the goal is. We have the answers for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I I'm a numbers guy. You know, Neil Neil is admittedly ⁓ he's a numbers guy too, but he loves talking, you know, tech stuff. Yeah Neil always says I'm a tech nerd at heart. But you know, for an average practice that is not using software that, you know, like like what Pearl does, if they started using Pearl and do what the software allows that practice to do and they really use it. I it's a ⁓ re correct me if I'm not correct, but I think a reasonable expectation is, you know, an individual practice could increase their revenues by a hundred thousand to a half a million dollars a year. The numbers are bigger than that. If you're doing a million dollars, we could reliably, if you're engaging in the tool set, generate make turn you into a one point five million dollar a year enterprise and you're paying a thousand dollars for that. This is why I say it's that it's just like an undeniable ROI. And it's also not yeah. Yeah, you're paying like four four or five grand a year and you're adding a hundred to you know potentially three hundred of of additional profit. Well it's not all profit, but it's very profitable. No, no, I'm saying that right, but if someone's adding half a million a year to their revenue, they might be adding three, four hundred ⁓ you know, three hundred thousand ⁓ Excuse me, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of of profit to their bottom line at a cost of four or five grand a year and providing way better patient care. So I always think we've ⁓ sorry, go on. So I I always like to, you know, give you give ⁓ guests an opportunity. If someone if a practice owner or DSO, CEO, ⁓ owner wants to talk or owner wants to get in touch with someone from Pearl, how do they get in touch with you? Like is is there you is you want to just spell out your website or what's the best way To get in touch you if you want to talk about using Perl. Yeah. And I will say on that point, we are very good and very meticulous about providing highly reliable ROI data. The feedback that we always get on our ROI data is like we run it independently ground up. And then they will run it independently ground up and it always matches. And we're always, if anything, more conservative with our estimates. So I think we have a lot of credibility with our partners because they see that we're not trying to like mislead them. Or feel godgy them into believing that there's some R that there isn't. It's just very attributable. but hellopearl.com, that's ⁓ hello h e l o pearl ⁓ com is probably the best way to schedule a demo or reach out. My personal email address is ophir op I r at hellopearl.com. ⁓ I would say you'll find all the resources you need at the website. ⁓ and to get in touch, feel free to reach out to me directly. I'll route you to the right individuals. depending on the nature of your enterprise, your location, ⁓ and your size, you'll be routed to a particular team. Yeah, thank you. And I I'm gonna say this again, like if you're not using Pearl and you own a practice or a group or a DSO, you are leaving so much money on the table. And you're also leaving you can really take a step up on on patient care as well. So the two go hand in hand and they're creative to each other. I absolutely love Pearl. I think it's the the best in the business in your space, period, bar none. ⁓ Neil, what else you got? I just I it I I wanna be respectful of your time. You're are you okay if we go a a ⁓ a couple of minutes ⁓ mo over or up to you. I just wanna be respectful, Jammel. Of course. ⁓ Well, while you're thinking, Neil, I also want to ⁓ just tell the audience that Pearl is coming to ⁓ Eric Morin's Tower Leadership Impact Summit in Atlanta, November 13th and 14th. ⁓ where it's gonna be an incredible, incredible summit. So if you are in dentistry, ⁓ if you own a practice, a group or a DSO, you don't want to miss the Tower Impact ⁓ Leadership Summit in Atlanta, November 13th and 14th. Pearl is gonna be there. I don't know if you're coming or if it's going to be Mackenzie Fagan who's awesome, but you guys will be on stage and ⁓ you know doing a great presentation and question and answer and have a booth there as well for anybody that's interested. Yeah, we're really excited about that event. Awesome. The next question is is there something or what do you think is a use case of AI that a lot of practices are adopting or using that you think is wrong? Well, I I don't know that anything is wrong as much as it's ⁓ potentially premature. Right. ⁓ there's a lot of, you know, voice AI reception oriented capabilities, for example, where people are trying to hand off a lot of control the front desk, which I think is an inevitability. I think it's getting extremely good. I think there are use cases there that are extremely productive. Like I believe in that space and I think it could add a lot of value today. But that is one area where there's like a little bit more saturation would be very helpful. ⁓ where I think people are using it wrong is more so That they're not maximizing what it can do, like I talked about earlier. And also the rollout and implementation and buy-in from your large team, if you're an enterprise, for example, is incredibly important. You want people to be bought in holistically for the right reasons. And ⁓ you know, we're doing ⁓ a ⁓ a roll out now with smile branch, for example. And I just give them a lot of credit and particularly like AJ Aciano and Jason, because they're so thoughtful about how they communicate and get ahead of practitioners sort of questions and curiosities about this and get everyone super gummed up and excited. So it's just like such a pleasure to launch because it's just like high fives all around. I think where folks make a mistake is they just feel like a pure IT project and they just like they get the tech out and they don't communicate anything about how it works, expectations, how to interface with it. This is a clinical reality. Doctors are sensitive. They want to be given the courtesy of communication and stuff like that. ⁓ And then on top of that, like I talked about earlier, is just like, you know, if you're buying this thing, like utilize it properly and get the most out of it. I think there's a lot of value left on the table. Is there a question that you wish people would ask you? about AI, but maybe don't or don't frequently ask you? Hmm. From Honestly, not nothing really comes to mind. I talk about this stuff every day. People think right right amount of curious, right amount of excitement. There's a lot of momentum behind just AI in general. I think we're all excited. We all feel like we're not doing enough with the capability set. We all are also like, What is this really gonna do to jobs and everything else? And you know, I share that fear and that concern as much as anyone. Like, ⁓ so ⁓ you know, I think the thing to do is to really become a student of the technology yourself. Like, it's not like other things in this world where like you're gonna have a training and suddenly like kind of get it. Like this technology is evolving extremely rapidly. It's fascinating, it's cognitive. You know, I told my team at Pearl, like, we're gonna do office hours, we're gonna bring companies and do trainings. We do this like AI showcases where we show the team what everyone else is building all the time. But like it's up to you to become a student of this thing. It changes every week. So like it's not even up to you to do that in service of Perl. It's up to you to do that in service of your own career and your own your own growth as as a as a person in this world. So you know get fascinated by it. It is inherently very fascinating. It's very easy to have the aha moment. Again, I'm talking about AI broadly right now as well as Bill. And make it very fundamental to how you operate in the world. That's the advice I would give. What advice would you give early stage founders that are starting companies in dentistry? Because I I I'm I sit on a lot of calls and ⁓ people call me all the time and I'm like, gosh, I mean, in general, these, you know, founders just they're kind of stuck in their in their own head and I listen to their pitches and and what they're trying to do and I'm like, boy, you got a rough road ahead of you. ⁓ like what what would be your main bits of advice to someone that is a founder i in a a a business in dentistry? Yeah. I mean, I would really do your diligence and spend time in market understanding the nature and quality of your product market fit and how you're going to fit into the longer term reality. Like we are so many companies that just call us and it was like just By us, by our team. Like we just can't, we don't want to do it anymore. They just give up. And they give up because, you know, they might raise a few million bucks from a super high quality impressive entity or Y combinator or whatever. And they like, ooh, dentistry, like I could I can do a lot there. It sounds like a juicy category. But there was just a complete lack of understanding about the intensity of that fragmentation, the intensity of the territorialism that could exist. And then Even if you are successful at doing a thing, if you really are just a point solution, I don't think you're going to be very successful long term because and I know this sounds biased towards Pearl, but like Pearl, everything that we do is better because of the other things that we do, including Radio Logic AI. And like it is just markedly better. So at the end of the day, you cannot there'd be this other thing that is not plugged into that infrastructure. I think that A lot of these value points converge. Like I don't think about this like building the next product. I think about building the next arm of the robot or the or the or the foot or something, right? Like and when all that value converges, ⁓ it's going to leave the entities that just do the one thing in a difficult position. ⁓ so look, I mean, I I don't want to just like sound super negative and say don't come into dentistry and build cool stuff. I definitely want to see more companies building cool stuff in dentistry, but like I would really do your diligence in your homework and walk in eyes wide open with a thesis and a perspective that is very durable that is winning, you know. I I agree. I I speak to a lot of founders that think they have a really cool idea and they don't understand how absolutely competitive it is in the dental space and how difficult it is to get market share and market penetration. And your market share is astounding. ⁓ you know, what what you've achieved. ⁓ and most people don't realize that. And people don't like to dentists don't like to try new software. They don't want to go through the training on an unknown, untested, you know, entity or or ⁓ company. And people think, ⁓ it's gonna be easy. Like I I had a call with someone they're like and their product was, you know, it was mediocre and they're like, you know, their pro forma showed being in ⁓ it was crazy, getting ten percent market share in twenty four months. And I'm like, you're out of your mind. Like, if you even get two percent share after five or ten years, you'll be very fortunate. So correct. Yeah, I don't know. Otherwise, entrepreneurs wouldn't do crazy stuff. And then you fit in and you learn, but like too much of it, like everything you said completely mat, like ⁓ and you're just gonna end up in a world of pain and then it stuck, right? Because you've like raised the money. These obligations, it doesn't make a very painful reality. And there's a lot of companies and I mean in ⁓ in dentistry that you know I think are struggling and it's it's hard to wake up and do that, live that struggle every day for a very long time. ⁓ that being said, it's a big tem. There's a lot of problems to solve. ⁓ you just have to be Yeah, very ⁓ you really have to have a durable, legitimate thesis around like why you're going to win, how you're gonna penetrate, how you gonna get distribution, how you're gonna get them to play nicely with you, all of that stuff, which is just non obvious unless you're in it. Yeah, it's very, very challenging. ⁓ so here I had another question. This is ⁓ I think probably my last question, but when you started Pearl, did you ⁓ way like right when you started, did you have a legitimate thought in your mind like My goal is to build a company that's gonna have a an enterprise value of billion plus at the end. Or did you start and say, ⁓ I'm not I'm not really sure where this will end up on enterprise value? No, we started with a billion plus at the end as the minimum marker of success, if I'm being honest. That's like like literally like I remember talking to me, if we sold for less than a billion or go public, whatever, then we would have not succeeded on some level. ⁓ And how were the initial investors when you when you told them, look, I I I I really have a vision and believe we we can get to a billion dollar plus multi-billion dollar valuation at the end of this. W ⁓ was the was the initial feedback like, yeah, I I I see the path, I think you can do it, or was it was it more like no friggin' way you're gonna hit that? No, I totally saw the path. I mean look, these are Silicon Valley investors who look at In accordance with an idea and say, like, is it possible? And could this team do it? ⁓ the TAM is there, it's possible. the idea is very compelling. They're only taking swings on things that can do it, by the way. Like the inherent belief has to be that it could be a minimum of a billion dollars, because that's like how these funds survive is that sometimes they're right and they get big returns, right? Our last round was you know, four hundred million dollar round in July of twenty twenty four. A billion dollar outcome is not a three X. That's the minimum target, right? So they obviously believe that. ⁓ Kraft and David Sachs and that Volk crew who invested in the A were also very familiar with Gum Gum. Had to believe that to make the investment. look, things once you get to the reality of life, things can go any which way. But like we have built this company. With the intention of building something very large and meaningful. And we've never looked for the exit. ⁓ we're not in a rush. You know, I've done enough companies in my career that like I'm not looking to go and like wrap this one up and go to the next one. I'm old enough that like that sounds super painful. I don't think I want to do it do that, do it quite that way. So, you know, we're trying to build a transformational company in a space that has a void, like it has a need for that. ⁓ whether or not we are successful is very much to be determined. but you know that's the goal. Yeah. It's it's an amazing, amazing story. ⁓ I feel like you that Pearl is built, you know, I know you have a couple of competitors, but I feel like Pearl has built the strongest moat around what Pearl provides. And the data is absolutely undeniable that the return on investment for dental practice that's using Pearl. I mean it's ⁓ the return on investment's off the charts. I mean off the charts. I don't know if there's if there's a another return on investment out there that that can compete with Pearl. It's true it's I the amount of customers that we have that are like I literally got a standing elevation from my board due to Pearl and they did it the last three board meetings. It's like I've gotten that note a lot, you know. So that's really exciting and super fun. ⁓ we are here to be collaborative with our partners and really put them onto sets of playbooks and and and ⁓ operational ⁓ sort of approaches that reliably drive outcomes. But look, I mean, everyone's also super busy trying to keep the lights on, trying to do a bunch of initiatives. So I just think that my my recommendation is like this is a worthwhile one to focus on, you will see results extremely quickly that I'm not sure. Amazing. Neil, you have any other final questions? No. ⁓ All right. Ophir, just one last time. If if ⁓ anyone wants to check out the website, it's hello h e l o pearl p-e-ar-r-l.com. And if they want to contact you, it's Ophir O P H I R at hellopearl.com. I just want to tell everybody, Ophir's an amazing, amazing guy. He's super friendly. ⁓ remember the first time I met you. You know, you didn't even know who I was and you were just really, really nice. I think we had dinner together. Yeah, we did. In Vegas. In Vegas, yeah. I like you from the start and I'm always very impressed by your entrepreneurial journey. You've done so much interesting and successful work. Thank you. Well, I just want to say thanks for always being so nice and anytime I've texted you or or called you, you've always been like really responsive and ⁓ I I appreciate that. You're just a phenomenal human being. ⁓ thank you very, very much. For ⁓ being on the Dental Mentors podcast. This is gonna be a great one. And Neil, any closing comments? I just thank you so much for being on. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, guys. I really appreciate it. Really fun. If you enjoyed today's video, we'd love to invite you to join the Dental Mentors Facebook group. The group is completely free, but it is private at invite only. The group is for practice owners, dentists, specialists, and dental CEOs. If that's you, we'd love to see you inside. As part of Dental Mentors, you're gonna have Direct access to the brightest minds in dentistry and the brightest mentors, and some of the greatest CEOs that have ever worked in the dental space. You're going to learn all the best practices that you're going to need to optimize the profitability of your practices, to properly scale your practices, and to achieve a high value exit. You're also going to learn the closely guarded secrets that the rich and wealthy use for asset protection. And the access to private investments and investment strategies that will allow you and your family to create generational wealth. 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