Building Proto Hologram: David Nussbaum on Rejection, Reinvention and Believing in Your Idea

Full interview transcript, lightly edited for readability from the original recording. Speaker labels and source-recording timestamps are retained. The edited audio may differ in timing and closing remarks.

Introductions and the broadcasting dream

Jet Bunditwong · Source 00m 00s

Welcome to The Personal Side of Business, where you hear real stories from real entrepreneurs.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 00m 17s

Hi, and welcome to The Personal Side of Business, where every business has a story. I'm your host, Jet Bunditwong, and today. My guest is David Nussbaum. He's a founder of Proto Hologram, a company changing how we connect through holographic communication. If you don't understand what any of that means, then you need to listen to David. David, welcome to Podcast.

David Nussbaum · Source 00m 34s

Hey, thanks for having me here. This is great.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 00m 37s

Okay, so let's start. I always like to hear how we got here. And I think for you, on the surface I think a lot of people would think you're scientists, a programmer, someone, but that's not how your career started. Okay.

David Nussbaum · Source 00m 49s

No, I’m not a scientist. I fell in love with Doc Brown from Back to the Future, everyone did. Right. So that's my connection to science. I the origin story of Proto really started about thirty or forty years ago. I'm obsessed with broadcasting and communications, obsessed with it. Grew up listening to the radio, sitting in the backseat of my dad's Volkswagen Rabbit.

And he would listen to AM talk radio all the time. I just loved radio. wanted to be the play by play announcer for the New York Mets. That didn't happen. I grew up a Mets fan. Yeah. Are you? Did you

Jet Bunditwong · Source 01m 27s

That's fantastic.

Okay. We're not doing good right now, but

David Nussbaum · Source 01m 32s

We always have 1986. But the so yeah, I grew up a huge Mets fan, obsessed with sports radio, sports talk. Yeah. and I started working for several teams over the years. So I started working for the Yankees, I worked for the Mets on WFAN 660 when the Mets had them. Anyway, I never fully got on the air, started a podcast when I'm an

Jet Bunditwong · Source 01m 59s

You’re one of the OGs. Word has it you’re an OG podcaster.

David Nussbaum · Source 02m 04s

Yeah, so I used to be sitting in that seat. In fact, it was really cool. Like so I started a podcast in like two thousand seven, two thousand eight. I know I don't look old enough to have a podcast in two thousand met my wife and the mother of my three children on my podcast in two thousand ten. She had she had won a reality show and I was a fan of the show. And so, just like what we're doing these days with podcasts, it's like, you know, you have people on that you want

To have on anyway, I had one of the earliest long-form interview shows on podcast. It was great. On that podcast, I met a guy that I had known only through the Howard Stern show. And his name was Johnny Fratto. And Johnny presented on the podcast to me patents that had just been used to put Tupac on stage at Coachella in 2012. So we built a company around that. We started bringing back all these dead musicians.

And to posthumously perform and all of a sudden Whitney Houston was performing here and this guy was pour it was it was amazing. It was the most brilliant thing. But because of my love and obsession with d communication, I thought hologram should be about connecting the living, not about raising the dead. So I went from broadcasting to podcasting to holoportation. And so I started Proto in my living room with that kind of founding principle, if you can't be there, being there.

Yeah. And that's kind of and that and the technology's been taken off ever since. So no, n not a scientist, not an engineer. I'm a I'm a broadcasting nerd that figured there must be a better way to communicate instead of talking into a microphone and hearing your voice come through a speaker. What if I could jet what if I could broadcast you?

Turning communication into a business idea

Jet Bunditwong · Source 03m 49s

But I feel like that probably helped change the trajectory of the hologram software, right, for you because you wanted to communicate. You use your broadcasting background to like if we can enhance this and make it more fun for people to really connect to each other.

David Nussbaum · Source 04m 04s

sure. And I was using all of the marketing words too. Holoportation, beam there. It's it's a it's a digital telepresence, which we do have some patents and the you know proprietary production process on. So beaming somebody somewhere to somewhere else, it's not really a hologram, but it does create the effect that a person or a thing is physically in the space with you. So as long as I can create that feeling of presence, I knew that the company

Would have a chance for success. And so I took that principle of physical presence to out into the world, and enough people liked it just enough. I started booking some gigs, and then I was able to find some early investment. and then I was able to finally hire people that

understood the idea and those are the people who actually are making Proto run. I came up with an idea and now I'm lucky enough just to have a job at this company. The people who I work with are scientists, are brilliant operators.

Rejection, early believers and raising capital

Jet Bunditwong · Source 05m 09s

What was the turning point do you think in Proto that went from, okay, I think people kinda get it, to all right, people are now starting to ride with this and want to see to the next level.

David Nussbaum · Source 05m 23s

It's a slow evolution. I don't think there was one turning point. I just know that I would get kicked out of every single office for about a year or two. when I came up with this crazy idea, this Doc Brown, you know, idea is like, hey, I'm gonna beam people places, and they're like crazy. They're like, security, get this crazy person out of here. So I think the turning point probably happened when Tim Draper.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 05m 38s

Are you crazy

David Nussbaum · Source 05m 51s

Actually, even prior to Tim Draper, there's guy named Doug Barry. Doug Barry's an early believer in Proto, and I was running demonstrations out of a corner of a set warehouse called 41 Sets in North Hollywood. They would build like sets for t television programs and stuff. And so Doug Barry came in with a group of people and he said, you know, you're really onto something. What if

I helped you raise some money. What if, you know, COVID had just started happening, so everything was shutting down at the time. And so I thought, you know, what if what if me and Doug kind of partnered up a little bit and Doug allowed me to be like this kind of, you know, crazy founder ideas guy, and Doug could actually build the business model, help me find investors, create the architecture of how to raise money. And so I think that was the

That was really the turning point is finding a believer like that, to give up everything that he has and put it all into Proto. And so then we then went out to market and then Tim Draper, founding investor of Tesla and SpaceX and a number I mean, he's a he's a he's an OG in the if it's if it gets big, how big can it get? And he's a big idea, he's a moonshot.

style investor. So if you have a if you're going to be a founder, if you want to start your own company and it's a huge idea, like this could be a multi-billion dollar, trillion dollar idea, Tim Draper's your guy. Seed and pre-seed and early stage. So Tim put like the first million bucks into Proto and that changed everything for us.

Building a team around your strengths

Jet Bunditwong · Source 07m 29s

And from a entrepreneur standpoint, when that was happening, how did you adjust to learn all the different aspects? I'm sure because you went from like, okay, it's kind of here and now it's starting to grow out to here. Did you have to start to bring people into certain places on let's say the back end side of things, go, I need you to be in this place in order for me to achieve the goals I need to achieve?

David Nussbaum · Source 07m 53s

Yes, absolutely. I'm again I'm not an engineer, I'm not a hardware guy, I'm not a software guy. There's a lot of stuff that I don't do around here. what I've been able to do is commercialize and popularize and you know, even be able to see around corners a little bit. I could almost see like into the f I'm gonna sound like a crazy person. I'm not gonna go there. So the idea of commercializing an idea. Yeah.

Let me do that while Rafi Krishek and you know and Edward Guinness run the software and technology and Nolan Cassidy and then have like you know Molly and Jack and Rich let them run with sales and let this person do this and let Noah Rossian run with live events and you know moving units all over the place. So

yes, I didn't fit into a lot of those different categories. And so as people would find me at a convention or a trade show or maybe they'd see something like this and I'd get I'd they would find me on LinkedIn and they'd say, Hey, I'd love to a job there. I'd say, Well, you know, I don't have any money quite yet. And they say, you know what, if especially if you're a salesperson or business development specialist, they'd say, I'll I'll eat what I kill.

Yeah. And so they'll just start going out there. And that's that's sort of how we started. And I got to focus on brand development, brand ambassadors, getting celebrity investors I thought was very important in Proto's history. Celebrity investors, they invested in Proto, they think that this is the future, and then not only do they invest their capital, but then their name-likeness and image, and then folks like Howie Mandel.

Paris Hilton, Marshawn Lynch, you know, Robert Griffin III, Al Leiter, former New York Met, and all of these people, they start saying, they start posting and saying, this is great, this is the future. Lil Wayne. So these were early investors who believed in Proto enough to say, not only am I going to give you some money for this for small little sliver of equity of your company, but I'm gonna go out there and help it move along.

Holographic communication in healthcare

Jet Bunditwong · Source 10m 15s

Yeah, because I think on the surface this feels like a lot of entertainment and visual candy, right? But I think the one aspect that I've learned a lot about Proto is the telehealth aspect that I feel like that's an avenue that could take off, you know, down the road and once, you know, everyone starts to accept this. could you talk about that aspect of the what Proto can do?

David Nussbaum · Source 10m 38s

Absolutely. yeah, the celebrity piece is the low-hanging fruit of beaming a celebrity into a thing. I mean, that's v like that's very easy. You don't have to connect too many dots on why that would make a lot of sense. but if you could beam Howie Mandel onto a stage at the comedy store, you could beam a doctor into a rural clinic 750 miles away. You could beam a teacher, one of maybe a person who wrote the book on a certain subject, beam that person into K through twelve schools in poor

you know, cities in different parts of the country or around the world. So you just take the idea of what is the low-hanging fruit and you expand it into these other areas. And thank goodness for the folks who we were just talking about, who understand that kind of core principle, beaming a person somewhere, projecting a person's likeness or image somewhere. And so over the years the technology became HIPAA compliant. Yeah. we were we were

SOC 2 compliant, which is an enterprise grade of encryption and privacy from end to end, so nobody could break into the Proto technology and pull out any data. And so once you're SOC 2 compliant, you're about 70 or 80 percent of the way there to HIPAA, and the team who was tasked with you know getting us there absolutely

nailed it. So HIPAA compliant. And all of a sudden doctors and patients felt really comfortable using this technology as a means of in-person consultation. So now you and your doctor can be 3,000 miles away, you could be on different continents, and then you could feel the presence of your doctor in the room. Yeah. Which is great for the patient. What's also great is for the doctor because now the doctor doesn't have to get in her car.

Let's say she's in Boston or Memphis or New York. She doesn't have to get in her car and then drive fifty miles to a s a smaller clinic or another location and spend time wasting time in the car back and forth, driving between clinics and hospitals or medical centers, whatever. So now they're they beam in, they have their consultation, they do their diagnosis, maybe some treatment, and they beam out.

David Nussbaum · Source 12m 57s

And so now they can see more people in more places extending their ability to help more people. And if you're an oncologist and you're a cancer patient, having that doctor in the room offers you a sense of comfort that a telehealth or Zoom visit just won't provide. So you gotta have that person feel like they're there in order for it to make a difference.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 13m 22s

Yeah, and could you explain to the audience a little bit from the not from a doctor's perspective, right? Because I think at first we're all looking at it from the patient's perspective and able to see what the doc just a doctor sort of beaming in there, but the doctor can actually see out and really look at a full body of a of a patient as well. Yeah.

David Nussbaum · Source 13m 46s

The each one of our Proto hardware devices has cameras, sensors, speakers, microphones. It's got all the all the stuff you would expect to be able to have for it to have, for it to be like multi-directional and interactive. So yeah, that doctor is seeing you, the patient, like you're in the room. It's like you're there in full volume. So you only need to st present yourself in front of any 4K camera.

could be an iPhone and you could beam into the doctor's office. Or the doctor could beam into your area, you could beam into your home and one of the you know smaller devices.

AI avatars, education and trust

Jet Bunditwong · Source 14m 22s

Yeah. And as I feel like as you're developing this and AI's coming into it now. So one of the things that I think you've sort of bumped up is now having like let's say celebrity learning who they are, AI is now able to interact while the celebrity's not there, right? Or whoever it is that's in there, they're able to interact with an audience member, learning personality, history and information like that.

How did that change how Proto was the trajectory of Proto?

David Nussbaum · Source 14m 58s

Well, it's always about communication and so is about the feeling of presence. AI is not going anywhere except forward. Yeah. Right. There's no stopping it. and it's about w what are who are the companies, what are the companies, who are the people who are going to be in place when the evolution of AI and what it can do starts to evolve. Proto thought very early on that we must be involved because the

w you want to start setting a standard. You wanna make sure that people who are using technology feel trust. and so an honest company who's using AI in such a way is absolutely required. So instead of beaming somebody somewhere, you can what we started out doing was taking two or three minute long videos of people and that person would then have their voice cloned through the process. The video would also have some

generic AI gestures and movements. and then the voice would then come out in that person's tone, cadence, and vibe, sounds like that person, moves like that person, speaks like that person. And then on the back end, you've got a prompt engineer, a RAG trainer, you've got somebody building the brain, the information. What's Jet gonna know? Is it everything you know, you could literally drop every podcast in there if you wrote a book

drop that book in there, redirect it to your Wikipedia and your website. It's amazing. So now it's got all the information. What languages does it speak? So you open it up to Italian and French and Zulu and Chinese and I mean it becomes a legacy project. It also becomes a trusted expansion, extension of that person. And so when you're in a doctor's office, that's very important. When you're in

A museum. Holy cow. You know, now all of a sudden this AI Avatar has all the information of everything that's ever happened in science history or in natural history or in you know it's real.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 17m 06s

Learning could potentially be different in five years, having to interact with that, right? You can have George Washington like in there talking about his life and his history and you're like, Wow, I and kids are probably gonna be able to connect to it a lot faster because they're just seeing it.

David Nussbaum · Source 17m 22s

Well and we're doing it. we're in several presidential libraries right now. We just worked with a company called the we're

gonna kill me. It's the anyway, I'm sorry. It's all right, you're

Jet Bunditwong · Source 17m 43s

I can move it forward. I can edit that part. If I can go forward.

David Nussbaum · Source 17m 46s

Well, we're working with a we're working with a museum in just outside of Chicago and they just had a space at the America 250 and you and Abraham Lincoln was giving the Gettysburg Address. we're working with a Philadelphia museum and we've got Benjamin Franklin. Why if you're a student, why would you open up a book at this time look, we're talking we're in twenty-six now, almost twenty-seven at this point. Why would you ever open up a book and read about something when you can

ask Benjamin Franklin about it directly. It's like you can literally ask him about it. And if you're Italian, ask him in it in Italian. He'll respond to you in Italian. Okay, so maybe that's not exactly historically accurate in that sense, but in that case, you can do that. Most of the time when we do something with historical accuracy, it the information lives and ends, begins and ends with that person's actual life. So

When you walk into the Theodore Roosevelt Museum in upstate New York and you ask President Roosevelt about who is your favorite president between Trump and Obama. He'd say, I don't know who these people are. But you know, so I don't have any opinion on them. But if you want to know about

the you know how w you know my the bifocals I'm wearing or whatever. So yeah, so everything is it's it's it's all in the guardrails. The guardrails are probably the most important part.

Collaborative leadership and product decisions

Jet Bunditwong · Source 19m 20s

You know, I was I was wondering about that, driving up here to see you as you further this along, 'cause it's I'm I'm sure it feels like it's moving at the speed of light, right? Like with all this technology just coming AI, what are you what have you set, if any, your guardrails and your guidelines as you move forward? It's like and do they change over time, right? From month to month, and you're like, Well, we have this new technology. What I thought I wanted to stick with

you know, in June feels like it's gonna be a little bit different going into September, October, right? How does how does that work for you?

David Nussbaum · Source 19m 56s

Well, so the guardrails for the company constantly evolve and we're doing a bit of a leadership by collaboration approach. it was easy for me to lead when it was just me and you know a few people. But now we've got all these great leaders. people who you're lucky enough to be in the room with. so we've got a bit of a like a leadership panel, a team, and so we have bi weekly meetings.

and outside of my advisory panel, my board of directors, several other people who are very much involved in Proto, we do have an internal leadership group. And so we wanna understand where the world is, who our competition is, where we want to where we wanna develop next. Is the hardware always gonna be tall, you know, d

you know, boxes? Is it going to be more spatial screens? Will we remove the hardware completely? We talk about stuff like that. We say, do we want to decouple the software from the hardware so that maybe somebody doesn't want a hologram display box in their in their lobby? Maybe they're fine with it not looking very hologrammy, but they still like all the software stuff that it does. The AI avatars, the live beaming, the

The interactions, the translation services, and stuff like that. Maybe they are cool with just putting that on a legacy screen or a spatial screen or something that maybe hasn't even been invented yet. So you can just plug right into that. And so these are the kinds of things that we're always talking about. We test them with beta testers. So we've got hundreds of customers, many of them are Fortune 500 companies. And so we'll go to like Verizon or Christie's or Cisco or Salesforce and we'll say,

Hey, you know, you're a great customer, Simon Malls, or like you're a great customer. How would you like to be one of the first people to receive a brand new software update? And with the software update, this may or may not actually make it to the final version. And many of them say, Absolutely. So it's a it's a collaboration approach. We like to test stuff out. We like to break stuff. We wanna we wanna see if something works or not before it goes far and wide. Yeah, because

Partnerships, affordability and growth

Jet Bunditwong · Source 22m 16s

I think, you know, from what I read with Proto, part of the goal is to get it more affordable, more affordable. I'm I'm guessing part of the vision is eventually everyone's gonna have it in a home. I ideally that would be great, right? We can we can talk to family members, friends that are five thousand, seven thousand miles away other countries. what is that what has to happen over time in order for the price and everything to come down?

David Nussbaum · Source 22m 42s

I think partnerships, many partnerships. I think also as you expand you know, as a startup, we're raising money when you can, you know, when you can fill your investment fund with a lot of capital, you can do more things, you can move a little bit faster, you could try out, you could R and D different displays and devices.

But I think partnerships are probably the most important thing. So having folks not just in the United States but outside of the United States presenting the technology to all of their different areas into their different networks will help move more displays. Yeah. The more you sell, the more you manufacture, the price comes down per device. I could make them for less, I could sell them for less. I think also there might be a way to move

our hardware into spaces without much of a of an upfront investment from the customer, just maybe by putting it on a bit of like a leasing model where it's almost like a like a cable box or a water cooler or something. Just we'll get it, we'll get it to you and then you're just paying a regular monthly fee on something like that. and then of course o over time everything, I mean the first TV set I had was enormous and now it's thin and it hangs on the wall. And in some cases people don't even

My kids don't watch TV. They look at their tablets, they look at their phones, and so technology will continue to evolve. So the coolest thing that you've ever seen will look like a V CR in twenty years from now.

Adapting while keeping a clear purpose

Jet Bunditwong · Source 24m 15s

Yeah, do you do you keep up with how fast technology is moving t in reference to how you have to keep adjusting? Or do you stay in your vision and go, Okay, we have to for ninety percent of the way we have to really stick to our guns and then and then do the small tweaks or are we are you guys always looking five years ahead and go, What's coming out so that we can plug it into this? Yeah, like how does that work?

David Nussbaum · Source 24m 42s

Yeah, we're looking five minutes ahead and we're looking five years ahead. tweaking as we go, absolutely you have to modify and evolve. If you don't evolve, if you don't pivot, you're dead. Yeah. It's over. There's no such thing as like a business model that's r written in stone. if you do that, you're dead. It's just I mean, I don't know anybody who said, This is the company and this is the way it's going to be.

from the second they wrote this down in their in their presentation and stuck with it all the way through. You have to pivot. maybe you have a core principle and you stick to that. You know, look, Netflix was founded to be to send movies through the internet, but they couldn't get there for years. They had to physically deliver them through the I mean the whole I mean the company is called Netflix. It was all about the internet

flex. And so the idea of the first several years of it being only through the mail or in pickup locations was a was a I don't know if that was part of their in initial roadmap, but their core principle remained. So you keep the core principle. Proto's core principle is the feeling of presence in physical spaces, even if it's even if that person's not physically there.

So whether it's a live communication, a beaming a person somewhere, or it's a piece of pre-recorded content, it could be a personality, it could be a product. If it looks like it's there, it feels like it's there, if it's connecting with a an audience member, a visitor, a fan, a student, a patient, then we've done our job. But guess what? Competition pops up. Other people get patents, things

are all of a sudden become popular. So that's where your partnerships come in handy. I think collaboration approach is a is a meaningful way to also get business done. And

Delegation, transparency and founder growth

Jet Bunditwong · Source 26m 49s

for you know, what has been a change that you've needed to

ha to develop in yourself as an entrepreneur and business owner leading this whole entire company that you didn't think you'd had to do before? What was something that you're like, wow, this is I need to do this in order for us to move forward.

David Nussbaum · Source 27m 11s

well, invite other leaders in to take charge of different areas. when I started Proto, I always wanted to surround myself with people way smarter than me, which

Jet Bunditwong · Source 27m 25s

Which is great. It's a great it's I think it's a great thing to be able to do in the beginning because I think a lot of people who are entrepreneurs go, This is my vision, I have to do this right for you. But you knew that for me.

David Nussbaum · Source 27m 36s

Well yeah, you have to do that. And also, if you're gonna hire somebody, let them do their job and stay out of their way. That's my approach. Also, I'm I like to be really transparent. I'm being very honest with you today. I'm saying a lot of things that I don't know that other you know, founders of companies might say. I'm giving you sort of an under the hood type of an approach. I think it's it's important if s if you're trusted.

People want to do business with you. If you're honest with people, they'll see that. They'll also I also think that it's important that you don't sell, you just ex you just be you're just passionate. I'm a passionate person, and obsessed with this company. So I talk about it in such a way without selling, I don't care, I don't wanna sell a unit. I don't want to sell the technology. I just want to talk about it. And so I think that's important when you're an investor when you're an investor, you wanna hear those kinds of things.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 28m 30s

And I think that over time, I think because there's so much so many filters for people to deal with right now in twenty six and beyond that being honest and straightforward I think will get businesses further. you know, so wrap up, can you tell the audience what's going on with Proto in the next couple of months and where they should look for you and what's going on? We

The Proto Player and what comes next

David Nussbaum · Source 28m 54s

We have I think one of the things I'm most excited about is something that I touched on just a moment ago. The ability to remove the software from the hardware. so right now companies are beta testing this. We're calling it the Proto player. And it's about the size of like a Roku device, like an Apple TV. Literally plug it into any display that has an HDMI input, and pretty soon you won't even need that. It'll just be a software.

Update on your smart screen. Spatial screens, holo boxes, anything that has either been invented now or in the future. you can now plug our software into that. So when you talk when people say this is this ever going to be a home device? I don't know that Proto is going to be building the consumer device, but maybe something will present itself in the future that the Proto software will power. So

XYZ company powered by Proto. I can see that being a real thing. I'm very excited about that. I also love all of the kind of the whiz bang stuff that we're doing too. We're we're we're we're in a lot of enterprise areas. We've become a trusted source of ROI in everything from malls to museums and airports.

But I still think this is a cool company. I still love that we have these holo boxes, these hologram displays, not just slim spatial displays, which create the effect of a hologram when you're standing right in front of it, but the second you step to the side it kind of becomes a flat screen again. There are companies like Looking Glass Factory and Samsung putting out displays like that. Proto can power those displays as well. So

That's kind of what I love is that whether or not you want a hologram box or you want something different, but you still love the software that Proto's known for, we can power whatever.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 31m 01s

Awesome. Well great. Guys, check out Proto. They're on Instagram. Instagram is super entertaining. You need to check them out. And you're on TikTok live all the time too. are there any other plugs that we need to put in for they for them to find at you?

David Nussbaum · Source 31m 18s

yeah, I mean I like to comment and reply to everything on LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn TikTok and Instagram are fun for me. LinkedIn is probably where we get the most business. and so yeah, find us on social media everywhere at Proto Hologram.

Jet Bunditwong · Source 31m 34s

Okay. Awesome guys. So wrap up and just at the end of this video, David is gonna take us around to show us the studio. So stay tuned and keep following it. Thank you so much David for being on the podcast. Thank you, sir.