Dr. Daniel Chao has been working most of his adult life to improve people’s lives through medical research. To achieve that goal and gain the knowledge and skills required to do so, he earned a degree in biochemistry, an MS in neuroscience and his medical degree from Stanford University, worked as a consultant for McKinsey and was an early employee for one of the world’s pioneer’s in medical device development.
So what is he doing creating a device to stimulate the brain for the purpose of improving world-class athletes’ performance? According to Chao, it’s all part of the same journey.
Chao has been at the forefront of research and development on and device development on neurostimulation, the process of using light electrical wave pulses to activate the brain which has proven helpful to people who suffer from chronic pain or neurological disorders like epilepsy.
When working on a medical device to treat epilepsy back in 2013, neuroscientist Chao grew frustrated with the invasiveness of the process. The equipment all had to be implanted – sometimes requiring patients to undergo up to 3 hours of surgery in order to install a device that would diminish the rate of epileptic seizures. “We were really encouraged on one hand in how efficacious the technology was,” Chao recalls, “but on the other hand, we were really frustrated by how invasive the technologies were and how generally unavailable they are because of the level of invasiveness.”
That frustration led to an intense hunt for non-invasive solutions, and ultimately to the founding of Halo Neuroscience in 2013. With the backing of notable investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Daniel and his co-founder, CTO Brett Wingeier, raised $9 million dollars and created the first company that expanded on and brought the benefits of neuroscience technology to everyone. Halo is a non-invasive device (just like a pair of headphones) that increases the brain’s ability to learn new skills. In fact, its website has a slick consumer look to it, that one might expect from an uber trendy headset manufacturer like Beats by Apple.
But the early results of the use of the device indicate a serious business. Athletes at the top of their game, Olympians, MLB teams, and other professional athletes are currently using Halo. According to Chao, the United States Olympic Ski and Snowboard Association saw a 1.7X increase in performance of their athletes from using Halo. While it is still very early days for the company, having just launched the device to the public in February of this year, the company is growing fast.
In a move that was, by his own admission, “atypical for a Silicon Valley start-up,” Chao says about creating Halo Neuroscience, “We didn’t think about our products or markets once.” Instead, along with their team—50% neuroscientists and 50% engineers–Chao and Wingeier worked to perfect the device. Halo Neuroscience tested 1,000 people at their offices before making any marketing or product decisions, but one market—athletic performance– bubbled to the top among a host of other applications. The company does have revenues, but Chao is keeping mum about specifics.
Halo Neuroscience’s primary product, called Halo Sport, speeds up the brain’s natural ability to develop new neural pathways, or the systems that govern the connections between the brain and the body. As we age, the speed with which these pathways are developed decreases. But Chao has discovered that with some external stimulation to our gray matter, repeated over a set period of time, those pathways are created more quickly, aiding in upping an athlete’s performance.
Among top athletes, even the smallest advances can make a huge difference. Take the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, which Chao was invited to observe at this year’s world championships in Vail, Colorado. In watching the men’s downhill, Chao says, only two seconds separated first place from twentieth. “If we could help one of these athletes, we could help the 20th place athlete improve by two percent, then that person could have stood on the podium.”
Chao believes that if athletes find Halo Sport valuable, “then it’ll spread like wildfire and it will become democratized, everybody will be using it.”
He continues, “When people think about athletic training, they think about just training the muscles, which couldn’t be further from the truth.” The reason why basketball players practice 100 free throws at the end of every practice, for example, is because those repetitive movements help build what we call “muscle memory,” which according to Chao is really another name for training the brain. “The vast majority of those reps are all for this part of the brain, the motor cortex, to train this part of the brain to be more automatic, and to be more automatic, it requires the building of new neuro circuits and that’s what we’re helping to enhance and accentuate.”
Chao grew up in Anaheim, California, the product of Chinese immigrant parents who came to the U.S. to attend graduate school. “My dad was hugely influential on me. He taught me the value of designing a life career around making the world a better place. He valued social impact above monetary or material gains,” says Chao.
He went to Cal Berkeley to earn his degree in biochemistry as his first step. He then landed his first job out of college working at a lab at UCSF, which would turn out to be foundational to his life’s work. There he got the chance to work with Professor David Bredt who at the time was the university’s youngest ever tenure tracked professor ever hired.
“David Bredt figured out a new way that neurons talk to each other. In the lab, It was just me and him. It felt like a start-up. We worked night and day to build that lab up. In just two years, we published 8 scientific papers. A collection of those papers describe a new method of treating muscular dystrophy through neurosignaling brain stimulation. It was just amazing to be a part of this. I wanted to be David Bredt,” says Chao.
So to do that he went on to earn his Masters and MD. The MD side was to learn how to fix people. After years of schooling, he then came to the conclusion that working at a small business would be a better way to learn how to do this, much faster, gaining the practicality of being on the business side. After testing the job market, he then decided he had a knowledge gap on developing a strategic business vision in his experience and then became a consultant at McKinsey working with big pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
He was then recruited to be an early employee at Neuro Pace, where he worked alongside legendary entrepreneur and medical device pioneer, Frank Fisher. “It was a privilege to work with him shoulder to shoulder over that time frame,” says Chao
“It’s been a long, crooked path. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it,” jokes Chao.
“Part of being an entrepreneur is having this never give up attitude. I learned that with David Bredt. There were so many ways to fail in the lab. When things don’t go your way—you work twice as hard. You don’t let it get you down. You work harder.”
Chao’s vision for Halo Neuroscience only starts with athletic training. He hopes to create not the largest, but as he puts it, “the most impactful neurostimulation company. If we think about modalities for affecting human health, you think of drugs or medical devices, this just could be an entirely new mode that we think about when we think about making ourselves better, either getting better from a disease or making ourselves better in terms of our performance.”