Future of the Business World Podcast · Wharton Global Youth Program

Using Your Eyes as a Window into Your Mind

·20 min·1 clip

Vital uses eye-tracking tests on a laptop to estimate brain health without specialized hardware.

Sai Matapali's interview centers on Vital, the AI healthcare company he started. The host first frames him through Wharton Global Youth, where DMV's finest finished top 10 in the investment competition two years in a row and won the global championship last year. The tone stays patient throughout. From there, the conversation shifts to the summer launch of a $12.5 million AI business and the student-founder grind behind it. Sai says most of what he knows has come from talking to other entrepreneurs. He says the team has spoken with almost 200 entrepreneurs in tech over the last four or five months. That kind of learning, he says, is hard to get from a book alone. Online courses help with technical basics, but they do not replace the messier lessons of building. The host then asks about the biggest skeptics of AI in healthcare. Sai points to doctors, and he ties that skepticism to the seriousness of their training and the lives at stake in their work. He does not treat that doubt as something to crush. Instead, he says the better approach is to build in alignment with it. He describes Vital's early push toward full diagnostics as one example of that thinking, and says they were a little in over their heads at first. The questions stay plainspoken, which keeps the interview organized. It feels more like a guided classroom conversation than a polished magazine profile. The closing stretch moves into the show's lighter personal questions, where Sai jokes about showering twice a day, names Lex Fridman's recent podcast with Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse as an inspiration, and picks Nick D'Alioso for a lunch date. Taken together, the episode is a straightforward look at startup learning, healthcare skepticism, and the work of earning trust.

As heard by us

A founder story that leans on trust and practical lessons instead of hype.

This episode is more about a young founder learning how to make AI useful in a field that has every reason to be cautious than about startup theater.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a teen founder to unpack AI healthcare, fundraising, and earning doctor trust without hype, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Future of the Business World Podcast