His Brush With Death Pushed Him to Leave Google's 'Moonshot Factory' and Make Brain-Reading Earbuds That Could Save Lives Jonathan Berent's fascination with EEG earbuds took him from a sales director job at Google, to "firestarter" at the storied moonshot factory, to spinning out his own startup. The journey has been full of surprises.

Jonathan Berent remembers the day he decided to found NextSense, a startup making revolutionary earbuds that read brain waves and could help treat conditions like epilepsy, insomnia, and depression. At the time, Berent was working at X, Google's iconic "moonshot factory" — a laboratory for developing ambitious, sci-fi-sounding solutions to the world's problems. Like earbuds that read your brain waves.

The day was October 18, 2019, when Berent was in a meeting with Google's chief economist, discussing whether reading people's brain waves would infringe on their privacy. The path that led him to that meeting was circuitous: For the better part of a decade, Berent had directed a sales team for GoogleAds, where he cultivated his interest in Eastern philosophy and turned his office into a "wisdom library" with a yoga mat for meditation. He also nurtured a long-running fascination with sleep, and when he caught wind of research that suggested you could monitor and possibly improve sleep patterns through EEG [electroencephalogram] earbuds, he took the concept to X. He wound up working on a project called Heimdallr, which explored whether human brains could control computers. That's what landed him in the chief economist's office.

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Not long into the meeting, Berent started feeling sick. He looked down at his Apple Watch, which told him he was in atrial fibrillation. He went into the hospital for testing, and they told him that his heart needed to be stopped, and restarted.

He was flabbergasted. His Apple Watch had, in all likelihood, saved his life.

By that point, he'd gone far enough down the research hole on the EEG earbuds to know that one application of the technology was detecting brain arrhythmias in people with epilepsy, not unlike the irregularities in his heartbeat that his Apple Watch identified. For decades, EEG monitoring devices had been difficult and impractical to use, requiring patients to come into a clinic and have electrodes pasted to their skulls. EEG earbuds are unobtrusive enough that people could wear them throughout the day and while sleeping would provide an unprecedented amount of brain data — and an opportunity to predict when seizures or strokes were coming on. That way, the person could get help as soon as possible.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, already had the health science company Verily, and this venture wasn't quite right for them. Berent decided that while the computer brain work at the moonshot factory had taught him a lot, his true passion was finding a medical implementation for his technology that could save lives.

So, in June 2020, he spun NextSense out into an independent startup, bringing five X staffers with him. Since then, they've developed another device that stimulates the brain, with promising evidence that it could one day treat depression.

Here, we talk with Berent about NextSense's evolution, what he learned from his time at the moonshot factory, and how to make hard decisions when you're on the cutting edge of a new technology with vast potential.

What wrong assumptions do you think people often make about ventures developed at the moonshot factory?

People kind of assume that because X is at Alphabet, it has all these dollars, and if you come up with a project idea you just automatically get 20 engineers. But there's a phrase that Ivo Stivoric [a VP at X] uses a lot. He says you have to find "a tribe of the willing."

Engineers at X have a lot of autonomy over what projects they choose to work on. So at the early stage in the pipeline, they might give us a little funding, but it's like, okay now you have to get scrappy and pitch this to the engineers. And that's part of the vetting process. I don't have an engineering background, so I assumed I'd be able to hire an engineer right away. But they were like no JB, you call yourself a self-starter, so let's see it. I actually ended up spending my own money on finding a vendor who would build me a prototype for like $5,000.

Coming from a sales background, was the culture at X an adjustment?

Now you're getting personal, but I can be a little bit vulnerable. I got feedback that my early presentations at X felt a little salesy. In sales, you're truthful, but you always present the most positive, optimistic aspects of the thing. So when I would present, I would say, "Look, we are doing great! We found this, we found that, we're gonna go do this." So when I got that feedback, at first I was a little offended, like, "Well, that's who I am! How do you think I even got into the moonshot factory? I sold myself!" But then I started observing other people's presentations, and noticed they were more even-keeled. They presented the pluses and minuses. And the more academic and scientific people I met, I started to realize there was a lot of pride in finding the critique. If you don't give people insights about what's failing as well as what's winning, they won't believe you have credibility.

What are some other ways you've learned to toggle between the business and scientific worlds?

In sales, you hire people who are good at finding solutions. You know, it's, "So-and-so can't sign it until next Tuesday because they're on vacation. Well, can you offer a discount and go get that signature? They may get back from vacation, get laid off, and the whole deal is dead." It's constantly coming up with solutions. But with engineers, someone had to tell me, "You know, JB, engineers like problems, not solutions." Tell them what isn't working. They may know how to implement features you didn't know were possible.

Now, the irony in this is that I got to a point where, after I left X, I heard backdoor feedback from an investor who was like, "Oh, you know, JB, nice guy, but very technical founder. Probably can't craft a business." So now I'm back on the other side, where my presentations are too balanced. So I've had to kind of go back and say, wait a minute. When I'm pitching pharmaceutical companies, or a VC, I'll always be truthful, of course. But it's different than talking to an engineer. Knowing who you're talking to and the story that will make them interested in you is important.

When you're working with a nascent technology that could have so many uses, like earbuds that read brain waves, how do you decide where to focus your attention?

I think a lot of founders get tunnel vision and think, "We're the best thing. There's nobody like us." I've been humbled many times. People will say, "What about this company?" I'm like, "Oh, I didn't know about that company." So really learning the landscape will help you not just for differentiation — but feasibility. There may be some experiments you don't have to run because somebody's already done it, and that helps you narrow the path.

And then there's the question of impact. NextSense is in this weird stage where we've proven feasibility, but now we're asking: Where are we gonna have the most impact? You have to focus because you don't have unlimited resources. So are we gonna go after sleep? Are we gonna go after epilepsy? Are we gonna go after depression? We have a device that stimulates the brain and has results against depression — postpartum depression in particular. And when you think about postpartum depression, there are a lot of moms who don't want to take drugs while breastfeeding. There's also a lot of adolescent depression, and a lot of parents who don't want their teenagers on Prozac. So we haven't picked a path yet, but it's about assessing feasibility, and impact.

You mentioned before that you're working with pharmaceutical companies, and also that you've developed a device that helps treat depression for those who don't want to take drugs. How do you balance those kinds of conflicting interests?

I was a philosophy major, so I really like Eastern philosophy and the yin-yang. Someone once told me that I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity, and I think you have to hold some tension, you know? Because on one hand I'm making revenue with pharma companies, and on the other I'm developing a treatment that people could use who don't want to use drugs. But I don't think it's all or nothing. If I'm partnering with a pharma company I'll say "Hey, maybe the drug works better with this. Let's do combination therapy." We have to make money because we're not ready to sell to consumers today. But we also want to be thinking about where we want to go, and how to actually impact patient lives.