We spent half our money on a broken dental scanner from eBay. The pedal was ripped off. That scanner kicked off a business that now employs 2,000 people across 5 continents.
I still remember staring at our bank account with Toni Oloko in my Philadelphia apartment. $15,000 total. That was everything.
Our business plan: Give dentists free scanners, they send us clear aligner patients, we make the aligners. Like Uber for teeth straightening.
New dental scanners cost $40,000. We found one on eBay for $7,000.
Thinking we struck gold, we bought it immediately, and a week later, it arrived in a box held together with duct tape.
Inside was an iTero scanner from 2008.
These old scanners had pedals like pianos - you'd press the pedal to capture the scan. Ours didn't have a pedal. It was ripped off. Metal shards where it should connect.
At first, we were terrified. We bet everything on this company, and now we have a barely functioning piece of equipment that we can’t return.
We hauled this disaster to a dental office in Philadelphia, set it up in their back room like we were professionals. The dentist looked at the missing pedal, looked at us, shook his head.
Six months later, our clear aligner business was dying. Revenue would spike, then crash, then spike again.
But something strange kept happening. Every dentist we talked to asked the same question:
"Can I use this scanner for crowns too?"
Turns out the broader dental lab market was $40B+, and zero tech companies were serving the dental lab market.
Instead of sending patients to dentists for aligners, we became the digital lab that dentists had been begging for. Free scanners to replace putty impressions. 3-day turnaround instead of two weeks.
Our first customer couldn't believe it. He called his lab of 20 years while we were still in his office: "Cancel all my cases. I'm switching everything."
His lab: "What happened? What did we do wrong?"
Him: "Nothing. These guys are from the future."
Within six months, we went from 3 customers to 300. Word spread through dental forums like wildfire. "There's a company giving away free scanners and they're actually good."
That broken $7,000 scanner is now in our office museum. Next to our first crown. Next to the rejection letters from VCs who said dental was "too small."
The pedal never got fixed. And now we have a team of 2,000.
