The following interview is a conversation we had with Roei Ganzarski, CEO of Alitheon, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $30 Million Raised to Help Organizations Trace the Untraceable.

 

Roei Ganzarski
Thank you. It’s a pleasure. 

Brett
So before we begin talking about what you’re building there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Roei Ganzarski
Sure. So I’m Roy Gilzarski. We’re based here in the Seattle, Washington area. Specifically Bellevue. I’m originally from Israel, was raised as a child in Asia. My dad was in shipping, then back to Israel, teenage years, young adulthood, and then came to the Seattle area to go to the University of Washington with my wife and never left. I’ve worked in advertising, banking, a lot of aerospace and a lot of innovation. 

Brett
What was it like when you first moved to the US. Take us back to that. What was going on inside your head. 

Roei Ganzarski
When you made the move? 

Brett
Or was it not a big deal? Because it sounds like you moved around quite a bit when you were younger. 

Roei Ganzarski
Well, it was a big deal because it’s one thing to move with your family when you’re going with your parents. It’s another when you’re the one making the move together with your wife to a place you’ve never been before to start a new life somewhere. And there was a bit of culture shock. Israelis are not shy, nor do they shy away from aggressive. Directness, we’ll call it. Not something that is completely I won’t say not accepted, but not normal here, definitely not in the Pacific Northwest. And so we had tone down a bit. The directness, we have to learn that when someone says, let’s do lunch, they don’t actually mean it. When someone says, hey, I’ll call you, they actually won’t. So are things that we have to learn, but overall, it’s paradise here. And that’s why we you know, I. 

Brett
Work with a lot of Israeli companies. I’ve been to Israel a few times, and it took me a while to get used to that style. At first I was like, are they being rude? And are they being an asshole to me? And then I had kind of come to realize, like, no, that’s like the culture and they’re not trying to be rude by any means. That’s just how they communicate. And I’ve grown to actually really like it. And I enjoy working with people from Israel. I like how direct they are. I think it makes things much easier. You always know where you stand with them and there’s no question which I find very you know, and I think. 

Roei Ganzarski
It stems from the creation of Israel as a country. The fact that everyone’s been to the military and goes to the military, the fact that you’re in continuous kind of surrounded by people who don’t want you there, it drives this element of there’s no time for fluffiness or sugar coating things, we just don’t have time. So tell me what it is. You like it, you don’t like it, and let’s get forward and move on because we don’t have time for the rest of the stuff. So it is an acquired taste. Not everyone likes it. I like it because to your point, you know exactly where you stand with people, with business, with the culture and you know, if you like it or not, you know what to do. 

Brett
I read this book in 2016 that I’m sure you’ve read and everyone talks about, which is Startup Nation. And no joke, two weeks later I was on a plane, I had cold emailed a bunch of different startup CEOs. The subject line just said, Coming to Israel, want to meet? And like 80% of them said yes. So I went there for a few weeks, absolutely amazing conversations and just made some lifelong friends there. So I love Israel and it’s just such a fascinating place from a startup perspective as well. 

Roei Ganzarski
Yeah, Startup Nation is a great book and it really is true to life. It’s the culture, it’s the thought process, this belief of I may not be here tomorrow, so let’s make sure we do something today that’s really core to every Israeli. 

Brett
Yep, such a powerful driver. Now, I’d love to ask about your time in the military. So I know you’d mentioned there in the pre interview, I believe it was five years, so I’m sure you learned a lot from that experience. But if we had to choose maybe like one big takeaway from your time serving in the military, what would that be? 

Roei Ganzarski
Wow. So it’s hard to choose one because there’s really a few really key points that to this point or to this day in my life now, 30 plus years later, still are very impactful. I think one of the key ones is the element of everyone is the same. And what I mean by that is when you go in at the age of 18 and you put on the green uniform and they shave your head and everyone is standing there equal, nobody cares or nobody knows your socioeconomic background, your religion, your beliefs, your political leanings, it doesn’t matter. Everyone is exactly the same and they’re there for one mission and you need to blindly trust each other, literally with your life. And so that really brings home this notion of enough with the nonsense about where did your family grow up? Where did you come from? 

Roei Ganzarski
How much money do you make? What school did you go to? Who cares? As long as you can protect me and you allow me to protect you, we’re going to do something together. So I think the military is really a phenomenal kind of social barrier breakdown system that I love. And today when you are thrown into that, you are raised in a way that says, look, all that doesn’t matter. Can you produce, can you deliver? Can you do and stand behind what you say? And that’s all that matters. And so today, that’s just part of my life. I find it fascinating when I look at and listen to everything that’s going on in the US today about your socioeconomic background and diversity and are you an African American or an Asian American or Chinese American, or are you a Caucasian? At the end of the day, what are you doing and are you delivering results? 

Roei Ganzarski
And if yes, great, let’s move forward. And that’s something that I think the military really teaches, including, by the way, the military here, we hire veterans. We work with a lot of veterans, and I see the same thing. It’s a great equalizer, if you will, for everybody. And then, of course, there’s the obvious ones of time management, resource management. When you put into the military and says, and you’re told, there’s your mission, go achieve it, there’s no such thing as, oh, well, let me see if I can raise a little more resources. Let me see if I can get some more time. Let me tell the enemy to stop and take a break so that I can reevaluate my strategy. Like, no, everything is in motion, and so you better be moving forward to your target while thinking about how do I deploy resources, how do I make sure they’re effective, they’re efficient, how do I quickly identify that? 

Roei Ganzarski
Because if I’m wrong, people will die. And so that skill, that ability to say, I need to quickly identify that I’m on the wrong or right path, that I’m using the right people for their skills and capabilities to achieve that mission, and nothing can stop me. And so that is something that you really learn really well in the military. And again, I see it with veterans all over. 

Brett
Yeah, we had a Founder on the other day who has a cybersecurity company in Israel, and how he was describing it to me was, you come out at 22, you’ve been responsible for I can’t remember what he said, like ten or 20 people’s lives. And then you go into startup world. And startup world can be stressful. There’s obviously challenges. It’s hard to build a company, but you’re very well prepared to manage those challenges when you’ve faced the challenges on a battlefield or when you’ve been at war and in the military. So he was describing it as it almost makes some of those typical challenges that may break another Founder who hasn’t had that experience. It just makes them kind of seem like a joke and makes it seem like very easy challenges in the grand scheme of things to overcome. When you compare the challenges of startups compared to Battle and War, which I thought was just a fascinating look at it. 

Roei Ganzarski
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I don’t know that it makes things easier, but I live my life based on consequences. And when you’re in the military, as I was in a combat unit and you’re in combat situations, the consequence of being wrong or doing the wrong thing is you or your friends die. It’s very clear. And that consequence is tremendous when the consequences you might lose some money, it doesn’t mean that’s okay, especially if it’s someone else’s money. But when you know everyone’s going to go home safe and healthy, it kind of lowers the bar, if you will, or the weight on your shoulders to say, I am still responsible for people’s mortgages and their ability to pay for their kids tuition, but at least they’ll go home safe and sound. And that’s really something that does put things into perspective. Yeah, I love that. 

Brett
Makes so much sense. Now, a couple of other questions we’d like to ask just to better understand. 

Roei Ganzarski
What makes you tick. 

Brett
First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them and what have you learned from them? 

Roei Ganzarski
I’m going to say the one I admire the most is my father. And I watched him growing up, both when he was an executive at a company, eventually became a CEO in a company, but do a few things that today I practice regularly. One is take your job seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. And that’s really important because what we do is already important. As I mentioned, we are responsible for people’s ability to pay their mortgage and their kids tuition, let alone the success of a company and return on investment and so on. That’s enough burden to where we don’t have to also try to be prim and proper all the time. So have some fun along the way. And I don’t mean go out and have a beer. I mean have fun at your own expense, laugh at yourself, have fun with mistakes that are made, and at least try to be not as serious when it doesn’t come to work so that you can have that. 

Roei Ganzarski
Now many times that creates embarrassments for your kids and that’s okay. I claim that’s one of my roles as a father is to embarrass my children as long as I can. I don’t know that they would agree to that, but they probably agree that I do a good job at it. But that’s one thing I learned from him. The other is the notion of do the right thing even when it’s hard. A lot of times people think of the CEO or people in leadership roles as, oh, one, they’re supposed to know everything and have all the answers. And no, we’re not, and we don’t. In fact, many a time, if not most of the time, my team has the answers I don’t even know to ask the question to yet. But my role is to identify that and be able to help them create those answers, drive those answers, deliver those answers. 

Roei Ganzarski
And so the ability to say, let’s make sure we’re doing the right thing, and that includes being transparent with all our employees, making sure they know what’s going on, they know what I’m thinking, they know why I’m thinking that. They know what I’d like to achieve, what the company would like to achieve, that everything is on the table. And so transparency is really important. And that’s hard, right? It’s really easy to hide behind the need to know or this is strategic or this is financial, or the employees, we don’t want to burden them or they won’t understand it. No, there’s no such thing. They should know and can know everything. And by the way, I found if you don’t tell them, they’ll invent it and make it up. And usually they make up the ideas wrong and to the worst. So why not just be transparent and let them know? 

Roei Ganzarski
So that’s one, two, being able to treat employees with dignity even when things go wrong. So in the worst case of things going wrong with an employee, you have to let them go, right? They either don’t fit or they’re doing the thing that you don’t need them to do, et cetera. And you have to let them go. Even there. You can do it the right way. Give them more than just what’s required, quote unquote, when you let someone go, give them what they deserve as a human being, as a parent, as a person, and do the right thing, because doing the easy thing or the wrong thing is very easy. Doing the right thing, especially when the consequence, going back to that point, of living by consequences, especially when the consequences either cost to you personally or to your brand, to the company’s brand. It’s sometimes things that people think about twice, and in my case, I learned from my father, don’t think about it. 

Roei Ganzarski
If it’s the right thing to do, just do it, no matter what. And that leads to a lot of things that you do with your team, with your children, with your family, with your friends, et cetera. 

Brett
Amazing. 

Roei Ganzarski
I love that. Now let’s switch gears here and let’s. 

Brett
Dive a bit deeper into the company. So I see that you joined in, what was that, last year, around this time last year? 

Roei Ganzarski
Yeah, January of last year. 

Brett
So what prompted you to join? And I’m sure you had options. I’m sure you were considering other things. So what about this company made you. 

Roei Ganzarski
Want to join so much that’s a really good question with an easy answer. One of the board members I know from a previous life said, hey, Roy, now that you’re available on the market, I just left my previous roles. You’re available on the market, you should come see this technology. I said, okay, like you said, you get to see a lot of stuff and so on. And I went to see it, and when I saw it, within, I would say, two minutes, two scenarios came to my mind that were bothering me for a long time. And this solved one was my lovely wife Anat bought me a nice watch for our ten year anniversary, which was quite some time ago, and I had to give that watch to service, like you give a car to service, apparently you give nice watches to service as well. 

Roei Ganzarski
So I went to the local dealers here and said, hey, I’d like to give my watch to service. And they said, Great, thank you. Why don’t you come back in six weeks and pick it up? Wait a minute. One for me at least. This watch is expensive. What do you mean, just give it and come back in six weeks? How do I know I’m going to get this watch back? And he you know, you could look at the serial number on the said and I said, I’ve been to Bangkok, I’ve been to Taiwan. I’ve seen the fakes that these guys make, and they are high quality fakes, and they all have serial numbers, so how would I know? And he said, well, you’ll just have to trust us. And that bothered me. It’s like, oh, wait a minute. This thing, not only is it expensive again, at least for my budget, it’s also sentimental. 

Roei Ganzarski
My wife bought it for me, so that’s sitting in the back of my mind for quite some time. The second is my previous role, and prior to that, were doing things for aircraft. So I would get parts, for example, in my previous role, doing electric propulsion systems for planes or electric planes themselves, we would get parts from suppliers, and they would say, oh, we secure this with a blockchain. So when you get a part, we secure the manufacturing certificate and all the things that go with it in the blockchain so no one can mess with it. And that way you know that this part is the right part, it’s the authentic part. It’s the part that’s supposed to be installed. And many times I would ask, well, what you’re telling me is that the certificate of manufacture or the FAA approval certificate or any other documentation that’s protected by the blockchain, but how do you know the blockchain belongs to this part? 

Roei Ganzarski
And the answer was, oh, look at the barcode sticker. Just scan the barcode sticker or look at the zip tie with a tag on it, and that will tell you it’s that part. And I kept thinking to myself, this seems wrong. We’re protecting all this digital data, but the physical item could be anything, and I would have no way to know. Yeah, I would believing a barcode sticker that could fall off, that someone else could print and put on their part. And how would I know? And in fact, today I know that many a car, many a plane, many a weapon system, many a watch have fake or gray market parts in them, and no one knows for exactly that reason. And so when I saw this solution, this technology, I thought, my God, this solves both of these issues so easily and simply, how can I not do this? 

Roei Ganzarski
I called my wife and I told. 

Brett
Her, this is what we’re going to do. 

Roei Ganzarski
Amazing. I love it. 

Brett
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Roei Ganzarski
It was actually last year, 2022, $2.3 trillion. It’s crazy. And we’re not talking about by the way, just for the listeners, to be clear, we’re not talking about the fake Louis Vuitton bags you buy on Canal Street in New York for $20, right? The guy selling to you knows that it’s fake. You are buying it for $20. You know that it’s fake, and Louis Vuitton know that you’ll never buy a real bag of theirs anyway if you’re going to buy a $20 fake. So I won’t say no harm, no foul, that’s still theft of IP and copyright, et cetera. But that’s not what we’re talking about in the 2.3 trillion. We’re talking about fake medicine, fake brake pads on cars, fake computer chips that go into airplanes. I mean, we’re talking scary stuff that’s being fake. And, yeah, $2.3 trillion. It’s crazy. That is just insane. 

Roei Ganzarski
Yeah. 

Brett
I think the other number that you had, there was one in ten medical products, and I think it was specifically in low middle income countries are fake or have fake products. Is that also accurate? 

Roei Ganzarski
Remember that correctly. So at least according to the World Health Organization that I saw, 10% in the first world countries, I. E. Western Europe and the United States, 10% of medicine will be either fake or gray market. In the third world countries, you’re looking at up to 30% counterfeit. It’s crazy. It’s unbelievable. It’s one thing. You’re going to fake a Rolex, right? Just for sake of the proverbial example, you’re going to fake a Rolex, you lose money, you’re faking medicine. My God, people are taking that hoping it helps them save their lives or solve an ailment, and you’re faking that. Or sometimes worse, you’re taking something that’s expired, changing the date on it and selling it as new. It’s crazy. The counterfeit medical industry is $200 billion a year. It’s unbelievable. So that’s why, I mean, for us, solving the issue of fake watches and so on is important. 

Roei Ganzarski
But that really is about how do we help people avoid fake brakes, fake computer chips on their planes, and fake medicine to be able to live normal lives. 

Brett
It’s so terrifying hearing those numbers and having to even try to comprehend in my brain what that means. It’s terrifying. And everyone who hears that should be terrified. And I feel like there are people who talk about this problem a lot. I’ve done a lot of work in the blockchain space, and I feel like this was one of those use cases that people talked about very early on. And just companies in general have really called out this problem, but it seems like it’s not really been solved. Why is this problem so hard to solve? And then when it comes to how you’re solving the problem, how does your approach differ from some of those other solutions that may be out there trying to address this problem? 

Roei Ganzarski
Yeah, really good question. So I’ll try to tackle both in kind of one scenario. So the reason this is such a big problem is there’s demand for it. As long as people cannot tell the difference between a real and a fake, but there’s demand for the product, bad people will fake it’s. Supply and demand. As long as someone wants more than what’s out there or wants it for cheaper, someone’s going to fake it. Medicine is in demand. Computer chips are in demand. Brake parts or brake pads for cars are in demand. So people will fake them because they can get away with it. That’s the biggest thing. As long as they can get away with it. Unfortunately, we can’t trust people to do the right thing because it’s easy to make money on a one time gig like this. And so that’s one aspect that’s going on. 

Roei Ganzarski
Two, with the advent of technology and more remote buying or online or digital economy, it’s so much easier as well. It’s one thing when I have to walk into a store, look you in the eye, and you’re going to give me a fake knowing that you’re cheating me. There’s an aspect to that’s a little harder than I’m just buying something online. You never see me, I never see you. I don’t know where this is coming from. Something shows up in an envelope in a store, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, let alone when it shows up at home. Now, worse, today, as people, we are so gullible that we will believe anything a sticker tells us, by the way, no different than we will believe anything a badge tells us. I could take someone else’s badge, walk into the office building, walk around with it, have full access, no one will ever question it, right? 

Roei Ganzarski
There’s always these signs of, oh, look at tailgaters, make sure someone isn’t following you in the entrance. How do you know someone didn’t just take the badge from someone else or fake one and walk in the door? But as people, we believe these additives as we like to define them. So if I see a hologram sticker on a product, oh, well, then it must be real. Look, it has a hologram sticker. It can’t be fake, or it has a barcode sticker. If I read the barcode, it’ll tell me what it is. So it must be good because otherwise, how would it have a barcode sticker? And the guys that do counterfeits in gray market today have figured out that if they focus on a better barcode sticker or hologram sticker, they don’t even have to focus as much on the fake product because we just believe it. 

Roei Ganzarski
And so that’s why it’s so easy to do fakes today. On the one hand, there’s demand. On the other, there’s no way to fight it because all of these things that people claim, oh, put my sticker is anti tamper. I’ll give you anecdote. I can’t tell you which company, but it was a company we’re working with, automotive company. And were doing this big test with them or showing them kind of what we would do to their executives. And we said, hey, we’re going to bring because it’s relevant, we’re going to bring some brake pads, and we’ll show you how it works with brake pads. And they said, no, we’ll bring our brake pads. Okay, great. So we arrive and they show up with two boxes of brand new brake pads, and they show us how they have this anti tamper, anti counterfeit sticker that closes the lid of the box. 

Roei Ganzarski
It has this hologram, it’s really cool, long sticker, very expensive as well. Has these holograms on it with the logos. And these are the types of stickers that if you were to try and lift them, the sticky thing would break apart, and you can’t stick them back and see, this is how we do it. That’s great. I flipped the boxes over, I opened them from the bottom. I took the brake pads out, closed the box, flipped it back over, and I said, look, I just replaced everything in your box, and your anti counterfeit anti tampering sticker is still intact. And there was this silence of like, oh, that’s not good. That’s right, because we can’t rely on all these additives. They don’t work. They used to work when the option was, I really have nothing else, so at least I have a sticker. I can think of if it doesn’t have a sticker, it raises a red flag, but it no longer works with the sophistication and the fact that we’re in such a distributed supply chain worldwide, those systems don’t work anymore. 

Roei Ganzarski
And so that’s why a litheon was created, to do it like it’s done for people. If we don’t want to rely on a badge or an ID that could be faked or stolen, what do we rely on? Biometrics. We say, hey, I want to use your fingerprint or your iris. Why? Because you can’t lose it. Well, I mean, you could lose a finger, but then you have a different problem. You can’t really lose a fingerprint. You can’t give it away to someone else and let them use it. And unless you believe Mission Impossible movies with Tom Cruise, which are very cool, by the way, but unless you believe that, you can’t really fake easily fingerprints either. So fingerprints are inherently built in to us humans, by the way, even twins or triplets have different fingerprints. They’re similar, but they’re different. And so fingerprints can be used to identify inerrantly and irrefutably people. 

Roei Ganzarski
The government uses them to put people behind bars if they find their fingerprints in the crime scene. So clearly we believe as people, it’s irrefutable. Now, it has its own social and legal issues of can you use it for the wrong reasons and so on. We’ll leave that aside. But as an item, technologically, it’s phenomenal. And Elithion said, let’s create or find fingerprints, digital fingerprints that are inherent to these items and do the same thing, where you don’t have to rely on a sticker or a barcode or a zip tie with a tag to tell you what it is. And that’s what we did today. We can take a picture of any physical item, a picture, not a series of pictures, a picture with a standard off the shelf phone or even a cell phone. I use an iPhone 13 when I do this, standard phone or standard industrial camera, no special lighting, no special lens, no x ray vision, spectral imaging, none of that. 

Roei Ganzarski
And no markings on the item, no barcodes, no secret invisible dust that I put on, nothing. And I can find with our algorithms, the inherent, we call them, feature prints of that item, that one item, not the class of item, not the type of item, I don’t care that it’s a black cat. I can tell you this is your black cat. It’s not a can of coke. This is your can of coke, which is very different and allows you to do things that no other system can allow you to do. 

Brett
So interesting, and I’m sure there’s just endless applications for this right. And endless use cases and so many markets that would benefit from having this type of technology. How are you choosing which markets to focus on? 

Roei Ganzarski
Yeah, that’s a really good point because especially the startup, it’s so easy to see the shiny thing, oh, look, I’ll pay you $50,000 if you come try this. We can’t afford either financially, but more importantly resource wise, to lose focus like that. It’s not just about revenue, and not all revenue is good revenue, by the way. If it’s revenue that defocuses you as a company and takes you off your path for the wrong reason, it’s the wrong revenue. And I’m blessed, and our company is blessed to have a board of directors and investors that understands that and says focus on the right thing. And so for us, it was about at this stage of a company, who are the industries that one know and acknowledge that there’s a problem, either a counterfeit problem, gray market problem, or a traceability problem. I want to know where are my real legal parts? 

Roei Ganzarski
Where are they? Where are they in my production line? What machines did they go through? People talk about Industry 4.0 or the next revolution of manufacturing, which is the digital plant that doesn’t even need people. Well, today everyone focuses on the machine. This machine will tell you that it’s calibrated if it’s online offline, it works in the dark without lights off, without people needing to be there. The challenge is you don’t know what parts went through it. So you might get an alert on your phone, on your connected phone to machine that says, hey, your machine just went out of calibration. So the last 100 parts are good. But then you go to the factory and out of the ten different lines, only one of them was there. Which parts went through that machine? People don’t know today, for the most part. And so Industry 4.0 not only requires that your machinery be smart and connected, but that you know which machines did which products down to the actual level of the individual product. 

Roei Ganzarski
And so our customers want to know that. So we said, let’s focus on those that know there’s a problem and acknowledge that there’s a problem. So that’s one. Two consequence. Where are the industries that if you get it wrong, the consequence is high, either financially or operationally. And that led us to the five industries that we’re currently in. One is transportation, cars and planes. If we get it wrong and you get a fake brake pad or an uncertified part on a plane, the consequence is pretty bad, not only financially, but operationally, and there’s a problem. So that’s one industry. We’re in the second DoD, or suppliers to the DoD, same thing. For example, two years ago, an F 16 came into landing at an Air Force base here in the United States. Lost an engine pilot, did what they’re supposed to do, which is eject because you can’t recover that low to the ground ejects. 

Roei Ganzarski
But the seat, instead of opening the parachute and disconnecting him from the seat so he can land safely, didn’t open the parachute. He crashed into the ground and was killed. Terrible, terrible. Two years later, the wife said, under the Freedom of Information Act, I want to know what happened. And lo and behold, there’s a high likelihood no one actually says what happens, but they said high suspicion that the computer board, the chips on the injection seat that are responsible at the right time to open the parachute were counterfeit. Imagine that. Fake computer chips on an F 16 ejection seat. Who would even think of doing that? Clearly, someone did, and someone died because of it. So DoD and suppliers to DoD are important as well. So that’s an industry we’re in. The third is pharma and medical, as I mentioned again, pink medicine, fake implants, et cetera, or simply not trace or gray market. 

Roei Ganzarski
There was a big case not long ago I won’t names, but a big case not long ago where these specific types of gauzes or sponges used in brain surgery to absorb blood, and they’re basically closed into your brain. They absorb the blood, and then they disintegrate. Apparently, this huge scam was found at an international level where, in the United States, when these would expire, instead of being destroyed, they would be bought by a company in the United States, sent to India. They would change the dates of the expiration, put in some fake or make believe type gauze in the real package, and sell it back to hospitals in the US. Thousands of surgeries in the United States were done with these expired, illegal gray market products, and no one knew until eventually it was caught by a surgeon who felt them and said, you know, something seems off with this. 

Roei Ganzarski
Maybe it was a bad batch. And that led to whole investigation after thousands of surgeries happened. So we want to solve that. So healthcare is the third industry we’re in. The fourth is precious metals, gold, silver, et cetera. There it’s an interesting challenge. There are fakes, of course, but fake gold is pretty easy to identify. It’s a chemical reaction. And, you know, this gold is not the 24 carat bar I think it is. But what’s harder is illegal gold, real gold, 24 carat gold mined, for example, in Russia today, it’s illegal to be sold in OECD countries. But pure gold from the Congo or Rwanda, kind of like blood diamonds. There’s this gold that’s illegal because it uses child or slave labor to mine it. But when it’s put into a bar and it has the logo of a European company on it, and you check that it’s gold, and then you think it’s okay. 

Roei Ganzarski
So our customers there, for example, they are able to insure for their customers, take a picture of it with your phone and we’ll tell you this is not just a real bar of gold. This is the bar of gold that the company in Switzerland made on this date at this time on this machine. It’s that literal bar of gold. Not a bar of gold from the same batch, not a bar of gold from the same factory, but it’s that individual bar of gold that we made that we stabbed. And so that’s the fourth industry and the last one kind of mentioned full circle luxury goods and collectibles. If you are going to buy an expensive watch or a collectible baseball card or a piece of art, you want to know that what you’re getting is real and is what you thought you were buying. And the consequence there of course is financial. 

Roei Ganzarski
So those are the five industries and only those that we focus on. 

Brett
Well, I have to say you’ve probably impacted my life in a negative way because now I’m going to question everything. I thought this know, just Canal Street, a Louis Vuitton versus like I know about the counterfeit problem. That’s why I always thought about it as but now next time I go to a doctor I’m going to have to see some authentication of what they’re putting in my body to make sure that it’s the real deal. And next time I fly I’ll be thinking the same thing. So thanks a lot. 

Roei Ganzarski
I know what I can. 

Brett
Now let’s wrap up here with a final question. Let’s zoom out into the future. So talk to me about that three year or five year vision. What is the company going to look like by then? 

Roei Ganzarski
By then we will have released our consumer facing solution. Right now we are purely b to b. We do not work directly with consumers. Our customers may release our app, for example, or our technology to their consumers specifically. For example, we’re doing a really cool project with the Brendan Murphy who’s an artist out of Miami. He’s doing a real cool fast sneaks program. It’s like these artistic that he does the art on sneakers. And so there he’s going to release our technology to his customers of those sneakers, those art pieces that they can authenticate or when they sell or buy them, they can make sure these are the real authentic deal. So they may do it, but we do not work directly with consumers. A few years from now, the three to five year vision is that we will be able to release our technology as a consumer facing technology for the following vision. 

Roei Ganzarski
Imagine anyone being able to download a simple app to their phone and take a picture, a single picture of the things that are important to them for whatever reason. Maybe it’s the watch my wife bought me. Maybe it’s the candlesticks we got from our late grandmother. Maybe it’s my bicycle that’s expensive and I want to make sure bicycle theft is pretty high in Seattle. I want to make sure it doesn’t get stolen for whatever reason. Maybe it’s my trading card. I play magic, and I want to make sure that when I go play, no one takes my card by mistake or not by mistake. I could take a picture of it with my phone, and now it’s secured. It’s literally in a virtual vault so that no one can ever say, hey, that’s my card. That’s my walk. That’s my bicycle. And erasing the serial number won’t help because I’ll be able to take a picture again with that, or anyone with the app will be able to take a picture of it and say, hey, that’s Roy’s bicycle. 

Roei Ganzarski
It may look different. You may have erased the serial number. You may claim it’s yours, but I can irrefutably prove that is the bicycle that Roy bought two years ago and was stolen last week. And there’s no question. So imagine what that means to your insurance premiums when you want to insure your television, your work of art, your car. Maybe the insurance companies now say, well, if you’ve feature printed it, that means that the ability to create fraud, commit fraud, or have it be stolen. For example, think catalytic converters. There’s this whole discussion about vin numbers and serial numbers. What if you could just take a picture of the catalytic converter, and when you go to buy one, take a picture of it and say, and it’ll tell you that was stolen off of that car. Irrefutably not that it looks like that catalytic converter. 

Roei Ganzarski
Is it, in fact, that specific one stolen off of that car yesterday in Detroit or whatever that is. And so imagine what that does from an insurance premium perspective, what it does for theft or crime. It won’t eliminate it, but it will definitely lower it. Because if I know that, I can’t walk into a collectible store, steal their baseball cards, and go to a pawn shop and try to pawn it off as a different card. If I know I can’t do that, because all the pawn shop has to do is take a picture of it, and they’ll tell them that is the card that was stolen last week. Not a card like it. Even if it’s real, it’s the card that was stolen suddenly. Why steal it? And so I think the impact that we can have from a society perspective on crime, fraud, insurance is tremendous once we get to that consumer grade level. 

Roei Ganzarski
And that’s our vision. 

Brett
Amazing. 

Roei Ganzarski
I love it. 

Brett
And that’s such a good place to wrap up here, because I think you left us wanting a little bit more. We’re going to want to dig into that vision at some point. So you set us up perfectly to have a part two in maybe two or three years just to recap and talk about everything that’s happened. We are going to have to wrap here because we are up on time. 

Roei Ganzarski
I don’t want to hold you too. 

Brett
Long before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go? 

Roei Ganzarski
The easiest place is on LinkedIn, where they can see what we do on a regular basis or on Twitter. And of course, our website, WW Elitheon.com, is the place to see what we’re all about. 

Brett
Amazing. Roy, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. And it’s always so fun to speak with companies that are really solving real world problems that create a lot of harm, and you guys are definitely doing that, so I applaud you for that. It’s just so cool to see, and it was so fun talking with you. I love the energy that you brought to the interview. Sometimes these can get a little bit slow and people can be a bit low energy when they come in, but you came in ready to go, and that’s always a lot of fun. So thanks for bringing the value. Thanks for making this fun and hope we can keep in touch. 

Roei Ganzarski
I appreciate it. This has been fantastic. 

Brett
All right, take care. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.