Smith: So, what happened next? What are you doing now?
Goral: Fortunately, I had some great friends and veteran contacts up in New York City who helped me meet with some really nerdy, techy, entrepreneurial, good people and really gain exposure to the New York startup scene.
I moved here from DC last year with a one-way ticket, a duffle bag, and a backpack.
After working with so many veterans and having been part of incredible advancements in technology I have since started up a company called Furenexo, which is focused on bringing those same sorts of advancements to "disability tech."
Everything in the space, between the skyrocketing commercial electronics curve and the painfully stagnant assistive devices market, is opportunity in terms of potential to remove challenges from people's lives. It also has business value. Considering that object/voice recognition and machine learning have become commodity-level technologies, we can now address challenges of disabilities like hearing loss and blindness in ways unthinkable even a few years ago.
My cofounder, Eric Skiff, and I began asking questions like, "Why is it more difficult for a person who is blind to navigate a sidewalk in their own neighborhood than for a driverless car to drive down the road?"
We have some big goals, and are approaching them step by step. We're engaging with groups throughout the disabilities community and forming partnerships with Helen Keller Services, Easter Seals and others to push forward with designs that can positively and affordably impact issues having to do with hearing loss, ADHD, and memory loss, with the ultimate goal of using our R&D to restore a sense of sight to people who don't have use of their eyes.