Village Global Podcast
Description
Mehul Trivedi is co-founder and CEO of Legato, a company building glasses that double as prescription-grade hearing aids. Before Legato, he was one of the first audio engineers on the original iPhone, led Bose's wearables and headphone group, and helped build out Luxottica's smart eyewear division, including collaboration on Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Amrit Rao sits down with Mehul to trace his path from a childhood built around music and engineering at Stanford to building hearing technology hidden inside a pair of glasses people are actually proud to wear. Mehul breaks down why the hearing aid industry has barely innovated in 70 years, a classic case of regulatory capture dominated by a handful of companies, and how Legato's approach using sparse AI processing instead of traditional DSP let the team build a device that outperforms not just over-the-counter hearing aids but most prescription devices under $6,000, according to third-party benchmarks. He shares the story of meeting co-founder Steve at Bose, why finding the right co-founder was one of the two most important decisions of his life, and how the company has tried to build without sacrificing balance or making anyone sleep on the floor eating ramen. The conversation also touches on his time co-founding Stanford's a cappella group Ragapella, the grandmother who shaped how he thinks about unconditional support, and his long-term vision for Legato addressing far more than hearing loss.
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