Magic Realist Google-backed techpreneur Rony Abovitz revisits UM to share insights with students into strangers benefiting from his medical technology, which also included orthopedic implants. “If you take care of your work as an engineer, it’s going to reverberate through life and through the world in ways you never expected,” he said. “But don’t think you can just throw something out there that pollutes people and ruins something and it doesn’t come back. When you do the right thing, it comes back in a good way.” Referencing everything from Zen Buddhism to the movies Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, Abovitz connected with students. “He made some excellent points,” said biomedical engineering major Anna Zapala. “He made me think that entrepreneurship may be a feasible idea for me.” Also encouraged was Hunter Bihn, an international business and economics major who said he suffers from diabetes and developed a start-up that makes disposal of diabetic testing materials safe
As a self-described scrawny nerd at UM, Abovitz became obsessed with joining the track team. He was repeatedly rejected but spent a year throwing a javelin on his own before a coach finally granted him a stomachchurning tryout that ended with him on the team. A decade later in 2001, his first company, MAKO Surgical Corp., got its funding on September 10, only to see that funding nearly disappear when hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center the next day. He spent the year driving cross-country to demonstrate his concept, a robotic surgical arm, to investors, hospitals, and physicians. “That was an important moment for an entrepreneur—would you and your idea keep going in a moment of great tragedy?” he said. “And would people continue to follow you and Magic Leap aims to enhance everyday life with extraordinary visual your idea despite the interactions and experiences. tragedy?” The company thrived and was and effortless. “His venture was much acquired by Stryker for $1.65 billion more complex and much harder to get in 2013. approved than hopefully mine is going to Abovitz described the incredible be, but it’s tremendously inspiring to see sensation of seeing something he made that he got through it in a much tougher being used by patients and bumping setting. It was great.” —Tim Collie
miami.edu/magazine Fall 2015 MIAMI 35
COURTESY MAGIC LEAP
TOM STEPP
Being a successful entrepreneur, says Rony Abovitz, B.S.M.E. ’94, M.S.B.M.E. ’96, is like jumping off a high cliff with a bag of parts and building the airplane that will save you on the way down. “If you’re not bold, don’t do it,” the multimillionaire inventor told a rapt audience of students, professors, and others during the College of Engineering’s 2015 M. Lewis Temares Entrepreneurship Forum in February. Abovitz, 44, has done it twice. In 2004 he founded a medical technology company that sold for $1.65 billion in 2013. His latest venture has Google’s half-billion-dollar backing and is valued at $2 billion, putting him at the forefront of what many believe will be the next major breakthrough in computing science: augmented reality. Simply put, the still-secret technology promises to bring the stuff of sci-fi fantasy into our everyday lives through augmented reality, or A.R., which will seamlessly blend computer graphics with the real world. A user wearing glasses or a headset would see overlays of images and applications as indistinguishable from real objects. The real revolution, explained Abovitz, whose Dania Beach-based startup, Magic Leap, Inc., received $542 million from Google and other Silicon Valley investors last year, will be how computer technology finally merges with the potential of the human body. After all, he noted, the greatest computer ever designed is the human brain. What Abovitz stressed over and over is that his life—and that of any successful entrepreneur—is a series of magic leaps. Some may have nothing to do with the venture you’re contemplating, but all are crucial to the character needed to take an idea from a notebook to the NASDAQ.