Today we’d like to introduce you to Weaver Gaines.
Hi Weaver, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
Life began as a war baby, not part of the Boomers (now leaving the scene), but before them.
My father had been the Army ROTC Student Commandant at the University of Florida and had been commissioned in 1941, just in time for World War II. He met and fell in love with my mom, an Army brat herself, at the Infantry Center at Camp Wolters, Texas (no longer an Army post but the home of the National Viet Nam Museum). My mom was a Colonel’s daughter, while Dad was a lowly second lieutenant – and there is nothing, not even the rawest recruit — lower than a “butter bar” second lieutenant. He was posted to the 88th Glider Infantry at Fort Meade, South Dakota, where I was born in August of 1943. Fort Meade was deactivated in 1944 (also no longer an Army post), causing me problems when I was first vetted for a top-secret clearance, and the Office of Naval Intelligence eyed me with suspicion since my purported birthplace didn’t exist.
I grew up as an Army brat. We moved roughly every two years, which I mistakenly believed was normal.
My first memories are of Frankfurt a/M Germany, where I our maid, Maria, taught me German. (Actually, a dialect of German – Maria was a refugee from the hideous Soviet occupiers of Prussian Silesia, one of the former eastern German provinces. By the way, the raping, looting, and wanton destruction by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine are a reprise of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1945. Not much has changed in the Russian way of war.) I remember the depressing ruins in Frankfurt, the partly collapsed building looking like full-sized dollhouses, the summertime smell of the corpses still trapped in the bombed-out buildings, the massive and dangerous DP (displaced persons) camps, and the city-wide celebration in 1948 when the first road in Frankfurt had finally been completely cleared of rubble from one end of the city to the other. And I remember playing in the bomb shelter in the basement of our requisitioned apartment house on Fresenius Strasse, one of the surviving roofed apartments in Frankfurt, where the Army wives hung their laundry to dry.
I went to four high schools: Killeen High School (Fort Hood, Texas), Stuttgart American High School, Heidelberg American High School -both in Germany, and finally Carlisle Senior High School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I wasn’t kicked out of any of them. Four years as an undergraduate at Dartmouth were the longest I had ever lived anywhere. I was on the Dartmouth National Debate Team, which was the most important part of my undergraduate education, and it led to going to the University of Virginia School of Law, something I had never thought about doing until all my Dartmouth Forensic Union classmates kept asking where I would go to law school.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of my heroes, said in his great speech on Memorial Day in 1884, “as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.” I have been blessed that I have shared the important passions and actions of my time: the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War (several childhood friends died there), hippies in Haight Ashbury and the turmoil of 1968, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the attack on the World Trade Tower 9/11 (several friends died there, too). How lucky I have been. In particular, I went to civil rights conferences, sat on segregated counters, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” I was commissioned as a second lieutenant of Infantry in 1965; before I went to law school, was the honor graduate of the Infantry Officers’ Basic Course at Fort Benning, a rifle company commander of Alpha Company, 3d Battalion, Sixth US Infantry, stationed in the divided city of Berlin, then was sent to Long Binh, Vietnam, where they drafted me into trying courts-martial.
My first real job was as a clerk-typist in the Plans and Policies Directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, but there has hardly a common theme of my many jobs (except possibly that I am easily bored): Infantry officer, Army defense counsel, Wall Street Lawyer, inside counsel at corporations, Vice President of M&A, General Counsel and CEO of the MONY mutual fund sponsor, compliance, and brokerage arm of the Mutual of New York, Senior Advisor (Financial Services) on the national campaign staff of the Bush/Quayle reelection campaign in 1992 where I met George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush (who everyone then called George, junior), adjunct professor of law, biotech startup CEO (Ixion Biotechnology), chairman of the board of a contract development manufacturing company (Nanotherapeutics), and Medtech startup CEO (Evren Technologies). I call myself a recovering lawyer, but mostly I changed jobs when the one I was in came to an end for good or ill.
Looking through my life from this end of the telescope, I can see no pattern, but can definitely state that it certainly didn’t turn out the way I thought it would when I was young. I have learned some lessons, however, and they include
• Things often don’t work out; learn to be flexible. Don’t quit too soon or too late.
• People also often don’t work out. Don’t be too quick to fire – or too slow.
• Don’t be afraid of decisions. It the decision was a mistake, correct it with the next decision. Don’t wait until you have all the facts – that’s the road to dithering.
• Don’t be a quitter, but don’t fail to quit when it’s time.
• Material goods and money are not good reasons to do things. Working on a worthwhile project with a team you like and trust and whose members are good at what they do is the key to job satisfaction.
• A life without goals is wasted and meaningless. In a meaningful life, everything you do matters.
• Value character over performance. My worst personnel mistakes were when I forgot this.
• Anger is rarely productive, and actions taken when angry have often been a source of regret. Even worse has been when I have done something I believed to be wrong but did it anyway.
• Mindfulness is a major virtue.
In addition to my day job, I am a member of the Corporate Relations Board of the Keck Graduate Institute of the Applied Life Sciences; a Trustee and chair of the audit committee of the Cade Museum of Creativity and Innovation; a founding director and Chairman emeritus of the Board of Bio Florida, the Florida biotechnology trade association; a Trustee and Treasurer of Dance Alive National Ballet, a Florida state touring company; and an adjunct professor emeritus at the School of Law at the University of Virginia.
And also, General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, after whom Gainesville, Florida was named, is a great, great uncle.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next, you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Evren Technologies, a clinical-stage device company, is transforming the treatment of PTSD by delivering cutting-edge, bioelectronic medicine with an intelligent hardware and software platform empowering patients to manage their own therapy through easy-to-use transcutaneous auricular vagal nerve stimulation (taVNS). The pilot trial in PTSD patients demonstrated higher compliance, better adherence, enhanced responder rates, and improved clinical effectiveness compared to the standard of care, with no significant side effects. We have the solution for a major unmet need in a $22.5 billion market for the over 15 million Americans needing treatment for PTSD, most of whom get little or no relief from legacy treatments. Our initial product — the Phoenix® CR-100 Stimulator – a research use device (not requiring FDA clearance) is scheduled to launch in late fall 2022. It delivers taVNS safely and effectively in laboratory, clinical, and unsupervised home settings. Our second product, the Phoenix P-51 Stimulator, a wearable therapeutic taVNS device, is in advanced development and will deliver safe and effective bioelectronic therapy with no known adverse side effects. Stimulating the vagus nerve is key to treating PTSD. Our proprietary closed-loop feature will allow dynamic adjustment of stimulation based on biofeedback. The FDA granted us a Breakthrough Device Designation, and the wearable therapeutic product qualifies for the FDA’s De Novo pathway, a simplified path to FDA marketing clearance. Bioelectronic medicine uses sophisticated technology to affect the electrical activity of the body’s nervous system and can supplement or even replace drugs or other interventions.
The body reacts to trauma with a sympathetic response (“fight or flight”), and afterward, most people return to a parasympathetic state (“rest and recuperate”). However, PTSD patients have had their neural reactions tuned toward sympathetic dominance, and they have lost the resilience to return to a parasympathetic state of safety, which, among other things, leads to hypervigilance. Thus, PTSD is a reaction to trauma resulting in a chronic perception of threat in the environment, generating a sustained pathologically aroused state. Our device stimulates the vagus nerve which plays the starring role in down-regulating the sympathetic nervous system and taking a person out of a stress response. Our goal is to make people feel safe.
We completed a pilot clinical study in a PTSD population showing our device meaningfully improved PTSD symptom severity and improved quality of life – so the device works.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
We are the only U.S. medical device company focused exclusively on PTSD. Right now, we are raising funds through crowdfunding under SEC Regulation CF on StartEngine (StartEngine.com/evren-technologies), where we are accepting new investors for as little as $399. Investing is easy through StartEngine. If you have PTSD or know someone with it, this is the best way you can help move this needed solution into the marketplace, where it can help people who desperately need it. And, with luck and the passion and talent of the Evren team, it will also be a good investment so that investors can do well by doing good.
Pricing:
- Min. Investment $399.00
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.evrenvns.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evrentechnologies
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EvrenVNS
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/EvrenVNS
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe1lzN0Ah2C3bAgXnnAlmyQ
- Other: https://www.startengine.com/evren-technologies
