Reardon and his colleagues at CTRL-Labs are using these signals as a powerful API between all of our machines and the brain itself. By next year, they want to slim down the clunky armband prototype into a sleeker, watch strap-style so that a slew of early adopters can dispense with their keyboards and the tiny buttons on their smartphones’ screens. The technology also has the potential to vastly improve the virtual reality experience, which currently alienates new users by asking them to hit buttons on controllers that they can’t see. There might be no better way to move around and manipulate an alternate world than with a system controlled by the brain.

Reardon, CTRL-Labs’ 47-year-old CEO, believes that the immediate practicality of his company’s version of BMI puts it a step ahead of his sci-fi-flavored competitors. “When I see these announcements about brain-scanning techniques and the obsession with the disembodied-head-in-a-jar approach to neuroscience, I just feel like they are missing the point of how all new scientific technologies get commercialized, which is relentless pragmatism,” he says. “We are looking for enriched lives, more control over things over things around us, [and] more control over that stupid little device in your pocket—which is basically a read-only device right now, with horrible means of output.”

Mason Remaley runs a demo of the armband controlling a computer game. Alex Welsh

Reardon’s goals are ambitious. “I would like our devices, whether they are vended by us or by partners, to be on a million people within three or four years,” he says. But a better phone interface is only the beginning. Ultimately, CTRL-Labs hopes to pave the way for a future in which humans can seamlessly manipulate broad swaths of their environment using tools that are currently uninvented. Where the robust signals from the arm—the secret mouthpiece of the mind—become our prime means of negotiating with an electronic sphere.

This initiative comes at a prescient moment for CTRL-Labs, where the company finds itself perfectly positioned to innovate. The person leading this effort is a talented coder with a strategic bent, who has led big corporate initiatives—and left it all for a while to become a neuroscientist. Reardon understands that everything in his background has randomly culminated in a humongous opportunity for someone with precisely his skills. And he’s determined not to let this shot slip by.

Reardon grew up in New Hampshire as one of 18 children in a working class family. He broke from the pack at age 11, learning to code at a local center funded by the local tech giant, Digital Equipment Corporation. “They called us ‘gweeps,’ the littlest hackers,” he says. He took a few courses at MIT, and at 15, he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire. He was miserable—a combination of being a peach-fuzz outsider and having no money. He dropped out within a year. “I was coming up on 16 and was, like, I need a job,” he says. He wound up at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at first working in the radiology lab at Duke, helping to get the university’s computer system working smoothly with the internet. He soon started his own networking company, creating utilities for the then-mighty Novell networking software. Eventually Reardon sold the company, meeting venture capitalist Ann Winblad in the process, and she hooked him up with Microsoft.

Reardon’s first job there was leading a small team to clone Novell’s key software so it could be integrated into Windows. Still a teenager, he wasn’t used to managing, and some people reporting to him called him Doogie Howser. Yet he stood out as exceptional. “You’re exposed to lots of type of smart people at Microsoft, but Reardon would kind of rock you,” says Brad Silverberg, then head of Windows and now a VC (invested in CTRL-Labs). In 1993, Reardon’s life changed when he saw the original web browser. He created the project that became Internet Explorer, which, because of the urgency of the competition, was rushed into Windows 95 in time for launch. For a time, it was the world’s most popular browser.