The Leading Difference

Dr. Ben Freedman & Dr. David Wu | Limax Biosciences | Innovation, Collaboration, & ”Snail Man”

Dr. Ben Freedman and Dr. David Wu are the founder and advisor of Limax Biosciences, respectively. In this episode, they discuss their breakthrough innovation of novel biomaterials to transform healthcare, why collaboration and mentorship are so important, and how slugs inspired their work to the point of Ben being featured in a German TV show as the superhero Snail Man. 
Guest links: https://www.limaxbiosciences.com/ 
Charity supported: Save the Children
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW NOTES
Episode 016 - Dr. Ben Freedman & Dr. David Wu
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to the Leading Difference Podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am very excited to introduce you to my guests today. They are Dr. Ben Freedman. He is the founder of Limax Biosciences, and along with him I am honored to have Dr. David Wu, who is an advisor for Limax Biosciences. Gentlemen, thank you so very much for joining me. I am so delighted that you're here. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Ben Freedman: Thanks so much for having us. It's great to speak with you today.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely.
Dr. David Wu: Thank you for having us.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I would love if you all wouldn't mind starting by sharing just a little bit about yourself, some of your background, how you got into the industry, and what you're excited about right now. Maybe we can start with Ben, and then David, I'll turn it over to you after that.
Dr. Ben Freedman: That sounds great. Yeah, so for me, I was always interested in science and technology in high school and prior to that point in time, and when I was looking at opportunities for what to major in as an undergrad, I came across bio-medical engineering, which at the time was really an emerging field that kind of blended a lot of the interests that I had between medicine and engineering and technology. And I got involved with a number of different courses. Had a number of different research experiences as an undergraduate and a lot of really fantastic dedicated research mentors that really pushed me to start to explore so many different areas within the field and industry and get a sense for all the different neat and exciting activities that were going on. And I really enjoyed research at the time, in the bioengineering space that led me to do a PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania where I was asking a little bit more basic science questions but had really strong interest in translation, in developing new therapies.
So, after that point in time, I continued to do a postdoc at Harvard and the Wyss Institute where we started kind of combining a lot of my interests from my PhD in soft tissue biomechanics with developing new therapies to try to improve the healing process. And one of those therapies that we came across very early is that we realized that for material to deliver something, whether that be a some cells or other type of drug therapy, two tissues. It really needed to be coupled to tissues locally. So we started exploring this area bioadhesive, quickly realized that this was a really exciting area, not for just areas within the orthopedic space, but really many different types of diseases throughout the body. And it basically led us to kind of explore not only the academic path, but also a lot of the translational paths as well. That's really what's brought us here today.
Lindsey Dinneen: Amazing. Thank you. David?
Dr. David Wu: Hi everyone. So, I am right now a clinician scientist at Harvard University and what got me interested in the space, so during high school and an earlier part of undergrad, I was really fascinated by this idea of biotechnology and the fusion between the biomedical engineering, biology, as well as healthcare. So I did my undergraduate training in anatomy and cell biology at McGill University in Montreal. And during that experience, being fascinated as a student to learn more about research, I was involved in several different aspects of research, including stem cell biology, tissue engineering and immunology. Wanted to explore a little bit more about how these things were intertwined together. At the same time, through working with the local community on certain humanitarian initiatives and community initiatives, I got exposed to the field of dental medicine actually because I was interested in having a very direct impact on each individual patient's lives, on a daily basis, as well as learning more about research and how to advance the field. As a scientist, I managed to combine both. So during my dental school at McGill University, as well, I was involved in a project in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, looking at how we use bone marrow cell extract to help patients who have oral cancer and have undergone a radiation therapy. So as a result of these type of radiation therapy, patients would have their salivary gland destroyed, and that could lead to a lot of oral complications, including rampant caries, different types of infections, so making these patients lives very difficult. And exploring different regenerative therapies, and that introduced me to the field of tissue engineering.
So, fast forward a couple of years in terms of graduation from dental school, I had the option of pursuing specialty training to become a specialist. And the specialty that I chose was the field of periodontology or periodontics. And for those of you who don't know what that entails, periodontology is basically a specialty treating gum diseases and building a good foundation of supporting structure, supporting your teeth. So your jawbone, your mandible, your gum. And right now what we do is a series of plastic surgery, a reconstructive surgery, to help patients with severe disease to build them back to a health condition to allow them to smile and chew. And part of that involves regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.
So when I started at Harvard University, I had the privilege of meeting professor David Mooney, who was a world expert in tissue engineering and bio materials, and decided to start my doctoral thesis at the lab. And at the same time, that's how I met Benjamin Freedman, who was postdoc at the lab at the time, and we started collaborating on these projects, exploring the application of bio adhesives in different indications. And one of the indications we're exploring has to do with the cranial facial complex. So that kind of attracted me to the MedTech industry as well.
Lindsey Dinneen: Wonderful. Yeah. And so I would love to hear then more about Limax?
Dr. Ben Freedman: Yeah. A number of existing topical adhesives such as the super glues, the cyanoacrylate-based adhesives that are used commonly for superficial wound closure actually don't perform very well once you start using them in any sort of wet or actively bleeding environment that those types of glues become very rigid and don't bond well to the underlying tissue surface. A lot of existing tissue pieces are very weak. They're brittle upon any interaction with dynamically moving tissues or organs, compression, which is very common inside the body where a lot of these materials simply crumble upon any sort of mechanical stimulus that you place on them. That is coupled with a lot of the complications and challenges with the human body. There's a lot of wet tissues, a lot of tissues that are bleeding or exuding other fluids. And while these materials are really designed to try to prevent leaks and things like that, when they actually don't perform very well once they start to interact with wet surfaces.
So for all these reasons they certainly demand for new materials. There's also, of course, a number of complications that have been reported for other types of bio adhesives, depending on their cross-linking mechanisms that include areas where they're toxic to underlying tissues. They can create all sorts of catastrophic embolization events and many other areas which are reported in the literature, which has really driven a big demand for developing new materials. But there's been a limitation in the field and kind of a breakthrough that we had made a number of years ago before I had started working in the lab with Dave Mooney at Harvard and the Wyss Institute. There was a discovery that was made for generating materials with really unique mechanical properties. And this was actually something that we didn't realize was gonna be as important for adhesives until recently. Because the reason why existing adhesives fail is that there's been a huge amount of efforts placed on generating strong adhesion to underlying tissue surfaces. But there has not been as big of an emphasis on generating materials that have strong cohesion such that the materials may be sticking strongly, but they have such weak matrix properties that they will fracture upon any sort of mechanical stimulus.
And it turns out that you actually need really strong, cohesive properties first before you can generate really strong adhesive properties. So it turns out that a number of years ago, about 10 years ago at this point there was a discovery made at Harvard University where a new form of hydrogel was created. So hydrogel is a swollen polymer network. It's about 90% water, and It was discovered that if you created a dual interpenetrating network of two different types of polymers, one that dissipates energy and another that has high elasticity, that either one alone has relatively weak mechanical properties, but if you couple the two together, they interact synergistically to create a material with very high what we call material toughness.
And these tough hydrogels have really enabled us to reimagine what we can do with a biomedical tissue. This same high toughness principle was later applied in around the year timeframe of 2016, 2017, when the bioadhesive were first developed in the Mooney group by a very talented postdoc, genuinely, who was now faculty at McGill. And this is around the time that I was starting in the lab and since then we've been working to, to create new versions within materials that have really interesting new properties, but it's really the synergistic interactions between this interpenetrating network with high toughness that's then added, coated with an adhesive layer that allows us to generate strong adhesion. And where all this came from is we were inspired by nature. We are coming from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard where we tried to turn to nature for new ideas to create new materials that have unique properties.
So here we actually turned to the slug. And when slugs feel threatened, they secret a very sticky mucus that prevents 'em from being taken away by a predator. If you analyze the composition of this mucus, there's a whole series of slug slime researchers out there who have done a fantastic job quantifying some of the compositional and mechanical properties of this mucus, that it has actually very tough mechanical properties. You can stretch slug slime about 10 to 15 times its initial length without breaking, and if you analyze the composition of that same slime, it's about 90% water. It's a hydrogel, and it has a dual interpenetrating network of ions, proteins, and sugars that give it its unique mechanical properties. So, once we started realizing this, it, became clear that, hey, we have actually a material already in the lab that has really high material toughness, our tough hydrogel. Maybe we could actually couple that to tissues by applying some of the same principles of this interpenetrating network with a very amine rich bridging polymer, which we try to recapitulate in the lab.
So we don't use any slug components. Full disclosure, no slug components. It's inspired by slugs and actually, Limax is Latin for "slug." So we have kept the slug theme all the way up to the creation of this entity. So it's something that we, hold very closely near and dear to our hearts. And something that we think has a really unique strategy to solve a very pressing, unmet clinical need.
Lindsey Dinneen: Well that is amazing and I love the story behind it. And so I just have to ask, are you ever gonna have a snail mascot or is that a thing?
Dr. Ben Freedman: That's a great question. That's a great question. But before we all laugh, we do integrate a little bit of the slug with our logo. So if you go back and look at the logo now, you'll probably notice there's a little component that does have some slug- like characteristics. And actually for fun back in 2017, a TV show based in Germany, which is essentially the Discovery Channel of Germany, came by to do a segment on our materials and they actually turned me into a snail superhero that they coined Snail Man. So, that is online someplace. But it's a fantastic snippet of what our materials can do and how they may have a, what we hope a great impact on healthcare.
Lindsey Dinneen: That's amazing. I love that and I am definitely gonna have to Google that later because that's pretty fantastic. Well, I'm curious for both of you, are there any particular moments or a moment that really stands out to you as something that reinforced the idea to you that this is the right industry for you?
Dr. David Wu: I think I can get started on this one. So my interest to get into the medtech industry is as a clinician, as a surgeon, you are doing a lot of surgery. You see a lot of different cases where you need a certain technology to make a treatment available to the patient in order to obtain the best results. But sometimes these treatment modalities or these technologies are not yet available. There's some maybe basic science research that demonstrated certain effects that are promising for clinical application, but in clinic, there's no such thing available. So my goal as a clinician, as a scientist, and entrepreneur is basically bridging the gap between benchtop research as well as clinic. And in order to translate this technology, I think the involvement of the medtech industry is so critical because it's a long, arduous journey to translate a basic science discovery all the way to benefit each individual patients. It involves a regulatory process. It involves manufacturing, design, marketing, so many different steps. So that was the main catalyst and my mission that drives me to not only doing these translational type of research, but also to building a strong line of, of products, of technologies to change how we treat patients and how patients benefit from these type of treatment in terms of quality of life, as well as successful outcome.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's great, Ben?
Dr. Ben Freedman: And for me it was, I don't know, going back to when I was really young. When I was in fourth grade, I think I, I had a kind of this toy robot that I was trying to build and the instructions kind of had a relatively basic design of the wrist of the robot. So it was pretty much fully rigid. The hand could open and close, but it couldn't exhibit the other types of range of motion that our human wrist could have. So I added some other motors and gadgets and things like that to kind of re-engineer the wrist. I think maybe that was an early sign that I was I was going to be a bioengineer cuz I was kind of curious to innovate, curious to try to develop new solutions that could better represent the actual human condition. And through that in a number of different projects that had been going on for a number of years, well before PhD undergrad projects, early on I took a technical entrepreneurship course. Kind of got involved with what would go into a business plan relatively early, got the chance to enter some competitions very early, which were great learning experiences and kind of left me hungry for more. And I think all these experiences, have kind of added up where, I definitely wanna be an innovator. I want to inspire new scientists, train new students, and develop new solutions for really pressing unmet needs that exist. I think, talking to so many folks, clinicians in this space, having family members that have also experienced a number of these terrible diseases and disorders that there's certainly so much work that still needs to be done and not enough folks out there developing new solutions here as we're running out of time to, to do all these things. So, certainly feel kind of the time pressure to develop new and an important solutions. And really to try to think big. I think that's really the most exciting part is to have a problem and really develop a solution that can really address that, that specific problem in the best possible way.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So both of you have had really interesting career paths that have led you to where you are today, and it sounds like leadership has been a winding thread through various different avenues for you both. So, I'm curious, two things. One is what does leadership mean to you? And then the second thing would be what advice would you have for someone who might be interested in doing something similar to what you're doing or is looking for a leadership role within the medtech industry? So whoever would love to take that, I'd just be curious to know your thoughts.
Dr. David Wu: Yeah, I can start. I think the most important part of leadership is finding a common mission and enabling people on your team to achieve that common mission together, whether it is teaching them the skills to do so or encouraging them. I think just bring everybody to achieve a same mission, the common mission, the common goal. For example, in the MedTech industry, it could be developing a new biomedical device to, to solve a particular technical or surgical issue in order to improve treatment outcome for a specific population. It could even be broader, right? Tackle aging or tackle specific type of cancer. So, having the ability to really gathering the team and to inspiring every individual team member, who are from different backgrounds, who have different priorities and different level of life experiences and skills. And how do you find the common denominator and how do you motivate them? I think that's the key to success to leadership.
Dr. Ben Freedman: And I think just to add to that, there's certainly different types of leaders, different types of leadership positions, even within a single organization. I think just finding the right people that can help build that positive work environment, that can help motivate a group and inspire group to go after a common goal. And I think if you can get everybody on board with not only the mission, but but really have the drive to where it doesn't necessarily feel like work. It feels like everybody's going after something that's gonna be extremely impactful. You know, award credit when credit is due. All these things are really important characteristics of what I think goes into making somebody be a good leader. Certainly lots of things that you could learn in a class, but also a lot of it is practice and learning how to manage a lot of things going on at the same time, communicating really effectively, really recognizing accomplishments and achievements for those in the team. And being organized and focused to define goals that are within reach are all the different kind of important qualities that will go into being a successful leader. I think, we're relatively both early in our careers. So I think we're still trying to learn some of the key things here and in talking to some of our mentors about how they may handle situations and learning from others. There's always things to learn in this space to further advance our own careers.
Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. And what about any advice you might have for somebody who's interested in, again, either doing something similar or obtaining a leadership role, just maybe somebody who's even earlier on in their career. What would you say to them?
Dr. Ben Freedman: So, I mean, I think there's a number of things here. A number of different little key bits of advice. Certainly, people will say that you need a lot of grit, you need to work hard, you need to be determined. It's easy to say those things, but it's also, you have to practice going through those different things too, where not every day's going to be winning a competition, where there's gonna be a lot of failure. There's gonna be a lot of unanswered questions. There's gonna be a lot of things where it may not feel like you're making a huge amount of progress. You might be making a little bit of progress. You might be taking steps forward, you might be taking steps backward. But hopefully, you just have to keep your eye on the goal. And I think a lot of these skill sets with grit and determination and, not just working hard but working smart. Being really efficient with hours and time are some of the things that we've developed during this postgraduate, graduate training which, I think has been helpful probably for us as young, aspiring scientists and entrepreneurs to really have an eye on where things can go. Appreciate that it's not necessarily a straight line and things can go in all sorts of directions.
But just to, try to keep a focus and we heard an analogy last night, we were at the Resolve Mass Challenge event and taking place in Boston. One of the keynotes was talking about thinking about approaching problems with kind of a bandpass filter. Filtering out the really good things and how that might affect you and the really bad. So just to keep kind of a more moderate response to a lot of the different things that are coming. And I think, part of that is true. Keep a steady pace and surround yourself with folks that, that share in your, mission and that can hear your stresses and successes and you know, just surround yourself with the people, great people and that can push you to do new things. And I think that's really an important part for folks in this industry and other industries. Where you're not doing this in a silo. I heard once that, the hardest job of somebody in these, top leadership positions, whether that be CEO or academic professors is not necessarily the company, or the lab or the whatever. It's managing your own mental health. And I think, that's certainly, an important part and something that we all have to work toward. And I think if you do that in addition to doing really good science and really good in innovative technology development, hopefully that will be something that leads to success, but it's not an easy path. It's a lot of factors that can be out of your control as well, depending on industry dynamics and people, et cetera. But until that point we're certainly in this interesting phase of great determination and surrounding ourselves with fantastic people that, that share in our vision.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. David, anything to add to that?
Dr. David Wu: Yes, I think one of the advice to, to any young folks either in the industry, in academia or in clinical practice is be open-minded. There's a lot of things we currently don't know. So having the foresight to network within your own industry, but also in adjacent industries. And really exploring what are the different innovations, the different discoveries going on, and how to cross pollinate and how to collaborate with each other because we have to acknowledge that we only have so much time and so much expertise in, in our domain. So having the opportunity to collaborate with people outside of our immediate field, that could be really beneficial.
A second point I'd like to touch on is a mentorship. As young, aspiring leaders and inventors in the industry, entrepreneurs, it's important to seek mentorship and to learn from those veterans who have been there, done that. They have a lot of advice to share. How did they start their own journey? So by talking to these different mentors and really building your core group of mentors, or for example, there's one particular term in the literature I'd like to refer to as your "personal board advisors." So identify these people that play a certain role in your own growth, in your own development that could really expand your horizons in terms of knowledge as well as network.
And the third point I'd like to touch about is dream big and also act on it. And recently, I heard somebody in my network talk about this concept. When opportunities come knocking on your door, you gotta be ready and you gotta be there to open that door. So, when you have a dream, you're not gonna be able to foresee what's gonna be coming towards you next year or the year after. But what you can do is to build a set of skill, to build a network within the industry and to understand what are some key areas of opportunity and aligning yourself up for that. And when you're presented with these opportunities, see those opportunities.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Yeah, that is great advice. Thank you very much both of you for that. I think you've touched on something that is really important and kind of a running theme of the interviews I've done so far is the concept that there are many avenues to a dream, and if you're open and you're willing to explore the opportunities that come your way, whether or not you initially thought that's how it would work out, I mean it leads people to some pretty amazing opportunities and experiences if you're willing to be open and you're willing to be humble enough to know that you're gonna be learning and growing your whole life.
Well, on a different note, for both of you, just a fun question. Imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want, doesn't have to be in your industry, but it could. What would you choose to teach and why?
Dr. David Wu: If I were offered an opportunity to teach a masterclass, and this might be coming from a totally different angle, but I would teach the art of Japanese sushi and sashimi making. And part of the reason why is first, it's full of art and history. And as the culinary arts is embedded in history. There's also a lot of knowledge you need to know and a lot of training. So just out of interest, for background knowledge, a Japanese chef for a Japanese sushi chef, when they undergo through training, it takes them about three years just preparing the rice for the sushi. And that is the amount of detail, technical knowledge, repetition, and perseverance. And once they're passed onto that stage, they move on to, to teach 'em how to make it a piece of omelet or egg. And that process also takes years. So to really become a master and to hone your skill to reach that level of master sushi chef it takes, 20, 30, even 40 years. And one of the most famous chef in Japan actually is well into his eighties and still perfecting his craft. And that is an analogy to my specialty, which is periodontal surgery. We do a lot of plastic surgery and a lot of the techniques in plastic surgery is very refined. You need to have fine control of the surgical blade. You need to master different levels and tiers of techniques. So that's kind of in parallel to, to the art of sushi making. So if I was offered a million dollars, I will definitely teach a class on these different aspects.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love it. Ben?
Dr. Ben Freedman: Yeah. So before I was-- I guess in parallel, actually, while I was doing science, I had a side job of teaching sailing. I grew up doing some water sports and got really passionate about teaching sailing and not just competitive sailboat racing, but I just loved the whole concept of working with somebody that's never been on the water, may have just learned how to swim and teaching them an entirely different skillset. It's not necessarily like walking or riding a bike, it's something where there's a lot of controls. You're on a boat that's floating and, and the ocean, there's lines to pull, there's ways you have to maintain your balance. All these things that, that go into place so that the boat goes forward, doesn't go in circles and you don't flip the thing over. And I've had such an enjoyable time working with younger students, adults. I volunteered for a number of years for the Sailing Special Olympics, working with athletes of all different backgrounds that, I would, in a heartbeat, love to build a, a whole career out of sailing. Probably not even pay me to do it. I would, certainly do it for free just because it's been such a strong passion of mine over the years. I think there's a lot of similarities to sailing a boat and doing a lot of things in life, whether that be entrepreneurship or learning a new skill or working harder in a class or doing a PhD, et cetera. A lot of times with sailing, it's not like driving a motor boat where you can go from point A to point B, you have to zigzag through the wind. You have waves, you have unintended obstacles that you'll hit, and you have to sometimes adapt on the fly. You can't predict what the weather is going to be or what might be out on the water. And I think that certainly resonates closely with me and the different activities that I'm doing in academia and the industry. And something which I think is true for a lot of us in life. So, without a doubt, I would teach a masterclass in sailing and I would do it for free.
Lindsey Dinneen: Well, we could put the million dollars towards your business. How about that?
Dr. Ben Freedman: Sounds good.
Lindsey Dinneen: Or a cause that you care about? One of the two.
Dr. Ben Freedman: Perfect.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, amazing. That is awesome. Thank you both for that. What is one thing that you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Dr. Ben Freedman: I think certainly, we're in this area because we certainly wanna make a difference and we don't wanna necessarily have any regrets of not going after something that could be, a chance to improve healthcare, improve our environment, improve world peace, et cetera. So, I think that we wanna be remembered as or at least I want be remembered as something that goes after challenging problems that are facing the world, going after them in ways that are, of course ethical and, creating a great community and, and group along the way. I'm also really passionate about training folks and enabling them to be successful at whatever they do and solve other really important pressing problems that we're facing. Hoping to make a mark in many different areas I'm gonna hopefully be remembered for those things and hopefully they do result in some new novel device. But if they don't, the way that we're going about it, just wanting to do that in the best possible way that enables others to have a great impact on the world.
Dr. David Wu: And as for me in terms of one thing I wanna be remembered for, as a clinician and a scientist, and I teach a lot students along the way, and I had a lot of mentors who have played this role in my life. I want to be remembered as somebody who really encouraged people to pursue their dreams and provided them with concrete advice, resources, and opportunities so they can find a fulfilling career-- whether it is in the medtech industry developing new devices to help patients, or whether it is to become a scientist to advance their research project or become becoming a clinicians to treat patients-- to help these trainees and students find the ideal career path and the ideal sense of fulfillment for themselves. So as a mentor and as a leader, that's one thing I wanna be remembered for.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Those are great answers. Thank you. And then my final question is, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Dr. Ben Freedman: Oh, right now the number one thing that makes me smile-- we just had a our first child a few months ago. And seeing our baby smiling or crying makes me smile every single time.
Lindsey Dinneen: Aw, congratulations. That's wonderful.
Dr. David Wu: And for me, also in terms of you were talking about personal milestones. So this past summer I just got married to my wife. We've been dating for almost 11 years now. So it's a long time coming. And just being able to spend time together, whether talking about our future or going on new adventures, exploring different parts of the world, that's something that makes me smile.
Lindsey Dinneen: Those are great answers. Well and clearly, great reasons to smile, so I'm so glad to hear about those things.
Dr. David Wu: I'm smiling right now.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love it. Well, I just wanna thank you both so, so very much for your time today. We are very honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Save the Children, which works to end the cycle of poverty by ensuring communities have the resources to provide children with a healthy, educational and safe environment. I am truly inspired by what you all are doing and the different solutions that you are developing for a whole variety of different uses. And thank you for your passion and your drive to change lives for a better world. I just wish you both massive, continued success as you go along your paths, and thank you, thank you for being here. And thank you so much to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Haven Tyler | Boston Engineering | Women’s Health, Mentorship, & A Horror Film

Haven Tyler is a Senior Client Relations Executive in medical device development at Boston Engineering and an aspiring interior designer in her spare time. In this episode, she discusses her innate curiosity about the world, why she decided to focus primarily on the medtech industry, her passion for furthering women's health, the power of mentorship, and the time she starred in a horror film.
Guest links: https://www.boston-engineering.com/industries/medical/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/haventyler/
Charity supported: Polaris Project
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW NOTES
Episode 015 - Haven Tyler
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I'm excited to introduce you to my guest today, Haven Tyler. Haven is a senior client relations executive at Boston Engineering, a consulting and technology development firm based in Boston. Haven brings over 30 years of a consulting experience to her clients and she has worked with such consulting firms as IDEO and Continuum. Haven appreciates the variety in her work, especially the broad range of technical business and regulatory challenges her clients face. In her varied career she made the personal professional shift eight years ago to focus on medical device development because of the impact her teams have on improving patients' lives. The path her current role has not been traditional. Haven has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, studied history of art and fashion, and is an aspiring interior designer in her spare time. Along the way, she also had a short-lived acting career and starred in a horror film in her senior year in college. What knits it all together is an innate curiosity in the world around her and solving tough problems. Well, hello, Haven. Thank you so very much for joining us today. I am so excited to learn more about you. Thanks for being here.
Haven Tyler: Oh, Lindsey, thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to go through this with you.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind starting by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and maybe how you got into the industry.
Haven Tyler: Oh, sure, I'd be happy to. So I have to say, in perfect honesty and transparency, my path to where I am has not been a straight one. So it's quite varied. I started out by going to college in New York. I went to a small liberal arts school called Sarah Lawrence. And I studied art history actually. But I think that the thing that education, and also in my family, that was instilled was the sort of innate sense of curiosity. So I think that's a thread that runs throughout my career. I ended up in the Boston area and started actually working for an industrial design firm and learned about industrial design, which is something that was totally new for me.
So I'm clearly more of a visual sort of design person, but I've appreciated the sort of messiness of the creative process and the complexity of problems and I've really always loved that kind of, there's a problem and everyone's brainstorming and coming up to a solution as a group. So that's always been something that I've really enjoyed and I learned a lot from an industrial design perspective. And I was really lucky I got to work at some pretty amazing places. I was able to work at IDEO as their Head of Business Development on the East coast in what I would consider the halcyon days, if you will, of design and design thinking and innovation. And, you know, a lot of those words are buzzwords now, but we were actually living them, you know, back in the day. And that was just such an exciting sort of heady time . And it really just opened up my eyes to how our work could make a difference in the world.
And at that point I was professionally focusing on a range of products including consumer products as well as some medical. But then during the course of basically 30 years, at some point, maybe about eight or nine years ago, I had reached a sort of apex in my career and in my life and just really thinking about what my-- "legacy" is a big word and it's not exactly how I was thinking about it. I don't know what the correct word is, but I was thinking about what difference I could make in the world. And that's when I made the professional and personal decision to shift to focus just on developing medical devices.
And at Boston Engineering, I've been able to do that, which has just been a great privilege to be on the team. And I've loved the complexities of the problems we face and our clients face on a daily basis. I have things that come across my desk that are fascinating and they're disease states that you didn't know about, and understanding about that and sort of diving into what those patients experience, what the doctor's experience, what the hospital's experience in terms of purchasing equipment, what our clients experience in terms of their business needs and their regulatory hurdles and reimbursement hurdles, and the challenges are really complex. And that's what I love is cuz then you have lots of different people with lots of different areas of expertise contributing. I hope that helps answer the question. That was a long-winded, long-winded answer, I apologize.
Lindsey Dinneen: No, I love it. I love that your story is not linear and that you have so many different really interesting twists and turns in your path. I think that's really exciting. And then, I really appreciated the sort of theme of curiosity is being what kind of ties it all together and I'm sure keeps you interested and motivated every day.
Haven Tyler: It does. And you know, it's interesting because in preparation for this, I've been thinking about how I ended up where I am. And I grew up in an academic family in New Haven, Connecticut, and my parents were-- their upbringing, they were born after World War II, so it was like forties and fifties. So their upbringing was very strict and restricted. And then when it came to their own children, it was the seventies and the eighties, so it was hands off parenting. It was very different than it is today. But it was also explore your bliss, like find your passion. There was never a sense of you're gonna have to pay the rent or have a career. There was no thing involved.
Lindsey Dinneen: So, so that was a wonderful thing growing up and maybe a slightly rude awakening as an adult, or were you prepared?
Haven Tyler: Well I think I was prepared in the sense that they instilled a sense of, "you can figure it out." You have the tools to figure anything out, no matter what it is. And it was a question of perseverance and grit and, all of those things. So, I think that it was definitely a little bit of a rude awakening, but you could figure your way out of it.
Lindsey Dinneen: That's fair. I think no matter how prepared you think you are, you're not, anyway, you know, it's always a learning curve, but that's what keeps life interesting.
Haven Tyler: Exactly. Yeah. It's interesting too because I love the fact that if you had asked me at 20 or 21, when I was graduating school, where do you think you'd be? This is not what I would've predicted at all. And I'm also grateful for that because I've ended up in a place that's really great and I, I couldn't have made that up. I couldn't have fantasized that. So, I think that the fact that I get to go to work every day and feel like possibly I'm being helpful to the planet or the world, and maybe we can make a difference in people's lives. And I work for a company that has a ton of integrity and they believe that, they really do. It's not just some kind of byline. It's something that the whole group lives and breathes and that's pretty incredible to be able to say that, right? So, I feel lucky to have landed in a place that feels authentic, you know?
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. I completely agree. That's one of my very favorite parts about being in the industry is knowing that even if your role is a little bit on the fringes, perhaps it's not the actual engineering of the product, but you're still helping to talk about the product and introduce it to the world, or however you fit into it, you're still making a difference. And I think that's a really powerful motivator and makes it fun to come to work every day because you just know inherently that you're doing good. So that's really special.
Haven Tyler: It is special and I don't think everybody gets to say that, you know? And I have friends who do a variety of different things and I have friends I've known since I was a kid and they're scratching their head going, "you do what for who," you know? How did you get there? And I was like, "I know it doesn't really make a ton of sense, but it's really where I should be." And I don't know if everyone gets to say that.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. It's a special situation when you do, for sure. And especially if you've been through other seasons of your life when perhaps you didn't feel quite as connected to what you were doing. All work is valuable, but sometimes, your personal connection, if it's not there, makes it a little bit harder to be excited about getting up every day and going to work.
Haven Tyler: Yeah. And there was a large part of my career where there was a a focus on really sexy products, if you will. But they were more based in the consumer realm. I loved being a part of that. And it was really cool. And it definitely had its attractions. But at the end of the day, I was like, I'll be walking down the aisle in Target or whatever with my kids going, "Yeah, I helped make that," and I just, I don't know, it wasn't moving the needle or helping the way I wanted to help. So I think that kind of spurred me on to look at medical a little bit more closely.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Is there a particular moment or series of moments that stand out to you because it clearly confirmed that this was the right next career choice for you?
Haven Tyler: Yeah, I think you're right-- the word "series" is probably the best. It's a lifetime of experience, and I can say this now cause I'm getting towards the tail end of my career. I had some health concerns in my own family that we had to address and I think my gratitude for the help that we got living in the Boston area-- I mean-- how fortunate are we to live in that area? You know? So I have access to some of the best minds and medical community. And I grew up in a medically privileged environment. My stepfather is a medical doctor. And our pediatrician was Uncle Sid and Uncle Sid would just like come on over to the house, and it was just amazing that you had access like that. And anyway, my, my appreciation and my gratitude for the people who are helping me and helping my family through a couple of different medical things was really profound, and it gave me a new line of sight into how complex that world was and how complex it was to get to the point where you were able to receive that kinda help. So I think that was definitely an aspect of things.
I think that also having certain people put into my life. So certainly working with my colleague, Paul O'Connor, who heads the medical business unit at Boston Engineering, that has been a really wonderful partnership, and I appreciate working with him. And he's, he has much more experience and depth in the medical arena than I do. But I think that we have a skillset that really complements each other and I rely heavily on him for aspects of building our business. And I hope that, I hope the inverse is true.
So, I think, having a combination of those types of things. I think one thing I wish that I had, and this is something that I talk to my own children about, is finding a mentor. And I didn't have that. So everything I did was really either sort of self-guided and I was just following my curiosity. Or something got put in front of me, and maybe it was fate, maybe it was, who knows? Something was in front of me. I think that large part of that was the product of my upbringing, of the sort of "follow your passion" kind of thing versus the " I'm trying to find a different kind of balance for my own children" and thinking about it with them as they're embarking on their careers. And maybe there could be a little bit more planning involved than there was in my career. Yeah, so I think the value of having mentors in your life, professional mentors, is something that could really be a great tool.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent agree. And that brings me to-- I'd love to hear some of your advice for perhaps somebody who is interested in coming into the medtech field. Maybe as a, either a young career person who would be interested in growing into a leadership role or somebody who is switching careers. Is there any advice that you would relate to that person to help them as they begin that process?
Haven Tyler: Yeah, I think, the notion of a mentor is really the strongest drum I would beat in that regard. I may not also be the best person to ask that question just because I've always been on the consulting side of things. I have not been a part of a larger corporation, like a big med device firm. So I don't really have that perspective necessarily. I do know what I hear at conferences. I do think, and I'm gonna really stress this, that we need more women. I think that the more women we can have in medtech leadership, the better. I've been going to a number of conferences and doing my own research and women's health has been sorely underrepresented for a long time. I think we're getting slightly better and I think we're talking about women's health in a different kind of way, which is fantastic. But the numbers of research and development dollars that are spent globally on women's health is very low. I mean, I think the percentage is about 2%, which somebody said at a conference is a rounding error.
I would love to see that change with the next wave of leadership and I would love to see more women writing checks and making those decisions to expand those conversations and learn more about the different phases of women's health that we go through cuz there are topics that we talk about and there are topics we don't, and I think there's been a decent amount of conversation around women's health, particularly around childbearing years. But, the topic of, let's just say menopause, is one that's very complicated and I think it's a potentially huge market.
So from a business perspective, I think big companies should perk up about that. But I think we need to know more because I think that we don't know enough about that. It's not necessarily a disease state, if you will, but there are lots of varied symptoms with that phase of life and it can be quite confusing. So, I'd love to see that improve. So I guess, mentorship. If you're a younger person, maybe be a little bit more strategic with the help of someone who can guide you through so that you can attain the goals that you, you want to achieve.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Mentorship is such a wonderful gift when you find a good match and are able to learn from that person and benefit basically from their own experiences and things that they would've done differently looking back or whatnot. You know, you talked a little bit about how-- because you didn't have a mentor-- you were self-taught and self-motivated or whatnot. And I'm curious: you have such a interesting eclectic background and you've had lots of different experiences. So how do you personally prioritize your own continued learning and growing, cuz obviously that's just been part of your life along with your curiosity, but I'm just curious how you prioritize it.
Haven Tyler: Oh, it's such a funny question because it's, it's not even a question of prioritization. It just happens. I'm just a curious person. I mean, I'm constantly taking classes that may have nothing to do with my professional life. I think I mentioned I'm pursuing a certificate in interior design because I like it. It's just interesting to me. Color and how colors relate to each other, and color theory. I go down these little rabbit holes that I think are very interesting and I go from there. I love architecture, I love gardening. It's never a dull moment, unfortunately for my family. But yeah, I mean, it's always been that way. It's definitely fun.
So I know a little bit about a lot of things which I think has actually served me well in my particular role, because my role at Boston Engineering is to identify where opportunities might be, develop the appropriate program, and I get engineers to help me with that. And that's creative in a way 'cause if you're looking for an opportunity, I'm looking for the negative space, right? I'm looking for where the hole is and, can I go in there and, is there a problem there we can help solve? And so, as I said, it's messy, but it, it ends up being not messy once you find the solution, if that makes any sense. So no, I don't really have any sort of prioritization.
The one thing that I have gotten better at though is, and I think Covid taught us all a lot, but it's just personally that I've gotten better at is boundaries. So, I start my workday at a specific time. I end my workday at a specific time. And so that allows me to have the space to do the other things I get curious about. So, during Covid, I personally found it a little hard because I think like a lot of us, there was a lot of fear. We didn't know what was coming around the corner from a health perspective, from an economic perspective. It was just scary for everybody. And so I was just very driven. And I think that while it's great to be driven, it can also be unhealthy. So, yeah.
Lindsey Dinneen: I'm just chuckling because I relate to that so much.
Haven Tyler: Yeah, exactly. And you can burn out and burnout's not good. I have a 18 year old who is going to be a college freshman, and she's incredibly driven. And she's just a good student. I've never had to check her homework. I've never had to do anything. And she can burn out. And I, I see this cycle in her and I think she's getting much better at having a balance, but I think left to her own instincts, that's where she goes. And so while that's a great thing in a lot of ways, how do you temper that, so, yeah.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And that is a really hard balance. But like you said, trying to put in some specific boundaries really does help. It sounds like you are boxing yourself in, but it's actually a freedom generating exercise.
Haven Tyler: Absolutely. I do think that one of the things that I've learned over life is that because I have three children and I, I've been a single parent for most of my children's lives, and taking care of myself was something that I didn't do very well for a long time. And making that a priority is really important. And that can come in many different forms. That can come with, I need to get enough sleep, I need to drink enough water, I need to exercise, I need to make time to walk the dog or sit outside in the woods or whatever it is that I need to do, to be able to do everything else effectively.
It's like that analogy where they give you the instructions on the airplane. And it never made sense to me that you would put the air mask on yourself first before the child. And I always thought that was just the complete opposite. I was like, "this is crazy." And then the reality is no, if you can't breathe, you can't take care of your child. So if you're a crazy person and you haven't slept and you're not eating well and you're not exercising, then you're not gonna be able to take care of anyone else. So, that's been something that has been a priority for a number of years for me. And like finding those balances and saying to people who need my time, like, "Yes, I really want to talk to you. That is very important. I have to get back to you in an hour." Or whatever that is. " But I can't have that conversation right now. I want to have that conversation, but let's do it in a little bit." And creating those guardrails has been helpful.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And not to pivot too dramatically, but I really do have to ask you about your short-lived acting career. Okay. First of all, how did this even come about? And second of all, what was that experience like?
Haven Tyler: Yeah. So it's, it was a little surreal, but yes. So I, as a part of my schooling, I took my senior year in Italy for art history. It was just an amazing experience. And that's one thing I encourage everyone to do. Try and study abroad if you can, or live abroad for a little bit. Anyway, while I was there, I was doing a lot of, and I had been doing while I was in school in New York, a bunch of kind of modeling and that was a great way to make money, but it was painfully boring. So I wanted to get out of that, but I still needed to figure out a way to support myself.
So, an American woman, who I met in Rome through a friend, was a casting agent, and she said, "You know, let me send you on a few things." And she sent me on one audition and it was funny because my mother, who is a dean of a college at Yale, she's like a serious person. She had flown in, we were gonna spend two weeks together and she had flown in and I said, "Oh, before we go, I have to go on this audition." And she is looking at me with her blue eyes going, "What the heck is this?" And I said "No, no, no, it's fine."
And we went into this place that kinda looked like a dentist office, but it had these big posters with monsters. And these guys come out and they don't speak any English and they say, "Come with me." And so I go back there and all I had to do was scream. So my poor mother was waiting in the lobby and all she hears is me scream. And so, I got the part. But I think that largely had to do with the fact that I had red hair and freckles and Sigourney Weaver was a thing at the time and the movie was a very specific genre. It was sort of a mashup, which was common then. It was a mashup between sort of "Aliens" and "Terminator." Anyway, it was just an absolute blast. I'm so grateful I had the experience. I am a horrible actress. But it was just really fun. And we spent two months filming in abandoned nuclear power plants. We spent a week in Venice filming overnight. I mean, it was just incredible.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Thank you for sharing about that, because that is an amazing story and such a unique opportunity. I love that you did that.
Haven Tyler: It was very fun. And I think two years ago, it was the 30th anniversary or something of the film release, and it has this unusual kind of, but very fun, cult following cuz it's this bad, bad horror movies. It was a part of a big drive-in movie theater movie festival up in upstate New York. So we all went, my family all went, we had our beach chairs and we got to watch it. And we had posters and signing autographs. It was just, it was very funny.
Lindsey Dinneen: That is amazing. I love it. I love it. Well, okay. That is fantastic. Just for fun, imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be in your industry or related to your education, but doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach and why?
Haven Tyler: That's a really fun question, and it's a big question. I think it would be a combination of teaching people to be their authentic self, and curiosity and creativity, all jumbled up together. And how to explore those and find them in yourself.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So when you say finding your authentic self, is there a specific thing that you would highlight? Or how would you talk more about that? Because I think that's an important thing that, that isn't always talked about as much.
Haven Tyler: Yeah, I think that I'm fortunate to have landed in a place professionally where I feel comfortable being myself. I think that when you're starting out your career, there's this feeling that you might misstep or you might make a mistake, and you clam up, you don't speak up, because you are concerned that you might say something wrong or you might embarrass yourself. Or you know, I mean, and I was guilty of this too. I'm not saying this with any judgment. I just think that it's, it's a natural thing. But to encourage people to feel, especially younger folks, to feel more confident in sharing because like 99.9% of the time us old folks in the room, we wanna hear what you have to say. But to let go of that fear to allow yourself to, to shine, whatever the topic is.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's especially something-- in fact, I was just having a conversation about this yesterday of the tendency and I think-- maybe not all women, but a lot of times for women-- especially the tendency to shrink and not show up as your full, authentic self. Not because you don't want to, but because you're not sure if you're gonna be accepted or if your opinion's gonna matter or count or any of those things that, that kind of keep you a little bit more quiet when actually you have a voice. You have things to say. And your contribution matters.
Haven Tyler: Yeah, it absolutely matters. And I've had the privilege of having younger folks on our teams and having these conversations with them and then once they start to feel encouraged and more supported, the solutions and the things that the ideas they have are just fantastic, really great stuff. And I see this with my own children as well. I love talking to my adult children. I'm like, "Wow, that's really interesting that you thought about it that way." Or they'll know something profoundly different than I do. And I think it's fascinating. So I would encourage people to find a place where you feel safe enough to be able to express yourself that way.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you. And conversely, I think that's a good reminder also for leaders to, to provide that space, to provide that encouragement for especially younger folks to speak up and that it's safe, it's accepted. So kind of on both sides, like yes, encourage the younger career folks to, to speak up more and also encourage those who do have the privilege of being in leadership to do their part to foster that environment too?
Haven Tyler: Absolutely. And I think it's our responsibility to do that, actually.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well, you know, you mentioned legacy a little bit earlier and that ties in very well to one of my questions, and that is, what is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Haven Tyler: So again, a very big question. I think I would really appreciate if people could think of it as like, "Oh, she was helpful." I don't need to be a rock star. I don't need to be a shining star. I just wanna be helpful.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Love that. Yeah. And then final question, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Haven Tyler: Oh, my dog. A hundred percent.
Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. Tell us about your dog, because I love dogs.
Haven Tyler: No, she's a total punk. I love her dearly but she hates people except for us. And she's just, yeah she's wonderful, little cuddle bug. But she's a Boston Terrier, but she's sort of the wrong colors. They're normally black and white and she's brown and white, and so she's a little offbeat, which makes me like her even more.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love it. She is her own dog.
Haven Tyler: Exactly.
Lindsey Dinneen: That's fantastic. Well, I love hearing your stories and your insights and your advice. Thank you just so very much for taking the time today to speak with me and for sharing just a little bit about yourself and what's important to you. I just really value that. So, so thank you.
Haven Tyler: Thank you, Lindsey. I appreciate this, and I appreciate before we jumped on the recording, you describing your motivation for starting this podcast. And I think that it's really important the work that you're doing, and I think that getting at the underlying motivations for people being in this industry is really interesting. I mean, yes, at the end of the day, it is a business and we do live in a capitalistic society. I mean, that's just like baseline. However, within that there's a lot of choice that people have to make, and how you go about achieving those goals can be very different. And I think that on our side of the fence, on the consulting side of the world, none of us are ever going to be the next Bill Gates. But it's such a motivator to think that, " Okay, this might make a difference in somebody's life." And it just gives me goosebumps to think about, like that we can say we helped make that. It's really pretty cool stuff, so I'm glad to talk about it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to the Polaris Project, which is a non-governmental organization that works to combat and prevent sex and labor trafficking in North America. So thank you for choosing that organization to support and really appreciate that, and we just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.
Haven Tyler: Thank you so much, Lindsey.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. And thank you also to our listeners for tuning in ,and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Alex Condon | COO at Galen Data | Working for Small Businesses, Networking, & ”Meerkat Moments”

Alex Condon is the COO and co-founder of Galen Data. In this episode, he discusses how his background working with small businesses prepared him to grow and scale Galen Data, why he occasionally looks outside of the medtech industry to gain inspiration and insight, and how showing up and being a good person will write your legacy for you.
Guest links: http://www.galendata.com
Charity supported: Opportunity International 
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 014 - Alex Condon
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I'm excited to introduce you to my guest today, Alex Condon. Alex is the COO and co-founder of Galen Data, a medical device cloud data platform. Prior to starting Galen, Alex was the Chief Strategy Officer at Tietronix Software, a longtime NASA contractor. Alex is originally from Scottsdale, Arizona, having attended Arizona State University, but now calls Houston home. Thank you so much for being here today, Alex. I am so excited that you're here and talking with me and welcome!
Alex Condon: No, thank you for the opportunity, Lindsey. Sincerely appreciate it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Well, if you don't mind starting off by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and maybe how you got into the medtech industry, I'd love to start there.
Alex Condon: Sure. So I'm originally from Scottsdale, Arizona. That's where I grew up. I went to school at the WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University for finance. So something way outside of MedTech. When I was 19, I got hired at a private investment management firm that was there in Phoenix and worked there until I was about 27. And then parted ways and took a job at NASA, Johnson Space Center, working for a NASA contractor, Tietronix software. They've been around for a long time. I usually focused on advanced technology across a wide spectrum of use cases. Things from system modeling and system engineering, all the way to augmented reality and blockchain applications and things like this.
And one of the things that a lot of NASA related kind of space flight software companies do down in Houston where offices is, is they moonlight doing medical device software because the compliance rigor of NASA space flight software is very close to class three medical device. So, the NASA contractor was splitting maybe 50% NASA related work and 50% custom medical software. And from that we saw a pattern merge of companies that needed cloud connectivity as part of their medical device offering. And typically if you're going to engage in that kind of work, it tends to be very costly and take a lot of time to develop. But the requirements from project to project are very similar. Everyone needs a way of seeing their device data, showing it to stakeholders, whether that be patients or clinicians or maybe someone else in the value chain. They needed a way to run algorithms, create notifications against the data. And from there we saw the opportunity to create a product and that's where Galen Data got started. So, went from finance to working with a NASA contractor and now in MedTech.
Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So you have had quite the exciting background. When you first started, could you have imagined that you would be now a COO of a company that you helped get off the ground from the very beginning? I mean, was that ever an idea of yours or was this just a complete surprise?
Alex Condon: I've always worked for small companies. When I worked for the investment management firm, I was the first employee, it was a team of three. And then when I left, I wanna say we were somewhere north of about 30. I think that number sounds right. When I started working for the NASA contractor, they'd always been small by design, liking to take on projects that they could really dedicate a lot of time and focus to. And it was about, I wanna say 75 people. And when I entered, I was in a Director of Strategic Initiatives role, and then moved up into Director of Strategy role. So, always worked for small companies. When the opportunity to create Galen rolled around, it felt very comfortable. So, no real surprises. But the journey itself was the surprise.
Lindsey Dinneen: Right. Getting from point A to point B was the surprise. Very nice. Is there a particular moment that stands out to you that this was the right career for you specifically? It could be Galen Data specific, but just in general working within the medtech industry, are there any moments or a series of moments that stand out to you as just, "Yes, I'm in the right place?"
Alex Condon: I think that the product was launched out of a need that we saw out in the world. So I think that being able to analyze the gap and seeing that these medtech companies were having to take on a large burden when it came to their cloud software. So those companies would have to, like I said, put up a lot of money, a lot of time, but there's an operation side of kind of owning cloud infrastructure and medical device that a lot of them might not be able to wrap their heads around.
So when you have the software, that can connect your device to the cloud, you're responsible for all the data that ingests, so you're responsible for all of the privacy concerns, the regulatory concerns. On the IT side, you're responsible for things like cybersecurity. You're responsible for things like disaster recovery. And in all of those landscapes, things change all the time. There's new regulations. There's new cybersecurity threats and all of those things can tend to morph a medtech company into an IT company. And that seemed like kind of a growing risk concentration, especially as more medical devices started leveraging the cloud for whatever they needed.
So, seeing that gap and seeing that the team we put together the CEO, Chris DuPont, the CTO of Abbas Dhilawala, both of 'em have very deep industry experience and by the work we'd done together, working at the NASA contractor, we all came out of the same place. I believe the team had the ability to execute. So if you marry that idea of product that has a need could seriously help people get their device to market in a safe and de-risked way, and then also have the team to execute on it, that to me solidified this is something that I wanna do and I think that it benefits the greater good.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. So could you tell me a little bit about the history of starting the company and where you are now and where you're looking to be? I'm always curious of the evolution of a small business and how you can go from that very first idea to reality and beyond.
Alex Condon: So, Abbas Dhilawala, our CTO, had the idea of creating this platform. Chris DuPont, our CEO, he has always had an entrepreneurial bent, and so they both latched on this idea of this is something that they want to do. But there was no kind of execution arm to get it done. And that's when I entered in. So, far before we became an actual company. But this idea of, well, Alex has this background in helping companies grow and seeing how a company should come together at an early stage. So putting some kind of, some meat on the bones. From then, we registered the company. The name, Galen Data, it doesn't really mean anything and it was by design. We knew that it was going to be in medical device or healthcare. So we picked an ancient Greek physician, Galen, to tack onto the name and then data, because we knew we were gonna have big data in some respect. Took those ideas, made the name, and then when the product came around it seemed to fit fairly seamlessly: a medical device cloud product for kind of cloud data management.
So Abbas had the idea and then a lot of it existed in his head. So from the time that we started the company in terms of kind of filing all the documents, we raised some funding and then Abbas just hunkered down and it went radio silent for a long time pouring his evenings into making an MVP for us. And from then it was okay, now we have this product, now it's time to try to scale it a bit. So we brought in a VP of IT Ops and started trying to attract some kind of initial clients. And when you have a company like ours that's housing a lot of this medical device data and the medical device companies who are our clients are reliant on our ability to execute, our ability to persist as a company, you have to knock on a lot of doors to find early adopters. As a small company that's being entrusted with a huge piece of operational infrastructure for a medical device that might have raised tens of millions of dollars and employ dozens of people, it requires a tremendous amount of trust.
And one of the things that's not lost on me is the amount of trust that those early clients put in us. The idea was relatively new to the space. Connectivity as a platform idea was something relatively new. Prior to that, everything was like what we were doing, kind of built the spoke. So, I look back and I love all of our initial clients, do anything for them. But awed by the amount of risk they took on working with a startup. And actually, one of the greatest days of Galen's existence was when we finally looked at the books and realized that we could persist through time. And that you were making enough money to pay all the bills and it was a huge sigh of relief across the company. And that is a, a great day that I'll always remember.
Lindsey Dinneen: That is a great day. Oh I love hearing those stories because I know how hard it is to get a company up and running and to be profitable and actually viable. So, so kudos to you because that is no small feat. So I am curious, you come from a finance background and found your way into the medtech space, which I think is fantastic. Do you have advice for others who might be in a similar situation, come from a background that is different, maybe not engineering, but that might be interested in being a part of the industry? Do you have any advice for those kinds of folks who might wanna make that leap?
Alex Condon: I think that this is a small industry that is very welcoming. And they put a lot of emphasis on knowledge. And so I think that if you are looking at becoming a leader in the medtech space, understand where your niche is, right? Go deep in that area. Network. People will respect you for the depth of knowledge you have and whatever it is you choose to pursue. And I think that's an easy way of integrating into the greater ecosystem. I think that the medtech in general, it spans so many different facets, right? From the people who are going out there and creating the product or the scientists behind the reason for the products to exist all the way through things like quality, regulatory, in our case, software supply chain, all of these different things. And I think that as long as you can show that you know your stuff in where you fit in the greater big picture, that people will naturally gravitate towards you. And I think that if people naturally gravitate towards you, it's also a good sign of trust and I think that, you know, if you have trust and you have people who believe in you, that's what kind of takes you places in this industry.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. That is really a great perspective, and I think that you're completely right in terms of, when you know your own area of expertise, it doesn't have to be the same as anyone else's. In fact, it's helpful to have a bunch of complementary skillsets. And you're right, I think this is a very welcoming, it's very respectful industry and sort of allowing each person to have their own area and own it and people are really friendly here.
Alex Condon: Agreed. And I think that it's one of those-- the kind of the beauty of the space is that, everybody is aligned towards inevitably the goal of helping people. Even if you work in some aspect of supply chain and you're far removed from maybe the doctor with an idea, everyone is moving in that same direction. And I think that when you have all of those people paddling the same direction, not only do you rely on each other, but you can also create a lot of momentum. And I think that momentum has a pervasive way of working into people and bringing people together.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned at the very beginning of answering that question, that knowledge is such an important component, and I couldn't agree with you more. And I'm curious how you as a leader in this space, and as somebody who has had a couple different iterations of your career so far, how do you prioritize your own learning and growing as a leader, as a individual, as a contributor to this field?
Alex Condon: So I think that again, kind of knowledge in the space being important. I always try to focus on, be the best that I can be in the space that I'm in, right? So we probably work right now with 20% of large companies, 80% kind of startup companies, and so understanding the value that we add in both places. Always trying to stay on top of new happenings that would affect either our company or kind of the state of the industry, both from the big company kind of perspective and also from the small company perspective. And always trying to take time to also study things on the periphery, right? How we can improve as a company. How I can be a better part of the greater team. And really keep the focus there.
And I think that a lot of my job also is going out and talking to different folks in both places, the small companies, the big companies, and trying to be an active listener. And understand what their pain points are. Pain points can evolve over time. And they're usually unique to each individual conversation, right? And then try to take those things and formulate them in a way that I can then better my own learning by turning actionable, right? Where are my gaps by listening to the outside world and trying to chase after that information or that answer, or try to seek out that key opinion leader or something like that who might be able to add more to to the story that I can ingest and then put into practice.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Great answer. I also think, sometimes it's helpful to look beyond your own industry's standards when it comes to any aspect of the business and to sometimes look at other industries and see how they're being successful in various ways and see if you can't grab some of those ideas and make them your own. And I'm curious if that's ever happened for you too, where you can get stuck in, "Oh, this is how everyone in the industry does it." But there's a lot of great resources outside too that can sometimes apply.
Alex Condon: Sure. Absolutely. I think that we are a SaaS product, right? Software as a service. And there isn't a lot of that in the medtech space, right? You have some quality management system companies that are doing things, maybe you have some supply chain platforms and things like this. But medical device in general has been a laggard when it comes to adopting new technology on the operational level. So when we first entered, you had to look around and see other areas where connectivity was more widespread. So, when I was looking at how my piece of Galen would form itself, I looked at the Internet of Things space. So looking at how companies had been successful in connecting devices in energy or in consumer devices in the home and things like that. And seeing how we could turn those ideas and those success stories and try to make them a part of our narrative with a MedTech flavor.
And it's been interesting. The perspective that you get today is based off a lot of success stories, right? So right now, when you look at how other people were successful, you have to remember that it's winners biased, right? You don't hear about the mistakes that companies made that no longer exist, right? And in our case, we were bringing a product that was new to the market. This idea of cloud data management for medical devices, a very compliance heavy industry, wasn't something that a lot of people had kinda pursued wholeheartedly. There might have been some fleeting attempts but not enough documentation to make something useful. So, looked in those areas and tried specifically to find why people failed. And why is it that some of these companies that were hot in the connected device industry didn't make a mark?
And then also I think that goes back to your question about kind of understanding your industry. Why, if at all, is MedTech different, right? And it is. The product life cycle is so long. The funding cycles for the startup companies, the decision cycles for the large companies. In both instances, the slightest hiccup can throw you off for months. So being able to appreciate the buying cycle, work it into kind of a greater business plan. And then making sure that we had realistic expectations heading into it was something that I think was critical that we learned as a result of both knowing our space, but also looking out and seeing where other people had success in aligned areas like IoT.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. That's great perspective and I really appreciate you sharing about that because, just in terms of what you were saying regarding winner's bias and things like that, where we have a tendency, even from an outside perspective, to only look at the wins or to only hear about the wins, right? And so I think it's really helpful to also be able to have those honest and transparent conversations, when appropriate, to say, "Yeah, we tried this and it flopped, and here's why. And that's okay cuz we learn from it."
Alex Condon: Absolutely. And I think that to your point about transparency, that's probably one of the most core pieces about Galen Data everywhere that I've ever worked has been a very transparent and flat kind of organization. And that's very much the culture that we have with Galen Data. Try to value everybody's opinion, always make them feel like they're a part of the team. Always allow ourselves to be open to criticism, even if it's from the lowest person on the org chart all the way up. And always think about the feedback that we get. And like you said, approaching problems with kind of introspection and brutal honesty.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's just been a reoccurring theme that I, I keep hearing from folks that I've been talking to is that idea of curiosity being such an important component to not only your own personal learning and growth and whatnot, but also as an organization. And if you can stay curious, then you can stay teachable and you can stay humble too, actually, which is not a bad thing.
Alex Condon: No, I think that I kind of find myself to be a naturally curious person. And I think that everything amazes me. I'm one of those people. I have a million interests. Everything amazes me. And I think that if you can bring that to a job or to a company, whatever, that it'll really take you places because you get out of your own kind of mental trench, right? It's important to pop up and look around every once in a while. And I think just being a naturally curious person creates that naturally. If that makes sense.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. I will say, when you were talking about popping up and looking around for a minute, I had this instant vision of this meerkat, so we can have our meerkat moment, you know, where we pop up and look around...
Alex Condon: That is a perfect example. I'm a huge outdoorsy person and one of my favorite things to do is just go out and look at Prairie Dog Towns. And so, sometimes you're digging and you're digging and digging in the dark, and every once in a while it's important to pop up and see what's going on around you.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love it. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Well, okay, pivoting just for fun. Imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be about something in your industry, but it doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach and why?
Alex Condon: So I grew up-- my family, me, mom, my dad, and my sister-- we did road trips a lot to the national parks. And I've always been, like I mentioned, a huge fan of the outdoors. And so I think that if I were to teach a masterclass on anything, it would probably be maybe national parks and kind of conservation in general. And this is not just something that's talking about here domestically in the US, but you know, national parks exist everywhere and every national park has a narrative around it. And I think that also, the outdoors kind of needs to fit inside of that work-life balance. And so for me, one of the things that I'm passionate about, and I try to do as often as I can, is go see the national parks, get some fresh air, take in the beauty that's around us and try to exist in that moment. Try to kind of take things in for the wonder that they are before you go back to work or family life and things like that. So, I love telling or reading about the narratives behind some of the big national parks here, hearing stories about the ones that are overseas, and I think that if I can share that passion with other people and get them more outdoors and enjoying that side of life, that's something that I would do if I had my druthers.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And that would be a great masterclass because it seems like not a lot of people necessarily prioritize as much, but when you've had the privilege to grow up and visit those places and experience what it's like to be in nature, and like you said, just take a moment and slow down and just be present. That is so important. So yeah, I would attend that masterclass.
Alex Condon: Sure. No, absolutely. Knowing a bit about your travels, I'm sure that you feel the same. It's, it's an important part of of our short time here. And so, make the most out of it. See all the things, do all the cool stuff. Try to soak in as much as you can and at the same time, if you're passionate about something like I am about Galen Data, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Amen to that. Well, what's one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Alex Condon: So this is not something that I think about too often. I think that, it would be great to be remembered by friends and family as just a good person. Again, I have a lot of interests and when you extrapolate out, if I could take my experience in the business world, or maybe socially, and apply them to all these various interests that you have, there's probably a narrative that gets left as a residual if you're able to pursue those paths, right? And so I think that if you show up and treat people well, the legacy will write itself.
And in our case, one thing that's not lost on me is our product, it's a great accelerant when it comes to medical devices coming to market. And when I think of medical devices-- we'll take a startup perspective-- there's a lot of education, a lot of late night working, investor money, time spent, creating these medical device products. And if we can help those companies get to where they need to go in a de-risked way, maybe they come to market far faster, that means that their impact can be by more people, right? More people sooner who need these kinds of products.
So in that vein, we're a small piece of the puzzle. But our kind of legacy I guess would probably live on through the devices that we service, right? So that's one thing that's extremely gratifying about the role, right? We have many devices, devices on four continents, dozens and dozens and dozens of companies that are using us. Being a piece of that narrative, even if the champion is the inventor, happy to carry them on our shoulders as best we can. And at the end of the day, we'll never really have an idea of the number of people that we help. But it's satisfying to know that we've been a piece of the process for so many device companies.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. That's fantastic. And final question, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Alex Condon: I laugh as I say it because a lot of it has been talking through it with you is, how we end up where we are, right? So, from working in Phoenix, Arizona, and essentially a basement with two founders of a investment management firm, and grinding my teeth there for years. And then, working with astronauts as part of this NASA contractor and getting to meet a whole lot of interesting people. And now being surrounded by some of the brightest people in the medtech space. I'm always happy to be the dumbest guy in the room. And looking at that play out in your own life is something that I smile about.
And then, outside of that, for me again, hearing positive feedback from the companies that we help, where they tell me something that was tangible to them: "we were able to save this much time, money or whatever we were able to launch our product this much quicker," or something like that. Going back to the last answer, hearing the results of your work. Again, being able to pop up from being that prairie dog digging in the ground and looking around and hearing people have liked what you've put a lot of sweat equity into and hearing how it really helped 'em, that always brings a smile to face a hundred percent of the time.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Oh yeah. That's a great answer. Well, thank you so very much for joining us, Alex. We are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Opportunity International, which designs, delivers, and skills innovative financial solutions that help families living in extreme poverty build sustainable livelihoods and access quality education for their children. So, we appreciate you picking that organization to support and thank you again so very much for your time today and we just wish you continued success as you and Galen Data work to change lives for a better world.
Alex Condon: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I sincerely appreciated it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, absolutely. Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you share this episode with a colleague or two and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Kevin Saem | Brand Leader, Zapyrus | Childhood Inspiration, Creating Impact, & Curiosity

Kevin Saem is a brand leader at Zapyrus, a lifelong learner, and a passionate problem solver. In this episode, he shares stories from his early childhood in Cambodia and how that inspired his interest in medtech and healthcare, why he's so passionate about creating impact wherever he goes, and why he places a high value on curiosity. 
Guest links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-saem/ | https://welcome.zapyrus.com/
Charity supported: Save the Children
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 013 - Kevin Saem
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference Podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and I am so excited to introduce you to my guest today, Kevin Saem. Kevin is a brand leader at Zapyrus, a lifelong learner, and a passionate problem solver. Having lived in Asia, North America and Europe, Kevin is a leader that values diversity and believes that the small differences are what give intrinsic value to an individual. Kevin, thank you so very much for being here. I'm just so excited to have you here and learn all about your background and what you're up to these days.
Kevin Saem: No problem, Lindsey. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. I would love starting off by just sharing a little bit about your background. I know that, even from your bio, you have had such a cool life so far, all sorts of places that you've lived, and I'd just love to hear a little bit about that and maybe what brought you to where you are today.
Kevin Saem: Yeah, absolutely. How far do you wanna go back?
Lindsey Dinneen: Whatever would make sense in terms of inspiring you to do what you're doing now.
Kevin Saem: Yeah, absolutely. When I look back right in my life, I always think of it as like the movie Inception. I don't know, have you, if you've seen Inception?
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that movie, one of my favorites.
Kevin Saem: So it's like a, yeah, so it's like a dream within a dream. When I look back at my life, cuz I grew up in a third world country. I grew up in Cambodia and it's almost like a different life there. So I almost see like a life within a life when I made the transition over to Canada. I was born in Cambodia, lived there for 10 years, lived through the nineties. And during the nineties, Cambodia experienced a couple things. So in the early days in the seventies, eighties, we experienced the Khmer Rouge, the genocide which my parents and my grandparents lived through. And then right outta that, when I was growing up in the nineties, we experienced the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was a delayed onset from what North Americans experienced in the eighties.
And so because of the whole genocide and internal warfare, the country was in already recovery while being compounded with a healthcare crisis, right? Super chaotic. Hospitals were not a thing at the time. There were like some, and I lived in the Capitol, and just seeing people that you knew, like neighbors or friends and family be affected by this disease. And nobody kind of knew what was going on until the UN stepped in and brought some aid and support through portable kind of diagnostic testing for this disease, which kind of helped brought the spread down and help control the spread of the disease. And seeing that impact of what healthcare technology, especially in the MedTech space, diagnostic specifically, could do to a small population in a third world country like that really stuck with me from the early days. So when I moved to Canada in 2000, started studying here, really gravitated to the STEM field.
So science engineering, was able to put my thinking cap on in that space, so to speak. So I went to university and studied chemistry. I went in with a life science background and then specialized in chemistry and decided to go to grad school and do my PhD in chemistry and infectious diseases specifically for diagnostics and medical devices, for testing of infectious diseases because I had that in the back of my mind growing up in Cambodia and seeing the impact that those technologies could make.
And I'm a firm believer in chasing impact and creating value at every stage of your life. Like within your inner circle, what value you could create before you move on, what long lasting impact that you could create. So from Cambodia to Canada to my graduate days I was fortunate enough to meet a bunch of intelligent people, be taken in by very talented researchers in the space. I did my studies in McMaster University, which has now become, I believe, the most research intensive university in Canada, if I'm not mistaken, a few years back. So I studied under professor Jose Moran-Mirabal and I had a bunch of other professors as mentors, and they were really great. I was able to touch a lot of different topics in research, which is unconventional from a graduate experience. Usually you're narrowed down into kind of one scope, but I was able to start with kind of material science, materials engineering, like making novel, conductive, stretchable, elastic materials. Moved from there to nanotechnology, biosensing, and then eventually closed off my graduate degree in doing some work on premature 3D printing and tissue engineering work to create synthetic scaffolds for testing or biomimicry, which that work has been able to mature over time.
So that's like my graduate experience. So when I was, I would say in the last year of my graduate study, again going back to the impact theme. I wanted to understand, what was the next step after a research paper. Like how do you go beyond just benchtop work into actually creating a product that could affect people's lives on a day-to-day? And I wasn't able to get that just being in research. And so that got me thinking about the startup path going into industry, you know, the typical challenges you come across as you're nearing your graduation, right? What is the next step? Do I pursue a career in academia, become a lifelong researcher, and just stick in that space? Or do I take a step out and look at the rest of the world and see what other cool things people are doing?
So putting on my curiosity cap again. Got a chance to network when I was doing a sabbatical research with my professor at the time, Dr. Jose Moran-Mirabal. He had a sabbatical in the south of France and he took me along. It was really great experience, right? We had a lot of great wine, traveled everywhere. So again, unconventional, I would say, graduate experience. So I was very lucky to have had all those sorts of experiences. And it was like a France/Canada collaborative research internship where we were starting kind of new project in tissue engineering and really novel biomaterials, right? And this was like at the very start of the early days of 3D printing for medical devices. And so, got a chance to meet a bunch of cool people.
And then one professor that sponsored us there started this liquid biopsy startup company out of the institute that we were working in. And so nearing my graduation, I was presented with an opportunity to be a part of that early day kind of startup life or this novel liquid biopsy startup company that was in the south of France. And so, I spent a bit of my time there again, wearing multiple hats, helping raise capital, managing R&D strategy, managing relationships with industry. So I did that for a little bit of time and got to know the medical device system from an OEM's perspective at an early stage and then the pandemic hit and it threw a wrench in everybody's plan, not just my own.
And so at that time, our Prime Minister gave out a signal to all foreign workers to come back home. So I had to come back home and it was another reset. And I was looking at kind of new opportunities in the space and I stumbled upon this local Toronto bootstrap SaaS company. At the time it was called Zymewire and I did a little bit of digging and found that it was bootstrapped by a couple of guys. The CEO, Pete Bastedo, he came from the pharmaceutical side of the business. And then the co-founder Ryan, the CTO, he had a technical background. So I was really fascinated by this kind of bootstrap company model. And I took a look at their site and fell in love with the culture that they represented. And it aligned really closely with the philosophy that I had as well. And so that got me even more interested and took me down a rabbit hole of like, all right, what are they about?
And so, I made the connection between Pete, the CEO, and a good friend of mine that came out of the same graduate program. And I pinged my friend Faheem. I was like, "do you know anything about this guy, Pete? How is he?" And then he gave me nothing but great reviews on Pete. He's a really intelligent guy, really smart, and he's doing cool, exciting things with the company, right? And so, eventually ended up speaking with both Pete and Ryan and they were telling me about their plans for the company and kinda where they wanna go. And given kinda my background in MedTech, they wanted to expand the product offerings beyond Biopharma and into MedTech. And that's how I came about into Zymewire at the time. But now we recently rebranded to Lumerate. And now Zapyrus was born just last year around this time as a premium MedTech business intelligence tool specifically for the MedTech industry. And so now we have that. Now it's real.
Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. Oh my gosh. That is amazing. First of all, your story is incredible. Thank you for sharing all of that, and it's so fascinating to me to learn about how someone's background and often childhood can really shape who they end up becoming. But it's interesting because for a lot of the guests that I've had so far, there's been something that says, " I wanna make a difference in this area." But then their career trajectory and their education has allowed them to sort of weave in and out of all sorts of avenues of pursuing their dreams in very interesting ways. So I just love hearing about that. So thank you so much for sharing and I would love to hear a little bit more about your company and how it helps MedTech companies now.
Kevin Saem: Yeah, absolutely. The industry is made up mainly of these small players. I would say 80, 85% of MedTech companies are small, medium size businesses, and then they eventually get acquired by the big ones, right? Basically, our platform helps to connect MedTech service providers with MedTech OEMs at the right stage and at the right time so that they can be supported to bring their lifesaving technology to market. And as you know, a lot of medical device companies come from maybe a doctor had an idea, right, that there's this unmet need and they need this device to come to market, but they don't have any business background or they don't know how to get device to market. And so there's a lot of mess that goes into the early days that a lot of service providers can't help these companies and get this medical technology to market and actually affect people's lives in a positive way.
And so for us, we wanted to humanize business development. We were seeing a trend where there's all these solutions that would give you lists of companies, lists of contacts, and then a way to just bulk email them or bulk spam them. And with a industry like MedTech and the community is so small, that doesn't really tend to work well, especially because you're talking to founders and CEOs that are passionate people that are looking to bring medical technology to help and enable patients and better their lives. So we wanted to create something that was a tool, yes, to help the salesperson and the marketing team in service provider companies to be able to identify the right companies to help at the right time. But we wanted a way for them to do it where it reflects the industry-wide belief of like, "hey, we're passionate people helping other people and that's our community." And so our tool was designed for that, right? That's what our philosophy is. That's how it was based around. We have this mission to bring humanity into MedTech business development. And we do so through suppliers.
Lindsey Dinneen: Love it. That's awesome. That is a very needed service that y'all provide, so I'm so glad that you are out there doing that work. And thank you for sharing about it because it's great to learn about the various resources that are available.
Kevin Saem: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Lindsey Dinneen: Well, I'm curious, is there a particular moment that stands out to you because it clearly confirmed that this was the right career path for you?
Kevin Saem: That's, that's a very tough question, Lindsey. For me to pick a time point in my life, honestly, I keep thinking back to a theme. I don't know if there's a particular moment, but I think there is a theme where, for me, I'm always looking for a way to create impact whether it's big or small, whether it reaches globally or it reaches my inner circle. That's always been my driving force of how can I do something that would benefit others around me in a positive way, and that would be long lasting? If I was gonna build something, it should be the best thing and it should do good. It's not enough to just do well. I think we should also focus on doing good. And so that's been my primary driver.
And so a particular moment in my life that I remember, this was back in my Cambodia days, from a very young age, I was always interested in building new things. So if I was presented with some sort of toy I would be disengaged really quickly because the toy was already built. I'm just playing with something like a finished product. I gravitated more towards building new toys out of clay, that was more my style. And so that theme just recurred. Like through research I was building out new projects, new process, I was developing new things. In this role as well, bringing a brand to market, you have to build things. And so that I think is in my DNA, that theme of creating impact through building new things.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Well, And I know you've talked quite a bit about the creating impact theme throughout your life, and I just love that. I think that has clearly shown throughout your career and the various different things that you've done. It seems like having that running theme is really helpful because it guides you as you maybe look towards the next thing or how do I go about this project? If your goal is creating impact, then you always have that guiding light and I think that's really valuable. So I'm curious, how has that affected your leadership philosophy, or is that part of the way that you interact with others including in a leadership capacity?
Kevin Saem: Yeah, that's a great question, Lindsey, and I think it, it does, it really does because in a leadership role I'm always looking to create positive, lasting impact as well for the people and for the business that I'm with. So it helps me to separate leadership from management in a way, if that makes sense.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.
Kevin Saem: So for me, that helps me to put people at the heart of it all and then it manifests outside of that. So if you're leading a team of people you're constantly thinking and you got your worried hat on of like, "are these people being fulfilled? Is their work enriched? Are they doing well? Am I helping them unlock the next stages of their progression?" That type of stuff lives in my mind when I think about leadership. Essentially empowering people to do great things and helping them achieve their goals. I think that's what it's all about if you're serious about leadership.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. Oh, that's a great definition of leadership. Amazing. How do you prioritize your own continued learning and growing as a leader?
Kevin Saem: Yeah. That's also another great question. You're coming with the heavy hitters here. So, I just wanna take a step back. And I think two people that kind of help me understand what good leadership looks like. The first person was my PhD. supervisor professor, Jose Moran-Maribal. He had a way to approach leadership where it's like an extra layer of inclusion that he has in the back of his mind and his ability to help support his students was amazing. I learned passively just through watching. Another person that currently I report to actually, Pete, I respect as a leader and I emulate a lot of my thinking through these key figures and mentors. Throughout my career, I always have at every stage several mentors that I like to learn from, either passively or actively. And so I guess that's helped shape the meaning of what leadership looks like, and I use that to surround myself with those types of people.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And so emulating has been a huge component in your own growth as a leader. Do you find that there are other resources that have helped you or continue to help you, or is looking towards those models of great leadership, is that primarily your source?
Kevin Saem: My source is actually in the people that I surround myself with. It's silly to say, but I think throughout my graduate school days I've really finally learned how to learn or how to ask questions the right way. And I guess to summarize that, it's how to think versus what to think. Leading up all the way to graduate school, you're told you know what to think. This is right, this is wrong. And then throughout my graduate school experience, I really understood the mechanisms of how to think.
And for me, my philosophy at continuous learning for leadership is trying to be the dumbest person in the room. It helps to protect me in a sneaky way where if you're the dumbest person in the room, you know there's only one direction, it's up, and you just learn so much. You just absorb everything, you soak everything in like a sponge. I learn things every day from the intelligent people that I have the opportunity to work with. And so yeah, I take that dumbest person in the room approach and ask tons of questions. That's the only way, I think, to really learn. And leadership is a funny thing where it's almost like trial by fire and you have to just go through it. You can read a lot of stuff-- obviously, I do read stuff-- but you kind of have to go through it and experience it and figure it out as you go and continuous process improvement along the way.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, absolutely. Yep. Great advice. Okay, just for fun, imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach ambassador class on anything you want. It can be in your industry, but it doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach and why?
Kevin Saem: Oh, there's so many bad answers to this and there's very few good answers to this question. I don't know if I am skilled enough to teach a quote unquote masterclass in anything, but if I were to pick one thing to teach, and this is probably another unconventional answer, it's probably the application of curiosity to fuel success in anything that you pursue. I think that's very underrated. As as a trait in people that are successful, I think they're intrinsically curious and they continue to be lifelong learners.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that answer. Yeah I absolutely agree with you. I had the good fortune when I was young, I was very curious and I was asking a lot of questions all the time. And I had an adult one time say to me, " You know, it's so good that you ask questions because then you'll always keep learning, so don't be embarrassed about it. Always keep asking those questions." And I'm so glad that someone thought to acknowledge that and point it out because it helped me retain that curiosity and not be afraid to be, like you said, the dumbest person in a room so that I could keep learning. So I love your advice. Curiosity is underrated and it's hugely important.
Kevin Saem: Yeah, absolutely, and I think there was a drastic contrast when I was going to school in Cambodia and when the country was in recovery, it was very authoritative interaction between students and teachers. It was seen as like the teachers know all the answers and you should just be quiet, right? And just absorb knowledge from this beacon of wisdom, so to speak. And I would get in trouble in class all the time, I would be sent home with notes saying, " your son is just a troublemaker. He is asking too many questions in class. He, he is disruptive." And they don't like challenges to what they know in that kind of culture at the time. I'm sure it's changed a lot now, now that it's more modernized as a country. But when I came here, I was very surprised as to how much encouragement in Canada and in North America as a whole to like question ideas and question what's right and what's wrong. And always be very inquisitive and almost skeptical of what's presented in front of you. And I really appreciate that philosophy over in North America.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, and that's really interesting perspective to have experienced both, so you can contrast and compare. What is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world? I think I have a pretty good idea of your answer, but I'd still love to hear it from you.
Kevin Saem: Oh my gosh. I'd love to hear you guess.
Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. I'm gonna guess that it has a lot to do with impact in the various areas, whether it's personal or professional. But I will let you go into detail.
Kevin Saem: You got it. I think you summarize it pretty well. You know, being remembered for having created something or opportunities or memories that has changed the lives of those around me in a positive way, I think that's enough for me. I don't need much more than that.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Absolutely love it. Okay, final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Kevin Saem: Oh, that's a good question also, and it's a good one to end off on. There's one fond memory and like I said, it's like life-ception. It's like a life in a life. When I was living in Cambodia versus here, you had to really mature quickly when you're living in a developed country. As a young child, you'll understand kinda the risks when you take a step outside. There's dangers all around you. You learn to be quite self-aware at an early age. And I just remember there was a relative that came from France to visit the country and they brought a pair of roller skates back. And this was like a size 10 and we're like eight years old. And there's a group of just street kids playing around on the rooftops and stuff cuz we had concrete buildings with flat rooftops and that's where all the kids would hang out.
And there's like about 10 of us and we remember just, we had a pair of roller skates and we were just taking turns using one each, actually, cause we didn't know how to ride roller skates. We're each just taking turns using one roller skate and just having the best time of our lives. And that reminds me of this, I guess, mantra that I have in my mind of " it's not about what you have, it's about who you share it with" and it's like that part of my life, we didn't have much, but we were so happy. We didn't know that there was anything outside of that. And so it's all about perspective, I think, and that's the memory that comes back to me that makes me smile every time. And I don't think anything else matters once you have things like that, that type of experience.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh, I love that story that I'm just smiling thinking about it too. Thank you so much for joining us, Kevin. I just really appreciate your perspective and advice and bringing such a powerful background to the industry. I'm so thankful for the work that you do. We are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Save The Children, which works to end the cycle of poverty by ensuring communities have the resources to provide children with a healthy, educational and safe environment. That was the organization that Kevin chose to support. So thank you so much for your time and thank you for all of your great quotable quotes.
Kevin Saem: Quotable. Yeah. No, thank you, Lindsey, for putting all this together. I think what you're doing is incredible. I think you're highlighting the other side of MedTech, right, that is probably less technical, but is just as important. And I think you'd know, as better as I know, that storytelling is a big part of passing on knowledge and sharing with the community. And our community is so small that I think this is gonna really help bring us all together, especially coming outside of a pandemic years. This is a great, refreshing podcast.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that feedback and yeah, that is the hope. It was so fun earlier when you were talking about bringing the humanity into MedTech, I just had to smile 'cause I was like, "there you go." We're very aligned.
Kevin Saem: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh man. Again, thank you so very much. We just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. I know that impact is really important to you, and I know that you're gonna continue to make an impact on the world, so thank you. And thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.
 
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Lindsey Jardine | FARAPULSE, Inc. | Clinical Trials, Lifelong Learning, & Academia to Industry

Lindsey Jardine is a Senior Clinical Research Associate at FARAPULSE, Inc. In this episode, she discusses her love of designing and organizing clinical trials, her zest for life and continual learning, and the very human moment in her career when she realized she had to make a major change from academia to industry. 
Guest links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsey-jardine-5a0985103/
Charity supported: Opportunity International 
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 012 - Lindsey Jardine
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am so excited to introduce you to my guest today, Lindsey Jardine. Lindsey is a clinical trial manager renowned for her exceptional leadership and groundbreaking achievements in the healthcare industry. With a passion for advancing medical technologies, Lindsey has successfully managed two breakthrough innovations: one at Farapulse Inc. which was acquired by Boston Scientific in 2022, and another at Shockwave Medical that went public in 2021. Her entrepreneurial spirit has also led her to contribute to the success of Cala Health, now commercially available. Lindsey has earned a reputation for excellence in leadership throughout her career in clinical research. Lindsey, thank you so very much for being here. I am so excited to have you as my guest and welcome.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah, super excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, absolutely. I would love if you don't mind starting out by telling us just a little bit about yourself and your background and how you got to where you are.
Lindsey Jardine: Oh yeah. I work in medical device. I work in clinical research. So the story of me, it's a long and twisty one, but I'm currently the Clinical Trial Manager at Boston Scientific in the electrophysiology division. So in electrophysiology, you kinda split in between cardio and neuro. So I've worked in both cardio and neuro. But yeah, just closed out my study for a atherectomyectomy device.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's great. I'd love to hear how you either intentionally explored the medical device industry or whether you meandered in, either way I just love hearing the background of what got you to where you are.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah. So my background was originally in biochemistry. So I went to school to get a degree in biochemistry, and in biochem there's only basically two ways that you can go in any kind of industry. So you can go into academia and do a PhD, or you can go into medicine. So in a PhD you'd usually go into genetics, which is a fascinating topic. Genetics is super fun. So I did work in a genetics lab after I graduated college, but with the intention of going into medicine, so while I was working in the lab doing a lot of like really interesting genetics work at UCSD, I was also studying for my MCAT, which did well, got into med school. While I was filling out the financial paperwork, I looked around and I was like, "everyone in medicine is miserable." And then I had this moment where I was just like, "you know what? I don't know if this is what I want."
Because in medicine you have this grind and it's like the glory is in the grind. And you sacrifice, and then eventually maybe you'll save some lives and your time on this earth will be worth it. But that seemed like a really bad idea because I love being outside. I love my family. I love my friends. I wanted to love life in a very profound way, so I decided that sacrificing everything for maybe some kind of hope that I'm going to further the human race was probably not best served in a hospital.
So I got very lost for a long time. Continued working in the lab doing genetics. I was like, "okay, maybe I can help figure out some cures. Maybe I can figure out some other way to help humanity at not costing me my life." So started working in research, decided that I was not a lab person, not because I don't love the problem solving of the lab, it's just more of a very isolated not as personal. So, I was at lunch one day and somebody who works in clinical research at UCSD, she's "oh, why don't you come into our office and our clinic and figure out what clinical research is all about?"
I was like, "Oh. That's a thing. Clinical research, I don't even know what that means." That's not really a degree that you can have in undergrad. It's not really something that you really hear about. At least when I was in college or immediately after post college, that's not really something that was, I'd never even heard of before. So, I started working at the Chelie Eye Institute, which was also like, not to get into too many too much detail, but a lot of genetic abnormalities present in the eye. So there was like a really strong genetic component. But also I got to work with patients in clinic, which was really fun. So on the hospital side, you get to implement a lot of other people's research and you get to interact with people and you get to see the benefits of research on a daily basis.
So I fell in love with clinical research. Then eventually I was recruited to work on a project at Stanford. So then I moved from San Diego up to the Bay area, started working on the baseline project at Stanford, which was a collaboration with Google and Duke University. So, that was a lot of fun. That was a lot of logistics that project was logistically super complicated, which was fun. I love that. That one was trying to figure out how all the puzzle pieces fit together and then also getting a really good deep dive into like data science. So that was my first like foray into like data science which was really fun. And then also I got to see what industry is like.
So from up until that point, my entire career was in academia. And I did like academia, but it was definitely still that grind that no matter what you do, it's never really gonna matter. You might serve somebody at some point in some time and then your life's gonna be worth it. It's like this noble sacrifice basically. But so then I got to see what industry is like and how innovative it can be, and like that really tickled my creative process and that was something that I really fell in love with was being able to move really fast, help a whole lot of people, and be creative in the process. And you get to put together all these like logistics puzzle pieces and understanding the science and really deep diving into something that gets noticed and that helps people in the immediate.
So that's that juxtaposition with academia and industry is-- academia you grind forever and then maybe someday you'll get a card saying, "You saved my life 10 years ago and my grandkids are now amazing people and it never would've been possible without you." But in industry you get that immediate kind of reward, like you see it come to market and you see your project. All that sacrifice, all that immediate hard work that you put into something, you see it come to market. And it's really fun and it's really great and you get to see it from not that 10,000 foot view where we're all contributing in the greater scheme of things. It's-- you get to see it, like you run a study of 20 people and you see the immediate effect of those 20 people. So that's why I chose MedTech specifically.
But yeah, so, after Stanford, I moved into the startup space. I started working at Cala Health which was neuro. So, that was my first transition into the electrophysiology, neuro cardio kind of space. For anybody listening who doesn't understand what electrophysiology is, it's basically understanding the way electricity governs your body, which is a really fascinating topic to me 'cause I'm a physics nerd. I love physics. So, being able to take all of my physics information, all my physics, like chemistry background, and then getting to split that time between the brain and the nervous system and, and the heart was really interesting. So that's when I fell in love with the heart and the brain.
But yeah, so Cala Health is doing really great. They're commercialized. I was part of the team that put together some of their early feasibility trials and also their pivotal trial, which was a lot of fun to work with them. And then almost immediately after that they got commercialization and being able to understand and talk through or hear the leadership team strategize for something like that was really interesting. And that was a whole new thing that I had never even seen before. Like, how do you bring a product to market and what capacity, who are we gonna reach? Who is this best suited for? So listening to all that strategy was really fun.
And then after that I worked for a company called Shockwave Medical, which is an atherectomyectomy device. So that's a cardio. So electrophysiology in the heart space. And that was a super fun, that was a breakthrough IDE/PMA trial. So it was huge. It was global. It was a lot of moving pieces that, all those logistics that I loved with the electrophysiology portion of it and I got to work with great leaders, and that's one thing that I find like really consistent about when I'm choosing my next job or my next project. I look at the leadership team and I get to see how they approach problems and that is how I make my decision of who I wanna work for, is if you approach problems in a methodical and innovative way, I love seeing that. I love being inspired by that. Those are the kind of leaders that I look up to is how well they approach problems in their thought process and their ability to innovate in a space that's either new or has been done a thousand times, either one.
But yeah, so worked at Shockwave, we were able to go IPO, the company went public and then we closed our trial. We started moving into the post-market trials, and I just still have that adrenaline high from the breakthrough study. We can get into this a little bit later, but those breakthrough PMA/ IDE trials are huge and they are a lot of logistics. It's very intense. It's a lot. It's a lot. And it's a grind, but in a fun way. For me, I love this. I love. So yeah, the thing that attracted me to medicine also attracted me to the breakthrough kinda trials, those breakthrough pivotal trials.
And so after that I was like, " I need another one." So I started looking. I got approached by a recruiter and this recruiter sent me a bunch of stuff and then I saw the Farapulse offer come across saying that they were looking for a clinical trial manager for their pivotal breakthrough trial. And I was like "That company looks like it's gonna change the game." Same thing with Shockwave, also changed the game. So I got on board with Farapulse which is another cardio EP, electrophysiology technology. And it was magic from the very beginning. And we just closed our trial-- which that trial had its own complications. It was a blinded trial and all the sites and like trying to figure out how to do all that through Covid, through all the things. So that's how I got to where I am now. Eventually, last year we were acquired by Boston Scientific. So, yeah, that's the very short background of how I got here, and now moving on to my next adventure, which is gonna be back in the neuro space.
Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. Oh, that's so exciting. That is something that kept resonating with me as you were talking, was just your enthusiasm and passion for this particular industry and for your role within it. And it's just so much fun to hear how all of your different interests and passions are coming together in a way that, it sounds like just keeps you constantly engaged with the process, and you know that you're making a difference as you get to see it right in front of you. It sounds fabulous.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah, it is. It is. I really do enjoy my job, even like the daily logistics, and not every day is magic. Some days are just the grind, but then two days later or a week later, you're back inspired. So I do love what I do and I love the pace in which the trials that I do sign up for go and it's really fun.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So, in your role as manager for someone who doesn't know what a typical clinical trial might look like. How does it work? Is there like a typical process or it, I'm sure it varies per trial, but I'd just love to hear a little bit more about how you go about even organizing it to start with.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah. Oh man. Oh, that's a good question. So there is, the FDA does have a reasonably prescribed way to put together a trial. So, when you're working in the startup space, what happens is you have somebody with a great idea. That person usually doesn't know how to build it. They usually don't know how to commercialize it. They usually don't know how to run a trial with it. So they have this great idea and then they go about trying to build this leadership team. So you'll try and find a CEO, you're gonna find funding, you're gonna start like prototyping some stuff. And then once you get to a point where you think that what you're building is viable, you bring on some engineers that work in the space, that are professional, they work in the startup space, kind of the same way I work in clinical trials. There's definitely people who work specifically in startups to engineer and build stuff like this.
So you bring on an engineering team, they build it, they test it, and then once they've gotten it to a point where, It's a viable product in a lab they usually bring on somebody like me, clinical trial manager, preclinical trial expert to start testing it in larger animals before we go into humans. So then you start putting together your preclinical data. And a lot of the times that's where somebody like me would jump in as a clinical trial manager or a clinical trial expert in some way. So it's usually not necessarily a clinical trial manager, but a clinical trial expert. In the service space, it's a fluid term. You could call 'em clinical trial specialist, whatever you want, but again, it's just somebody who has the expertise of bringing something from an engineering perspective all the way through market.
So, in that process, I get to build the protocols. I get to ask the questions. I get to set up the preclinical work so I can inform my clinical work, if that makes sense. So when we're putting together the preclinical work, you're putting together the studies, you're understanding the device, you're understanding the product, you're understanding the demographic that you're going after. So, the disease space basically. So that's one thing about clinical research, as somebody who specializes in clinical research, is the disease space changes with the technology. So I've worked in electrophysiology and neurology, so, atherectomy, ablation, therapy, neuromodulation.
So the disease space changes, the technologies change, but how you think about your job and how you approach things should be consistent, so it's that innovation. I think that's really what the difference is when you go into academia is you focus on as a very specific disease space and you focus on one very specific and you get into the minutiae of one specific thing. So if you're going into medicine you specialize, you subspecialize, and then you really understand that one protein of that one gene.
So, coming back to where I am now, I don't necessarily understand one specific disease, I have the opportunity and the privilege to work with a lot of different disease spaces. There's a lot of different products and I get to understand and innovate and build my knowledge as I move through my career. So I've worked in a lot of different types of medical devices and it's really fun being able to learn from the engineers and learn from the physicians, and learn from all of my colleagues as I go through my career. So I'm building my knowledge as I go along. So my specialty is building clinical trials. So to answer your question, there is a reasonably prescribed way to do it, but that prescribed way is driven a lot by your logic.
The FDA is your partner in all of this. So they have regulations that you have to follow. So as you're going through and you're building this process, as you're building these clinical trials, you have to make sure that you're adhering to all of the regulations that the FDA has set forward. So that's everything from building your internal standard operating procedures at your company to making sure that all of your regulatory documentation is above board and your operations, all of that stuff. So the FDA's your partner through all of this and making sure you're putting together a clinical plan and/ or protocol that is safe, effective, gets at the correct end points, targets the right demographic of people, disease state, and making sure it's safe and effective as you go through all of these steps from preclinical all the way through clinical.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And that actually brings up a question that I had, and that is, have there been any moments that have been scary in clinical trials because part of it from my understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that you are trying to establish, not only does this product work as intended, but is it safe? And of course you hope you've done enough pre-work with that to have a solid idea. But are there moments where you've just been like, whew, that did not go as planned?
Lindsey Jardine: We have a term for that. It's unexpected adverse events or unexpected device malfunctions, but that's a good question. So it's yes and no. To be clear: one, you want to make sure that you study your device in the preclinical setting as thoroughly as possible. So that's your engineers. And your engineers are also going to the FDA for pre-submission and the FDA's double checking everything. But with that being said, that's why we do so much diligent testing before we put it in humans in order to make sure that once we get into clinical trials, it is absolutely safe.
So, protocols, they test out for years after a procedure. But to make sure that we have all of our ducks in a row, all of our T's crossed and I's dotted, we're not gonna hurt anybody. I've never been a part of a product that I was ever afraid was going to hurt somebody. That being said, there are definitely times in lab where just " Oh, that happened." So there's definitely times where you're just like, "Oh my God, how did that happen?" In a lab setting, but never in a clinical setting to be very clear, I've never been a part of that. So in a startup, you'll have like your engineering on one side of the building and your operations or something on the other side. But when you're going through user testing or trying to design user interface, the engineering department will bring somebody in you're like, "Hey. I'm gonna teach you how to use this. Let me know if this makes sense to somebody who doesn't build it." So, I've definitely been in a few situations where I was using something and something unexpected happened. I was like, "What was that?" They're like, "Oh, we found a bug!"
So, stuff like that definitely happens, but I've never been clinically in fear of any of the devices that I've worked with. But I also work with really amazing engineers and really amazing physicians. So that's another really great part about what I get to do is I get to collaborate with physicians who do this for a living, who do that very specific, very granular work in one very specific disease state. So they also inform and help, and it's ultimately their responsibility to make sure that whatever they're using on their patients is safe and effective. So that's why we work really closely with all of our physician surgeon collaborators to make sure that we aren't doing anything that could hurt anybody, cuz that's obviously, that's the opposite of what we wanna do. So yeah, that's another thing that I love about my job is the collaboration.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, it does seem the more that you've talked, the more I can sense how much you enjoy working with people and having that collaboration, that problem solving, we're in this together trying to make a difference. That's really cool. Another thing that you brought up that I really liked and something that I tend to ask my guests is about how you as a leader in the industry continue to prioritize your own learning and growing. And it sounds, because you get to work on so many different devices and with so many different indications, you really have this opportunity. It's almost built into your job. And then it just sounds like you as an individual are just a really curious person. So you're probably getting to learn and grow all the time. There's no stopping it.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah, that's true. It's true. There is no stopping it. Honestly, that's why I chose the space that I'm in is I love learning. It's one of my favorite things in life is just expanding my knowledge base, learning fun new things. And even in my personal life, I'm always going out exploring, doing new things like learning and absorbing the world that we live in. And that's one consistent theme of my life is I just want to love the life that we have right now. And so learning and exploring and doing and driving yourself to, to a point of excellence is something that I truly enjoy doing. But yes, that learning is my job. And if I ever stop learning, I think that I would stop being good at my job. And hopefully by that time I can retire and learn something new, learn something that I haven't learned or even attempted to learn before. So, to answer your question, learning is definitively what I get paid to do.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love it. I love that. That is fantastic. Yeah. So is there a particular moment during your career that stands out to you as kind of a defining moment of "Yes, this is the right industry for me." Just confirmation that you really chose and that it was fulfilling some of those deep desires that you've had.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah. That's a really good question. I can't say that there was ever one like lightning moment that told me that I was on the right path, but I do recall one specific moment where I knew I was on the wrong one. I think that the consistent feedback that I get throughout my career now is a continuing affirmation that I've chosen the right path and the fact that my personal happiness gets more-- like I, I gain more and more happiness with every passing day of my job. Not to say that you have to be happy every single day. I think that there is definitely something to be said with the highs and the lows in a moderated way, not the extreme highs and lows. But I consistently reaffirmed that I made the right decision.
But I remember probably the lowest point of my career that I had to take a step back and say, "This is not okay for me." I was working at that, the baseline project, and a lot of my mentors would call me probably more of a racehorse kind of personality, where I want to do stuff, I wanna improve, I wanna run it at full speed. And working on a project that was that logistically complicated with that many people and that many things, it was really fun. But, in the academic space, slow and the hierarchy, and it was definitely not my my favorite place because I remember there was this one instance where we had this intern and I was helping him and he and I were collaborating on a project and I was like, "Okay, this is how I'm gonna put all this stuff together."
And I have, like I'm known for my spreadsheets. I have this 80 tab spreadsheet and we're putting all together and we're putting all these formulas together. And he was helping me and it got to a point where I was like, "Man, I am super proud of this." I was really excited that I got to learn something about putting all of this stuff together. And I got to teach it as I was learning it. And I did it and then I got to teach it and then I got to see him like do some stuff and he felt very rewarded by it. And I felt very rewarded by that too. So that particular project had lots of different principal investigators. So we had four different principal investigators that I can remember.
And so we're in a room of 30 people. All of them are my superiors and obviously his superiors. But I'd found out that he had taken my work and he had presented it to my boss's boss as his own. And I had no idea that this was happening. And so I'm sitting in this meeting and he's presenting my work and you can't really stand up and be like, "Hey, get outta here, that's mine. I taught you that." And I was just fuming in this meeting. And there's just so much bureaucracy in that context that even if I were to say something, it would've fallen on deaf ears. And I did say something to my supervisor and they're like "Sorry, it's for the greater good." So, oh no, and I was just furious. And so I talked to him after and I was like, "Hey, you just put your name on my work." And he's, " I've changed the color scheme." And I was like, "Did you now? That's so cute."
But there was like, there was no repercussion. There was no anything. So I probably did an immature thing and just stopped talking to him. And he didn't take that very, he was an intern. It's fine, but so I'm just like, I'm not working with you anymore. I can't trust you. So he brought me flowers and he put them on my desk and I threw them. And that was brought like, but I remember like taking these flowers and throwing 'em at a wall and I was like, "This is a bad spot. I should not be here. I'm setting myself up for failure." So, that's when I decided that I needed to leave.
So I moved into the private industry, which was much more intimate. Everybody saw everybody else's work. Everybody knew, everyone was all striving towards the same thing, and it was never an ego trip for anybody, if that makes sense. And there's always that greater good feeling like we're all trying towards the greater good, but you personally are not sacrificing for somebody else's glory. And that's the thing that really got me about academia and that kind of " grind until you die" space. I was like, but. I did that. I feel good about that. Not that person gets to present my work and they get to feel good about it. So, to answer your not question. That was the moment where I knew I was in the wrong place.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. But those moments are just as important cuz they're teaching you what doesn't work and what does not align with who you want to be or, or how you wanna show up in the world. So I think actually, I really appreciate you sharing that story in that very just sort of human moment because I think it's so important to be honest about those kinds of moments that also are exactly what you said, " this is not the right path for me." And then it sounds because of that experience, you were able to go, okay. It's not like I have to get rid of the entire industry or anything like that. It was just, this isn't the right place for me and I'll find the right place for me. And I think that's really important too. So. Yeah.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah. And I do get reaffirmed by my job every day, and I love that. So it wasn't some shock, like lightning bolt moment, like this is the one. It was a slow burn that keeps burning brighter over time for me.
Lindsey Dinneen: And I love that too, because how wonderful is that? It's not just this one flash of inspiration, which could be the catalyst to continue on the path and do something great and whatnot. But I love that you're in a position now where you can just be constantly, maybe in very tiny little ways, but just constantly reaffirming this is right. And that's special. That's really cool.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah. That is special. It is. And being invited on a podcast like this, I'm like, "When did this happen? When did I become the leader?" Like yesterday I was throwing flowers at people in a violent way. And all of a sudden I've been getting interviewed for a leadership podcast. Yeah, there's definitely been some significant changes that, all of a sudden, you turn around and you're like, I am the person that I wanna be. I did get here. This is amazing.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. I worked hard for this and it is paying off. And yeah, I can change and grow. That's great. That's fantastic.
Lindsey Jardine: Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is very special. Yeah.
Lindsey Dinneen: Just for fun, I'm gonna take the interview in a slightly different direction, but imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be in your industry, but it doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach and why?
Lindsey Jardine: Oh man, that is another really good question. You're making me think. I like it. I would say if I could teach a masterclass in anything, it would be confidence. When I was sitting there watching my work that I've been, the project that I've been working on for months, being presented by somebody else, and then my reaction to it, that was a deep feeling of insecurity. And I think building confidence is a very important thing and building the appropriate confidence is another very important thing. I mean, for many years I was a "fake it till you make it" person. But having all of that insecurity being presented and then having somebody else take credit for my work, and then everybody else saying " So what, who are you?" If I had more confidence in myself, I would've reacted differently. And if I would've had more confidence in my ability to figure out problems, I would have not put myself in that position. I would have figured out how to get out earlier or figured out that "grind until you die" was not the right path.
So if I could build a masterclass, if I could help people understand, knowing their own personalities and finding that confidence in themselves. And I think that is an invaluable skill in any industry is not that you don't have to be the person up on stage presenting the project. You can have your own confidence in building something and saying " that's mine" and owning it as opposed to having that insecurity and exploding all over everybody.
So I would say that, yeah, I think that is definitely something that we are facing in a society that is troubling to me is the we're gonna go meta completely away from my specific story, but I see so many people with anxiety, I see so many people with imposter syndrome. So many people that even like Instagram, all these like social media feeds, it feels like a very deep-seated insecurity. And I dislike that. I dislike how we have to look a certain way or have to act a certain way or like all of these different movements to make people be seen and understood. And if we could collaborate and if we could speak with confidence, if we could speak with understanding that everyone here has some issues and if we could speak confidently about what we know, if we could be confident about who we are, then I think we could solve a lot of problems and not erupt into this, this really controversial space.
So I know that having confidence also means having compassion and having that ability to reach out and say, "these are my flaws, but that doesn't mean I'm incompetent. I'm confident in myself. I'm confident that I know that this is the space that I don't know anything about and I need somebody to teach me, and that has so much confidence." And that's another thing that I've learned over my years of working in clinical research is there is no space, there's no time to fake information. You have to learn information and you have to have the confidence to say that, "I don't know this. I need to learn it." No matter how stupid that question is. "I need to learn that piece of information so I can do my job confidently and I can be confident in the product that I'm putting forward." So, if I was going to teach a masterclass, I choose confidence.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love that. That was really insightful too. I appreciate your perspective on confidence and, like you alluded to, appropriate confidence too with empathy, with compassion, with collaboration.
Lindsey Jardine: You can't possibly know everything. But somebody else knows something. And if they don't know it, you have to have the confidence to be able to figure it out.
Lindsey Dinneen: Right. And that curiosity is a strength. Because you don't know everything. Like you are highly specialized in, in many different ways, and you have this fantastic capacity to learn, but it doesn't mean that you're necessarily an expert in every single thing you come across and so having the confidence to be curious and to say "I, I didn't know this. Tell me more." That's fantastic.
Lindsey Jardine: That's truly it. That really is the curiosity and the confidence . You said it really beautifully. Just tell me more. Teach me everything and then we can change the world together and we can be better people to each other.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. I love it. What is one thing that you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Lindsey Jardine: Oh my goodness. That's a really good one. The one thing that I wanna be remembered for I would say, my confidence. Yeah, I would say my confidence. And that's my all-encompassing confidence, compassion, and curiosity, because I roll all of those things up into confidence, if that makes sense. So my confidence doesn't come from perceived understanding of myself, but it comes from the feedback that I get on a daily basis from my family, my friends. My confidence is something that I hope inspires and I hope that people remember me for the type of confidence that I have. How about that? The type of confidence.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. I like it. Awesome. Okay, final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Lindsey Jardine: Oh, man. Okay. The one thing that makes me smile. I would say, life. That's not too tacky. Yeah. Life makes me smile. I am continuously impressed by the world around me. And that comes with all of the changes that life brings, and it's not always pretty. It's not always great. I've definitely had some times where I didn't wanna do it anymore, and I want to encourage anybody who's listening, who does not have that passion for life to just wait cuz it does get better. Because I, I threw flowers at people, and not in a fun way, in a very violent way. There's definitely times where I was not happy or impressed with life and I didn't wanna do it anymore, and I just I didn't think the next thing was gonna be any better than the last. But I can honestly say right now, life makes me happy, not on a daily basis because I think it's a misconception that you have to be happy every single day because you don't really understand happiness and you don't really understand what life has a capacity for until you know what the bad looks like.
So having bad times is just as important as having good times and understanding that the next piece of your life has the potential to be the best, has potential to be better than anything you've been through so far. But it makes me smile every day knowing that I get to keep doing this in this space and time that we're in right now. And in the world right now, there's turmoil everywhere, but I am very encouraged about life and it makes me happy because I get to see how hard everybody works. I get to see that we are going through something very profound and I'm very confident in the future. And life makes me smile.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. That's the first time anyone has said that, so I love it. Beautiful answer.
Lindsey Jardine: Thanks. It's kinda meta, but that's the one thing, yeah I don't know. Boyfriends, girlfriends, family, the sunshine. All of it's nice. All of it's good. Life makes me smile even when it's making me cry. It's the pain and the struggle and the future that, that just inspires me. And I love that and that makes me happy.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Lindsey, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. I just really appreciate you taking the time to join me today. We are really honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time to Opportunity International, which designs, delivers and scales innovative financial solutions that helps families living in extreme poverty build sustainable livelihoods and access quality education for their children. So thank you for choosing that organization to support, and seriously, thanks again for your time. I just wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. I love the fact that you have such a passion for life and for your work, and I know what you're doing makes a difference, so thank you.
Lindsey Jardine: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me on. This was a lot of fun. All your questions were so good. I loved it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Good. Glad to hear that.
Lindsey Jardine: Thank you for doing this, for doing you. It's very inspiring.
Lindsey Dinneen: Appreciate that. I appreciate that. And thank you also to our listeners for tuning in, and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.B5IkdlvEu8YlwXbE9H3a

Miguel Adao | Voler Systems | Business Development, Managing vs. Leading, & Having a ”North Star”

Miguel Adao is a passionate leader in the medical devices, internet of things and consumer wearable spaces, and serves as the Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Voler Systems. In this episode, he discusses how living in nine countries and traveling to over 65 has impacted his life, the difference between managing and leading people, and the importance of having a "North Star" to guide your decisions and actions.
Guest links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/migueladao/ | https://www.volersystems.com/
Charity supported: Save the Children
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 011 - Miguel Adao
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am excited to introduce you to my guest today, Miguel Adao. Miguel is a passionate leader in the medical devices, internet of things and consumer wearable spaces, and works for Voler Systems. Miguel, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to chat with you.
Miguel Adao: Yeah, Lindsey, thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to our chat as well.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Well, I was wondering if you don't mind starting by just telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this industry.
Miguel Adao: Sure. Yeah. Oh my, where do I start? It's been an interesting ride. I've lived in nine countries. I was born and raised in Portugal, in Lisbon. Went to high school in Rome, Italy, and then I lived in Paris, France, in London, England, in Munich, Germany. Spent many years in Rio and Sao Paulo in Brazil. Lived in Buenos Airs in Argentina. I went to college in Florida and grad school in Ohio and doctorate school in New York. And I've worked for some fantastic companies. I worked for Proctor and Gamble and Pepsi, and Hewlett Packard and Petco, the retailer, and Cigna Healthcare. That was my first kind of exposure to the healthcare side in a way.
And now I live in San Diego. I'm married to Lindy. She's British and we have two teenagers. Olivia's 15 and Nico is 13. And I joined this company called Voler Systems almost a year ago in May of 2022 and we focus on medical devices. We help healthcare and medical and wearable and IOT companies develop and design their prototypes and their devices. And I just love where I am in my career at this point in my personal life with with my family and geographically. We love San Diego. So yeah it's been a very interesting journey, indeed.
To your second question, the whole medical healthcare side obviously touches all of us personally, right? We have parents and relatives who get older and unfortunately sometimes sicker. So it touches us on the personal side. I lost my father years ago due to a health condition. So, on that personal side, I have obviously strong affinity to this industry and to this space cuz I want to make the world better. And it's almost a cliche, but I also wanna help people live longer and healthier lives. And then on the professional side, I'm trying to think. I've worked so closely with healthcare and medical devices and pharmaceutical companies through the years. When I was at Hewlett Packard for 12 years, I worked for a company called VMware as well. I was with Cigna Healthcare Insurance for three years, and now at Voler Systems, 80% of our business is around medical devices and medical wearable devices as well, not just the FDA classes one, two, and three. So not just on the scan, like a wearable watch or ring or a skin patch. But also other types of devices that actually go inside the body, like a stent or a catheter or perhaps devices that are used in robotical arms for surgery, et cetera. So I'm very close to the medical device world and the MedTech Industry as the Head of Sales and Marketing here at Voler. And yeah, from a personal side, I'm very passionate about this industry as well.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well first of all, your background is so cool, and I love that you've lived in so many diverse places. I, I have to ask, is there a favorite?
Miguel Adao: I get that question all the time and my, my kind of cheesy answer-- my wife thinks this is so cheesy, Lindsey-- I love the most the place where I am currently.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh. Oh, that's great.
Miguel Adao: I always say that. I always try to at least, I don't always succeed, but I try to live in the here and now, so I try to enjoy the most the place where I am currently. But certainly looking back, I'm very biased to Portugal. I love going back. I go back twice a year to visit my mom and my friends and family. In fact, I told you before the recording, I'm going to Portugal next week to visit my mom for a big 80th birthday. I'm so excited about that. So I always like going back to Portugal, but my favorite country in the world is by far Italy. Both because of course, historically and culturally, and in terms of beauty and architecture and food and fashion, it's astounding. But also just because I lived there from the ages of 14 to 18, went to an American high school in Rome, and those are formative years. That's when you start to become an adult and you start to really define who you're gonna be and, and who I am today is in large part because of that time in, in Italy. So I absolutely love my time there and I love living in California now.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love that perspective. I think that's a great way to go about life and just enjoy where you are in the moment and I guess also take the good from the various other places you've gotten to experience along the way as well. So I love that. But I agree with you that Europe definitely has some particular charms.
Miguel Adao: For sure, as does the US, as does Asia.
Lindsey Dinneen: Of course, as everywhere does.
Miguel Adao: But it's interesting. Yeah, this whole thing, I've been talking a lot with my wife about this as well. She's a life coach and it's very interesting how, isn't it true? Isn't it just so absolutely true that we in our lives spend most of our time revisiting the past with regrets or anger or sadness or whatever. Or pre-living the future with anxiety and doubt and insecurities. We're never in the moment. Right? I've been talking about this with my teenage children as well. We're always worried about what's going to happen next and sad or regretful or upset about something happened in the past and I think that's just something I've been working on myself and it's been an interesting topic for my family as well.
If you can live in the here and now, just enjoy this moment and just learn from this moment-- don't have to enjoy it, not everything is joy in life and thank God, because you need to have a balance. But it's an interesting challenge that I'm presenting to myself, and I'm using this podcast on industry with you, Lindsey, to remind myself, just enjoy this moment, enjoy this podcast and nothing else matters. Enjoy this podcast right now.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. I love that perspective. Well, and that actually brings up an interesting thought. So, you know, as you were talking about that I absolutely agree with you, but what's interesting is in the medtech industry specifically, there's of course such an emphasis on innovation and it is partially to either solve past dilemmas or perhaps anticipate future ones. So, how do you think about that in terms of your role of sales and marketing for Voler? How are you able to stay present and grateful for the here and the now, but also think about it in terms of the industry, which sort of naturally has to be both problem solving and problem anticipating?
Miguel Adao: That is such an interesting way to look at it. Yeah. Let me think about that for a second. I really like that. And I guess it could apply to most themes in our personal family or professional lives, right? You gotta learn from your past, obviously. You gotta just not repeat the same mistakes of the past. I think that's a definition of insanity, right? So you wanna learn from that. And obviously you are looking to the future. We all want in the medtech industry to cure cancer, right? And obviously you wanna have a future goal and you want to learn from the past experiences, failures and successes, and certainly I'm a marketer before being a business development guy.
Really, my entire career was in marketing. And marketing is nothing more than storytelling. It's about basically bringing folks along with you on a journey so that they can find what you're presenting or delivering or selling impactful and beneficial and insightful. And so as a storyteller, whether we're storytelling from a brand perspective, from a digital podcast, a program or whether we're talking to a potential customer or existing customer, you wanna be able to tell that story and to be able to articulate that vision of how exactly your organization will help them accomplish that future goal. Learning from the past experiences, but we're doing it today, right?
So, the present in a way is the bridge between the past and the future. Right? And so in my day-to-day, although I haven't really thought about this in this light, but your question kind of makes me think about it-- both from a business development and from a marketing standpoint, what we wanna do is help our organizations or partners or customers essentially help their end users, right, i.e. either consumers or their patients with better outcomes and so what does that better outcome mean? It means curing a disease or it means extending the life of someone or resolving a medical problem of sorts.
And so from my company's perspective, If our engineering prowess can help a medtech company develop a device and launch and improve a device that will make people's lives better, healthier, and longer, then that's it. What else is there that more aspirational than to help people live a better life. I don't think there's any other industry that can come close to the medical and the MedTech industry in terms of making the planet and the inhabitants of the planet better.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great answer to that question. And I think that like you said, it's just such a unique industry in that way. And so it, it definitely brings up different considerations perhaps than other jobs or careers. Okay. Well, is there a particular moment that stands out to you because it clearly confirmed that this was the right career path for you?
Miguel Adao: Yeah, certainly as family members have become ill or even lost their life because of medical conditions that certainly raised my awareness as I was growing up and becoming more and more aware of my mortality and others, the people I love and their mortality and their lives. So certainly the fact that I've been touched as perhaps have all of your listeners and, and folks that we know been touched by illness and by medical conditions, if not ourselves, and by those we love. That always was in the back of my mind. And although I've worked in soft drinks and hair care, when I was with Procter and Gamble, I worked with Pantene and Head & Shoulders, and that's not saving lives necessarily. It's making you, I guess, feel better about yourself And that's also important for mental health, et cetera.
But really throughout my career, as I got exposed, as I said with Hewlett Packard, a lot of engagement with hospitals and medical groups in England, I worked with HP in the UK and also in Germany, and that was my first exposure and it was, it's just so, what's the word I'm looking for? Empowering and rewarding. That's it. It's so rewarding to work with a company with a customer and providing a solution, a technical solution or whatever, when you know that solution is going to make people's lives healthier and longer and better. More, more than just, I don't know, build a better golf club which is important too, certainly if you're a golfer. But my exposure at HP to hospital groups, medical organizations was the first time where I really got this personal satisfaction of seeing that what we're doing with our HP computers and printers and devices was actually helping the hospitals and the surgeons and the nurses and the practitioners make things better for their patients.
And so when I was approached by a head hunter last year to join this company that is focused on MedTech and medical device development, Voler Systems, I met the founder and the president, still my boss, Walt MacLay, and we just hit it off and I wake up in the morning, the alarm goes off at six, and I'm excited because I feel like, "okay, we're gonna work not on a chip or a sensor or we're not gonna work on a wireless connection or power management solution. We are working on something that will make somebody's mom, daughter, sister, friend, live longer and live better." And so, that makes me want to get up and makes me want to put in another good day of work. And approach it with a lot of passion.
If I may say this, Lindsey, it's an analogy I always like to say also when I'm talking to new employees who join my team or others, there's this old story of the king visiting these folks, brick layers putting bricks down on this construction. And the king asks the brick layer, "what are you doing?" "Oh, I'm just laying my bricks." Day after day for the last 40 years, and I'll lay my bricks. And then the king asks the second brick layer, "oh, I'm building dreams. I'm helping to build cathedrals and visions that will last generations long after I'm gone." And it's like if you have that vision, that what you're doing is more than just a stupid little brick, then your contribution is so much bigger than that, and therefore your passion about it will be commensurate to your vision of what your contribution is.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love that. I also love that story. Thank you for sharing that. I think I'm in a similar situation in that I'm also in marketing and being able to be in this industry is one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do because it is so impactful. And I agree with you. You know, you wake up in the morning and go " it's really not a cliche to say I am a part, maybe a small part, but I am playing a part in hopefully helping someone live a better, healthier, longer life. And my role is letting people know about what we do." And it's not engineering itself, but I do play a small role and that's really cool.
Miguel Adao: Yeah, and it's not so small. I'm sure in the grand scheme of things, it's not so small a role.
Lindsey Dinneen: There you go. Yeah. Well, I'm curious, I know your career has been really eclectic. Essentially, you've gotten to work in a lot of different industries and for different companies, and I would imagine that along the way you've picked up some good sort of leadership tips and tricks. Do you mind sharing your perspective on leadership?
Miguel Adao: Yeah, sure. I think there's a big difference between being a leader and being a manager, right? That's a cliche of articles and other podcasts perhaps, but you don't want to be just a manager going through the motions and ticking off the boxes and the to-do list. But a leader actually brings folks along on a common vision. And by definition, folks will come to the party with a different point of view, a different perspective, a different vantage point that is influenced by their personality, by their upbringing, by their history, by their preferences and passions. And so you need to be respectful. And I must say I was not a good leader earlier in my career. I learned through the years, through good leaders of mine, by replicating and mirroring their behaviors and their attitudes that you need to be more empathetic and more understanding that not everybody, in fact, you don't want people to be exactly like you.
I'm very outwardly enthusiastic. You can tell, right? I'm outwardly passionate and energetic. At first I used to think, "why aren't those folks equally rah, rah, rah?" They can be just as committed to the vision and even more so in their own way, and they're absolutely happy and passionate inside, and they don't have to demonstrate outwardly. So the extrovert versus introvert dynamic, et cetera. And so I've learned to appreciate that as a leader, what you want is people to rally behind and align with a vision and in their own way and in their own rhythm to follow along and to help build that. Not only follow along, but in many ways lead the leader, right? And help move the organization towards that common goal.
I also like this notion that not everybody needs to agree, but everybody needs to align, right? So you don't always need to agree. How can you expect a larger team of dozens and hundreds and thousands of people to agree on everything? It's impossible and thankfully so, but as long as folks align, then they can go towards that common goal with give and take and compromise, et cetera. So I think the biggest role of a leader is to bring those folks along on that journey with a combination of resolve and focus but also empathy.
The empathy part is what I learned later in my career cuz I was always, "come on, let's do it." If you're not doing this, get out of the boat and all those cliches, right? You're either with me or what is it? Or you're in front of me and if so, step out of the way or something like, and it's just so harsh and, and there can be cultural differences. There can be gender differences, that can be historical differences. And so, I've learned and I continue to learn more about empathetic and more kind of generous understanding of leadership. Because folks will contribute in, in different ways.
I always find that there are fundamentally three major drivers in life, and I always go back to my personal life as a father, as a husband, as a son, as a brother. But also at work, there's three key senses or key drivers. One is a sense of purpose. You want to get up and you want to have a sense that what you're doing matters. We all want to feel that what we do matters, hence the cathedral analogy. Hence the, we're here to help people live longer lives that matters. So a sense of purpose.
The other thing is a sense of achievement. A sense of accomplishment. So it's not just that kind of more ethereal sense of purpose and meaning to life and to what you do, but a sense of achievement. You're growing as a company. You're in percentages and in dollars and in market share and in number of customers and successful partnerships. So a sense of achievement that's the athletic kind of sports men like approach to not necessarily that you're competing and putting somebody else behind you, but that you're competing against yourself and you are getting better.
And then I think the third big driver in life is sense of connection, of human connection. Right? And we are very collaborative and gregarious and tribal animals. And that's why the pandemic was so tough. It was tough on us. It was certainly tough when my kids and children in particular suffered with skipping a year and having to do it at home. I'm just saying being away from other human beings is tough. And so in this new day and age, especially post COVID, we're still very much doing Zooms and Teams and podcasting, which is great. But every chance I get in the car, like I told you I'm gonna do in about 15 minutes, and I drive an hour and a half to see somebody. I live in northern in Delmar, north of San Diego. I'm driving up to San Clemente in Orange County, just south of LA to meet somebody for 40 minute lunch, cuz I need that human connection. So yeah, sorry, another long elaborate answer to your question, but for me, leadership is about connecting. It's about giving folks a sense of purpose and meaning, and it's about allowing folks to also accomplish and celebrate accomplishments and achievements.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And so how do you continue to prioritize your own learning and growing as a leader? And perhaps, as a manager as well?
Miguel Adao: Yeah, I'm very big on this. I love learning and I love teaching. I always try to remember when I lie down in bed at night, I'm trying to remember, "okay, what did I learn? What are two highlights from today? And, and what did I teach? What, is something that I share with somebody today that I think will also maybe improve their lives or their journeys?" And I do the same thing with my kids when I pick 'em up at school. Three highlights. "What did you learn today and how did you make your school day better for your teachers, for your classmates?" I've been doing this since they were kids, and I only speak Portugese with my kids. It's so funny. Because if I speak English with them, they'll just say, "Papa, that's weird. Don't do that." Even though they're 15 and 13. And one was born in England, the other was born here in San Diego. I only speak Portugese with them and so, I'm always prioritizing continued learning.
I got a doctorate in business years ago in New York and in Paris, not because I need it for business. I only did it because I wanna publish and I want to teach one day. I'm very big on mentorship. I'm training four different people now in different companies, in different countries. I'm also mentoree, if that's the word. I like to mentor. I always seek out mentors, and right now I have two, one helping me on more strategic financial P&L, managing the financial health of a company, which is not something that I was ever that close to. And one is helping me more on those topics I mentioned earlier about empathy and about those emotional intelligence as well, which historically has been a little bit of a blind spot for me. So those are two areas. That one is more hard skills, financial skills, strategic, running a business. And the other is more about how to be a better, more empathetic human. And so that's something I do all the time.
I also, whenever I can, I. I I do an executive program. I'm looking forward to doing a short program at Stanford University up in the Bay Area soon. And it's great to, to be able to do these programs, to be around like-minded individuals or maybe even unlike-minded individuals, but folks who also are looking to improve themselves and, and learn regardless of age. I'm 55, but I still want to learn as much as when I was 25. And just as I like to learn, I like to teach, so I love to present at different events and also mentor, as I said, I'm advising different entrepreneurs on their organizations as well when I have the time and the opportunity. So, yeah, continued learning both ways is a must, otherwise, you're a bike, and a bike if it stops moving, it falls over.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Yes. What a perfect illustration. Thank you for that. My next question ties into that actually pretty well, so I'm happy about this. So for fun, imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It doesn't have to be in your industry, but it could be. What would you choose to teach and why?
Miguel Adao: For a million dollars I can do anything at all, I'll make it up as I go along.
Lindsey Dinneen: Right, right, right.
Miguel Adao: We'll use ChatGPT to really learn about it 15 minutes before the masterclass.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh my gosh.
Miguel Adao: But I probably wouldn't be as knowledgeable and therefore not as passionate about it, and they wouldn't want to give me the full pay for the events. No, but on the professional side, the more corporate side, I'm passionate about marketing, about helping organizations, helping my organization move from awareness to consideration, to preference to purchase. And I feel that I'm very comfortable talking about this theme of growing brand awareness and generating leads and pipeline, and ultimately, like we were talking about, storytelling, helping folks come along on that journey with you so that you were saying the right thing to the right person at the right time and the right particular need, whether it's a B to C consumer need or a B to B kind of business need. And so I can talk about marketing in all its different aspects and tactics and vehicles till the cows come home, but nobody would pay even $10,000 for that cuz there's a lot of knowledgeable people who know a lot more about that than I do.
One area that I find I'm equally passionate more on the personal side, but that it touches obviously businesses and corporations and organizations as well, it's a combination of international intercultural experiences. Having lived in nine countries, speaking five languages, and having been exposed-- I've visited about 65 countries. I actually took the time to count one day. I've understood that actually the world, as diverse as it is, at the end of the day, everybody wants the same thing, right? It's just in a different way, in a different language, in a different approach, but everybody just wants to live a meaningful life. I'm not even gonna say happy life because happiness is relative, but a meaningful life, and they want to give their children or their loved ones the opportunity to do so as well.
And so I'm, I've always been very big on inclusion and diversity, not so much from the kind of catchphrases, which are so topical today and can generate all kinds of emotions, both positive and negative, but more from the point of view that from an early age I moved around the world. I had to learn different languages. I have to learn different habits and different attitudes. And so I find that I adapt myself easily to who you mentioned, different industries and different types of organizations from a Fortune 10 company to a small boutique engineering services firm.
So that's something I would love to teach a masterclass about how to adapt to different scenarios and certainly in terms of moving abroad, my friends and colleagues always check in with me if they're either visiting a place or moving to a place, what are some tips and tricks? So that's something I'm very passionate about, international and intercultural experiences.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. Well, and that is so cool too, because of your background , like you said, you have had such cool opportunities to, to travel to different places and experience different things. So I really think that adaptability is such a good skill to learn. I can say that from personal experiences as somebody whose natural inclination is towards the more sort of routine driven, you know, learning to adapt and be flexible is so important. Yeah, Okay. What is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Miguel Adao: I'm never gonna leave this world. I'm immortal.
Lindsey Dinneen: Alright.
Miguel Adao: Yeah. It's, it's so stupid, isn't it? We come to this existence. We live 80, if we're lucky, 90 years, and then we're gone. It can't be, it can't be. When we were in our twenties and thirties, we think we're gonna live forever. And then certainly as friends and elderly parents or relatives leave this world too, you realize, "yeah, this not, this is, this gig is not gonna last forever." I do want to be remembered as more than anything, as a good father and a good husband, and a good son, and a good brother. I'm not always, as those relatives would happily testify. I'm not always living up to my promise and my aspiration, but that's certainly my aspiration to be remembered as a good parent and husband above all, but also is a good friend and a good son and brother. That's, that's kind of the journey in the here and now that I'm on at all times. And so I try to remind myself in moments of stress, anxiety, sleeplessness, whatever, try to remember, this is your ultimate goal. What is the right behavior and the right thought, the right action for the moment.
Also, just more generically with Voler Systems, the company that I work for, that helps organizations build their medical devices and their wearable devices. And we talked about this at the beginning, how I'm so happy that I work for a company that's making organizations better so they can make their patients better. I want to leave Voler Systems better than when I arrived. Just as every other company that I worked for, I wanted to leave the company and the team as the organization, the department, better than when I arrived. And I think that's my summary is to just leave this place, quote unquote place, whatever the place is, a company, a city, a community, a planet, better than when I first got there. That's, that's my legacy. Now I am far from this, but certainly it doesn't hurt to have a wish and a desire and an aspiration, kind of a north star to help guide. I fall down time and time again in this goal, but, but it's still my goal. I'm not letting go of it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh, I love that though. I, I love the perspective. In fact, I don't think I've heard anybody else say it quite like you did in terms of, if you have a goal and it's your north star, and this is how you wanna be remembered-- when you're feeling not at your best, you still have something to look at and go, "you know what, here's my ultimate goal." So here are the behaviors or the things I should say or not say to help get you closer to that goal. I think that's a beautiful way to put it. So it's not this aspirational idea that feels somewhat insurmountable or even unquantifiable. But instead you're doing tiny steps, tiny decisions make a big difference. So I love that.
Miguel Adao: Absolutely. Everyone should have a North Star. Everybody should have an ultimate goal, both in their personal, family, professional, financial, romantic, religious, spiritual, whatever. Everyone should have a goal and then you have many goals and many objectives to get there. And the line from here to that goal, to that north star is never a straight line. It's a zigzag. Sometimes it goes backwards. Sometimes it stalls for two years. But you should always be aspiring to get there. And so if you have a goal, aspirational and unreachable but still possibly reachable, then it's gonna keep you motivated and focused. And you will make mistakes and as you will invariably, cuz we're human, but you'll learn from it. And at least one thing, you can rest easy in knowing that at least that North Star does not change.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Great advice. Thank you. And then final question, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Miguel Adao: Oh, that's so easy. My kids and my wife, they crack me up. They're the three most incredible people I've ever met. And yeah, and it's just so interesting-- for those listeners who have kids-- you had this little baby that you shaped and molded and pretty soon that baby becomes an actual human being with thoughts and opinions and perspectives and intelligence and humor and wit, and some of it does not match what you say. And you're like, "where's this coming from?" And it's like, oh, I'm in awe. So, yeah, Olivia and Nico, and Lindy that's who makes me smile the most every day. And I, I live a blessed life because of them.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. What a great answer.
Miguel Adao: They'll like it too when they hear the recording.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.
Miguel Adao: Awkward.
Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I'm so thankful that you joined us today, and I just really appreciate learning more about your background and your experience and your passion. And so I really appreciate your time, and we're honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Save the Children, which works to end the cycle of poverty by ensuring communities have the resources to provide children with a healthy, educational and safe environment. That was your choice of charity to support and I am just so thankful that you chose that one. So, thank you again so much. This has been amazing.
Miguel Adao: I loved it. Thank you so much. Thank you for that charitable contribution as well. And thanks for the engagement, Lindsey. I really enjoyed it. Let's do it again next week, shall we?
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, there you go. Absolutely. Well, thank you again. We just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. And thanks also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Zoe Lalji | ALS Heroes | Virtual Reality, ALS Advocacy, & Self-Awareness

Zoe Lalji is a junior at UT Austin studying neuroscience with a minor in entrepreneurship on a pre-med track, and she is working to make virtual reality accessible to ALS patients. In this episode, she discusses what it was like when her dad was diagnosed with ALS and how that changed the trajectory of her career, her work with advancing virtual reality technology to better support patients' lives, and how hardship has developed an essential self-awareness.  
Guest links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoe-lalji/
Charity supported: ALS Heroes
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 010 - Zoe Lalji
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am so excited to introduce you to my guest today, Zoe Lalji. Zoe is a junior at UT Austin studying neuroscience with a minor in entrepreneurship on a pre-med track. Her passion for neuroscience began when her father was diagnosed with a Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in 2017. And since then, she has been constantly searching for ways to improve his quality of life and expand his avenues of connection with the world around him. As part of this work, she is working to make virtual reality accessible to ALS patients and other highly disabled populations as a way to provide them with autonomy in the form of novel experiences and immersive activities that they're unable to engage in physically.
Zoe, oh my gosh, thank you so very much for joining us. I am just so very delighted that you're here and I just can't wait to hear more about your story and your background. But first, thank you just so much for being here.
Zoe Lalji: Aw. Thank you, Lindsey. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's awesome to be a part of this great podcast you have.
Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome. Well, I was just wondering if you wouldn't mind starting by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and what led you to what you're doing now.
Zoe Lalji: Sure. So, right now I'm a junior at UT Austin and I'm studying neuroscience on a pre-med track and minoring in entrepreneurship. And as far as what kind of got me to where I'm at and-- I've been passionate about medicine for as long as I can remember. Both of my parents are in medicine. My dad was a dentist and my mom studied as a gynecologist and transferred into functional medicine. And they both had their own practices, so I've had that business background as well.
But that all shifted, I would say, when my dad was diagnosed with ALS in 2017. And from there it was a pause button if you could say on on my entire scheme of my life, my plans. You know, I think with pre-meds there's a track that is a starting point and you have a series of events that are lined out for you until you reach medical school and get that MD. And that kind of stopped me in my tracks and made me reassess what was truly important because I had to spend a lot of time caring for my dad, caring for my family, and it definitely shifts your priorities and makes you reassess your life.
And although, everything was still of in line with my values growing up, which was, I've always wanted to help people and that's what drew me to medicine. That's what I had really admired about my parents is the impact they had made on others' lives that were struggling, that had health conditions and needed guidance in that area of their lives. And I think watching my dad undergo one of those health conditions and just doing everything in my power to make it better for him in any way that I can. It just truly strengthened that core value for me.
And I think when you're in pre-med, there's kind of a tendency to get tunnel vision. And, kind of that check mark mentality where you go, "Do I have the grades? Do I have the volunteer hours, the extracurriculars," all that stuff. And I think, you lose sight of the why of medicine, until even after residency when you're actually in the field where you actually meet the patients and you actually you know, talk to the people that are struggling and realize how important it is. And until then, it's more about, memorizing facts and figuring out how the body works without really putting it into the context of the bigger picture.
So I think studying medicine alongside actually understanding what it's like to be on the other side, on the patient perspective, was a real driver for me. I guess the turning point for me for where I really realized that making an impact for medical problems is where my heart really lies.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that is such a powerful story, so thank you for sharing that. I was wondering if you would be willing to share a little bit more about ALS and how that affects people's lives. I know it's a very difficult disease, but just from your perspective, especially having experienced it and trying to help someone who is dealing with it-- I would just love to hear a little bit more about it.
Zoe Lalji: Yeah, absolutely. So ALS is a neurodegenerative disease. It impacts the motor neurons in the body, which effectively causes people to lose their ability to walk, talk, move any part of their body and eventually breathe on their own. And it's a interesting disease in that there's not much known about the pathophysiology of it, in that like they don't know what causes it. They don't know how to even approach treatment. Only 10% of ALS cases have been found to be connected to a gene. And even then they haven't really found a way to reverse any of that.
So it's a completely uncured disease, the treatment is very limited, in that there's maybe a few months of life expectancy increased by the treatment, but in contrast you get a lot of side effects from it, which effectively makes you pretty much zombified. You know, it's a lot of fatigue, a lot of nausea, and a lot of patients just opt not to do it because the quality of life is really reduced from just being on those treatments.
And so it's just a hopeless disease. And when you're given that diagnosis and told that it's always fatal and there's nothing that really you can do, you just feel completely helpless. And then as you lose your agency over your body, your ability to do things on your own, that helplessness sort of grows and consumes you. It's a very difficult disease to be diagnosed with on the patient and the family.
Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. Yeah. Well, and I know part of your work, something that you are doing right now is working to make virtual reality accessible to ALS patients. And I love this idea, and I would love if you would be willing to share more about this and what brought that idea about and where is it taking you.
Zoe Lalji: Yeah, of course. I love talking about it. This idea came from just my desire and my constant searching for things to do with my dad or things to bring him happiness in his life, or greater quality of life. And it came about from actually an internship I had during my gap year, which I took before college. And I was at a startup accelerator and there was a XR lab in the accelerator where they had virtual reality headsets, and I had talked to the head of the lab and he let me use one of his headsets and I ended up using Google Earth on the headsets. And I don't know if you've ever used virtual reality, but for whoever has used it, it's very life like, like you actually feel like you're there. You feel like you're walking the streets of Rome or you're in, you're in Paris, or so many different places that you can just click a button and just be fully immersed there. And that's just Google Earth.
There's so many other immersive scenarios that you can dive into in virtual reality. And with the immersion of the Metaverse and so many different concepts of the growing interest in virtual reality as a way to have a life outside of the physical life. And just from seeing that Google Earth scenario, immediately I thought, "Wow, this would be incredible for my dad."
Because for patients that have all of these life support machines, when they lose their breathing, you have to get a surgery and you have to be basically connected to a machine that controls your breathing. And obviously with that, you can't travel, you can't get on a plane. And for many of these patients, like my dad, you have all these hopes of where you would like to travel one day, things you would like to do one day, and life just happens and you don't end up doing it. But you always think there's time. You always think, " Maybe when I retire, I'll go and travel the world." The common notion that people say.
When something like this happens and puts your life in pause where you realize you're never gonna be able to travel again, or you're never gonna be able to skydive or bungee jump or do those bucket list things that you said that you would one day do. And like, even further than that, it's more the things that you used to do every day that sort of defined you, that sort of made you feel like-- for example, my dad would, for as long as I can remember, probably my earliest memory of him is him waking up every morning and going for a run. And he never missed a day. And it was so important to him, like being who he is and his day working out the way he wanted it to, that he had that run, he had to start his day off feeling like himself.
And I feel like we all have those hobbies and habits that really all together define who we are. And when you get a disease, not only is it like you're losing all of those things all at once, you start to define yourself as your disease then, because there's nothing else really left. I think for me, virtual reality meant giving those back this semblance of who they once were that they've lost. I think we're all the sum of what we do every day and our dreams and hopes for the future. And when those are taken away, it's who are we really? And that's not even considering the communication that patients lose. So you can't even really express yourself either.
So with that, it's like there's this huge disconnect with their identity and I, I just see VR as a way for these patients to enter the world where they don't have to be defined as their disability, where they can do everything that anyone else can in virtual reality. And the problem lies with the modes of interaction with the devices where VR right now has remote controls that you need to use to interact with the environment, and you have to walk around to see the full environment, which for all quadriplegics, there's no really way to do that. So I'm trying to make that aspect accessible for that population so that they can have access to those virtual life-like immersive experiences that can tie them to the things that they used to love or would love to do one day.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So essentially taking some of the existing tech, but putting it into a new method of delivery, I suppose? So that folks who can't, like you said, walk or that can't necessarily interact through a series of controllers or something like that, would be able to still experience those wonderful, immersive things. Is that...
Zoe Lalji: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Lindsey Dinneen: Ok. Wow. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. This is so exciting, just to hear all about this. I know that you are still pursuing medicine and then now you're also pursuing this sort of tech side of things. I understand the background of you coming into it and why, but how have you found these interactions? Have they played out easily? Has it been an odd transition, or how has that all worked out?
Zoe Lalji: Yeah, as you can imagine, it's like I have two sort of big things that I love and I'm passionate about and they both take a lot of time and effort and energy. And to say the least, it has been difficult to prioritize one or the other and find the time in the day for both. What I love about medicine is that the hope that we can bring to the patient. I love the innovation of it. I love coming up with solutions that aren't out there, that for the patients like my dad that don't see hope in existing medicine. I wanna be the hope for those patients.
And that's, that's how I feel right now. I, I know I will always love every aspect of medicine, but that's what really drives me is that notion of helping those people that are feeling the medicine has failed them, and providing them with unconventional solutions that maybe they didn't think to look for or didn't think that there was one, you know? I think that until there's a cure for some of these diseases, technology can bridge that gap of function and bring back what people have lost.
And I've seen it, I've worked with Paradromics as a BCI company in Austin and that was my first exposure since developing my startup into the, the medical technology world. And they're just such a amazing team and they have such a noble cause that they're fighting for and they just wanna help people like my dad. And to be surrounded by people that want to do that and the technology and seeing how impactful it has the potential to be. It really inspired me, especially coming from such a hopeless diagnosis that we had, it really gave my family hope. It gave me hope, and that's the feeling I wanna give to other people.
And so my plan right now is to finish out my pre-med prerequisites in college and take a gap year or two to really work on my startup, really work on things like put myself in different environments in the medical technology world, get more experience and really understand my passion and what I can offer to the field. And from there I'll really decide if an MD is the right path for me or if I want to go a different route to get a different degree, you know, and still work within medicine, but not maybe bedside and not maybe in a hospital and not maybe with direct patient care. So yeah, I think that's the route I'm thinking right now? Yeah that's the plan.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. That's a great plan. And I love, I love your willingness and your openness to explore and continue to evolve, perhaps, over time in terms of, when you go into a new path and you've had this set of expectations for yourself for a while, that this is where you were going to head. And then things change and I just think it's quite remarkable when someone like you who is obviously very talented, smart, multi-passionate, is able to pivot and say, " I love this aspect, but I also love this aspect and maybe I can do both in a really creative way." I think that's fantastic.
Zoe Lalji: Yeah, I mean, it was such a difficult thing for me since I had wanted to do medicine my whole life. It was something that was so ingrained in who I thought I was. Everyone asks you when you meet them, like "What do you wanna do with your life? What are you majoring in? What's your path?" And always it's pre-med, ever since I was a kid, I'd say pre-med, and it's strange to change that. And I think what really helped me get there is my life has been so turbulent and I've had to really get used to things not being how I planned, you know? And like that with my dad's diagnosis, throwing us into a spiral. And then after that actually, the gap year itself was another event that I had not planned for.
I had decided to take one because my dad really needed me, and I found in my value scope that really came first before anything else. And then it became a serendipitous decision because in December, after I had taken my gap year, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. And luckily she's cancer free now, but we had to go through chemo, radiation, surgery and I could not have dealt with that at college. I had to be home, I had to be with her. And somebody had to take care of my dad. Somebody had to help her keep everything together and keep herself together.
And I think, that was probably one of my biggest teachers is that, things are gonna happen. You can't avoid change, and I think that was really difficult to realize that maybe my plan wasn't the right plan for me, and maybe I need to take a second and let myself sit in the ambiguous unknown, which is really uncomfortable, but sometimes it's necessary in order to figure out where you really belong. But yeah it's definitely not easy. I definitely have not figured everything out. It's definitely some days I'm like, I just want to go back to the known, it's so much easier. But yeah, I think it's just getting used to the unknown and getting used to change.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. And kudos to you for that viewpoint. And I'm sure, I'm sure some days are easier than others. I certainly understand that. But seriously, kudos to you for being willing to adapt to changing circumstances that you didn't plan for and you wouldn't have wished for, but this is really amazing to me as to how you've taken something that is so incredibly difficult and challenging, but you've really embraced the challenge-- and maybe that was a long time in coming-- but you've embraced that challenge and then you're not just helping your own family, which is incredibly important, but you're doing work that's gonna help so many people. And I think that is just amazing. Thank you for doing what you're doing.
Zoe Lalji: Absolutely. Like you said, it definitely was a long time of really a lot of self-awareness, a lot of self-work, to get to a place where I was ready to embrace it, like you said, like it's something that has been difficult, has been so trying on our family, so trying on my dad. And a lot of days I am like, why did this happen? And I feel a lot of grief and a lot of sadness and unwillingness to embrace it. But for the most part, I've reached a point where I've realized that this is something that we've come a long way from, and we try to make the best out of the situation and make every day as bright as we can, given everything. And that's all we really can do.
And I think watching my dad overcome it himself has been just what has given me the strength I need to get out of that sort of pity, out of that grief of like, why me? Why has this happened? And anger because when you think about what ALS patients go through, it's like you just can't even imagine what it could be like to be in that position. And to watch my dad really take that in stride and be this ferocious warrior through it and keep fighting no matter what life throws at him. He's almost at six years since his diagnosis and he's still fighting and he's still finding a reason to smile every day.
And when I think about that it reminds me that it's okay. If he can fight like he's been fighting, then we all have that strength in us and that's, I think, what inspires me to want to help people like him, to want to bring more light into others' lives that are going through what we've gone through. And I think it's our duty really. I think I've gotten a very unique experience to watch somebody rise from the ashes and learn from that and I think that hardship, it sucks, and I'm not gonna say it doesn't at all like it, it does suck. All of it sucks, but it's an opportunity to learn. It's an opportunity to grow and it's an opportunity to become the best version of yourself through it.
And there's moments when you don't want to learn , you know, you just, "I'm done with the lessons," like "I've had enough!" I think at the end of the day, it's like everything that I am and everything that I've learned it's valuable, regardless of what I have to go through to get me here. It's who I am. And so I think the best thing I can do with that is use it as a way to empathize with others in a way to really understand what's needed and how to help people that go through similar things that I've seen with my dad.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely beautiful. Well, I'm wondering is there a particular moment or perhaps series of moments that stands out to you because it clearly confirmed that this was the right career path for you, even though it's been a bit of a meandering one, a pivoting one. Is there any particular moment where you thought, "Okay, this is why I'm here."
Zoe Lalji: Like you said, it's a lot of moments. I mean, I would say the first moment was definitely when my dad was diagnosed. But even then I didn't really make that shift of " I'm definitely gonna do this for the rest of my life." It was more of a shock where I realized this is something I really care about. But I think really working on my startup has been so empowering. And then also my internship at Paradromics. I think the main moment that recently has made me realize that kind of clarify what exactly about medicine really drives me is I was invited to speak at a brain computer interface conference at the Chamber of Commerce. And through that I met so many key players in the the ecosystem. And I spoke to a lot of them about what I was passionate about, what I was doing, my story.
And it was remarkable to me that so many people really cared and it was so obvious that everyone genuinely cared about the patient and about helping that person. It wasn't about the product, it wasn't about the business. It was about how can we help people the best way that we can and how can we use the potential of this technology to really help people's lives. And I think that energy and being in that space of like people just wanting to help, that was just so new for me because I think when something happens like that, you feel so incredibly alone and nobody could ever really help you, and it's like there's no hope.
And people can try to support you and they can try to take care of you, but there's no way that they can actually help. And then even from the medicine side, there really wasn't anything there. And to enter into a room where so many people were making things actively that could help, for me as a daughter of somebody that was going through it, it wasn't so impactful and it made me think what about for others that are like me or for others that are like my dad to be exposed to this world of increasing potential and technology. And I was like, this is where I wanna be. This is home.
Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. Yeah. That is a very powerful story. Thank you for sharing that. I have been personally so inspired by people in the medtech industry and healthcare because, you know, you start talking to them and it's easy to see how much they care. It's like you said, it's not just about the product, it's not just about the business, it's not about making money, although everyone needs to to make a living but it's about truly helping people, and I think that's just one of the most inspiring things that I have personally gotten to witness by meeting truly remarkable people through this field. That makes sense to me that, that was a moment that stood out for you. Well, that's amazing. Well, I'm curious, so you're in a really interesting new phase. Yeah. And I, I'm curious as you continue to develop your startup and whatnot, how would you define leadership? Or what does leadership mean to you?
Zoe Lalji: I think for me, and from my experience with it, leadership is really about empathy and understanding your team. And the analogy I would use is like a wolf pack. The leader of the wolf pack is always walking behind the pack and making sure nobody gets lost and making sure everybody has purpose and a destination. And I think that as a leader, it's your responsibility to make sure that the team is whole, in a way, where everybody on the team-- you understand them enough to know their strengths and to know their tendencies and set them up to succeed and set them up to benefit the full team and have everybody on the team feel like their strengths are building the team into the best version of itself.
And I think having that ability to really understand people really qualifies someone as a great leader. And I, I would liken a leader to a mentor in a way, because it's not about you, if you're leading a team, your success is the team's success, right? And your goal is to inspire success in each of the individual people on the team so that the team can be greater than the sum of its parts. Because everyone's strengths play in a way that they add to each other and compliment each other.
And I think from what I've found is that when people realize that you truly understand them and you see what really makes them unique, they're more willing to devote those strengths to whatever cause you're going for. And they're more attentive to the goals you place for the team, the end goal. And I think another thing that a leader really has to do is understand the why of the team and really show that or really demonstrate that to the team and align them under the same why. Because I think what makes a team really unique is their ability to align themselves under that goal and all fight for that goal together. I think those are two things that I find are really important in a leader.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Agreed. Yeah. So pivoting a little bit, just for some fun. Imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be in your industry or something you're working on now, but doesn't necessarily have to be, what would you choose to teach and why?
Zoe Lalji: Wow. That is a fun question. Wow. Okay. I think I would probably want to teach a class on self-awareness through hardship. I think that is one of the biggest things that I have struggled with especially when I think in my gap year was the biggest moment where I realized, I am really defining myself as a caregiver. I'm defining myself as someone that cares for others because I did that every day. And it was so difficult to have my own identity, to have my own sense of self, and I think that really finding that balance of what do I need to be the best version of myself and to do the best for others because of that.
I think that journey for me of really finding what's important to me, reprioritizing, because I think moments like these shift your priorities so much. They shift your view of the world. They shift who you are. And to catch up with that is there's so much change going on in your life to keep a pulse on you and who you are, what you stand for, is so incredibly difficult. And I think if you're not careful and you're not placing importance on that, you become misaligned and you don't live in your true values. You don't live within your true values because you don't have that alignment within yourself.
And I think, once you've gone through a phase where you've completely lost sight of that and it's a phenomena with caregivers that we tend to forget about ourselves completely. And we place focus on others, on the people we're caring for. And I think in my gap year with both of my parents needing me to be there for them, it made me feel like this is more important, right? Because before the diagnosis with my dad, my highest priority was always family. And caring for others and giving back was such a huge thing that had been instilled in me, and it's still a huge priority for me.
But I never had to take care of myself. I never had to place importance on that because there was never a point where I was gasping for air and gasping for care. And I think it also just felt like I didn't know who I was anymore, and that's such a terrible place to be in. And that's why I can say that for, for patients that undergo this, it's that to a totally different extent, and that goes back to my VR project. But I've done so much, coming into college and really getting the space to put myself in different scenarios and see who I am.
 I think that sitting with myself and taking that time and doing that work has really allowed me to be there better for my parents, be there better for my family, because I'm just more aligned. I'm more me. And being around my dad when I'm not even me is not helping him. He wants to spend time with me. I think when you neglect yourself, it's hard to be you, you know, it's hard to explain, but I think just having that alignment through something so pivotal in your life, something so earth shattering that happens to you, that kind of shifts who you are. And keeping track of that shift and keeping yourself in your care and treating yourself as a child, because you are. You have to nurture your inner child and really take care of that child and not think that child is perfect because they're not.
And the thing about this particular class would be that I haven't figured it out. But I have done a lot of work and I would want to help people that are trying to navigate that because I feel like there's been a lot of trial and error and if I can help people in any way with my experience with it and what's worked for me, and how I went about figuring out what works for me, I think finding that balance within such a all-consuming situation and hardship, that I would wanna help people through that. That's been monumental for me in realizing that myself was important, in defining myself and being aware of myself and who I was. And so yeah, I think realizing that was important through all of this hardship. I think that's one of the biggest learning moments for me, and I'd really wanna share that.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, there are so many people who are going through similar things that could really benefit from that. So that would be an amazing masterclass. So I'll look forward to that whenever that comes up. What is one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Zoe Lalji: Honestly, I feel like my impact will be in the lives that I've impacted, and if I can be remembered as a friend, as an advocate, and as a mentor for those people, I would be fulfilled. I feel like I would just want to at least help one life that needs that guidance, you know, that feels so alone and feels so hopeless, to bring that small amount of hope, even if nothing at all. And I think where my fulfillment comes is that I want to help people like my dad, people like me, people that have been struggling, that can't find what way is up, which way is the light, either guide them or provide them with some semblance of hope. Or just be a friend, or just be support. Because coming from someone that's been there, coming from someone that can empathize and make them feel like, "Hey, you're not alone. It might feel lonely and it might suck, but you're not alone."
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. That is very powerful. Final question, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Zoe Lalji: Well, I think that one is easy because it's my dad. He's my inspiration. He has so much light within him that only comes from overcoming something like this. And his energy is just so incredible, and he is the reason I keep doing what I do. And I think also, the memories I have of him, the memories of him as my father when I was a kid and things that he used to do with me and things that just really showed that he loved me so much. And those memories that are just so sacred to me and every time I think about it, it's bittersweet, but it always makes me happy to remember what he means to me.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Zoe, oh my gosh, you are so very inspirational. I would not wish the path that you have taken on you in the way that it has happened, but I just admire you so much for taking a very hard path, but making so much good come from it and embracing the light and embracing choosing to help others see that light and see hope in a difficult time. Gosh, I cannot wait to continue following your work and seeing what you do because I know you're gonna be impacting a lot of lives. Oh my gosh.
Zoe Lalji: Thank you. Yeah, and I really loved being on your podcast. I loved talking to you. This form is amazing and I can't wait to see what other amazing speakers you get on here.
Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome. Well, thank you, and we are so honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to your family's organization, which is ALS Heroes. This organization honors the heroes amongst us who have stared devastation in the face, only to say, "you do not define me." The organization hopes to guide those heroes in navigating their resources and provide them with hope in the midst of a seemingly hopeless disease. And I'm so excited to continue to learn more about the organization and how we can get involved. So thank you for bringing our attention to it, and thank you again for being here. We wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.
Zoe Lalji: Thank you so much, Lindsey. It's been a pleasure.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in. If you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I would love it if you would share this episode with a colleague or two, continue to pass along the word, and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Etienne Nichols | Greenlight Guru | Gratitude, Writing to Reflect, & Furthering the Medtech Industry

Etienne Nichols is a mechanical engineer, PMP-certified project manager, the host of the Global Medical Device Podcast, and the builder of the Greenlight Guru MedTech Excellence Community. In this episode, he shares a plethora of advice and great stories, including why gratitude and curiosity matter so much, how writing helps you to identify what you truly believe, his passion for furthering the medtech industry, and how an article he read changed his life. 
Guest links: https://www.greenlight.guru/podcast | https://www.greenlight.guru/etienne-nichols-thankyou | https://www.linkedin.com/in/etiennenichols/ 
Charity supported: Polaris Project
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 009 - Etienne Nichols
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to The Leading Difference. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am excited to introduce you to my guest today, Etienne Nichols. Etienne is a mechanical engineer and PMP certified project manager with a wealth of experience in the medical device industry. He's worked with Fortune 500 and startup medical device companies and has taught classes on quality management systems and design controls for Regulatory Affairs Professional Society and American Society for Quality. He is a frequent speaker at MedTech conferences, the host of the Global Medical Device Podcast, and the builder of the MedTech Excellence Community. Thank you so very much for joining us, Etienne. I'm so excited to have you here on this show today. Welcome.
Etienne Nichols: Thank you. I'm excited to be here as well. I'm super pumped to be with you today.
Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome. Well, I would love, if you wouldn't mind starting by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you got to where you are now.
Etienne Nichols: Sure. I guess if I was to break down as simple as possible, I'm the host of the Global Medical Device Podcast, and I say that partly because we just interviewed Dan Purvis, the CEO of Velentium on his book, "28 Days to Save the World." Loved that, but, anyway, just had to throw that out there because I'm just such a big fan of you guys as well.
Okay. To your question, specifically, my background, the word background can meet a lot of things. I just finished a book called "Livewired" by David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford. He basically says, our brains aren't so much observers of reality, but filters. So we filter out our past, we hone in on certain things. Okay? I say all that to say when I think of background, I imagine a picture of Mona Lisa, what's in the background? You think Mona Lisa, what's in the background? Only things that matter to Da Vinci. So I'd like to tell you a quick story. It might not seem super relevant, but this is a story of kind of help shape who I am.
When I was in my early twenties, I thought I was in love, but it turned out that it wasn't meant to be. So as an early 20 something without a fully grown prefrontal cortex, I did what any self-respecting Oklahoman would do. I signed up for Terry Don West School of Bull Riding. Terry was a world champion bull rider 1985 to 2003, and he had a school outside in Henrietta, Oklahoma. So I went there. I was the only city kid there. After a few rides, like I literally got on multiple bulls and I got on one where it laid down in the shoot, it was bucking around and laid down in the shoot and it, it was dark down there. And my brain immediately said, "abort mission, jump outta here, jump outta the shoot." And I jumped out and I was terrified. Terry ran over, he yanked me by the collar, he stuck his gloved finger in my face, and he said, "you never ever ever get off a bull in the shoot."
And so I, I'd say that story to say, when I think about background, that was a pivotal moment in my life when I thought, you never give up. You know, no matter how dark or scary it is, you never give up. So that, that was one of the things that before I was engineer, that was one of the pivotal moments.
 I'll talk about my real background, I guess that's more traditional. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. Before coming to MedTech, I worked in aerospace, the steel industry, so both regulated and unregulated. I'm gonna close my window because I actually have a rooster right outside my window.
Lindsey Dinneen: I've been enjoying him.
Etienne Nichols: But I've worked in manufacturing regulatory. I actually got my project management, professional certification on a regulatory project product development. Finally was a project manager of a drug delivery combination product. So, all of those things before I came to Greenlight Guru, which is where I am now. I've worked with dozens of companies to help them set up and implement their quality management system. And so as I mentioned before now, I manage the Global Medical Device Podcast. So it's been a really fun ride.
Lindsey Dinneen: Awesome. Yeah. And a very eclectic ride. It sounds like you have come at this in a very unique way. Okay. I would love to hear a little bit more about your story on joining Greenlight Guru, because I recently read a post on LinkedIn about it. I just thought, "wow, what a great story." I'd love if you'd share that with us.
Etienne Nichols: Sure. This was several years ago. I was working as a project manager for a drug delivery combination product company. I walked into the VP of Engineering's office. He and I were talking about some things that were going on, and I thought, I need to do a little bit of research. I went back to my computer. I started looking for an article, and that was when I first stumbled across Greenlight Guru. I came across the article, "DHF Versus DMR Versus DHR." It's a helpful article because FDA and their acronyms, if you're familiar with those. So after reading that article, I did what anyone would do. You know, you reach out to the author, thank them for their writing. And so I, I reached out to Jesseca Lyons who was the author on LinkedIn, and I told her I really appreciated the things that she had written, and she just responded, "yeah, you're welcome."
The very next day she posted, "Hey, we had a great quarter last quarter, and by the way, we're hiring" and I thought "hiring?" So I clicked on the link and it looked really interesting and I just applied on the whim. I was not looking for a new job. I wasn't interested in getting a new job, but I wanted to learn more about this person and their company. And after my first interview with her, she literally put a Zoom meeting on my calendar that afternoon. Three days later I had an interview with Tom Rish. Four or five days later, I had an interview with Fran Cruz, who was the VP of Customer Success at the time. And I basically had an offer in less than 10 days, I I believe.
 So, Jessica and I joke about that article changing my life a little bit, but it's a really good article. But it's been a fantastic ride and I've really enjoyed my time at Greenlight Guru. And I'll say one other thing, it felt like a big risk at the time to move because I was in a great position. I loved the company I was working for. I really respected the CEO. But after looking at this company, it felt like a risk, but the more I thought about it, it was so in line with what I really loved doing: content creation, interacting with customers directly, and the potential to get on stage and speak on the podcast or at conferences. I felt like it was a bigger risk not to take this job.
So this is something that I would throw out to some of the listeners is you may be facing different career steps and there's always a risk no matter what you do, but you always have to think about the risk of not taking a risk. And I think that's something we sometimes forget. So I dunno if that answered your question. That's the story as least as it's coming to me at the moment.
Lindsey Dinneen: No, That's a great answer. Yeah, I love those collisions, I like to call them. All of a sudden, things work out, but it takes intention, right? You read an article and then you reached out to the author and that led to a series of events, and here you are. But, I just love when those, those kinds of things happen. Those stories are my favorite.
Etienne Nichols: Yeah. It makes me think-- oh, I'm probably gonna butcher this-- but the definition of luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes.
Etienne Nichols: And I think if you're always preparing, you, you may or may not be lucky. The opportunity may or may not arise, but when they do, you know, you almost have an obligation to take that sometimes.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely agree. Yeah. A theme that I have picked up on from following your work on LinkedIn and whatnot is gratitude. And I would love if you would share just a little bit maybe about your philosophy behind it, because it seems like something that you often express gratitude, whether it's to the author of an article that you appreciated or it's to an interviewee that had a particularly inspiring thing to share. I just have noticed that theme throughout your work, and I would just love to hear your perspective on it.
Etienne Nichols: Wow. I actually got like little chills when you were saying that because I don't think anybody, nobody's ever mentioned that or called that out. So I'm glad that's showing through, for sure. I'm really thankful, I'm thankful that's showing through. It's funny, let me rewind to a period in my career that I thought this was one of the toughest parts of my career. It, looking back, it was one of the toughest. I was in a situation where I was leading a project that if this project did not succeed, many, probably dozens of people would be laid off because the company wouldn't be able to support them if this project didn't succeed.
That was my perception. And I think even looking back, I think it's accurate. So, I was really stressed at the time. We were working 60 plus hours a week, me and my team, And during that time, I honestly thought a lot about giving up. I never gave up. I told my wife, no matter how hard it is, I've gotta finish this. And then, if it's still difficult, after we're done, we're gonna move on. And that is what happened. We brought the project to fruition and moved on.
But during that time, I remember standing outside a conference room and I stared at an empty whiteboard and I looked at that whiteboard and I thought someone should put something in there. So I put just a question. "What is your definition of success?" I believe that was the first question. A few days later, I walked by again and lots of people had answered that with their different definitions, and I thought, huh? I took a picture, went home, and I wrote a memo. I said, "what is your definition of success? This is what you said."
I went back to work and I sent this out to, I don't know, 20 different people. I didn't know who had answered on the whiteboard and I wrote a lot of these different things and people kept telling me you know, appreciate you translating our words into this memo. Just kinda your giving it your own thoughts. By the time I left that company, I had over a hundred people who I was, you know sending a Monday memo to, and I learned somewhere along the way that people don't mind getting a little bit of encouragement. During that time, the way I was able to get through the stress was every morning I would write that Monday memo. I would think about those things people were saying, and I would try to focus, what am I really grateful about these people? And that's really what helped me get through.
So, that was kind of a circuitous way of answering your question, so I'd like to be a little bit more succinct here in the, my last couple phrases here. There is, there's a lot of scarcity in the world, but gratitude really shows you what you have. When you start looking and comparing your life to other people's, it's easy to wish you had this, wish you had that. When you're grateful for what you have, you start recognizing all the things that you do have. And so it's more of an abundance mindset. So that's been my philosophy. I believe gratitude is at the heart of of an abundance mindset.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. And that story is pretty awesome. So was that maybe the start of your content creation journey?
Etienne Nichols: Yeah, I do think that. Oh,, if you'll let me go through another story, which is
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, please.
Etienne Nichols: When it comes to content creation I'm a big believer in writing and having a writing practice of some sort. So, to answer your question just directly, yes. that was the beginning and I learned the value of writing every morning. In fact, at that time I was very disciplined. I have three kids now, I'm not quite as disciplined. I would get up at 4:45 every morning. I would go work out and then I would stop at a coffee shop on my way to work. I would write for 30 minutes, and then I would go to work. That was before the pandemic, coffee shops closed. And it was before kids and all these different things, but that's when I started writing.
Fast forward to Greenlight Guru. I was working with different customers and I was loving what I was doing. Occasionally I would post on LinkedIn just a long form article about, this is something I learned about, I don't know 21 CFR part 820.40 document controls. Why do you need to show a Rev A to Rev B? Why do you justify those changes? All these different things. I've just wrote an article about that, and I would do that every now and then. Well, while I was in that position here at the company at Greenlight Guru, the CMO, Nick Tippmann reached out to me and said, "Hey, we're thinking about building a community and we want you to build the community. I've been watching what you post on LinkedIn."
So this is a guy I'd never met before. He's within my company, but he saw what I was doing on LinkedIn, the content creation. At the same time, the founder of the company, Jon Speer reached out to me and said, "Hey, I've watched some of the things you wrote on LinkedIn. Wondered if you'd be interested to be a co-host on the podcast." And so these are two separate situations happening at the same time because of the content creation.
Now I'd been writing for years up until this point. And I'll tell you one more thing about writing is it helps you identify what you truly believe, what you actually think. You may think something, but once you write it out, you may change your mind or tweak it slightly. And so that really helps. And so I've been doing this for multiple years and it got me to a point where two different people approached me and I was able to accept that, and it's been really fun.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love that story. When you had the opportunity to do the podcast, was that something that you felt immediately comfortable taking on? Was that something that took a little bit of a learning curve, or how did that work for you?
Etienne Nichols: The way I would describe it was terror. I had never met the founder of this company. And not only was I meeting the founder, we were interviewing the best in the field-- people like Mike Drews or your CEO, Dan Purvis. Every time I saw those names on my calendar, the pit of my stomach would ball up and I'd go through some breathing exercises, do some squats, whatever. And it's okay, we could do that. But, when you get scared like that, to me, you, you have to qualify it a little bit, but a certain amount of that fear, to me says this is the right direction for me. And the same thing happened at multiple points in my career that sort of confirmed this is the right thing and that little bit of fear is one of 'em. You can look at it as fear, but you can also be excitement because I'm reaching beyond my grasp, and if I keep reaching, I'll grow and I can actually reach this thing. So that's how I looked at that.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I was once told by a friend that she felt that whenever you were nervous it was because you cared. And so use that nervous energy to do a really good job because it can be harnessed, right? That fear, that, that nervousness, but it's not a bad thing, it's just along for the ride. It's there to help give you a little extra boost and that's okay. And I've always kinda liked that.
Etienne Nichols: So I'm curious about you because I love talking to other podcasters, so I just, if we could flip the script just for a minute. I'm curious how you handle that nervousness or is, are there any specific things you do?
Lindsey Dinneen: That is a great question. Yes, I still do get nervous. And it does depend on the situation, but I think one thing that I have learned is that being yourself, being just normal and natural and a little vulnerable and a little bit not polished is actually a lot more relatable to people than being perfect. And I'm not perfect. My interviews will never be perfect, but I can do my best and I can be me. And the more that I embrace that, the more comfortable I am.
Etienne Nichols: Oh, yeah. I think that's great. The one thing that I I can't remember who told me this but curiosity-- you talk about like what is the opposite of love? Is it hate? Some people may say hate, but I actually think it's indifference. Indifference to me is the opposite of love. So what's the opposite of cowardice or being afraid? The opposite of that isn't courage, because you have to be afraid in order to have courage. To me, the opposite of being afraid is curiosity. Someone may disagree with me, but that's the way I banish fear is, man, be really curious. " Why did I react that way? Or what are they really trying to tell me?" And instead of thinking, oh, this person's title is this, and this, I'm like, "what are they actually saying?" This is really interesting. So that's how I look at that.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. That's great advice too, just in general because curiosity allows you to explore and exploration is always a success, right? It doesn't lead to failure, it's just a way to learn more about the world around you.
Etienne Nichols: Absolutely.
Lindsey Dinneen: Well, okay, so you have mentioned that there have been a couple of moments along your journey that I guess confirmed to you that this is the right path. But I'm curious, specifically in the medtech industry, what is it that drives you, that gives you that passion to continue doing what you're doing?
Etienne Nichols: Yeah, I can tell you a couple different things. So the spark I would say happened when I was in college. I broke my arm and it was a go-karting accident. And I went to school with arm in a cast. But before I got my arm in a cast, the guy's name was Garrett Watts, the hand doctor who put me back together, and he knew I was a mechanical engineering student. He talked to me about the Synthes DePuy, I don't can never pronounce that word, but the little piece that was going to be placed into my arm with different screws and talked about the physics of it really fascinated me. I thought, man, as a mechanical engineer, I could contribute to this industry. That would be great. That was a spark.
Then when I met my wife, she has had a pacemaker since she was 11. So, I've seen her through multiple surgeries to get new pacemakers. And every time I see that, it's man, I am so thankful somebody developed this medical device. There have been other times when I had to watch a loved one go back to the OR, and just talking to the surgeons afterwards and learning about the things that they have to go through. I want their life to be easy. I want them to be able to do their job efficiently. And so I really am passionate about the medtech industry for those reasons.
You know, I love all of the things that go into engineering. I will never be the best at those things. And I kind of had to realize that somewhere along the way. The people who are really the best at anything are the people who do it for a living and also do it for a hobby. And those are the people you want in your life in different roles leading technically and things like that. But when it comes to MedTech, I realize I could be passionate about this product because I know the end user is going to be truly affected by this. Not only some unknown person, it could even be my wife, my son, anybody I love could be affected by this. To me, MedTech is really personal, and that's what confirmed this industry.
For different roles, I see myself as, I just want to help the industry and so whatever role I can be in, whether that's mechanical engineer or a project manager, or a regulatory consultant or a podcaster. However I can help further the industry to where we work more efficiently and more streamlined in a way that produces safe and effective medical devices. That's the role I want to be in, whatever that role is.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You've mentioned having opportunities to be in leadership roles, to lead teams, and we've had that discussion in regards to gratitude specifically, but I'm curious, how would you define leadership? Or what does it mean to you?
Etienne Nichols: That's a good question. And so two things come to mind. And they're actually both books, and so you don't have time to quote an entire book, but all my best thoughts came from someone else. And so even that's a line from someone. But the two books I could think of first one is "Leaders Eat Last," I believe it's by Simon Sinek. And it's really the idea that leaders are meant to build others up. In fact, actually, a third book comes to mind. That's "28 Days to Save the World" by your CEO dan Pervis. That's a fantastic book. I really recommend that one as well. And I'm not just saying that because it's your, it's your guy. He covers so much ground in that book. It really was something that you almost need to read multiple times.
But the second book that I recommend is "Captain Class" by Sam Walker. So he talked about the captains of teams. So usually when we think of a leader, we might think of the CEO, we might think of the executive team, and those certainly are incredibly important. But the "Captain Class" by Sam Walker, he's actually a sports journalist, if I'm remembering all of this correctly. He analyzed all of the great sports dynasties, not just someone who wins one off, but he gave certain parameters as to what he would define as a team sport and a team and a dynasty, and all those different things at the beginning of his book. But he talks about " what do they have in common?" And he looked at the coaches, he looked at the budget, he looked at the manager, he looked at the location, all these different things.
And the thing that he found that was really consistent across all of these dynasties was the captain of the team. It might not be the best player. It might not be the person who's most outspoken, but it's that person who brings a certain energy and can recognize when things are going sideways or things are changing, and he somehow tweaks the team in such a way that they can reorient and get back on track.
So you want your best player shooting hoops, shooting those free throws. They don't have to lead, they just do what they do. Put your best players in the positions where they can excel. But the captain, like I said, they may not be the best player. They may not be the best person on the team, but they're the person who's kinda like the glue, who gels everybody together. And so those two different concepts are what I think of a real good leader. Number one, leaders eating last, and the second one being that glue who's able to look at a bird's eye view and determine what direction we need to go in, what attitude adjustment needs to happen.
I'll give you one more little anecdote that you may have heard before, say you have a bunch of people working their way through a woods cutting with axes trying to get through the woods. The manager is the one running around saying, "Hey, do you have the right ax? Do you need this sharpen? Do you need this? Let's help you out." It's still a servant role, but the leader is the one who climbs the tree and looks up and says, "Hey guys, I think we need to go in this direction." So that's the leader in my mind.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So the visionary and the person who is the cheerleader and motivator and helps bring people together towards a vision.
Etienne Nichols: Yeah, so my, my dad actually told me something once that he probably got this from someone else, I'm not sure, but he said, " you know, Etienne, a leader without followers is just a guy taking a walk." And some of us are just taking a walk, but a leader is someone who people are willing to follow too. So yeah, there's lots of different facets. It's a good question.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So you mentioned curiosity before, which I think is a really important theme. And so I'm wondering how that plays into your continued growing and learning as a leader yourself. Obviously, you have had a bunch of different roles even within the industry and through various companies and I'm sure each one of them has prompted you to learn and grow in different ways. So, how do you continue to prioritize that these days?
Etienne Nichols: Yeah, that's a good question. I've gotta speak to your question about curiosity first. In every role that I've been in, one of the things that's really important to me is to understand how this role that I'm working in interacts with every other role in the organization. I'll give you a quick anecdotal story, I guess, for that. I was at one company where they put me in a cubicle that was right outside the break room, and that's a terrible idea. You do not put an engineer right outside the break room. The people had to walk out of the break room and either turn left or right or go straight into my cubicle. Since I was new, they told me that my cubicle was cursed. Nobody had managed to be there for more than three months. And nobody knew why. It's just cursed.
I'm like, okay. Well, I figured out pretty quick why. It's because I started writing down how many people came into my cubicle to say hi to me, and it was in the 30 to 50 people a day and I was not getting things done. Just a few minutes with each person, and that becomes hours a day. So I realized quickly that this is a problem or an opportunity. And so I tried to treat it like an opportunity. The next engineer who came into my desk or came into my cubicle, I said, "Hey, can you help me with this thing I'm working on my spreadsheet?" And they said, "oh yeah, you just do this, and this."
And my 15 minute task turned into a one minute task. And so that happened multiple times. Pretty soon I was getting more things done than pretty much anyone else on my row. And so being curious about what that person knew was really important to me. And I realized it clicked in that role early on in my career. And I said, man, I need to learn what everybody in the company does. And so I started actually making a running list of who is everyone in the company and who do I know. And I put a check mark next to their name and I said, "okay, I gotta meet this person and find out what they know. Meet this person, find out what they know."
It wasn't all me. When I came to that company, this is actually a really fantastic practice that this manufacturing company had done. They gave me a list of every machine in the entire company. And so we had multiple buildings, you know, out there. And they said your first job is to find every machine, learn who runs it and what product it touches and how that machine interacts with that product. And that's a big homework assignment. So if I wasn't interested, that would've been hard to accomplish. So, between my situation being outside the break room and my forced interest in the manufacturing floor, I decided to make it a personal goal of mine to meet everyone in the company and to learn exactly what they do, a little bit selfishly, to see if I could make my job a little bit easier to learn what they knew and so forth. And so that really helped. And that really reinforced the importance of curiosity.
Lindsey Dinneen: That's a great story and I'm sure you looking back are also quite aware, obviously of how things evolved in your own career. But it's fun to hear it from an outside perspective and go, okay, I see how certain things that you did, maybe just because you were curious, led you to be in a position now where you are comfortable-- maybe still get nervous-- but in general comfortable talking to all sorts of different people cuz hey, you were just going around meeting everybody, learning what they do anyway.
Etienne Nichols: Oh yeah. It's crazy to look back. When we look back, we can connect the dots easily, but when you're in that soup, you're in the moment you're like, oh, my life is a mess. You're not really exactly sure. But yeah, yeah, you nailed it, that's true.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And then nowadays your continued learning and growing as a leader in the medtech industry? Yeah.
Etienne Nichols: So the way I answer that, the way I prioritize it is it's true. We all, we only have so much time in a day. It's difficult to get those things in. I try to double dip as much as possible. And so what I mean by that is, let me give an example. The best way to learn something is to teach it, right? When I was approached, I looked at myself, I said, "Etienne, you don't have what it takes to do these things." And that was just my honest assessment of myself. But I said, but I'm gonna take this on and I'm going to get what it takes.
And so, after I was in the role a little bit, I started looking at the different conferences I could potentially go to learn more about these things. And you might make the argument, okay, going to a conference. That's a continuing improvement, right? You can learn there. Well, that wasn't good enough for me. So, I have a specific story about this. There's a conference called CMX. It's the number one conference for community building, I believe. I found that and I thought, "okay, I want my company to send me to this conference, but I don't just want them to send me, I want to speak on stage, even though I've been in community for only a few months."
I'm going to come up with a problem that I've faced and a problem I've solved, and I'm going to write a proposal for me to speak at this conference. So I sent it in. I sent my proposal in and they wisely said, "no, but you can moderate a panel." I thought, "okay, well that's good enough." So I went to the industry. I moderated the panel, but because I was speaking and I was gonna be on stage, I now had access to all of the voices in the industry who were speaking. So I sent them all messages, tried to socialize with them prior to going to that event. And I now have dozens and dozens of really valuable connections in the industry to that specific subset of an industry. So that's one example.
Another example I'd give is double dipping. I gotta describe something real quick. So there's something that I learned early on. Have you ever heard of " The Seven Spoke Wheel of Life" by Zig Ziglar?
Lindsey Dinneen: I don't know that I have.
Etienne Nichols: Oh, man, you've got to check that out.
Lindsey Dinneen: Okay.
Etienne Nichols: So I learned this in college, lets see if I can remember them all. But see, he has the Seven Spoke Wheel of Life. Essentially, what he says is there's seven spokes. You have family, career, intellectual, social, financial, physical and spiritual. I think I did it unless I repeated something. So all seven of those spokes essentially make up your life.
If you have a broken spoke, you have a flat tire, just think of it that way. So I looked at that and I said, "okay, well, I go running with different people and we usually chat about the same old thing." So I said, I'm gonna start using this Seven Spoke Wheel of Life as much as possible. And so the next guy who I went running with, I told him about the seven spokes. I said, why don't we pick a different spoke every time? We'll just talk about that while we run our 10 mile run or whatever it is. And so we would do that and we'd cover more ground.
And so when I say double dip as much as possible it's making those different spokes cross over each other. So that was, let's say, intellectual. Maybe I'm gonna meet with some engineers to go running. So that's a physical thing. That's an intellectual thing. It's a social thing. I have now met three needs in one interaction. Or maybe I'll go to a coffee shop in the morning. I have a book club that I meet with every week to discuss a book that we're talking about. So there's a social interaction, there's our intellectual interaction and it forces me to be reading. If you can double dip, even the podcast-- I get to practice my public speaking. I get to extend my career perhaps. But also meet with people like you, Lindsey, and other people in the industry, and it's really fun. So double dip as much as possible and don't feel bad about it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, that's great advice. I really like that. I like, I like the double dip because that's a little better than multitasking, right? Because we're actually not wired to do that. But I really like your idea of combining a couple of different things together for the win. So.
Etienne Nichols: Yeah, and I love that categorization. It helps me anyway to kinda have that seven spokes, so you kind of differentiate for yourselves. Okay. This truly is doing multiple things. it's beneficial for me anyway.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Just pivoting a little bit, just for fun. Imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want, doesn't necessarily have to be in your industry, but it could be. What would you choose to teach and why?
Etienne Nichols: A million dollars! Oh, okay. Well, So the thing that comes to mind for me is listening and I know it's a soft skill. And if I thought long enough, maybe I could come along something technical and specific to medtech. But for right now, listening comes to mind. So few people really listen. And sometimes I struggle with this myself, but most of the time we're just waiting for our turn to talk and you've actually done a really good job. I'm actually pretty impressed with your capability and your listening. It's really cool, Lindsey.
 But a lot of times when we think we're listening, we're coming up with that next thing to say, but instead if we're able to ditch those lines and listen with your whole body, your whole mind, your whole soul, make this person in front of you the most important person in your life. That changes everything because what I've realized is people are willing to give me the amount of attention I give them and not a whole lot more. And so, you've really gotta learn to listen to, to really succeed.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love that. And actually to your point, I'm curious how do you manage that as a podcast host and when you're moderating panels and things like that because part of your job does entail a certain amount of preparation. So how do you balance the two? Because you, you wanna get to the questions that are important for you, but then you also, of course, wanna be actively listening so that you can have a real conversation. Have you found a good way to balance that?
Etienne Nichols: It is really difficult. If anyone ever says moderating a panel or moderating a podcast is easy, I don't know that they really know what they're talking about. It takes a lot of focus. I go back to a quote, I guess, I think it's, was it Eisenhower who says "planning is everything, plans are nothing." And when you go to a, an interview like that or a panel is a good example. I'm glad you mentioned that. When you go to a panel, you probably have a list of questions that you want to get to, but it's hard for our brains to remember every one of those little points that we want to ask. So if you instead focus on the overarching theme that you want to cover, and this is the advice I give people, is focus on the overarching theme and then when you're talking to those people, you have your initial question, you'll ask that question and they'll answer, really listen, because most likely the gold is somewhere in that question that they asked.
I'll see if I can think of a example. If they're answering a question about the time that they, took a company public and it was pretty stressful at the time. They managed to get it public. They signed all the papers and now they're retired, but they're really excited because now they're advising other people. I'm like, okay, there's something stressful. I heard them say that. I wanna know, what did your wife think when you decided to take that public? What did your executive team, or what did the people who work for you think? I may have a list of questions, but I really want to dive in and just treat it like a conversation keeping in mind the overarching theme of the panel. So I dunno if that answers your question, but that's how I approach it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, I really like that. And something that came to mind as you were talking about the overarching theme was sort of in tandem to that-- maybe the idea of what do you hope the audience will gain from it? So if you have that perspective of I want the audience to feel inspired or I want them to know more about this particular topic by the end or whatever, then that can help guide the conversation too. Especially if it doesn't go quite the way you anticipated.
Etienne Nichols: Yes. I love that you said inspired or I want to make them feel inspired because that's a really good point. I told someone this recently, man, everything on the panel you could probably Google. Sometimes there's really good tidbits, but for example, Dan Purvis and I, we did the the interview a few weeks ago and it was a fantastic interview and you could go and read his book and maybe get a lot of the anecdotes that he told us about. But you're not gonna get the feeling of passion for the industry or excitement for the future and all these things. And so, that's really what a lot of these live events will give you. It gives you a feeling to move you forward and we think, "oh, that's wishy-washy. We're technical, we're engineers," but you can't forget that we're humans. We're driven in a certain way.
And so these interactions that make our job easier, a lot of that is softer skills or softer experiences and not necessarily hard technical things. As important as those are, you have to have the things that pull you forward. So I love that you mentioned that inspiring the audience and things like that.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, definitely. So speaking of inspiration, I suppose, what is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Etienne Nichols: I think it's interesting that we even want to be remembered. When I'd step outside myself and look at myself, I'm like, why do you wanna be remembered? But you do. And so I can't really get rid of that. That's fine. So when I think about that, the answer I think I would have is the strength of my kids. I heard someone say this once. See if I can remember exactly how it goes. I want my son to be the strongest man at my funeral. It's my job to make that happen. When I think of being remembered, I think about being remembered through my kids. There's another ancient writing that goes something like, "like arrows in the hands of a warrior so are the children of one's youth." So being a good dad, that's probably the most important thing to me in my life.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. And then final question, what is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Etienne Nichols: Oh, It would have to be my daughter. She's 13 months old now, and if a rainbow could become a person, that person would be Darcy, my daughter.
Lindsey Dinneen: That's wonderful. I love it. Oh my gosh. Thank you so very, very much for joining me today. This has been so much fun. Speaking of inspiration: lots of it, lots of great advice and your stories are fantastic. So thank you so much for sharing all of that with us.
Etienne Nichols: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much, Lindsey. I really appreciate you inviting me onto the podcast and excited to work together in the future.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, and we are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to the Polaris Project, which is a non-governmental organization that works to combat and prevent sex and labor trafficking in North America. So I really appreciate you choosing that organization to support and just again, thank you so much. We just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.
Etienne Nichols: You're so welcome. Take care.
Lindsey Dinneen: Of course, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you share this episode with a colleague or two and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Diane Bouis | MedTech Innovator | Connection & Mentorship, ”Switching,” & Being a ”Nerd in a Suit”

Diane Bouis is a scientist-turned-startup leader and ecosystem connector with MedTech Innovator. In this episode, she shares how accelerator programs can make a big difference in the success of a medtech startup, her passion for mentoring scientists leaving academia, her unique ability to "switch" easily and effectively, and why she self-identifies as a "nerd in a suit."
Guest links: https://medtechinnovator.org/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/diane-bouis/
Charity supported: Save the Children
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 008 - Diane Bouis
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to the Leading Difference Podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am so excited to introduce to you as my guest today, Diane Bouis. Diane is a scientist turned startup leader and ecosystem connector. She is the director of the US Program of MedTech Innovator, which is the largest accelerator for MedTech in the world. Diane, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited you're here.
Diane Bouis: I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Well, I would love if you would just start by introducing us to you. Let us know a little bit about yourself and your background, kind of what led you to this industry and this field.
Diane Bouis: Thanks for that question. Quite a few years ago. I told my parents at age 14 that I wanted to become a medical scientist and solve HIV/ AIDS, and cancer. No lack of ambition there. And I'll say unfortunately, I have not managed to solve either of these two problems so far. But I became a medical scientist, did my PhD in the Netherlands and then moved to the US right after my PhD to do a postdoc at University of Michigan. So, classic scientist trajectory, you do a PhD, you go to the US to do a postdoc and then you go back to Europe to become a professor.
I'm originally from France and so, so any European country would've done, but really loved it, loved the research that I was doing in cardiovascular research and stuck around and eventually left academic research by way of an MBA. And discovered startups and discovered the fact that science and business folks don't always speak the same language. And I often jokingly describe it as the dichotomy between the scientists who look at the business people just as suits, and the business people who look at the scientists as nerds. And so I always say, I'm a nerd in a suit. I am business and science, and that's an excellent place to be. So my motivation remains to save lives, but it has broadened a little bit from two very specific diseases to saving and improving lives across the industry.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. And oh my goodness. Yeah, you were definitely ambitious right from the get-go. I love it. I love it. And I love how your path has changed along the way, but you have clearly stayed open to all sorts of different opportunities and that has led you to experience some really amazing things, and like you said, you get to be a part of a lot of different discoveries and innovations and I think that's awesome. Well, thanks for telling us a little bit about your background. I am curious what you do now and how has that all come about?
Diane Bouis: So I'll take a step back and tell you a little bit about MedTech Innovator. And I appreciate that you mentioned in your introduction. We're the largest accelerator for MedTech in the world. And MedTech Innovator has been around for a decade. I am rather new into my job. I'm less than a year with the organization, so I don't really have merit in building this fantastic organization. However, we run an accelerator program between the month of June and October. But taking that a step back to, to really where we are and what we do. We work with startups in MedTech and we define that as medical devices and healthcare IT. And we work with startups in MedTech between the seed stage and the series C, so that's a very broad swath, I would say our cohorts are roughly split in two between the earlier stages, so seed and series A. And the later stages, B and C. And we work closely with our strategic partners. MedTech Innovator is a nonprofit, and so we're not asking for equity, we're not asking folks to relocate. We are really the conduit to great partners and mentors. And that is with great names in the industry and as well as investors. Basically, we connect you to people who can help you get to the next level. That's what an accelerator does, and we do it uniquely in MedTech.
And so I run the US program. That is the largest one, the flagship one. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the other two programs. We have an Asia-Pacific program that Sakeena Tan runs out of Singapore. And we have a BioTools program that Ayelet Marom runs. She's also in LA and so, specifically BioTools and MedTech innovator, we're in the same geography. We are working very closely together as we are recruiting startups. BioTools is adjacent and between the two programs, sometimes the applications overlap. MedTech is anything that impacts patients, whereas the BioTools application could be a startup that is in research tools or that is in platform technologies for personalized medicine. So those are the three programs. That's that's really where we play. And I personally run the West program, which means finding great startups, soliciting applications from great startups, and then facilitating some of the review. We have fantastic partners and reviewers and judges as well as then creating the program that really helps those companies accelerate.
Lindsey Dinneen: Thank you so much for that background, because that does provide a lot of context for our conversation and obviously for the amazing work that MedTech Innovator does and I can personally say from having attended just one event last year, that included some of the MTI companies that are part of this experience-- oh my goodness. I mean, it was so inspiring to hear from these inventors who are coming up with just amazing, life-changing devices. And wow, those stories must inspire you every day.
Diane Bouis: I agree. I always say I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business: saving or improving lives. And the inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them. And so I get to work with the greatest people.
Lindsey Dinneen: Well, so you mentioned a little bit when you were talking about your background, and I think this is a great thing to touch on, there can, not always, but there can often be a little bit of a disconnect between what you referred to as suits versus, did you say nerds or geeks?
Diane Bouis: I said nerds. I self-identify as a nerd.
Lindsey Dinneen: Okay, perfect. So what have you found that has really helped bridge the gap between those two, especially for, say these brilliant scientists and nerds, who, you know, have fantastic ideas, but maybe don't have as much of the business background to really bring those ideas to market , to actually market them, so that people can actually know that they exist and things. So, how has your interconnectedness of those two elements played out through your own career and as you are now in this role.
Diane Bouis: There's a couple of things that come to mind. One: it is very hard for all of us to know what we don't know. And so if I know, I don't know something, I can seek knowledge. I can ask someone questions. I can go and find a book and read it. I can get a course. If I don't know that I don't know, something, that's much harder. And so, every single one of us can strive to uncover the unknown unknowns. And one of the ways to do that is to surround yourself with people who are somewhat different from you and who know different things than you.
And so to come back to the inventor who has found a really fascinating phenomenon or who has invented a really interesting device but may not know a good way to get it into the world, to bring it into the market. In many ways, it's a matter of asking questions because when I meet someone for the first time, I don't know if they have perhaps previously held commercialization positions and know what they're talking about or not. And so asking questions: " who would use this? Do you know what the need is out there?" Depending on the situation and the level of comfort, it crystallizes to "who cares?" but saying, "who cares?" can feel adversarial. And so you've gotta pick your words wisely there.
But asking questions and learning and than bringing up the concept of the unknown unknowns to simply put that out there, you, and I say you in this case, to an inventor, maybe the world leader in a particular area of science. And while during my days in the lab, I was definitely very conversant in my particular scientific niche, I also recognize that there are areas of science that I'm not that conversant about, and so everybody understands that they're very good at something and maybe less good at other things. And so just opening that conversation. Once we both agree, maybe you don't quite know how to get to market, then we can have the conversation around, "okay, well what are the resources available to you here and elsewhere to learn about this and to learn what you might be missing?" And then sometimes I can connect someone to resources, accelerators are a good one, but very often there's grant funding opportunities. There are local economic development entities. There are other entrepreneurs. There are entrepreneurial organizations from whom you might be able to learn a thing or two. We learn a lot from our peers and so even recognizing that you may need a peer group can be helpful.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. So I'm curious, is there a particular moment that stands out to you because it clearly confirmed that this was the right career for you?
Diane Bouis: I will say for me, there have been several interesting moments of change and getting into accelerators was not an obvious choice. While a lot of our world was was slowing down due to the pandemic, I had the opportunity to help someone I know design a curriculum for a digital health accelerator and had a ton of fun with that. That person knew that I've done programming. I co-founded a healthcare hackathon nonprofit. I've run events that help healthcare innovators in many different ways. And so they knew that I could help with that and and so I did. And I had a ton of fun designing a curriculum and running a curriculum. And while that was supposed to be a one-off during the pandemic in my spare time, I recognized I had a ton of fun with it. And I think whenever, in our careers we realize, I'm doing something that is valuable, that people appreciate and that I'm really enjoying, ask yourself, is there a job where I can do more of that or where I can do that all the time? And so I, I did what any reasonable person would do. I Googled top "10 medtech accelerators." Lo and behold, as you would imagine the top result was MedTech Innovator and I had run across some social media posts from MedTech Innovator before so it wasn't completely new, but I thought, "gee, that seems to be the right organization for me, let me reach out to them." And I'm very fortunate that a little over a year later, here I am.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. What a great story. Do more of what you love when you can. Well, now obviously you have held a variety of different positions throughout your career, and it sounds like leadership has been a running thread, and so I'm curious, how would you define leadership or what does leadership mean to you?
Diane Bouis: I would say leadership is defining a shared goal and aligning one's self and one's actions to it, which then in turn also means aligning a team towards those goals. And so when the goals are very clear, we can all move in unison towards them. A friend of mine once said, "just hire great people and get out of the way." And I think that is correct, but that only works if you have a great shared vision where everybody intuitively knows we're all moving in this direction, therefore this is the correct action even if I don't have the opportunity to ask you for direct feedback. And so give a lot of feedback in the beginning and then align to that shared vision that we're all pursuing. So, to summarize, set a shared vision and and then go after it together.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. Very good. Yeah. And then what would be your best piece of advice for someone who maybe is early on in their career or is looking for the next step or whatnot, then they're interested in obtaining a leadership role within the medtech industry. What would you say to someone who might be wanting to do that?
Diane Bouis: The advice I always give to my mentees is, of course, get your name out there. And so say yes to opportunities, even if it's not immediately obvious how they will benefit you and in ways that are somewhat transparently self-serving. When you have opportunities to, for example, participate in ecosystem events. When you can give advice to a budding startup, when you have an opportunity to be on a panel or in a speaking role at a conference, those are ways in which you can showcase your leadership in the field, showcase the leadership, thought leadership of your organization. That's one of the ways a rising manager, a rising person in our industry really can get out there. I would also highly recommend joining professional organizations and joining a committee. It is about giving back to the industry, but it is also about the other members of that committee. We are at the same time, a large industry as well as an industry small enough where you will encounter people again, maybe not next year, but maybe 2, 3, 5 years from now. And so, be a good citizen and involve yourself in things that are directly useful to you professionally, as well as not immediately useful to you, but perhaps useful to others. It's a great practice to grow oneself, but it's also leading by example for the people you work with. Just because telling people to do something is one, doing it is the other. People will observe what you do and what you prioritize and will make similar choices.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. So, being a model, even if you are not yet in that position, but you are modeling the kinds of behavior that a good leader would want to exude anyway, so you can start doing that no matter what your job title is or where you are in your career.
Diane Bouis: I would agree especially , with the complexities in the MedTech industry, nobody knows everything and we sometimes don't know what other people know. And so, speaking up when you have knowledge that could benefit someone, is really helpful. I consider that as I still mentor scientists leaving academia. I consider that one of the biggest differences between academia and the business world. In academia, you only speak up when you truly know. In the business world, nobody has time for that, to wait until the last person might have gotten enough data to make a call. And so if you know something, speak up. There's opportunity to be heard. And if you have something to contribute, it would be a mistake to not contribute it. Together, we can truly make a bigger difference than individually.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. I love that advice. And I'm curious because you've mentioned you don't know what you don't know, adopting kind of a growth mindset and your own continuous learning and growing as a person. And I'm curious, as a leader, how do you prioritize your own learning and growing?
Diane Bouis: While I was still a scientist and contemplating getting an MBA, a friend of mine who had walked that path from PhD to MBA before suggested spending 10 to 20% of one's time on personal growth and personal growth is sometimes giving back to the ecosystem. So sometimes that's giving somebody else career advice, but also spending time reading something that is not directly pertinent to your work. And so, it can be a newsletter from a different industry. It can be a scientific article, it can be a book. Often concepts from other industries can really help. And so, making sure that you take the time to grow yourself beyond just the ability to make interesting small talk at the next conference, but really thinking about what the future looks like, the future of our industry, but your personal future and the world can lead to choices of books, of courses, of where is the world going to be in 10 years, and where do I want to be in 10 years? And the answers to those questions should lead to a couple of steps to do every week, every month to keep growing.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Good advice. Thank you for sharing that. So for fun, imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It doesn't have to be in your industry. It absolutely could be if you'd like, what would you choose to teach and why?
Diane Bouis: I think, I would enjoy designing a masterclass in switching, and that might sound funny at first, but I have come to realize that is something that I happen to be quite good at and that not everybody else is good at. And switching for me can be switching between different industries. I've worked industry agnostic almost for the past decade while I come from the biomedical sector. And so I can bring an analogy out of agricultural technology or petroleum refining that someone in the medical industry may not have thought about. So that's switching in terms of switching industries. But far more personally, I happen to be a speaker of several languages. I speak both French and German to my parents, and that's where the accent is from that, that usually tricks somebody up. So it's worth saying. And what I've realized since a very young age is many people speak languages quite well. I happen to be really good at switching and translating in real time, and so I can keep up a conversation with 2, 3, 4 people in 2, 3, 4 different languages simultaneously. And so switching is often the hard part and learning and teaching to really seamlessly go from one language to another or one area of science or a business to another, I think is a useful skill more of us could have. Now I would need at least a month to actually really design that course, but it would be a ton of fun. I think I'd enjoy that.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh, well I love that. That sounds like a wonderful skill to have. It peaked my curiosity a little bit because you had mentioned before that transition and for yourself and helping other people with a transition from say, the academic world for scientists or whoever to transition out of that. And I'm wondering for yourself or the people that you mentor, and this is a huge, I would think, shift for anyone. I mean, I've undergone various shifts as well, and it's sometimes it kind of impacts your identity. Do you find that's a component, that is something that you would talk about, say in your masterclass or even that you talk about in real life in your mentoring other people? Is that a component of it that you have found has been something to consider as you're making these life changes, these switches?
Diane Bouis: Absolutely. That's a really great question. We spend the largest part of our waking time at work, and so what we do professionally largely defines us, for better or worse, and that also means that if we make substantial changes that will almost invariably impact how we see ourselves and how others see us. And both of those, how we see ourselves and how others see us have a big impact on our psyche and how we perform in what we do. So it's important to be cognizant of that. And for me, that first step was leaving academic science. I'd been a scientist for a decade, and so "I am a scientist" stops being true when you're an MBA student. So then you're a former scientist, but you haven't quite arrived to, what am I now? And so, so, how do you define yourself? And I will often say "I'm lean startup" and working with startups is far more who I am these days and how I define myself. So helping startups is really the nutshell. But how we define ourselves is important. And it's important to spend some time on it because what we signal to the world, and especially people earlier in their careers, where you have been is evident from your resume, but who you want to be your next step is yours to tell. And so that is really important. And the past informs the future, but doesn't automatically define it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a subject that is not talked about a lot. But it is so important because it is, it's a huge component of making those switches and being able to make those switches effectively in terms of how you see yourself and like you said, how others see you. It does play a role and so it's nice to have honest conversations about that and, " let's think through that. Let's work through that." Thank you for sharing that. What is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Diane Bouis: I would say probably for caring. I care deeply and so most people and organizations and startups I interact with I cannot help but care, but that also often means I lean in and I, I truly do want to help sometimes in unconventional ways. Startups are unconventional, so caring. I think if there's one thing to be remembered for, it would be caring.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. That is a wonderful thing to be remembered for. And then final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?
Diane Bouis: I would say what fills me with joy and therefore makes me smile-- but it is a more profound feeling of joy-- it is good people coming out of the woodwork when asked. That is the very definition of community. Somebody needs help and asks, and the community comes to the rescue. I am part of a number of local communities, obviously with MedTech Innovator, for example, we just had a call earlier today with a 2022 cohort. So those are folks, most of them I haven't seen since October. And about 25 or so of the startups, of the 50 startups that went through the cohort, showed up just for updates. But then there's always someone who has a question as in, "Hey, have you heard of this conference? Hey, do you know someone who can help with this? Hey, do you know about this?" And there's always somebody who has an answer. And so it's community. It is asking for help and receiving help. That'll make my day every day of the week.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I love that. What a great answer. I just absolutely love that. Well, I just wanna say thank you so, so very much for your time today. Thank you for sharing your advice, your insight a little bit more about MedTech Innovator and everything that they provide to this industry. I just really appreciate it. We are very honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Save the Children, which works to end the cycle of poverty by ensuring communities have the resources to provide children with a healthy, educational, and safe environment. That was Diane's choice of an organization to support. And I just wanna say thank you so very much for doing that, Diane, and we just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. So thank you again so much for being here today.
Diane Bouis: Thank you very much for having me.
Lindsey Dinneen: Of course, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.
The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
Velentium's core competencies include electrical design, mechanical design, embedded software, mobile apps, contract manufacturing, embedded cybersecurity, OT cybersecurity, systems engineering, human factors and usability, and automated test systems.
Velentium works with clients worldwide from startups seeking seed funding to established Fortune 100 companies.
Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Frank Jaskulke | Medical Alley | Public Speaking, Making Connections, & Being Comfortable with Discomfort

Frank Jaskulke is the VP of Intelligence at Medical Alley, leading the company's startup and global business platforms. He discusses how he got involved ("serendipitously") in the medtech industry, how Minneapolis became known as the United States' "Medical Alley," why he's comfortable with discomfort, and why he advocates that everyone take public speaking classes. 
Guest links: www.medicalalley.org
Charity supported: ASPCA
Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 
PRODUCTION CREDITSHost: Lindsey DinneenEditor: Tim OliphantProducer: Velentium
 
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Episode 007 - Frank Jaskulke
Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey with Velentium and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.
Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.
Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.
Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.
Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.
Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.
Hello and welcome to the Leading Difference Podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am excited to introduce you to my guest today, Frank Jaskulke. Frank is the VP of Intelligence at Medical Alley, a consortium of 800 plus global healthcare companies. He leads the company's startup and global business platforms. Thank you so much for being here today, Frank.
Frank Jaskulke: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, I'm so thrilled that you are here. Well, if you are willing, I would love for you to share just a little bit about you and your background. How did you get into this industry?
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah. I got into this industry coming up on 18 years ago now, totally serendipitously. Out of college, I was working at our state capital, was just a page, the entry level staff job. And I got assigned to our commerce committee, which at the time was working on legislation to fund joint research between Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota on the topic of genomics. I found that interesting, learned a bit more about it. And when session ended, I needed to find another job until the next session, stumbled on Medical Alley. And honest to God, I got a job at Medical Alley the same day as I got a job at Home Depot across the street from our office and Medical Alley had health insurance. So I went with that and here we are, 18 years later.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh my word. Oh my goodness. What a great story. Okay, so very different potential career paths, and you went with Medical Alley. And obviously that turned out to be a great fit for you, but tell me a little bit about growing up. Was MedTech or healthcare something of particular interest? Was it a family interest or sort of what led you to say, yes, this could be the right choice? Even not knowing that you'd be with them 18 years.
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah, on the background of it, nothing would suggest this is where I would end up. No family history of it. My mom's a teacher and an artist. My dad's a mechanic. I studied American Indian law in school. Like, that was my focus and that is a family thing. But coming out of the session, landing at Medical Alley, what I learned very quickly was we have this community in Minnesota of healthcare leaders, you know, Mayo, Medtronic, United Health Group, 3M, and so many others, that it's kind of, it's the hometown team. If you are gonna be in healthcare, This is a really good place to do it. And I fell in love over time with all of the innovation and the creativity and most importantly, the commitment that the people had. These are all people who are super smart. They could go do anything, they could go do a lot of other things and make more money, have a less stressful life, but they choose to be in this industry and to do the work, whether it's as a doctor or nurse, or as an engineer, as a business leader. Because they choose that, I just found there was such a deep passion and being around that is motivating and enlivening.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. And so can you tell me a little bit about your career progression, even through Medical Alley? Where did you start and what are you up to today?
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah. I started at the front desk, was the receptionist and staff assistant. At the time, opening the mail, sending faxes. The way we promoted most of our activities was to send the fax to our member companies. It still weirds me out to think when I started, I didn't have a smartphone. I didn't have a computer for work at home, and we were sending faxes and that-- I'm not that old, it wasn't that long ago. But how quickly it changes. But the thing that really kept me was, I got lucky early on and I had a boss, woman by the name of Liz Rammer and a CEO, a guy by the name of Don Gerhardt, who just passed away a couple of months ago, who were totally on board with, bring smart people in and let 'em try things out. So from day one, they were having me meet with the companies. They were having me join in legislative sessions. They got me involved in the different aspects of the business. And when I wanted to try something, they let me try it and if I stumbled, they'd let me stumble and then they'd help me out. And for 18 years now as I've progressed up the organization, that has been a truism of Medical Alley as a company, that we've always had leadership who embraces bringing in smart, creative people with diverse backgrounds and then unleashing 'em and letting them figure things out, being there to help 'em. But you know, saying, if you wanna do it, go for it.
Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. That sounds like an absolutely perfect company culture in terms of allowing individuals to grow and be themselves and make mistakes and learn from 'em. I think that's pretty amazing. I can see why you've been there for that long.
Frank Jaskulke: It's not that we don't have challenges, but on that one aspect, I think we've done it really well and it's paid off. Former coworkers who are running businesses, have started companies, are executives in other healthcare organizations, have gone into the legislature. We have a state senator that came out of our office. Like great people have come in, done great work and then gone on to bigger things along their journey.
Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. Yeah, that is fantastic. Well, I'm curious, is there a particular moment that stands out to you because it clearly confirmed that this was the right career for you, that being in the medtech industry was your path?
Frank Jaskulke: I don't know if there was an exact moment, but I do know the string of moments. There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives. That simple. That we go and meet with the CEOs of startups, of big companies, of hospitals, of insurance companies, drug companies, and we listen to their problems, and then we come up with creative solutions to resolve those problems as an industry, right? Instead of you having to solve the same problem I had to solve, we solve it once. Once that clicked, it became really easy. I'm gonna hang out with smart people doing great things and my work is gonna make it easier for them to do more great things.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, I can understand that. And that brings up an interesting question, presumably-- although you'll have to tell me from your own experience-- but presumably, I would imagine it may have taken a little bit of time to grow into being comfortable in that role. I mean, was this something that you were just naturally extroverted or-- whatever the right word would be-- confident enough to just go into those conversations and, tackle them with ease or is that some element of the job that, you did sort of grow into?
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah, definitely grew into. I'm very introverted. Confidence wanes by the day, right? Sometimes good, sometimes not. But I've never been afraid to be wrong. The idea of the more you're wrong, the more likely you are to learn something, I've always embraced. And so I was super comfortable going into meetings and just saying, "I don't know what you're talking about. What does this mean? What's important to you?" And I took advantage of, especially early on in my career-- I was very young, relatively fresh outta school-- a lot of the CEOs were very open to the idea of they wanted to pay it forward, help the next generation, and were willing to just share their knowledge and help me learn more quickly. So the, definitely not confidence, not extraversion, but just purely being interested and being okay with being wrong. Probably longer than most people are comfortable with being wrong.
Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. And so can you share a little bit about how Medical Alley does assist its members? I know you have a whole membership platform. I know you do a lot of educational material, you hold events, but I would love to hear from your perspective. Why do people, why do companies want to be a part of Medical Alley and how do you all work together to better the industry?
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah. So companies fundamentally get involved for two reasons. One is they care about their ecosystem and community. They wanna make sure that there is this healthcare and health technology industry, particularly in Minnesota, for the next generation. The other reason is they need help for themselves, for their company. They have challenges they're confronting. That they understand can be better resolved together than individually. So the, fundamental operating model of Medical Alley I would describe as, convening to solve common challenges.
So back up just a moment. Medical Alley is the only group in the country that has healthcare providers, healthcare payers, and the technology firms, medical device, biopharma, diagnostic and digital health as co-equal partners in the consortium. By doing that, we're able to get these sometimes conflicting groups. I develop a device. I need a payer to pay for it. I need a provider to use it. The payer's trying to manage costs and outcomes. The provider is trying to grow patient volume and deliver better quality. Sometimes those things are aligned, sometimes they're not. We're the only group that can bring that whole ecosystem together and work on getting to better alignment, to ultimately deliver better patient outcomes at lower cost. And what we recognized a long time ago, and this goes back to Earl Bach and one of their founders who was also the founder of Medtronic. He recognized that there were often problems that a company would have that a lot of other companies had as well. And instead of one company solving that problem and then another company having to solve it, and another having to solve it, and a lot of wasted resources that don't help the patient get better. He brought the industry together and said, "Hey, we could identify those problems, distribute our resources and work on them collectively. And we'll more rapidly remove those roadblocks and we'll be able to help more patients as a result." And that is still the rallying cry today. Bring this industry together to solve some of the most challenging problems in healthcare that haven't been solved when we've operated separately, when it's only been hospitals or only medical device, or only the insurance companies. We think if we come together as an industry that's all of healthcare, we can have a bigger impact.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I know that the organization does a lot of good for a lot of people. So thank you for being here and for being so supportive of the medtech, the healthcare, all of those industries. That is really an amazing thing. So it's cool to hear from an insider perspective too, exactly what you all are passionate about and why you're here. So thank you for sharing that.
Frank Jaskulke: Oh yeah. Thank you.
Lindsey Dinneen: And then how would you define leadership? Or what does leadership mean to you?
Frank Jaskulke: I always feel like that's one of those questions that we all should have an easy path answer, but it's really hard. I think, for me at least, leadership means one working on things that matter. There are lots and lots of things we could do. There aren't as many things that we should do. And so I think leaders are the kind of people, regardless of where they are in an organization, that get us focused on what we should do. I think the second thing is, I would have always the idea of leaders make leaders. That the true sign of a good leader is the people that come out of their mentorship in support and development and become better leaders than you know, the person they were working with.
And then maybe the last piece, I think a lot about is, not just being the person willing to make the hard decisions, but being the person who enables your colleagues or your team members to make hard decisions and not worry about it. And I think we've all been in that situation. If something didn't go quite right, then now we gotta tell the boss about it and we're worried about the consequence. I think leadership is creating an environment in which when mistakes happen or when hard decisions have to be made, it's recognized, it's celebrated, it's accepted, not denigrated or punished.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, and for folks who might be interested, maybe, especially people that are younger in their careers, what is your best piece of advice for that person who is interested in obtaining a leadership role within the medtech industry?
Frank Jaskulke: Ah, learn how to manage sideways and manage up, early. And by that I mean, I see a lot of people who get really hung up on proving their worth and showing like how good they are at a thing or how valuable they are. And you realize, eventually if you get into a management or a leadership role that like the great ones are the ones who help others be better, not who do great work themselves. And so that, early on, learning about how you help others do their work better, how you help elevate your team members and your leaders and your company. I think that's one of the fastest tracks to then become a leader including the promotions and the pay and the title and all of that stuff that goes with it. Because ultimately that's the leader's job. They're not the one necessarily out making the sale or building the project, but they are marshaling the resources and getting the teams motivated to accomplish things they didn't think were possible. That can be done very junior in an organization. You can make others around you better by your presence and by your leadership, regardless of your title or your role in a job.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's true. I think there's a lot of perhaps, haziness, around the idea of a leader. And I think you're right, it doesn't have to be in your job title or even your job description. You don't have to be, directly managing people underneath you are leading people underneath you. You can be a leader in your own right. And set a good example and make a difference without necessarily having the title to match it yet. There are still many opportunities.
Frank Jaskulke: And that's a really good thing you said about setting the example, like modeling the type of culture we wanna have in an organization can be a very powerful part of leadership regardless of your level in an organization. Living the values, making decisions based on those values, and helping others to do the same. But, and I think it's, it sometimes is a big mindset shift for people to make. You know, when you're in an individual contributor role to a great degree, you are measured on what you deliver in the work. Whereas a leader or a manager is measured on what their team delivers or what the organization delivers. And so getting that early mindset of" I'm gonna model those behaviors, I'm gonna help the others around me to be better." I think that's how you get on the rocket ship.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, and to that point, something that you mentioned earlier, which I really loved was that you essentially, when you were having those initial meetings with CEOs and whatnot early on in your career, and you weren't coming from a place of extroversion or confidence, but you were coming from a place of curiosity and genuine interest and a willingness to learn. And I love that. I think that that's a wonderful trait because it can help you continue to learn and grow your whole life. But I'm curious, how do you prioritize your continued learning and growing as a leader today?
Frank Jaskulke: Oh yeah. I don't think it's a matter of prioritization. Learning just has to be all the time. You know, if you're not learning, I don't think you're getting ahead. The world changes far too much. This community and industry is so complex. There's always something new to learn. But then I think even more importantly, it's the mindset of being a learner. You know, if you have a fixed mindset, a mindset of scarcity, you're gonna have a hard time, I think, getting ahead in this world and making a real meaningful impact. Versus a mindset of abundance, of we can make more, and of being open to new ideas and new perspectives, new ways of approaching a problem. So, like for me, learning is my hobby and I don't have other hobbies. I don't play sports. I don't do art. I don't do other stuff. I talk to smart people, ask them questions and learn from them. And I always think of " How to Win Friends and Influence" guide.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Dale Carnegie.
Frank Jaskulke: Dale Carnegie. Thank you. He had a line in the book where he is " the best way to be interesting is to be interested."
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes.
Frank Jaskulke: And if I had a life motto, it'd be that. I am just interested in anything and everything, and that has been the difference maker. So it's never a prioritization. It just always is.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So I suppose that in your capacity in getting to continue to interview people because you're also a podcast host. Yeah, I was gonna say, so you get paid to do this, is basically the wonderful aspects of your job.
Frank Jaskulke: Bingo. Yep. And that is why I get passionate. I am paid to every day learn something, if not some things new. And by doing that it works out. And I mean, in a lot of ways it's kind of an old sales thing, right? Like people don't like to be sold, but people like to buy stuff. People may not want to hear your story, but people love telling their story. I want people to tell their story, I want to hear their stories, I wanna learn from it. And then that actually makes the business work even better.
Lindsey Dinneen: Are there any particular episodes or moments from an episode that really stand out to you in terms of either light bulb moment or a story that just kind transfixed you or something? I'm always curious what about from your perspective, are those moments?
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah we've had some fun ones over the years. Recently we had Dr. Bill Maurice, who runs Mayo Clinic Laboratories, and during the pandemic became very prominent because he's a massive, massive sports guy. And he started going on some of sports radio shows to talk about Covid and talk about vaccination. And this is an MD PhD, incredibly smart person, but who also is really into hockey and basketball and football and everything. He was able to connect with a group of people who were not as receptive to the traditional way of communicating about public health and vaccination. And have honest, thoughtful, open conversations about what was going on. And I would argue I probably made as big of a public health impact as anyone as a result. And it, it just really struck me how humble and honest and authentic he was about it. You know, It wasn't an air for him, it was legitimately him and he was excited to be on ESPN sports radio programs, like he was nerding out about it and able to then make a public health impact. So that has stuck with me.
The other one I've always liked, and I've interviewed her a couple of times, Lee Jones, who is the co-founder of a company called Rebiotix, and a longtime Medical Alley board member. She was a Medtronic executive in the medical device industry and started a biotech company in a state that is not known for biotech. But what's crazy, when they started the company, she thought she was starting a medical device company, and so it set it up as a medical device company, did all the normal stuff, and then the FDA said, "actually, you're a drug." And they had to pivot on the fly from a device company to a drug company. And the way she handled that pivot, the people she got involved, she was doing remote and hybrid work back in 2015 with this well before it was much of a trend. That company got FDA approval in September last year. They had a nice exit, great return for the investors, and hearing her story of a successful entrepreneur, a corporate executive, and pivoting from med device to drug and just going with it, I have found very inspiring.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that is amazing. Wow. Well, on a bit of a less serious note, so I've always wondered this, why Minnesota, why is Minnesota Medical Alley, just out of curiosity. I think Minneapolis is a cool city, but I'm just curious, what is the attraction? How did that become what it is?.
Frank Jaskulke: The honest to God, glib answer, but it's correct, is two things: the Mayo brothers stopped in Rochester 150 years ago, and Earl Bachan was born in Northeast Minneapolis. That was it. Like it wasn't planned. It wasn't a grand design, it was, Earl Bachan born here, started the modern medical device industry, Mayo brothers here, start the modern healthcare system and then we doubled down on it. The industry existed. And then we had thoughtful leadership, Earl Bachan, the Mayo Clinic leadership, a guy named Lee Berlin who came out of 3M, and at the time, Governor Rudy Perpich, back in 1984, they got together and they said, "Hey, we have something here we should build on it." So they created Medical Alley, the company, to organize and promote the industry. So we got lucky. And then if anyone out there, if you've read "Good to Great," we capitalized on our luck, right? We maximized our return on luck by doubling down on the industry, building it up, and creating an environment where if you're here, if you're doing medical device, you're gonna find the workforce, you're gonna find the suppliers, you're gonna find the investors, and you're gonna find the companies that might buy your company. If you're in digital health, you're gonna find the same thing. And increasingly, that's even becoming true if you're doing a biopharma startup here. Over time, a complete ecosystem is built up. But as Warren Buffet used to say, "we hit the genetic lottery" in having Earl Bachan born here and having the Mayo brothers stop here.
Lindsey Dinneen: Very nice. Okay. There we go. Now I know. Well, speaking of not quite as serious questions, but imagine someone were to offer you a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want-- does not have to be in your industry-- absolutely anything. What would you choose to teach and why?
Frank Jaskulke: Oh, that, that's easy. I would teach a class on the fundamentals of public speaking. Yeah. It's a skill that, no matter what you do, whether it's big business, a nonprofit, government, anywhere, public speaking, communication is so fundamental and a lot of people are scared by it. And then there's a lot of people who aren't scared by it, but do it poorly. And, harm their ability to drive their cause forward. So yeah, I'd do that one for free, but I'd certainly do it for a million dollars.
Lindsey Dinneen: Amazing. Well, okay, so that does generate a follow-up question then. Did you take extensive public training courses or classes or Toastmasters or anything like that? Or is your own experience over the years led you to a place where you would be confident in teaching a class.
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah. In high school I got very lucky and was recruited onto the debate team, had no idea what it would be about, fell in love with it and then joined the speech team and that has been more useful and a bigger contributor to my success professionally and personally than my undergraduate degree, than my graduate degree, than anything I've done. High school speech and debate is the best thing I've done in my education.
Lindsey Dinneen: Agreed. Yeah. I will second that. I actually also did speech and debate in high school . Yeah. And I do agree it is one of those, or two, of those classes or activities that you can do that actually do carry over substantially throughout your life, so.
Frank Jaskulke: Anyone out there if you've got kids that are thinking about stuff, it is well worth encouraging your kids to check it out. It is such a force multiplier.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Agreed. What is the one thing you wish to be remembered for after you leave this world?
Frank Jaskulke: I don't really care if I'm remembered or not. It kind of gets to the why, like the only thing I'm really interested in is that the impact happens. Whether or not people know I had a part in it, I'm okay with, I'll know.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Okay. And then final question. What's one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it? .
Frank Jaskulke: Oh, that's easy. That'd be my cats. We've got two cats, Astra and Zeneca. They're getting up there in age, but they're still, get home. They come and welcome me. Sleep on the bed all night. If days are warm or cold, they're always there. The cats.
Lindsey Dinneen: Aw. Well that's amazing. And it sounds like they're actually rather social for cats cause I think sometimes that's at risk.
Frank Jaskulke: Yeah. They're a little bit dog-like in how like clingy they can be. Um, not the aloof cats that we normally would think.
Lindsey Dinneen: Oh my gosh. Now, did you grow up with cats or was that something that you had, as an adult or where'd your love of cats come from?
Frank Jaskulke: I've always had pets. Yeah. We always had at least two cats and at least one dog forever.
Lindsey Dinneen: That's wonderful. Well, Frank, I just wanna say, this was so much fun to hear about you and your background, why you're passionate about the industry, what Medical Alley has done, not only for you personally, which is wonderful, but obviously for the world, how it's impacting lives. So I just wanna say thank you for sharing all of those stories and the behind the scenes. I love hearing that. And we are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is dedicated to preventing animal cruelty in the United States. We really appreciate, Frank, you choosing that organization to support and thank you just again, so very much for your time here today. It was so much fun to talk to you and get the behind the scenes, and I just wish you continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.
Frank Jaskulke: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me on and letting me share a bit about what we're up to, and I appreciate that Velentium is collecting these good stories to share more broadly, and has been a part of the Medical Alley community. And to everyone out there, thank you for listening to this story and helping to spread it. Medical Alley is always here at your service.
Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Thank you again, Frank, and thank you also to our listeners for tuning in, and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.
 The Leading Difference podcast is brought to you by Velentium.
Velentium is a contract design and manufacturing firm specializing in the development, production and post-market support of diagnostic and therapeutic active medical devices, including implantables and wearables for neuromodulation and other class three indications.
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