Week Three Recap: Techstars Healthcare, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai

The third week of the Techstars/Cedars-Sinai accelerator was really pretty crazy. Between our official, round-robin style meetings with mentors (back-to-back, 25 min each), feedback sessions with physicians, and other appointments we crammed onto the calendar, Maggie and I met with about 45 different stakeholders last week.

Just like week two, we heard lots of varied opinions. And, just like week two, we saw a lot of this kind of expression around the CS Spaceship. Do we regret it? No. Are we somewhat confused? Yup.

Aside from meetings from dawn to dusk, week three was also a big week for Inscope Medical because we had a new prototype to test with physicians. I even got to take our prototype into the amazing patient simulator lab that C-S uses for training and intubate a dummy with the newest Inscope Direct Laryngoscope.

Unfortunately, during all this testing, we found a few more design details that need to be fixed. And that brings me to what I learned (or re-learned) last week. Fair warning, it was a densely-packed week.

We tend to value losses more than we value gains. While I’ve read about loss aversion before, I had a very personal experience with it this week and it was fascinating to step back and analyze my reaction. I made a mistake with a design decision a few weeks ago that was realized this week. That mistake will cost us about $5–10k to fix and 2–4 weeks of development time. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor loss that won’t kill us.

However, finding that mistake hurt. It hurt really bad. For about a day, I was an angry mess. I couldn’t forgive myself. What struck me later though, is my negative reaction to this setback was significantly stronger than my positive reaction to the budget/timeline savings we managed to find in week two, despite those savings being greater in magnitude than the losses. Adding the week two gains and week three losses, we’re still looking at a net positive. Yet, I spent a day angry at myself for a mistake. Guess I’m still human.

So that leads me to my next point, and one that I don’t quite do a good job of recognizing for myself yet. Most people do a poor job of consistently understanding individual responsibility in a team effort.The mistake I mentioned above? It wasn’t completely my fault. Neither were the gains we found in week two. But it’s still easier for me to assign blame to myself during bad times and distribute praise during the good times.

You have to find an anchor to keep you sane during really intense stretches. Last week felt really off-balance at almost all times to me. My sense of time was (is) completely lost because the density of activity and information is pretty staggering. My sense of clarity about our company and product has been challenged in several different ways. My normal stress-relieving outlets are a couple hundred miles away because we moved out to LA for the program. In short, last week was a breeding ground for sudden failure.

About mid-week I realized that I was really in need of some stability to help weather the storm. So what was my anchor? Simply walking, actually. The 25 minute (or much longer sometimes) walk back to my apartment at the end of each day has turned out to be a great time to reflect on the day and absorb feedback from mentors.

Also, Audi won the first FIA WEC race of the season at Silverstone over the weekend! :D

When reflecting and discussing your progress with mentors, try to end on a good note or an actionable item. If you don’t follow this, you’ll end up like me at our weekly program recap meeting; you’ll cause a super awkward silence after you announce your struggles. We’re not talking about awkward chuckles, but full-blown crickets. Yup, I sure can liven up a party.

Going back to my previous comments about the design mistakes I made, last week was a great reminder that you should steal as much as you (legally) can from existing products in your industry. “But Adam, stealing is wrong.” You can’t see it, but I’m glaring at you as you think this.

You know what’s more wrong? Dumping a bunch of your startup’s money into designing a product when there is a proven design in the public domain that you can modify. Also, this helps reduce the potential negative impact of your other innovative features on the customer. Remember, humans, like sleep aids, are habit-forming. Try to avoid breaking too many habits at once.

Have I gotten this feedback before? Yes, of course.

Did I ignore it? Yes, of course. Well, not entirely, but I did ignore just enough for the resulting mistake to sear the lesson into my brain.

Will you regret it if you (completely) ignore the collective wisdom of established products/competitors in your market? Yes, of course.

It’s all about team, team, team. It seems like I keep mentioning something about team value. However after a few weeks in program, this takes on a bit of a different meaning. Quite suddenly, the value of other co-founders in the cohort, partners, your contractors, etc. skyrocketed for us, because the weight of all the decisions and meetings of the week became difficult to bear alone. Without an incredible contractor partnership, a strong and supportive cohort, and great partners, week three would have been much worse.

That brings me to my last cliche of this blog post; there’s a lot of beauty in the struggle. The really lazy, but really common reaction to the challenges of each new day (or each new feedback data point of Mentor Madness) is to complain or allow the stressors to win.

It takes real courage and uncommon stamina to take on each new challenge with a smile and positive attitude. I certainly am not a shining example of staying positive in the face of adversity; there are several co-founders in our cohort who could serve as the example.

However, two in particular have spread positivity, built up other cohort members, and thoroughly improved the program experience around them, all while enduring a situation that would cause most founders to quit. It’s amazing to see that two people can put in the effort necessary to continue to give the best of themselves when their own struggle is so great. To be in their presence is both humbling and uplifting.

Other random thoughts:

Cultivating your network via LinkedIn is super powerful. Ask John Hill.

I’ll defer to Mark Suster’s wisdom about navigating confusing feedback, and just note that it takes diligence to put this advice into effect.

UberEats is really easy to get addicted to when your day is super packed. Travis Kalanick do I get free UberEats now?

Soylent isn’t as viable a meal substitute as I hoped it would be. Bummer.

If you enjoyed this, follow me here (and on Twitter) for more. Also, please share with anyone you know in entrepreneurship; disseminating my knowledge gained from this experience is a big goal for me. I’ll be writing a weekly recap of lessons learned during Techstars, along with some occasional posts about medical devices, startups, healthcare, etc.

Week One Reflection: Techstars Healthcare, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai

I’m happy to finally be able to publically announce that Inscope Medical Solutions is a part of the 2016 Techstars Healthcare Accelerator, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai. It’s an amazing program, for so many reasons. But it also feels a bit like deja vu.

Our first week here felt kind of like the first week of school. Except I actually want to be here. So it’s not actually a whole lot like the first week of school at all. But, I’ll continue the metaphor for laziness’ sake.

Remember how you always felt compelled to try to meet everyone in your class (and if you are an introvert like me, you probably didn’t actually make a huge effort) in that first week? Yup, that feeling again.

What about that one teacher/professor who always assigned something the first week? Remember that? They’d say, “Don’t worry, you won’t be graded on this one. It’s just to establish a baseline.”

At least we get to learn while sitting on bean bags…

Liars. They always graded that first assignment. Well that’s the managing director (MD from here out — yes it’s a bit confusing in a healthcare accelerator). Again, unlike school, I actually want to do the assignment, but I don’t fully understand it (KPIs are seriously hard for a pre-revenue company). Also, our MD isn’t a lying teacher. He’s pretty awesome.

Then there’s the school that felt somewhat like a prison, because you were plucked from break and stuck in for hard (work) time. You have to remember that, right? Yeah, our accelerator space is not remotely similar. It’s pretty stunning. We’re spoiled. 

Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but they’re not nearly as valuable as visiting the space and feeling the energy. Come see for yourself!

Did you ever get sent to the office and have to deal with the (surprisingly small) staff that you knew probably ran the place with black magic, but you never actually witnessed it first hand? Me neither, I was a perfect angel that never got in trouble (or caught). Anyway, every time I dealt with them in school, I could sense a secret loathing. None of that here. It’s incredibly humbling (and that’s really not a strong enough phrase) having people work hard to facilitate your work. Not just people though, seriously capable (probably more capable than me) people like Maureen, Omkar, and the associates who just want to make us more awesome.

Was there graffiti in the bathrooms at your school? There isn’t any here, but there was some at a gas station near the accelerator. I’m only including it here because I think it’s aBanksy, and that’s really cool.

Did you have a big pep rally or meeting your first week of high school? Well ours was on our first day. We watched part of an in-house innovation competition at Cedars-Sinai and the excitement in the room was tangible. But it wasn’t our excitement; it was the staff, nurses, physicians’ excitement from being actively encouraged to develop solutions to problems within C-S by the senior leadership. There was true, palpable buy-in from everybody I saw in the room. I’ve seen less-engaged audiences at startup events held by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

I could go on and on, but I’ve got “Mentor Madness” to dive into and homework to work on. Here’s what was due last week (and might be spilling over already):

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — these amazingly helpful tools help you identify, measure, and manage the most important metrics for your company. When you’re doing week over week (WoW) updates like we have to as part of Techstars, hardware development KPIs don’t fit. So Maggie and I are re-setting our KPIs.
• Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) — figure out the one most important activity is for the week (hard). Set that as your primary objective (easy-ish). Determine what constitutes success, your key result (hard). Now identify what question you expect the OKR to answer (hard).
• Institutional Review Board (IRB) — Cedars-Sinai is going to actively help us get our first devices used in patients. This is huge for us!
• Identifying, Prioritizing, and Testing Assumptions — we thought we knew how to do this. We were wrong. Use the questions “do we have data to back this assumption up” and “how critical is this assumption to my business” to sort/prioritize. Duh? Yup, but reminders are good.
• Jerry Colonna taught us how to be better humans and how to continually practice being a good human. Check him out, he’s pretty powerful.
• David Cohen answered a lot of questions, and gave us a lot to think about. No real homework here, just a lot of mental jogging. He did re-assert the value of building a strong startup community in your hometown. Ahem.

#givefirst y’all. #givefirst (it’s a Techstars thing, but you should understand)

From the moment I walked into the accelerator space (technically I’m supposed to call it the Cedars-Sinai Innovation Center), I knew this was going to be a very different experience from anything I’ve had before. Both Techstars and Cedars-Sinai clearly pulled out all the stops to make sure this program will be successful. But the more amazing thing to me is how clear it is that very few of “the stops” that were pulled out for the program were manufactured for the program. Everything I’ve seen about Cedars-Sinai so far shows me that innovation is truly built into every aspect of the company’s operations, so the partnership with Techstars is just an extension of that. We’re in the right place.

So what’s my big take-away from this week? The magnitude of the opportunity in front of Inscope Medical is far greater than I imagined. I’m humbled that we were selected to join this very strong cohort and work with such an amazing set of partners. But we are determined to make the most of it.

If you enjoyed this, follow me here (and on Twitter) for more. I’ll be writing a weekly recap of lessons learned during this new program, along with some occasional more general posts about medical devices, startups, healthcare, etc.