89.3 KPCC Demo Day Review

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has teamed up with a startup accelerator to provide a boost to firms developing new products for the health care field.

A key idea behind the effort is that providing access to medical and other experts who can give an invention a test run can make the difference between failure and success. 

The program, which Cedars recently launched with the global startup accelerator Techstars, runs for three months.

The partnership invests $120,000 in each company chosen to participate, and provides work space in a lab across the street from Cedars. The goal is to help the startups fast-track their products into the marketplace. 

Cedars and Techstars selected 11 firms for the initial three-month program after sifting through 500 applications, says Omkar Kulkarni, the hospital's point man for the project.

"In those three months we surrounded them with mentors," he says. The mentors include "about 500 people from Cedars-Sinai, from local hospitals, from the investment community, other startup communities." 

The firms in the program "learned whether or not their product was a fit for the health care market," Kulkarni says. "We really had a chance to closely work with these companies to build and pilot technologies that would otherwise have been really difficult for these companies to do in such a short period."

The initiative's first class of health care entrepreneurs graduated last week.  On graduation day, each company demonstrated its product for an audience of potential investors. 

Among the 11 new products: virtual reality goggles that immerse patients in calming scenes of beauty as a drug-free way to manage pain; an inexpensive endoscope designed to eliminate the risk of infection because it’s disposable after one use, and a secure text messaging system that allows patients to set up appointments and communicate with their health providers. 

The second crop of startups will go through the program early next year, says Kulkarni.

Releasing Some Pent up Thankfulness: Techstars/Cedars-Sinai Healthcare Accelerator

I have to preface this by saying that I can’t claim the title here. It’s a brilliant line from one of our cohort-mates, Kyle Hill of HomeHero about the power of intentionally taking time to encourage outward displays of thankfulness in company meetings:

People have a lot of pent up thankfulness just waiting for the right forum to express it.

What struck me about Kyle’s comment was his insight that his team’s thankfulness was pent up, as in under pressure, waiting for an excuse to be released. We often think of anger, aggression, or other negative emotions in this way and recognize the need to provide a constructive outlet for the negativity to ensure an overload doesn’t occur. For me, the release used to be boxing or working out, but I can’t seem to find time here in LA…

Anyway, as far as I know, there’s no common outlet for expressing thankfulness on a regular basis. For whatever reason, it is nearly as uncomfortable to directly thank a colleague for doing their job as it would be to chastise a colleague for not doing their job. This shouldn’t be true, but we even see it between the closest co-founders here at Techstars. But by simply giving his team an open, welcoming forum where they could truly and publically recognize their co-workers’ efforts, Kyle was able to ensure that no good deed went unrecognized.

The result? According to Kyle, an increased sense of company cohesion and renewed vigor to achieve the goals ahead. I’m sure it was pretty powerful to be in the room during this exercise.

Before Kyle’s comment, I thought I was pretty committed to recognizing what I have to be thankful and showing my colleagues that I appreciate their efforts. But I realized that I too allow my thankfulness to get pent up or go unsaid. So, in the spirit of Kyle’s comment, I want to spend most of this blog releasing some personal pent up thankfulness. I haven’t re-read any of my previous blogs, so some parts of this may be a bit repetitive. If that happens, take it as a sign that I’m especially thankful.

Either someone’s not paying out when we pass Go, or we haven’t passed Go yet… Both are scary. (credit: BGR.com)

Startupland is a roller coaster. We all know that, and on some level accept when we pick our character and put it on the first square. But the last couple weeks for Inscope have been a daily, and often hourly, roller coaster. To put it simply, every day has felt like Tuesday. And Tuesday is the worst day of the week, guaranteed.

The Inscope roller coaster has very nearly left the rails on a couple occasions recently, and it’s only thanks to the heroic efforts of a few people that we’re still on track.

First, and probably most important, is our development team at Occam Design back home in Louisville. To say that I’m thankful for our relationship with Occam is an understatement. If you have any need for an team to help you design/develop/manufacture a medical device, there is no company I’d recommend more.

Minor deviation, but I’ve realized recently that startup founders/employees aren’t the only ones affected by the ridiculous pace of Startupland, not to mention accelerator programs. Everyone associated with each startup, but particularly development teams and corporate partners, gets at least a taste of Startupland, whether they like it or not (I keep capitalizing Startupland because I kind of want to make a board game by this name about entrepreneurship). My experience has been that most partners can’t handle the kind of rapid changes we’ve thrown at Occam.

On a similar note, I have to thank my friend Daniel Johnsen, who has completed several last-minute 3D prints for us when no other options would work and we needed results in less than 18 hours. He and the LVL1 makerspace have been clutch, to say the least.

We haven’t just been saved from product development mishaps recently. Maggie can tell you more, but a recent seminar from Techstars co-founder and startup guru, David Cohen, has radically changed our perception of how to successfully fundraise. Are we thankful for his insights and time? You bet. Despite a couple unexpected setbacks recently, we’ve used David’s advice to build even more momentum than we had before the setbacks. As a result, we should have a big announcement soon.

Really? You filed TPS reports all weekend? Sounds thrilling. (credit: Office Space)

You may have experienced this in the break room at your office; there’s always that one (dozen) coworkers who will ask about the project you’ve been struggling with just to make small talk. They don’t actually care, they just don’t want to re-caffeinate in silence. Buncha jerks.

I don’t have enough digits to count the number of co-founders, employees, and TS/CS staff who have asked about our struggles, not to make small talk, but to find a way to help or lend a truly empathetic ear. I can honestly say I haven’t experienced anything like this before and I’m incredibly grateful. I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out a few individuals from this group (in no particular order):

- Monica Jain — a wealth of knowledge about navigating product testing in a regulatory-compliant manner that also happens to have seemingly endless energy and willingness to help each company here.

- Omkar Kulkarni — I’m pretty sure his middle name is Magic. Need a contact? Done. Need killer advice? Just ask. How about a reminder that it’ll all end up working? Just in time, every time.

- Sri Batchu — social media, entertainment, boundless energy and optimism all in one Indian Teddy bear (his words, not mine). He also knows all of DJ Khaled’s major keys now, so watch out world!

Adam teaches us about tea and how to de-stress for a few minutes.

- The Techstars Associates — Adam, Elana, Mattieu, Michael, and Timur make our accelerator life work. They make snacks appear, keep us on time to meetings, rebuild websites, make pitch decks, collect product feedback data, teach us traditional tea ceremonies, and any other crazy task we ask, all with a smile. They live #givefirst.

- Maureen and Matt — our accelerator mom and dad that always have time to talk through our daily/hourly challenges, set up great speakers and connections, and much more we probably don’t see. And, it’s their first time doing this Techstars thing…

- Dr. Hopp, Dr. Gold, Dr. Liu, Dr. Torbati — four of our mentors that always have time to give us advice. I’m pretty sure they also take really good care of patients in what little free time we leave them.

- The Cedars-Sinai legal department and executives — basically the (benevolent) puppet masters that pull any string we ask for and have shown a willingness to move both rocks and hard places for every company here. They are proof that big organizations don’t have to be slow and can foster innovation.

- David Brown and Kevin Tapply — Techstars executives and two of our mentors. Proof that the commitment to building companies and founders runs deep top to bottom in Techstars, these guys lead by example by making connections for us that otherwise would take months or longer. The crazy part is that, in making these connections, they have never made us feel as if we’re asking too much; quite the opposite.

Lastly, I have to release some personal pent up thankfulness to my brother, my sister-in-law, my mom, my girlfriend, and my fraternity brother. The random reminders of home, pictures of family, and terrible jokes are always perfectly timed. A successful founder recently gave us some advice to help overcome the rough patches: keep an image of the handful of people you’re building your product for in mind. You guys are that core group.

I was originally going to call this blog post Whack-a-mole, or Zen and the Art of Problem Solving in an Accelerator, but I decided to change it at the last minute. Why? Mostly because it didn’t seem right to keep bitching about how often problems occur in startup life when we have so much to be thankful for. New and inventive problems are guaranteed, new and incredible support is not.

To everyone that has helped so far, and especially to those that we have somehow neglected to thank, please know that we recognize and appreciate everything you do.

Rise and Fall and Rise of a Startup By Adam Smith; Art by Ruolin Li

Stasis Labs: A Startup Story

A Marathon of Sprints: Techstars Healthcare, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai

Before we started Techstars, I made a promise to myself and a friend that I’d write a weekly blog about what happened and what I learned. Well I skipped week 4, so this is a combo post. Fair warning, it’s a bit long.

A lot of people like to refer to entrepreneurism as a marathon, rather than a sprint. Frankly, I think that’s wrong. My (somewhat limited) experience so far has shown me that starting a company is more like a series of sprints, connected only by the occasional break to re-orient yourself as a founder.

While I’ve never run a marathon, I think I understand the general concept. Running a marathon requires a deliberate focus to keep your pace consistent over a great distance, right? That’s not startup life. At least not in my experience.

In my experience, startup life is about all out speed, and somewhat deliberate chaos. Needed to make a major decision yesterday? Manageable. Just found out about a grant opportunity? Bring it. Major product revisions before the rollout this Friday? Assemble the devs!

It may get crazy on a fairly regular basis, but the sprints of startup life are pretty normal and they’re generally pretty distinct. You run a 100m dash, collect yourself, power through the 200m race, take another breather to make sure you’re on the right track, and knock out a 400m sprint. Easy? No. Impossible? Also no.

Sometimes its ugly. 

So if starting a company is a marathon of sprints, what is an accelerator? Again, recognize that I’m coming at this analogy from a point of inexperience, but Techstars feels like a marathon of those Spartan/Tough Mudder/etc. races.

Here’s the big difference vs normal startup life: in an accelerator, you set a big weekly goal for yourself that requires several components to come together. That may be normal for some companies, but it doesn’t fit medical devices well. To achieve those goals, you’re sprinting (finding experts/stakeholders to talk with), leaping over hurdles (setting up meetings), slogging through mud (product development), making semi-blind leaps (also product development. Or business strategy. Both), crawling under razor wire (definitely anything to do with regulatory compliance), and trying to avoid the jerk with the fire hose (customers and/or investors giving feedback). And that’s all just Tuesday. Oh and don’t forget that you set yourself two big goals this week, because you’re a masochistic jerk.

Turns out Soylent isn’t people. It’s astronauts. Tasty tasty astronauts.

Perhaps this process is slightly better for the companies with larger teams, but word around the Soylent fridge is that the variety of the work may be reduced on an individual basis, but there’s an corresponding increase in the magnitude of work. Racing around to put out small fires becomes flying cross-country to fight blazes.

Sorry, my analogy got away from me there… We were talking about running weren’t we? And who would put fires on a track where people are racing? Probably a competitor.

If it sounds like we’re a bit crazy to deal with all this, allow me to confirm your suspicions. We’re not just dealing with our crazy world, we’re probably loving it. Well most days. Generally not Tuesdays though. Tuesdays are the worst.

                                                                           . . .

So what did we learn the past two weeks? A lot:

Perception of our prototype performance vs current laryngoscopes, where 3 is equal performance.

Weekly key performance indicators (KPIs) and hardware companies don’t quite fit with each other. It has taken us about four weeks to get there, but we finally have a KPI graph to show — potential users of our scope like the design changes we’ve made! Once we’re outside of the accelerator environment where weekly gains are necessary, our KPIs will make much more sense on a monthly cadence.

See that patent print? It’s from 1937 and the most common laryngoscope design has changed very little since then. Replacing it is my motivation.

However, our Kanban is kind of sad. Look at that backlog! Gross. The huge backlog stems from struggling to prioritize work when it all seems important.So we had to create a “reconsider” category to allow ourselves a way out of dealing with things that still feel important, but we know aren’t going to happen this week. I’ll let you know when it really starts helping.

When really uncommon or interesting feedback comes your way, it is important to fully consider the source and the implications of following the feedback. We received some feedback about our business strategy that we hadn’t heard before during mentor madness and got similarly challenging feedback in week 5. The questions that were posed to us forced us to revisit not just our targets for first sales, but also our timeline to corporate and distribution partnerships. You know, just a few minor details.

When I wanted to dismiss the feedback or revert back to old decisions (out of laziness/frustration/decision exhaustion), Maggie really dug in to make sure we got the most out of the feedback that we could. The result was a lot of additional effort to make sure we found the right experts that could give us specific feedback about our niche, but we have much more clarity now. So not only did I get a lesson in the value of digging into feedback, I got a reminder that your startup co-founder is critically important during tough times.

So what did we learn from all the feedback? The business development strategy possibilities for a medical device company are very, very diverse. Maybe that is a really predictable answer, but I could easily write a post on just medical device business strategy and not cover it all. Maybe I will, later.

The inter-program bond continues to grow, at speeds and strengths I have not witnessed before. Each time one of the companies has experienced a major challenge, the rest of the cohort has been incredibly supportive.Sometimes it’s simply encouragement, sometimes that support is connections to experts, and others it’s actively helping solve a problem. We experienced all of this in the past two weeks, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to work in such an uncommonly supportive environment.

This is going to sound dumb, but I had a revelation the other day, based on my experience intubating a simulator in the Cedars-Sinai patient simulator lab… our laryngoscope is going to have a potentially massive impact on the lives of the patients it touches. Only through a fervent focus on perfecting the device can we ensure that our device will only improve patient outcomes. This unfortunately means that product design setbacks, while not inherently positive, are important because they refocus us on getting the design right. Not until we get our fully functional prototypes into the lab again in two weeks will be be able to prove the efficacy of our recent design changes.

Other random thoughts:

• Patience may be a virtue, but it’s a pain in the ass. Unfortunately everything seems to ask me to be patient lately.
• Louisville, we talked about having an open relationship, right? LA has been flirting really hard with me, and I’m finding it hard to resist…

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.

Techstars: A Journey into Healthcare

We had a dream — a big dream — to make the world better with Virtual Reality. Working with the best academics in the world, we learned how VR could help people tackle big human problems. Academic research has proven time and time again, VR can make us more empathetic, reduce anxiety, and even help decrease severe acute pain.

We talked to a lot of people, at big companies, and big organizations (even the White House) about this big idea. Some smiled. Many nodded. Cedars Sinai and a few other innovators took action! A few months later, we find ourselves involved as part of the first Techstars Healthcare Accelerator, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai.

After an NBC News segment aired about our pilot with Cedars, a number of people in the investment and tech community recommended that we take a look at the accelerator. We realized we were onto something HUGE. We already had our plan, and this would change it. We asked advice from many business leaders and met with the Techstars and Cedars-Sinai Managing Director. We felt the influence of the Techstars community. It became clear that when enough smart people tell you to do something, you better do it.

Techstars Healthcare Accelerator

The Techstars Healthcare Accelerator Program, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai, is a 3-month intensive program that provides access to capital, mentorship, business development and more, to illuminate the entrepreneurial journey. It’s basically a crash course in the healthcare landscape to help drive innovation. As part of Techstars, we moved our office and came together with a great number of healthcare tech innovators. We immediately felt the value out of being part of the community. The accelerator environment is collaborative and challenging, and we needed to bring our “game faces” as innovative, smart-as-hell entrepreneurs enveloped us, united behind a common purpose. With access to some of the top healthcare professionals and business people in the country, who all want to see us succeed, and with Cedars fully engaged from the C-suite down, the support has been overwhelmingly positive.

Our journey is dynamic and exciting, and we’ve learned a lot. Here are a few of our key takeaways from this experience thus far:

The Value of VR in Healthcare

VR can help patients in a variety of departments from Emergency and Surgery, to OBGYN and Pediatrics. From reducing anxiety before an operation to distracting a patient from pain after surgery, the therapeutic benefits for a patient using VR have proven beneficial in improving the healthcare experience.

One of the most important metrics is patient satisfaction. Under the Affordable Care Act, there’s an increasing importance of patient satisfaction scores for hospitals. In fact, quality is now being tied to reimbursement, with a percentage of Medicare reimbursements tied to quality measures. Thus far, our VR technology has been really helpful to patients in managing their anxiety and pain and we’re excited to see how this affects patient satisfaction long term.

Redefining “Better Design”

Even with the best content in the world, VR wouldn’t be integrated into healthcare if it isn’t easy to use, embraced by the healthcare professionals and is non-disruptive to a very complex work flow. We’ve redefined our “better design” mantra to include not just the patient experience, but also workflow design and staff experience. Our applications can be experienced from the confines of a hospital bed, from different positions (seated, supine, etc.) and by people of all ages and backgrounds, all easily managed by the nursing staff.

Plus, there are a lot of small, but important things to figure out, such as sanitation. If you’ve ever tried VR at a conference or public display, you know it’s not the most sanitary experience. Your face touches the same part of the headset as hundreds of others. We have had to innovate on how to take a consumer technology and make it useful in healthcare.

Demonstrating ROI

Ultimately, there needs to be a clear value proposition for the patient, the staff, and the healthcare provider. There is a lot of really engaging, entertaining VR content out there. But, there are very few content developers who are performing clinical validation and extensive user research to understand the effectiveness and usability of their content. For VR to be embraced in healthcare, there needs to be clear value demonstrated for helping the patient improve their experience in healthcare, helping the staff engage their patients in an innovative yet practical way, and for the healthcare provider to see benefits in their P&L.

In the coming weeks, STAY TUNED for updates on our journey to Demo Day. If you enjoyed this post, please share it to help spread our message. You can also find us here: Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.