Validating Demand in Medtech: Interview with Pristine Surgical CEO Bryan Lord

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[upbeat music] One of the fundamental things is really being rigorous, uh, and making sure that you're being objective about whether or not this is a market pull or whether it's a technology push.
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But that doesn't always mean that the market is interested in the application of the technology that you're enamored with, and it's very easy to fall in love with the concept, the promise, the specialness, the uniqueness- Welcome to MedSider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology.
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Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful life science startups in the world. Now, here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey, everyone. It's Scott.
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In this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical. Brian started his career as a quote, unquote, "deal guy," originally a tech lawyer in Boston and always involved in startups.
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With a wealth of experience across various technology sectors, including semiconductors, enterprise software, and med tech, and spanning roles in corporate finance, technology licensing, and M&A, he now serves as president and CEO of Pristine.
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Before that, Brian also founded three venture organizations: New Venture Advisors, Orthopedic Venture Partners, and Innovation Alliance.
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Brian earned his JD from Notre Dame Law School and MBA from Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Here are a few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation.
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First, building a strong competitive moat goes beyond securing patents. True differentiation lies in the unforeseen details, your trade secrets, software code, and unique manufacturing processes.
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While patents are valuable, it's the proprietary knowledge and execution that truly fortify your position in the market and give you a significant competitive advantage.
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Second, validate market demand before falling in love with your technology. Engage with potential stakeholders, including physicians, ASCs, administrators, and technicians to refine your value proposition.
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Train your sight on simplifying complex processes to offer substantial operational benefits.
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Third, to survive the med tech minefield as a startup, one of your most important tasks as a CEO is to surround yourself with good advisors and mentors who will help you refine the company's story.
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It's also imperative to own your own circumstances and make the best of them, moving your venture forward by always maintaining momentum.
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All right, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. [upbeat music] All right, Brian, welcome to MedSider Radio. This has been a long time coming, so appreciate you coming on the program.
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Really looking forward to the chat ahead. Thank you, Scott. Really looking forward to it as well. Thanks for the invite. Yeah. This should be a, a fun discussion. I'm sure you'll come with s-some juice, right?
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Some-- A lot of lessons learned over your career. With that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this episode, but I typically like to start here.
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You've got a, a fairly extensive med tech background for a while, but if you can summarize that into maybe a one or two-minute elevator pitch, uh, leading up to your role as CEO of, of Pristine, let's maybe start there.
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Yeah, you bet. Look, I appreciate the credit for the med tech background because some folks have also characterized me as being a, a conspicuous outsider in med tech.
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So I'll take that badge of honor to a certain extent as well. If you can carry both, uh, mantles, maybe you've done something right. But I came into my professional career actually as a lawyer, which is interesting.
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I was a corporate finance venture capital fund formation lawyer, but when I got into that because I was most interested in getting into the tech world.
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And so it happened to be, and you can create narratives that make sense in the rearview mirror, but it was just a stepping stone that was an availability of me-- for me to get into the tech world.
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Li- I lived in Boston and got deep into that and more right at the peak of sort of the first internet bubble.
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We joke about being given assignments that we probably should have never been given at a very young age, and so it was a baptism by fire.
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But that led to an opportunity to go join a semiconductor company, advanced materials company in the semiconductor space, which is where I really got first kind of domain expertise.
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It was an MIT spin-out, great company, great technology. Arguably a little bit before its time. What isn't sometimes in startup world? That was a neat opportunity.
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The second kinda step of my career, I ended up doing a lot of different work in a lot of different domains, doing what I called outsource corporate development and venture services.
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So I worked in a variety of different areas, including software and consumer and advanced materials, continued in that space.
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And then the opportunity came along with Pristine, and that was my entrée into the med tech space.
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I got in originally and did some investing, coordinated some investment in getting this company off the ground, and then eventually moved over and took over the reins in the management suite.
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In a lot of ways, it's been a baptism by fire, as we- they say, learning on the go, but also complemented with, I think, an outsider's perspective, as I mentioned at the outset.
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And where I sit today Frankly, I don't know that I would wish that learning curve on folks, but it's served me well, I think, having a, a, a sort of complement of both.
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I feel like I'm the old guy now when I go to the LSI conferences and, and see some of the different folks that are coming through, smart, bright, motivated folks, and that's a little different vantage point because, um, I was the new kid on the block for, for a number of years.
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Yeah. And it looks, at least based on your LinkedIn profile, which we'll link to in the full article on MedSider for this particular interview, you've been at Pristine for, since fall of '15.
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We're recording this in mid '24, so almost a decade into the company at this point. Does that sound about right? Almost a decade, yes. Yeah. So the early days were fractional.
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It was really about making sure that the work on the development side was progressing.
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That also means fundraising and making sure that we're developing the shareholder base to make sure that the development work is continuing and the bills are being paid.
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So I won't take credit for full amount of, you know, that tenure in the early days.
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But look, on the other side of the coin, it's been a good six to six years or so of really leaning in, uh, full time, certainly in the chair as the organization evolved and matured and the product developed and we started to scale organizationally.
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That also meant that it was time to lean in fully into the organization. Yeah, look, it's, as we all know, the listeners and Scott, med tech is not for the faint of heart. There's, uh, long development pathways.
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One of my board members used to say it takes twice as much time and twice as much money, and I think that's certainly borne out for us.
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But also the rewards on the flip side of that, which is why the space, uh, remains robust, are also present as well.
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And the neat thing about where we are, I know we'll talk about it here soon, is that when you cross that chasm on- onto the commercial side of it, you see a good moat, you see a long development pathway that means that what you've done is hard, and that actually on this side of it is, uh, a real strength and a positive for what we've done.
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Oh, yeah, no doubt. Especially with, I would say, novel, more complicated systems, right, like what you're developing at Summit, doing and being on, on the leading edge of kind of an, a newer trend, right, in that world.
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The moat, and I'm talking to a former attorney here, right? But is the moats, is, is not necessarily s- always on the, the IP side, right?
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It can be just the sheer amount of grit and resources that it takes to get to this point where you're effectively commercializing. Yeah. Said, look, the moat is a number of different things.
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I, I don't know that this would be something taught in business school, but when I think about moats, I also think about things like prioritization within an enterprise, right?
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This is a project and a type of technology that docs have wanted for a long time, that the market has been very interested in. In some large enterprises, they've tried and then they shut down those efforts.
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I think the technology was too nascent at the time.
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In other cases, you've got incumbents that are very comfortable with the status quo, and you just don't have the sort of classic Clayton Christensen dynamic where that disruptor is motivated to come to the table.
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Even with motivation, that motivation needs to be complemented with capital, and even with capital, that motivation and, and capital needs to be complemented with talent that can actually execute and deliver on those things.
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There is a, a sort of enterprise level execution moat that it takes people to do stuff and it takes capital to do stuff and it takes opportunity that's a cost that's applied and, and prioritization to do those things.
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I, I think that sometimes gets overlooked, right?- Mm-hmm... uh, in, in the marketplace. We look at formal aspects certainly of IP and other types of stuff.
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We've been very proactive in filing patents as, as you would expect, and did some work in that space. But I also think that when... in, another overlooked place is trade secrets and software code. Yeah.
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With a single-use device, you can bet that folks are gonna be curious and they're gonna get their hands on it, and they're gonna look at the things that they can look at, and you rely upon intellectual property to be that aspect of the moat.
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There's also a lot of things about the manufacturing of the device that you would never be able to understand, um, by looking at the device itself. Those are part of your moat as well, and then code, right?
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This is an electromechanical device, but it's a digital enabled, cloud connected, and sophisticated digital instrument that has a lot of code that helps generate the type of image that you can see now, that 4K image that you see on the screen.
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So there's a lot of software also involved in it and as everybody knows, software is pretty fundamental aspect of your int- intellectual property stack as well. Yeah, no doubt.
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I, I, I oftentimes think of this analogy when we're talking about moats and, and with respect to IP is, look, a lot patents, granted patents are in the public domain, relatively straightforward.
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Get your kind of, your base level understanding of like how big and wide is this moat.
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But then when you're dealing with trade, trade secrets, it's murky water and you don't know how really deep the moat is, and you don't... Does it look different once you start [laughs] going in that water?
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So it's, I think you, you hit the nail on the head, right? That can often be equally as significant of a moat, just the, the knowhow, right, that's protected internally.
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With that said, let, let's talk a little bit about Summit, because I do wanna leave 20, 30 minutes to go back in time and learn a, get your take on a, a, a variety of sort of cross-functional initiatives, right, and layering in kind of your experiences with Pristine as well as even before Pristine or some of the startups that you've been involved with.
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But with respect to Summit, that's the flagship product, kinda similar to, I guess, maybe the first question is, give us an elevator pitch on kind of what Summit is for those that aren't familiar with what your team has been building at Pristine for the better part of a, a decade now.
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That's right. Look, Summit is our flagship product. It's a single use digital endoscope. And in particular it's a single use digital arthroscope.
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So our first indication is in sports medicine, commonly referred to as arthroscopy, when in sports medicine you're looking in, into, uh, the body and doing minimally invasive, uh, visualization.
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Um, our Summit platform though anticipates, in fact we already have our second product underway, um, under development. We just had a fantastic test of that last week in Minnesota.
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That's our next product line, and that's for general surgery, um, a la laparoscopy.
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And then beyond that, we have functional prototypes that also we got a beautiful image that's generated functional capabilities from the mechanical side of things in flexible endoscopy. Mm-hmm.
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And that will follow on as a third level. That's much more at the advanced prototype stage and as you can imagine, there's a lot of work on the DFM- Uh, that's necessary in order to bring that last piece to market.
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So we really think sequentially. It's about sports medicine, where we were founded and, and initially did our product development, then laparoscopy from there, and then beyond that into flexible endoscopy.
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And we really think a little differently than I think a lot of companies do about the space. You know, there's a lot of silos that really organize themselves around indications.
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We think of ourselves really as serving the, the doctors obviously who use the device, but also the facilities who are responsible for having that device in the right place at the right time and in, in working order and clean, um, and procured.
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And so we solve issues on the process side of things for the facilities, and we'll also improve visualization for the doctors.
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And so we really think about it cutting across indications, but with the commonality of also serving the facilities as much as the physicians in our offering.
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And that's part of the reason why we think more broadly from a platform perspective.
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I think two other things to mention, to highlight about the product and the offering, as I mentioned, this is a digital scope, and so we have... There's two elements to that.
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One is there's a chip and a tip on all of our product designs, as well as a high-brightness LED located on the tip.
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So we call that fully integrated to really distinguish between some solutions that might be, you know, partial, have components that might be single use.
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But really our entire visualization capability is wrapped up together in one. So obviously, as I mentioned, there's a digital aspect.
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Sometimes people have colloquially referred to these devices, particularly in the laparoscopy space, as video scopes give that sense of a chip on a tip, an integrated camera and lighting functionality.
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The other part of the digital footprint is in the cloud. So this is a connected device. We connect our image processing unit, which is the box that the, uh, the single-use device plugs into.
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That connects into the cloud and gives us a whole suite of functionality that we can bring then also in the digital health realm, as well as, frankly, um, some very basic blocking-and-tackling functionality, which is also fundamental and we think quite unique, which is managing inventory.
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So when you think about the business model of switching from a durable, high-maintenance, expensive piece of capital equipment into a single-use modality, one of the first things you think about is, all right, we gotta be world-class at inventory control.
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You gotta make sure that when physicians are ready to do surgeries on a Monday morning with a full schedule of surgeries, that there's already inventory of those consumables available for the surgeon and for the surgery center.
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And so we de-risked all of that by building this end-to-end inventory management platform that's also managed for the cloud. So those two aspects are complementary.
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One is an operational functional capability that's enabled in the cloud, and then we also have the capability to expand on that and do a whole host, as I said, of digital health services through that platform as well.
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Got it. That's super helpful overview. And, and the website's pristinesurgical.com. Pristine, just as it sounds, P-R-I-S-T-I-N-E surgical.com, pristinesurgical. We'll link to it in the full article on MedSider.
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Highly encourage everyone to check out the site to learn a little bit more about the technology as well as the company and the brand that Brian and the team have built. It's a really great site, too.
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So before we go back in time, in terms of life, life cycle, you already touched on this a little bit, but you're fully commercializing this at, at this point for, in the, in the sports medicine vertical to start out with at this point?
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That's right. Okay. We already have, um, paying customers, um, on tap.
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Uh, we are, um, in the process literally as we speak of, uh, transitioning from a limited market release where really our sales team was focused on direct sales and figuring out aspects of the device post 510[k] approval that we wanted to fine-tune, that we want to get feedback on, that we wanted to refine.
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And also frankly, figuring out some of the unique selling attributes of it.
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In our very first procedure, in fact, value proposition, which we'll, we'll talk about in a bit, came to light that we frankly didn't appreciate.
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And it's been a good period, uh, for our sales team to not only, um, get p- feedback in the field about the device itself, but also frankly learn, um, how to sell a device that's, um, different and unique and has a very, um, uh, uh, differentiated value proposition and really hone that.
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And so as we flip the switch here, um, we now have, uh, an independent sales rep force that's been, uh, recruited, retained, built, trained, and ready to go.
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And so in a matter of days, we'll be opening up the deployment of that team- Mm... for, uh, broader outreach.
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And so we're excited to shift from that direct to that scaled independent rep 1099 force that will be helping us scale and get t- this device into even more people's hands. Yeah. That's great. That's cool.
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Exciting times for sure with where, where, where you're at, especially as you look at, at scaling kind of the, the footprint.
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With that said, I wanna step inside the old MedSider time machine, if you will, and learn a little bit more about or get your take, right, on a, on a couple different key topical areas.
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First one being early stage development. And you touched on this a little bit, even in the early days of Pristine where, you know, your role was fractional in nature, right?
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A lot of the resources were being allocated towards getting to the next iteration of, of the product and the, and the, and the system at, at the time. From my perspective, this is like, startups are always hard, right?
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But this is especially hard when you're trying to iterate quickly with very limited resources, right? And not, and in most cases, not a lot of full-time focus, right?
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Because again, all of your dollars are sort of going to- towards development.
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So when you think about either your experience directly at Pristine or maybe some of the other startups that you're involved with, where do you think most founders or CEOs go wrong?
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Or you can flip that and say, what do you think you really need to do right at those early stages of a, of a startup? Yeah. You can come at that from a number of ways, more specifically generalize it.
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I think, uh, the, the sort of general level, I'm certainly not the first and won't be the last to, to highlight this, but I think one of the fundamental things is really being rigorous, uh, and making sure that you're being objective about whether or not this is a market or whether it's a technology push.
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Mm.
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I think there are a lot of things that in the Fast developing world of technology that if you come at this from a technologist perspective, and God bless them, the amount of things that we're able to do today are mind-boggling, whether it be the recent emergence and fantasticness of AI or anything that goes in history that we can talk to.
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But that doesn't always mean that the market is interested in the application of the technology that you're enamored with.
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And it's very easy to fall in love with the concept, the promise, the specialness, the uniqueness. You look, as a founder, it's your baby, and you really do think about it the same way, um, we think about our children.
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And just like we cheer the loudest for our children on the sidelines for their games, it's very easy to fall into that trap and lose objectivity and believe that the whole world gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night thinking in the same way that you do about the universe that you've developed around you.
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I think that myopia is common, and it's enticing, it's understandable, but that's probably the biggest thing, is to really be as objective as possible with the market, talk with physicians, understand whether or not there's a true need for the technology.
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And in our case, look, we also needed to talk with facilities and understand really whether, as I talked about, this dual value proposition of the high-quality image with the cost reduction and the simplicity on the operational side of things, really understand whether that truly is a, a pinch point.
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We had a pretty good sense that was, uh, present. This was not technology push, this was need driven in, in, uh, from that attribute.
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The flip side of the equation though, it took a while to actually figure out the operational aspect, um, uh, of the value proposition.
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And when I took over this role, um, it was right about the time when the Olympus class action lawsuits were taking place around the flexible scopes, and there was a lot of focus on, pre-COVID albeit, but a lot of, uh, focus on infection and ways to limit that, as well as ways that they weren't properly limiting that, which was some of the subject matter of the, of the legal action, and ways that the instruction sets needed to be more robust and that the things needed to be, the instructions need to be followed more, more clearly and, you know, um, I'll leave it to the record [laughs] to sort of cover all that.
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But my original belief was, just to give an, a for instance and where you can go down dead ends, was that surgery centers were gonna be driven by, uh, infection control on the rigid endoscopy side of things in the same way that they were driven by, understandably, in- infection control on the flexible endoscopy side of things.
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And it just turned out not to be the case. Think the prevalence of infection in the rigid endoscopy side of things is there, but there's other risks associated with surgery as well.
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And so it wasn't the kind of thing that bubbled up to the top of the list. It's less in rigid endoscopy than it is in flexible. And what we learned really over time is that the means of sterilizing a scope,
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it's really not about the efficacy or not of the sterilization of the existing mobi- modality, the existing what, uh, folks refer to as a rod lens scope.
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It's really about the burden that it takes to comply with those steps i- in order to accomplish it.
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So for the most part, look, I have come to believe and understand that ambulatory surgery centers are o- one of the real unsung heroes of the healthcare space.
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They have incentives to be thinking rigorously about process improvement, about cost reduction, still about patient safety obviously, and efficacy of the procedures.
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I was just at the Becker's ASC conference last week, and it's really very admirable, robust component of the healthcare delivery market.
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What they have to do is bear the burden of, particularly with the multi-specialty facilities, a wide array of different equipment sets, each of whichs- which have specific instructions for use.
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In the case of a arthroscope, there's 35 instructions for use on a typical arthroscope, all of which not only need to be complied with for patient safety, also need to be complied with from a regulatory perspective.
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And if they're, uh, handled correctly, you still have instances where bad things happen, but for the most part, the processes run the way they're supposed to run. The challenge is those 35 steps are really burdensome.
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They're really expensive, and they require a lot of training with staff that's difficult to recruit and retain and perform all those steps properly.
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And so we adjusted really from it being a risk mitigation value proposition. Well, we still address that. People are interested in that.
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But really at the top of the list on the operational side of things really is about cost and efficiency. And so our mantra at Pristine is that our job is to simplify endoscopy.
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It's to take those 35 steps and turn them into two, right? You grab the box, you open the package, and you plug it in. I guess there's three steps to that process.
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If what we're doing then is delivering the same if not higher quality image, but also at a lower cost and with a simpler process flow, now what we've delivered is something that's truly disruptive to the marketplace.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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And I, I would imagine, and, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I would imagine getting to that value prop, the messaging around that value prop, took some iteration, and it never ceases to amaze me the problems that we think we're solving upfront, right, which in your case might have been largely around risk, right?
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Of course, it makes sense. Disposable scopes, yeah, there's a need for that to reduce risk.
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But in reality, the bigger value was actually in the simplicity, right, in order to comply with the, the sort of requirements, as you point out. So that's super interesting, and it reminds me of this graph that I was...
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And circling back around to your point around trying to find market pool, I think it was, if I remember correctly, my days are, are getting mashed up, but I think it was maybe even just this morning on LinkedIn, I saw this graph of these pure play tech companies, and on the a- the, uh, X axis was time to product market fit, and the, the brands that were, where there was a really tight kind of window upon launch and finding true product market fit, like they stood out amongst the others, and I think it speaks to, like, your comment earlier.
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We should be very mindful of those earlier stages as not allocating too many resources towards something that Truly doesn't have market pull. We're having to, like, push people onto this.
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And I always like to think about when I'm talking with other early-stage founders of it, it's harder to do this in med tech because we're working on typically har- hardware-based systems where there's a huge hardware component, so it's not like software where you can just ship a, an MVP.
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But look for when you're talking with various stakeholders, whether it's docs, ASC, administrators, payers, investors even, for that matter, if by and large people are leaning back and it's just hard to get their attention on something, I don't know, you might want to question whether this i- is truly a push, right?
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You're... A- again, try to look for some of those signals as, as early in the process as possible. 100%. Look- Mm...
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uh, I'm self-aware enough to know that my ability to identify a disruptive medical technology at the early stage of its incubation, probably not gonna be super high.
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If you take that level of humility into the marketplace, your job is to look for those market external responses and to think soberly about them- Mm-hmm... and to pay attention to them. You're exactly right.
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Are people leaning out or are they leaning in? In our case, look, as you've talked about, it's been a long march, but along that march, those are circumstances I looked for at every turn, right?
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I got a family to take care of, and opportunity costs abound and other things that you could be leaning into. But what really kept the fire burning was the growing cadre of people who said, "Yeah, this is unique."
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And it's not every day you see something that can not only deliver, but also have an opportunity to join and be a part of that process.
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So, uh, just as a e- example for that, I had a chance to be introduced to who's now our chief medical officer, Dr. Steve Snyder, and he's generally considered to be amongst the real luminaries in the arthroscopy space.
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He's a wonderful man, has taught, I don't know, I think he's had 125 people go through his very revered SCOE shoulder fellowship, and mentor to many and a teacher to, to many more.
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So I had a chance to meet him and I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna... Look, I'm an entrepreneur. What's the angle here with, with this superstar in the field?"
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And so I thought, "Look, I, I think new devices and a device like ours could be used from a educational perspective, right?"
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It's a good training device, and we all know the sort of marketing angle where if you can product in the training that those trainees are gonna eventually grow up to be full-time users.
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So sat down and made a little small talk with Dr.
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Snyder and turned the conversation towards perhaps an opportunity where I could get a little relationship built with him, and fished for his interest in whether he might help us think about how we could use it in an educational environment.
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And he said, in his very gentle way, "Brian, that's a really interesting thought."
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And he paused, and I was ready to be let down gently by this, uh, wonderful, gentle luminary, and instead he pivoted and he said, "But what would you think about having a chief medical officer?"
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[laughs] Stopped, grabbed myself a little bit- [laughs]... and said, "Yes, Dr. Snyder, I think we should talk about that a, a little bit more."
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And underneath my breath I'm thinking, "Did I just hear what I thought I heard?" [laughs] It's a fun little anecdote, right, of pleasant surprises, but when you see folks like Dr.
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Snyder lean in and say, yeah, this is something- Mm...
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that would make a difference in his practice, that he would be willing even more so to put his name and his reputation associated with, those are the things that sort of build that momentum towards a concept that gets you to the next phase.
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And ultimately, I believe that the job of the entrepreneur is to continue to build a collection of people who are contributing to the mission of the organization. Mm-hmm.
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And so that becomes a, a momentum builder, and other people take note of that.
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And that's what's really, uh, quite rewarding about the exercise of entrepreneurship because, look, our job is to create a vision and to sell that vision, and it's not to twist people's arms, but it's really to enjoy their sharing of that vision, and then their contributing to that.
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Been unbelievable, uh, member of our team, and those are the things you look for, Scott, amongst many. Yeah. We've had many of those instances as we've grown over the years. Su- such a great example.
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I think it also speaks to the brand that you and your team have built, and maybe I see this mostly on LinkedIn as an example, but just being in the mix and being active in the community.
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I see it from afar, but I gotta think that's helpful, and obviously the example that you just shared of approaching a pretty esteemed physician with one idea, but he's circling back and interested.
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You're looking for those signals, interested so much that he, he threw out that, the old CMO, uh, [laughs] title. So yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah, good position to be in. [upbeat music] Hey, everyone.
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Let's take a quick break to talk about Fast Wave Medical, the company I co-founded and lead as CEO. Our team is developing next-generation intravascular lithotripsy systems for complex calcific disease.
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This type of therapy is often referred to as IVL.
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The market size for IVL is over $9 billion, and there's only one player in the space with a market cap of around $10 billion, so naturally, there's a lot of investor interest in Fast Wave.
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In fact, we opened up an opportunity to invest directly into the company almost a year ago, and we were blown away by the interest from our community.
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So much so that we ended up closing $8 million from our supporters in less than a month.
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Typically, opportunities to invest in venture-backed startups like Fast Wave are pretty rare, so based on significant and continued demand, we highly encourage you to sign up for our wait list to avoid missing out on the next opportunity to invest.
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You can opt in at fastwavemedical.com/invest. And if this is the first time you're hearing about Fast Wave, here are some key highlights.
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As I mentioned before, we are sitting on an IVL market valued at over $9 billion with only one incumbent.
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Second, we just completed our first inhuman study with eight treated patients, resulting in 100% lesions crossed and a 93% reduction in mean diameter stenosis from baseline.
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We've raised over $20 million to date from corporate venture and cardiovascular KOLs, and we have five granted patents by the USPTO and multiple FTOs.
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If you're interested in empowering physicians with advanced IVL technology while potentially benefiting from a fast-growing IVL market, head over to fastwavemedical.com/invest and check out the details.
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Again, that's fastwavemedical.com/invest. All right, let's get back to the rest of the conversation. [upbeat music]Let's shift gears a little bit.
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Uh, and you touched on this to a certain extent when we were chatting about moats and I- and IP, but considering your background, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask this question, 'cause there's not a lot of founders, CEOs that I have on the program that have a JD behind their name.
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And you've got pretty extensive experience with licensing, M&A deals, et cetera, corporate finance.
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When you think about that topic or maybe your former life before Pristine, any sort of either, one, counterintuitive thoughts with respect to that domain, or something that tends to come up a lot and only someone in your shoes and with your background could really coach up another founder or CEO kind of in, in this area?
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Yeah. Uh, it's a great question.
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So look, I always still to this day cringe with the actual storyline of starting as a lawyer, because what that suggests to people is an image, right, of conservativism, of risk mitigation, of that, that kind of stuff.
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For me, the early days of starting out my career, that was an entry point into the world of technology. I said to somebody the other day that I think I was a entrepreneur trapped in a lawyer's body.
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[laughs] Some of that's what we were sharing before we rolled here. You grew up in Iowa. I grew up in central Minnesota. Um, this is not exactly Silicon Valley or Route 128, right? Mm-hmm.
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I went to s- to school undergrad at Concordia Moorhead. Wonderful school. Met my best friends and my wife, the love of my life, and all that stuff, and it was a wonderful place to, to go from there.
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But there too was not exactly the focal point of innovation in the world, although there is some really interesting ag tech going on in Fargo-Moorhead for the astute listeners here.
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[laughs] So the real question was, okay, if I was enamored with tech and this was '90-ish frame, um, how do you, how do you get there? And look, I had an... to, to go to law school.
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Uh, I had the sense that I didn't wanna be a lawyer my whole, whole life, but I knew that there was a burgeoning area of tech law, and so I had an idea that's where I wanted to go.
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And as it turns out, I was able to figure out how to get some opportunities both on the West Coast and the East Coast. My wife and I made some very life strategic decisions.
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"Honey, should we go to the West Coast or the East Coast?" And she said, "Uh, I think it's West Coast is weird, so why don't we go to the East Coast?" [laughs] Those are, those are the decisions you make in life.
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And as it's turned out, look, I spent a lot of time on the West Coast, and I love the West Coast too. So [laughs] those are the, those are the things you do in, in your first and second years of, of marriage together.
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Um, but I found an opportunity in a firm that was very entrepreneurial. In fact, uh, Dick Testa, who was the founder of the firm, was the, um, godfather of the modern, uh, venture capital fund structure.
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His first client was General Dorio, who founded American Research and Development. And so I got him get to do a lot of deals with Dick Testa as a young associate. The DNA of the firm was not a white shoe Boston.
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It was a perfect fit for an outsider from the Midwest. I loved it, and we worked our tails off. We were doing deals that we shouldn't have any chance of doing.
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But I think in hindsight, look, if there are entrepreneurs stuck in a lawyer's body, and I've certainly, uh, solicited some advice from people over, over the years, you're not defined by what your, uh, graduate, uh, degree is.
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Um, what I found in hindsight was that experience was, um, akin to being, uh, an engineer.
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And what you really learned was, uh, the plumbing down to the nuts and bolts, in many cases, uh, late nights down to the semicolons and, and commas.
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And yet you understood at a very granular level how deals were put together. And from that you can extrapolate.
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The middle part of my career, I'm not that old, but the next stage I should say, or at least I don't feel that old.
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Uh, the next stage I hung out a shingle and I did corporate development work and I did transactional work. I went back and got my MBA from Wharton because I felt like I needed to complete that skill set.
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I was a business poli sci undergrad. My two favorite classes were always, whether high school, college or whatnot, was either finance or social studies or poli sci in the college case.
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And so I had a chance to go back and get my MBA. I went to Wharton. Um, my CEO had suggested it to me that he knew I was itching and he sponsored me to go do that.
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What a wonderful life event that was, and it completed, right, my journey to no longer be, at least in my own mind, stuck in that box. But at the end of the day then, okay, you're doing deals.
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I would say that's more as an architect, right? What you're doing then is taking your understanding of the engineering of the building of the structure.
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Now you're moving into a mode where you're more thinking about how to design transactions and work to negotiate the completion of things.
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And then I find myself today in, over the last, thank you for reminding me for how many years I've been in this seat. [laughs] But I would say that now you're, I'm in the situation of being a developer.
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It's about trying to find undervalued pieces of land or undervalued structures or greenfield areas and developing that and creating something new or something improved where there wasn't before.
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And frankly, look, people ask me, "Did you need to go to law school? Did you need to get an MBA to do what you're doing?" Not really, probably.
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But on the other hand, maybe because at the end of the day, I think the ability to have that background and the confidence of knowing the engineering and knowing the architecture gives you the chutzpah that it takes, I think, to get up every day and do something that hasn't been done before.
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And that takes a lot for a small town kid from Central Minnesota to say, "I'm gonna lead an enterprise and recruit the, the Steve Snyders and the Dave Careys and the Sid Decis and the Thurm Ballards to the enterprise, the Chris Lynns of the world and the board members and the investors and say, 'This is where we're gonna go.'"
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So in some respects it also was essential, but ha- hard to know. It's a windy road. Yeah. I think his first book, um, was Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. Mm. If I remember correctly- Yeah... the, the title. Yeah.
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But one of the notions in, that he lays out is this idea of earlier in your career you should avoid this idea of just pursue your passion. You don't know really, right?
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And so you have to get good at certain things, right? And- It sounds like that's been the story with your career. You made decisions, right? You're an entrepreneur in this lawyer's body, right?
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But you just made decisions, and you got really good at certain things, and that kind of led to the next inflection point in your career.
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I think it's important for those that are listening to this, that are looking at you as the CEO of Pristine and want to get there someday, the path isn't perfect. You have to move and make decisions and go.
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It's never gonna be like one dot leads to the next in a very clear fashion. The most important thing is get in the game. Yeah. Put yourself out there, take some risk, and find ways that you can contribute.
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And when you do that, more opportunities for being in more games will present more opportunities to learn and grow and broaden your skill set, more relationships that you'll build, and more opportunities that you'll have to contribute.
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And so as long as you keep that, I think, open perspective, it doesn't...
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It does eventually, and I, I'm, I'm, I speak out of both sides of my mouth in some respects because one of the things I bristled at was being pigeonholed, um, and that certainly led to me doing some things like going and pursuing my MBA and other things like that.
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But on the other hand, it's, if you just think about it the same, it's not about being pigeonholed, it's about saying that there are roles to play at varying stages of your life, and there are ways that you can contribute, and to appreciate that you're around the table and that the things you're learning from being there, and either yourself or watching people wrestle with the myriad of different challenges and decisions that need to be made on a day-to-day basis, is invaluable.
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And then it ultimately, you continue that pathway, and pretty soon you're gonna look around and say, "All right, who's making the decisions here?" And you realize it's you.
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And then you take that responsibility on your shoulders and hopefully bring others along behind you. But look, the narratives are only clear in the rear view mirror. They're hard to...
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[laughs] As we know, it's pretty foggy out there as you're pursuing it. But yeah, I've also been blessed, uh, at the, at the same time.
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Really had some great things and continue to have some great things that, that we're working on. Yeah.
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And it, it, that, that I think a lot of people listening are probably familiar with that, that Steve Jobs quote that's pretty well known is, "You can only connect the dots in looking in the rear view mirror."
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It's hard to connect those looking forward. And your phrase may be a little bit more straightforward, right? It's foggy, uh, oftentimes looking ahead, but you have to move.
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With that said, you, you mentioned something with respect to the launch of Summit, right, at Pristine, and some of the, the, the learnings that you've gleaned to get to even now, right, uh, at the, you know, mid-'24 that we're, we're recording this.
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Uh, I'd love to get your s- your sense for that because I, I, I, I, I mentioned this earlier. You guys like... It- it's a cool brand, right? You guys are active on LinkedIn. Uh, like I said before, you're in the mix.
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You're in the... It feels very much like your community. I'm not in this space at all, but I enjoy, like, seeing your team post on social as an example. But what are...
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Like, when you think about even the initial kind of like maybe LMR initial launch to where your team is at now, anything that you've learned or that even going through that process that you think would be helpful for other founders, CEOs that are staring down a, a commercial launch?
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Look, I'll give Dave Carey the credit on this for sure, and he's been through his fair share of product launches. It's one of the reasons why he's a, a, a really outstanding chief commercial officer for us.
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I think that in the med tech space, and you talked about, I saw that same post about sort of the speed to which you can find product market fit. Mm-hmm.
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Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way in the med tech space, and a lot of people will intellectually acknowledge, but I don't think really fully internalize the dramatic
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difference between launching in a regulated versus an unregulated environment.
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When folks talk about finding product market fit, that means actually shipping product that's got bugs, and you're not sure that the customers really want it or not.
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But the whole mantra is, "Get the damn thing out there and let's go," and then you iterate and go. You're smiling because we both know how preposterous that would be in the med tech space. [laughs] Absolutely.
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Um, there's not only patients and the responsibility and the honor that we have to be able to have our products be trusted in that environment, but then this agency called the FDA that's got a very strong place around the table to make sure that you don't test things in live circumstances before they're ready to go.
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So the compare and contrast is, I think it's meaningful, and look, a lot of things we try to do at Pristine is to think about the fact that we're doing something that, um, takes more technology from the consumer area than perhaps a lot of other med tech-oriented devices.
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It's one of the ways that, um, it's both a necessity and an opportunity for us.
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If you're gonna be building a single-use device, not only do you have to perform excellently, but you have to be able to deliver it at a cost that's affordable to single use as well, which means that your Lego blocks need to be as much from a current existing market when you put those pieces together as possible, and that comes from the consumer space, right?
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Yeah. LEDs to image sensors to chipsets and certain levels of cloud functionality and everything else. So you're by definition hoarding, but the environment is fundamentally different, of course.
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And one of the crazy things, and look, I'm gonna sound really elementary when I say this, but just hit me like a ton of bricks that we have spent all of this time and all of this energy and all of this money, and until we actually literally- Hmm...
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with Dr. Gettleman at, uh, Southern California Orthopedic Institute, and he's saying, "Here we go. One small step for man," right?
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And we, we were all there watching this very first procedure, and everybody's holding their breath, and that's endemic to, and it's the, it's fundamental to, it is the, the nature of being in med tech in a regulated environment that you don't get...
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Look, there, there are obviously some exceptions to this where you can get approval for the advanced studies with the FDA.
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But for the most part, you don't get a chance to actually see that instrument in that commercial environment until you've already built and you've already locked down your production by definition, or you're not gonna get the FDA approval, and it's done.
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And then you use it and see how, how it performs. Dave was a real advocate of making sure that, he uses this phrase, "Aim small, miss small."
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We talked about a three-phase product rollout where we did our first in human, and then we did our limited market release, and then the full nationwide, uh, launch. It doesn't work.
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I've talked a, a little bit about some nuances around that to be totally dogmatic about it. There are nuances around it.
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But it's not a bad framework to think about, and I think the advice, to get to your question, Scott, is that- That limited market release is a, is a fundamentally important time, and I think it
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is incumbent upon med tech entrepreneurs and leaders to be patient through that period, and to remind their constituencies, boards, shareholders, employees for that matter, that you've got an asset that you've built that everybody's believed in, and this is a fundamentally important time to make sure that you're,
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um, uh, refining the attributes of that now that you've gotten the, quote, "license" to be able to use it responsibly in humans.
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And I give a lot of credit to our physician partners who have leaned in with us, who've been with us on that journey, who've staked their reputations as well on the engagements that they have with us.
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At the end of the day, on the one hand, it's fully safe. It's got all the different stamps of approval, but from a product market fit perspective, you still got learning to do.
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I don't think I'm giving away too much, um, state secrets here, but I'll identify in our particular case an area that we needed to spend a little bit of time on.
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As it turns out, I say with a smile on my face, cadavers don't bleed.
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It's pretty difficult to actually determine how your scope performs in a environment where blood is obviously present, which is most cases, but certainly is also the case for arthroscopy.
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Cadavers also don't hold water in their joint in quite the same way that humans do as well.
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So one of the overlooked attributes of an arthroscope is that a full rod lens scope, and our, our scope does as well, delivers water into the joint along with the imaging, and the water is a fundamental aspect of the imaging.
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We all think about 1080p, 4K, about le- lenses and things like that.
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But if you're not delivering water at the right pressure with the right flow, with the right suction, with the right movement of that water in and out of the joint, you're gonna be looking at the equivalent of pond water as opposed to clear, pristine water that you're looking through, and that is a fundamental aspect of things as well.
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So we needed to work a little bit and refine some elements of the water flow to make sure that all of those critical aspects, and there are dozens about water flow that, um, just get taken for granted when you're focused on pixel density and image quality and other attributes.
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When you're actually in the, um, in the procedure, the water flow is a fundamental part of that.
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And so we took some significant steps to refine that, to get that tight, to get the complementariness of the flow together with the complementariness of the digital image.
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And that's just an example of some of the things that you need to work on or that we needed to work on in the limited market release.
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Yeah, no, that's really good feedback, and maybe the take-home message is to I think Dave's kind of framework earlier is aim small or start, aim small, miss small.
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And I know Jim Biggins was at the DeviceTalks event that we were at. I think he mentioned something similar with their LMR, that they, they were very cognizant about not going too broad, right?
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Starting very small, very narrow with physicians and in a, in a, a market that they really understood well, right? Before going too big, in essence. But, um- That's right. And look- Mm... to, to close the loop on that,
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in our particular instance, we believe that, uh, independent reps are the path for us for commercial, uh, scale. Independent reps aren't, um, perfect for all, um, situations.
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When you've got a very complex, very, um, high touch, low volume, you gotta be in the operating room, you oftentimes need to have really that dedicated, highly trained, multi-year experienced kind of salesperson or device rep accompanying the procedure.
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In our case, look, we've talked about our mantra is simplicity. It's one, two, three out of the box. It's plug and play. So independent reps fit very well for us.
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Independent reps also, their job, and they by definition will rep other companies, is to move product out into the field.
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And so you gotta make sure that device is primed and ready to go also for them, or you're making a fundamental misstep in the marketplace as well.
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Independent reps don't have the time, the interest, and it's just not their role to be part of the refinement of the product.
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What they need to do is move the product when you're ready, and that takes a transitory time to get to that spot. Yeah. That's a really good point. And I know we're a little bit over time.
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Do you, do you have a hard stop? Do you have a few extra minutes? Nope. No, I'm good. Yeah. O- okay, good. I, I wanna be sensitive to your schedule, but I did wanna get to, to fundraising, right?
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Because you have a, a pretty great sort of dep- depth of experience i- in this topic as well.
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Uh, and before we get to the, the last rapid fire, uh, questions, which we, we should be able to move through, uh, quite quickly, but when it comes to fundraising, you, you closed on a Series D, I think a couple years ago now.
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I believe it was maybe, I, I don't know if it's 2023 or '22, uh, but a couple years now. Not a lot of startups, right? Get to this stage, right? Where you're raising that, you're that deep into fundraising, so to speak.
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So when you think about all of the lessons learned, is there, like, maybe one or two things that really come to mind with respect to your journey, either raising capital for Pristine or just o- other various startup investments that you make, uh, or are active in within the, the med tech ecosystem?
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Yeah. I have a little bit of a, um, to grind with the marketplace on this particular question. So how about this, Scott? We'll go there in, on your podcast. [laughs] I think that there is pressure from
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constituencies, whether it be investors and boards and whatever else, sometimes to manage kind of the aesthetic of fundraise, um, as if there's some sort of
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magic pattern recognition that goes along with the viability of the company or the promise of the product or whatever else that you can glean signal
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ultimately of the ultimate value of the product, um, based upon the consistent, steady trajectory of A round to B round to C round to D round and perfectly constructed syndicates that move around there and appropriately but not too aggressively increasing price and pre-money valuation from round to round in terms that are whatever, NVCA standard and whatever else.
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Life, I think in particular our marketplace has demonstrated, just doesn't work that way. And in the public markets, public companies are...
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Everybody knows it's just a truism, it almost doesn't need to be mentioned that their stock price fluctuates with the market, and that is generally seen as largely mismanagement and all those sorts of things, but largely seen as a exogenous circumstances, one that's really driven internally.
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And of course, there's analysts that try to separate those two things and figure out how to disaggregate those two different components. In the private markets,
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I don't think we do a very good job of disaggregating those things.
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God bless us entrepreneurs, if I can pat ourselves on the back for making it through this 500-year drought, right, of, uh, med tech financing over the last 18 to 24 months.
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I've become good friends with Scott Pantel and other folks in the industry, and we all go to the same conferences and chat with each other and touch base, and we all know.
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And look, I've got sympathy also for the VCs that are out also fundraising and, you know, the LP market is, uh, challenging in, in its own right.
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But we don't do a good job, I think, of letting ourselves off the hook by the exogenous fac- factors in the marketplace, and the realities of what you have to do as an entrepreneur then to maintain the liquidity of the company at whatever cost it takes.
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How many... As people say with like a sense of wryness, "Oh, gee, down round is a new flat round." Yeah, that's true in some respects, but it's not really funny. It's really gut-wrenching, right?
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To go through that, especially when you feel like there's a aesthetic that also is being overlaid over the trajectory that a company needs to take.
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I think at the end of the day, my advice to entrepreneurs is to forget about that aesthetic, that your job is to do the best that you can in your duty to your shareholders and the enterprise and everybody else that you have.
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And that ultimately, the most important thing is to be responsible based on the circumstances that you have around you. And the rest of it is for other people to create narratives around. But I had some...
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The reason I bring this up is I had somebody ask me, "Wow, you've been through a number of different rounds," and this sort of stuff like, does it matter if you have like the pre-seed and then the A and then the B and then the C, and how do you think about the definition of that?
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And I just wanted to laugh because it was a serious question, and I, I don't begrudge the entrepreneur, but laugh and sort of say, "Really, is that where we are as a marketplace, that we're coaching our entrepreneurs to worry about the aesthetics of those circumstances a- as one of the first questions that they might ask somebody who's been down that path before?"
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Hell no, don't worry about the aesthetics of those circumstances.
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Build your board, build your investor syndicates, do the best that you can in each one of those terms, and many more things than the aesthetics of what your fundraising history would look like.
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So that's a, a long and maybe slightly im- impassioned answer, but entrepreneurs, don't give a second thought to it. Work from where you are today. Deploy that capital smartly. Deploy it efficiently.
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Build your, your syndicate, your relationships. Lean into those investors. Bring them on your board and get to the next milestone and get to that next round.
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And if the market is off by 50%, do a down round and move on and get to the next point and recognize the oscillations in the marketplace are something you're not gonna out navigate, um, nor should you.
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And keep it moving with headwinds, with tailwinds, with side winds, but keep moving down the track and leave the aesthetics to people who don't got anything else to do.
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I, I love that framework or that analogy of, of the aesthetic, right?
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I never really thought about the, the trajectory of a startup, right, and how much attention we pay to, "Oh, why did you raise, why did you raise a B1 instead of a... Why did you raise two B2?"
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Like at the end of the day, it doesn't matter, right? To, to your point, and I'm really glad you, you brought that up because I think it's especially helpful for...
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We got a lot of founders and CEOs and startup people that listen to this podcast that given your experience, right, Wharton MBA, lawyer by background, spent a bunch of time in, in, in M&A stuff.
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If anyone would be like, "Hey, you got to pay attention to this finite detail," it might be you.
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But in fact, you took a little bit of a counterintuitive approach and said, look, like at the end of the day, survive and advance, right? Everyone's familiar with the NCAA tournament.
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A lot of times those teams that get to the Final Four, it was ugly getting there in a lot of cases, but they got there. They survived the previous rounds and they advanced.
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And typically, barring any injuries, they're in shape to play, right? To be... They're in the game and playing.
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And so I think, I don't know, that's especially true in med tech because it's like playing the startup game on hard mode. I've used that phrase a lot.
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And for a company to get to a series B or a series C or series D, that's, that is no easy feat to get to that point.
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And as long as you keep building and executing against doing whatever milestones ahead, that's the most important thing versus how pretty the details of a particular fundraise looks. That's good stuff. I, I want...
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We're over, so I want to get to the rapid fire. I might combine a, a few of these questions. But again, for everyone listening, pristinesurgical.com is the website, exactly as it sounds, pristinesurgical.com.
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We'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider. Uh, we'll also link to Brian's LinkedIn profile as well as the Pristine's page. They put... I- it's a fun brand, so I'd encourage everyone to follow along for sure.
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So with that said, rapid fire questions. If you want to expand a little bit, feel free, but they're meant to be quick hitting.
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So when you think about the next 12 months ahead, so fast-forward to like mid-2025, is there one particular thing that you're most excited for with Pristine? Selling scopes. Look, I'm excited about scaling. That's good.
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That's good stuff. All right. This may be a bit repetitive, but let's say we've got a room full of med tech entrepreneurs. We're in the northeast, maybe we're somewhere in downtown Boston.
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If, if there's one lesson that you think is really important for them to take home, what would that be? Which one would you maybe p- pick out of the list of insights that you heard those over the past hour or so?
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Uh, look, there's... Cliches abound, but I think maybe two things. One, perseverance, right? Uh, two, lean on your fellow entrepreneurs.
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I think that there's an opportunity to get a little bit of tunnel vision, a little bit of wrapped up. People talk about the Um, C-suite being, um, lonely, and I think there's some truth to that.
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I think it's, uh, people talk about networking for a variety of different reasons, but I think one of the most fundamental aspects of building a network is so that you can recognize that, um, A, there's some pattern recognition in some of the things that you're doing, but B, you know, look,
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chances are the things that you're dealing with, you're not alone. There are other folks that have been dealing with those things too, and I'd encourage folks, drop me a DM. Um, I'm happy to chat.
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I feel weird because I don't feel like I'm in the sort of that role yet in my career, and yet I've been flattered by folks doing that. Do that with each other and lean on each other.
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I saw a post the other day which I thought was wonderful. It was about how competitors deal with each other when they see, they're standing next to each other in a trade show.
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Look, I've gotten to know some of the, the competitors in our space, both from an- the incumbents. We had a fellow who come by our booth and, and we chatted it up.
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At the end of the day, I think we're all, uh, focused on advancing the ball, and you'd be surprised, I think, what type of relationships you can build with your fellow travelers. Yeah, that's good stuff.
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And thank- thanks for offering up, uh, or opening up your, your DMs on LinkedIn. I, I've always, like, I've known you a little bit from afar, right?
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Just because I follow Pristine on your posts, David's posts online, but I don't know. It was fun to connect in person.
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I've re- respected kind of your take throughout the years, even though we're just getting to know each other a little bit. Yeah, no, I mean it. I love the kind, your ability to simplify things, right?
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And weave in stories. I think it's, it's really helpful. Last question on the docket.
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Starting over in maybe your mid to late 20s, maybe in, in your career, you're thinking about you're going down the, the law school path, but is there anything that you'd tell the younger Brian Lord at that point in time?
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Look, I, speaking of LinkedIn posts, I've shared a little bit about my greatest pride and joy of being a three-time girl dad.
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So my girls are just getting out there and trying to figure out, so I can think about it personally to your question and also as I'm starting to see it through their eyes, and I think the greatest amount of advice is quit waiting for permission.
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I think part of what I've maybe described a little bit about my career path was in the early days, yeah, look, there was about the engineer to architect to developer kind of pathway, but I also think part of what I did erroneously was wait for permission to be where perhaps I am today.
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And I could have probably been a little bit bolder if I had a little bit more confidence a little bit earlier, uh, to do those things.
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The practical reality is I can sit here and you can make, um, kind remarks, but we're all just figuring it out day by day, and there isn't a whole lot different about figuring it out today than the fear and trepidation that you have if you're in your 20s, um, trying to look off into the abyss as well.
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It's an uncertain external environment, um, and you're gonna have to muster courage, whether you're young or the middle ages or whether you're old, to go venture into that environment as well.
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So if that's the path you want to take, get to it and learn what it's like to make decisions, learn what it's like to lead with your chin.
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Found a landscaping startup if you're interested in figuring out how to be an entrepreneur.
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Find ways to be entrepreneurial as opposed to waiting for permission to align yourself with phenomenal MIT material scientists or physicians in the medical space. Now, that's wonderful. It's been a huge part of my life.
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But the entrepreneurial drive has, I think,
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always been innately there, and you can exercise that a lot earlier than you think, and I would encourage people to do that if that's where their, where their head and their heart is. Yeah. That's good stuff.
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Good way to wrap up the conversation.
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I, I, I oftentimes use the analogy of like when you see Steph Curry in his prime, maybe he's a little bit past his prime, but Steph Curry in his prime, LeBron James, you rarely see them take eight shots, right, from the field.
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It's just real- It's usually they're 12 of 30, right? On a good night, maybe they're 12 of 21 or something. They're taking a lot of shots, and I think that's really important, right?
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Especially early in your careers, not to be afraid. That doesn't mean that you're so bold that you get kicked out of the room, but, uh, it also means that you're not so afraid to just lean in and go. It was good stuff.
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I know we're way over, so I really appreciate your time, Brian. Uh, for everyone listening, again, pristinesurgical.com is the website.
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We'll link to, uh, that in the full write-up on MedSider, as well as Brian's LinkedIn profile, and highly encourage, uh, you to check out both the, the website as well as Pristine and, and Brian and, and the team on LinkedIn especially.
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Can't thank you enough. I'll have you hold online real quick, but really appreciate everyone's attention. As always, until the next episode of MedSider Goes Live, everyone, take care.
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[upbeat music] Hey, it's Scott again. One quick thing before you go. You see, I love bringing you insightful conversations with the best founders and CEOs of medical device and health technology startups.
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But here's the thing. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion.
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Leave your honest thoughts and hit that five-star rating if you think we're worthy.
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Your feedback is incredibly important, and it's the best way to ensure we keep bringing you awesome discussions with leading founders and CEOs. So take a moment to be a good friend and leave that review today.
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As always, thanks for being a part of our journey and for helping MedSider continue to grow and evolve. Your support is greatly appreciated. All right, enough talk about reviews.
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Stay tuned for another informative episode coming at you soon. [upbeat music]