Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Build the Medical Case Before Chasing the Consumer Market: Interview with Wellysis CEO Young Juhn

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Young Juhn, CEO of Wellysis.Wellysis is the Samsung spinout behind S-Patch, a lightweight wearable that enables long-term ECG monitoring without the discomfort of established cardiac monitoring devices.Young has spent more than two decades bridging hospital and home-based care — from his early career at Johnson & Johnson, to more than a decade at Kaiser Permanente, to leading healthcare innovation at Samsung before spinning out Wellysis in 2019.In this interview, Young shares why patient interviews should shape product design, how regulatory clearance is just the starting point for global commercialization, and why building a medical foundation before branching into consumer markets is critical for lasting adoption.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VII. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Young Juhn.

Let's go to wellness and then we can expand into medical. I had different thoughts, right? Because on the wellness, eventually I think wellness and medical will have to be merged, right? Because at the end of the day it's the same thing, right? We want to make sure that people are healthy. Whether it's wellness, whether it's medical. Now on the medical side, yes, if you're doing cure, yes. I think that's purely clear that you're going to have to have doctors and all that stuff.

But if you're doing care or chronic disease management, which requires a lot of, you know, self-driven, you know, because behavioral health, right, at the end of the day, diabetes, you know, overweight and blood pressure and all that stuff, it's all around behavioral management. And that's where, you know, the bridge start. And if we start from consumer point of view, then we're going to have very, very high, hard time convincing providers to say that data is meaningful. Welcome to MedSider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. 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. In this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Young June, CEO of Well Assist, the Samsung spin-out developing S-Patch, a lightweight wearable for long-term ECG monitoring. With more than 25 years of healthcare experience across the U.S. and Korea, Young has held leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Shield of California, and Samsung SDS, where he led healthcare innovation projects before launching Well Assist in 2019. He holds a computer science degree and an MBA in pharmaceutical management from Drexel University. Here are a few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, if patients don't like using it, nothing else

matters. Traditional cardiac monitors delivered reliable data, but failed on comfort and usability. Young's team flipped the process. More than 120 patient interviews focused on how people actually live with the device, shaped S-patch choices like weight, form factor, and the use of commodity electrodes. Second, clearance isn't commercialization, especially across borders. Young assumed FDA clearance would unlock the U.S. market. Instead, Wallace has spent a year navigating payers. rules, EHR integrations, and even redesigning hardware for different body types. The experience underscored how regulatory approval alone doesn't guarantee adoption. Every geography rewrites the playbook.

Third, build the medical case before chasing the consumer market. In MedTech, it can be tempting to position a device as a wellness tool first and then expand into clinical use later. Young pushed for the opposite. His reasoning was simple. Physicians will never trust data validated only in consumer settings. By starting with FTE clearance and clinical adoption, Wellassus ensured its device earned credibility where it mattered most with doctors and patients.

All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of Medsider Mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health and other proven MedTech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every Medsider interview isn't easy. That's why we created Medsider Mentors. These ebook volumes distill the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest format. To check the latest volume out, head over to Medsiderradio.com forward-slash mentors. Premium members

get free access to all past and future volumes, plus a treasure trove of other resources. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. We recently revamped Medsider with swanky new features, especially for our premium members. In addition to every volume with Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to our entire interview library dating back to 2010. You'll also get Medsider Playbooks, curated guides packed with actionable insights and topics like fundraising, regulatory challenges, reimbursement strategies, and more. And if you're fundraising, don't miss our exclusive investor database featuring over 750 life science VCs, family offices, and angels.

We've even created three custom packages to help you with your next fundraise. Learn more about Medsider mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's dive in in the interview. All right, young, welcome to Medsider Radio. Thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here. Excellent. I know everyone's listening to this and not watching us on camera, but you've got a great virtual background with what looks like the well-assist booth, you know, almost as if you're, you're dialing in live from a big med tech conference. So it's all good. But with that said, I recorded a very short bio that probably didn't do you justice at the outset of this episode.

So let's start there. If you can give us kind of a two-minute elevator-style overview of your journey leading up to running well as this. So I guess I started my career with Johnson & Johnson back in New Jersey headquarters. And that's how I started to get into the healthcare industry. And I ran a lot of innovative projects, including like baby.com when initially internet was starting. And then I moved on to Kaiser Permanente and worked for Kaiso Memente over a decade. And same thing, I worked with the business architecture and innovation team, where our focus back in Kaiser Permanente was how do we create more services, hospital services,

outside of hospital, from the community, from the home. And that really got me into more passionate about, you know, how can we create technology that can bridge and help, you know, hospital services to be executed at home or at the community. Then out of the blue, I got a call from Samsung. And, you know, they are, you know, getting into the healthcare and they wanted, you know, someone like me. And I thought, wow, yeah, Samsung would be very good candidates to really breathe that. gap because, you know, Samsung appliances and devices is almost every home, right, whether it's a TV, refrigerator, you know, whatever might be. So that got me into joining Samsung and relocating myself from U.S. to South Korea. And within Samsung, we had a few projects around diabetes

management or you know dynamic sequencing and things of that and then the last project was this project about S-patch which is cardiac monitoring and with that you know we commercialized the device and the whole concept Samsung decided to spin it off and asked me to lead the spin of company and that's where we started this wallace's and I've been running as a CEO of wallaces last six years. Very good. And we're recording this in mid, mid-20205, if you're listening to this after the fact. But I don't think I realized that.

So the device was already commercialized when Samsung and your team decided to spin it off and do a separate entity. Yes, yes. Ah, very good. Actually, the device was actually showcased at the CES back in 2017 as a Samsung brand. You know, usually the keynote, they usually, you know, put out these future devices, right? And the S-Patch was one of them. Ah, very good, very good.

Well, it's certainly a cool-looking device. I'm actually looking at it right now on your website, which is well-assist.com. If you're listening to this, we'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider, but it's well-assist.com, W-E-L-L-L-S-I-S-S-com. Tell us a little bit more about the S-Patch. It appears to be a pretty, pretty innovative. kind of industrial design as well as, you know, the rest of kind of the feature set looks pretty compelling. So give us a sense for kind of what it is and maybe how it's different than some of the

other cardiac kind of wearables that are that are offered or on the market today. Yes, yes. So because we're not a hospital based, you know, one of the thing that we wanted to make sure is we are, you know, creating solution not for cure per se, but it's for care, right? So how do we make sure that the patients love our device? They like the look and feel. They like the touch. They like to wear. So we spend a little bit of time really from design point of view as well.

So that's why we made it, you know, very slick look and things of that. The other key technology inside this patch is bioprocessor chip, which was dedicated and, you know, made by Samsung, you know, chip maker. This was one of the new chip that Samsung made and only us right now is using it. And this chip is designed to process human

virus size. You know, just like a lot of these chips are very dedicated to do one thing, right? Whether it's a camera, whether it's multi-processing and things of that. This was designed to process viral signs including ECG, P-PG, temperatures, BIA and things of that.

And so that's kind of where we are a little bit different than anyone else because we use this tiny little chip that actually process multivirus size. Currently we're using ECG only, but we plan to extend to a multivirus size. And so we are probably the lightest. The light is about, it weights about two sheets of paper. So it's only 8 gram. And when people wear, they don't know they are wearing one. And so, you know, that's kind of where we wanted to make sure it is more consumer-likeable product. A lot of the medical devices are, hey, they don't care.

They want easy for doctors to use, right? So we made that a little bit different. Yeah, it definitely has the look and feel of more like an aura device or even a whoop or something like that, right? It's definitely, definitely, it definitely appears to be pretty consumer-friendly, which I hope to, you know, get into in a little bit more detail, kind of like how you, how you thought about that, right, designing something that's, you know, that serves a real kind of medical need, but also aligns with what a consumer expects. But before we, before we get there, obviously, as we just, you know, you just mentioned, the company is, is actively commercializing. So, you know, as of kind of the current, the current date, call it mid mid-20205, are you particularly

focused on a certain geography or give us a sense for kind of where the company is, is at right now? Since we started the company and commercialized this in South Korea, so we had definitely South Korea FDA approval. So we started the region in South Korea and then we expanded into Europe. So we got CE mark. And I think one of the first country in Europe was UK and Greece. And then we started expanding to other parts of the Europe as well as Asia Pacific, like Thailand, Singapore, and eventually. India. Then in 2004, first quarter of 2004, we got FDA approved. So after we got FDA approval, our focus is US. So since then, all our, because we're, you know, still startup company,

small company with very limited resources. There was no way for us to be able to, you know, support multi-region. So currently we are focusing just Korea and USA. Very good. Very good. So started east and headed west, sounds like over the past, over the past handful of years. Well, that's a good overview of the company. And I'm looking forward to kind of diving in to some more kind of functional topics, if you will. But again, for everyone listening, wellassist.com is the website, W-E-L-L-S-I-S-I-S-Well-Assist.com. Definitely encourage you to check out the technology as well as the company. It's very cool.

You can, you know, you really get a sense for kind of how they're positioning it, positioning the device in a very consumer. way without losing sort of the science, right, the scientific rigor behind the product either. So job well done. I encourage everyone to check that out. And again, we'll link to it in the full right up on MedSider. So with that said, you know, let's spend the next 20 minutes or so, 20, 30 minutes kind of talking about some of those functional areas that I mentioned, right, that any device startup, regardless of their key audience is going to probably have to have to conquer at some point in their journey. And I'd like to start with what we, you know, kind of just touched on, right, which is the consumer sort of experience behind this device.

And even if you're not working on, I would say, a pure play kind of consumer device, right, whether it's regulated or not, this kind of idea of industrial design is often lost, right, to most medical device startups. They think it's, it doesn't have to look pretty, it doesn't have to feel that good. A doctor's just going to use it, right? So just, you know, they don't really spend a lot of time here, but clearly you did. And so give us a sense for kind of like, you know, maybe how you thought about this and maybe frame that up for what might be most helpful for other, you know, other device CEOs that are, that are, that. are currently trying to figure out the best approach to their particular device design. Yeah, so luckily, right, because not many people know, but Samsung has one of the largest hospital in Korea and in Asia. And so when we first start designing this device, so we work with a lot of the Samsung Medical Center doctors. And so we got this chip that can do

multiviral science, what are the most important ones that, you know, we need to work on? And it came out to be ECG. Now, you know, Holter, which is six lead that you have to wear and with bulky, you know, devices that you can only probably wear about 24 hour or 48 hour. But a lot of these, you know, journals is out there. And I read them kind of was leading in terms of this long-term ECG monitoring, where, you know, your detection rate goes up to, you know, 60%, 90%, the longer you wear. And so we were dealing with this bulky, big devices versus long wear, right? So how do we make sure that we still have this holter type of, you know, accuracy and the data that doctor wants, but at the same time that you can still wear long term?

When we did a lot of the interview with patients who wear ZioPatch, one of the complaint was, there's no way they're going to wear these things for 14 days. Skin irritations and itchiness and barkiness and all that stuff. So that's why we designed it such a way that it looks like a line that connects like a halter, which gives you a better ECG, especially the P wave. But at the same time, we made it very lightweight. We made it such a way that the people when they wear, they are not ashamed of. Because a lot of people who will be in a view, they go, when I wear a whole tar, people start asking me, what's wrong with you?

Why you have to wear this, right? And people just didn't like that. And the other feedback that we also, so we did a lot of patients interview before we started to do the design. And that's how with all that input, we started to work on the design. Got it. And do you think that was the key to kind of where you eventually landed is that, that, you know, sort of those in-depth patient interviews? Yes, yes.

We just had a curiosity. Do you recall how many, roughly? I'm assuming it was a lot. Oh, yeah. So we did probably about 120 or so. And not just an interview, but we actually follow them, right? So before, after, and after, you know, if they had to come back, repeat. And so after six months, we follow them and D and other interview and things of that.

So, and that's where, you know, we thought of a reusable device. Like a lot of our competitors are single use because that, you know, hospital don't like to have these things in inventory, right? They like to just place it and then throw it away after the test is done. But what we thought was as people start to do more than one test, then we realize this has to be reusable so that the patients can eventually own one of this and, you know, test themselves few times a year. Got it.

So is S-Patch the only or one of the few reusable devices? Oh, interesting. Very good. Yeah. What you touched on earlier about following patients, right? I think sometimes that's underappreciated, right? because we may have, you know, when I say we, most device companies, you know, have some sort of interview human factors types of studies that are set up.

But, you know, they may be kind of a regulatory checkbox, if you will, right? Whereas if you're really trying to solve for a certain issue or, in your case, come up with a design, you know, that's very consumer oriented. It requires, you know, real life, evaluating that in a real life, in a real world, you know, scenarios. And so I think that's a really, really important point that you kind of touched on. Yeah. And that's kind of, I think, I guess, also the benefit of like a Korean culture. In U.S., you know, you go to multiple doctor's offices and, you know, hospital based on, you know, your sickness. The culture in Korea is, let's say, you know, people like Samsung Medical Center,

that you go to that place, same place all the time throughout your ears. So Samsung Medical Center usually have, you know, patients data of 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, without, because the patients don't jump from one hospital to adult hospitals. And that was kind of also benefit for us to be able to do the follow-up, you know, after six months, after a year. Also, we were able to get a lot of the data when we develop our AI. Same thing, we were able to get the data of the same patients of ECG of their 20 years. So when they were from, you know, 30 years old, all the way to, like, you know, 40, 50, 60 years old, so every year's data, we were able to have access. So that was a huge differentiator also for us from our AI point of view.

Got it, got it. Yeah, that's a really important point to remember, right? If you're working on a project or a concept or a device that does require a fair amount of follow-up, it's wise. to be mindful of, you know, how difficult that follow-up is going to be, right? In your case, it sounded like the kind of the integrated Samsung hospital or network really facilitated, really facilitated, it allowed you to accomplish that a lot more efficiently maybe than, yeah, maybe than someone else or, you know, a different, you know, approaching a different center would have. Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah, let's transition to, um, to market expansion, right? And this move from kind of east,

east to west, you know, I think anyone that would hear you describe, you know, those efforts, would be, you know, not only impressed, but also it kind of feels a little bit overwhelming, right? I mean, those are big, significant markets that you kind of methodically, sounds like kind of methodically knocked down. And so I would love to kind of get your take or maybe a couple of your learning experiences, not only approaching, you know, various markets, but also how maybe that's changing with respect to the U.S. Yeah. So I guess luckily, right, you know, I have a lot of the background of Western healthcare system because I work for J&J for 10 years for Kaiser Permanente 10 years.

And so when we move from, you know, we thought, you know, patients is a patient. But yes, that is from the experience point of view. However, when you start commercializing, there's more than patient, right? You need to work with doctors. You need to work with payers. You need to work with, right, you know, the health system ecosystems, which is, Let's say in U.S., most of the hospital had either Epic Center, e-clinical work. There are few EHR-EMR-MR vendors that you need to integrate.

In Korea, every hospital, they develop their own systems. They don't buy, you know, EHR, EMR. And so it's a completely different landscape. Same thing in terms of payer. In Korea, there's only one payer, government. That's it. When you come to U.S., you have to deal with Medicare. Medicaid plus all this private insurance, right, Signal, Edna, Hibana, whatever might be.

And they all have different guidelines on how those reimbursements happens. And so that was, you know, it took us even after we got FDA, you know, we thought, yeah, we got FDA. Ah, we're going to have a commercial deal now. No. Yeah, we started to start, you know, making sure that we can integrate into the, process, protocols, and that took us, you know, good one year to make sure, you know, the benefit we had was patients was excited to be, you know, to want to be aware.

And, you know, doctors was, oh, yeah, this is very easy to do. And all the service provider actually gave them a benefit, financial benefits, and their process benefit because, you know, because it's a reusable. there's a huge cost benefit. And also the sticky that actually attached to your body is called electrodes. And we use, we are the only one, I think, or few that actually is compatible with existing electrodes out in the commercial. So compatible with falter electrodes. Where a lot of other patches, they have their own electrodes.

and that can become very expensive. So a lot of our competitor goes through, you know, business model of printer, right? You know, they provide the device a little bit cheap, but then ink is expensive. And same thing. The price might be, and then their electrodes are expensive.

But for us will be, you know, electrodes, you can just use whatever that is available on the market, which is, you know, 20 cents, you know, 30 cents. But the device itself can be reused as much as you can. So those becomes a little bit of experience that we deal with. The other one was also patience demographics. A lot of the Asian countries are pretty much the same, right?

90% they are all same shape, same height. But when you come to Westerns, it's very diverse, right? You have very small to very big. And so, you know, we had to actually redesign the length of the device because it won't fit in some of the chest. Yeah. And, you know, when we design the power button without, you know, everyone's finger looks the same or will be the similar size. No, right? You know, as you know, some of these athletics or, you know, some of people who are well built, they have large thumb.

And so when we asked them to turn it on, they go, oh, I don't see the lights, right? Because you're covering with the... So we had to redesign, you know, some of those things, you know, minor things like that too. But, you know, we wanted to make sure that everyone, from patients to the doctors to the service provider, to be able to see the benefits. And so those things were a little bit we had to adjust based on, you know, the populations and the health system. Yeah, yeah. Those are really interesting points. I mean, and I think most people listening would would hear you, you know, kind of describe your approach of aligning or understanding and

trying to align as best as possible with like a disparate payer landscape in the U.S. versus, you know, the single payer environment in Korea and, you know, understanding sort of those different sort of sites of care and who's paying for what. But it's really interesting sort of the change, like hearing you touch on the changes that you had to make with respect to the, kind of the user interface, right, and how it changes based on the demographic that you're commercializing into. And I think that's really healthy to remember, right? Because sometimes that you can overlook that the fact that, you know, you've maybe designed a certain cable length for a cath lab or an operating room environment in the U.S., but, you know, that may change dramatically,

right, in Japan or Korea or, you know, name your, name your country kind of outside the U.S. And so that's, I think, a really, really helpful point to keep in mind if you're kind of at that stage and thinking about, you know, how your devices may or should change, right, as you approach different geographies. On that note, let's talk a little bit about kind of your regulatory approach, because that also is kind of a, you know, you've accomplished a lot as well as you kind of expanded, you know, westward, you know, from CE mark to now 510K clearance. When you think about some of the key lessons that you've learned navigating, you know, some regulatory challenges, are there a few that, that kind of. to mind? The regulatory is all about, you know, making sure that it is safe, right, you know, for patients and the device does what it's supposed to do. So I think, you know, with the challenge was a little bit where, you know, a lot of this technology component has many different component inside. And we had to make sure that we control all these little components, right,

including, you know, there's our chip, but there's a small memory chip, small BLE communication chips, right, you know, and all those things to make sure that especially nowadays with cybersecurity and what happens if someone can hack in, right, and, you know, grab your data or, you know, someone else is looking your heart, right? And all these things are, you know, probably no one wants to see my heart, right? But other than my doctor. But you know, you never know, right? And so I think those are, you know, we didn't expect it. Cybersecurity to be that tight in some of this.

But, you know, when we heard about, you know, one incident about some of these high-rank officials, when they're wearing one of these medical devices, someone hacked in and were able to get the high-ranked person's health information, right? And so, you know, we spent a lot of time. we're thinking about, you know, the cybersecurity portion of it and how we protect the data and, you know, making sure that those data are, you know, well, secure. Now, the other part that I'm looking at looking forward, right, at the end of the day, so who's the owner of the data, right?

Especially when you're dealing with these vital signs. Because, you know, I believe patients should be the owner. I know sometimes payer might define say, hey, I pay for it, so I own it. Or the doctor said, I diagnosed it. So I owned it. But especially all this virus that you wear and you keep track at home that you will have access to. You can own it. You can store it.

And you decide when you want to share that data to the doctor. So, you know, for the future model, we're definitely looking into that area. as well. But for now, you know, we just make sure that everything is encrypted, everything is well protected. And so that was one of the, you know, a thing that was, you know, a little bit harder, especially for the U.S. The U.S. had a very high standard for cybersecurity and which I think, you know, it needs to be. Hey, everyone, let's take a quick break to talk about Fastwave Medical, the company at co-founded and lead as CEO. We're developing next generation.

intravascular lithotripsy systems, or IVL for short, to tackle complex calcific disease. The IVL market is valued at over $10 billion, but there's currently only one major player. In early 2023, we opened up an investment opportunity to our community, and within a month, we secured close to $10 million. Then in early 24, we closed and oversubscribed $19 million round in just a few weeks, bringing the total investment into Fastwave to over $40 million. Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing too, the $900 million acquisition of Bolt Metaer, by Boston Scientific, and then J&J's $13 billion acquisition of Shockwave Medical signals a lot of attention towards emerging IVL startups like FastWave, and we're making some serious progress. FastWave recently received its seventh patent for our differentiated laser IVL platform for coronary applications.

On the clinical side, last year we completed the first inhuman study of our advanced electric IVL system with some pretty compelling results. Next up in 2025, we have IDEE trials plan for both our peripheral and coronary IVL platforms. So if you're interested in investing in the fast-growing IVL market, sign up for our investor wait list at fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Again, that's fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah. Cyber is one of those areas where it's almost impossible to overestimate how much is required for that. It always, there always seems like something, right, that's unexpected that comes up related to cybersecurity.

So that's interesting to hear you kind of talk through how you've, you've kind of overcome that, that particular challenge. Before we move on to a different topic, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about kind of the WOOP, the recent warning letter that WOOP received, right? And if you're not familiar, if you're listening to this, you're not familiar with that. Woop is a, you know, a very consumer first kind of company that has traditionally kind of commercialized their devices, you know, with wellness claims. And I don't know all of the details, but my understanding is they, they incorporated like a blood pressure kind of element to their, to their device, which triggered, you know, an FDA warning letter, you know, that they were kind of marketing it for not medical, medical purposes.

And so there's been a fair amount of seems like back and forth. So generally speaking, kind of what's your take on this, this concept of a medical device, right? Even though it's maybe commercialized for, you know, to the consumer, for consumer kind of, you know, applications versus, you know, wellness companies like ORA or WOOP or, and there's a number of others that are, you know, generally marketing their devices for general wellness purposes. Yeah, so this was one of the discussion I had when we were first creating strategy around this with a lot of the Samsung executive, where Samsung is all about consumer, right? And so they want us to take like a whoop, right?

Let's go to wellness, and then we can expand into medical. I had a different thoughts, right? because on the wellness, eventually I think wellness and medical will have to be, either, merged, right? Because at the end of the day, it's the same thing, right? We want to make sure that people are healthy, whether it's awareness, whether it's medical. Now, on the medical side, yes, if you're doing cure, yes, I think that's purely clear that you're going to have to have doctors and all that stuff. But if you're doing care or chronic disease management, which requires a lot of self-driven, you know, because behavioral health, right, at the end of the day, diabetes, you know, overweight and blood pressure and all that stuff,

it's all around behavioral management. And that's where, you know, the bridges are. And if we start at from consumer point of view, then we're going to have very hard time convincing providers to say, that data is meaningful. You're not going to get any of that, right? Because I had an experience, you know, because I've been working with doctor for the last 20 years and they're never going to do it.

So my approach is actually, let's go medical first. Then we can expand to later to, you know, consumer if you want to. And so my approach is, yeah, I think any vital signs that are used at the medical facility, I guess, you know, it has to be studied. at the medical side, get FDA approval, and then get into that. Now, you know, the OOP is a little bit different because the blood pressure, if, you know, if the blood pressure is used for other reasons, right, then trying to create, cure or manage, you know, hypertension or, you know, high blood pressure, that's a different study. Then, yes, I think what FDA warning, it completely makes sense. But if you're

trying to use pro pressure for your own performance management or your mood management, that's a different story. Right. I think that's where I think the gray area started happening. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And I would say, because of my, the company I found prior to Fastwave was very much, we designed and developed class two devices, but commercialize those entirely online to direct to consumer. So I've got a fair amount of experience kind of sitting on both, kind of both ends of the ends of the spectrum. And there's a lot of interesting things that we had to navigate with the other company that I mentioned Juve. And so I tend to side kind of with whoops kind of overall take. This is like they're marketing this product for wellness purposes, right? And, you know,

blood pressure is a component or a signal of that. But I also at the same time understand kind of, look, FDA is, there's a precedent here with FDA around blood pressure. And I see why they're weighing in. So I'm just hopeful that there's maybe this forces the agency to kind of maybe begin to kind of like, establish a little bit more guardrails or guidance, right, around, you know, what defines, you know, general wellness and what defines, you know, medical, because there is a lot of overlap, right, between the two. And I'm right there with you. Like, ultimately, there should be a convergence of the, of the two, right? Especially with the prevalence of LLMs and more and more patients, right, using data from LLMs, you know, in their discussions and conversations and conversations with

physicians. And you would believe, I mean, so many physicians I've talked to, even over the past year, I would say, have historically said, yeah, when when my patients come in and say they read something using, you know, using a Google search or WebMD, I would, I would scoff, you know, and kind of, you know, almost laugh in a sort of respectful way. But now with, you know, GPT, you know, Jim and I, name your, name your LLM, like the data is actually really, really good. And so that's going to be kind of an interesting kind of thing as time moves on and AI gets that much better, that much smarter. So with that said, let's talk a little bit about AI, right? You touched on it earlier, and I know your team is kind of working on on developing some models, right, with your devices,

especially I think around AF, AF prediction. So, and I think in fact, I believe that data was published fairly recently. So when you think about how you've approached AI, whether it's, you know, incorporating into your device or building, out a data model or maybe even just how to best incorporate it into a workflow. What are some of the more kind of unique or maybe non-obvious things that you've picked up throughout this experience? So, you know, ECG AI, I guess, you know, maybe first started from Stanford and, you know, they started to use, you know, the old AI model methodology from CNN, you know, and machine learning

and all that stuff. But at that time was very much of, okay, you have a snapshot of ECG. Now have AI to look at it and define, you know, do I have AF here? Do I have abnormality here? But what we think was because, you know, when we look in a long term, our, we want people to test the device a lot longer. And also we want the AI to, you know, use the streaming data. You know, the AI started with, you know, imaging, right? So, you know, when you have a scan images and AI will do diagnosis based on the Snapchat of those images, the ECG is streaming, right? And so as soon as, you know, we have 256 hertz. So every second, you know, we have the data of your beat and we want to make sure our AI look at every bit

as its streams. So we took that approach. And also, you know, challenging also is creating, you know, curated data, right? Answers, right, to train the AI. And we realize, you know, one doctor might say differently.

So there's no clear answer sheet sometime. And so, you know, some doctor, yeah, that's okay. I don't think that's an AAP. The other doctor said, yeah, that's definitely an AI. Okay. So, you know, and this is, part of the guideline of FDA as well, when you have two different persons discrepancy,

then you need to have a third person to vote in one or the other, right? And that became the curated answer sheets. And so, you know, creating those things and validating through the streaming data, that was a little bit challenging. But that's the approach that we did. Now, we realize a lot of, we do have a lot of competitors out there doing similar thing with us. The paper that we just released about prediction is if the patients actually do once in your lifetime of ECG test, then prediction is hard.

However, if you do, let's say, once a year or every six months, now we can actually do prediction based on your trend changes, right? And this was another benefit that we had with Samsung Medical Center and Korea government mandates that every population do once a year in a health checkup. And that health checkup include ECG. And now actually we are included as part of the health checkup. So before used to be resting ECG for 30 seconds or one minute. Now actually when people come in, they wear our device, go home for two days.

And then we collect that data. And based on that data, we provide the reports. screening reports. So now we have we start together now more information about that patients every year of their ECG for two days. And that has been a huge leap of frog for us to start creating this prediction model where people regular doctor cannot see those changes. But AI can see the changes and they can predict. So you know, you can predict about 90% that you're going to develop AF within a year. Got it.

It's super interesting. If you had to kind of sum up your experience incorporating AI, right, and building out these models and ensuring that the data, you know, is rigorous, you know, what do you think is probably the number one thing that, you know, another device CEO needs to get right as they kind of, you know, build out maybe or incorporate their, you know, a certain AI into their, into their product. I don't have all the answers. But, you know, what I think, right, is that using AI on the medical field, it still has to be very careful, right?

Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of liability involved. And so we're not yet in medical field creating AI to replace doctors. That should never be the goal, right? It's to help doctors to make their decision better, to see the areas that. and they might overlook them. But there's a focus of AI to really help the doctor. And then there's another AI that helps the patients to recognize, you know, oh, I didn't know that I had this irregular heartbeat every time, you know,

I exercise or every time, you know, I'm sitting on the couch watching football, eating popcorn. You know, I think those are information that I'm. need for patients to know so they can change their behavior. So I think there's two different angle of AI. You know, what is the AI trying to do? Is it trying to help doctors to diagnose and, you know, better? Or is it AI to really help patients to change their behavior or give them the insights

of their body? Yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah, those are two different ones that we're trying to. So for our commercial one, yes, we are definitely focusing more for doctors to help the doctors to make their decision better. But for our long term, we are focusing on the patients so that we provide the patients. And that way, we're not mixing AI with other person's data, but we're only looking at your data and providing information about your insight, not someone else's insights. Yeah, it's a good way to kind of frame it up from our first principles perspective, right? Like at the end of the day, what are you aiming to do? What's the single biggest thing you're aiming to do with your AI, right?

Is it accelerate efficiency, right? Or assist, you know, supportive physician's kind of diagnosis or is it, you know, a larger data set specific to a, you know, a patient. So that's a good way to think about it. You know, it's interesting. I was listening to this podcast just a couple days ago. And one of the hosts mentioned that not using AI, right, is going to be the, in five years. year. I can't remember the window one no. He said, I think it was like five years. And, you know, if you're not using AI and, you know, five years from now, it's going to be the equivalent of showing up to work without a computer, without a laptop, you know. And so I thought that was a good, kind of a good way to kind of think about, think about it. And I was, I was at, you know,

I was at a conference recently here in the U.S. with a bunch of KOLs. We were at dinner. And it was, it was surprising to me how little AI these physicians actually used, you know. And I think it'll be interesting to see how this, how this evolves, because you, it's, it's hard to line that up with the fact that, you know, open evidence just raised a monster valuation, right, which is a, you know, a pretty, pretty popular AI, AI tool for, for clinical literature. So anyway, it's a fun topic to kind of discuss and certainly evolving quite quickly. But with that said, I'm looking at the clock. I know we don't have a lot of time left. I'd love to get your take on a couple different things. One is, is maybe lessons learned

spitting out, you know, well-assist, how to add a Samsung, because that is kind of unique experience. And then two, you know, any, any startup, you know, is going to have to raise capital. I'm not entirely sure kind of the relationship that you have, you still have with, with Samsung in that regard. But it looks like, you know, based on our research that you've just secured maybe some investment from Access Bio, you know, if you've got a partnership with a pharmaceutical company, Sam Jin, I believe is that is how you pronounce that. So give us it, give us kind of your, your, your, your take maybe on both things, right? Like what that was like spinning out well as this, as well as, you know, what you've, what you've learned along the way, raising,

raising capital for the company. Spending off experience was kind of interesting because throughout my life, I will always work with big companies, like J&J, Kaiser is a mega company. Same thing is Samsung, even bigger company, you know, with 300,000 employees, right? And so, and from spinning up, from that kind of organization, and now I have like 10 people, and you have to do everything, literally everything, right? Where, you know, when you have a big organization, you have organization who does this, you know, you have an organization who does that, right? So you can always, you know, rely on someone else to do other stuff that you don't care.

When you have startup, I have very important one, you know, making sure that I can develop this product, but you have all this other stuff that you need to still worry about, right? You know, managing the bank, managing your, you know, you know, HR, your, you know, office, right? A lot of little things that you still need to, you know, manage. And yeah, I guess I didn't realize that I would be doing, wearing, you know, 20, 30 different hats every day. But I think that was very, you know, huge learning, right. So, you know, I encourage people who, you know, doing a startup, it is a great opportunity to learn about running a company. from soup to nut, right?

So I think that's going to be, you know, experience of the spinning up. Now, from the investment, you know, fund raising point of view, yeah, fundraising is never fun. Fund raising is all about people disagreeing with you. People don't believe in you. There's only a few who's going to believe with you.

Or even they say, oh, yeah, that's great good idea. That's it, right? And so we're a little bit lucky in the beginning, right? Because as part of the spin of Samsung did invest. And I think that's also very good to have on our cap table. Because, you know, when you talk to other investors go, oh, if you're Samsung invested, okay, then it's not one of those companies who might be out there for a year and then disappear. And, you know, a lot of our components was still was provided by Samsung.

So I think, you know, those things really help, you know, other VCs to say, yeah, okay, you know, they got something and they have a, you know, big company who's backing it up. So that's helpful. But still, you know, a lot of people will challenge in many, many different ways. and especially SI, you know, so companies like AccessBio or company like, you know, Korea pharmaceutical company like Samjin is more SI, right, strategic investors. So because they align, they know these areas of the business and they are some alignment into their business. And therefore, I think, you know, just making sure that you convince them how, you know,

if we becomes Quebec, that can also help their companies. company from their portfolio point of view. But pure BCs are more of, okay, in 10 years, how much money can you make for me? Right. Because at the end of the day, they are, you know, it's like a loan, like a bank, right? So they need to exit. So having a good exit strategy, I think those are helpful. But, you know, just like any other, you know, founders out there, you know, we never did this.

you know, this is my first time, right? You know, that's why I think someone who went through few startups, I think they are better off actually, you know, but being as a first, you know, startup, those are all, I didn't know what, you know, that I need to have an exit strategy in the beginning, right? Even though when people told me, yeah, we're going to become big, right? But we're going to become IPO, right? But, you know, IPO also has a different ways of IPO, right?

How you're going to do that? I think those are detailed planning that is required. And so it's not just about product commercializations, going through the key technology, but also making sure how we create a differentiator stories on the market and how we're going to have the access strategy. Yeah, those are really good points. And you mentioned a couple of things that sort of resonated with me.

One is in terms of fundraising, it's going to feel lonely a lot, right? Because most people are going to disagree with you. And that's tough to kind of get used to, right? You know, especially if generally speaking, you like to get along with most people, right? Hearing no a lot, you know, and even kind of those people that are, you know, seemingly excited about what you're doing, but still unwilling to write a check, I mean, it just can feel defeating a lot. So that's, you know, if you're in the throes of fundraising, that's very normal. very normal and would be very unique if you weren't getting a lot of nose, I would say,

even if you're in a hot category or a hot space. But the other thing, Young, that you mentioned, too, with respect to kind of spinning out well-assist, that's something I hear quite often, right, for people that are new to startups is like the sheer amount of things that you have to manage and do and are responsible for is, you know, is kind of shocking, right, if you're not used to it. And I would add another thing on top of that is, In a lot of cases, you're going to feel uncomfortable doing all of these things because you won't feel like you probably should be, right? Someone else should be doing it or has more expertise. But the cold reality is that, you know, there's not that other person that you can go to in most cases, right? You just can't afford it or you need to move faster, right, than what, you know, the time that's going to take to kind of go elsewhere and utilize multiple resources.

So some really, really good feedback. I'm looking at the clock. I know we have a few minutes left, you know, but I want to get to this rapid fire portion in an interview. you. But again, for everyone listening, wellassist.com is the website, W-E-E-L-L-L-Y, S-I-S-S-E-S-W-Sys. Definitely encourage you to check that out. Well, of course, link to it in the full write-up on MedSider. If you're new to these interviews, we include a longer-form article that accompanies these podcast episodes that really highlight and summarize the key points, the key lessons learned that our guests share with us. So I highly encourage you to check that out as well. With that said, Young, a few rapid-fire questions to wrap us up here. feel free to answer in abbreviated fashion or if you want to expand a little bit, that's perfectly fine too.

But first one on the docket, take us to mid-20206, right, a year from now. What are you most excited about at Wellesis? Yeah, I mean, you know, 2026 will be a big year for us. So because it's a year of expansion, right? We are right now, you know, building our customer landscape one by one. But I think, you know, 2026 will be, you know, exponential growth year, which that's kind of the one I'm targeting. And the other one is, you know, we are actually also targeting IPO in Korea stock market

by end of 26. So, you know, we'll be, you know, very busy, you know, try to get to that level. And so, yeah, it will be very, very exciting, you know, for 2020s for us. No doubt. If you're staring down on IPO, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's, it's, Definitely a lot to chew on for sure. All right, since spinning out the company and taking it on the CEO role, what's the most surprising thing you've learned over the past five to six years?

Surprising, I don't know, but I think one of the most important thing as a CEO, we have to be hands-on. And I still do believe, you know, people's relationships. And the relationship, I don't know, you know, we do a lot of this conference call. But actually meeting in person is 100 times more effective than, you know, 10 conference call. And so, you know, I tend to, if I have someone who, a doctor who might be interested, I will fly to them, meet them, show the device. Because touching and actually feeling the device is different than how pretty it is to show on the screen.

is night and day differences. So, you know, one of the lessons to learn is, yes, human touch is still out there and you need to be hands-on. You can't just be like, you know, big company's management style. You know, you need to be out there, work with clinicals, work with patients, you know, hear them. I still go to see some time. If there, errors complain, I fly out there, meet the patients. you know, hear about their complaints, how we can improve. And that's the benefit of being small company.

Big companies cannot do that because there are too many layers of decision making. For us, if I hear, I see it, I need to make changes, I'll make the changes. And I think, you know, that's the benefit of being startup, being able to change quickly, change, and adopt quickly. And I think those are, you know, huge lessons learned, you know, last six, seven years that I've been doing start up here. Yeah, that's good, good stuff. It never sees it to amaze me how much, how much an in-person meeting or in-person kind of engagement can really move the needle.

Last question, last two questions, but I'm going to kind of combine them into one for the sake of time. Let's presume we're maybe in Houston, right, near U.S. office. And we had, you know, we're just having dinner with a group of other, you know, med tech entrepreneurs. What's the one thing that you'd really want to kind of leave them with? Yeah, something maybe that you thought you wish you understood, you know, maybe in your earlier career.

I still believe this medical field or healthcare field is very, very exciting. It's the most exciting industry, I believe, and it will last forever, right? Because at the end of the day, it is one of the most important ones. And so I think we all need to be very proud of what we do. Yes, we're here to make sure that we can also make money and run the company. but at the end of the day, we are making changes and saving life at the end of the day. And to be proud of what we do, yes, there's a lot of times that, you know, feel lonely, feel like, oh, I want to give up, you know, why is you talking me like this, right?

You know, you have all these, you know, things. But at the end of the day, you know, I'm so happy that I'm in this field. I'm proud of what I'm doing. I'm proud of all my team who's working nights and day to create this product to make sure that the patients are happy, the doctors are happy, and payers are happy. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of the where. So I never regret of starting where this is. You know, every morning I wake up, excited, well, what I'm going to do today, who I'm going to meet today, right? and, you know, and every little thing that we do, we're making changes to save life.

That's good. Good way. I love the enthusiasm. And I'm right there with you, right? This is as hard as running a startup is in the health care, life science, is med tech, kind of a, you know, domain. It's the best. It's so rewarding, you know, unlike any other, any other sector or vertical.

So with that said, I know we're a little bit over. So, you know, I can't thank you enough for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time and kind of sharing a lot of the, A lot of the lessons that you've learned over your career, and especially over the past a handful of years as well as this. Thank you. And thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts. Absolutely.

I'll have you hold on the line. But for everyone listening, thanks again for your attention. As always, until the next episode of MedSatter goes live, everyone, take care. 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. But here's the thing.

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