Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Creating Consumer Demand for a New Category: Interview with Climatic CEO Eric Kau

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Eric Kau, co-founder and CEO of Climatic.Climatic is commercializing L Max, a daily inhaled system that proactively supports lung function.Before Climatic, Eric served as COO of Seed Health and was part of the foundational team at Chewy. Earlier in his career, Eric held growth and operational leadership roles across consumer, wellness, and e-commerce businesses, including Amazon, BoxyCharm, Target, and Best Buy. In this interview, Eric discusses what it takes to build a consumer category that doesn’t yet exist, how Climatic approached clinical validation and consumer education simultaneously, and how early user behavior helped identify the company’s strongest initial customer cohorts.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device founders and CEOs and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.And if you’re ready to level up your medtech game, you should check out Medsider Courses — 8-week masterclasses covering topics like fundraising, M&A and exit planning, design and development, clinical and regulatory strategy, and commercialization.These courses, featuring hard-earned lessons from elite medtech CEOs, can be purchased individually or come free with our All-Access Pass.If you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Eric Kau, which includes a link to ScottBot — an AI version of host Scott Nelson trained on every Medsider interview and playbook. Feel free to ask ScottBot any questions you'd like!KEY MOMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW(02:49) - Eric’s path through Amazon, Chewy, Seed, and the consumer health experiences that led to Climatic (05:49) - Why Climatic is treating lung health like hydration, sleep, or nutrition (11:47) - How Climatic rapidly iterated on formulas, delivery systems, and prototypes to launch a product for a new category in under 2 years (14:56) - Climatic’s approach to product design, which is built around gym bags, vanities, and existing wellness routines (19:59) - How early users shaped both Climatic’s clinical strategy and its go-to-market focus on endurance athletes and biohackers (23:56) - Why Climatic spent more time teaching consumers about lung health than selling the product itself (34:07) - What investors needed to believe before funding a category that didn’t yet exist (40:27) - How Climatic built a 15,000-person waitlist through Strava run clubs instead of paid ads

Since this category doesn't exist, they're not necessarily anywhere today. So you have to start to think about, you know, what are the tangential products that they would be using? And start to think about where they're learning about those, and then think about how we inject ourselves into those experiences. The other one I would maybe just say is in real life. One of the things that we've thought a lot about, both in how we've developed the experience and how we, you know, more so going forward than we have historically, but how do we, you know, in real life events?

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, in this episode of MedSider, we sat down with Eric Cow, co-founder and CEO, of Climatic. Climatic is commercializing LMAX, a daily inhaled system that proactively supports lung function. Before Climatic, Eric served as COO of Seed Health and was part of the foundational team at Chewy. Earlier in his career, Eric held growth in operational leadership roles across consumer, wellness, and e-commerce businesses, including Amazon, Boxy Charm, Target,

and Best Buy. Here are a few topics we explored in this conversation. First, how do you create demand for a category consumers don't yet recognize? Second, what can real world product usage reveal that traditional market research often misses. Third, what does designing for consistent use look like in consumer wellness? And last, how do you convince investors that a new category deserves to exist? Before we dive into the full episode, if you're a MedTech founder or CEO preparing to raise capital, you should check out the MedSiter fundraising cohort. This four-week live workshop combines small group sessions with real-time feedback to help

you sharpen your investor story, build a targeted investor pipeline, and run a focused fundraising sprint instead of a never-ending slog. Over the month, you'll walk away with an investor-ready narrative and deck, outreach scripts that actually get responses, a refreshed LinkedIn profile, a simple content plan that keeps you on investors' radar, and a repeatable system for running your raise. You can join the waitlist at medsider.com forward slash fundraising cohort. Again, that's medsider.com forward slash fundraising cohort.

All right, let's get to the interview. Eric, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you coming on. Yeah, hey, Scott. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and thanks again for your flexibility with my schedule. So definitely looking forward to this conversation and learning a lot more about climatic, but also your background as well, and kind of your journey leading up to what you're doing now. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this episode.

But I always like to start here, kind of hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But give us a very high level overview of kind of your career arc, you know, leading up to co-founding climatic. Yeah, absolutely. So I spent the early part of my career at the brick and mortar side of thing, spent some time at Target and Best Buy. But I've spent the last, I would say, 12-ish years, kind of at early stage or high-growth, businesses, kind of building consumer brands and consumer products from bringing them to market. So started that journey at Amazon and then did some since early stage at Chewy.com in the pet space and then at Boxy Charm, which is a personal care cosmetics subscription business. But prior to founding Climatic was the COO of Seed Health and a lot of similarities, as we'll get

into it, I'm sure between my experience at Seed Health and scientifically backed, highly efficacious consumer products, but in the kind of probiotic or microbiome space. And then, you know, while I was going through that journey, met a lot of people, including, you know, my co-founders at Climatic and just, you know, really loved the idea and the opportunity of, you know, bringing a new category to market in this kind of unmet need for like proactive pulmonary or long health. Speaking of seed, which maybe we'll get into it a little bit, a little bit more detail with some of these questions. But I was an early seed user or a consumer, if you will. I recall seed is like being one of the first, I would say, supplement brands, especially kind of in the microbiome space. that did lead with like a very heavy like science first approach. And I think other supplement brands have obviously, you know, have sort of like fast followed that. But I don't know, do you think that's like

fairly accurate. I mean, I think it stands out to me as one of the first, the first supplement brands to do that. Yeah, I think so. And I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit. But I think there's a, there's some consumer trends that led to that, led to that being the case and led to what we've seen, you know, more recently over the last five to seven years, you know, brands taking that approach. And I think, you know, it's a, you know, coming out of the, you know, early 2010s where there was a lot more, you know, quote unquote, snake oil products on the market, I think to differentiate yourself and to appease a more discerning consumer. You had to go to that level of detail to justify efficacy and claims. The reason I think it's important is because a lot of like traditional med tech people listen to this, listen to this show. And they kind of scoff at this idea of like, even if they're like their device is primarily used by, you know, physicians, nurses, techs, etc.

they kind of scoff at this notion of like, you know, appealing at all to the patient or the consumer. And I fundamentally believe that's like that's not the greatest approach. That's not an ideal approach, right? Because there's a huge trend in really more kind of consumer health space where like patients, consumers, they want more information, right? They want the science. They want to understand sort of the, you know, the mechanism of action. And so, you know, I think those those opinions kind of conflict with each other.

But yeah, I think it's why I brought it up. I think it's important for other folks to kind of realize that that don't have. as much kind of consumer experiences as you do. Yeah, yeah, agree. Let's get to Climatic. So I'm on the website right now, climatichealth.com. So just as it sounds, Climatic, C-L-L-I-M-A-T-I-C-Halth.com, beautiful website, very well done. And I know you guys, you guys just launched. We'll link to it in the full write-up. For those that have never heard of this product, of this device, describe it like I'm a junior in high school, right? Learning about it for the first time. So Elmax, our first product is a first of its kind, you know, daily lung health system.

So it's, you know, it's designed for high performers, health conscious individuals, wellness buffs, biohackers, really anybody that's looking for a proactive, you know, everyday health solution for the lung. It's an inhaled dry powder, so an all natural formulation, again, intended for everyday use. And, you know, part of its efficacy is it delivers the formation directly to the deep lung, where it supports the body's natural process for particle removal. So that particle removal process comes under stress for a variety of different reasons. And we like to say we're providing kind of a multivitamin, quote unquote, to the lung

to allow it to support that body's natural clearance process and get the bad particles out of the lung. Okay, very cool. Yeah. And for those listening, you've got to check out the website, like super cool technology and really, really well presented, especially, you know, considering this is a new category, right? And there's a fair amount of education during what I think is a really good job balancing, balancing both those worlds, making this information easy to understand. You'd also educate at the same time. So give us a sense for where the company's at right now.

I mentioned that you, I think you just, based on our notes, you just officially launched, but there was like a wait list building up to this launch as well. We launched about three weeks ago into a, and we sold out in about the first week for our first batch. That first batch has shipped and it's in consumers' hands. They've been using it for about 10 to 12 days. So it's been great to see the feedback from that group. And then, yes, we are in a prepaid scenario now. So if you go to the website, you can sign up. And we're working as hard as we can to get inventory up to the level to support the demand.

And we'll get the product out to the consumers that have, you know, already bought as soon as possible. Yeah. That's awesome. Good problem to have, right? Running out of. Yes, but I would love to be able to get it in people's hands as soon as possible. Yeah, yeah. I guess if you're going to choose a problem to solve why, I'd rather have that one,

versus, you know, crickets, you know, waiting, waiting for people to pay people's orders to come through. All right. That's a good starting point, I think, for the rest of the conversation. And I guess I should have level set. We're recording this in Q2 26. So if you're listening to this after the fact, you know, three, six months down the road, hopefully climatic has product and stock. It's not fully sold out. And you have access to the to try it out. So with that said, let's go back in time. It's been the next maybe 20, 30 minutes, kind of going back in time and learning not only about your experiences, but also kind of the lead-up to this launch as well. And I want to kind of start with like early, early prototyping. So, and maybe before we get into kind of how you iterated, you know, through some early versions of this product, like, why, why climatic?

Like what, what led you even to starting this company, you know, coming off of your previous experiences? So our founder group, which consists of Nick Alley and I, all have had or been around family members or individuals that have dealt with some level of, like, pulmonary stress or pulmonary issue, whether that's siblings with asthma. I have an uncle who's been very close to me with COPD. I deal with sleep apnea myself. So does most of my family.

Nick's parents deal with chronic cough. So just a variety of different conditions that have had us always thinking about lung health. But the imbitist of it really came around the time of the wildfires were happening in Canada. And it was blanketing most of the Northeast in soot or smog or, you know, dust or, you know, things that you didn't want to be inhaling or didn't want into your lungs. And that really led us collectively to ask the question, you know, what is there? that you could be taking every day that would be supporting your your lungs when they're under stress. That led us down a path to ask questions about just broader lung health, broader consumer lung health, which ultimately led to a research process. And that research process started

with our chief science officer, Dale Christensen, you know, doing initially academic research, then ultimately some in vitro research around lung cells and different types of compounds. That led to in vivo research and one of our initial clinical trials, which was done in vitro research, which was done in partnership with Mount Sinai, testing the product in sheep models, which are kind of the gold standard to pre-human use. And then that has led into some beta human trials and ultimately into a double-blind placebo-based clinical trial,

which we have out and in process right now. So along those iterations, we've obviously made multiple changes to the formula. We've tested different compounds. We've tested different combinations on the actual physical product side of things. And then as I touched you a little bit earlier, also really thinking about deliverability, which is an important part here, which gets into the particle size of the product and, you know, really where it's landing in the deep lung.

It's one of those products that when, you know, in doing some research for this interview, I'd never heard of, right? I never really kind of considered like lung health. But then once you start to see it there, you're like, yeah, okay, like this is something that more people should pay attention to, right? So it's kind of one of those, like, I wonder why no one has really done this before. You know what I mean? It's kind of one of those feelings.

We take 20,000 breaths a day. we take more breaths than steps we do in our life. And, you know, when you think about the world we live in today, it's, you know, more industrialized, more built. And the result of that industrialized and built world for reasons that I'm sure, you know, many of your listeners are aware of, it's putting more stress on our lungs. It's putting more particulates into our lungs. And that lung load doesn't have anything outside of, you know, RX or maybe OTC solutions. And we wanted something that was more readily available and efficacious for humans. Yeah, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And I think most, I thought of this, you know, but most people, I think would be, would feel similar. Like, you know, you naturally kind of think about like air purification, right? And air filters inside the house. But the reality is like a lot of us spend a lot of time outside the house, right? And what are we exposed to? And kind of makes sense to think about, you know, how to basically, you know, enhance your lung health, right, to deal with some of those conditions. And so. Yeah, it is a bit surprising that nothing like this exists. But I do think, you know, coming out of COVID, I think we all collectively are a little bit more aware. of respiratory health. You see that in the way breath work has been involved into different wellness routines, whether it's around stress or sleep or anxiety, etc. So I think, I think, you know, it's a bit surprising, but I think the time is right. Yeah, no doubt. That's kind of a good segue into kind of, I guess, one of the first kind of functional topics I wanted to talk about, which is development, right? So it seems like, I mean, based on your LinkedIn profile,

it looks like, I'm not sure if this is accurate, but you maybe could have been doing a lot of prototyping before them, but you guys have moved really quick. I mean, it looks like you started the company kind of late, 24-ish time frame, you know, we're sitting on maybe not even quite two years later and you've got a product that you're ready to commercialize. So maybe touch on how you were able to kind of move, you know, so apparently so quickly kind of through iterative, even though like the devices I would consider relatively straightforward, there's still a lot going on, right? Especially the fact that you're, you know, you've done a lot of preclinical work kind of leading up to commercializing. And so, you know, when you think about kind of key

learnings and how you approach kind of that early stage iterative development, are there a few things that kind of stand out to you or words of words of wisdom to other, you know, other founders that are kind of in a similar stage. Yeah, it's funny. You say fast. It felt long along the way. But I, you know, we had some great partners along the way, both internal and external. I think, you know, as I think about the development process, I think first and foremost was like finding a compound that was both, you know, safe and efficacious. That was just a test and learn, right? You know, try something, test it, you know, again, mostly in partnership with our, with Mount Sinai, kind of seeing what we were getting in terms of, you know, the core bodily

function that we're measuring here is mucociliary clearance, or MCC for short, and that we were kind of using that as our benchmark for particle removal. And then as we were iterating on, you know, different variations of the formula, you know, looking to that KPI to help us understand what type of progress we were making and what type of iterations we needed to implement. Then after that, you know, you're your start, you have to test for safety and then delivery. So I think if you think about that from a company building perspective, once we had the formula in a really good place and I have understood its characteristics, then you can start to think about, you know, the manufacturing of that formula in a way where then it can be delivered through our device. So although the device may

look simple from the outside, the process by which we developed a device, you know, the device, that did not require any electrical components, any heating components, there's no vaporization, it is all natural breath actualized. It was a pretty strong effort in both, I would say, industrial design and just like pure creativity. And I think that process was maybe our second stage that we had to go through. And then once we had functioning prototypes, both on the formula side and on the device side, then it's a, I would, I don't know if traditional is the right word for it, but a more traditional scale-up exercise. So once we had raised capital and could start investing in the things that we needed to

get this ready for market, that would have been the third stage that we went through. You're really interesting point. I really thought about this, even looking at the device, is that, you know, nebulizers would be, you know, kind of a comparable, right? I think that most people are at least familiar with. And like, that's, you know, requires AC power, you know, and it's very different. And your device does not, you don't plug it in, doesn't run on power, you know, traditional power, whether it's DC or, it's not DC, right? It's not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that had to be some probably come down to some pretty clever, clever engineering. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, too, is the fact that this is used by a broad

segment of the, you know, consumer use in essence, right, a broad segment of the population. And so designing for that, I think, can be quite tricky as well, right? Because a lot of your expectation is that a wide variety of people are, you know, can easily use this, use this device. So, you know, were there a few things that kind of went into, you know, that consumer design thinking, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think, you know, in some ways we thought about consumer behavior associated with any

habituation or kind of wellness protocol. So you think about those different groups and kind of when you interact with, I don't know, the right word for a supplement or a particular wellness routine. And it's usually in the morning, it's usually before you work out or it's before you go to bed. So really thinking about that and thinking about, you know, where does the device, where will the device be? will it be on your vanity, will it be in your medicine cabinet, will be in your gym bag?

And how do we kind of co-design the device and then ultimately the cartridge or blister experience associated with that device so that it can be easy to use across kind of those three primary use cases, which I think from our early research we learned is what consumers were looking for. And that's what led us to include the travel case that comes with the starter kit. It led to the design of the cap. It led to the design of the interaction of the kind of cartridge with the. particular, if you're on the website, you'll see it, the way that the cartridge interacts with the door and then the door closes. So just really thinking through both ease of use,

simplicity or speed. If you liken this to swallowing a pill in the morning, we wanted it to be just that easy. And hopefully, and we believe we've done this, sensorally more enjoyable in swelowing the pill. So it has a nice flavor associated with it. So really, really just thought through that consumer journey, when consumers were interact with it. How do we make that as frictionless and as enjoyable as possible to make it easy for people to, like, incorporate this into their current wellness protocol or wellness habits. Yeah, a lot of good, a lot of good tips there to think through because I think it's easy to gloss over a lot of those, a lot of those issues and without kind of properly thinking about that, that true kind of user journey. I think you get yourself

into, or make some design-related decisions that you end up regretting, right, down the road, if that's not properly thought through. Let's talk a little bit about clinical evidence. You mentioned Mount Sinai a couple times. And based on our research, or so you correct me if I'm wrong. I think you've collaborated with Duke as well. You mentioned an RCT as well. So anyway, you're generating a fair amount of clinical evidence for this device. The counter to that, right, which some may say is, do you feel like you needed all of that, right? And so how did you kind of balance the desire to kind of get to market quickly, but also you're building a category, right? So you need some sort of like clinical substantiated, you know, scientific clinical substantiation.

So how did you kind of think through some of those challenges? I think there's a couple different ways to answer that question. I think, you know, one, we recognize that we're, you know, asking consumers to take on a behavior that has some historical stigmas associated with it that are not very positive. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, when consumers looked closely at this, you know, when anybody looked closely at this, pulmonologists, wherever, that there was a pretty clear track record, not only just of efficacy in that it works and it was kind of worth the time to use, but also in safety. You know, so in addition to the efficacy studies that we ran, you know, you mentioned the Mount Sinai study. we did a few beta studies and then ultimately our clinical trial. We also ran a full toxicology study on the product to ensure that it would be safe for human use. I think you would also ask, you know, the kind of the why.

Like, you know, and I think there's, that's twofold. One, I just touched on kind of the proof of efficacy, but also given the diverse number of, I don't necessarily like this word, but like endpoints or use cases that consumers would come to use the product, we wanted to have a diverse set of data on how the product could be efficacious. You know, I think sometimes if you think about the pharmaceutical or drug world or even some other particular supplements, you know, it's a much more singular use case. We think about breathing and lung health a little bit more like hydration and it's like a core pillar in human health. And there's a lot of reasons why you may come to the need to hydrate.

And there's a lot of reasons why I think you will come to the need to improve lung performance. So we wanted to have a broad set of data. We wanted to have a broad set of different, I'm trying to think of the right, we're different, they're not patients because we're not in that world, but different trial participants. Yeah, yeah. Is the right way to say it. You know, experiencing the product and be able to point to that when we had different questions as we got closer to market.

Yeah, that makes it a ton of sense. Knowing that you needed clinical evidence for kind of that broader multiple segments, right, a broader degree of a patient, you weren't like focused on one very specific dish per se. How did that, what did that look like? Did you, did you try to design the trials to account for that? Or did you view it as like, hey, we need a study for X and then we need to do another study for Y. Like how, what was the, what was the approach that, or how did you basically try to accomplish or kill multiple, multiple birds with, with one stone here? Yeah, I think we were a bit opportunistic in that.

You know, I don't, I don't want to oversell our initial strategy and intent. But I think we were a bit opportunistic in that part of it. And that as we, as we had people just using the product and we where I, hearing the feedback, that kind of led us towards, you know, hey, we should test and see if that's something that's happening more widespread or if it was more of like a, you know, end of one type of scenario. That was just our, if I take a step back, I would say very early on, we felt the need to get this product in the hands of as many people as possible and get their feedback. Because, you know, it is a new category. There isn't a whole lot of consumer research on how people would interact with this. And we leverage that consumer research. And our chief of staff,

Annabelle, has been amazing and just like interacting with. with the users of the product and really synthesizing that data down into, you know, mostly qualitative, but somewhat quantitative early on, down into, you know, how we felt like these individual cohorts or consumer cohorts would interact with the product and then developing a thesis that we would want to test within each of those cohorts. But I say all of that, our objective has always been to focus on the kind of endurance athlete, the wellness optimizer, the biohacker, as we were going to market. We just felt like, oh, this product can be efficacious to everyone, everybody who breathes.

We felt like that group was the most primed. And as we were hearing their feedback, the most interested and had identified, even without us saying anything, this area, like, when you just mention it, it was, you could see the kind of light bulb go off as to say, like, as an individual who thinks so much about my health, how have I not thought to do something for my lungs? And like, once that light belt went off, you couldn't turn it off. And then they were asking for the product. And we really saw it in that kind of wellness optimizer biohacking community.

And that's why we leaned into that group, both with our studies and ultimately how we're thinking about bringing the product to market. Okay. Got it. Just hearing you kind of riff on that topic, my takeaway is with a product like this, that could be used by so many different people, it would be easy to kind of, you know, spread yourself too thin in terms of, you know, studies you want to run. That probably ladders up to like how you're even going to, you know, market and

commercialize this. But starting with that, that classic kind of, you know, innovator and early adopters, right? and focusing on what do they, what kind of data would they want to see? What kind of, you know, studies would they want to see in order to, like, convince that, you know, that segment of our audience to adopt this. I think that's a, you know, smart play for anyone kind of considering, you know, dealing with that sort of challenge, right? And kind of going too broad with your studies.

On that note, you guys have accomplished a ton when it comes to clinical work. I mean, again, this company's pretty new. You've knocked off, like, a really unique product and then also studied it, both pre-clinically and clinically as well. I mean, like, any, any tips for like how you've, how you've been able to kind of execute so quickly on the clinical front? I mean, the clinical front sometimes tends to move at its own pace, right? Yeah. You know, not necessarily the pace of entrepreneurs, more the pace of academia.

So we've kind of navigate around that. But I think, you know, you touched on it a little bit in your, in kind of your question there, which is, you know, just being very intentional about what you're trying to learn. I think as much as we have taken maybe a broader view to what we wanted to measure in our clinical work than maybe other consumer. health products would have done. We also were very intentional about particular outcomes and we're very focused on achieving those. And that goes down to like, you know, what devices are you using to measure biomarkers? What questions are you asking as you think about protocol? What partners are you choosing in terms of how you recruit? So I think we were very thoughtful. We've added a lot of different options and maybe, you know, spent a little bit more time in the planning phase. And then when we got to

execution, it was pretty simple to be able to kind of put it in simple. Simple. I use simple in air quotes. those who can see me. It's relatively simple to execute. Yeah. Did you run most of these studies in house? Or did you work with, you know, clinical research partners? I mean, outside of Sinai, of course, which you've mentioned. Yeah. But what was your question? Yeah. For the for the non-human, it was Mount Sinai. And then we're working with a great partner called People Science on the double-bine clinical. Okay. Okay, cool. Let's talk about category creation. I mean, you've kind of touched on this a little bit. But, you know, any, I guess, first mover has that advantage, right? But the challenge is how you're actually creating a category at the same time. And so what do you, was there, were there a few,

like, key things that your team felt like you needed to prove, right, in order to kind of establish this idea of daily lung health sort of as a credible, you know, category? I don't know about prove per se. I think we're leaning heavy into, and hopefully anybody who's seeing kind of how we're showing up in the world right now, we're leaning heavy into education, right? It isn't, we're not out there, you know, necessarily in the quote unquote old world just like selling the product. We are taking the time to build the category and build, you know, to educate the consumer on why this, why long health is an important pillar to kind of long-term human health and wellness. And we think, you know, that both helps establish us as a credible

leader in the space as we develop the category, but also, you know, helps consumers think through why this product is valuable for them. And again, that's been a very, what's the right word, very multifaceted approach, given that there's a lot of different reasons why lung health, why people could come to long health, whether it's, you know, allergies, wildfires, occupational hazards, chronic conditions, athletic-performed, like athletic-induced conditions. So that's a disparate way in which we've had to think about education, but really leaning into education. And I think this is something that we saw work extremely well in my time at Seed. You know, Aaron Rajah there, the founders of Seed, took this approach very early.

on to educate people about what the microbiome was and then, you know, work your way to the idea that the product is, you know, something that can be efficacious to that, but start with education around, you know, what the microbiome is. In our case, start with education around why long health is important. Hey, everyone, let's take a quick break to talk about Fastwave Medical, the company I co-founded and lead as CEO. We're developing next generation intravascular lithotripsy or IVL systems to tackle complex calcific disease. Over the last few years, we've closed a series. We've closed a series of oversubscribed funding rounds bringing the total investment into FastWave to over $50 million.

Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing to, the $900 million acquisition of Bolt Medical by Boston Scientific in 2025, and Johnson and Johnson's $13 billion acquisition of Shockwave Medical signal a lot of attention on emerging IVL startups like FastWave. And we're making serious progress. In addition to recently receiving our ninth patent, we've successfully completed peripheral and coronary feasibility studies and are gearing up for pivotal trials. If you're interested in investing in the fast-growing IVL market, head over to fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Again, that's fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Now, let's get back to the conversation. So for other founders and CEOs that are listening to this and in a similar boat, right,

they're not a fast follower, you know, they're creating a newer category. They're thinking about education. Of course, this is somewhat dependent on the product and who you're trying to reach. But are there a few kind of like, you know, key channels or key initiatives that you think work exceptionally well in terms of educating kind of a market around a new category like Lone Health. Yeah, I think I don't want to sound a little bit repetitive, but I think talk to your customers and talk to them as often as you can and for as long as you can and for as many them as you can. Although we launched the product, you know, at the time of this recording,

it's, it's, you know, we launched it in late April, 2026. We've had people using this product since January 2025 in some prototype version and different customer segments, different demographics, some people have been using it for over 14 months. Some people who are only using it for shorter periods of time throughout that, but constantly getting into your consumer's hands. And then even with 14, 15, 16 months of that experience to tailor our messaging, tailor our approach, tailor our packaging, everything that we would do that kind of rolls into the consumer experience, we still got some things wrong that we're learning right now. So, you know, once we're in market, you asked about channels, you know, phone, email. Like we're talking to our earliest customers right now,

and asking them what they're thinking about the product and, you know, what doesn't make sense? What don't you understand? And just, you know, having ourselves in a position where we could rapidly adjust to that while we're in market now. Okay. Has been, I think, you know, a big reason why we've been successful as we have in this first few weeks in market. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong or correct me if you disagree. But thinking about launching a product early, you're creating a new category at initial launch.

Are you sort of optimizing for, optimizing for learning in essence, right? So like to be a little bit more pragmatic, or I guess where I'm going with this is, let's say you can automate customer service right now, right, for new customers that are ordering. But maybe you don't necessarily want to automate that, right? You want to make it a little bit more manual because more manual means that you have more engagement and you can learn a lot more. Is that kind of like a little bit of thinking? It is. I mean, Allie and I are answering the customer service requests ourselves right now, right?

And if there are questions, we're asking for phone calls with customers, we're not just trying to be responsive to their question. We're trying to learn as much as we can. And I think, you know, unlike, you know, if I think back to the probiotic space, there really any product you're launching into an existing market, you know, you can, you can pull all of the customers. And when the customers responding, they have a certain level of awareness or understanding to the questions that you're asking because they know, I would use probiotics as an example, they know what a probiotic is. Whereas you're asking somebody questions, you're using those like traditional market research in a market that doesn't exist, the consumer doesn't know enough to tell you what they want. I mean,

you know, Jobs always says nobody wanted the iPhone until you gave it to them, right? Right, right. Not necessarily comparing us to the iPhone, but similar concept, right? And where the market doesn't exist, you have to be in a position to engage your consumers, listen to your consumers and then react quickly. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a crucial point because I think it's, it would be easy for anyone that's in, that's kind of in a, that's navigating a similar type of challenge, right? Where they're, they're having to educate a market around a certain category to kind of fall back into that traditional research. And the reality is that's like, yes, there may be some, some interesting kind of insights that you could pull from that, but largely going to be

ineffective, right, because you're not going to know, you're not going to know the ideal questions to ask, right? And so, really, really good point. Circling back around to kind of your early user testing, right? Because you mentioned you've had people using this product since early 2025. So, you know, and you effectively launched almost a year and a half later, or not quite, but a year and a half later, let's call it for rounding purposes. Normally, I think people would be like, yes, get it into the hands of early users because to learn as much as you can about the product. Were you guys learning also about sort of where those early users are getting their education? Like what information are they? Like who are they consuming information from,

etc.? Was that kind of part of the learning experience as well? So you knew out of the gate which channels or maybe how to best educate the market around lung health? Yeah, I think less so that. I think, I mean, in the, I think there's a lot of, I would maybe step out one order magnitude there and talk more about just like general where the general wellness consumer is, right? And kind of understanding where they're getting their cues in terms of, you know, what's both what's new, but also what works and what's efficacious. And I think, you know, there are different channels out there, you know, things like things like the feed, for example, right, which is kind of set a certain bar around, you know, quality. And then thinking about those

channels, different, you know, fit inside or different things like that. So like that's where they're reading about different products. And then ultimately, and this is where it gets a little bit more nuanced or micro-segmented for us, the different influencers in the space. So I think that's probably not a complete answer. If I sat around and thought about it, I think there's a lot of other things that we're doing to educate consumers. But, you know, it maybe sounds cliche, but a little bit of like meet them where they are. And since this category doesn't exist, they're not necessarily anywhere today. So you have to start to think about, you know, what are the tangential products that they would be using and start to think about where where they're learning about those and then think about

how we inject ourselves into those experiences. The other one I would maybe just say is in real life, right? I think one of the things that we've thought a lot about, both in how we've developed the experience and how we, you know, more so going forward than we have historically, but how do we, you know, in real life events? You know, I think unlike swallowing a capsule, which is a lot of, you know, kind of wellness supplementation today. This is an experience that you can feel. So getting people to try it, it's a very different sensorial experience than, you know, swallowing something. That's really

interesting because normally you hear, you know, in real life for IRL, you know, types of activities is, uh, does it scale? Like how scalable is it? You can kind of be expensive, resource constraining, etc. But to your point, there's like a lot of, a lot of value as well, right? Obviously engaging customers too, learning how they, learning how they, learning how they engage actually with the product. Of course, there's byproducts of this, you know, in terms of, you know, content production at, you know, that you can, you can kind of capture in real life events. So yeah, that's interesting that that's been kind of a key, sounds like a kind of a key focus area out of the, out of the gate. Yeah, definitely going forward.

I mean, we've got to get into market. We've got to get enough inventory. There's just practical problems we have to work. You can't, you can't show up to these, these events with no product. I mean, does that. Right. Is that right? No. Show them a picture of a video. This is how it should work. I mean, I don't have any to actually use right now. No, joke to this idea. The other thing that it really stands out, though, you kind of rip on this is how early, right, you've got products into hands of users, right?

And it sounds like that's really held true of like, you know, this sounds simple, but I think, again, one of those things that you can gloss over as things kind of start to get busy and you get closer to launch is like staying as engaged or as close to the customer as possible. You know, the fact that you're still answering support tickets, right, from early, early users.

I just think that's like so critical and, you know, highly encourage everyone to, you know, whether you're selling to more of a consumer audience or whether you're selling into, you know, physicians in traditional med tech, etc., like staying as close to the customer for sustained periods of time, right, is really, really, really critical.

Let's segue to fundraising, because you mentioned you raised some capital early on kind of through some early stage development, and I don't know if that was kind of the January, then you raised another round, I think just earlier this year, at least it was announced earlier this year. So maybe touch on kind of like,

you know, your fundraising experience with, with climatic, also curious to see kind of what lessons you've learned through these experiences. And maybe the better question is, what do you know now about fundraising that maybe you wished you knew five or 10 years ago? I would by no means classify myself as an expert in this, but I'm happy to share, happy to share our experiences. Just to clarify the timeline, you know, we raised our round in January of 2025. We didn't denounce it until more recently. So that's where I think the timeline gets up in the air. But I think, you know, when we really set out, you know, I think we leaned on

lean on two things in the message that we wanted to communicate. You know, one, I think the rigor that went into the scientific, the kind of like the efficacy of the product. I know we're touching on that topic a lot, but we did feel like that that was quite differentiated for us. And I think, you know, when you think about VC early stage, they see a lot of supplementation. And I think even thinking about consumer in general at the time, you know, go back, you know, 16, 18 months, you know, not that we're not still in it, but, you know, most of the capital was really, leaning towards GLP-1s and AI, right? So we were kind of in that, in that ecosystem trying to stand out, you know, for capital deployment. So we felt like, one, the need to kind of really

demonstrate that we had real science here, not like Hocom science, but like real science that have been tested with real protocols. And then, two, the importance of the category and the need for the category to exist and the tailwinds from a consumer perspective towards this category existing, right? In other words, you know, really overcoming that idea that, you know, and I think we've done this in, especially given what we've seen in the last few weeks, we've done this very well, but, you know, that we're not, we're creating a, we're solving a real problem. We're not trying to create, like, solve a problem that doesn't exist. And I think, you know, through through the process, we were able to find, you know, the right venture partners that

understood the science, right? So they'd been around enough of the products and could actually interpret the difference and the quality and the work that we had done versus, you know, some other things that they may see out there and shared our vision for the, for the category. And, you know, every, it's not to knock the funds that didn't invest, but every fund has a different thesis and every fund has a different perspective. So there's a bit of get out there, talk to as many people as you can. You know, what you learn early on is you can't be overly selective. Talk to as many people as you can. But that can also, you're also trying to run a company and build a company while you're trying to do So I think you have to quickly identify the groups or it just isn't a fit.

Can't hold on to every thread. There has to be some triage along the way to say, you know, these guys really seem to get it. It's worth some diligence and some effort here where this seems to be just kind of like flippant, maybe personal interest, but we don't necessarily align with kind of funder investment strategy. And that's, you know, it's highly iterative. It's, you know, meetings early in the morning and late at night for Ali and I just kind of working through that.

But ultimately we found a great set of venture partners that we, they've been, you know, along the journey, they've been highly supportive and great partners to us. Yeah. That's a really, I just want to like double click at one point you made around ending threads that don't, that are just likely not going to go anywhere. I just think that's so important because to your point, raising capital, you know, for an early state or pre-commercial kind of early stage companies is never easy while actually doing, doing all the work of building the company is just like you get pulled in a million

different directions. And if you, if you hang on to those threads, right, or those perceived. opportunities for too long can just be a distraction. And that's not to say that you don't, you know, those could become, you know, future investors down the road and that you don't sort of like, you know, create some sort of CRM or some way to track that. But ultimately, you kind of have to say, this is a no for now, you know, and let's, let's move on. You know, I would say, you know, in every initial pitch call and I'm sure all the entrepreneurs out there know this, but at some point in the first 30 minutes, they tell you what their investment thesis is.

You know, listen to that. And if that's not you, you know, actually hear that and interpret that. You know, everything's a judgment call. So there may be options where you kind of break your rules. But I would just say, like, hear that. Because, you know, you can have a great set of six-week conversations and ultimately they'll come back and point to that exact reason as to why they're not investing. And you'll say, well, we knew that six weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. So true. And more often than not, you're not going to convince them to flex on that thesis or can flex on that that may have date. So, so yeah, really, really good point. Circling back around to that that other, I think, key point that you made around. How do we solve this question that, or the skepticism that this isn't a real

problem, right? Were there a few things that, like, were especially helpful to answer that question? Because I think, I would imagine this comes up a fair number of times with, you know, with other CEOs that are founders and CEOs that are raising capital for new categories, in essence, right? It's like, is this even a thing? You know what I mean? Like, looks like you've got some good science. Looks like the product is cool. But is this like really a thing? You haven't launched yet, in essence, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are categories out there where there's like one reason why it has to exist, but I would bet that those categories become so obvious that you don't have to do any convincing. I think for us, it was a multitude of different things. I think

you could point to the focus on respiratory health coming out of COVID and all the fears around long COVID. I think you could point to the instances of wildfires as being indicative of that. I think there were a lot of, and I'll spare the details here, where you could just go cohort by cohort and show that that group was increasing over time. The increase in wearables and the data that was showing that people were measuring things related to pulmonary health like the O2 Max, right? So I think there's, there's, you know, there's just the search terms. There's a lot of pieces that you put together that collectively in our, I mean, we had to convince ourselves first. Yeah. Right. In order to kind of go down this journey and then was kind of taking what had convinced us and putting it into a format that was

kind of digestible and credible to investors, right? And again, I think anybody who's raised this knows, knows that this is the case. Like, some people will get it and some people won't. And that's just, that's just where they're at in their understanding of the market. And then you find the ones that do. And then those are the ones you, you know, you hopefully end up partnering with. Yeah. One of the things that stands out, and it's kind of like related to this, right? And I got to think that it serves as a bit of a signal that you're on to something. Is this wait list, right? I mean, we touched on it briefly kind of at the outset of this conversation, You had, you know, roughly, I think, around a 15,000, you know, person wait list even before you launched.

This is incredibly impressive, especially because they're this a new category, right? I mean, you're educating people around, you know, the importance of Lunghouse. So, like, were there a couple, like, was there anything creative that you did there to sort of like, you know, generate that size of a list ahead of, ahead of your launch? Yeah, I think, you know, like anything, it's a multitude of different factors. But I think the fact that we had been talking to people for 14 to 16 months had queued up a population. of people that were highly credible to get into that waitlist early on. But I also, you know, coming back to like to meet them where we are, I think we didn't take a kind of digital clickbait type approach to waitlist building.

We took a very engaged community. So, you know, Strava being one example, which is a big endurance running community with a lot of different segments across the country. You know, we engaged the chapter heads individually at each individual one. And then through them met their individual run clubs in, you know, know, Austin, New York, Boston, wherever it was. And then through that more, I would say, like personal touch engagement, we're able, you know, it's a little bit more work to build the wait list. But we felt like the wait list was a much more credible wait list in terms of like actual

intent and kind of willingness to buy. You know, so being kind of intentional about not throwing out to everybody on meta and saying, do you want to join the wait list? But, you know, kind of thinking about the traffic to the waitlist sign up, being our core customer, our ICP. The website now, again, which is Climetichealth.com. You've got obviously a, you know, a science section kind of front and center in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, even if you're not, if you're listening to this and you're not, you know, you're not, you're not, you're not marketing direct to consumers. I would just highly encourage you to look at the website and see how climatic is, is doing it. Because it's a really, it's a really good

balance of a science plus making it, you know, fairly digestible. The reason I bring this up is, as you know, this, this waitlist, were you generating content on, on, on, on the site as well? I mean, was that sort of a, you know, a proactive effort as part of that kind of that broader approach to education? You mean like like UGC content or more of like the creative content? Like scientific content. I mean, did you like, were you know, producing, you know, articles on the website, right? And and kind of using that as a way to kind of, you know, slowly educate users even even a year ago as an example. Or did you, were you operating kind of more under kind of like a stealth, kind of like, you know, not really telling a lot of people.

Yeah, I would say more stealth for a period for a period of time. I think, you know, content creation as it relates to the scientific side was more of a net result of the amount of research we did. And then we felt like we had the collateral, for lack of a better word, to create good content alongside it. And then, you know, just some great creative and design partners that could help make, you know, boring words on a page turn into something that looks really nice in real life. Yeah, yeah. Well, kudos to you and your team and your partners, right? Really, really well done. I want to get to the rapid fire of this portion of this interview.

But again, climatichealth.com is the website, just as it sounds, C-L-I-M-A-T-I-C-E-E-C-Halth.com. We'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider. We'll also link to Eric's LinkedIn profile as well as you can check out his background in a little bit more detail. So with that said, first rapid fire question I've got for you when you think about like the next year ahead. And maybe you alluded to Elmax being the first product. So I'm a little bit curious if you can share anything at all about kind of the future roadmap. But, you know, when you think about the next 12 to 18 months, what's, what's most exciting. What are you most excited about? On the most exciting part of it, you know, I think,

I don't know if there will be a moment in time when this will occur, but I think the, the establishment of daily lung health as a normal wellness protocol is the objective, right? Where it becomes well known to consumers that doing something proactive for your lungs can be highly beneficial to your long-term health and your just how you feel every day, among a multitude of other use cases. So I think, you know, really turning this into, something that's interesting to something that's habitual for consumers through the education and efficacy of the product, not necessarily just convincing them of it, but really educating them on the wise would be, again, I don't know if that will be a moment in time, but that is the

objective. To your question around other products, I would be happy to come on and share more when we're willing to talk about what those are. But we're really, you know, climatic as a brand, you know, the product is LMAX. Climatic as a brand is really around like climate adaptive wellness and this idea that we live in this world that, you know, despite our best efforts is having a more negative impact on our wellness. And we want to focus on products that, you know, allow people to live healthier, happier lives, despite the fact that the world is maybe, you know, working against us on that. Okay. So if we do a round two, maybe we'll have a chance to kind of dive into, you know, what that second or other product is. All right. Let's say we're in your neck of the woods

down in Florida, and we just maybe wrapped up a dinner with a bunch of med tech or health tech entrepreneurs. What's the single biggest kind of lesson or insight that you think they really need to understand, right, to see any sort of semblance of success in their venture? Yeah, I think, you know, crossing like chewy, boxy term seed and that even now a climatic, I think, you know, ruthless prioritization is where I see, you know, we all live in capital constrained environments. We all live in resource constrained environments. So the idea of ruthless prioritization. And I think I learned this probably first and foremost in my time at Chui where we were just in like direct competition with Amazon all the time is just, you know,

there's a lot of really good ideas that you have to say no to. We used to call it the strategic no. And I think it can be really easy for founders to get into like shiny penny syndrome or to want to do all the good ideas. And I don't know if it's more irons in the fire or if it's just a passion about what you're doing. But really, really narrow in on. the best things that you can be doing and the best ideas, and laser focus your resource-constrained team on those. Throw the rest of them into a bench that you're going to come back to when if-and-when bandwidth opens up.

But that idea of kind of like ruthless prioritization has been critical to us, given how much we've tried to do in a short period of time and just what I've seen be successful, working with other founders at previous companies. That's really so much easier said than done, where you're in the moment and, you know, this shiny object, it really looks shiny and really looks compelling. But what's that like buff? I think it's Buffett, kind of a classic Buffett line

of like any time you say yes to something, you're not seeing no to something else in essence, right? And so even though it may be easier to say yes, there's a, you know, there can be a very significant opportunity cost. Not to belabor the point, but I think there's also, there's always a lot of voices around you. You know, if you're blessed enough to have a great set of investors and a great set of advisors, they're going to have a lot of really good ideas. and they can be very influential on you. And that can be where it becomes very hard because you feel an obligation to see all of those ideas through, given the support that those individuals have given you. And that can be where you have to really kind of like, you know, you're running the business.

This is your baby. You know what's going to be successful. Interpret all of that information. Bring it in, digest it. But then make your decision and stay focused and then be proactive at communicating it out to those groups so that, you know, they know where you're. time and energy is being spent. Good stuff. All right. Last question I've got for you, Eric. If you had the chance to kind of go back in time and whisper, you know, something in the ears of your younger self, maybe take us back to your days at Target or Best Buy. Maybe, maybe a chewy,

you know, later on in your career. Anything, anything you'd say to the younger, Eric? The younger? Oh, geez. A lot of things I'd say. Fail fast. Like, I think earlier in my career, I was a bit risk. I didn't have the quite risk tolerance that I've learned now. And there's a lot a cliches associated with like two day two waivers you know one way doors right and just like understanding when something's a two way door go through it fast learn quick adjust and adapt and I think you know at every stage I've tried to apply that principle in a more real and practical way but early on I just didn't have the risk tolerance and maybe that comes with experience maybe that comes with all of the mistakes that you make along the way but I you know I would encourage people to kind of

figure out how you take all the right risks as early as possible. Because it's really where you learn. And you find out, I think when you're on the other side of something that you think is risky, then it probably wasn't risky as you thought it was. There's more anxiety tied up in the risk than actual risk. So it's like you take the leap, learn and then, you know, deal with the consequences. Yeah, good stuff. Eric, I can't think you enough for coming on the program. This is a, this is a fun conversation. I love what you're doing. I mean, this is like a, of a bias towards kind of these sort of arenas. And so, so yeah, I can think you enough, it would be really fun to kind of watch what you and your team do at Climatic over the next year and beyond. And for everyone

listening, again, Climatic, I mentioned the website a few times, but Climatichealth.com is the website. We'll only do it in the full write-up on Medsider. If you're new to Medsider, we produce kind of longer form articles, if you will, right, that accompany these audio podcast episodes that try to pull on a lot of the key insights that our guest share, including a lot of the valuable ones that Eric, Eric disseminated to us over the past hour or so. So again, everyone listening, climatichealth.com, and you can check out the full write-up on Medsider. Eric, I'll have you hold on the line, but thanks again for doing this. Appreciate your time. And for everyone listening until the next episode of Medsider goes live,

everyone, take care. Yeah, thanks, Scott. 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. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion. So if you found value in this podcast, if you found yourself nodding your head while

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